(37 comments) SHARE        Saturday, April 9, 2011
Our Lives Are Under Threat From Some of the Most Powerful and Richest Entities -- Here's How We Can Fight Back and Win The full power of the fossil fuel industry -- the most profitable business in the planet's history -- has been brought to bear on the fight, and they play hard and dirty. The Koch Brothers spend huge sums to underwrite the network of global warming skeptics; the US Chamber of Commerce emerged as the biggest campaign funder of them all, shuttling 94% of its donations to climate deniers.

(38 comments) SHARE        Saturday, June 19, 2010
Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident -" it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart of capitalism

(38 comments) SHARE        Friday, October 7, 2011
Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now "Why are they protesting?" ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: "What took you so long?" "We've been wondering when you were going to show up." And most of all: "Welcome."

(8 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Hurricane Sandy: beware of America's disaster capitalists The flurry of attempts to use Sandy's destructive power as a cash grab is just the latest chapter in the very long story I have called the The Shock Doctrine. And it is but the tiniest glimpse into the ways large corporations are seeking to reap enormous profits from climate chaos.

(72 comments) SHARE        Friday, April 17, 2009
HopeOver, HopeLash, HopeBreak: A Lexicon of Disappointment All is not well in Obamafanland.

(5 comments) SHARE        Monday, November 14, 2011
Capitalism vs. the Climate Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people to quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for the cleanup in the Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the "polluter pays" principle to be applied to climate change. Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency.

(16 comments) SHARE        Monday, June 28, 2010
Sticking the public with the bill for the bankers' crisis The heads of state who, on Sunday night, smashed social safety nets and burned good jobs in the middle of a recession. Faced with the effects of a crisis created by the world's wealthiest and most privileged strata, they decided to stick the poorest and most vulnerable people in their countries with the bill.

(1 comments) SHARE        Monday, January 18, 2010
How Corporate Branding is taking over the world From tooth paste to tanks, corporate branding, and corporate power, are entrenched. Naomi Klein first published this piece in the Huffington post.

(21 comments) SHARE        Thursday, November 10, 2016
It was the Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are "leaderful," as many in the Movement for Black Lives say.

(10 comments) SHARE        Friday, April 11, 2014
Why US fracking companies are licking their lips over Ukraine The crisis du jour is conflict in Ukraine, being used as a battering ram to knock down sensible restrictions on natural gas exports and push through a controversial free-trade deal with Europe. It's quite a deal: more corporate free-trade polluting economies and more heat-trapping gases polluting the atmosphere -- all as a response to an energy crisis that is largely manufactured.

(2 comments) SHARE        Saturday, October 3, 2020
A Message From The Future II: The Years Of Repair With political and ecological fires raging all around, is it irresponsible to imagine a future world radically better than our own? A world where governments fear the people instead of the other way around?

(28 comments) SHARE        Friday, February 6, 2009
All of Them Must Go It's taken a while, but from Iceland to Latvia, South Korea to Greece, the rest of the world is finally having its ¡Que se vayan todos! (They all must go!) moment.

(8 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Real Change Depends on Stopping the Bailout Profiteers The question is now whether Obama will have the courage to take the ideas that won him this election and turn them into policy. Or, alternately, whether he will use the financial crisis to rationalize a move to what pundits call "the middle" (if there is one thing this election has proved, it is that the real middle is far to the left of its previously advertised address)

(3 comments) SHARE        Sunday, August 30, 2015
Change Everything or Face A Global Katrina The U.S. government is barrelling toward an economic crisis, in no small part thanks to the deficit spending that has bankrolled the construction of the privatized disaster economy. That means that sooner rather than later, the contracts are going to dip significantly.

(18 comments) SHARE        Saturday, February 5, 2011
Goldstone Report Details a Massive Crime Scene in Gaza Many Gazans I met on that trip appeared as traumatized by the absence of an international investigation as by the attacks. They explained that even in the darkest days of the Israeli onslaught, they had comforted themselves with the belief that, this time, Israel had gone too far.

