Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth Naomi Klein 20240713

We are in midtown manhattan where branding and marketing is a big business. What did you learn about nike and microsoft, starbucks . Guest its great to be with you and to have this time. When i was writing a logo it came out at the beginning of 2000, soso it is almost exactly 20yearsold and when i was researching it for years before that, it was a period where a lot is changing in the corporate world and there was a full blown lifestyle brand that we all take now, but these were companies that for the first astime were declaring the busins model wasnt to sell products but did so ideas or the sense of belonging that they could then extend into kind of selfimposed branded cocoons and so everything as long as it was branded this logo. So nike was the first one to do this. They didnt ever own their factories in it and the main thing i learned when i was researching is that there was a relationship between this aggressive kind of marketing that was constantly sort of trolling thely Youth Culture to find the most cutting edge ideas to get them in places that they never had before like schools, to co brand with Music Festivals and so on. Buthi there was an inverse relationship between that aggressive marketing and the kind of good job offered in the economy because the way the the companies were freeing up money to spend on this much more aggressive kind of lifestyle divesting fromy their factories. From the idea that they should be producers at all. So they kind of paved the way in thisn sense because they never owned their factories in the first place. They made it there running shoeo through contractors and subcontractors they put against one another who could provide the shoes for the lowes lowest e and this was such a profitable Business Model that all of the competitors started closing their factories and never reopened it. We often talk about the factories moving from north americawe to mexico or china or vietnam but in fact it wasnt just that theyve been moving locations. They didnt see themselves as producers so it is related to the deindustrialization and precarious work that we sort of take for granted today. Host nike in particular is getting criticism from its customers. Guest at the time because it was sort of new. This was still an america that remembered the board of manufacturing model where you understood the product youre buying, the car you were buying was an economic anchor for the cmmunity and the idea is that people making the cars should have enough money to buy the cars. It was culturally shocking for people to discover that Companies Like nike or disney who were spending sog much moneyputting out images of themselves that were very progressive or in disneys case, very Family Friendly that you pull back the curtain and wait a minute, in some cases its children or people a little bit out of being children, people in their early 20s that are making these products under abusive conditions and so when that was exposed, it was a scandal in the 20 years later people take it for granted that almost all the products in our lives are made under conditions that are pretty dubious. Youve got electronic factories in china that catch people because they are so desperate on the cbe job, so i think it is of those things to think about and what has changed since is the sense of shock that i was sort of tracking like i cant believe that these Running Shoes are made by a 18yearolds in indonesia that are sleeping in cramped dormitories and not getting paid for their overtime or are using bottles under their sewing machines in all these scandals were coming out and they were genuine. They were movements responding to them, and i think people sensed a shock and outrage about this. And its almost like a joke on latenight television. Host theres a coupleup examples in the book and one is starbucks in how the coffee shop opens up inspired by starbucks trying to essentially as you could ruputit run away from thes brand. Guest that is an example from the addition of no logo where in the original that came out in 2000 i had a fair bit that told us the t grand meaning is what they called a third place, not home or work for a place for people to gather and they were using the discourse of the public sphere almost like a town square and it was interesting that this was happening after you had thisf very aggressive privatization so corporations had to come along and say we are a pseudo town square which is what facebook is doing now. In the 90s it was starbuck. But when i wrote an introduction for the tenth anniversary starbucks had just opened up a coffee shop in seattle that was completely unbranded. Hi you didnt see their logo anywhere which seemed a marker for how far they have fallen in the sense of it in order to, you know, recapture any sense that they had to unbranded themselves. Host in the tenth anniversary of the book you talk about president obama and one of the questions is did he live up to his hopen and change brand. Host guest there was always something a little bit nike about the obama brand but its vague enough to pin him down to a clear political platform and res another interesting measure we are right now because i think theres more if you look at the democratic primaries right now, i think theres more of an expectation that the candidates have a really specific and fully formed platform, economic platform, labor policy platform and environmental policy platform. If i think about the Obama Campaign of 2008 which i was w writing about, it was like im going to recapture the sense of optimism, youve are not going to be ashamed of america. People are tired of eight years of bush and thats why i wrote about that as the First Political campaign that uses the same tools that these Corporate Lifestyle brands have been using this sort of base themselves in the progressivism and so the question david obama lived up to it its complicated that it was nevenever specific so its hardo say whether i he lived up to itr because there wasnt that much better about what he was promising. Although he did specifically promise im going to revise main street and take on wall street. And i think there was a huge amount of discipline that didnt really happen and people hoped that there would beea a reinvestment in Small Businesses and you know, maybe more factory jobs. Its part of a global phenomena where the politicians come to power with sort of a progressivism in change but the economy continues to make people feel excluded, disempowered, more insecure and that sets the stage for the rightwing populism that we are seeing worldwide. Obviously there are the specific factors relating to obama being the first black president in a racial backlash in the United States, but its also important to remember that there is a global phenomenon of this rise of rightwing populism that we see everywhere. Host you can join us at the tv. Our guest foror the next two hours, naomi klein. 202 7488200 in eastern or central time zone, 202 7488201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zone. You are teaching at rutgers university. How do you frame this classroom in terms of the book, the original and its tenyear Anniversary Edition . Im teaching a course called up the corporate self, and it looks at the integration of the human and corporation and the corporations trying to act more like humans, which is the original brands were all about that, like putting a sort of comforting taste like uncle bens or aunt jemima, much of it racialized and hearkening back to the nostalgia. So, we look at this sort of racial history of branding. And then where no logo and, remember this was written in the late 1990s, this than completely new idea that humans, like everyday humans, not celebrities needed to become their own brands in order to succeed in this newly precarious job environment with job security as a way to get ahead is to find your inner brand and project it w onto the world, and this was after we had seen celebrities do this. In the book i talk about Michael Jordan as the first super brand, then we look at whats happening now with social media because when i learned about 20wr years ago, it was a pretty notional idea of the idea that anybody could be their own brand because anybody doesnt havesn the money to take out advertisements and do the work of projecting the