Ever since Steve Bannon was demoted, and drama started playing out between Bannon and Jared Kushner and the firing of Comey and "Is he going to get impeached?" we have been trapped in a classic Survivor reality TV show, like, "Who's going to get voted off the island?" And this has every single news show enjoying ratings never seen before. And it physically pains them to talk about the stakes of this administration, whether it's health care or climate change or the deregulation of the financial sector or social security. None of it can compete with this reality show.
Naomi KleinIt (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.
Naomi KleinOne of the main ways in which I get attacked is by being called a conspiracy theorist by the right and the other main attack is actually from the conspiracy theorists who are really pissed at me for not admitting that 9/11 was an inside job.
Naomi KleinThe theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the roleof expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically - prices will not keep rising, nor will wages.
Naomi KleinEither greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn't. You can't unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons' sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That's just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that's what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons.
Naomi Klein