(4 comments) SHARE        Saturday, September 20, 2014
Climate change is a global emergency. Stop waiting for politicians to sound the alarm What is most terrifying about the threat of climate disruption is not the unending procession of scientific reports about rapidly melting ice sheets, crop failures and rising seas. It's the combination of trying to absorb that information while watching our so-called leaders behave as if the global emergency is no immediate concern.

(3 comments) SHARE        Friday, October 17, 2014
Climate change: how to make the big polluters really pay The astronomical profits these companies and their cohorts continue to earn from digging up and burning fossil fuels cannot continue to hemorrhage into private coffers. They must, instead, be harnessed to help roll out the clean technologies and infrastructure that will allow us to move beyond these dangerous energy sources, as well as to help us adapt to the heavy weather we have already locked in.

(4 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, October 30, 2013
How science is telling us all to revolt one dynamic offers hope--resistance--movements of people who adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the capitalist culture. This includes "environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist groups."

(10 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Harvey Didn't Come Out Of The Blue. Now Is The Time To Talk About Climate Change. Talking honestly about climate change -- what is fueling this era of serial disasters -- even while they're playing out in real time -- isn't disrespectful to the people on the front lines. In fact, it is the only way to truly honor their losses, and our last hope for preventing a future littered with countless more victims.

(10 comments) SHARE        Saturday, May 9, 2020
A High-Tech Coronavirus Dystopia Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, joined the governor's briefing to announce that he will be heading up a blue-ribbon commission to reimagine New York state's post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.

(6 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, December 8, 2020
The Great Reset Conspiracy Smoothie The Great Reset through articles, videos, webinars, podcasts, and a book by WEF founder Klaus Schwab, provided a coronavirus-themed rebranding of all the things Davos does anyway, now hastily repackaged as a blueprint for reviving the global economy by "seeking a better form of capitalism."

SHARE        Sunday, December 14, 2014
Why #BlackLivesMatter Should Transform the Climate Debate What does #BlackLivesMatter, and the unshakable moral principle that it represents, have to do with climate change? Everything. Because we can be quite sure that if wealthy white Americans had been the ones left without food and water for days in a giant sports stadium after Hurricane Katrina, even George W. Bush would have gotten serious about climate change.

(26 comments) SHARE        Saturday, August 4, 2018
Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not "Human Nature" We aren't losing earth -- but the earth is getting so hot so fast that it is on a trajectory to lose a great many of us. In the nick of time, a new political path to safety is presenting itself. This is no moment to bemoan our lost decades. It's the moment to get the hell on that path.

(2 comments) SHARE        Friday, January 24, 2020
How the Transformative Power of Solidarity Will Beat Trump Bernie Sanders has just done exactly what many critics have long called on him to do: He asked his supporters to dial back the personal attacks on rivals in the Democratic primary and focus on substantial policy differences.

SHARE        Monday, November 15, 2010
G20 Trials and the War on Activism let's always remember that the gravest crimes of that summit were not the fake lake, or the civil liberties violations, or even the security budget. The following speech was made by Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein at the telethon held to raise funds the legal costs of G20 protesters. The telethon took place in Toronto on Nov. 11 and rabble.ca carried it live.

(5 comments) SHARE        Saturday, June 22, 2019
Forget Bernie vs. Warren. Focus on Growing the Progressive Base and Defeating Biden. There is a small army of candidates, with two of the leaders running on platforms so far to the left, they would have been unimaginable for anyone but a protest candidate as recently as 2014. The front-runner, meanwhile, is eminently beatable (especially if Joe Biden keeps showing us exactly who he is, as he did about six times this week).

(15 comments) SHARE        Saturday, November 14, 2020
Now We Have To Fight Trump's Tin-pot Coup -- And Biden's Worst Instincts We have to do it all: Stop the Republicans from stealing an election they lost and stop the Democrats from blowing a mandate they won.

(14 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, September 8, 2009
We Don't Feel Like Celebrating with Israel This Year

(14 comments) SHARE        Friday, September 29, 2017
A new shock doctrine: in a world of crisis, morality can still win Ours is an age when it is impossible to pry one crisis apart from all the others. They have all merged, reinforcing and deepening each other like one shambling, multi-headed beast. The current US president can be thought of in much the same way. It's tough to adequately sum him up. You know that horrible thing currently clogging up the London sewers, the fatberg? Trump is the political equivalent of that.