image of oneself but today because of social media, anybody that has computer access has the capacity to market themselves, m to market an idea of themselves and to think about what is my brand, which is very different from who am i . So what we are unpacking, and i had a Wonderful Group of students that first evolved we talk about how this even though they have grown up with this idea, it is a relatively new idea it wasnt always the case you would have been looked at if yothey were mad 30 yearsrs ago o say to a 15yearold kid not what you want to be when you grow up, but what is your brand. As we try to make visible some of the things they take for granted and then think about what does it mean to have two separate yourself from the idea of your self, to have that distancing and what does that do to friendships and relationships and what does it do to social movements. So, it is fascinating to unpack ouis with them because they know a lot more about social media than i do so they are teaching me all the time, but this m sort of elitist phases were intimately connected to the fact we were living our lives on the line in a constant annoyance of our personal brand is that the Tech Industry sees data as the new oil as it is often repeated so they are mining all the information we are sharing for their Business Model so we are looking at all these questions ofng surveillance and data mini. Its interesting once again to see how much has changed since i wrote that now claims book host let me frame this question in terms of the original new deal because you write a lot about essentially have transformed the country anr the world. Guest sure, yes. Therehis inspiration to be takn the original new deal and warnings to heed because so many people were excluded from the protection of the new deal. Many africanamerican workers were excluded, women were excluded, and there were systemic disaggregation and it is also true that the United States transformed itself at a speed and scale that is comparable to that kind of speed and scale of change that we need to embrace if we are going to lower emissions in line with what scientists are telling us. T gathering scientific experts that would advise issued a report a year ago saying that we need to cut global emissions in half in a mere 12 years which is now 11 years and they said coming into this i, andthis is y of the report this would requiro unprecedented transportation and transportation, agriculture, Building Construction and so there are not many points in history where you can say we saw the scale of transformation one is in these Second World War whn you have americans planting Victory Gardens. We saw factories transform themselves very rapidly that the new deal isde less topdown whih is why it is a useful precedent for us to look at because i dont think we want government telling everybody what they should do. We should worry about the authoritarianism so you saw grow America Electric side more than 10 million americans directly employed, a renaissance of public art and much of the infrastructure today another part is thinking of the conservation corps was probably the most popular of the new deal program, and its a reminder that the new deal was not only responding to an economic crisis but responding to an ecological crisis because of the dust bowl and crisis of deforestation. So, they sent more than 2 Million People from cities to the hundreds of camps in rural parts of the United States and they did things like plant 2. 3 billion trees which is more than half of those ever planted sole that kind of scale is important and its also the kind of thing we need to do to pull carbon out ofed the atmosphere n the face of a Climate Crisis. Host in the book you write the quote part of what thinks Climate Change difficult for many of us asra we live in a culture of the perpetual prese present, when the deliberately severs itself from the past and created usth in the future. A lot of what im doing in this book is trying to m make visible the Economic Systems and sort of relatively new economic and social models born of the particular kind of capitalism that we have had since the reagan era which has been all about deregulation, privatization and venerating the individual consumers, a clay thing, shopping with democracy and that has produced an extremely accelerated culture which then people point to and say its just human nature that we cant deal with a crisis like Climate Change because clearly we are just too selfish, too individualistic, think to short term and this requires us to have a longer timeframe and to put the collective good ahead of something that you might want to justst write now to satisfy an individual urge. And so, theres been a lot written that has made this human nature argument about why we will never respond to this crisis. And what i find when im talking about what we need to do in this crisis, which i do a fair bit, t find that the biggest obstacle that we are up against is not Climate Change denial which is definitely on the way. And its not the lack of technology or the understanding of what we to be done. It is this sense of doom that we as human beings are incapable of doing the things necessary. And thats why i think it is important to draw on these historical precedence even ifly they are not the kind of thing that we need to do now, they do anow there are different ways of being human and in the lifespan of people alive today, people were able to think longer term and were able to put the collective good ahead of their individual desires. And there are people, you know, Indigenous People in north america who teach their children to think seven generations into the future or into the past, so what i am trying to do i guess this problem and ties the sort of appeals to human nature that we hear a lot of and say actually that is equally thing a particular relatively recent form of deregulated consumer picapitalism with the idea of wt it means to begin with and while we cant change the nature we can change the systems that we did create ourselves if they are threatening life on earth and in fact we need to do that. Not saying its easy but just that its possible. Host a son that is 7yearsold you moved a lot though. Activist parents, for those who dont know, spend a minute till your life story and then we will get your phone calls. Guest just a minute . Daaughter] so, i was born in canada, in montreal. And my parents are in american. My parents were peace activists in the 1960s. My father did not want to go to vietnam, and he had to choose between jail and canada and like many of his peers, he chose canada so we moved to montreal and later moved back to the United States for a few years when i was very young and they decided they liked canada a better, so i sometimes say that we left because of the war of thbutwe stayed because of the universal public healthcare. My mother is a documentary filmmaker now retired who worked for the National Film board of canada at the first womens film studios so she made for the feminist movement. So i grew up with political parents. My father worked in the canadian Healthcare System involved in doing things like bringing olmidwives into hospitals and bg advocate for natural childbirth. Hes a family doc are also retired. I wouldnt say i grew up in this really radical i had friends that have serious radical parents that were homeschooled and you know, their parents really walked the talk. I kind of grew up between the world with their values but going to regular schools in the 1980s. So i sort of felt pulled between them and then my home life where my parents were saying why do you want to hang out with her friends at the mall, why would you ever want to do something wlike that . Maybe thats why i wrote no logo in my 20s. Host mike, youve been patient from florida welcome to the conversation. Caller nice to speak with you. My main problem with the whole thing through these methods of technology that are not going to be there to this pie in the sky type of thinking there is no doubt about it for the foreseeable future. I would urge you to look up the work of Mike Jacobson at stanfordk university. He is a professor of engineering whos got a big team and hasas been doing specific research about how it is possible with the existing Technology Ticket to 100 Renewable Energy very rapidly for electricity first and transportation