The post 5 Minutes of Peace with Naomi Klein appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

Things are pretty shocking out there right now — record-breaking storms, deadly terror attacks, thousands of migrants disappearing beneath the waves and openly supremacist movements rising. Are we responding with the urgency that these overlapping crises demand from us?

Journalist and activist Naomi Klein studies how governments use large-scale shocks to push societies backward. She shares a few propositions from “The Leap” — a manifesto she wrote alongside indigenous elders, climate change activists, union leaders and others from different backgrounds — which envisions a world after we’ve already made the transition to a clean economy and a much fairer society.

“The shocking events that fill us with dread today can transform us, and they can transform the world for the better,” Klein says. “But first we need to picture the world that we’re fighting for. And we have to dream it up together.”

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We already know that the Trump administration plans to deregulate markets, wage all-out war on “radical Islamic terrorism,” trash climate science and unleash a fossil-fuel frenzy. It’s a vision that can be counted on to generate a tsunami of crises and shocks: economic shocks, as market bubbles burst; security shocks, as blowback from foreign belligerence comes home; weather shocks, as our climate is further destabilized; and industrial shocks, as oil pipelines spill and rigs collapse, which they tend to do, especially when enjoying light-touch regulation.

All this is dangerous enough. What’s even worse is the way the Trump administration can be counted on to exploit these shocks politically and economically.

Designed as a “toolkit for shock-resistance”, Naomi writes that ‘culture jamming’ is the way to gain the upper hand on Trump. The empire he has built around his personal brand gives us leverage to resist his cruel and unjust regime, and may hold the key to forcing him to use his position as President of the United States to help people other than himself.

“This book [helps us understand] how we arrived at this surreal political moment, how to keep it from getting a lot worse, and how, if we keep our heads, we can flip the script and seize the opportunity to make things a whole lot better in a time of urgent need.”

Naomi’s four steps to Jamming the Trump Brand:

Step 1: Fire the boss: If Trump’s personal brand is being the boss, make him look like a puppet.

Step 2: Make Richie Rich less rich: Actively make sure Trump’s brand doesn’t get your business.

Step 3: Go after the big fish: Ensure developers aren’t willing to put Trump’s name on their buildings.

Step 4: Be a nuisance: Jam the phone lines to Trump’s hotels with polite comments on Trump’s policy.

“If his brand gets battered enough, Trump might just course correct.”

Click here for more information and to preorder

The post “No is Not Enough”: New book on resisting Trump by 2016 Laureate Naomi Klein appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

Klein urges us to see beyond the policies to the administration’s motivation: to create crises in order to exploit American citizen’s collective confusion for personal economic gain. She poses the question how will this administration exploit the crises that will happen under their watch?

The following two articles, “Trump’s Crony Cabinet May Look Strong, but They Are Scared” and “Get Ready for the First Shocks of Trump’s Disaster Capitalism” offer a concise explanation of Klein’s view on what’s actually going on in Washington, and what we can do about it.

Trump’s Crony Cabinet May Look Strong, but They Are Scared

Written by Naomi Klein, first published in The Nation on January 26, 2017

Let’s zoom out and recognize what is happening in Washington right now. The people who already possess an absolutely obscene share of the planet’s wealth, and whose share grows greater year after year—at last count, eight men own as much as half the world—are determined to grab still more. The key figures populating Donald Trump’s cabinet are not only ultra-rich—they are individuals who made their money knowingly causing harm to the most vulnerable people on this planet, and to the planet itself. It appears to be some sort of job requirement.

This article is adapted from several speeches given over Inauguration weekend.

There’s junk-banker Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, whose lawless “foreclosure machine” kicked tens of thousands of people out of their homes.

And from junk mortgages to junk food, there’s Trump’s pick for labor secretary, Andrew Puzder. As CEO of his fast-food empire, it wasn’t enough to pay workers an abusive, non-livable wage. Several lawsuits also accuse his company of stealing workers’ wages by failing to pay for their labor and overtime.

And moving from junk food to junk science, there is Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. As an executive and then CEO of Exxon, his company bankrolled and amplified garbage science and lobbied fiercely against meaningful international climate action behind the scenes. In no small part because of these efforts, the world lost decades when we should have been kicking our fossil-fuel habit, and instead vastly accelerated the climate crisis. Because of these choices, countless people on this planet are already losing their homes to storms and rising seas, already losing their lives in heat waves and droughts, and millions will ultimately see their homelands disappear beneath the waves. As usual, the people impacted worst and first are the poorest, overwhelmingly black and brown.

Stolen homes. Stolen wages. Stolen cultures and countries. All immoral. All extremely profitable.

But the popular backlash was mounting. Which is precisely why this gang of CEOs—and the sectors they come from—were rightly worried that the party coming to end. They were scared. Bankers like Mnuchin remember the 2008 financial collapse and the open talk of bank nationalization. They witnessed the rise of Occupy and then the resonance of Bernie Sanders’s anti-bank message on the campaign trail.

Service sector bosses like Andrew Puzder are terrified of the rising power of the Fight for $15, which has been winning victories in cities and states across the country. And had Bernie won what was a surprisingly close primary, the campaign could well have had a champion in the White House. Imagine how frightening this is to a sector that relies on workplace exploitation so centrally to keep prices down and profits up.

And no one has more reason to fear ascendant social movements than Tillerson. Because of the rising power of the global climate movement, Exxon is under fire on every front. Pipelines carrying its oil are being blocked not just in the United States but around the world. Divestment campaigns are spreading like wildfire, causing market uncertainty. And over the past year, Exxon’s various deceptions came under investigation by the SEC and multiple state attorneys general. Make no mistake: The threat to Exxon posed by climate action is existential. The temperature targets in the Paris climate deal are wholly incompatible with burning the carbon companies like Exxon have in their reserves, the source of their market valuation. That’s why Exxon’s own shareholders were asking increasingly tough questions about whether they were on the verge of being stuck with a whole bunch of useless assets.

This is the backdrop for Trump’s rise to power—our movements were starting to win. I’m not saying that they were strong enough. They weren’t. I’m not saying we were united enough. We weren’t. But something was most definitely shifting. And rather than risk the possibility of further progress, this gang of fossil-fuel mouthpieces, junk-food peddlers, and predatory lenders have come together to take over the government and protect their ill-gotten wealth.
Let us be clear: This is not a peaceful transition of power. It’s a corporate takeover. The interests that have long-since paid off both major parties to do their bidding have decided they are tired of playing the game. Apparently, all that wining and dining of politicians, all that cajoling and legalized bribery, insulted their sense of divine entitlement.

So now they are cutting out the middleman and doing what every top dog does when they want something done right—they are doing it themselves. Exxon for secretary of state. Hardee’s for secretary of labor. General Dynamics for secretary of defense. And the Goldman guys for pretty much everything that’s left. After decades of privatizing the state in bits and pieces, they decided to just go for the government itself. Neoliberalism’s final frontier. That’s why Trump and his appointees are laughing at the feeble objections over conflicts of interest—the whole thing is a conflict of interest, that’s the whole point.

So what do we do about it? First, we always remember their weaknesses, even as they exercise raw power. The reason the mask has fallen off, and we now are witnessing undisguised corporate rule is not because these corporations felt all-powerful; it’s because they were panicked.

Moreover, a majority of Americans did not vote for Trump. Forty percent stayed home, and of the people who voted a clear majority voted for Hillary Clinton. He won within a very rigged system. Even within this system, he didn’t win it, Clinton and the Democratic Party establishment lost it. Trump didn’t win with overwhelming excitement and big numbers. He won because Hillary had depressed numbers and a lack of enthusiasm. The Democratic Party establishment did not think campaigning on tangible improvements to people’s lives was important. They had virtually nothing to offer to people whose lives have been decimated by neoliberal attacks. They thought they could run on fear of Trump, and it didn’t work.

