Naomi Klein
Author of No Logo
About the Author
Naomi Klein was born in Montreal, Canada on May 8, 1970. She attended the University of Toronto and began writing there for the student newspaper, The Varsity. Klein was offered a series of editorial jobs in newspapers and magazines and this prevented her from getting a final degree from the show more university. She worked for The Toronto Globe and Mail and This Magazine. She is an author and social activist, who is known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization. Her books include No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She received the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction for This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Naomi Kline/photo by Kourosh Keshiri
Works by Naomi Klein
No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (2017) 1,029 copies, 26 reviews
Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002) 820 copies, 10 reviews
How to Change Everything: The Young Human's Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other (2021) 139 copies, 5 reviews
Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction 3 copies
Blank is Beautiful [essay] 1 copy
Addicted to Risk {TED Talk} 1 copy
Associated Works
Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies (2002) — Contributor — 1,026 copies, 6 reviews
Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman (2005) — Foreword, some editions — 781 copies, 16 reviews
All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis (2020) — Contributor — 468 copies, 12 reviews
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy (2003) — Foreword, some editions — 142 copies, 4 reviews
Ya Basta! Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising (2004) — Foreword, some editions — 118 copies, 1 review
Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2003) — Contributor — 84 copies, 1 review
The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy (2017) — Preface, some editions — 65 copies
Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run Factories (2004) — Foreword, some editions — 55 copies
People-First Economics: Making a Clean Start for Jobs, Justice, and Climate (2010) — Contributor — 47 copies
The Anti-Inauguration: Building Resistance in the Trump Era (2016) — Contributor — 33 copies, 1 review
The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict (2011) — Introduction — 29 copies
Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt? Writers Respond to Capitalist Climate Change (2017) — Contributor — 20 copies
The Possibility of Hope [2007 film] — Anti-Globalization Activist — 3 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Klein, Naomi
- Birthdate
- 1970-05-08
- Gender
- female
- Education
- University of Toronto (dropped out)
- Occupations
- journalist
activist
professor - Organizations
- The Nation
In These Times
The Globe and Mail
This Magazine
The Guardian
University of British Columbia - Awards and honors
- Sydney Peace Prize (2016)
Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction (2014)
Warwick Prize for Writing (2009) - Relationships
- Lewis, Avi (spouse)
Klein, Seth (brother) - Nationality
- Canada
- Birthplace
- Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Places of residence
- Montréal, Québec, Canada
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada - Associated Place (for map)
- Canada
Members
Reviews
In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein explores some of the more unsettling aspects of contemporary politics and culture, taking as her jumping-off point how frequently she herself has been confused in recent years with feminist-turned-conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf. Conspiracy theories and doppelgangers/doubling have abounded in recent years, and Klein is at her strongest when she explores how we are all susceptible to manipulation and to confirmation biases. I doubt it's possible to read Klein's show more grappling with self-examination in the wake of her "double's" mirroring of her without a certain queasy empathy, and she writes with admirable humour. However, Klein's doppelganger theme feels a bit strained and over-extended at times—are some points of similarity alone enough to merit the title of doppelganger? Contemporaneity and causation aren't the same thing, and I'm wary of grand narratives; then, too, there is the sense that Klein is spending a lot of time grappling with understanding those whose narcissism is both banal and obvious. Still, a thought-provoking read. show less
It's 2007 and Naomi Klein builds a rather convincing argument about modern governmental/corporational trends.
I've personally never seen it laid out so baldly, but after having read several dozen of political books, perhaps an equivalent number of documentaries, and a lot of otherwise independent research into the topics herein, I'm willing to concede that she has a very valid point.
What is the point?
Modern economics theories are used to lay out a rather obvious plan of mass looting. They're show more constructed as laissez-faire Chicago School of Economics, which looks great on paper, letting the invisible hand of Adam Smith regulate all markets. In practice, putting it into effect, under the heading of Democracy or Liberation or whatever they want, the big heads of the Chicago school are backed with the CIA, big corporation interests, and a single additional theory that makes the whole thing gel together.
What's this extra theory? It's simple. They believe, as they have learned from their lessons in briefly earlier psychology research, that the best way to heal a patient is to first break their minds and bodies, starting them out on a tabula rasa, and then rebuilding from the rubble. So many have quoted the belief that the only way to get real change is after a disaster.