afterwards in line with what scientists are telling us we need to do. Thereve been breakthroughs in Battery Storage and price breakthroughs as well. Like i said im not saying that its c. But i think the barriers are muchre more political than they are technological and that is precisely what the panel on Climate Change said when they were having global emissions in 12 years in that report and i waniwant to stress that is a ret around 6,000 sources of the peerreviewed science of it isnt just a oneoff paper. Its coopted by almost 100 officers and receivers. So it is a stateoftheart finance and they said we can meet these targets with existing technologies. Theres a few factors. This is why sometimes in my opinion you have quite frankly g. Zero engineers talking about one way we can deal with climate disruption as imitating the High Altitude spraying sulfur into the atmosphere reflecting more of the suns rays away from earth. So, that is one of the main reasons behind the little ice age and another reason. There is a huge loss of life for many millions of people in the americas that led to a brief agitation and that was part of it as well. Host if you could turn the volume down and go ahead with your questions. Caller can you hear me . E host yes we can. Caller to make electric power using fossil fuel you dont eliminate one molecule so i cant believe you wouldnt know that. I cannot believe that all these senators running never mentioned Hydrogen Fuel cells. Its that simple. Ive sent a few messages on your facebook numerous times. I dont knowno if you actually read this or just dismiss it or what you do but you never mentioned Hydrogen Fuel cells. None of the candidates mentioned Hydrogen Fuel cells. To discuss this title of my book is respirations. What im suggesting is the need to be over a Million People necessary to do the work to completely change from fossil fuel electric power to Hydrogen Fuel cell electric power. Host thank you for the question and comments. Guest the reason for not getting the response or way the idea isnt being taken seriously as it isnt a perfectly serious idea that the Renewable Power does reduce emissions which is not to say there are not environmental costs to any Technology Including the local environmental impacts which is why we cant simply think of this as being a switch from fossil fuels to renewable and Everything Else staying the same. Im talking about the 20 wealthiest people on the planet responsible for 70 of emissions and we have to consume less. It doesnt mean we are going to live in misery. We have to look at the level of the average european is generally recognized as one of the l leading experts and if tht ithat iswhy its important to lt the areas we can afford to expand like child care, health care, experts areas that are already low carbon and can be made more low carbon so there have to be some Lifestyle Changes for peoplee that are ovr consuming but that doesnt mean that its all contraction. Host 16yearsold from sweden why do you think that her voice out of so many has omprecipitated . Guest it is complicated to be honest with you. There are many voices that have been trying to get the worlds attention for a long time ive been going through the u. S. Climate summits for about a decade now and there is incredibly powerful voices coming from the Marshall Islands and the United Nations in 2014 by a woman from the Marshall Islands who wrote a poem to her nine montholdhe baby and she read it to the assembled country representatives and it was an incredible speech that should have gone as viral as any of the speeches. There have been other moments a few years later when they hit the philippines at the very moment that there was a un summit happening on Climate Change and the representative didnt know whether his family was safe or not and he broke down crying in front of the entire assembly that should have gone as viral as any of the i speeches so to be honest with you, i think therere is a dish u around the fact that shes a white girls from sweden and thats part of why her voice breaks through when the others on the front line of the crisis who are living it and for whom te feels absolutely existential have been ignored. I think that shes a remarkable young woman and i have so much respect for her and these other voices ive spoken about before and i could find to many others but sheis is remarkable and i think theres something in that she is so clearly not performing for anyone and not looking for anyone to like her coming back to maybe what we were talking about earlier, we live in a culture where everybody is performing a version of themselves, everybody is interested in being famous and promoting themselves. She couldnt be less interested and i can tell you i know her. So 100 focused on the science and talks about how having been diagnosed with aspergers since i am not interested in your social games as somebody on the autism spectrum so i think theres something about how w interesting she is in our opinion of her that makes her a trusted messenger for a lot of people. Shes clear minded about why shes being attacked by the likes of vladimir trump and putin. Its because shes part of building ay Global Movement tht is growing with exponential speed. There were 7 Million People who participated in the world of climate strikes over an eight day period that is unprecedented in the history of the planet so shes part of an Amazing Movement and would be the first person to say its not about me it is about a movement of people coming together. Host into the using fossil fuels are not the sole driver of Climate Change, they are the biggest and you also write an incremental approach will not work. My question is can we afford to agree new deal, the price tag is in the billions of dollars. Guest it isnt just fossil fuel, its another major driver. So can we afford it . Thereve been studies that it would cost to stay on the road we are on and not try to avert a catastrophic levels. It was around 4 degrees celsius on average if we continue with its called businessg. As usual that means doing what youre doing now which Means Nothing and making the problem worse. That leads to four to 6 degrees but isnt compatible with anything you would describe as organized. We need to recognize a lot of the estimates about when things are going to start to get really serious has underestimated the speed with which things started to unravel. There are different estimates. I would say in the tying period of children a life we would be seeing catastrophic levels under the o business as usual model ad there actually isnt when you start costing out what it would mean to lose new york city or shanghai, there literally isnt enough money on the planet so i can make an argument that it is a bargain to invest in the Green New Deal which is expensive but compared to what we would pay later, did something morally reprehensible about making just the financial argument because we are talking about hundreds of millions of lives here that would be lost if we do not embrace the speed of change that is required so yes it is expensive and a moral imperative and doing nothing is even more expensive. Host you are next with naomi klein. Guest caller good afternoon. I think any serious person that looks at replacing fossil fuels, the majority of them realizes the only possible way to use it would be to go from generation three or four Nuclear Power plant. Where are these generations on the Nuclear Plant . Caller guest they are not out there is the point. Caller we have a lot of Nuclear Plants running. Guest but you are talking about next Generation Nuclear and in the discussion, the noshow future form of nuclear is held up in whats going to be built with what is going to be proposed is the same technology that does have high risks. Ibebe think that im going to rr people once again to the research which is very clear about the fact we can do this with Renewable Energy and there are many benefits of giving it with renewables over nuclear including the fact that clear is more expensive and the capitalism and corruption weve seen this againe. And again. What i think is great about Renewable Energy is that it lends itself to a decentralized form of ownership so having a few players in the Energy Sector as we do today we have a controlled energy grid which is built around the fact that the air and the sun is everywhere and so we can have micro grade, community control, Energy Cooperatives and the revenues from this can stay in communities to pay for other services and we can kill two birds with one stone if you will and moreir economy resources as well as getting ourselves to our own emissions. Host i think that this is your smallest book. Who are the disaster capitalists . Guest the book that i wrote after no logo because it took me aok long time to researh we have seen the aftermath of economic shock and large natural disasters. A certain theory of political change which i call the shock of using the sense of panic in the public that necessarily follows the war were destabilizing the economic crisis or largescale hurricane to push through policies you wouldnt be able to push through under normal circumstances because people are focused on their daily emergencies and we are also seeing a. M. Infrastructure of people who want to make quick cash in the aftermath of disasters and so the battle for paradise is a kind of case study which before it even made landfall we were hearing talk of how this was a great opportunity to prioritized the energy grid and it was already the site that was used for the austerity and deregulation so porter rico had already become a tax haven, and this is a way that it was used during the debt crisis to attract the socalled High Net Worth individuals, change your mailing address, you dont have to spend the whole year. It was attractive to the Financial Sector and then they didnt have to pay all kinds of taxes they would have had to pay so the disaster capitalists in the h battle for paradise and to erke advantage of the real estate and the crypto currency gaining was within seatacs. Its a strategy we have seen again and again by the wealthy players in the aftermath of disasters i began the shock doctrine with Hurricane Katrina which is when i first started writing about Climate Change a decade and a half ago. When i was in new orleans it was still partially underwater but there were already real estate speculators talking about what an opportunity it was to get rid of the Public Housing projects and a lot of that happened in the aftermath and pretty soon they had the most privatized Charter School system in the United States so disgraced for m pthis raised forme and a lot s in new orleans what is the alternative to the capitalism and how can the communities, democratically respond to crisis that in so many cases points to the need for the dissolution to put forward their vision for how the communities should be built in the face of the disastersaf they can to get there in the aftermath of hurricane to advance what they call the peoples platform for how puerto rico should actually be rebuilt respond to its vulnerability to credit disruption and that includes no longer beingno dependent on overwhelmingly imported food from florida. So much of the land is in this very moment being sold off to the developers and other private interests. Theres various proposals into largescale it wouldve been a Green New Deal which is a way of responding to the collective Climate Crisis in a way that battles systemic inequality on every front. Host lets go to edward from keyport new jersey on booktv. Se caller it seems you just pretty much covered what i was going to talk about as an advocate for the future i see that m this disconnect between harnessing social energy that goes into in banning iraq on one little picture being scared of things, how do we cutut through this noise when its a one and 53,000 chance you could be killed by a terrorist but yes the diversity and other things you are covering. Hank you for your work. Guest it seems possible to harness huge amounts of Public Wealth if it is to wage a war and as the call mentioned based on pretty dubious evidence was later disproven, and yet we are demanding like the report with sources from 6,000 peerreviewed articles is seen as not good enough for us we are still waiting for the evidence to come in. But i think it has to do with who the Climate Crisis threatened and the fact that if we wereim to take the science seriously, whether it is loss of biodiversity, it would mean that a lot of very wealthy people, very wealthy interests in the Global Economy would have to make some serious sacrifices which is why they want to change the subject to it all being aboutwa whether or not you are going to be able to eat hamburgers or not. Its about the fact exxon mobil is threatened, shell wail, cargo was threatened. They are the most powerful this assist in the Global Economy who have a Business Model that is reliant on the continued extraction and exploitation of the fossil fuels. There are other ways organizing a business they are not as possible to have a solar Business Plan is to have an oil and gas business and so we have had this deliberate spread of misinformation on the airwaves and in print weve had the fossil fuel Company Funding the Disinformation Campaign that i would argue weve heard evidence of on the show and it has slowed us downan a. We have lost wonders that we will never get back because of it. And now we are in a moment where regular people are declaring an emergency from below. I think that is what we are seeing in the climate strike that was started with the Swedish Parliament a little bit more than a year ago. At this point she was 15yearsold and learned about Climate Change and watched a love of nature documentaries and learned about biodiversity and all these crises and looked around by her own telling and thought the world didnt make sense. If this were true wouldnt everybody be talking about it if we are destabilizing our one and only home against politicians be focused on this all the time and wouldnt it be the front page of every newspaper and everywhere she looked people were talking about Everything Else and i think that is pretty much still true even though we have an improvement in the climate coverage and so she decided to declare her own emergency and the one thing she had power over, onene of the ways she was able to disrupt business as usual is to not do the one thing everybody is expected to do so she stopped going to school on friday and helden her sign sayig it is the strike for climate and then more people came in different cities including new york city started having their ownis climate strike and withina very short period, she started in august of last year, by september of this years are just so just alittle bit more tr there were 7 million participating in the strikes and e this is people saying we are t going to wait for politicians to recognize this emergency. We are going to declare and put pressure on politicians to follow. Some governments declared a state of Climate Emergency. Whether they are following that up with the kind of policies hat that would demand, we will see. I think it has he drawn the map in the democratic primaries, the scale of change that is being debated in the party right now is nothing like what we werere talking about a few years ago when it was a debate about cap and trade versus a carbon tax now we are talking about who is spending how many trillions of dollarsri on the Green New Deal plan and how many jobs can be created and how quickly we can move and whose targets are more ambitious and its not because theyve seen the light but its because theres iothats becausl movement that is putting pressure to up their game. Host and very animated the fireball moments. Let me turn to you for a moment how do you approach writing a book but its thehe style . Host there were years between my the books and i think of those even though i didnt get a phd i was lucky enough with my first book and the fact that its called the way you did it put me in a privileged sisition as an author i was able to get an come i was able to walk off several years to do research, to put together a researchre team to build barries around Everything Else in my life because of course i do get speaking requests and things like that. Two write the shock doctrine by holed up in the woods in British Columbia where my family lives. Not a bad place, i must say. Its a beautiful place but quite isolated. The part i am in you cant get to without a fairy into driving for another hour. It is quite isolated and that makes it easy to say no to things when people come out and ask you to do things. Before there were apps like that, myea husband put Parental Controls