April 17th, 2019By Naomi Klein and Molly Crabapple Video by Molly CrabappleToday, The Intercept launches "A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez," a seven-minute film narrated by the congresswoman and illustrated by Molly Crabapple. Set a couple of decades from now, it's a flat-out rejection of the idea that a dystopian future is a forgone conclusion. Instead, it offers a thought experiment: What if we decided not to drive off the climate cliff? What if we chose to radically change course and save both our habitat and ourselves?What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like then? Read on The Intercept ...

17 April, 2019

February 13th, 2019By Naomi Klein "I really don't like their policies of taking away your car, taking away your airplane flights, of 'let's hop a train to California,' or 'you're not allowed to own cows anymore!'"   So bellowed President Donald Trump in El Paso, Texas, his first campaign-style salvo against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey's Green New Deal resolution. There will surely be many more.   It's worth marking the moment. Because those could be the famous last words of a one-term president, having wildly underestimated the public appetite for transformative action on the triple crises of our time: imminent ecological unraveling, gaping economic inequality (including the racial and gender wealth divide), and surging white supremacy. Read on The Intercept ...

13 February, 2019

November 27th, 2018By Naomi Klein Like so many others, I've been energized by the bold moral leadership coming from newly elected members of Congress like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley in the face of the spiraling climate crisis and the outrageous attacks on unarmed migrants at the border. It has me thinking about the crucial difference between leadership that acts and leadership that talks about acting.I'll get to the Green New Deal and why we need to hold tight to that lifeline for all we're worth. But before that, bear with me for a visit to the grandstanding of climate politics past.It was March 2009 and capes were still fluttering in the White House after Barack Obama's historic hope-and-change electoral victory. Todd Stern, the newly appointed chief climate envoy, told a gathering on Capitol Hill that he and his fellow negotiators needed to embrace their inner superheroes, saving the planet from existential danger in the nick of time. Read on The Intercept ...

27 November, 2018

October 10th, 2018By Naomi Klein "Boring." That was Donald Trump's instant verdict on the New York Times's blockbuster investigation into the rampant tax fraud and nepotism that undergirds his fortune. Sarah Huckabee Sanders heartily concurred, informing the White House press corps that she refused to "go through every line of a very boring, 14,000-word story."Welcome to a new political PR strategy premised on the shredding of the American mind — you don't want to even try to read that interminable article; check out my Twitter feed instead, and this viral video of me saying rabid things. Read on The Intercept ...

10 October, 2018

September 21st, 2018By Naomi Klein I've been digging into disaster capitalism for a couple of decades now. For those of you who are new to the term, disaster capitalism is about how the already rich and powerful systematically exploit the pain and the trauma of collective shocks — like superstorms or economic crisis — in order to build an even more unequal and undemocratic society.Long before Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico was a textbook example. Before those fierce winds came, the debt — illegitimate and much of it illegal — was the excuse used to ram through a brutal program of economic suffering, what the great Argentine author Rodolfo Walsh, writing about four decades earlier, famously called miseria planificada, planned misery.This program systematically attacked the very glue that holds a society together: all levels of education, health care, the electricity and water systems, transit systems, communication networks, and more. Read on The Intercept ...

21 September, 2018

August 3rd, 2018By Naomi Klein This Sunday, the entire New York Times Magazine will be composed of just one article on a single subject: the failure to confront the global climate crisis in the 1980s, a time when the science was settled and the politics seemed to align. Written by Nathaniel Rich, this work of history is filled with insider revelations about roads not taken that, on several occasions, made me swear out loud. And lest there be any doubt that the implications of these decisions will be etched in geologic time, Rich's words are punctuated with full-page aerial photographs by George Steinmetz that wrenchingly document the rapid unraveling of planetary systems, from the rushing water where Greenland ice used to be to massive algae blooms in China's third largest lake. Read on The Intercept ...

03 August, 2018

March 20th, 2018By Naomi Klein Like everywhere else in Puerto Rico, the small mountain city of Adjuntas was plunged into total darkness by Hurricane Maria. When residents left their homes to take stock of the damage, they found themselves not only without power and water, but also totally cut off from the rest of the island. Every single road was blocked, either by mounds of mud washed down from the surrounding peaks, or by fallen trees and branches. Yet amid this devastation, there was one bright spot.A Solar OasisJust off the main square, a large, pink colonial-style house had light shining through every window. It glowed like a beacon in the terrifying darkness. Read on The Intercept ...

20 March, 2018

June 13th, 2017By Naomi Klein Shock. It's a word that has come up a lot since November— for obvious reasons.I've spent a lot of time thinking about shock. Ten years ago, I published "The Shock Doctrine," an investigation that spanned four decades from Pinochet's U.S.-backed coup in 1970s Chile to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.I noticed a brutal and recurring tactic by right wing governments. After a shocking event — a war, coup, terrorist attack, market crash or natural disaster — exploit the public's disorientation. Suspend democracy. Push through radical "free market" policies that enrich the 1 percent at the expense of the poor and middle class.The administration is creating chaos. Daily. Of course many of the scandals are the result of the president's ignorance and blunders — not some nefarious strategy. Read on The Intercept ...

13 June, 2017

June 7th, 2017By Naomi Klein Well, that didn't take long. On Monday, the Trump Organization announced plans to launch a chain of three-star hotels to target the millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump but could never afford his gilded hotels, condos, or clubs.Until now, Trump's middle-class base had to settle for purchasing little chips off the Trump brand: a bottle of water, a steak, a made-in-China tie or, of course, a hat. But there is more gold in them thar voters, and it is positively un-Trumpian to leave it unmanned. Read on Boston Globe ...

07 June, 2017