south. my wife recommended it. >> host: if the viewers and listeners follow you on social media how can they do so? >> guest: iem on twitter at jasonrileywj. >> host: joining us on in depth, we thank you for the conversation.

>> booktv monthly program with best-selling author naomi klein. her books on economics and public policy include no logo, the shock doctrine and the recently published on fire, the case for the green new deal. thanks for joining us in our studios in new york on booktv. we are in midtown manhattan were branding and marketing is a big business. let me begin with your first book. what did you learn about nike, microsoft, starbucks? >> guest: it's great to be with you and have this time. it came out at the very beginning of 2000, so almost

exactly 20-years-old. i was researching it for years before that. it was a period a lot was changing in the corporate world and you had the first kind of full-blown lifestyle brand which is an idea that we all take for granted now but these were companiesco that for the first time were declaring that their business model wasn't to sell products but so ideas and the lifestyle of belonging that they could then extend into kind of self-imposed branded cocoons and they could sort of celebrating in this logo. nike was the first one to do this. the main thing i learned when i was researching is that there was a relationship between the aggressive kind of marketing that was constantly trolling the

youth culture to find the mostin cutting-edge ideas to get ad ads into places they never had them before like schools to co- brand with the free music festival and so on but there was a relationship between that aggressive marketing and the kind of good jobs that were offered in the economy because the way th the companies were freeing up money to spend on this much more aggressive lifestyle marketing was by divesting from their factories from the idea they should be producers at all so they kind of paved the way because they never owned their factories in the first place. they made their running shoes through contractors they put against one another but could provide issues for the lowest price and this was such a profitable business model to for competitors started quoting the

factories and never reopening it. that was the key thing they never reopened their factories. we often talk about the factories moving from north america to mexicory or china or vietnam, but in fact it wasn't just that they weree moving locations, theyha were never owning their factories and they didn't see themselves as producers so it is intimately related to the deindustrialization id precariousness of work the sort of take for granted today. >> host: you point out my key in particular getting criticism from its customers. >> host: >> guest: at the time because it was new. this was still an america that remembered the manufacturing model that you understood the product you are buying into the car you were biting you knew where it was made in this was an economic anchor for that community, the idea that people making the car should have

enough money to buy the car so it was culturally shocking for people to discover that these companies like nike or disney who are spending so much money putting out images of themselves that were very progressive or in disney's case, very p free family-friendly they could pull back the curtain and wait a minute, it gives in some cases children or people just a little bit out of being children, people in their early 20s who are making these products under abusive conditions. so, when that was exposed, it was a scandal and 20 years later i think people take it for granted that almost all the products in our lives are made under conditions that are pretty dubious. we've got electronic factories in china that have them catch people at risk of suicide on the

job. the sense of shock like i can't believe these shoes are made by 18-year-olds who are sleeping in crammed dormitories and not getting paid for their overtime or having to p. in bottles and other sewing machines. the scandals were coming up and they were genuine scandals. i think people sense of shock and outrage has been doled and some of the jokes on my television -- late-night television. >> host: starbucks into the coffee shop opened up trying to essentially run away from the starbucks brand. >> host: that was an example from the ten-yearr anniversary where in the original edition

that came out in 2000 i had to say a bit about this company who told us what they called the third place and they were really using the discourse of the public sphere almost like a town square and it was interesting that this was happening in the '90s after this aggressive privatization so the corporations had to come along and say but then when i wrote this for the tenth anniversary edition they just opened up a coffee shop in seattle that was completely unbranded. you didn't see their logo

anywhere but seemed to be a bit of a marker for how they followed it if in order to recapture any sense of newness they had to unbranded themselv themselves. >> host: you talk about president obama and did he live up to his change. >> guest: it was early in the years that i wrote that. i think there was always something a little bit about the brand that it's hard to pin him down to a clear political platform and it's another interesting where we are now because if you look at the democratic primaries right now, i think there's more of an expectation that candidates have a specific and fully formed

platform, labor policy platform and environmental policy platform if i think about the obama campaign of 2008 it was pretty big like i'm going to recapture the sense of optimism you're not going to be ashamed of america. people are tired from eight years of bush and that's why i wrote about that in the first political campaign that used the same tools that the corporate lifestyle brands have been using to base themselves in the progressivism. so the question did obama live up to it it's a complicated question in the sense that it never was very specific so it's hard to say whether he lived up to it or not because there wasn't that much of their although he did specifically promise i'm going to revise and take on wall street and i think there was a huge amount of

disappointment. people hoped that there was going to be a reinvestment in that small businesses and ma mae more factory jobs. we are very disappointed by that and it's part of a global phenomenon where the centrist liberal politicians come to power with sort of a progressivism in change but the economy continues to meet people feel excluded, more insecure and that is the stage for the spopulism we see worldwide. there are specific factors to obama being the first black president and the racial backlash in the united states. but it's also important to remember that there is a global phenomenon of the rise of the right-wing populism that we see everywhere.

>> host: you can join us on twitter at the tv. our guest for the next two hours, naomi klein and also get a phone call (202)748-8200 in the eastern and pacific time zones. 748-8201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zones. you are teaching at rutgers university. how do you frame this in the classroom in terms of your book and the ten-year anniversary anedition? >> guest: teaching at rutgers looks at the integration of the human and corporation and the corporations trying to act more like humans which the original brands were all about putting a sort of comforting space like uncle ben's or aunt jemima, much of it racialized in the nostalgia about plantation life so we look at the racial history of branding.

