Naomi Klein: Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contempora...

Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction of humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature

Naomi Klein

economic-models law war

The task is clear: to create a culture of caretaking in which no one and nowhere is thrown away, in which the inherent value of people and all life is foundational.

Naomi Klein

tasks culture people

Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.

Naomi Klein

hate hope fear

We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.

Naomi Klein

atmosphere corporations climate

We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.

Naomi Klein

mastery nature letting-go

Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you.

Naomi Klein

cacophony free-speech freedom-of-speech

It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.

Naomi Klein

political community science

Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.

Naomi Klein

voting democracy political

[On climate change:] What if it's all a hoax and we've created a better world for nothing?

Naomi Klein

what-if climate world

Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.

Naomi Klein

sprung sprung-up

The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.

Naomi Klein

delicacy powerful nihilism

In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality.

Naomi Klein

climate people world

I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale.

Naomi Klein

historic climate opportunity

It's CNN who really should hold Trump accountable. And because they are trading the short-term fix of increased ratings by focusing on Trump drama - and I'm not saying they shouldn't cover the Russian investigations, of course they should - but the blanket coverage, it's not about news values. It is about ratings. And it comes at a tremendous cost because Trump supporters are fully defended against this. As far as they're concerned, this is a vast conspiracy, it's fake news, it doesn't impact their daily lives, it makes them see Trump as a victim, which he wants to be seen as.

Naomi Klein

daily-life fake drama

Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we.

Naomi Klein

shakes oil people

It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power.

Naomi Klein

balance community people

You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality -- not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.

Naomi Klein

peace reality ideas

Public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated.

Naomi Klein

stress cities numbers

And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming.

Naomi Klein

events home weather

We live in this culture of endless extraction and disposal: extraction from the earth, extraction from people's bodies, from communities, as if there's no limit, as if there's no consequence to how we're taking and disposing, and as if it can go on endlessly. We are reaching the breaking point on multiple levels. Communities are breaking, the planet is breaking, people's bodies are breaking. We are taking too much.

Naomi Klein

point-break community culture

Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth.