THAT WAS FUN. Just got done spending $3 trillion. Try it yourself - it's a lot harder than you might think. Honestly, it would have been a whole lot easier just to follow the president's example and blow it all on one illegal occupation of Iraq.

$3 trillion...

Read Part I of this conversation here.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been posting pieces of my ongoing conversation with Naomi Klein, about her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. You can watch our first encounter here, and read our earlier conversations...

Two weeks ago, I talked with Naomi Klein about her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. If you missed the original video, you can watch it here, and the longer transcript is here. You can also learn more about the book and read excerpts...

But after the camera crew stopped rolling, Naomi and I kept talking. Here's a transcript of part of that conversation...

Cusack: One of my favorite quotes is from Arthur...

I sat down with Naomi Klein to talk about her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This revelatory work belongs in that rarefied air with A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn and Witness to a Century by George Seldes.

"Naomi Klein is an investigative reporter like no other. She roams the continents with eyes wide open and her brain operating at full speed, finding connections we never thought of, and patterns which eluded us. She shows us, in clear and elegant language, how catastrophes -- natural ones like Katrina, unnatural ones like war -- become opportunities for a savage capitalism, calling itself 'the free market,' to privatize everything in sight, bringing huge profits to some, misery for others. To ensure the safety of such a system, it becomes necessary to constrict freedom, to assault human rights. The torture chambers for some then match the torturing of the larger society. This is a brilliant book, one of the most important I have read in a long time." -- Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States.

"Naomi Klein is one of the most important new voices in American journalism today, as this book make clear. She has turned globalism inside out, and in so doing given all of us a new way of looking at our seemingly unending disaster in Iraq, and a new way of understanding why we got there. And she does it in a lucid, reader-friendly style that almost makes it fun to read." -- Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer prize winning investigative journalist

"Naomi Klein has written a brilliant, brave and terrifying book. It's nothing less than the secret history of what we call the 'Free Market..' It should be compulsory reading." -- Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

And this was my take on the book:

"This masterful book is a measured but furious call to arms. Naomi Klein is Antigone before the King, the antidote to the feeling of inevitability that says that we must accept murder as a legitimate economic policy. She has the audacity and the courage to chronicle the human costs of an ideology in which worshiping the markets is not enough; you must actually kill to feed them. Klein is the vanguard, the fire, the resistance and she challenges us not to join the suicide club that enables corporate cannibalism. A spectacular triumph."

So, what to do? Arundhati Roy points us home:

"Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we're being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them."

To read Arianna's take on Naomi's book, click here.

Besides family, health and friends, here's another thing I'm thankful for. I was asked to write a little something for a Joe Strummer tribute in Scotland... Doing so, I remembered just how grateful I was he showed up on earth while I was around...

There was no one like Joe...

Murder is a crime. Uunless it is done...by a poooollliiicceeeman. Or an ariissssstoocrat -- Joe Strummer

Bush 2. How depressing, corrupt, unlawful and tragically absurd the administration's world view actually is...how low the moral bar has been lowered...and (though I know I'm capable of intellectually lazy notions of collective guilt)...

Went to Hunter S. Thompson’s memorial service in Aspen. The next day, we went to Owl Farm -- which remained untouched since Hunter’s death two weeks before. The sun was shining and gunfire echoed as friends and family gathered and shot targets on the lawn. Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in...