Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and author of the bestsellers, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and No Logo. This Changes Everything was an instant New York Times bestseller, and was nominated for multiple awards, winning the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Klein is currently on a book tour for her newest book, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need.
Actress Brit Marling, who co-wrote and stars in the Netflix original series, "The OA", narrated the audiobook version of No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. Marling facilitated a Q & A with Klein about the book on June 21st, at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angles, and SDLS was there.
The event opened with Naomi Klein taking the stage and reading the final paragraphs of the book, setting the stage for the conversation that followed. Klein talked about the feelings of shock that many had over the reality of Trump winning the election. She used the analogy of dystopian fiction to help us understand our current political reality. She stated that the reason dystopian fiction resonates with us is due to the fact that we understand that the outcomes depicted are possible, because they represent the logical extension of choices made in our actual reality. Klein states that it is this horror of recognition when reading dystopian fiction that makes it so terrifying. She went on to say that, "Trump is not a rupture in the system at all, but rather, the culmination, the logical end point, of a great many stories our culture has been telling for a very long time — that greed is good, that the market rules, that money is what matters."
No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need builds upon Klein's earlier books, particularly The Shock Doctrine and No Logo. No Logo talks about the proliferation of branding, and critiques corporate brands, among other things. During the Q & A, Klein discussed the concept of branding, and the cult of personality, particularly manifest with Trump. She stated, "In 'Trump-World' there are only two existential categories: winners and losers. Trump stands for winning, and if you oppose him, you are a loser. His support is curiously immune to the scandals and failings that would have sunk other politicians". Klein believes that this is due to Trump's branding skills, and the migration of branding into politics, as well as other factors.
Trump has shown that "you don’t need to be objectively good or decent, you only need to be true and consistent to the brand you have created". Trump’s brand is that he’s the boss, and part of being the boss is that the rules don’t apply to him. "It wasn’t until ‘The Apprentice’ that he became a hollow brand," Klein said. She described the show as being a "televised class war". One of the myths crucial to Trump's brand, which was reinforced on "The Apprentice", is impunity through wealth.
"We’re all inside Trump’s reality show now," she said. While the Trump brand has proven to be very helpful to his interests, Klein believes that one of the best ways to oppose Trump is to attack that very brand, and she discussed several ways to do this. For example, Klein told the audience about Trump’s other brand, MAGA (Make America Great Again), and the chain of hotels his sons are building under that brand, saying that one way to hurt Trump is by disrupting MAGA by boycotting builders who use the Trump or MAGA names on their properties.
In The Shock Doctrine, Klein explodes the myths of the global free market, exposing the thinking, the money trail, and the strings behind the world crises and wars of the last 40 years. During the Q & A, Klein noted that Trump’s cabinet is packed with some of the men whose careers have been based on exploiting shock. For example, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson profited handsomely from the increase in oil prices after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and he has used his influence to ensure global inaction on climate change. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is known as “the foreclosure king”, profiting from the housing market collapse, and Vice President Mike Pence played a particularly ignominious role in the aftermath of Katrina when he promoted a slate of pseudo relief policies, including reduction of labor standards, making the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone, and repealing environmental regulations along the Gulf Coast.
The conversation ended with a discussion of the Leap Manifesto. Since her book This Changes Everything was published, Klein’s primary focus has been on putting its ideas into action. She is one of the organizers and authors of Canada's Leap Manifesto, which is a blueprint for rapid, and justice-based, transition off of fossil fuels. The Leap Manifesto has been endorsed by over 200 organizations, tens of thousands of individuals, and has inspired similar climate justice initiatives around the world.
Additional info here:
http://www.naomiklein.org/main
https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/Labels: Celebrity Author
