The Poster Child Nike Could Just Do Without
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday July 13, 2001
Young American anti-globalisation author Naomi Klein headed into the Australian bush this week to meet anti-nuclear campaigners in the remote South Australian town of Coober Pedy.
Ms Klein, in Adelaide for the three-day Festival of Ideas, became the poster girl for the S11 anti-globalisation protest movement after the publication of No Logo; Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which chronicled the insidious cultural and economic impact of the big consumer brands. She became an anti-globalisation campaigner and a sworn enemy of labels such as Nike, which she outed for paying, in 1992, more to basketballer Michael Jordan for endorsing its sneakers than it paid its Indonesian workforce of 30,000.
In Adelaide to talk about ``the branding backlash", Ms Klein came via Coober Pedy, where she met Aboriginal women opposed to uranium mining. She talked with local elders and met a group of young women from Melbourne involved in S11 direct action.
``They have decided they want to be involved in campaigns that are very local, very rooted, and moved out to the Coober Pedy area to make that a reality," she said.
Ms Klein, 30, says the power of what she called the ``moments of convergence" behind S11 protests in Seattle, Melbourne, and at Davos in Switzerland was that they were firmly rooted in local political movements.
As to the effectiveness of the protests which have disrupted recent World Trade Organisation and other global monetary meetings, Ms Klein believes progress has been made.
``They are are certainly having an impact in many superficial ways," she said. ``More and more security is needed just to maintain business as usual."
But on a more significant level, international negotiators were now on notice, she said.
``The actual advancement of the agenda has essentially been frozen. There is very much a question whether the next round of WTO negotiations in Qatar [in November] is going to be successful, not because of the protests on site but because the protests in Seattle led to more local campaigns around the world and now politicians and trained negotiators know they are being watched in a way that pre-Seattle was simply not the case."
Other festival speakers include the radical US bishop John Shelby Spong and an international authority on drugs and the CIA, Dr Alfred McCoy.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
