Naomi Klein Quotes

I don't think there could've been a pitch as crass as Trump's 'I can fix America because I'm rich' without that groundwork laid by Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative.

Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their restoration to the center of American life.

Capitalism might everywhere be spreading havoc, but it is also triumphant everywhere.

I do not think it is a coincidence that young people gravitated toward populist voices in the French election and that the two issue positions where Donald Trump and young voters seem to agree most - global engagement and trade - are rooted in populism.

Since the crash of 2008 and during the neoliberal retrenchment known as austerity, many commentators have muttered that the left is dead, watching social democrats in their timidity lose elections and respond by becoming ever more timid and neoliberal. They deserve their defeats.

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, Wal-Mart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola.

My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn't work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.

Instead of ideological objectives of a political nature, today we are faced with ideological objectives of economic nature.

In the field of economy, for instance, we … members of the developing world follow the currents of globalization, with conditions set by the rich countries, and at a speed dictated without our slightest input.

Americans today are blaming globalization for change itself and the pace of change, much of which has little to do with globalization.

We must combat the over-riding interest of organizations such as The World Bank, The International Monetary fund … They work in collaboration of the most reactionary elements of Argentina.

Many on the right confuse the "is" of globalization with the "ought" of simply accepting all its effects. They preach a political quietism that is really just a cloak for greed.

Free markets were supposed to lead to free societies. Instead, today’s supercharged global economy is eroding the power of the people in democracies around the globe. Welcome to a world where the bottom line trumps the common good and government takes a back seat to big business.

A market economy is a tool—a valuable and effective tool—for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values sweep into every aspect of human endeavor. It is a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.

Modern capitalism has no purpose except to keep the show going.

Populists feed on democratic dysfunction. As long as democratic elites and institutions in advanced industrial democracies remain unable or unwilling to tackle the myriad challenges facing their societies, we should expect populism to remain an attractive political option.

The media increase the political nastiness while distancing voters from those clashes. Citizens become spectators. ­Headline-­driven news emphasizes the extremes, the fights, the hysteria, the sensational. Political reporters, trying to appear objective by quoting two opposing sides to almost every story, mostly sharpen the differences, slighting any centrist position.

In truth, the 'populist anger' fueling Trump's coalition is fundamentally different from Sanders' 'progressive populism.' The superficial similarities between the two end when they talk about solutions.

Trump has raised the very issues I raised in the early '90s.

Globalization and trade liberalization were supposed to make us all better off through the mechanism of trickle-down economics. What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics, as we moved ever closer to a system of 'one dollar, one vote' as opposed to 'one person, one vote.'

Politicians and leaders who see the media as 'the enemy within' divide society into two clashing cultural camps. Populist demagogues benefit from binary oppositions.

I'd say putting another Clinton in the White House is only going to make that right-wing extremism greater. We will see more of these neoliberal policies, like Wall Street deregulation, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Hillary has always supported. She's changed her tune a little bit, but Hillary has walked the walk.

Neoliberalism is hard to define. It could refer to intensified resource extraction, financialization, austerity, or something more ephemeral - a way of life - in which collective ideals of citizenship give way to marketized individualism and consumerism.

Trump would have been unelectable were it not for the groundwork laid by Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, two liberal heroes.

I am not saying Russia is not important, but Trump's base is very well defended against that: 'the liberal media is out to get him', 'it's fake news', and all the rest.