Klein - No is not enough defeating the new shock politics

Naomi Klein

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NO IS NOT ENOUGH

Defeating the New Shock Politics

Urgent, timely, and necessary Noam Chomsky

Naomi Klein constructs a common story that allows us to sustain the effects of being shocked. We can act upon that, with intelligence and happiness, to recover our world Gael Garca Bernal

If youre wondering how Naomi Klein has managed to produce an essential and gripping book so early in the Trump presidency, its because shes spent her whole intellectual life preparing for just this moment. Trump is the ultimate logo. Every day we watch him try to exploit yet another shock to the system. So this is the book to read not just the first word on Trump, but in powerful ways the last word as well Bill McKibben, author, Radio Free Vermont

A genuine page-turner highly engaging and provocative and provides a fascinating lens through which we can view our current moment. Klein is not preaching to the choir, but framing the moment, connecting necessary dots, and outlining the challenge that lies ahead in clear terms that anyone can understand Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

No Is Not Enough is the accumulation of years of brilliant and layered analysis applied with lightning precision to an understanding of how we got to Trump, and how we can use this moment to bring about another system and world Eve Ensler, author of In the Body of the World

Saying No to their shock doctrine is essential but insufficient. Naomi Kleins new book incites us brilliantly to stiffen our lip, to overcome quickly their calculated shocks, and to interweave our No with a programmatic Yes. It is a manual for emancipation by means of the only weapon we have against orchestrated misanthropy: constructive disobedience Yanis Varoufakis, former Finance Minister of Greece

Naomi Klein has written a compelling book that we all need to read and act on. No Is Not Enough is an essential handbook for all people, especially young people, who want to understand the economic, social, and political forces that produced the current crisis we are facing and how we can effectively organize to win a better world Danny Glover, actor

No Logo

The Shock Doctrine

This Changes Everything

For my mother, Bonnie Sherr Klein,

who teaches me more about shock resilience every day.

Im not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has.

JOHN TRUDELL

Santee Dakota activist, artist, and poet (19462015)

Shock.

Its a word that has come up again and again since Donald Trump was elected in November 2016to describe the poll-defying election results, to describe the emotional state of many people watching his ascent to power, and to describe his blitzkrieg approach to policy making. A shock to the system, in fact, is precisely how his adviser Kellyanne Conway has repeatedly described the new era.

For almost two decades now, Ive been studying large-scale shocks to societieshow they happen, how they are exploited by politicians and corporations, and how they are even deliberately deepened in order to gain advantage over a disoriented population. I have also reported on the flip side of this process: how societies that come together around an understanding of a shared crisis can change the world for the better.

Watching Donald Trumps rise, Ive had a strange feeling. Its not just that hes applying shock politics to the most powerful and heavily armed nation on earth. Its more than that. In books, documentary films, and investigative reporting, I have documented a range of trends: the rise of Superbrands, the expanding power of private wealth over the political system, the global imposition of neoliberalism, often using racism and fear of the other as a potent tool, the damaging impacts of corporate free trade, and the deep hold that climate change denial has taken on the right side of the political spectrum. And as I began to research Trump, he started to seem to me like Frankensteins monster, sewn together out of the body parts of all of these and many other dangerous trends.

Ten years ago, I published The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, an investigation that spanned four decades of history, from Chile after Augusto Pinochets coup to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, from Baghdad under the US Shock and Awe attack to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The term shock doctrine describes the quite brutal tactic of systematically using the publics disorientation following a collective shockwars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, or natural disastersto push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called shock therapy.

Though Trump breaks the mold in some ways, his shock tactics do follow a script, one familiar from other countries that have had rapid changes imposed under the cover of crisis. During Trumps first week in office, when he was signing that tsunami of executive orders and people were just reeling, madly trying to keep up, I found myself thinking about the human rights advocate Halina Bortnowskas description of Polands experience when the US imposed economic shock therapy on her country in the midst of Communisms collapse. She described the velocity of change her country was going through as the difference between dog years and human years, and she observed that you start witnessing these semi-psychotic reactions. You can no longer expect people to act in their own best interests when theyre so disoriented they dont knowor no longer carewhat those interests are.

From the evidence so far, its clear that Trump and his top advisers are hoping for the sort of response Bortnowska described, that they are trying to pull off a domestic shock doctrine. The goal is all-out war on the public sphere and the public interest, whether in the form of antipollution regulations or programs for the hungry. In their place will be unfettered power and freedom for corporations. Its a program so defiantly unjust and so manifestly corrupt that it can only be pulled off with the assistance of divide-and-conquer racial and sexual politics, as well as a nonstop spectacle of media distractions. And of course it is being backed up with a massive increase in war spending, a dramatic escalation of military conflicts on multiple fronts, from Syria to North Korea, alongside presidential musings about how torture works.

Trumps cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires tells us a great deal about the administrations underlying goals. Exxon-Mobil for secretary of state. General Dynamics and Boeing to head the department of defense. And the Goldman Sachs guys for pretty much everything thats left. The handful of career politicians who have been put in charge of agencies seem to have been selected either because they do not believe in the agencys core mission, or do not think the agency should exist at all. Steve Bannon, Trumps apparently sidelined chief strategist, was very open about this when he addressed a conservative audience in February 2017. The goal, he said, was the deconstruction of the administrative state (by which he meant the government regulations and agencies tasked with protecting people and their rights). And if you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.