and then where the no logo and, remember this is written in the late 1990s and this then completely new idea that humans like everyday humans, not celebrities needed to become their own brand in order to succeed in thiss newly precarios job environment. nobody can expect the jobs that these are the way to get ahead is to find your inner brand and project it onto the world and this is after we have seen celebrities do this. in the book i talk about michael jordan, the first super brand, but then we look at what is happening now with social media because when i wrote that 20 years ago, it was a pretty notional idea that anybody could be their own brand because anybody doesn't have the money to take up advertisements and actually do the work of projecting an image of oneself, but today because of social media, everybody who has

computer access has the capacity a market themselves and an idea of themselves to think about what is my brand which is different from who am i.. so, what we are unpacking, and i have a wonderful group of students we talked about how even though they've grown up with this idea, it's a relatively new idea. it wasn't always the case he would have been looked at as if you were mad 30 years ago to say to a 15-year-old kid, but not what you want to be when you grow up what is your brand. we try to make visible some of the things they took for granted and then what does it mean to have to separate yourself from the idea of your self to have that distancing and what does that do to friendships and relationships and social

movements. so it's fascinating to unpack this with them because of course they know more about social media than i do and they are teaching me all the time the latestes phase of this are intimately connected to the fact we are living our lives online and the constant performance of our personal brand is that the tech industry sees that as the new oriole as it is often repeated, so they are mining all the information that we are sharing for their business model that we are not getting any part of. we are not paying for the data that we are providing for free so we are looking at all these questions are the surveillance data mining. so that's interesting once again to see how much has changed since i wrote t that >> host: tour next book for

the burning case on the green new deal. you wrote a lot about how that essentially transform the country and the world. >> guest: there was inspiration to be taken and also some very important warnings because so many people were excludedti. many african-american workers were excluded, domestic workers, women, agricultural workers and there was systemic discrimination and segregation. it's also true that the united states transformed itself at the speed and scale that is comparable to the speed and scale of change that we need to embrace if we are going to lower

emissions in line with what the scientists are telling us. a year ago the panel on climate change, the foremost gathering of scientific experts t that advises the government on the state of climate science issued a report a yearr ago saying we need to cut global emissions in half. and this is a quote from the summary of the report that would require unprecedented transformation in every aspect of the society. this is the time we solve the scale of transformation one is during the second world war when you have americans planting victory gardens and getting 40% of their products from the gardens and they transformed themselves very rapidly but the new deal is another era that ise

less top-down and which is why it's a useful historical precedence for us h to look at because i don't think we want the government telling everybody what they should do. i think we should worry about that kind of authoritarianism so digging the new deal era you saw america electrified more than ten millions directly employed at the renaissance of the publicly funded art. all kinds of public infrastructures, reservoirs and much of the infrastructure today is a legacy of the new deal. anotheanother part that ise quie public into thinking about the green new deal is 50 hours civilian conservation corps was probably the most popular of the new deal programs and it's a reminder that the new deal was not only responding to an economic crisis but to an ecological crisis because of the dust bowl and the crisis of

deforestation so they sent more than 2 million poor young people to the hundreds of camps in rural parts of the united states and they did things like plant to 3 billion trees which is more than half so that kind of scale is important and it's also the kind of thing we need to do to pull carbon out of the atmosphere in the face of the climate crisis. >> host: part of what makes climate change is a very difficult for many of us to grasp is that we live in a culture of the perpetual present one that is separated from the past that created us and in the future we are shaping with our actions. >> guest: a lot of what i'm doing in this book is trying to make visible the economic systems and a relatively new

social models born of the particular capitalism w capitald since the reagan era which is all about privatization and generating shopping with democracy and the good wife and that has produced an accelerated culture that offend people point to and say it's just human nature we can't deal with a crisis like kind exchange because clearly we are too selfish, too individualistic and its required us to have a timeframe to put the collective good ahead of something that you might want right now to satisfy an individual urge. there's been a lot written that has made this argument about why we will never respond to this crisis and what i find when i'm talking about what we need to do

in the face of this crisis, i find that the biggest obstacle that we are up against a small climatis notclimate change denis definitely on the way, and it's not the lack of technology or understanding of what needs toat be done. it is the sense of doom that as human beings we are incapable of doing thema things necessary and that's why it is important to draw on these historical precedent in the lifespan of people alive today, people were able to think longer term and were able to put their collective good ahead of their individual desires and their

indigenous peoplthere areindigeh america who teach their children to think seven generations into the future and the past so i'm trying to p do is problem with ties these appeals that we hear a lot and say that i it is equipping a particular relatively recent form of deregulated consumer capitalism with the idea of what it means to begin with and wh within whyt change the law of nature we can change the systemm that we can create ourselves if they are threatening life on earth. not that it's easy but i'm just saying it's possible.

>> guest: i was born in canada and montréal and my parents are american. my parents were peace activists in the 1960s. my father did not want to go to vietnam and he had to choose between jail and canada and like many of his peers, he chose canada so we moved to montréal and later moved back to the united states for a few years when i was very young before i was 5-years-old and they decided that they liked canada better, so i sometimes say that we left because of the war but h we stad for the universal public healthcare. she worked for the national film board of canada and made for the feminist movement i grew up with

political parents and my father worked in the canadian health care system and was involved in bringing midwives into hospitals and an advocate for natural childbirth. i've had friends that have had serious radical president pair in. going to regular schools in the 1980s i sort of felt pulled between. that's why i wrote of no logo.

>> host: welcome to the conversation. >> caller: nice to speak with you. my main problem is the amount of energy that is required is impossible. the technologies just are not going to be there to this pie in the sky type thinking. how do you explain -- >> host: we won't get a response. >> guest: i would urge you to look up the work of mark

jacobson at stanford university. he's a professor of engineering who has a big team giving specific research about how effective is it to get to 100% renewable energy very rapidly for electricity first and transportation afterwards in line with what the scientists are telling us we need to do. there've been huge breakthroughs in battery storage and price breakthroughsea as well in the cost of renewable energy so i would disagree. i think it is possible. i'm not saying it's easy but the barriers are much more political than they are technological and that's precisely what the panel on climate change said when they set the target of halving the global emissions in 12 years in that fateful report, and i want to stress that they report that drew in 6,000 sources so it's not just a one-off paper.

there is a few factors one is a high-altitude volcano that is one of the main reasons, and another reason i talk about in the book is this followed the

genocide against indigenous peoples in america and there is a new science that looks at how this huge loss of life over many millions of people in the americas led to and that was part of that as well. >> host: norwalk connecticut, steve. go ahead.ea >> caller: [inaudible] >> host: if you can turn the volume down and go ahead with your question. >> caller: good morning. can you hear me? first, let's eliminate batteries to make electric power to go into a battery using fossil fuel, you don't eliminate one molecule of co2, so i can't

believe youou wouldn't know tha, but you evidently don't know that. i cannot believe that all these senators running for president never mentioned hydrogen fuel cells which happened to be the only remedy to eliminate the co2 because there is no co2 when you use hydrogen fuel cells period. it's that simple. i sent messages on your facebook numerous times. i don't know if you've actually read this or just dismiss it or what you do, but anyway, you never mentioned hydrogen fuel cells. none of the candidates mentioned hydrogen fuel cells. it's the only remedy. i'm going to have a meeting soon i hope to discuss this. the title of my book as

reparations because what i'm suggesting is there would need to be over a million people necessary to do the work to completely change from fossil fuel electric power to hydrogen fuel-cell electric power.