Never mind that the original torture victims in McGill college that underwent sensory deprivation, LSD, PCP, punctuated with ECT and blaring noise did not come out of the experience quite sane. Most of them never recovered. But THIS was the original study that they based their first great experiment on. Export the school of thought to Chile, and when it didn't quite take, destabilize the government, assassinate Allende, and install Pinochet. On Sept. 11, 1973. They used shock and awe, destroyed infrastructure, and people went hungry and were terrorized.
Guess who got a Nobel Prize in economics?
It's worse. The dictatorship was atrocious, but the big corporations were given leave to move in and rape the economy, loot anything of value, while allowing Pinochet to take the lion's share, turning him into an Oligarch, overnight. A decade later, Chile, once sporting one of the most impressive resumes of a growing and happy populace, could barely stand on its own. But the corporations got RICH.
Jump ahead to Russia right as Communism is going defunct. The same Chicago school economics of Free-Market offers them a deal. Businesses will loan expertise and open market doctrines and massive loans, but be sure to destabilize everything first. When enough blood is on the ground and people are terrified, starving, and giving up everything they ever owned, then offer them a deal they can't refuse. Capitalism on a plate that promises everything that the European nations and America has to offer since Communism is dead.
When democracy is offered but capitalism is competing, capitalism beats anything. Enter a capitalism-backed coup, corporate sponsorships everywhere, and a promise that our new leader will be able to make himself and a handful others into some of the top 30 ranked richest people in the world, opening up Russia to free trade on a scale never seen before, the only way to keep it going is by looting the population. And it did. What was the number? 14 million homeless children? Think about that. At least under communism there WAS something like a middle class. Now it's only the super rich and the survivors.
CLEARLY, this is an AMAZING outcome for the Chicago School! Companies got rich. The stock market had a field day supporting the victors. Everyone was shaking everyone else's hands. Except for the rest of the 99%, of course. They went hungry. A reported 50,000 AIDS victims exploded into 1.5 million over the space of a couple of years. Clearly, everyone was having a party.
But the rich got richer.
Remember what happened during the Iraq War, part 2? Privatized war, with every single aspect of the war delegated to private companies except for the troops, themselves. 90% of every contract went into overhead, contractors subcontracting up to four times until there was no longer any money left for doing the work. And easily, if you look back on the actual work for the reconstruction, either it was not completed in 85% of the cases, or what did get finished was at half capacity after a year. ALL work and workers were brought in from the outside. Corporations tried to set up McD and Walmart, unloaded big screen TVs on the streets that were lined with rubble.
Shock and Awe. Come on. The purpose is to drive them all into a permanent state of helplessness or create an environment of terrorism. Against them. But heck, as long as we can brew terrorists this way, each one wanting to get revenge or at the very least, JUSTICE for this travesty. 650,000 dead. For Oil. For the free market. For the freedom of a hoard of corporations to come swooping in and install a Free Trade Zone, where profits just kept coming.
Let's ignore for a moment that every cabinet member in the presidency at that time had vested and current interests in the very same corporations that made the most money on Iraq. Or that America inflated its debt many times over to pay for the graft, looting, and amazing incompetence, while leaving the door open to keep ALL of the contractors out of the legal crosshairs of ANY country, while walking away with astounding paychecks.
Ignore the fact that most invasions, if they're NOT there to loot, will actually set aside troops to protect national heritage. There is a lot of proof that the national museum holding artifacts thousands of years old was specifically excluded from that protection list, which is why troops sat by and watched as so many truckloads of priceless artifacts were spirited away. Later, even now, only 20% have ever been recovered.
We can add Hurricane Katrina to the list. The same contractors for Iraq came in to help out, taking more government money, pulling the same exact crap, and then leaving the job almost completely undone. We're talking BIG money, too. But look on the bright side! All that land can now be cleared out to build new condos! Tons of companies swooped in to reclaim the land. And they did. And a lot of them were linked, intricately, to the SAME people who were supposed to REBUILD for the original inhabitants.
Sorry, folks, couldn't do the job. You're gonna have to find a new place to live. My brother here wants the land for his new McD!
Yep, first you need to have a disaster. If you don't have a disaster, make one. If you can, build compounds and Green zones and make sure you give enough fodder to create a simmering cauldron of hate that you can regularly call on to rise up and smash down with your brand new war machine. And make sure it keeps on simmering, too, right, ISIS? We need a reason to keep getting the latest equipment to protect our super-rich bunkers.
