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.
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.
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."
The Leap Manifesto calls for a Canada remade as "a country powered entirely by renewable energy, woven together by accessible public transit, in which the opportunities of this transition are designed to eliminate racial and gender inequality."
"Our debt to Haiti stems from four main sources: slavery, the US occupation, dictatorship and climate change. These claims are not fantastical, nor are they merely rhetorical. They rest on multiple violations of legal norms and agreements."—Naomi Klein, in The Nation(via @shockozulu)
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.
Naomi Klein (No Logo) and Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón (Children of Men) have created a short film to accompany her latest book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," whose thesis is that present-day global capitalism took hold when its advocates learned to exploit disasters. — Read the rest
An op-ed by Naomi Klein on the imperative to ensure that those displaced by Katrina have a say in the reconstruction:
t's a radical concept: the $10.5bn released by Congress and the $500m raised by private charities doesn't actually belong to the relief agencies or the government – it belongs to the victims.
Author and journalist-turned-conspiracy theorist-and-MAGAt Naomi Wolf is at it again. She posted yesterday on the site formerly known as Twitter that all kinds of strange things have been happening to her electronics since she formally endorsed Donald Trump for President. — Read the rest
Though popular parlance and political pundits push the idea that Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, colonialism is the apt definition of how the United States – political and capitalist class- has engaged the island fore more than a century. — Read the rest
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
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
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
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 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.
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.
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.