>> the local and environmental impact for mining for solar and wind power but in the book i talk about the fact we cannot think of this to be a switch from fossil fuels to renewables and everything else staying the same and we do have a real problem of overconsumption in particular with a disposable mindset. and there will have to be the fairytale of infinite growth so when i say we i'm talking about the 20th percent wealthiest people that are responsible for 70 percent of emissions we will have to consumee less it doesn't mean we will live in misery you'll have to live that the level of the average european that is generally recognized from one

of the leading omission experts and this is why in the context of the green new deal it so important drt to look at e areas or we can afford to expand like health care or childcare or theth, arts or ares that are already low carbon so there will have to be some lifestyle changes for those who are over consuming but it doesn't mean it's all contraction. >> greta from 16 missiles from sweden why do you think her quick.as resonatedut >> it is a complicated question to be honest. there are many voices as well as grad is who should be resonating and trying to getting attention for a long time going to the us climate summits for a decade now and this has been incredibly powerful moral voices coming from the marshall islands an

incredible speech made at the united nations in 2014 by a woman from the marshall islands a young woman who wrote a poem to her nine -month-old baby and she read it to the assembled country representatives and it was an incredible speech that should have been as vital as any of greta's. there have been other moments like a few years later when the typhoon hit the philippines at the veryat moment there was a summit happening on climate change and the representatives didn't know whether his family was safe or not and he broke down crying in frontry of the entire assembly that should have gone his bible as any of greta's speeches so to be honest there

is an issue around the fact she is a white girl from sweden that's part of why her voice breaks through from those who are on the front lines ofoi this crisis for those it feels existential and those that have been ignored. greta is a remarkable young woman i have so much respect from her and she does have a prophetic voice and others that i have spoken about before as well and i can point to many others but greta is remarkable and there's something about greta in that she so clearly is not performinge. for anyone are looking for anyone to like her may be coming back to what we were talking about where everybody performs version of

themselves everybody wants to be famous or to promote themselves. she could not be less interested she is so 100 percent focused on the science and talks about being diagnosed with asp burgers i'm not interested in your social games as somebody on the autism spectrum how uninterested she is of our opinion of her that makes her a trusted messenger she faces massive attacks and is clear minded about why she is being attacked by the likes of putin and trump and trolls because she is part of building a global movement that is growing with exponential steam there were 7 million whoal participated in the world climate strike over in a day.

annette is unprecedented in the history of the planet. she would be the first person to say is not about me but a movement of young people coming to gather. >>host: you say fossil fuels are not the slow one - - the sole driver of climate change biggest of theclimate change incremental approach. can we afford the green new deal with the price tag into the billions of dollars quick. >> is not just fossil fuels bu agriculture can we afford it cracks there have been studies about what it would cost to stay on the road we aree on and not try to avert catastrophic levels that's around 4 degrees celsius we warmed by 1 degree on average if we continue business as

usual i just to make it worse that's what donald trump is doing that is between four and 6 degrees of warming that's not compatible with anything that is organized with civilization threatening every coastal city well before the end of the century we need to recognize the estimates when they will get serious has underestimated the speed with which they start to t unravel we were not expecting to lose our sea i.c.e. as rapidly as we are losing it september the hottest on record july the hottest month ever recorded june was the hottest june it's happening really fast. there are different estimates

of children alive on this planet we will see catastrophic levels of warming under business as usual when you start to cost out what it would mean to lose new york city or shanghai literally there's not enough money on the planet to cost that out so i could make the argument it is a bargain to invest in the green new deal that is expensive but compared to later it's much cheaper but also something morally reprehensible about making just a financial argument because were talking about hundreds of millions of lives lost if we do not embrace the speed of change yes it is expensive and a moral imperative and doing nothing is more one - - even more expensive.

>>host: louisville kentucky you are next. >>caller: good afternoon. my question is about nuclear energy. any serious person who looks at replacing fossil fuels, and a majority of them realizes the only possible way to do it would be to go with generation three or generation for nuclear power plant. >> where are they cracks where these generation three and four nuclear p plants quick. >> they are not out there is the point. >> we do have a lot of nuclear plant. >> but you are talking about next-generation. often in these discussions the

future form of nuclear is held up but what is being built but actually what is proposed is the same nuclear technology that does have highh risk i will refer people once again to mark sanford's research which is very clear about the fact we can do this with renewable energy and there are many benefits doing it with renewables over nuclear including it is a lot more expensive and prone to crony capitalism and what i think is great about renewable energy is that it lends itselfre to a decentralized form of ownership so rather have those few monopolistic players

fossil fuels or nuclear we have an amazing opportunity to have a much more democratic one - - democratically controlled grid that is built around the fact the air and the sun is everywhere and we can have micro grids energy cooperative and they can pay forbi other services to have a fair economy as well as having zero emissions. >>. >> so the book that i wrote was the shock doctrine and in that book i make ann argument that we have seen in the

aftermath of economic shock and large natural disasters theory of political change that i call the shock doctrine that is a panic in the public that is that destabilizing crisis to push through policies you cannot push through under normal circumstances because people arepe focused on daily emergencies. also people who want to make quick cash in the aftermath of a disaster. so that is a case study of what i call the shock doctrine after hurricane maria we were already caring how this was a great opportunity to privatize puerto rico's energy grid

before it even made landfall. and the island was already a site of an economic crisis to propose austerity and deregulation. puerto rico had become a tax haven and this was way to be used during the debt crisis to attract high net worth individuals it is fine attractive to cryptocurrency they didn't have to pay the taxes so a lot of them are bit coin entrepreneurs who relocated to take advantage of the real estate and their cryptocurrency would not be taxed when they converted them if they did so.