It's great economics as long as your real intention is to get extremely rich. It's not good economics if you want long-lasting, sustained prosperity. It's the looter's creed. Make situations you can profit from. Make sure you always negotiate from the ultimate position. If that means making sure the rest of the world has a foot on its neck, then that's all for the best. That's GOOD NEGOTIATION TACTICS.
Laissez-faire, to these guys, means taking away all the safety nets. They're the same ones gutting social security, social protections, and basic food and health for the poorest people in our first-world nations. They want no government, or to turn all governments into shells with no power to do anything. They've stated this creed a million times. They want social darwinism at its worst. Keep everyone so shock and awed that they can take everything. Absolutely everything.
Let's judge an idea not on its stated ideal. Let's judge an idea based on its actual practice. If this wonderful ideal says it works best after a disaster, flawlessly re-establishing the free hand of the market, then by their own writings, we should have seen a flowering of cooperation, self-interest coinciding with everyone else's self-interest, and a natural growth of blanket prosperity that effects everyone involved. It's pretty. I've read many great books on the Chicago Style of Economics and loved them. But let's look at the ACTUAL FACTS of its implementation.
There has never been a free hand of the market. The big banana corporation pressured America to secure its economic freedom. America got it's most famous laissez-faire economists to embark on a campaign, assisted with a ton of money, integral CIA support, and a bunch of extra vultures hanging in the wings, smelling blood in the water. When the blood splashed and buildings with the elected government were murdered, all the looters moved in. Of course, back in the day, it was all ideological garbage. Sticking it to the communists, bringing in democracy. Ignore the fact that they just bombed a democracy and Pinochet the dictator came in, got rich, and entered a very profitable loot cycle with the outside vultures.
It begs the question. If, each and every time, they bring in the Chicago School of Economics, they always bring the same result, then maybe we ought to question their motives. Maybe.
I'm just waiting for other enemies of this paradigm to get their own shock and awe. Left-leaning college campuses? Gay bars? All they need is a disaster. They can wait for it and exploit it like with Katrina, but they're perfectly willing to orchestrate them, too. And give you wonderfully idealistic reasons why you should let them murder you, too.
Dark, right? But real. You've seen these looters in the housing bubble. The banking crisis. It's big. Very, very big. You can complain about transgenders in bathrooms all you like, but the really scary bits are right here. And they can take us all down. Equally. show less
I've personally never seen it laid out so baldly, but after having read several dozen of political books, perhaps an equivalent number of documentaries, and a lot of otherwise independent research into the topics herein, I'm willing to concede that she has a very valid point.
What is the point?
Modern economics theories are used to lay out a rather obvious plan of mass looting. They're show more constructed as laissez-faire Chicago School of Economics, which looks great on paper, letting the invisible hand of Adam Smith regulate all markets. In practice, putting it into effect, under the heading of Democracy or Liberation or whatever they want, the big heads of the Chicago school are backed with the CIA, big corporation interests, and a single additional theory that makes the whole thing gel together.
What's this extra theory? It's simple. They believe, as they have learned from their lessons in briefly earlier psychology research, that the best way to heal a patient is to first break their minds and bodies, starting them out on a tabula rasa, and then rebuilding from the rubble. So many have quoted the belief that the only way to get real change is after a disaster.
Never mind that the original torture victims in McGill college that underwent sensory deprivation, LSD, PCP, punctuated with ECT and blaring noise did not come out of the experience quite sane. Most of them never recovered. But THIS was the original study that they based their first great experiment on. Export the school of thought to Chile, and when it didn't quite take, destabilize the government, assassinate Allende, and install Pinochet. On Sept. 11, 1973. They used shock and awe, destroyed infrastructure, and people went hungry and were terrorized.
Guess who got a Nobel Prize in economics?
It's worse. The dictatorship was atrocious, but the big corporations were given leave to move in and rape the economy, loot anything of value, while allowing Pinochet to take the lion's share, turning him into an Oligarch, overnight. A decade later, Chile, once sporting one of the most impressive resumes of a growing and happy populace, could barely stand on its own. But the corporations got RICH.
