Naomi Klein

Climate change and capitalism

November 12, 2013
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Scientists have been ringing the alarm bells about climate change for decades now, but the message, which is barely filtering through into the public consciousness, has yet to do anything to reverse the destructive path that human civilization is on. There are perhaps many reasons for this, but the crux of the matter is corporate capitalism and it’s control of the political process. Corporations are driven by the logic of maximizing profits at all costs, including costs to society and to the environment, and politicians are driven by the logic of catering to these corporations, on whom their political careers…

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Economic and environmental crises

January 3, 2012
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Interesting comments from Naomi Klein on the Occupy Wall Street movement.  She makes a connection between the economic and environmental crises that is worth repeating–that they are really two sides of the same crisis or two consequences of a single cause, namely, corporate capitalism. A system based on greed and growth inevitably destroys its own base, whether that be the workers on whose spending power the economic system depends or the natural ecosystem on which all life depends.

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Don’t let a financial crisis go to waste: use it to privatize public education

November 18, 2011
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Another must-read article in The Nation magazine documents the successful efforts that are underway to privatize the last shreds of the crumbling public education system in the US.  The author, Lee Fang, picks up where Naomi Klein ended in No Logo. Reader beware: the information contained in this article is extremely distressing and should not be read by those who are easily depressed. 

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The Occupy Wall Street Movement

October 14, 2011
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John Nichols, writing in The Nation, provides a nice analysis of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. My only criticism is that Nichols seems to understand it as mostly an American movement. Wall Street may be, as he says, the right target for Americans to address, but Wall Street is ultimately just a part of something broader, something that has no geographic boundaries, namely,  global capitalism. Laurie Penny, speaking on Democracy Now, said that:  “What I found fascinating, being at Wall Street, is how similar it is to protests that I’ve seen in London over the past 6 months. And I’ve talked…

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