>> so what is a communal recovery quick. >> the shock doctrine that we see again and again with the wealthy players in the aftermath within hurricane katrina when i first started to write about climate change decade and a half ago when i was in neww orlean orleans, it is still partially underwater but there were real estate speculators talking about what an opportunity it wasut to get rid of public housing and condominiums. it was used by educational entrepreneurs and to have the most privatize charter heavy school system. so for me it raised what is

the alternative to disaster capitalism cracks how can communities point to the need for deep solutions for how those communities should be rebuilt to make us less disaster prone? and i see that in puerto rico where that little book all the proceeds go to r a coalition who came together in the aftermath of hurricane maria in order to advance the people's platform how they should respond to the

vulnerability to clinic disruption and that is no longer being dependent on imported food from florida apricots a fertile island they want to practice ecology so if there is a storm to knock out the port they don't starve now it is land redistribution because now it is sold off to developers and private interests. they also want decentralized energy so there are proposals for's that. and on a large scale it means a green new deal to respond to our collectiveic climate crisis that battles systemic qualities of every front. >> you just covered what i

wanted to talk about. and to harnessing the social energy invading iraq on one picture and to be scared of the stupid things that the corporate noise about the things they are telling us when it is at one out of 53000 chance you will be killed by a terrorist but yet we can't be scared of loss of biodiversity. thank you for your work. >> it's a great way to put it. seems possible to harness huge amounts of public wealth to wage a war based on pretty dubious evidence that is later proven but yet we are demanding a report with 6000

peer-reviewed articles is not good enough were still waiting for the evidence to come in. but it has to do with who the climate crisis threatens. if i we were to take the science seriously whether loss of biodiversity or climate relation it means wealthy people and interests in the global economy would have to make some serious sacrifices why they would want to change the subject to being about if you can eat hamburgers or not. this is really about the fact exxon mobil is threatened shell oil is threatened cargo is threatened. the most powerful businesses in the globallre economy that is reliant on the continued

extraction and exploitation of fossil fuels. there are other ways of organizing a business but they are not as profitable. is not as profitable to have a solar business as oil and gas. we have had a deliberate spread of misinformation on the airwaves and in print with fossil fuel companies funding misinformation campaign i have argued we've heard evidence of on this show. we have lost wonders we will never get back because of it. and now we are in a moment whered regular people are declaring an emergency from below.w. that is what we see with the climate strakes and what greta started with her loan act in front of the swedish parliament a little more than a year ago forgot this point she was 15 years old learned about climate change in school watched nature documentaries

and learned about biodiversity law and the crisis and looked around by her own telling the world didn't make sense if this was true what it everybody be talking about it all the time? if we are destabilizing our one and only home when all the focus be on the politicians every day? but every day people were talking about everything else and it still true even though we have a little improvement of climate coverage. she decided to declare her own emergency as a student one way she could disrupt business as usual does not do the one thing which is to go to school she stopped going on fridays and said school strikes for climate and people in different cities including new

york city started to have their own climate strike. within a very short. she started in august and by september of this year there were 7 million people participating climate strakes to say we won't wait for politicians to recognize this is an emergency we will declare an emergency and put pressure to follow some have declared a state of climate emergency. whether they follow that up with the policies it would demand we will see but it has completely redrawn the map in the democraticle primaries the scale of change being debated right now within the democratic party is nothing like what we were talking about a few years ago when it debate about cap and trade versus a carbon tax now we talk about how many chileans spending on the green

new deal and how many jobs can be created and how many targets are more ambitious. is because there is a social movement. >> of course greta got very animated in september and that went viral. how do you approach writing ait book? what is your style quick. >> there were seven years between my first three books and to think of a phd thesis even though i didn't get that but i was lucky enough with my nfirst book and the fact it sold the way it did put me in a privileged position i was

large enough to block off several years to do research to put together a research team and build barriers around everything else in my life. i hold up in the words in british columbia but it was quite a's isolated. and it makes it easy to say no toy things. so i usually spend about three years on the research and two years on the writing. when i am writing a book that is all that i do.

i turn off the internet because i can be easily distracted. my husband put parental controls on my computer every time i try to go online before the one hour that i was allowed i would be confronted with a teddy bear in chains for call that is how i write books. [laughter] teeseven your next book? >> i don't know because this process that i describee requires with 70 pages and i know it does require removing oneself for a few years and this isn't a moment where i feel i can remove myself from a political debate. these are such big years leading up to the election

that g i will not lock myself away i've just done a book i hope contributes to this debate right now why we need climate action and we need to marry the struggle to build a fair economy and make the argument why that doesn't slow us down that speeds us up because if we don't bring together the two imperatives people well resisted as they did in france. i am focused on in 2020 and it will have to be before i can hide myself away. >> from putnam valley new york you are on go ahead please. >>caller: thank you.

thank you for your work. it will only get tougher. i am mostly calling even with the solar stuff the other gentleman mentioned just like the 99 percent not the 40 percent 99 percent is worth it. the main thing i want to mention is the book called hidden nature the's hidden insights victor strasburg. and he developed the implosion motor captured by the nazis

but is based on the stream when you straighten it out you rekill it when it goes around the corner there is a vortices on the inside and thehe outside and six other little ones one is a negative one is a positive. the electromagnetics in the water that keeps buoyant and nutrition is not just the movement of the water but the fact t it is actually a life with energy. i think there is a lot of answers in nature but you have to step back and realize i am 73 years old a combat that in vietnam it only took me 25

years to get ptsd which is a negative response to every p flex teeseven welcome to our listeners on c-span radio. >> it is an important observation and we are seeing many solutions from paying attention to the natural world from nature which is a paradigm shift to see our role to dominate the natural world and bend it to our will and that brute force engineering of the damning of the rivers and really the fossil fuell economy that we could dig up buried life and said waist up

into the atmosphere not worry what happens and then tell ourselves we have conquered nature. that was the whole promise of the fossil fuel age. you are no longer bossed around by mother nature. you are the boss. read the marketing o materials of the first commercial steam engine you are now the boss. you have to wait for the wind to blow to sail your ship you can sail whenever you want you don't have to build your factories next to fresh rivers because they used to be powered by water wheels you can build them wherever you want so the idea you had portable climate and could control the temperature the master of the wind and wet climate change tells us is maybe we are not the boss after all because all the carbon we admitted over these hundreds of years of the industrial age have been accumulating in the atmosphere and now comes the response and

that takes the form of hurricane dorian that parked over the bahamas for 48 hours and that is unprecedented whether storms or fires or heat waves and that is what is far more powerful than us so every action has a reaction and it allows us to tell us the fairytale that we are at the driver seat dominating there would be no downside too this. so the beauty of renewable energy it puts us back in dialogue with the natural world not just venting it and breaking it. >> we go in depth with a leading author every month

this month is naomi klein. where can people follow you quick. >> i am on gue twitter at naomia klein i don't do any other social media. i have the algorithm of hate through twitter i don't need the algorithm of envy through instagram. [laughter] >> have you noticed and that is preemptively rated with signs and prevent them from doing a protest. i am a republican and and i am a conservative. this bothers me because it's like going into a church to take my antiabortion signs.

