I came across this OpEd in the Economist, beautiflly titled "Why Naomi Klein needs to Grow Up" chastising the latest work of 3rd class punditry from Naomi Klein, author of No Logo.    

Reading it invoked old, smoldering memories of when I forced myself to read her book -- so much so that I retroactively wrote up a book review about it in my blog. 

The Economist takes an uncharacteristically fiery tone towards Naomi -- even for a British publication.   They tongue-in-cheek introduce Naomi as engaged in an almost Joan-of-Arc struggle:

THE battle to save the world is an arduous and paradoxical one. Today's most visible scourge of globalisation and brands is herself an inexhaustible globetrotting brand: a 32-year-old Canadian journalist, armed with little more than a portable computer, a plane ticket and Internet access. Naomi Klein is the pre-eminent figure (she would deplore the term “leader”) in a worldwide protest movement against companies, free trade and global integration—in effect, against capitalism—that has no name or organisation, but is the most vigorous expression of leftist sentiment since the 1960s.

Naomi's struggle is more about saying the right thing to be heard rather than saying the right thing.   She consistently engages in cry baby exploits to grab attention that have no bearing in the real world --

In her 30s, Ms Klein has all the incoherence and self-righteous disgust of the alienated adolescent... As she looks around the world, she sees nothing she likes, no redeeming features—except for “the movement”. The rule of corporations, as she sees it, is inherently repressive and exploitative of powerless citizens. Democracy is a sham. She gives capitalism no credit for the extraordinary progress seen in recent decades in reducing poverty and other measures of deprivation (notably child mortality) in the world's poor countries. She measures the growing-pains of capitalist development not against real-world alternatives but against a Disneyesque utopia in which no poor person ever loses his job or chooses to work in a multinational factory at low wages (by rich-world standards). As the world's poor move from farm to factory to office, jobs are inevitably lost and people uprooted. The countries that change the least, where the costs of growth are closest to zero, are those where poverty and disease are worst. This basic trade-off is never addressed.

It is precisely this kind of writing that makes the Economist one of my all-time favorite pubs!  The article goes on to further describe the inherent contradictions between the political empowerment & wealth that Klein seeks for the world and the attacks upon the engines of creation that she unleashes.   Without wealth in the first place, what is there to redistribute?   If people really were completely "free" wouldn't that mean that they'd be able to engage in the cross-border interactions that she so deplores?

Klein is consistent with the anti-globolization legion of idiocy in being absolutely unprescriptive about what she'd want to replace capitalism with.

The Economist (harshly) concludes:

Ms Klein's harshest critics must allow that, for an angry adolescent, she writes rather well. It takes journalistic skill of a high order to write page after page of engaging blather, so totally devoid of substance. What a pity she has turned her talents as a writer to a cause that can only harm the people she claims to care most about. But perhaps it is just a phase.