Interesting insights from Naomi Klein on what the jury selection selection process for Conrad Black's trial revealed.

In her piece, published here on AlterNet, she argues that the jurors took a very dim view of the elites and the values that Black championed.

Klein writes:

"Perhaps in 2000, at the height of the stock market bubble, Black would have faced a jury made up of such supportive folks, ones who would have looked at his uncanny ability to divert Hollinger profits into his own accounts and said, 'More power to you.' But in 2007 Black came face to face with the casualties of the boom's collapse and of the ideological revolution he so aggressively globalized. As the judge questioned a pool of 140 prospective jurors in order to whittle the group down to twelve, plus eight alternates, she found men and women who had "lost every dime" in the WorldCom collapse, whose pensions had evaporated on the stock market, who had been fired thanks to outsourcing and who'd had their finances ravaged by identity theft.

"Asked what they thought of executives who earn tens of millions of dollars, jurors answered almost uniformly in the negative. 'Who could possibly do that much work or be that much capable?" one asked. A union mechanic's apprentice pointed out that no matter how much he works, 'I'm barely getting by as it is, living at home.' No one said 'more power to you.'

"Regardless of what else happens in the Black saga, the jury-selection process has already provided an extraordinary window onto the way regular Americans, randomly selected, view their elites -- not as heroes but as thieves. As far as Black is concerned, this is all terribly unfair--he is being "thrown to the mobs" because of rage at the system and, unlike American billionaires, he doesn't "dress in corduroy trousers" or donate his fortune to AIDS charities. Black's lawyers even argued (unsuccessfully) that their client could not get a fair trial because the average Chicagoan "does not reside in more than one residence, employ servants or a chauffeur, enjoy lavish furniture, or host expensive parties.

There is no doubt that what is going on in that courtroom looks less like a fraud trial than class war, one at the heart of the Anglosphere. Even if Black wins, it will be harder to sell the world an ideological model that is so deeply reviled at home."

It's typical Klein. Many times, she takes her argument too far and over the top - what's happening now in the Chicago court room is still very much a fraud trial, not class war - but in the end, there is a smidgin of truth in the argument.

If nothing else, it reveals the deep divisions between the elites and ordinary wage and income earners, something I have blogged on here and here.

The issue here isn't class war. It's more about a lack of trust between big business and ordinary folk.