and a conspiracy to commit a public nuisance. >> you are referring, thank you for that. i appreciate your nonpartisan solidarity. it is called extinction rebellion for go they are a fairly young group. but they engage in nonviolent civil disobedience to express that we are in a climate emergency that the government declare a climate emergency. but they are a completelyab nonviolent group in planning to kick off a new wave of civil disobedience on the

seventh so i do agree that is a violation of their rights of peaceful assembly teeseven the new yorker did a profile of you a few years ago that naomi klein is not interested in making the left part of the mainstream. instead she wants to convince left it does not need thence mainstream that was 11 years ago is that still relevant quick. >> i don't know it depends on how you define the mainstream if it is pundit and self-described very serious opinion makers who actively police the parameters of acceptable discourse i have

been telling people that that we should allow ourselves to be guided what we know is right and needed and what we have to do and move to when the center is. looking at the democratic primaries in the range of policies under discussion that sanders and warren are putting on the table that are unthinkable for god would never tell people they shouldn't worry about the a mainstream because that is where most people are. but we have been fairly consistent about what you can and cannot say. >> and sibling rivalry your r brother was the good activist child and you were not.

>> and he was like the young climate strikers he was focused on the nuclear war of the anti- nuclear movement and he started a student group when he was in high school. he was part of the generation to wake up in the middle of the night terrified of a nuclear war. it is still terrifying. i guess for me and my family dynamics he definitely has the good activist thing covered i was a more social kid i was interested in my friends and having fun. it wasn't that i didn't care about fairness or politics.

i didn't care about organize politics but i was concerned with racism, sexism, things that i perceive to be unfair. but i was not enjoying her i did not join groups and things like that. that's why i became a writer. [laughter] >> laramie wyoming go ahead. >>caller: did naomi here the argument the economic crisis of the great depression was caused by governmentalnd interference in the clear market economy what are your thoughts about those arguments with the robber barons new look back to the rise of big business in america?

>> i hope i don't offend anybody but i did not see that. i am not familiar with his work specifically but i am familiar with the argument that what created the great crash of 1929 was not the deregulation of markets as virtually everybody else believes but a small group of free market economists that it was deregulation or with government intervention i am not convinced by that. i feel the breaking up of the banks under fdr was a big part of stabilizing the financial sector so i don't agree with that. >> know is not enough you begin with one word on the election of donald trump. shock. [laughter] >> yes.

you asked me how i write books and no is not enough definitely did not follow that pattern to write years and may be rode in a fever over seven months after trump's election. but i wrote it because i was really terrified having research the ways from my book the shock doctrine create the same - - this and the state of distraction where it is possible to get away with all kinds of things precisely because everybody tries to get their footing and the word shock was used again and again after the election because it shocked so many of us it defied the polls and expectations and came is such

a huge shock as an untraditional political player so i was worried about this idea out of the blue that if we expected that narrative of him as an interruption of everything that was understood about america that i want to stress this isn'twa everybody's reaction there's a lot of women and african-americans who said my lived experience in this country would indicate to me there is a big appetite for this message he is peddling and was not surprised by the fact. >> markets rule money is what matters in white men are better than the rest. >> what i was trying to do those are lines of thete book that these are some of the messages that we get together explicitly or implicitly from the trump presidency. makes the argument these are

widespread ideas and it is a logical conclusion of a trend not to say he isn't something you are a new iteration but we were worshiping at the altar of wealth we have been exhilarating billionaires just because they are billionaires lifting them to the status of god to make that argument through this infrastructure like the gates foundation and the clinton global initiativeda that pares super wealthy individual with a social problem we can fix this without government h and the gates foundation which pivots gatese knowledge in the computer sphere to him being an expert on global health and

agriculture in africa just because you're good at one thing doesn't mean you are good at everything. but we live in a culture that seems just by becoming a billionaire you are treated as if you knoww everything. the argument i make that created a context for donald trump to stand before the american people to a say i have no experience whatsoever but i am rich and the fact i ran this company that i claim to be successful in a play a successful businessman on television that youve watch , that is why you should vote for me. so what i try to do in the book is explore the rows to trump to make him less shocking when we are in a state of shock we are distractible and not very focused.

and if you don't have a story that explains the event you are in that state of dislocation and shock so was trying to do my part in helping get americans out of shock to protect ourselves a lot of what is happening behind the scenes that he is a non- distraction machine there is a clear pattern to what he's been doing on the economic sphere no president has deregulated as much of the american economy and environmental standards as donald trump. nobody has given more to millionaires and billionaires of tax cuts and donald trump. in the book i call it a corporate b coup. and this is the story we often miss when we are so focused on what's the new shocking thing he has done or the latest

wheat forgot that's what he tweets i so much. it's a constant look over their strategy. maybe he has taken it a little too far and he may pay the price for that. >> you make the point the trump brand is not even in the top ten of luxury brand hotels in the world that you begin by talking about election night hillary clinton and donald trump both nominees here in new york city you are half a world away and your reaction when you heard the news? where were you? >> i was in australia i was awarded the sydney peace prize i was therefore a better part of a month doing research and it made a documentary the t great barrier reef which just experienced massive die off

most of it is bleached half of it is dead. so combining the speaking that i was doing with research and political organizing. is actually in a meeting in australia with a group of organizations who are interested in putting together a coalition of a green new deal for australia with indigenous rights activists in the room and we were having a forward-looking meeting how to do this and how we get this forward-looking agenda together and this is been my focus since i wrote changes everything. and in the middle of thein meeting everyone's phone started to vibrate because

election results were coming in in the evening but it was midmorning and australia when the result started to come in and it becameg clear that it look like trump would win and this meeting which was all about the imperative to a embrace we run completely new territory and they all went away to go find a bigger screen to watch this in real time. >>caller: thanks for taking my call. i read a book in 2003 called plan be written by brown who has retired since then but he was talking about mobilizing a wartime mobilization to address climate change have you read that or are you

familiar with his work and if so what about the influence on the green new deal currently? >> i am familiar with his work and literature that draws on world war ii as a historical precedent that shows us it is possible to be tool factories at an incredible clip. we've all heard the stories going from cars to fighter jets overnight and their are many parallels. i mentioned in victory gardens and 40 percent were getting from victory gardens and americans and canadians in the british radically change the

way they moved around during the second world war because the fuel needed to be conserved for the war effort so pleasure driving was not happening they drove very little compared to before public transit increased by more than 8 percent. in this country more than 90 percent in canada so there were parallels bernie sanders talked about them as well points to the fact that we now call the green new deal is not a new idea but has been floating around the climate movement for a long time as a climate justice movement but reason i think theement but precedent of the new deal is a little more useful than the world war ii precedent is simply this was so top-down.