Jump ahead to Russia right as Communism is going defunct. The same Chicago school economics of Free-Market offers them a deal. Businesses will loan expertise and open market doctrines and massive loans, but be sure to destabilize everything first. When enough blood is on the ground and people are terrified, starving, and giving up everything they ever owned, then offer them a deal they can't refuse. Capitalism on a plate that promises everything that the European nations and America has to offer since Communism is dead.
When democracy is offered but capitalism is competing, capitalism beats anything. Enter a capitalism-backed coup, corporate sponsorships everywhere, and a promise that our new leader will be able to make himself and a handful others into some of the top 30 ranked richest people in the world, opening up Russia to free trade on a scale never seen before, the only way to keep it going is by looting the population. And it did. What was the number? 14 million homeless children? Think about that. At least under communism there WAS something like a middle class. Now it's only the super rich and the survivors.
CLEARLY, this is an AMAZING outcome for the Chicago School! Companies got rich. The stock market had a field day supporting the victors. Everyone was shaking everyone else's hands. Except for the rest of the 99%, of course. They went hungry. A reported 50,000 AIDS victims exploded into 1.5 million over the space of a couple of years. Clearly, everyone was having a party.
But the rich got richer.
Remember what happened during the Iraq War, part 2? Privatized war, with every single aspect of the war delegated to private companies except for the troops, themselves. 90% of every contract went into overhead, contractors subcontracting up to four times until there was no longer any money left for doing the work. And easily, if you look back on the actual work for the reconstruction, either it was not completed in 85% of the cases, or what did get finished was at half capacity after a year. ALL work and workers were brought in from the outside. Corporations tried to set up McD and Walmart, unloaded big screen TVs on the streets that were lined with rubble.
Shock and Awe. Come on. The purpose is to drive them all into a permanent state of helplessness or create an environment of terrorism. Against them. But heck, as long as we can brew terrorists this way, each one wanting to get revenge or at the very least, JUSTICE for this travesty. 650,000 dead. For Oil. For the free market. For the freedom of a hoard of corporations to come swooping in and install a Free Trade Zone, where profits just kept coming.
Let's ignore for a moment that every cabinet member in the presidency at that time had vested and current interests in the very same corporations that made the most money on Iraq. Or that America inflated its debt many times over to pay for the graft, looting, and amazing incompetence, while leaving the door open to keep ALL of the contractors out of the legal crosshairs of ANY country, while walking away with astounding paychecks.
Ignore the fact that most invasions, if they're NOT there to loot, will actually set aside troops to protect national heritage. There is a lot of proof that the national museum holding artifacts thousands of years old was specifically excluded from that protection list, which is why troops sat by and watched as so many truckloads of priceless artifacts were spirited away. Later, even now, only 20% have ever been recovered.
We can add Hurricane Katrina to the list. The same contractors for Iraq came in to help out, taking more government money, pulling the same exact crap, and then leaving the job almost completely undone. We're talking BIG money, too. But look on the bright side! All that land can now be cleared out to build new condos! Tons of companies swooped in to reclaim the land. And they did. And a lot of them were linked, intricately, to the SAME people who were supposed to REBUILD for the original inhabitants.
Sorry, folks, couldn't do the job. You're gonna have to find a new place to live. My brother here wants the land for his new McD!
Yep, first you need to have a disaster. If you don't have a disaster, make one. If you can, build compounds and Green zones and make sure you give enough fodder to create a simmering cauldron of hate that you can regularly call on to rise up and smash down with your brand new war machine. And make sure it keeps on simmering, too, right, ISIS? We need a reason to keep getting the latest equipment to protect our super-rich bunkers.
It's great economics as long as your real intention is to get extremely rich. It's not good economics if you want long-lasting, sustained prosperity. It's the looter's creed. Make situations you can profit from. Make sure you always negotiate from the ultimate position. If that means making sure the rest of the world has a foot on its neck, then that's all for the best. That's GOOD NEGOTIATION TACTICS.
Laissez-faire, to these guys, means taking away all the safety nets. They're the same ones gutting social security, social protections, and basic food and health for the poorest people in our first-world nations. They want no government, or to turn all governments into shells with no power to do anything. They've stated this creed a million times. They want social darwinism at its worst. Keep everyone so shock and awed that they can take everything. Absolutely everything.
