On Fire: Naomi Klein's book is a time-series of the shift from climate denial to nihilism to Green New Deal hope

My latest LA Times book review is for Naomi Klein's new essay collection, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, which traces more than a decade of Klein's outstanding, on-the-ground reports from the pivotal struggle to begin the transformational work needed to save our species and the rest of the Earth's living things from a devastating, eminently foreseeable, and ultimately avoidable climate catastrophe.

"A Message From the Future": short film about the "Green New Deal Decade," narrated by AOC, drawn by Molly Crabapple, presented by Naomi Klein

The Intercept has just released "A Message From the Future," a short science fiction movie narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and drawn by Molly Crabapple, describing the coming "Green New Deal Decade," when Americans pulled together and found prosperity, stability, solidarity and full employment through a massive, nationwide effort to refit the country to be resilient to climate shocks and stem the tide of global climate change.

Watch: Naomi Klein and Jeremy Corbyn talk about the future of politics in the US and the UK

Naomi Klein (previously) is the author of several voraciously readable, hugely influential books about radical politics, most recently No is Not Enough, which calls for a positive vision for a different, better future, going beyond the idea of replacing Trump, May and other neoliberal leaders with slightly less neoliberal leaders who might be slightly better on climate change or women's reproductive rights — as the joke goes, "A conservative wants the world to be run by 150 white, male CEOs; a liberal wants to be sure half of them are women and/or people of color."

Naomi Klein on America's bailout


Naomi Klein's must-read piece in Rolling Stone about the $700 billion Wall Street bailout begins by examining Reuben Jeffery III, the man first tapped to serve as the program's chief investment officer. Snip:

Like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, he's an alum of Goldman Sachs, having worked on Wall Street for 18 years.

Read the rest

How to read Donald Duck 50 years after the CIA fomented a coup in Chile on September 11, 1973

There is no blue or red pill like there is no spoon. It's all purple haze.

Classical liberal enlightenment thought as distilled through political pundits, free-market professors of all disciplines, and other pillars of privatized public and partisan pontifications – across the proverbial aisle talk about capitalism as an economic system – only. — Read the rest

Corporations, capitalism and conceptions of the self

What is capitalism? What is a corporation? What is the relationship between one's desires for consumption, capitalist notions of the individual self, and the power of corporations? The following documentaries help answer these and other questions about how capitalism limits democracy, and how psychoanalysis has impacted consumption and the notion of the social. — Read the rest

AOC really plays in Iowa

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is campaigning with Bernie Sanders in Iowa, generally considered a conservative, red-state kind of place — so much so that Iowa GOP operators made a series of public predictions that she would be laughed out of the state. The state party chairman Jeff Kaufmann called her "Doctor Ocasio-Cortez" and Sanders "Crazy Bernie": "She's got a problem with our cows here!" — Read the rest

The Reality Bubble: how humanity's collective blindspots render us incapable of seeing danger until it's too late (and what to do about it)

Ziya Tong is a veteran science reporter who spent years hosting Discovery's flagship science program, Daily Planet: it's the sort of job that gives you a very broad, interdisciplinary view of the sciences, and it shows in her debut book, The Reality Bubble: Blind Spots, Hidden Truths, and the Dangerous Illusions that Shape Our World, a tour of ten ways in which our senses, our society, and our political system leads us to systematically misunderstand the world, to our deadly detriment.

The #ShellPapers: crowdsourcing analysis of all correspondence between Shell and the Dutch government

The Dutch activist/journalists Follow the Money and Platform Authentieke Journalistiek — last seen revealing the dark money funding thinktanks that backed the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership — have a new project: the #ShellPapers, a deep, crowdsourced investigation into Shell oil, its sweetheart relationship to the Dutch government, its corruption and violence throughout the world, its role in climate change and environmental devastation.

Kleptocracy in America: Russian-style corruption, driven by global oligarchs, enabled by US elites

As Naomi Klein documents in her classic and seminal book The Shock Doctrine, disasters and upheavals are the bread-and-butter of global looters, who use the collapse of civil society or the default of debtor states to privatize state assets at pennies on the dollar, then milk them into further crises, which create more chances for looting — but the collapse of the USSR was different, because the spies and strongmen who rode out that collapse ensured that public assets were only given to domestic looters, not off-shore oligarchs.

Puerto Rico didn't suffer a "natural disaster": it was looted and starved long before the hurricanes

Hurricanes Irma and Maria left Puerto Rico in tatters, but it would be a mistake to blame the weather for Puerto Rico's suffering; Puerto Rico was put in harm's way by corrupt governments doing the work of a corrupt finance sector, then abandoned by FEMA, and is now being left to rot without any real effort to rebuild its public services so that they can be privatized and used to extract rent from the island's residents.