and i wouldn't want federal government to have that much power. so i do think we need a model that is more decentralized to empower more governments but the truth is we actually need to look at the whole era for the rapid change and the new deal and the transition to the wartime mobilization in the marshall plan as examples of times when people understood the various threats whether the dustbowl and the threat of fascism in the case of the marshall plan that they fell under control of the soviet union so they wanted to rebuild western europe in a a way that makes sessional - -

socialism less appealing with strong safety nets and said we just can't have deregulated capitalism it has to be a more mixed economy with a much stronger social protection or people will go full blown socialist and will lose that to the soviet. >> is there a book or an author that influenced or changed or thinking on any subject? >> yes. so many books. i don't know where to begin but when i was writing this changes everything. reading silent springs where is important also indigenouss thinkers i am canadian and i dedicate this book to a man who is a indigenous leader and

author in canada former chief and a mentor of mine who wrote a couple of books that was posthumously on the reconciliation manifesto with that knowledge is very important to rise to the challenge and thee book that had the biggest impact on me recently is a novel which is the understory which i have told everybody they have to rea read. because it's just magnificent. i read a lot of fiction that helps me think about the work i do around climate but the

most recent novel that is underappreciated is called an sheltered because she gets at what it means to live in a house that is fallingng apart hers is a physical house but it is a manifestation of our collective health of the planet but it is just magnificent and understanding how trees communicate with one another and live in communities it's also one of the most beautiful descriptions of activism i have ever read. i don't think activist gets a fair shake in society if they

put the collective good on - - ahead of their own freedom and writing about people who write so passionately that they engage in direct action and those that live in trees and he writes about them not uncritically but with respect and compassion. >> you placed your husband to places restrictions on your access is he an editor cracks. >> did you find a typo? [laughter] >> yes he has always edited me. earlier he would edit me more. he reads almost everything before it goes out and i edit him he directed a film that when i was writing this changes everything it was to

go with the book it was in parallel we were experimenting normally you write a book and then you make a film about it f if you are going to which i did with the shock doctrine but there is something funny about that because you are necessarily retracing your footsteps so you don't have that same sense of discovery you are member one - - mimicking it for the camera and i never want to go backwards i always want to go forward so i don't like the idea to make the film after i had already written the book it was tough to film that so we decided to do something different i was writing the book and he was making the film so that meant we were really busy so he hadwere less time to edit me that he had previously.

>> cokie roberts said the biggest challenge of writing a book was her husband. [laughter] >> i believe it. it was hard enough to make the film and book together i'm not sure if i could cowrite with anyone but not with the husband i value our life too much. [laughter] >> new york you are next. w >>caller: i would like to know your thoughts where are all the people going to work in thehe future? over the last few decades i think the lack of jobs is the root of all evil. >> that's a great question.

i think it's not exactly a lack of jobs but a lack of jobs that pay salaries that provide benefits and a sense of security we do have very low unemployment but ann epidemic of underemployment people needing multiple job so there is a contradiction where people who support the president want to say everything is great with the economy but that doesn't explain why there iss so much economic stress and affection and addiction is not going well the kinds of jobs they aree getting. is clear when we invest in renewable energy and efficiency and public transportation we create many more than in fossil fuels

already more than in the fossil fuel sector but too often we haven't made sure these newer jobs pay the same salaries they had while working at an auto plant these are good jobs although they are getting worse we have a strike right now with uaw workers. and this is in the original tesolution of the green new deal that workers who move from high carbon jobs to renewables and energy efficiency need to maintain salary and benefityy levels. so that is key. have a lot of jobs in thee service sector called the care economy and because it has

been women's work there hasn't been any women's collars. so i impress you to call because i am lonely. [laughter] >> hello. thank you for your clarity of thought and communication of the existential crisis of our lifetime. i also heard you speak onn youtube and in other venues about what is sacred. and the demarcation that happens with the new wage has become more scientifically based c and got away from older

and more religious ways of thinking can we soup on - - separate the supernatural and the superstitious from the sacred to come up with a new u vision of what we will see in the future? and a new lifeif expectancy and a clean new deal for our future in particular for kids and grandkids? thank you for your time. >> what a great big question. i think the don of the scientific revolution in the industrial age, there was a shift in worldview away from seeing the natural world as sacred. i appreciate the collar using the word sacred because i don't think it is religion or

organized religion and once again a relatively new phenomenon not to see the world as sacred or a little bit scary or alive and deserving of our respect every other cosmology except the modern industrial age saw the world that way you don't want to pass off the gods. you don't want to make too big of a mess. that's the draining away and this is part of the reason why i love the over story it is the re- enchanting of the natural world that i believe a lot of people are drawn to the

crisis with climate change has to imagine it is the inert machine that led us to believe that we could take and take without repercussion. . . . . oe

debate. repercussion. . . . . oe >> thost: this changes everything. >> guest: the subtitl >> guest: the subtitle is capitalism versus the climate, and it's about the clash we have between an economic system that requires expansion in order to not be in crisis an in a natural world but in orders we >> host: let's go to margaret in fayetteville arkansas. we've been waiting to hear from you. >>thank you and thank tom for hs question and naomi for her reply. this morning my son received two alerts for flash flood in my area and i think greta is a

voice and it seems to me some religious denominations are listening and hearing and studying to know the truth. i am unsure about my denomination, southern baptist. i don't really know what their opinion is now. some of us believe that [inaudible] is the first bible an and wouldo well to read the scriptures of nature and accurately interpret them. >> host: it was hard to hear what you were saying but i think we got the essence. thank you for your call. >> guest: i absolutely agree we need leaders in this

conversation. it isn't just about politics or economics. we need to think of people's whole south. after pope francis received the incredible document that i would encourage everyone to read and i've never thought i would be recommending catholic tests but it's an amazing test that draws on the teaching. being in the vatican and i attended a conference where it was a really profound debate that was happening in the catholic church about re-examining the idea that the earth is human.