on the computers i would become fronted with a teddy bear and change whilee writing the shock doctrine so that is how i write the. Guest the process but im describing would write a book with 70 pages of endnotes and it does require removing oneself for us and its a moment i feel like i can remove myself from the political debate. Ive just done a book that i hope is contributing about why we need to do transformational actions and married the struggle to lower emissions making the argument for why that doesnt slow us down but speedsec us up because people are hurting so much economically that if we dont bring together these imperatives people are going to resist it. I think it is going to be a while before. Joining from Putnam Valley new york you are wrong with naomi klein. On with naomi klein. Please go ahead. D. Caller thank you very much for your work. Its only going to get tougher. Even with the solar stuff the other gentleman mentioned its not going to be enough. It is a book called human nature and its a startling insight. He developed the implosion mode or and the people he worked for both this craft and everything but its based on the stream. When the grocer out of the corner theres about six others and one side of the stream is in the negative and the other is a positive and its electromagnetics in that order that keeps nutrition and everything that just normally wouldnt be a. Its the fact that its alive with energy and i think theres a lot of answerse in nature but you have to step back from that and realize im a 73yearold combat vet. It took me 25 years to get ptsd which is pretty much just a negative response or reflex. Guest i think we are seeing Many Solutions coming from paying attention to the Natural World which is a paradigm shift from the kind of dominance as speaking to dominate the Natural World, to bend it to our will and that sort of brute force engineering behind the dimming of great rivers and the fossil fuel economy that we could build up. Let and burnett and send it up into the atmosphere at about worry about what happened and then tell ourselves we have conquered nature you are no ndlonger boston bound by mother nature. You are the boss. Adif you read the marketing materials of the first commercial steam engines it was all about you are now the boss you dont have to wait for the wind to blow. You dont have to build your factories next to the rivers because they used to be powered by water wheels. You can build them wherever you want. The ideact was you had your portable climate and you could control the temperature. Over the hundreds of years of the Industrial Age they have been accumulating in the atmosphere and now comes the stsponse that takes the form of hurricane dory and was unprecedented to behave that way whether its the storms, fires, heat waves, we are up against forces that are more powerfull than us. Its a fairy tale about the idea that we now are in the drivers seat. I think the beauty of renewable entry is that it does put usbe back in dialogue in the Natural World and it is about sort of harnessing the power of nature and of bending and breaking it. Guest go in with a leading author and artist this month as naomi klein. You can join on twitter affectt booktv or facebook. Where can people follow you . Twitter naomi klein. I dont really do any other social media. I sometimes say that i am on twitters way of the algorithm of hate. I dont need the algorithm of envy. Host dme from tennessee. Go ahead. Caller have you noticed that theres an activist group in the uk that is rated apparently they have a warehouse with signs and the authority to prevent them from doing a protest now i am a republican and a conservative and this bothers me because this is like going into a church and taking my antiabortion science. Id appreciate your nonpartisan solidarity. The good is called extension rebellion and they are a fairly young group they have not been around for that long but they engage in nonviolent civil disobedience to try to expresse the fact that we are in a Climate Emergency and they have been demanding that the governments declare a climate as we were talking about earlier and they have shut down bridges and roads but they are completely nonviolent and they were planning on taking off or they are planning on kicking off disobedience starting on october 7. With the very serious opinion makers that meet that parameters of acceptable discourse. And that we should ignore them and allow ourselves to be guided by what we know is right and needed and we need to move where the center is. And that is what has beenn happening when those 11 years that the democratic primaries. And all of those Bernie Sanders puts on the table. So there is a transformation they shouldnt worry about the mainstream because thats where most people are but that is that pandit talk of what you can or cannot say. I want to create any rivalries but your brother was a good activist child and you were w not. Is that fair quick. Yes. My brother was like these young climate strikers focusing on nuclear war. And he started a Student Group in a school. And was part of the generation and it is still terrifying. For me and my Family Dynamics he has a good activist thing covered so i was interested in having fun so its not that i didnt care about politics it was organized politics but i was concerned with racism and sexism that i perceive to be unfair but i did not join groups and thats why i became a writer. [laughter] did she hear him argue the economic crisis of the Great Depression was from government interference so what are the thoughts of the robber barons in america . Thank you very much. I hope i dont offend anybody but i cannot respond. Im not familiar with his work specifically but i am with the argument that the great crash was not deregulation as everybody else believes but it is a small group that says it was deregulation i am not convinced by that i think that breaking up of the banks under fdr was stabilizing the Financial Sector. Know is not enough and you begin with the one word on the election of donaldec trump. Yes. You ask me how i write books and its not enough to fall in that pattern to take years and years i wrote it over seven months after trumps election because i was terrified to research the ways in which my book and with this distraction where it is possible to get away with all kinds of things so when that word was used again and again after the election that shocked so many of us. With those expectations with that untraditional player i am this worried that the idea he comes out of the blue but if we second that narrative of him of everything that was understood about america this is at everybodys reaction. And that lived experience and that there is a pretty big appetite. S. And with those lines in the book that these are some of the messages from the trump presidency. These are pretty widespread ideas. He is logical ideation we have been looking at billionaires just because they are billionaires lifting them to the status of god so i make the argument in the book that Capital Infrastructure with the foundation with the Clinton Global Initiative to say we can fix this without government. Went to pivot that knowledge with Global Health and reproduction just because youre good at one thing doesnt mean youre good with everything but you live in a culture that assumes just because you are a billionaire so the argument i made from another is and where they could stand before the American People but the fact of my richness at least to play a very successful businessman on a tv show. So what i want to do is explore the various roads to make it less shocking. You , are pretty distractible and not focused. And that is between the narrative and if you dont have a story that explains that event in that state of dislocation and shock. And to get people out of shock themselves and a lot of what is happening in there is a clean one a clear pattern. And no president has deregulatedhe as much of the American Economy and Environmental Standards as donald trump. Nobody has given more to millionaires and billionaires of tax cuts than donaldli trump. In the book i call it a corporate clue. And whats the latest we. And then was taken a little too twe far. And with the top ten Luxury Brands in the world that we begin by talking election night. Hillary clinton and donald trump both nominees in new york city. You