Here’s the good news: All this makes Donald Trump incredibly vulnerable. This is the guy who came to power telling the boldest and brashest of lies, selling himself as a champion of the working man who would finally stand up to corporate power and influence in Washington. A portion of his base already has buyer’s remorse, and that portion is just going to grow.

Something else we have going for us? This administration is going to come after everyone at once. There are reports of a shock-and-awe budget that will cut $10 trillion over 10 years, taking a chainsaw to everything from violence-against-women programs, to arts programs, to supports for renewable energy, to community policing. It’s clear that they think this blitzkrieg strategy will overwhelm us. But they may be surprised—it could well unite us in common cause. And if the scale of the women’s marches is any indication, we are off to a good start.

Building sturdy coalitions in a time of siloed politics is hard work. There are painful histories that have to be confronted before progress is possible. And foundation funding and activist celebrity culture tend to pit people and movements against one another rather than encourage collaboration. Yet the difficulties cannot give way to despair. To quote a popular saying on the French left, “The hour calls for optimism; we’ll save pessimism for better times”. (“L’heure est à l’optimisme, laissons le pessimisme pour des temps meilleurs.”)

Personally, I can’t quite muster optimism. But in this moment when everything is on the line, we can, and we must, locate our most unshakable resolve.

Get Ready for the First Shocks of Trump’s Disaster Capitalism

Written by Naomi Klein, first published in The Intercept on January 25, 2017

We already know that the Trump administration plans to deregulate markets, wage all-out war on “radical Islamic terrorism,” trash climate science and unleash a fossil-fuel frenzy. It’s a vision that can be counted on to generate a tsunami of crises and shocks: economic shocks, as market bubbles burst; security shocks, as blowback from foreign belligerence comes home; weather shocks, as our climate is further destabilized; and industrial shocks, as oil pipelines spill and rigs collapse, which they tend to do, especially when enjoying light-touch regulation. All this is dangerous enough. What’s even worse is the way the Trump administration can be counted on to exploit these shocks politically and economically.

Naomi Klein explains how the Trump administration might take advantage of coming crises to Jeremy Scahill at the Women’s March, Jan. 21, 2017.

Speculation is unnecessary. All that’s required is a little knowledge of recent history. Ten years ago, I published “The Shock Doctrine,” a history of the ways in which crises have been systematically exploited over the last half century to further a radical pro-corporate agenda. The book begins and ends with the response to Hurricane Katrina, because it stands as such a harrowing blueprint for disaster capitalism.

That’s relevant because of the central, if little-recalled role played by the man who is now the U.S. vice president, Mike Pence. At the time Katrina hit New Orleans, Pence was chairman of the powerful and highly ideological Republican Study Committee. On September 13, 2005 — just 14 days after the levees were breached and with parts of New Orleans still underwater — the RSC convened a fateful meeting at the offices of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Under Pence’s leadership, the group came up with a list of “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices” — 32 policies in all, each one straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook.

Vehicles form a line at an Exxon gas station off of Interstate 55 in Jackson, Miss., Aug. 30, 2005. The station was one of the few in the city with both power and gas one day after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Photo: Rick Guy/The Calrion Ledger/AP

To get a sense of how the Trump administration will respond to its first crises, it’s worth reading the list in full (and noting Pence’s name right at the bottom).

What stands out in the package of pseudo “relief” policies is the commitment to wage all-out war on labor standards and on the public sphere — which is ironic because the failure of public infrastructure is what turned Katrina into a human catastrophe. Also notable is the determination to use any opportunity to strengthen the hand of the oil and gas industry.

The first three items on the RSC list are “automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas,” a reference to the law that required federal contractors to pay a living wage; “make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone”; and “make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone (comprehensive tax incentives and waiving of regulations).”

Another demand called for giving parents vouchers to use at charter schools, a move perfectly in line with the vision held by Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

All these measures were announced by President George W. Bush within the week. Under pressure, Bush was eventually forced to reinstate the labor standards, though they were largely ignored by contractors. There is every reason to believe this will be the model for the multibillion-dollar infrastructure investments Trump is using to court the labor movement. Repealing Davis-Bacon for those projects was reportedly already floated at Monday’s meeting with leaders of construction and building trade unions.

Back in 2005, the Republican Study Committee meeting produced more ideas that gained presidential support. Climate scientists have directly linked the increased intensity of hurricanes to warming ocean temperatures. This connection, however, didn’t stop Pence and the RSC from calling on Congress to repeal environmental regulations on the Gulf Coast, give permission for new oil refineries in the United States, and to greenlight “drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”

All these measures are a surefire way to drive up greenhouse gas emissions, the major human contributor to climate change, yet they were immediately championed by the president under the guise of responding to a devastating storm.

The oil industry wasn’t the only one to profit from Hurricane Katrina, of course. So did a slew of well-connected contractors, who turned the Gulf Coast into a laboratory for privatized disaster response.

The companies that snatched up the biggest contracts were the familiar gang from the invasion of Iraq: Halliburton’s KBR unit won a $60 million gig to reconstruct military bases along the coast. Blackwater was hired to protect FEMA employees from looters. Parsons, infamous for its sloppy Iraq work, was brought in for a major bridge construction project in Mississippi. Fluor, Shaw, Bechtel, CH2M Hill — all top contractors in Iraq — were hired by the government to provide mobile homes to evacuees just 10 days after the levees broke. Their contracts ended up totaling $3.4 billion, no open bidding required.

And no opportunity for profit was left untapped. Kenyon, a division of the mega funeral conglomerate Service Corporation International (a major Bush campaign donor), was hired to retrieve the dead from homes and streets. The work was extraordinarily slow, and bodies were left in the broiling sun for days. Emergency workers and local volunteer morticians were forbidden to step in to help because handling the bodies impinged on Kenyon’s commercial territory.

And as with so many of Trump’s decisions so far, relevant experience often appeared to have nothing to do with how contracts were allocated. AshBritt, a company paid half a billion dollars to remove debris, reportedly didn’t own a single dump truck and farmed out the entire job to contractors.

People wait for assistance after being rescued from their homes a day earlier in the Ninth Ward as a small fire burns after Hurricane Katrina, Aug. 31, 2005, in New Orleans.

Even more striking was the company that FEMA paid $5.2 million to perform the crucial role of building a base camp for emergency workers in St. Bernard Parish, a suburb of New Orleans. The camp construction fell behind schedule and was never completed. When the contractor was investigated, it emerged that the company, Lighthouse Disaster Relief, was actually a religious group. “About the closest thing I have done to this is just organize a youth camp with my church,” confessed Lighthouse’s director, Pastor Gary Heldreth.

After all the layers of subcontractors had taken their cut, there was next to nothing left for the people doing the work. For instance, the author Mike Davis tracked the way FEMA paid Shaw $175 a square foot to install blue tarps on damaged roofs, even though the tarps themselves were provided by the government. Once all the subcontractors took their share, the workers who actually hammered in the tarps were paid as little as $2 a square foot. “Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung,” Davis wrote, “where the actual work is carried out.”

In Mississippi, a class-action lawsuit forced several companies to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages to immigrant workers. Some were not paid at all. On one Halliburton/KBR job site, undocumented immigrant workers reported being wakened in the middle of the night by their employer (a sub-subcontractor), who allegedly told them that immigration agents were on their way. Most workers fled to avoid arrest.