bat is pretty radical. hell do you think history will judge president of trump in this moment in history? >> guest: this moment in history will depend on what we do. we are at a profound crossroads. what i'm worried about in this moment is not just the weather. i'm not just worried about a flash flooding that the caller mentioned or the forest fires that have ravaged the part of the continent where my family is or the historic storms that are

pounding the caribbean as we speak. i'm worried about all that. what scares me the most is the intersection of heavy weather with this rising climate and i don't think they are unrelated. i think that we are seeing figures like this emerge, but also the figures that are good at defining the protective and group and threatening the out groups within the national orders and also as we know with trump, the so-called invading army of others and so we are seeingwe the borders not just in the u.s., but the where thousands have been left to drown. like i said, i don't think it's coincidence that these two fires

are happening at the same time with the unmasked xenophobic hatred. people understand that we are entering or we are in an era of ecological disruption and this space for the human habitability on the climate is contracting. i think people are going to have to move, and there's a couple of ways we can respond to that. the danger of how we will look back on this moment is that this will be the moment that we decided we were just going to only protect ourselves and we are entering an era where people are going to be okay with seeing an unspeakable number of people by or we go on another road and

that is based on the idea that absolutely everything in life has equal value and everybody has the right to speak safety. if this is a crisis created in the rich world that we owe each other a lot. but we are in a web of interconnections away hope in 20 years from now what we are seeing about this moment is that this is the moment when we chose not to board but to share. it is not just the alternative is being the type of human i don't think we want to be. >> host: if the presidentre is

reelected every waking moment for me is focused on that's not happening because we don't have another four years to spend cracking open new pieces of wilderness and unleashing more hatred in the most formidable fear. i think it is an absolute moral imperative, and that means making sure that the candidate emerges from a democratic primary who is a trusted messenger for standing up to corporate power not being mired in a swamp of washington and seen as somebody that is going to have a different set of moral values. i will leave it to your viewers and listeners to who it is that

best meets that criteria but i think that it's incredibly important that it be such a sharp alternative and that they not have a lot of baggage going into this race because this is reg change that is ahead of us and there are very powerful forces that are going to try to stop anybody that tries to do the right thing and so if you look at the candidates, make sure you are choosing a candidate that has a very strong appetite for taking on powerful figures. >> host: we will go left to san francisco. you are on with naomi klein. >> caller: it's a pleasure to speak with you. i wanted to turn the conversation to kind of my favorite subjects lately as russia, ukraine and the 2016

election -- the following collusion delusion with russia and i specifically wonder where you stand on the collusion delusion part, but let me just say that the revolution that happened in 2014, i see it as the classical regime change operation that was run out of the state department. john mccain, victoria newland, the whole gang and then on top of it, you have the overheard conversation where she lays out the whole leadership of who is in and who is out. that's crucial because as we talk about ukraine and the role that it's now being talked about, you have to go back and realizrealized that there was ap d'état and be supported these elements in ukraine that are still active and strong.

now jump forward to the 2,016th election and you have paul manafort has become a campaign manager. the campaign that was completely in bed with the ukrainians from the coup d'état joe biden etc., they are basically doing maneuvers to get paul manafort indicted which he was, it was pulled after trump became president and now we fast forward to hear where we have the two years of mueller and this whole idea that trump was a russian puppet. even looking over every stone, they couldn't prove that which just goes to show that it was a it was a bump accusation from the beginning. >> host: i'm going to jump in and get a response. thank you for the question and

comment. just though i'm not sure that i agree that there is absolutely nothing there, but i do -- obviously they didn't make the case on russia. what's going on now with ukraine and with what i was talking about earlier in terms of who the candidate is that runs against trump, i would encourage anybody who has trouble with mr. trump to go find a reasonable trump supporter and told them the story and why he should be impeached and then tell me how you feel about biden because i don't think you can tell the story in a way that in

which they both don't look bad which is not the same as saying that he's done anything illegal. he probably hasn't and i do think that trump has committed an impeachable offense if he should be impeached for it. i think that he's committed other impeachable offenses that he could have been impeached for but given that this is the one that they've seemingly chosen, i think that it is a huge problem for biden because even if it isn't illegal, i keep reading these stories saying there is no evidence of wrongdoing, if there is no evidence of illegality but that isn't the same of wrongdoing. and i think that we are in a climate crisis and we were in a climate crisis and the obama cheers. it was all about natural gas and their interests in ukraine were

all about increasing natural gas production. the fact that a sitting vice president's son would be on the board of a energy company of any kind getting $50,000 a year is the kind of fossil fuel nepotism that isn't good for politics or the planet, and i think that we need a much cleaner break with this kind of i think it's a cesspool quite frankly and after the 2016 election, they asked me to write an op-ed responding to the claim that hillary's loss meant that no woman could be president and addressing sort of the.

to misogynist ever have a woman lead and i wrote an op-ed making the argument that i do not think that is what we should take from the 2016 election because i feel that hillary clinton was too compromised on a love of funds to run as hard as she needed to and one of the things that, one of the way hi ways trump was vue is that he had multiple women accusing him of sexual misconduct. hillary clinton wasn't able to go after him on that because she was too compromised with bill clinton and that is one of the reasons among many others. the point is her hands were tied behind her back because of her own compromises. i would say one of thing trump is most formidable lawn is his

own nepotism in his own family which may be not illegal but certainly improper and flies in the face of him claiming that she's standing up for working america and it's all about those workers. it's one of those areas he's most formidable having to deal with the various ways in which his family has profited from the presidency. ask yourself is joe biden a trusted messenger given what we are learning about hunter biden with his hands tied behind his back in the way that hillary clinton was tied behind multiple fronts with trade and other fronts, we need a candidate whose hands are not tied behind their back. so, please don't make it joe biden. we will go to frankfort kentucky. you are next, go ahead. >> caller: i would like to get back to what we were discussing in the new deal because i didn't