Let's judge an idea not on its stated ideal. Let's judge an idea based on its actual practice. If this wonderful ideal says it works best after a disaster, flawlessly re-establishing the free hand of the market, then by their own writings, we should have seen a flowering of cooperation, self-interest coinciding with everyone else's self-interest, and a natural growth of blanket prosperity that effects everyone involved. It's pretty. I've read many great books on the Chicago Style of Economics and loved them. But let's look at the ACTUAL FACTS of its implementation.
There has never been a free hand of the market. The big banana corporation pressured America to secure its economic freedom. America got it's most famous laissez-faire economists to embark on a campaign, assisted with a ton of money, integral CIA support, and a bunch of extra vultures hanging in the wings, smelling blood in the water. When the blood splashed and buildings with the elected government were murdered, all the looters moved in. Of course, back in the day, it was all ideological garbage. Sticking it to the communists, bringing in democracy. Ignore the fact that they just bombed a democracy and Pinochet the dictator came in, got rich, and entered a very profitable loot cycle with the outside vultures.
It begs the question. If, each and every time, they bring in the Chicago School of Economics, they always bring the same result, then maybe we ought to question their motives. Maybe.
I'm just waiting for other enemies of this paradigm to get their own shock and awe. Left-leaning college campuses? Gay bars? All they need is a disaster. They can wait for it and exploit it like with Katrina, but they're perfectly willing to orchestrate them, too. And give you wonderfully idealistic reasons why you should let them murder you, too.
Dark, right? But real. You've seen these looters in the housing bubble. The banking crisis. It's big. Very, very big. You can complain about transgenders in bathrooms all you like, but the really scary bits are right here. And they can take us all down. Equally. show less
We knew that the real disaster was not the hurricane but the terrible vulnerability imposed by Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship to the United States, as well as the forced privatization of health and other services; massive layoffs; huge numbers of school closures; reductions in social rights and in investments for collective well-being; abandonment of social and physical infrastructure; and high levels of government corruption and ineptitude. This vulnerability was aggravated byshow more
Washington’s imposition of the Financial Oversight and Management Board, an unelected body pushing for the privatization of electricity and schools, increased costs of basic services, massive cuts in public education, pensions, vacation time, and other rights—all in order to pay bondholders a $73 billion debt that was patently unpayable, illegal, and illegitimate. The net result was to leave the majority of people in Puerto Rico without a hopeful future, and that was all before Hurricane Maria hit our shores.
There are few persons alive today who has the voice, breadth, and prosaic succinctness that Klein has. Her ability to paint a picture, to show what's wrong, and how we can get to a better place, is like a breath of fresh air, a younger version of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. I'm glad to know she is alive and kicking today.
And kicking she is. Puerto Rico has been smashed by neoliberal powers prior to Hurricane Maria, that left the island devastated.
Researchers at Harvard recently revealed the death toll from Hurricane Maria may be a staggering 70 times higher than the official count. The official death toll still stands at 64, but the new study estimates a death toll of at least 4,645, with some projections topping 5,700. The Harvard study found that “interruption of medical care was the primary cause of sustained high mortality rates in the months after the hurricane, a finding consistent with the widely reported disruption of health systems. Healthcare disruption is now a growing contributor to both morbidity and mortality in natural disasters.”
As noted, part of Klein's strength as a writer is to show how human beings are prone to help each other, and how; where corporations and kleptocracies fail us, we get by:
Several Puerto Ricans I spoke with casually referred to Maria as “our teacher.” Because amid the storm’s convulsions, people didn’t just discover what didn’t work (pretty much everything). They also learned very quickly about a few things that worked surprisingly well. Up in Adjuntas, it was solar power. Elsewhere, it was small organic farms that used traditional farming methods that were better able to stand up to the floods and wind. And in every case, deep community relationships, as well as strong ties to the Puerto Rican diaspora, successfully delivered lifesaving aid when the government failed and failed again.