SHARE        Friday, January 23, 2015
Message to the UK: The Fracking Bridge is Already Burning In rushing to exploit the UK's shale gas reserves, the industry has spent millions on public relations and brazenly overridden the democratic will of British citizens by overturning laws that had prevented drilling under homes. The coalition government, meanwhile, has done the sector's bidding at every turn.

(2 comments) SHARE        Thursday, April 7, 2016
The Problem With Hillary Clinton Isn't Just Her Corporate Cash. It's Her Corporate Worldview. While Clinton is great at warring with Republicans, taking on powerful corporations goes against her entire worldview, against everything she's built, and everything she stands for. The real issue, in other words, isn't Clinton's corporate cash, it's her deeply pro-corporate ideology: one that makes taking money from lobbyists and accepting exorbitant speech fees from banks seem so natural.

(12 comments) SHARE        Saturday, December 26, 2009
For Obama, No Opportunity Too Big To Blow Contrary to countless reports, the debacle in Copenhagen was not everyone's fault... There's plenty of blame to go around, but there was one country that possessed unique power to change the game. It didn't use it. If Barack Obama had come to Copenhagen with a transformative and inspiring commitment to getting the U.S. economy off fossil fuels, all the other major emitters would have stepped up.

(4 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Chile's Socialist Rebar; Klein rebuts sloppy WSJ op-ed attack Just two days after Chile was struck by a devastating earthquake, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens informed his readers that Milton Friedman's "spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile" because, "thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse. Stephens attacked Kleins Shock Doctrine theory, but Klien rebuts with reality, overcoming neocon fantasy

(4 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Irma Won't "Wake Up" Climate Change-Denying Republicans. Their Whole Ideology Is On The Line. We need to stop waiting for disasters to "wake up" hardcore deniers. But as Trump uses overlapping disasters of Harvey, Irma, North Korea, and whatever other hell he can exploit to smuggle through his cruel economic agenda, the rest of us should be wide awake to the reality that stopping him, and the worldview he represents, is a matter of humanity's collective survival.

(4 comments) SHARE        Monday, November 12, 2012
Superstorm Sandy -- a People's Shock? Is there anyone who can still feign surprise at this stuff? The flurry of attempts to use Sandy's destructive power as a cash grab is just the latest chapter in the very long story I have called The Shock Doctrine. And it is but the tiniest glimpse into the ways large corporations are seeking to reap enormous profits from climate chaos.

(2 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Awake, Hungry and Idle No More During this season of light and magic, something truly magical is spreading. The people whose land our founders stole and whose culture they tried to stamp out are rising up, hungry for justice. These are the rights Mr. Harper is trying to extinguish now. Canada's roots are showing. And these roots will make us all stand stronger.

(4 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, April 22, 2014
The Change Within: The Obstacles We Face Are Not Just External Because of the way our daily lives have been altered by both market and technological triumphalism, we lack many of the observational tools necessary to convince ourselves that climate change is real -- let alone the confidence to believe that a different way of living is possible.

(5 comments) SHARE        Friday, January 12, 2018
"New York City Is Taking a Game-Changing First Step in Turning the World Right Side Up" By suing the five oil majors who knowingly deepened the climate crisis, and simultaneously beginning the process of divesting $5-billion from fossil fuel companies, New York City is taking a game-changing first step in turning the world right side up. And not to overstate the case, this could change the world.

(4 comments) SHARE        Sunday, June 19, 2016
The best is yet to come The evidence is clear: The left just won. Forget the nomination -- I mean the argument. Clinton, and the 40-year ideological campaign she represents, has lost the battle of ideas. The spell of neoliberalism has been broken, crushed under the weight of lived experience and a mountain of data. Left ideas are popular just as they are, utterly unadorned. Really popular -- and in the most pro-capitalist country in the world.

(3 comments) SHARE        Saturday, April 24, 2010
What Happened in Bolivia This Week Could Save Our Failing Democracies Four rights discussed: nature should be granted rights that protect ecosystems from annihilation; that those who violate those rights and other international environmental agreements should face legal consequences; that poor countries should receive various forms of compensation for a crisis they are facing but had little role in creating; and that there should be a mechanism for people around the world to express their views

SHARE        Saturday, December 1, 2018
The Game-Changing Promise of a Green New Deal The Copenhagen deal -- cooked up behind closed doors with the most vulnerable countries locked out -- amounted to a "grubby pact between the world's biggest emitters: I'll pretend that you are doing something about climate change if you pretend that I am too. Deal? Deal."

(2 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, February 10, 2009
All of Them Must Go - "¡Que se vayan todos!" Watching the crowds in Iceland banging pots and pans until their government fell reminded me of a chant popular in anti-capitalist circles in 2002: "You are Enron. We are Argentina."

(3 comments) SHARE        Sunday, June 6, 2010
Blinding the Witnesses There is something way too literal about Israel shooting out the eye of a witness to its crimes.

(13 comments) SHARE        Monday, November 9, 2020
We were told Joe Biden was the "safe choice." But it was risky to offer so little Even if the Democratic party base was much more politically aligned with Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren, in their support for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, for racial justice, the party was sure that Bernie Sanders was too risky. And so, as we all remember, they banded together and gave us Biden.

(7 comments) SHARE        Saturday, April 20, 2019
A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez The video is a seven-minute postcard from the future. It's about how, in the nick of time, a critical mass of humanity in the largest economy on earth came to believe that we were actually worth saving. Because, as Ocasio-Cortez says in the film, our future has not been written yet and "we can be whatever we have the courage to see."

(2 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Electing Trudeau Isn't Enough, We Need "Relentless Pressure From Below" We are determined to learn from the US experience. We remember what happened when progressives demobilized after Obama was elected and we won't make the same mistake. Instead, a huge and growing movement of Canadians is determined to give our young prime minister the best gift any new government can receive: relentless pressure from below.

(6 comments) SHARE        Thursday, May 2, 2013
Time for Big Green to Go Fossil Free The movement demanding that public interest institutions divest their holdings from fossil fuels is on a serious roll. At last count, there were active divestment campaigns on 305 campuses and in more than 100 US cities and states, and in Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Britain. The mission statement of the Fossil Free movement: "If it is wrong to wreck the climate, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage.

(1 comments) SHARE        Sunday, November 30, 2014
4 Reasons Keystone Really Matters If TransCanada isn't able to build Keystone to the south, then another pipeline will be built to the west or east. Or that dirty oil will be transported by rail. But make no mistake, we have long been assured: all that carbon buried beneath Alberta's boreal forest will be mined no matter what the president decides.

(3 comments) SHARE        Sunday, May 26, 2019
We're stepping up -- join us for a day to halt this climate crisis On 20 September, at the request of the young people who have been staging school strikes around the world, we're walking out of our workplaces and homes to spend the day demanding action on the climate crisis, the greatest existential threat that all of us face. This is going to be the beginning of a week of action all over the world. And we hope to make it a turning point in history.

SHARE        Wednesday, November 25, 2015
What's really at stake at the Paris climate conference now marches are banned Climate change is a moral crisis because every time governments of wealthy nations fail to act, it sends a message that we in the global north are putting our immediate comfort and economic security ahead of the suffering and survival of some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on Earth. The message is: our security is non-negotiable, yours is up for grabs.

(8 comments) SHARE        Monday, September 9, 2013
Overcoming 'Overburden': The Climate Crisis and a Unified Left Agenda The attacks working people are facing right now are a classic case of The Shock Doctrine. There's no shortage of examples, from the mass slashing of salaries and layoffs of public sector workers in Greece, to the attacks on pension funds in Detroit in the midst of a cooked up bankruptcy, to the Harper government's scapegoating of unions for its own policy failures right here in Canada.