think she was aware that the economic stabilization board was found by the man who did this, he was a congressman that helped pass the amendment and i think a lot of what she wants to accomplish could be done using article five of the constituti constitution. after he quit being the treasure he left the congress and the clash happened before fdr became dpresident and the economic stabilization was in response to the depression. after they got that stabilized, he went on to serve on the supreme court. they have a long history with

russia because they are our largest neighbors. you would have to state speakers in texas. the amendment. thank you for the call from kentucky. >> guest: i think i will treat it like a comment. >> host: joining from willis california. go ahead. >> caller: thank you. so, naomi mentioned about the power of corporations, so i just wanted to make her and other people aware that there is a movement to amend the constitution to say that corporations are not people with rights. a corporation is a useful device for organizing people and money and resources, but it should be in the public interest a corporation is formed by an act

of government and since we have a government of the people supposedly, the corporation should serve the people rather than the other way around, so there is an organization called move to amend which is working on passing a constitutional amendment to make it clear that corporations have privileges which could be granted by law but they don't have the same inherent rights as people so i would like to make that statement. >> host: it's a great initiative move t moved to ameni would recommend people check it out. think it is a big piece of the puzzle in terms of having all of the letters that are needed in order to change things as quickly as we need to. the corporations having the same status. >> from massachusetts, car carig good afternoon.

>> caller: good afternoon and thank you c-span, so much. you have very mind expanding programs and guests. i shared your last name so it's fun but still the different way. i am a laureate of my town and i have a two-part question i wanted to know if you ever write poetry, did poetry contribute anything to your writing in the tpast or how you started writig because many writers say they started with poetry before they went to pros. the other part is because of your canadian upbringing. i have relatives from canada myself, and i wondered if you think having your son at the age of school, do you see a value of canadian school education over the american education public private or charter?

i would like to know your opinion. i will hang up and listen on the air. >> host: before yo you hang up can you stay on the line for a minute. i guess i have to admit i did write some bad poetry before i started writing. it was definitely my first sort of writing passion but i haven't done it in many years. >> host: i think that would be hard. >> guest: yes. it sort of fits my team years very well. i appreciate it and one of the things i talk about around with the green new deal should be it led to a renaissance of public funding for the arts including funding for poets and playwrights and novelists and painters and muralists and so on

and this is the good work that we need to invest in not just putting a solar panels. poets that is a good green job i guess i would say to the previous caller. i am living in the united states right now just because i'm teaching at rutgers. we actually just moved a little more than a year ago so we've experienced both the canadian public school system and the american public school system. i think that it's tricky because i would see the canadian public school system is less unequal than the u.s. one is my perception i think because it is all based on property taxes here or at least where i'm living so much of it is based on property taxes. there is an absolute massive discrepancy between the kind of public school education you get

separated by just a few miles. we do have differences and if all those racial fault lines in schools in wealthier neighborhoods tend to be better resourced and able to raise more money anden so on but it's not quite as unequal as it is in the united states. there are definitely things about the system that i find are better. my son has special needs and needs special support. you have the americans with disabilities act which is a strong legal instrument that has given students and parents stronger tools to require that schools provide that support and to be honest with you, and i know people have their views

about canada and i would be happy to talk about how much better our health system is, but when it comes to special needs, the u.s. has us beat. >> host: whether or not they have influenced your writing think about that. let's goyo to heidi joining us from maine. >> guest: >> caller: such an honor to be with you today. i had a lot of ground to cover but basically i want to ask about your concept of silencing. the whole concept of the fossil fuel and sponsorship of the walls that clamp down on environmentalists especially indigenous people and in the spirit of the unity, a masking

especially in new york city, massachusetts and maine thatr want to face their new deals on the genocide and ethnic cleansing, some c of our indigenous neighbors we've had based on the situation with the alberta canadian tar sands stuff. i'm talking more about the ecosystem that has been claimed by the dams. how can we find a more sustainable way to offer the thn olivinall their fleet so that te people that are working in those fossil fuels and all these other industries can find another way to find in income that would help them all so-called fair people lived in the sustainability.

>> host: you put a lock on the table. thank you for that. i want there. >> guest: the core principles of what the climate justice with main under the current people that have the dirtiest industries in their backyard and have the highest cancer rate during the toxic burden of this economy needs to be first in line to benefit from the transformation including owning and controlling but also that no worker should be left behind in this transition. we talked earlier about the language on the resolution about the workers in those sectors maintaining their salary and benefits levels and t also have the job to guarantee, that just

completely in addition to the jobs that will be created, the huge numbers of other sectors in addition to all of that, there is a lot of cleanup work that needs to be done. in the region yoany region you l fuel extraction and a lot of land rehabilitation to do. there are tens of thousands in alberta but there's hundreds of thousands of jobs that. can be

created just by getting them to pay for the mess that they've created and that doesn't require a lot of retraining because they would be on job sites where they know how to tap the wells and clean them up. the problem is we are not getting the companies to finance the cleanup so there's plenty of work to be done and if we have a climate justice principle that the front-line communities including indigenous people need to be first in line, but as i mentioned earlier, it's really important that the indigenous knowledge and land rights be respected as a part of our response to the climate crisis. we know we need huge reforestatione land rehabilitation. this shouldn't be done on the same model where you create the parks and peopleno have access o their land. there has to be a way that we respect indigenous land is and

leadership as a part of the huge conservation work ahead. >> caller: 9/11 they stopped airplanes from flying into the planet heated up. the comment [inaudible] >> guest: i'm not sur >> guest: i'm not sure that i understood the question.

climate change has been from a future threat we talked about being worried about the something impacting the lives of everybody now. for many the entire city has been flooded, they've lost massive infrastructure on the west coast they are blanketed in wildfire. summer after summer. i was recently in paradise california. this is not an abstract issue were far off emergency. we see this reflecte reflected d it is a huge shift since i started writing about this. this. americans are now ranking and concerned about climate change at the toper of their healthcar.

>> host: but we go back to my final question. students play a role in influencing the thinking or shaping the question on how to do well at this. >> guest: you know, i think the people i talk to i partnered with this book tour which is a climate justice movement and everywhere i go i have a private meeting with them before i do my public events and they are worried about everything whether it's going to college, so uncertain about the future, whether they should have kids

they are living with such a sense of sensitivity about work but also the sense of is there a future at all and we are not taking it seriously. being in contact with the venice with fuels me. >> host: know it' though it's nt enough, the shock doctrine. thanks for joining us on c-span2 book tv. >> guest: it was a pleasure.