It's interesting to see how Puerto Rico is basically being used as a sieve for the wealthy who seek to avoid paying their taxes. Here's a telling sign from the book:
Earlier this month, in San Juan’s ornate Condado Vanderbilt Hotel, the dream of Puerto Rico as a for-profit utopia was on full display. From March 14 to 16, the hotel played host to Puerto Crypto, a three-day “immersive” pitch for blockchain and cryptocurrencies with a special focus on why Puerto Rico will “be the epicenter of this multitrillion-dollar market.” Among the speakers was Yaron Brook, chair of the Ayn Rand Institute, who presented on “How Deregulation and Blockchain Can Make Puerto Rico the Hong Kong of the Caribbean.” Last year, Brook announced that he had personally relocated from California to Puerto Rico, where he claims he went from paying 55 percent of his income in taxes to less than 4 percent. Elsewhere on the island, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans were still living by flashlight, many were still dependent on FEMA for food aid, and the island’s main mental health hotline was still overwhelmed with callers. But inside the sold-out Vanderbilt conference, there was little space for that kind of downer news. Instead, the 800 attendees—fresh from a choice between “sunrise yoga and meditation” and “morning surf”—heard from top officials like Department of Economic Development and Commerce Secretary Manuel Laboy Rivera about all the things Puerto Rico is doing to turn itself into the ultimate playground for newly minted cryptocurrency millionaires and billionaires.
The official slogan of this new Puerto Rico? “Paradise Performs.” To underscore the point, conference attendees were invited to a “Cryptocurrency Honey Party,” with pollen-themed drinks and snacks, and a chance to hang out with Ingrid Suarez, Miss Teen Panama 2013 and upcoming contestant on “Caribbean’s Next Top Model.”
But make no mistake—the true religion here is tax avoidance. As one young crypto-trader recently told his YouTube audience, before moving to Puerto Rico in time to make the tax-filing deadline, “I had to actually look it up on the map.” (He subsequently admitted to some “culture shock” upon learning that Puerto Ricans spoke Spanish, but instructed viewers thinking of following his lead to put a “Google translator app on your phone and you’re good to go.”)
In early 2018, Governor Ricardo Rosselló announced the privatisation of PREPA, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. "Two days later, the slick, TV-friendly young governor unveiled his long-awaited “fiscal plan,” which included closing more than 300 schools and shutting down more than two-thirds of the island government’s executive-branch entities, going from a total of 115 to just 35."
The major preamble to his statement? Check this:
Broke and desperate, the Puerto Rican government turned to borrowing, in part by using its special tax status to issue municipal bonds that were exempt from city, state, and federal taxes. It also purchased high-risk capital appreciation bonds, which will eventually rack up interest rates ranging from 785 to 1,000 percent. Thanks in large part to these kinds of predatory financial instruments, borrowed under conditions that many experts argue were illegal under the Puerto Rican Constitution, the island’s debt exploded. According to data compiled by lawyer Armando Pintado, debt-service payments, including interest and other profits paid to the banking industry, increased fivefold between 2001 and 2014, with a particularly marked spike in 2008. Yet another shock to the island’s economy.
No matter what the outcome of this is, it is vital that we all not only react, but act.
With books like this, we can make haste. show less
Klein uses the concepts from her previous books (namely branding, the use of disasters to push through unpalatable agendas and climate change) to needle into Trump, examining his modus operandi and how how the conditions appeared for him to be President.
It works really well and I agree with her central statements that Trump is a symptom of our broken system (which she constantly eviscerates - along with Clinton's/Centrists woeful attempts to offer anything other a than the status quo) and show more figuratively cutting off his head through impeachment etc will just lead to another (probably less orange) one emerging. Although he should still be called out and protested against, more time and energy needs to be ploughed into more general, progressive and community based programs to try to forge an image of a new future.
Although too recent for her book to mention, Labour's recent success with a manifesto that doesn't sing from the usual neo-liberal hymnsheet and presents a politics of hope shows that more progressive ideas, often seen as political suicide, are actually popular and well received by the public when given a fair hearing. Klein's book is recommended reading if you're feeling depressed by the state of things currently, times are bad but there's definitely seeds of hope. show less
It works really well and I agree with her central statements that Trump is a symptom of our broken system (which she constantly eviscerates - along with Clinton's/Centrists woeful attempts to offer anything other a than the status quo) and show more figuratively cutting off his head through impeachment etc will just lead to another (probably less orange) one emerging. Although he should still be called out and protested against, more time and energy needs to be ploughed into more general, progressive and community based programs to try to forge an image of a new future.
Although too recent for her book to mention, Labour's recent success with a manifesto that doesn't sing from the usual neo-liberal hymnsheet and presents a politics of hope shows that more progressive ideas, often seen as political suicide, are actually popular and well received by the public when given a fair hearing. Klein's book is recommended reading if you're feeling depressed by the state of things currently, times are bad but there's definitely seeds of hope. show less
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