(1 comments) SHARE        Monday, September 26, 2016
Canada's founding myths hold us back from addressing climate change Our new government has adopted the utterly inadequate targets of the last government. Alberta has a climate plan that would allow tar sands emissions to increase by 43 percent, wholly incompatible with the goals of the Paris climate agreement. And the push for new pipelines -- often sold as "nation building" -- continues to tear us apart.

(1 comments) SHARE        Sunday, December 17, 2017
Hope Trumps Nope: A Blueprint for Resistance One of the most unjust aspects of climate disruption (and there are many) is that our actions as adults today will have their most severe impact on the lives of generations yet to come, as well as kids alive today who are too young to impact policy. They have done nothing to create the crisis, but they are the ones who will deal with the most extreme weather -- the storms and droughts and fires and rising seas.

(5 comments) SHARE        Friday, May 15, 2009
The Cure for Layoffs: Fire the Boss! Tomorrow night (May 15) at Cooper Union in New York City, we're taking part in a panel that looks at this phenomenon, called Fire the Boss: The Worker Control Solution from Buenos Aires to Chicago.

SHARE        Monday, June 22, 2015
Climate Change Is a Crisis We Can Only Solve Together We know that time is short, especially when it comes to climate change. We all hear the clock ticking loudly in the background. But that doesn't mean that climate change trumps everything else. It means we need to create integrated solutions -- ones that radically bring down emissions, while closing the inequality gap and making life tangibly better for the majority.

(4 comments) SHARE        Sunday, April 19, 2009
Vote Out Larry Summers This article is an amalgam of two pieces by Naomi Klein regarding the ever pompous, repeatedly wrong, elitist economist Larry Summers. This man's insufferable arrogance and self serving advocacy for failed policies that only serve the extreme elite is a danger to the middle class, and the nation.

(3 comments) SHARE        Thursday, October 1, 2009
Copenhagen: Obama Better Go Back When Obama arrives in Copenhagen tomorrow to support Chicago's Olympic bid, he will be showing the world that he is willing to schlep to Scandinavia for an event he considers important. The big question now is: will he do it again on December 7, when Copenhagen plays host to the United Nations summit on climate change, the highest-stakes environmental negotiations in history?

(3 comments) SHARE        Monday, December 14, 2009
Memo to Danes: Even You Cannot Control This Summit When it comes to producing absurdly appealing light fixtures and shockingly comfortable desk chairs, that Danish form of displacement is clearly a very good thing. When it comes to hosting a world-changing summit, the Danish need for control is proving to be a serious problem.

(3 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Looting with the lights on You can't cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance -- whether organised protests or spontaneous looting. And that's not politics. It's physics.

(2 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, November 5, 2008
A Night When The People Holding Open the Doors Were Happier Than The Ones Walking Through Them Since I already sent my serious post, I just wanted to chime in with an anecdote. I was in Washington D.C. last night, staying two blocks from the White House. At 11:30 pm, a half hour after the results were announced, I happened to walk past a very stuffy private club, one that, as far as I can tell, is populated exclusively by hardcore Republican men in their later years...

(1 comments) SHARE        Thursday, November 13, 2014
Some Very Initial Thoughts On The US-China Deal The fact that both governments felt the need to make this pledge speaks to the growing power of social movements in China and the US demanding pollutions controls. In the US, 350,000 people marched in NYC in September demanding action. In China, soaring air pollution levels in major cities have put unprecedented pressure on the governing party to stop relying on coal.

(1 comments) SHARE        Thursday, December 27, 2012
I Feel Theresa Spence's Hunger -- for Justice The greatest blessing of all, however, is indigenous sovereignty itself. It is the huge stretches of this country that have never been ceded by war or treaty. It is the treaties signed and still recognized by our courts. If Canadians have a chance of stopping Mr. Harper's planet-trashing plans, it will be because these legally binding rights -- backed up by mass movements, court challenges & direct action will stand in his way

(2 comments) SHARE        Friday, October 7, 2011
Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now Class war & the hunger for status go with the condition of being human, but that doesn't change the necessity to do battle with the elite when they abuse both. It's an epic struggle & Americans have just opened the next chapter.