This corruption and abuse is particularly relevant because of Trump’s stated plan to contract out much of his infrastructure spending to private players in so-called public-private partnerships.

In the Katrina aftermath, the attacks on vulnerable people, carried out in the name of reconstruction and relief, did not stop there. In order to offset the tens of billions going to private companies in contracts and tax breaks, in November 2005 the Republican-controlled Congress announced that it needed to cut $40 billion from the federal budget. Among the programs that were slashed were student loans, Medicaid, and food stamps. In other words, the poorest people in the United States subsidized the contractor bonanza twice: first, when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate handouts, providing neither decent jobs nor functional public services; and, second, when the few programs that directly assist the unemployed and working poor nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills.

Jenny Bullard carries a pair of boots from her home, which was damaged by a tornado, Jan. 22, 2017, in Adel, Ga. Photo: Branden Camp/AP

This is the disaster capitalism blueprint, and it aligns with Trump’s own track record as a businessman all too well.

Trump and Pence come to power at a time when these kinds of disasters, like the lethal tornadoes that just struck the southeastern United States, are coming fast and furious. Trump has already declared the U.S. a rolling disaster zone. And the shocks will keep getting bigger, thanks to the reckless policies that have already been promised.

What Katrina tells us is that this administration will attempt to exploit each disaster for maximum gain. We’d better get ready.”

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Lessons from Standing Rock: Organizing and Resistance Can Win

By Naomi Klein

This article first appeared in The Nation on 4 December 2016.

“I’ve never been so happy doing dishes,” Ivy Longie says, and then she starts laughing. Then crying. And then there is hugging. Then more hugging. Less than two hours earlier, news came that the Army Corps of Engineers had turned down the permit for the Dakota Access Pipeline to be built under the Missouri River. The company will have to find an alternate route and undergo a lengthy environmental assessment.

Ever since, the network of camps now housing thousands of water protectors has been in the throes of (cautious) celebration and giving thanks, from cheers to processions to round dances. Here, at the family home of Standing Rock Tribal Councilman Cody Two Bears, friends and family members who have been at the center of the struggle are starting to gather for a more private celebration.

Which is why the dishes must be done. And the soup must be cooked. And the Facetime calls must be made to stalwart supporters, from Gasland filmmaker Josh Fox to environmental icon Erin Brockovich. And the Facebook live videos must, of course, be made. Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard—here as part of a delegation of thousands of anti-pipeline veterans—is on her way over. (“Exhilarated,” is how she says she feels when she arrives.) CNN must, of course, be watched, which to the amazement of everyone here gives full credit to the water protectors (while calling them “protesters”).

The climate movement already knew that mass organizing could get results. We learned it, most recently, in the Keystone XL fight and the resistance to Shell’s Arctic Drilling. Victories usually come incrementally, however, and at some delay after mass action.

Standing Rock is different. This time the movement was still out on the land in massive numbers when the news came down. The line between resistance and results is bright and undeniable. That kind of victory is rare precisely because it’s contagious, because it shows people everywhere that organizing and resistance is not futile. And as Donald Trump moves closer and closer to the White House, that message is very important indeed.

The youngest person here is someone many people credit with starting this remarkable movement: 13-year-old Tokata Iron Eyes, a fiercely grounded yet playful water-warrior who joined with her friends to spread the word about the threat the pipeline posed to their water. When I asked her how she felt about the breaking news she replied, “Like I got my future back”—and then we both broke down in tears.

Everyone here is aware that the fight is not over. The company will challenge the decision. Trump will try to reverse it. “The legal path is not yet clear, and the need to put financial pressure on the banks invested in the pipeline is more crucial than ever,” says Chase Iron Eyes, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe attorney and member (and a recent congressional candidate).

Nor does today’s victory erase the need for justice and restitution for the string of shocking human-rights violations against the mainly Indigenous water protectors—the water cannons, the dog attacks, the hundreds arrested, the grave injuries inflicted by supposedly non-lethal weapons.

Still, there is more physical and psychic relief in this room than I have witnessed in my life. As Cody’s father, Don Two Bears, says when he arrives at the house, “It’s not over, but it’s a good day.”

For his son, what today means is that the real work can begin: building living and inspiring alternatives to water-polluting and climate-destabilizing fossil fuels. Leaning back on his leather chair, dressed in a red sweatshirt with the word “Warrior” emblazoned in black letters, Cody Two Bears reflects on the start of colonization, when his ancestors taught the Europeans to survive in a harsh and unfamiliar climate.

“We taught them how to grow food, keep warm, build longhouses.” But the taking never ended, from the Earth and from Indigenous people. And now, Two Bears says, “things are getting worse. So the first people of this land have to teach this country how to live again. By going green, by going renewable, by using the blessings the creator has given us: the sun and the wind.

“We are going to start in Native country. And we’re going to show the rest of the country how to live.”

The post Naomi Klein on The Lessons from Standing Rock appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

I would like to pay my respects to the elders both past and present of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation on whose land we gather tonight.

Tonight I will be speaking about the need to change our cultural stories so that they cease to pit us against one another and the earth. And our greatest teachers in this process of transformation must be the Indigenous people who have kept their stories and practices of right relationship alive for tens of thousands of years.

Thank you David Hirsch, for this tremendous honour, and thanks to the members of the jury of the Sydney Peace Prize.

Thank you Senator Patrick Dodson, for your words and all of your work.

And my deepest gratitude to everyone who is gracing the stage tonight, especially the artists.

I want to thank my husband Avi Lewis, my great collaborator in all things. And our four year old son Toma, who is here and doing his very best to behave.

I also want to acknowledge the many land and water warriors in this room – fighting to protect territory in this country from coal mining, fracking and oil drilling – and who are protecting the planet as a whole from disastrous warming in the process.

As I was making notes for this lecture over the past couple of weeks, I knew I really should be preparing two versions – the “Hillary-wins” version, and the “Trump-wins” version.

Thing is, I couldn’t quite bring myself to write the Trump-wins version. My typing fingers went on strike. In retrospect, I was derelict in my duties. So I apologize if what follows seems rushed – it is rushed. A “hot-take” as they call it these days, on a hot planet.

If there is a single, overarching lesson in the Trump victory, perhaps it is this: never, ever underestimate the power of hate. Never underestimate the power of direct appeals to power-over “the other”: the migrant, the Muslim, Blacks, us ladies. Especially during times of economic hardship.

Because when large numbers of white men find themselves hurting and insecure, and those men were raised in a social system built on elevating their humanity over the others, a lot of them get mad. And there is nothing wrong in itself with being mad – there’s lots to be mad about.

But within a culture that so systematically elevates some lives over others, anger makes many of those men –and women – putty in the hands of whatever demagogue of the moment is offering to deliver back an illusion of dominance, however fleeting. Build a wall. Lock ’em up. Deport them all – for life. Grab ’em wherever you like and show ’em who’s boss.

What other lessons can we take from our two-day-old reality that we now live in a world with a President-elect Trump?

One lesson: that the economic pain is real and not going anywhere. Four decades of corporate neoliberal policies of privatization, deregulation, free trade and austerity has made sure of that.

Another lesson: leaders who represent that failed consensus are no match for the demagogues and neo-fascists. They have nothing tangible to offer and they are seen – quite correctly — as the people responsible for much of this economic pain.

Only a bold and genuinely redistributive agenda has a hope of speaking to that pain and directing it where it belongs: the politician-purchasing elites who benefitted so extravagantly from the auctioning off of public wealth; the polluting of land, air and water; and the deregulation of the financial sphere.

But there is a deeper lesson that we must urgently learn from this week’s events: if we want to win against the likes of Trump, and every country has their Trump, we must urgently confront and battle racism and misogyny — in our culture, in our movements, in ourselves.

This cannot be an afterthought, it cannot be an add-on. It is central to how someone like Trump could rise to power. Many people said they voted for him despite his objectionable race and gender pronouncements. They liked what he had to say about trade and bringing back manufacturing and that he wasn’t a “Washington insider.”

Sorry but that doesn’t cut it. You cannot cast a ballot for someone who is so openly riling up race, gender and physical-ability based hatreds unless, on some level, you think those issues aren’t that important. That those other lives matter less than yours. You just can’t do it. You can’t do it unless you are willing to sacrifice “the other” for your (hoped for) gain.

But this isn’t just about Trump voters and the stories they may have told themselves. We have arrived at this dangerous moment also because of the stories about “the other” told on the progressive side of the political spectrum. Like the one that holds that when we fight against war and climate change and economic inequality, it will benefit Black people and Indigenous people the most because they are most victimized by the current system.

That doesn’t work either. There is too long and too painful a track record of left movements for economic justice leaving workers of colour, Indigenous people, and women’s labour out in the cold.

To build a truly inclusive movement, there needs to be a truly inclusive vision that starts with and is led by the most brutalized and excluded. Rinaldo Walcott, a great Canadian writer and intellectual, issued a challenge a couple months ago to white liberals and leftists. He wrote: “Black people are dying in our cities, crossing oceans, in resource wars not of our making…. Indeed, it is obvious that Black peoples’ lives are disposable in a way and fashion that is radically different from other groups globally.

“It is from this stark reality of marginalization that I want to propose that any new policy actions in the North American context ought to pass what I will call the Black test. The Black test is simple: it demands that any policy meet the requirement of ameliorating the dire conditions of Black peoples’ lives… When a policy does not meet this test, then it is a failed policy, from the first instance of its proposal.”

That’s worth thinking hard about. I know that my work has too often failed to pass that test. But now more than ever, those of us who talk about peace, justice and equality must rise to that challenge.

When it comes to climate action, it’s abundantly clear that we will not build the power necessary to win unless we embed justice – particularly racial but also gender and economic justice – at the centre of our low carbon policies.

Intersectionality (as the kids these days call it) is the only path forward. We cannot play “my crisis is more urgent than your crisis”: war trumps climate; climate trumps class; class trumps gender; gender trumps race. That trumping game, my friends, is how you end up with a Trump.

Either we fight for a future in which everyone belongs, starting with those being most battered by injustice and exclusion today, or we will keep losing. And there is no time for that. Moreover, when we make these connections among issues – climate, capitalism, colonialism, slavery — there is a kind of relief. Because it actually is all connected, all part of the same story.

I was feeling this very intensely last week when I visited the Great Barrier Reef. Some of you may have seen the short film we made with the terrific team from The Guardian.

Floating in the waters off of Port Douglas, looking at a whole lot of bleached and dead coral, I found myself thinking, as one does, about Captain James Cook. Thinking about all of these forces that came together right around the time that the HMS Endeavour navigated those very waters.

As all you good students of Australian history know, Cook arrived in Queensland in 1770. Just six years later, the Watts commercial steam engine went on the market, a machine that massively accelerated the industrial revolution, now powered by a potent combination of slave labour in the colonies and coal. That same year – 1776 – Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, the textbook on contemporary capitalism. Just in time for the United States to declare its independence from Britain.

Colonialism, slavery, coal, capitalism – all tightly bound up together, creating the modern world.

This country called Australia was born precisely at the dawn of fossil fuelled capitalism. We should connect the dots because they are connected – the land grabs, the changing climate, the economic and social theories that rationalized it all. We are all living, in a very real sense, in Captain Cook’s climate, or at least the one he played an absolutely central part in creating.

One detail that particularly struck me in my research for this lecture: the HMS Endeavour didn’t start life as a Navy or scientific vessel, tasked with unlocking astrological and biological mysteries — and, in its spare time, claiming vast swaths of territory for the British Crown without Indigenous consent.

No, the HMS Endeavour was built in 1764 to haul coal through British waterways. When the Navy bought it, the boat had to be extensively (and expensively) retrofitted to be suited for Cook and Joseph Banks’ voyage. And it seems fitting that the ship that laid claim to New South Wales and Queensland started life as a coal vessel.

Is it any wonder your government has an unnatural love affair with coal? Is it any wonder that not even the catastrophic bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef – one of the wonders of the world – has inspired Queensland’s government to rethink its reliance on coal?

As Vandana Shiva said when accepting this prize six years ago, the roots of our crisis lie “in an economy which fails to respect ecological and ethical limits.” Limits are a problem for our economic system. Ours is a culture of endless taking, as if there was no end and no consequences. A culture of grabbing, and going.

And now this grab-and-go culture has reached its logical conclusion. The most powerful nation on earth has elected Donald Trump as its grabber in chief.

A man who openly brags about grabbing women without their consent. Who says about the invasion of Iraq, “We should have taken their oil.” International law be damned.

This rampant grabbing is not just a Trump thing, of course. We have an epidemic of grabbing. Land grabbing. Resource grabbing. Even grabbing the sky by polluting so much that there is no atmospheric space left for the poor to develop.

And now we are hitting the wall of maximum grabbing. That’s what climate change is telling us. That’s what our endless wars are telling us. That’s what Trump is telling us. That it’s time to put everything we have into shifting from a culture of endless taking to a culture of consent and caretaking. Caring for the planet, and for one another.

It’s so good to be with you all during these difficult times.

When I learned that I had been awarded the Sydney Peace Price for my climate work, I was incredibly honoured. This is a prize that has gone to some of my personal heroes – Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, Vandana Shiva, Desmond Tutu among so many others. It’s a very nice tribe to be a part of.

So I was thrilled to receive the call. But after that wore off a bit, the doubts surfaced. One was: why me? My writing builds on the work of so many thousands of climate justice activists around the world, many who have been at it for far longer than I. Another doubt was more practical: can I really justify the transportation pollution required to accept an award for doing my bit to fight pollution? To be perfectly honest with you, I’m still not sure I can justify it.

But I consulted with Australian friends and colleagues. They pointed out that your government is the number #1 coal exporter in the world, selling directly to those countries whose emissions are growing most rapidly. That you are well on your way to playing the same leading role for liquefied natural gas.

Even as other countries freeze and wind down their coal production, your Prime Minister is defiant. He says the plan is to stay the course with coal “for many, many decades to come” – long past the time when we all need to be off that dirty fuel if the Paris climate goals have a chance of being met.

Canada, under our last Prime Minister, used to provide some rather unhealthy competition for Australia in this arena. But now Justin Trudeau, our hot new Prime Minister, is at least saying some of the right things, if not doing enough of them.

Earlier this week, I said that Australia stands increasingly alone in raising its sooty middle finger to the world. Unfortunately, I now have to amend that statement: starting in January, when Donald Trump moves into the White House, Malcolm Turnbull will have some company. Ouch.

The Australian friends whom I consulted told me that having the megaphone that comes with this prize could help support their work. Crucial work to stop new fossil fuel projects like the gargantuan Carmichael coal mine on Wangan and Jagalingou territory. And to stop the Northern Gas Pipeline, which would open up vast areas of the Northern Territory to industrial fracking.

This resistance is of global importance because these mega projects concern massive pools of what we now call “unburnable carbon” – carbon dioxide and methane that, if extracted and burned, will not only blow past Australia’s paltry climate commitments but blow the global carbon budget as well.

The math on this is very clear: in Paris, our governments (even yours) agreed to a goal of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius while pursuing “efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C.”

That goal – and it’s an ambitious one — places all of humanity within the confines of a carbon budget. That’s the total amount of carbon that can be emitted if we want to hit those targets and give island nations a fighting chance of surviving.

And what we now know, thanks to breakthrough research from Oil Change International in Washington DC, is that if we were to burn all the oil, gas and coal from fields and mines already in production, we would very likely pass 2 degrees of warming and would certainly pass 1.5.

What we cannot do, under any circumstances, is precisely what the fossil fuel industry is determined to do and what your government is so intent on helping them to do: dig new coal mines, open new fracking fields, and sink new offshore drilling rigs. All of that needs to stay in the ground.

What we must do is clear: carefully wean ourselves off of existing fossil fuel projects, at the same time as we rapidly ramp up renewables until we get to 100 per cent by mid-century. The good news is that we can do it with existing technologies. The good news is that we can create millions of well-paying jobs around the world in the shift to a post-carbon economy – in renewables, in public transit, in efficiency, in retrofits, in cleaning up polluted land and water.

The better news is that, as we transform how we generate energy and how we move ourselves around, we have a once-in-a-century opportunity to build a society that is fairer on every front, and where everyone is valued.

Here’s how we do it. We make sure that, wherever possible, our renewable energy comes from community controlled providers and cooperatives, so that decisions about land use are made democratically and profits from energy production are used to pay for much needed services.

We know that our reliance on dirty energy over the past couple hundred years has taken its highest toll on the poorest and most vulnerable people, overwhelmingly people of colour, many Indigenous. That’s whose lands have been stolen and poisoned by mining. That’s who get the most polluting refineries and power plants in their neighbourhoods.

So we can and must insist that Indigenous and other frontline communities be first in line to receive public funds to own and control their own green energy projects — with the jobs, profits and skills staying in those communities.

This has been a central demand of the climate justice movement, led by communities of colour. This is already starting to happen on an ad hoc basis. But too often, it is left to already underfunded communities to raise the money.

That is upside down: climate justice means they are owed public funds as a drop in the ocean of reparation.

A few months ago, the Movement For Black Lives in the United States released a sweeping platform, filled with specific policies that would get at the root of the many forms of violence visited on black lives. It included many ideas for these kinds of climate justice policies.

Climate justice also means that workers in high carbon sectors — many of whom have sacrificed their health in coal mines and oil refineries – must be full and democratic participants in this justice based transition. The guiding principle must be: no worker left behind.

For the past two days in Canberra, the Australian trade union movement has been meeting to plot and plan for precisely this kind of transition.

Here are a couple of examples from my country. There is a group of oil workers in the Alberta tar sands, who have started an organization called Iron and Earth – they are calling on our government to retrain laid-off oil workers and put them back to work installing solar panels, starting with public buildings like schools. It’s an elegant idea, and almost everyone who hears about it supports it.

Our postal workers union, meanwhile, has been facing a push to shut down offices, restrict mail delivery, and maybe even sell off the whole service to FedEx. Austerity as usual.

But instead of fighting for the best deal they can get under this failed logic, they have put together a visionary plan for every post office in the country to become a hub for the green transition – a place where you can recharge electric vehicles; do an end-run around the big banks and get a loan to start an energy co-op; and where the entire delivery fleet is not only electric and made-in-Canada but delivers more than mail. It delivers locally grown produce and checks in on the elderly.

These are bottom-up, democratically conceived plans for a justice-based transition off fossil fuels. And we need them multiplied around the world.

Sounds pricey, you say? Good thing we live in a time of unprecedented private wealth. For starters, we can and must take the profits from the dying days of fossil fuels and spend them on climate justice. To subsidize free public transit and affordable renewable power. To help poor nations leapfrog over fossil fuels and go straight to renewables. To support migrants displaced from their lands by oil wars, bad trade deals, drought and other worsening impacts of climate change, as well the poisoning of their lands by mining companies, many based in wealthy countries.

And we can also invest the profits from pollution in the sectors that are already low carbon. I’m not just talking about green technology. Teaching is low carbon. Caring for the sick is low carbon. Making art and public interest media is pretty low carbon.

So let’s invest in those sectors – the ones that tangibly improve our quality of life and create more caring societies — instead of hacking away at them in the name of that manufactured crisis called “austerity.”

The bottom line is this: as we get clean, we have got to get fair. More than that, as we get clean, we can begin to redress the founding crimes of our nations. Land theft. Genocide. Slavery. Yes, the hardest stuff. Because we haven’t just been procrastinating climate action all these years. We’ve been procrastinating and delaying the most basic demands of justice and reparation. And we are out of time.

All of this should be done because it’s right and just, but also because it’s smart. The hard truth is: environmentalists can’t win the emission reduction fight on our own. It’s not a slight against anyone – the lift is just too heavy. This transformation represents a revolution in how we live, work and consume.

To win that kind of change, it will take powerful alliances with every arm of the progressive coalition: trade unions, migrant rights, Indigenous rights, housing rights, transit, teachers, nurses, doctors, artists. To change everything, it takes everyone.

And to build that kind of coalition, it’s got to be about justice. Economic justice. Racial justice. Gender justice. Migrant justice. Historical justice. Not as afterthoughts but as animating principles.

And that will only happen when we take real leadership from those most impacted. Murrawah Johnson, an amazing young Indigenous leader who is at the heart of the struggle against the Carmichael Mine, put it very well the other night here in Sydney: “People need to learn to be led.”

Not because it’s “politically correct” — but because justice in the here and now is the only thing that has ever motivated popular movements to throw heart and soul into struggle.

I’m not talking about going to a march or signing a petition, though there is a place for that. I’m talking about the sustained, daily and long-haul work of social transformation. It’s the thirst for justice – the desperate bodily need for justice — that builds movements like that.

We need warriors in this fight and warriors don’t step up against the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere, not on its own anyway. Warriors step up for clean water, for good schools, for desperately needed decent paying jobs, for fully accessible healthcare, for the reunification of families separated by war and cruel immigration policies.

You already know that there will be no peace without justice – that’s the core principle of the Sydney Peace Foundation. But here is what we need to understand just as well: there is no climate change breakthrough without justice either.

Perhaps I should apologize for this kind of battle talk at a peace prize. But we have to be clear that this is a fight, one in desperate need of a warrior spirit. Because as much as humanity has to win in this battle, the fossil fuel companies have a hell of a lot to lose.

Trillions in income represented by all that unburnable carbon. Carbon in their current reserves and in the new reserves they are spending tens of billions to search out every year.

And the politicians who have thrown their lot in with these interests have a lot to lose too. Campaign donations, sure. The benefit of that revolving door between elected office and the extractive sector too.

But maybe most importantly, the money that comes when you don’t have to think or plan – just dig. Right now Australia is getting windfall profits from exporting coal to China. It’s not the only way to fill government coffers but it’s most certainly the laziest: no pesky industrial planning, no tax or royalty increases on the corporations and billionaires with the resources to buy limitless attack ads.

All you have to do is hand out the permits, roll back some environmental laws, put new draconian restrictions on protest, call legitimate court challenges “green lawfare,” trash the greenies non-stop in the Murdoch press, and you are good to go.

It is this cozy set up that the Indigenous rights and climate justice movement threatens to upend. Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised by the scathing assessment offered just last month by Michael Forst, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders. After a visit to Australia, he wrote that:

“I was astonished to observe mounting evidence of a range of accumulative measures that have levied enormous pressure on Australian civil society… I was astounded to observe what has become frequent public vilification of rights defenders by senior government officials, in a seeming attempt to discredit, intimidate and discourage them from their legitimate work.” And he went on.

It is striking that many of the people doing the most crucial work in this country — protecting the most vulnerable people and defending fragile ecologies from industrial onslaught — are facing a kind of dirty war.  And we know all too well that it doesn’t take much for this kind of political and media war to turn into a physical war, with very real casualties.

We see it around the world when land defenders try to stop mines and mega dams – it’s been eight months since Berta Caceras, one the great environmental and Indigenous rights heroes of our time, was assassinated in her home in Honduras.

We see the same thing when communities in India and the Philippines have tried to stop coal power stations because they are a threat to their water and wetlands. Not a metaphorical war, but real war, with lethal live ammunition fired into the bodies of protestors.

According to Global Witness, this worldwide war is getting worse: They report, that “More than three people were killed a week in 2015 defending their land, forests and rivers against destructive industries…. These numbers are shocking, and evidence that the environment is emerging as a new battleground for human rights. Across the world industry is pushing ever deeper into new territory…. Increasingly communities that take a stand are finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and a thriving market for contract killers.”

About 40 per cent of the victims, they estimate, are Indigenous.

And let us not tell ourselves that this only happens in so-called developing nations. We are seeing the war for the planet escalate right now in the United States, in North Dakota, where police who look like they stepped off the battlefield in Fallujah brutally repress a non-violent Indigenous movement of water protectors.

The Standing Rock Sioux are trying to stop a massive oil pipeline that poses a very real threat to their water supply and, if built, would help hurtle us towards planet-destabilizing warming. For this, unarmed land defenders have been shot with rubber bullets, sprayed with pepper spray and other gasses, blasted with sound cannons, attacked by dogs, put in what have been described as dog kennels, strip searched and arrested.

My fear is that the vilification of land defenders that we are seeing here in Australia – all the various and overlapping attempts at delegitimization, layered on top of openly racist portrayals of Indigenous people in the media, coupled with an increasingly draconian security state – prepares the ground for attacks like these.

So though I continue to feel queasy about the carbon I burned on the flight, I am more than happy to be here, if only to play the role of the confused foreign meddler. The one saying: “hold up a minute. We know where this leads and this is a dangerous path you are going down.” This beautiful and beautifully diverse country deserves better.

Oh and this idea that your coal is somehow a humanitarian gift to India’s poor? That has to stop. India is suffering more under coal pollution and the climate change it fuels than almost anywhere else on earth. A few months ago, it was so hot in Delhi that some of the roads melted. Since 2013, more than 4,000 Indians have died in heat waves. This week, they closed all the schools in Delhi because pollution was so thick they had to declare an emergency.

Meanwhile, the price of solar has plummeted and is now a more viable option for electrification than coal, especially because it requires less infrastructure and lends itself so well to community control.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by your government’s attempts to package coal as a poverty alleviation program – this is the same gang who markets the hell holes on Manus and Nauru as humanitarian programs exclusively designed to save migrants from dying at sea. Bleeding heart do-gooders, all of them.

But you don’t really need me to tell you this. Australia has some of the most incredible climate justice and migrant rights activists in the world. And it is such an honour to be honoured by you.

One small way of expressing the fact that I know my work rests on the labour and sacrifices so many others is to redistribute the generous prize money. So Avi and I will be setting up a mechanism to get it to frontline groups fighting pipelines and mega dams and also building justice based alternatives.

I feel most comfortable doing this in Canada since that’s where our strongest relationships are – and it will help because a lot of environmental funders are currently pulling back, convinced that our new Prime Minister is an environmental Adonis.

But I do hope that this small gesture inspires others here in Australia to think about how to do more to support Black and brown climate justice leaders who are on the frontlines of both extraction and deep alternatives. As Murrawah Johnson said the other night: they don’t need to be saved, or spoken for – they need the resources to do both for themselves.

I’d like to end tonight with some words from a man who we lost today. Leonard Cohen, one of the all time greats in the Tower of Song. Most people didn’t know it but Leonard was passionate about climate justice: he was one of the very first people to sign The Leap Manifesto, a grassroots climate justice blueprint that our corporate media cast as dangerous and radical. But Leonard had no qualms about putting his name to it.

His last album, released just a couple of weeks ago, is a masterwork. It is so good that somehow we all knew it was a parting gift.

I’ll leave you with the first verse from “Steer Your Way”

Steer your way through the ruins 
of the Altar and the Mall
Steer your way through the fables
 of Creation and The Fall
Steer your way past the Palaces
 that rise above the rot

Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought              

Thank you.

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All day I had been sending emails with the subject line “It’s the end of the world”. I suddenly felt embarrassed by the privilege of this hyperbole.

If Trump does what he says and rolls back the (insufficient) climate progress won under President Barack Obama, inspiring other nations to do the same, Chi-Fang’s nation and culture will almost surely disappear beneath the waves. Literally, the end of her whole world.

Chi-Fang talked about how the Paris climate summit was a rare moment of hope. It’s not a perfect text, but island nations waged, and won, a valiant battle to include language reflecting the need to keep warming below 1.5 degrees.

“We didn’t sleep,” she told the crowd.

That 1.5 degree target gives Kiribati and other low-lying islands a fighting chance at survival. But we know that meeting the target, and even the higher 2 degree one, means we cannot sink a single piece of new fossil fuel infrastructure. We have already blown our carbon budget just with the carbon from fossil fuels now in production.

The village of Tebunginako in the Kiribati islands had to move because of rising seas and erosion. The new village (pictured) is now under threat of inundation and sea walls have to be constantly maintained. Photo: Justin McManus

Donald Trump, in his “100-day plan to Make America Great Again”, unveiled at the end of October, made it clear that he intended to grab carbon as aggressively as he bragged about grabbing women. Here are a few of his immediate plans:

• allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to move forward;
• lifting restrictions on fossil fuel production;
• cancelling “billions” in payments to United Nation climate change programs.

 

Protesters march in Salt Lake City in support of the Standing Rock Sioux against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Photo: AP

That’s right: warm the planet as quickly as possible and burn the paltry life jackets that are now being thrown to the people who will suffer most. And lest there be any doubt that he means it, he just appointed Myron Ebell, from the climate-denying, scientist-harassing Competitive Enterprise Institute, to transform the Environmental Protection Agency.

This is just some of what is at stake if Trump does what he says he will do. We cannot let him. Outside the US, we need to start demanding economic sanctions in the face of this treaty-shredding lawlessness.

In the North America region, where the carbon that Trump wants to unleash is now buried, we need to get ready to warrior up – and if you want to know what that looks like, turn your eyes to the Indigenous-led resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock.

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Naomi Klein is the author of This Changes Everything and will accept the Sydney Peace Prize at Sydney Town Hall on Friday evening 11 November.

This article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on November 10, 2016.

The post Naomi Klein: “Donald Trump isn’t the end of the world, but climate change may be” appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

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The event highlighted the important work done by women leading their communities in the fight against climate change, and brought together powerful voices from frontline communities fighting for climate justice, the climate science sector, the union movement, the human rights sector and the media.

We heard courageous and inspiring stories from Murrawah Johnson about the Wangan and Jagalingou people’s struggle to stop Adani from opening Australia’s biggest coal mine in history, and Maria Tiimon Chi-Fang who is seeing her beloved Kiribati disappear below the sea level.

Take a look at the inspirational videos from the event, and listen to The Guardian’s ‘Behind the Lines’ podcast

Naomi Klein urges people to learn from and protect cultures which respect the land

Naomi Klein calls for a moratorium on coal mines

Nadine Flood on the power of movements and coalitions

The post Naomi Klein calls on Australian movement leaders: To Change Everything We Need Everyone appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

In “Under the Surface”, a special Guardian film, the award-winning writer and environmental campaigner Naomi Klein travels to the Great Barrier Reef with her son, Toma, to see the impact of coral bleaching caused by climate change. In a personal but also universal story, Klein tells how she wants him to bear witness. ‘Just in case, amid the coral that is still alive, he can find something beautiful to connect with, something he can carry with him as he navigates life on a warmer, harsher planet than the one I grew up on. Because climate change is already here – and kids are on the frontlines.’

The post Naomi Klein at the Great Barrier Reef: what have we left for our children? appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

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Author and social activist says political action on climate change was lacking ‘and nowhere more so than Australia’

The Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein has criticised Australia’s climate change policies after winning the Sydney Peace prize for her work exposing the structural causes of the planet’s climate crisis.

Klein said political action on climate change was lacking “and nowhere more so than Australia”. She has previously described Tony Abbott as a climate change “villain”.

Klein is best known as the author of critiques of unfettered capitalism including No Logo and her work on global warming, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate.

On Saturday the Sydney Peace Foundation, a foundation of the University of Sydney, announced Klein was the winner of the award.

The jury explained Klein won “for exposing the structural causes and responsibility for the climate crisis, for inspiring us to stand up locally, nationally and internationally to demand a new agenda for sharing the planet that respects human rights and equality, and for reminding us of the power of authentic democracy to achieve transformative change and justice”.

The jury noted climate change was at the root of violence and suffering across the world, from wars over water to fires and floods that destroy livelihoods and therefore “if we want to achieve peace, we cannot ignore climate change”.

Speaking about the win, Klein said: “It is a tremendous honour to receive this recognition. It comes at a time when the impacts of the climate crisis are being acutely felt, from the devastating bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef to the horrific wildfires tearing across my own country.

“A great many people know in their hearts that now is the time for bold action. Yet political leadership is still lacking — and nowhere more so than in Australia.”

The Sydney Peace Foundation chairman, David Hirsch, said Klein “challenges feelings of powerlessness, apathy and confusion, and inspires people to demand a leap towards a society based on caring for each other and for the earth.

“We think that Klein’s message is one that Australians really want and need to hear.”

A former recipient of the award, Arundhati Roy, praised the choice of Klein. “There is no looking away from the direct connection she makes between climate change and capitalism,” she said. “I hope the Sydney Peace prize will help amplify her message.”

Klein spoke at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas last year.
“What we need to do is tax those with the most in order to pay for this transition [from fossil fuel to sustainable energy industries] and, in Australia, we’re seeing the exact opposite with carbon and mining taxes being repealed,” she told Australian audiences in September.

Klein also criticised the festival for including a supporter of Australian asylum policies on its board.

Previous winners of the Sydney Peace prize include archbishop Desmond Tutu and the US academic Noam Chomsky.

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Below is a selection of books, films, advocacy work and interviews from and by Naomi Klein, one of the world’s leading voices on climate change and climate justice.

With her most recent work on This Changes Everything and The Leap Manifesto, Naomi Klein has inspired thousands of people across the world to stand up and take action.

From wars over water to fires and floods, climate change destroys livelihoods and is displacing thousands. It is inherently linked to violence and suffering across the world. If we want to achieve peace, we cannot ignore climate change.

For Klein, climate change is an opportunity to right the wrongs committed in the name of the economy. A catalyst for change – away from fossil fuels and “predatory economics”, to a system that cares for people and planet. Naomi Klein shows us another path forward, away from exploitation and towards peace and justice.

Journalism:

Klein is a contributing editor for Harper’s and reporter for Rolling Stone, and writes a regular column for The Nation. In 2004, her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Additionally, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail, El Pais, L’Espresso and The New Statesman, among many other publications. In 2014 she received the International Studies Association’s IPE Outstanding Activist-Scholar award, and in 2015 she received The Izzy Award honouring outstanding achievement in independent journalism and media. She holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia. She is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics.

Books:

2014: This Changes Everything – Capitalism vs. The Climate

Klein’s critically acclaimed book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate argues that climate change is an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways.

Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis.

2007: The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism 

In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explores the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly demonstrates the workings of disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate re engineering of societies reeling from shock. It explains how neoliberal ideology seizes moments of social crisis to impose “shock therapy”, transferring public resources into the hands of the wealthy and demanding austerity of ordinary citizens.

1999: No Logo – Taking Aim At The Brand Bullies 

Naomi Klein’s first book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies was dubbed “a movement bible” by The New York Times.

Equal parts cultural analysis, political manifesto, mall-rat memoir, and journalistic exposé, No Logo is the first book to put the new resistance into pop-historical and clear economic perspective. It tells a story of rebellion and self-determination in the face of our new branded world.

 Films and documentaries:

 2014: This Changes Everything

Filmed over 211 shoot days in nine countries and five continents over four years, This Changes Everything is an epic attempt to re-imagine the vast challenge of climate change.

Directed by Avi Lewis, and inspired by Naomi Klein’s international non-fiction bestsellerThis Changes Everything, the film presents seven powerful portraits of communities on the front lines, from Montana’s Powder River Basin to the Alberta Tar Sands, from the coast of South India to Beijing and beyond.

Interwoven with these stories of struggle is Klein’s narration, connecting the carbon in the air with the economic system that put it there. Throughout the film, Klein builds to her most controversial and exciting idea: that we can seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better.

Short trailer:

Extended trailer:

 2007: The Shock Doctrine

This documentary adaptation Naomi Klein’s 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine investigates disaster capitalism, based on Klein’s proposition that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate re-engineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001.

The films traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today.

New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, shock and awe warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

 2004: The Take

In the wake of Argentina’s dramatic economic collapse in 2001, Latin America’s most prosperous middle class finds itself in a ghost town of abandoned factories and mass unemployment. The Forja auto plant lies dormant until its former employees take action. They’re part of a daring new movement of workers who are occupying bankrupt businesses and creating jobs in the ruins of the failed system.

But Freddy, the president of the new worker’s co-operative, and Lalo, the political powerhouse from the Movement of Recovered Companies, know that their success is far from secure. Like every workplace occupation, they have to run the gauntlet of courts, cops and politicians who can either give their project legal protection or violently evict them from the factory.

The story of the workers’ struggle is set against the dramatic backdrop of a crucial presidential election in Argentina, in which the architect of the economic collapse, Carlos Menem, is the front-runner. His cronies, the former owners, are circling: if he wins, they’ll take back the companies that the movement has worked so hard to revive.

Armed only with slingshots and an abiding faith in shop-floor democracy, the workers face off against the bosses, bankers and a whole system that sees their beloved factories as nothing more than scrap metal for sale.

With The Take, director Avi Lewis, one of Canada’s most outspoken journalists, and writer Naomi Klein, author of the international bestseller No Logo, champion a radical economic manifesto for the 21st century. But what shines through in the film is the simple drama of workers’ lives and their struggle: the demand for dignity and the searing injustice of dignity denied.

 Advocacy:

Click on the images for more information

Articles:

25 June, 2016, Naomi Klein on the racism that underlies climate change inaction, Naomi Klein, The Saturday Paper

22 April, 2016, When Political and Physical Realities Collide, Naomi Klein, Boston Globe

20 November, 2015, What’s Really at Stake at the Paris Climate Conference Now Marches are Banned, Naomi Klein, The Guardian

18 November, 2015, Why a Climate Deal is the Best Hope for Peace, Jason Box and Naomi Klein, The New Yorker

28 August, Change Everything or Face a Global Katrina, Naomi Klein

Videos and interviews:

 Naomi Klein: Capitalism and the Climate, Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2015

Naomi Klein: This Changes Everything live with Owen Jones 2014 | Guardian Live

Naomi Klein: People’s Climate March & the Global Grassroots Movement Fighting Fossil Fuels | Democracy Now! 2014

Capitalism vs. the Climate: Naomi Klein on Need for New Economic Model to Address Ecological Crisis| Democracy Now! 2014

Naomi Klein on Paris Summit: Leaders’ Inaction on Climate Crisis is “Violence” Against the Planet | 2015

Naomi Klein on ABC Q&A – Cheating, Climate, War & Democracy | Sydney, 2015

The post Naomi Klein: books, films and resources appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

Naomi Klein is a Canadian award-winning author, journalist, activist and one of the world’s leading voices on climate change. Her bold, unapologetic and insightful analysis impressed the Sydney Peace Prize Jury. The Jury citation reads:

Naomi Klein: for exposing the structural causes and responsibility for the climate crisis, for inspiring us to stand up locally, nationally, and internationally to demand a new agenda for sharing the planet that respects human rights and equality, and for reminding us of the power of authentic democracy to achieve transformative change and justice.

Press Releases from Sydney Peace Foundation:

16 May, 2016, 2016 Sydney Peace Prize Winner Naomi Klein: “Lack of Political Leadership on Climate Change in Australia”

14 May, 2016, Naomi Klein Wins 2016 Sydney Peace Prize

Media coverage:

10 December, 2016. How does Naomi Klein’s plan to save the planet weigh up? Tim Elliot, Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend.

14 November, 2016. Fighting climate change in a Trump era. Vaidehi Shah, Eco-Business.

11 November, 2016. Naomi Klein Delivers Sydney Peace Prize Lecture Against Backdrop of Trump Win. Deidre Fulton, Common Dreams.

11 November, 2016. We need more climate warriors like Naomi Klein. David Hirsch, Sydney Morning Herald.

11 November, 2016. Trump is a distraction from the real problem of global elites, says Naomi Klein. Nastasya Tay, SBS News.

11 November, 2016. Awards: Naomi Klein wins 2016 Sydney Peace Prize. Becky Robertson, Quill & Quire.

10 November, 2016. ABC TV The Drum with Julia Baird.

10 November, 2016. Naomi Klein to get Sydney Peace Prize. Times Colonist (Canada) and Northumberland News (Toronto, Canada).

10 November, 2016. Sydney Peace Prize Winner Naomi Klein spoke at Cabramatta High School. Frances Sacco, Daily Telegraph.

10 November, 2016. 3RRR Radio Melbourne: Naomi Klein on Breakfasters.

10 November, 2016. We need a moratorium on all coalmines: Naomi Klein in conversation – Behind the Lines podcast. The Guardian, Podcast of event “To Change Everything, We Need Everything” co-organised by the Sydney Peace Foundation and Sydney Environment Institute, Greenpeace Australia Pacific and ActionAid, and supported by the Edmund Rice Centre, 350.org and Seed.8 November, 2016. 774 ABC Radio Melbourne: Afternoons with Clare Bowditch

9 November, 2016. Voices to Change the Future. Frances Sacco, Fairfield Advance.

8 November, 2016. ABC Radio National: Late Night Live with Philip Adams.

8 November, 2016. ABC Radio 702: Afternoons with James Valentine

8 November, 2016. Naomi Klein attacks free-market philosophy in Q&A climate change debate – video. The Guardian.

8 November, 2016. Q&A: Naomi Klein criticises Institute of Public Affairs over climate interventions. Michael Slezak, The Guardian.

8 November, 2016. Q&A: Naomi Klein says Australia no better than ‘insane and racist’ Donald Trump. Georgina Mitchell, Sydney Morning Herald.

8 November, 2016. Naomi Klein asks ‘where the outrage is’ over 18C and the right of asylum seekers to be heard. ABC News.

8 November, 2016. Canadian activist slams Australian treatment of refugees as “insane and racist”. Women Weekly.

8 November, 2016. Naomi Klein likens Australia’s refugee treatment to Trump’s ‘insane’ wall. Elise Cooper, Mashable Australia.

8 November, 2016. Q&A: Australia ‘raising middle finger to the world’ on climate change, Naomi Klein says. Dan Smith for ABC News.

8 November, 2016. ‘You’re doing it, he’s just talking about it’: Canadian author slams Australia’s ‘insane and racist’ treatment of refugees and compares it to Donald Trump’s plan to build a Mexican wall. Rachel Eddie, Daily Mail Australia.

8 November, 2016. Australia’s asylum seeker detentions compared to Trump’s policies. 9 News.

8 November, 2016. Peace Prize winner Naomi Klein inspires students. Fairfield City Champion.

7 November, 2016. ‘You’re doing it. He’s just talking about it’ — Australia compared to Donald Trump for ‘insane’ policy. Andrew Koubaridis, News.com.au.

7 November, 2016. ABC Q&A with Naomi Klein, Anthony Albanese, James Paterson, Don Watson, Georgina Downer

7 November , 2016. ‘There Is Shame In All This’: Naomi Klein Voices Rage as Reef Disappears. Deidre Fulton, CommonDreams

7 November 2016. Naomi Klein: Climate change is intergenerational theft. That’s why my son is part of this story. Naomi Klein, The Guardian.

7 November 2016. Naomi Klein at the Great Barrier Reef: What have we left for our children? Naomi Klein, Josh Wall, David Hannan, The Guardian.

4 November, 2016. Can one person really make a difference? Beth Godwin, Fairfield City Champion.

The World According to Naomi Klein. Sophie Calagas, Frankie Magazine, issue 74.

25 June, 2016. Naomi Klein on the racism that underlies climate change inaction. The Saturday Paper. (online)

27 May, 2016. Naomi Klein explains how the rise of Trump and Sanders proves she was right all along. By Julian Morgans, Vice Australia. (online)

18 May, 2016. ABC 702 Breakfast with Robbie Buck. (radio)

18 May, 2016. Climate change believers can still be climate change deniers. ABC Triple j Hack (online)

17 May, 2016. Naomi Klein: Australia is the ‘outlier’ on tacking climate change. Radio National Drive (radio)

17 May, 2016, Naomi Klein calls out Australia’s climate change vacuum. The Fifth Estate (online)

16 May, 2016. For inspiring ‘A new agenda,’ Naomi Klein wins 2016 Sydney Peace Prize. Independent Australia (online), Hard News (online), Common Dreams (online)

15 May, 2016. Naomi Klein Wins 2016 Sydney Peace Prize. Obert Madondo, Canadian Progressive (online)

15 May, 2016. Naomi Klein criticises lack of global action on climate change after Sydney Peace Prize win. Paul Karp, The Guardian Australia (online)

14 May, 2016. Activist and Author Naomi Klein has won the 2016 Sydney Peace Prize. Olivia Chang, Business Insider Australia (online), The Marshalltown (online)

14 May, 2016. Sydney Peace Prize awarded to Naomi Klein. Skynews (online)

14 May, 2016. Canadian author Naomi Klein takes out Sydney Peace Prize. Channel 9News (online)

14 May, 2016. Naomi Klein wins Sydney Peace Prize. Warren Barnsley, Yahoo!7News (online), SBS (online), Channel 9News (online)

14 May, 2016. Naomi Klein wins 2016 Sydney Peace Prize. The University of Sydney (online)

14 May, 2016. 2016 Naomi Klein to be awarded 2016 Sydney Peace Prize. Joesphine Tovey, Sydney Morning Herald (print and online)

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