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Famous Naomi Klein Quotes

“Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular.”

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Book:No Logo
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“Most people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their relatedness to the places that formed them. 'When I rebuild the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself,' said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Night Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka, and New Orleans, the process deceptively called 'reconstruction' began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere and rooted communities, then quickly moving to replace them with a kind of corporate New Jerusalem - all before the victims of war or natural disaster were able to regroup and stake their claims to what was theirs.”

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Book:The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
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“Corruption has been as much a fixture on these contemporary frontiers as it was during the colonial gold rushes. Since the most significant privatization deals are always signed amid the tumult of an economic or political crisis, clear laws and effective regulations are never in place - the atmosphere is chaotic, the prices are flexible and so are the politicians. What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting locations from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.”

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Book:The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
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“After listening to the great farmer-poet Wendell Berry deliver a lecture on how we each have a duty to love our 'homeplace' more than any other, I asked him if he had any advice for rootless people like me and my friends, who disappear into our screens and always seem to be shopping for the perfect community where we should put down our roots. 'Stop somewhere,' he replied. 'And begin the thousand-year-long process of knowing that place. That's good advice on lots of levels, because in order to win this fight of our lives, we all need a place to stand.”

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Book:On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal
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“Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude-that moment being the tail end of the go-go '80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.”

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Author:Naomi Klein
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“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism. ... We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe - and would benefit the vast majority - are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”

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Author:Naomi Klein
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“It (the Chinese move to embrace capitalism in 1989) is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.”

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Author:Naomi Klein
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“Because it is such a huge crisis, because it puts us on a firm science-based deadline, it's a once-in-a-century opportunity to build a better society and address raging inequality, create huge numbers of jobs, rebuild our public infrastructure. But, we can't do it unless we break every single rule in the free-market playbook. Which is why the worst people in the world all deny climate change.”

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Author:Naomi Klein
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“If this really is true, then greed really isn't good, after all. It really isn't the way to maximize the best possible outcome. We really do need to come together and act collectively. Government isn't always the problem. It's sometimes the solution. And, so their whole intellectual scaffolding collapses. So, they'd rather deny the science.”

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Author:Naomi Klein
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