338 Quotes by Naomi Klein

This is what Keynes had meant when he warned of the dangers of economic chaos – you never know what combination of rage, racism and revolution will be unleashed.

What industry calls innovation, in other words, looks more like the final suicidal throes of addiction. We are blasting the bedrock of our continents, pumping our water with toxins, lopping off mountaintops, scraping off boreal forests, endangering the deep ocean, and scrambling to exploit the melting Arctic – all to get at the last drops and the final rocks. Yes, some very advanced technology is making this possible, but it’s not innovation, it’s madness.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke out strongly against war profiteers, saying, “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.

Populations of songbirds like the pied flycatcher, meanwhile, are collapsing in some parts of Europe because the caterpillars that parents depend upon to feed their young are hatching too early.

So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis.

The ability to discount darker people and darker nations in order to justify stealing their land and labor was foundational, and none of it would have been possible without those theories of racial supremacy that gave the whole morally bankrupt system a patina of legal respectability. In other words, economics was never separable from “identity politics,” certainly not in colonial nations like the United States – so why would it suddenly be today?

In early 2013, I came across a speech by Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer and educator Leanne Simpson, in which she describes her people’s teachings and governance structures like this: “Our systems are designed to promote more life.

Clinton’s brand of identity politics does not challenge the system that produced and entrenched these inequalities, but seeks only to make that system more “inclusive.

A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there’s such a range of different kinds of market economies.