are half a world, away. What was youre reaction . And for the better part of a month into have a documentary that to experience massive die off and combining the speaking with new research that i was doing with political organizing with the group of organizations that were interested to put togetherli a coalition for the Green New Deal or some version of that in the trade Union Leaders and organizers and climate activists all in this room and we had this forwardlooking meeting of how we do this and this changes everything. So in the middle of the meeting everyones phone started vibrating because here in new york but that the results came in and it was clear that trump was going to win. With those climate actions that faded away everybody realized we were on completely new territor territory. Vancouver washington go ahead. Caller thanks for taking my question. I read a book in 2003 called plan b written by mister brown who has retired since then but he was talking about mobilizing a wartime mobilization to address Climate Change. Have you read that or familiar with his work . If so then what influence does he have on the current greed new deal quick. I am familiar with his work and the literature that draws on world war ii the historical precedent to show us to read to all factories at the incredible clip of producing fighter jets and also many parallels i mentioned Victory Gardens but americans and canadians and british people radically change the way they move around with the Second World War because of all the fuel to be conserved for the war effort. So people drove very little compared to before. Public transit increased by more than 80 percent. In this country more than 90 percent in canada so there are important parallels. Bernie sanders talks about these as well. This points to the fact that we cant agree one call the Green New Deal is not a new idea it has been floating around for a long time with the Climate Justice movement. There reason i think the new deal is a little more useful than the world war ii precedent is simply this was so topdown. I went one federal government have that much power we need more communities involved andre sub components but we do need to look at that whole era for precedent for the rapid change in the new deal and the transition to wartime mobilization and the Marshall Plan as an example of times when resources are marshaled understanding various threats or the threat of fascism and that countries were falling under control of the soviet union. And to re bill the public sphere and then a more mixed economy with a much stronger social protection and then we lose it all to the soviet. Was there a book or an author that influenced or changed your thinking on any subject quick. Yes. So many books. I dont know where to begin but this changes everything with silent spring was important and of the indigenous leader and author in canada. That posthumously published book through that reconciliation manifesto many including fighting Climate Change it is very important as we rise to the challenge. So recently the novel is that story everybody has been told they have to read because its just magnificent. I read a lot of fiction and the workaround climate. But the most recent novel is underappreciated and called an sheltered and what it means to live in a house thats falling apart. And the manifestation but it is just magnificent and then to understand how they commute how trees communicate with each other and every living community. Its one of the most beautiful descriptions of activism i have ever read. I dont think they get a fair shake in society for those that really do put the collective and then and then but then writes about them not uncritically with a lot of respect anddct compassion. And your husband and places restrictions on you when you are writing a book. [laughter] is he antr editor . But earlier on he would edit me more. And then he directeded a film that when iin was writing and to go with the book and then to make a film about it which i did with the shock doctrine and there is something funny about that because you are necessarily retracing your footsteps you dont have that sense of discovery so you are mimicking that for the camera i never want to go back what i want to go forward so i didnt like the idea to make films after i had already writtenin the book. It was tough so we decided to do Something Different i was writing the book and he was making the film so that meant we were both really busy so he had less time to edit me in previous books. Cokie roberts said theme biggest challenge was writing a book with her husband. [laughter] i believe it. It was hard enough to make a film and book together im not sure i could cowrite a book with anyone but now with my husband i value our life too much. [laughter] new york you are next. Caller what are your thoughts where all the people work in the future . It seems the last few decades the emphasis is to do away jowith the jobs this is the root of all evil. Its a great question. Its not exactly a lack of jobs but a lack of jobs that pay salaries that cann support families with a sense of security with very low unemployment right now there is an epidemic they have multiple jobs there is a contradiction because there is low unemployment that doesnt explain why theyre so much economic stress and falling. Into poverty not everything is going well with the kind of jobs they are getting but it is clear if we invest in Renewable Energy and energy tiefficiency and Public Transportation and we create many times more jobs than when we invest already there are more than those directly involved. But too often and with those same salaries although they are getting worse thats why we have a strike right now with the uaw workers and this is in the original green new sudeal resolution that workers who are moving from high carbon jobs to these new jobs in renewables need to maintain salary levels of benefit levels. That is key. Another part is we have a lot of jobs of the Service Sector sometimes called the care economy that overwhelmingly he is bed womens work and there hasnt been any womens callersan so if there are any women out there call because i am only. [laughter] lonely. No offense. [laughter] none taken. [laughter] really i want to thank you for your clarity of thought and communication on the existential crisis of our lifetime. I also heard you speak on youtube and other venues on what is sacred and the new and the lash with the new age to get away from more religious ways of thinking can we separate the supernatural andpe superstitious to come up the new vision of what we see in the future and a new Life Expectancy and a new deal for our future and for our kids anddeal grandkids. Thank you very much for your time. Led a great big question. The dawn the scientific revolution and the Industrial Age, there was a shift in worldview away from seeing the Natural World as sacred i appreciate the collar using the word sacred its not just the religion or organized religion. Once again it is a relativelyn. New phenomenon to not see the Natural World as sacred or a little scary and alive and deserving of our respect and pretty much every other modern Industrial Age saw the Natural World that way and then you are more careful you dont want to kiss off the gods or make too big of a mess when this is part of the reason why i love the other story because it is re enchanting of the Natural World that a lot of people are drawn to understand the crisis has to with imagining the world as a machine that made us believe we could take without repercussions so i do believe climate distraction is not ecological crisis for an economic crisis but a spiritual and narrative crisis that we could dominate nature to see the Natural World thatna the machine it is how we ended up where we are with the return of older stories and part of getting us out of there. Fences and widows is a collection of essays i wrote when i was on the front lines of corporate globalization. This changes everything the subtitle is capitalism versus climate it is about the class that we have with an Economic System that requires expansion to not be in crisis in the Natural World that we contract to not be in crisis. Margaret from arkansas were waiting to hear from you. Caller thank you. Thank you tom for his question and naomi for her reply. This morning my phone received two alerts for flash floods in my area i do think greta is a prophetic voice and it seems some religious denominations are listening and hearing and studying to know the truth i am not sure about my denomination of the southern baptist. I really dont know what their opinion is now. But some of ubu believe is the first bible and we would do well to read the scriptures of nature and accurately interpret them. We will get a response thank you for your call. Thank you and i absolutely agree that we need faith leaders in this conversation is not just politics and economics but speaking to people wholesale not just organized religion but a chapter p that describes what i took as avowed to the vatican as a secular after the pope released his document that i encourage everyone to read and like i said i dont usually recommend catholic text but it is amazing to draw on the teachings of francis of assisi in dealing with the vatican i attended a conference where it was a profound debate happening in the Catholic Church about reexamining the idea that the earth is human dominion that is just here for us to what pope francis was saying very clearly is that nature has value in and of itself and that was pretty radical we need leadership from all faith leaders. If we would say here 20 years from now how do you think history will judge President Trump with this moment in history it depends on what we do we are on our profound moral crossroads and what im worried about is not just the weather the flash flooding the previous color mentioned or the forest fires that town the caribbean as we speak but i worry about the left but what scares me thehe most is the intersection of heavy weather with the rising climatein hate i think we see figures like trump emerge and these figures who are really reallyzi good to protected in group and then defining these threatening out groups within the borders and the invading armies of other so we see the fortress of the borders not just the us but European Union where thousands have enough to drown in the mediterranean i dont think its a coincidence that the two fires are happening at the same time of climate disruption in the unmasked xenophobic hatred people understand we are in anst era of ecological disruption that for human and habitability is contracting and people will have to move and there is a couple of ways we can respond to that the back onf how we look this moment 20 years from now my fear is this will be the moment where we decided that we would only protect ourselves or our own we were entering an era where people willka be okay where an unspeakable number of people die or we can go on another road based on the idea every human life has equalot value everybody has the right to seek safety it is a crisis in bethe rich world that we owe each other a lot by right of being human so i hope in 20 years from now what we see about thisye moment that we chose not to hoard but to share and figure out how to live together to live on less land but with more generosity and humanity i believe it isbl possible. I know it is hard that the alternative is not just climate disruption but the human that we dont want to be. If the president is reelected . All i know is that every waking moment for me is focused on that not happening. Because we dont have another four years to spend cracking open new pieces of wilderness to drilling and building new fortresses to unleash more hatred against the most vulnerable. Getting rid of trump is a moral imperative and that means making sure the candidate emerges from the democratic primary for standing up to Corporate Power not being mired in the swamp of washington and seen as somebody who will have a different set of moral values. I will leave it to your viewers and listeners to figure out who best meets that criteriaut but its incredibly important there is such a sharp alternative and they dont have a lot of baggage going into the race because this is big change ahead of us. There are very powerful forces that will try to stop anybody who tries to do the rightt thing. If you look at the candidate make sure you choose a candidate who has a strong spine to take on powerful figures. West to San Francisco you are next. Caller its a pleasure to speak with you. I want to turn the conversation to my favorite subject lately is Russia Ukraine and the 2016 election and the following collusion delusion with russia and i specifically wonder where you stand on the collusion delusion part but let me say that the revolution that happened in 2014 i see that as a classical regime change operation that was run out of the state department with john mccain victoria newman the whole gang and then on top of that you have the overheard conversation where she lays out the whole leadership of who is in and who is out that is crucial because as we talk ruabout ukraine and the role that its now talked about you have to go back to realize that was the coup detat we supported neofascist elements in ukraine that are still active and strong. Jump forward to the 2016 election with paulto 2 manafort who was Trumps Campaign manager. The Hillary Campaign is completely in bed with ukrainians from the coup detat and joe biden et cetera basically they do maneuvers to get Paul Manafort indicted which he was it was pulled after trump became president and now we fast forward to hear whereer wewe have two years of mueller and the whole idea that trump was a russian puppetet but even look over every stone they cannot prove that which just goes to show it was the bunk accusation from the beginning. So now i will jump in to get a response thank you for the questions and g comments. I am not sure i agree there is absolutely nothing there. But obviously they did not make the impeachable case around russia. But whats going on now with ukraine relates to what i was talking about earlier withte who the candidate is that runs against trump. I would encourage anybody who has trouble with mister trump to go find a reasonable trump supporter tell them the ukraine and biden story and why he should be impeached. And then tell me how you feel about biden because i dont thank you can tell the story in a way that they both dont look bad thats not the same to say he has done anything enillegal. He probably hasnt and i do think that trump has committed the Impeachable Offense at and should be impeached and has committed others that he could have been impeached for but given that this is the one that the democrats have seemingly chosen, i think its a huge problem for biden because even if its not illegal, its not illegal but i read the story saying theres no evidence of wrongdoing if there is no evidence of the legault lawn illegality thats not the same as wrongdoingil. We are in a Climate Crisis and we were during the obamama years. The obama biden private presidency was all about natural gas the interest in ukraine was about increasing production. The fact we have a sitting Vice President son would be on the board of an Energy Company of any kind but a Foreign Energy Natural Gas Company getting paid 30000 a year is that fossil fuel nepotism it nepotism is a good for politics or the planet and there needs to be a much cleaner break. It is a cesspool actually saw after the 2016 election the New York Times asked me to write an oped responding to the claim that hillarys loss but meant that no woman could be president addressingg a that there were a lot of women who took itlo w personally. What will i tell my daughter . The United States is too misogynist to ever have a t woman . I made the argument that i do not think that is a we should take from the election because i feel that Hillary Clinton was to compromise a candidate to run as hard as she needed to against trump and the one way that trump was vulnerable was that multiple women accusing him of Sexual Misconduct and she cannot go after him because she was to compromise with bill clinton and thats one of the reason she lost the election but her hands were tied behind her back because of her own compromises so one of the things that trump is most vulnerable is his own self dealings and nepotism in hisse own family maybe thats not illegal but it is improper flies in the face of him claiming he standing for working america that is where he is the most vulnerable in the ways that his family has profited from theit presidency trustede biden the messenger . What about hunter bided on