Naomi Klein

Her main point is that despite suggesting editorially...

Remember Francis Fukuyama? You probably don't. He's a purely historical figure now, from the distant past. But once upon a time he was famous as someone who wasn't an historian making pronouncements about history, rather in the way that Bjorn Lomborg was famous as a non-environmentalist pronouncing on the environment.

Naomi Klein has recently pointed out that good old market forces, instead of helping to save the planet, as neocons would have you believe, are channelling money into a protective industry which will protect the uber-rich when the rest of the world goes belly-up. Kind of a metaphor for...

Do you have a bit of down-time at the end of the year? Catch up on your reading with the DMI 2007 Year in Review's Reading List. This list features some of the "can't miss" books, studies and reports that you just may have accidentally missed. So here...

Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city's public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained...

Cross-posted on OpenLeft.

One of Wes Clark's best expressions is 'we can do it because we are doing it'. And after wallowing in some frustration over mistakes progressives have made, I'm coming around to the view that we are working hard to end the war. Whether you are working...

"Well, now the fun part starts," Hillary Clinton has now said. "We're into the last month, and we're going to start drawing a contrast, because I want every Iowan to have accurate information when they make their decisions."

Hillary's definition of "fun" strikes me as going to the...

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...

Naomi Klein quotes economist Milton Friedman as saying "...Only a crisis actual or perceived causes real change". In her book The Shock Doctrine, the author describes major economic and political shifts taking place in the immediate aftermath of traumatic upheavals (war, natural disasters, etc.), an analytical record of the ideological...

Naomi, since you have made Milton Friedman the ultimate villain of disaster capitalism, you might be surprised by some of the things he told me in his last interview the November before he died at his apartment in San Francisco overlooking the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Look at...

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.

You might have read the piece in Salon the other day where John Dean laments the passing of the Republican Party as a positive, or, even, a non-damaging force in American life. The party he has known for forty years, and the party he says that his friends now...