Quotes from Naomi Klein

We learn the same lesson over and over again: in highly unequal societies, with deep injustices reliably tracing racial fault lines, disasters don't bring us all together in one fuzzy human family. They take preexisting divides and deepen them further, so the people who were already getting most screwed over before the disaster get extra doses of pain during and after.

Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us."28

a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the interconnection of all life, appears to be humanity's best shot at collective survival.

Honoring the dead begins with telling the truth. And the truth is that there is nothing natural about this disaster [Hurricane Maria]. And if you believe in God, leave her out of this too.

We can pretend that extending the status quo into the future, unchanged, is one of the options available to us. But that is a fantasy. Change is coming one way or another. Our choice is whether we try to shape that change to the maximum benefit of all or wait passively as the forces of climate disaster, scarcity, and fear of the other fundamentally reshape us.

Most of us chose to oppose the war as an act of folly by a president who mistook himself for a king, and his British sidekick who wanted to be on the winning side of history. There was little interest in the idea that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake.

Hunger isn't about the amount of food around—it's about being able to afford and control that food. After all, the U.S. has more food than it knows what to do with, and still 50 million people are food insecure.

They deny reality because the implications of that reality are, quite simply, unthinkable.

We are looking to [corporate] brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.

To build a truly inclusive movement, there needs to be a truly inclusive vision that starts with and is led by the most brutalized and excluded.

there is a close correlation between low wages and high emissions...And why wouldn't there be? The same logic that is willing to work laborers to the bone for pennies a day will burn mountains of dirty coal while spending next to nothing on pollution controls because it's the cheapest way to produce.

That he won at all is the result of an electoral college system originally designed to protect the power of slave owners.

In December 1994, Yeltsin did what so many desperate leaders have done throughout history to hold on to power: he started a war. His national security chief, Oleg Lobov, had confided to a legislator, "We need a small, victorious war to raise the president's ratings," and the defense minister predicted that his army could defeat the forces in the breakaway republic of Chechnya in a matter of hours—a cakewalk. 59

We must always remember that the fossil fuel era began in violent kleptocracy, with those two foundational thefts of stolen people and stolen land that kick-started a new age of seemingly endless expansion. The route to renewal runs through reckoning and repair: reckoning with our past and repairing relationships with the people who paid the steepest price of the first industrial revolution.

The search for the true meaning of brands - or the brand essence, as it is often called - gradually took the agencies away from individual products and their attributes and toward a psychological/anthropological examination of what brands mean to the culture and to people's lives. This was seen to be of crucial importance, since corporations may manufacture products, but what consumers buy are brands.

is the new stability.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain. —JAMES BALDWIN Notes of a Native Son, 1955

In French, "decroissance" has the double meaning of challenging both growth, croissance, and croire, to believe—invoking the idea of choosing not to believe in the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet.

Too often, when politicians introduce climate policies divorced from a broader agenda of economic justice, the policies they introduce are actively unjust.

Democracy isn't the work of the market's invisible hand; it is the work of real hands.

Los capitalistas del desastre comparten la misma incapacidad de distinguir entre destrucción y creación, entre dolor y recuperación.

the poorest people in the United States subsidized the contractor bonanza twice: first, when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate handouts, providing neither decent jobs nor functional public services; and second, when the few programs that directly assist the unemployed and working poor nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills.

That we live a sponsored life is now a truism and it's a pretty safe bet that as spending on advertising continues to rise, we roaches will be treated to even more of these ingenious gimmicks, making it ever more difficult and more seemingly pointless to muster even an ounce of outrage.

are symptoms of the same underlying sickness: a dominance-based logic that treats so many people, and the earth itself, as disposable.