his hands tied in the way that Hillary Clintons were tied on hers . We need a candidate whose hands are not tied behind their back. So please do not make it joe biden i would just would like to say that. [laughter] kentucky you are next. Caller i would like to talk about fdr and the new deal because the stabilization board was his treasure who was aa congressman who called back the 16th amendment. And a lot of what she wants to accomplish could be done with five after he quit being the treasurer and then became treasurer for fdr thought that the crash happened before fdr becamepr president the Economic Stabilization board was in response to the depression so after they got that stabilized he then went on to sit on the Supreme Court he was from kentucky they have a long history with russia they are our largest neighbors if you cut that in half you have two states bigger than texas. [laughter] a i will treat that as comment. Next call or go ahead. Caller talking about the power ofns corporations went to make people aware theree is movement to amend the constitution to say corporations are not peopleno with rights a corporation is a useful device for organizing people and many and resources but it should be in the Public Interest it is formed by a corporate charter and since we have a government of the people supposedlyme of corporations and serve the people rather than the other way around there is an Organization Called move to amend thats working on the constitutional amendment to make it clear that corporations have been privileges granted by law but do notve have inherent rights as people. Thank you margaret. Thats Great Initiative i would recommend people check it out i am not aware of that and that is a big piece of the puzzle of all those that are needed to change as quickly as we need to. Good afternoon thank you. I am a former poet laureate of my town and i wanted to know is a twopart question, will you ever write poetry . Did poetry contribute anything to your writing or how you started writing because many say they started with poetry the other is because of your canadian upbringing. Relatives from canada myself so if you think have your a son the age of school do you see a value of Canadian School icucation over the American Education of public or private or charter cracks thank you so much. Did you hang up . She hung up i was going to ask her to read ai verse. I have to admit i did write bad poetry before i wrote pros. It was definitely my first sort of writing passion but i have not done that in many years. I think it would be hard. Yes. It served my teenage years appreciatend i i that and i talked about what the Green New Deal should mean the original new deal read to a renaissance including funding and so on and with that good low carbon work to invest in. Not just solar panels. So i am living in the United States right now im teaching at rutgers we actually just moved little more than a year ago we have experienced most the canadian and American Public school b system. The canadian public School System is less unequal. Its all based on property taxes this massive discrepancies between the kind of education that we get in those schools and wealthier neighborhoods are better resourced and can raise more money but its not as unequal as it is in the United States. There are things that i find are better than the canadian system. I think there i sound disloyal but my son is specialneeds and need specialal support you have the ada which is a strong legal instrument that has given students and parents stronger tools to require that the schools provide the support. And to be honest, people have their views about canada, id be happy to talk about how much better the Health Care System is, but when it comes to special needs, the us has us beat. If they have influenced your writing now joining us from maine go ahead. Caller that such an honor to join you today. I have a lot of ground to cover but basically i want to ask you about the silencing of the scientist in canada and your thought of the whole concept of fossil fuel in s corporate ship that clamps down on environmentalist especially Indigenous People and in the spirit of the unity , how can we call on our leaders especially new york city or massachusetts to base the agreed new deal the Green New Deal with those indigenous neighbors based on the situation with the Alberta Canadian tar sands with the neighbors ofr the north of the ecosystem that has been cleansed by the quarterback make it damn how do we find a more Sustainable Way to offer them the all of leaf and all those other industries to find another way that would also help them to live sustainable spirit there is a lot on the table we will get a response. The Core Principles of what Climate Justice would mean that those who got the worst deal under the current economy those who have the dirtiest industries in their backyard the highest cancer rates the highest asthma rates they bear the toxic burden on this economy need to benefit from the transformation including their own Energy Projects as the cooler one the caller was alluded to but nobody should be left behind in this transition talking earlier about thehe language with the resolution of those in the sectors to have the maintain salary and benefits level but in addition to the jobs created Bernie Sanders estimates 5 million jobs in Energy Efficiency affordable green housing to invest in Public Transit you have other sectors of the care economy that is teaching that is low carbon in addition there is a lot of cleanup work that needs to be done like that tar sands. Any region where you have had intense fossil fuel extraction or fracking or abandoned wells or land rehabilitation, there are tens of thousands of abandoned wellheads in alberta. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs that could be created getting the polluters to clean up the mess they created the that requires retraining because they would be on job sites where they put them in the knowhow to cap them and clean them up as just a problem we dont get them to finance at their cleanup theres plenty of work towo be done that the frontline communities including Indigenous People it is important that that knowledge and land rights be respected as part of the response to the climateis crisis. We need huge reforestation land rehabilitation and this should be done on the same model of Indigenous People on their land the way you create national parks. There has to bele a way we respect that land rights as part of the huge conservation work ahead. Last question from st. Paul please be brief. Caller with 9 11 they stopped the airplanes from flying and then the planet heated up a little bit so in minnesota today the fall comes earlier in the winters days later so the comments even though the planet is heating up less light is getting throughg. Im not sure that i really understood the question about less light. Absently Climate Change is gone from a future threat off in the distance to something that is impacting the lives of pretty much everybody now. They notice the subtle changes. But for Many Americans the entire city was flooded they lost massive infrastructure or on the west coast they are blanketed a wildfire summer after summer i was recently in paradise california which was razed to the ground by the historic cant fire it is not an abstract issue in this is a huge shift and this is concern about Climate Change. Back to my final question the rule to play at influencing or how you view all of this. Young people generally i meet young people everywhere i go i partnered with this book tour through use Climate Justice movement that demands of the Green New Deal i have a private meeting with them before i do my Public Events everywhere i go. They are worried about everything from whether it makes sense to go to college they are so uncertain if the future or if they should haver kids. I think young people live with such a sense of insecurity about w work but the broader existential if theres a feature at all and we are not taking thise seriously of what it means to their Mental Health and to the future being in contact with them is what fuels me. Naomi klein including no is not enough the shock doctrine and on fire thank you for joining us we appreciate it. Thank you so much it was a pleasure. Congratulations and thank you for joining us today. Your book, we will cover a lot ofro