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I Do Believe That Our Ability To Jam The Trump Brand Is Somewhat Limited. I Think We Can Chip Away At It, But Ultimately The Way To Undermine The Trump Brand Is A Better Product In The Political Marketplace, If You'll Forgive The Capitalist Metaphor. I Do Think That The Negative Messaging On Trump Is Severely Limited Because He Is Tapping Into A Very Deep, And In Many A Rightful, Desire For Deep Change, And A Feeling That The Whole System Is So Broken And So Corrupt That You Might As Well Raise A Middle Finger As Some Kind Of Act Of Agency.

-Naomi Klein

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I Do Believe That

Naomi Klein

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I Do Believe That Our Ability To Jam The Trump Brand Is Somewhat Limited. I Think We Can Chip Away At It, But Ultimately The Way To Undermine The Trump Brand Is A Better Product In The Political Marketplace, If You'll Forgive The Capitalist Metaphor. I Do Think That The Negative Messaging On Trump Is Severely Limited Because He Is Tapping Into A Very Deep, And In Many A Rightful, Desire For Deep Change, And A Feeling That The Whole System Is So Broken And So Corrupt That You Might As Well Raise A Middle Finger As Some Kind Of Act Of Agency.

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More From Naomi Klein

Politics Hates A Vacuum. If It Isn't Filled With Hope, Someone Will Fill It With Fear.

Ever Since Steve Bannon Was Demoted, And Drama Started Playing Out Between Bannon And Jared Kushner And The Firing Of Comey And "is He Going To Get Impeached?" We Have Been Trapped In A Classic Survivor Reality Tv Show, Like, "who's Going To Get Voted Off The Island?" And This Has Every Single News Show Enjoying Ratings Never Seen Before. And It Physically Pains Them To Talk About The Stakes Of This Administration, Whether It's Health Care Or Climate Change Or The Deregulation Of The Financial Sector Or Social Security. None Of It Can Compete With This Reality Show.

The Task Is Clear: To Create A Culture Of Caretaking In Which No One And Nowhere Is Thrown Away, In Which The Inherent Value Of People And All Life Is Foundational.

If Enough Of Us Stop Looking Away And Decide That Climate Change Is A Crisis Worthy Of Marshall Plan Levels Of Response, Then It Will Become One.

Thing That We Wanted To Do Was Redefine What A Green Job Was, What A Climate Job Was. We Said: "wait A Minute. There's All These People Out There Who Are Doing Low-carbon Work." It's Not Just Guys In Hard Hats Putting Up Solar Panels. Teaching Is Low Carbon. Caring For The Sick Is Low Carbon. Daycare Is A Green Workplace. Overwhelmingly, This Is Work That Is Done By Women, Overwhelmingly Women Of Color, On The Frontlines Of Austerity Clawbacks.

Why Would We Build As Unequal A Renewable Energy Sector As We Have Built A Fossil Fuel Sector? The Nice Thing About Renewables Is They're Everywhere, So You Don't Have To Have Monopoly Control In The Same Way.

Renewable Energy

Catching Trump Out Not Paying His Taxes, Treating His Employees Like Garbage - None Of This Sticks To Him Because That Actually Reinforces His Power, Power Over Other People, Which Is This Specific Kind Of Power That He's Selling.

In A World Where Profit Is Consistently Put Before Both People And The Planet, Climate Economics Has Everything To Do With Ethics And Morality.

I Think This Has Been A Class War Waged By The Rich Against The Poor, And I Think That They Won. And I Think The Poor Are Fighting Back.

One Of The Main Ways In Which I Get Attacked Is By Being Called A Conspiracy Theorist By The Right And The Other Main Attack Is Actually From The Conspiracy Theorists Who Are Really Pissed At Me For Not Admitting That 9/11 Was An Inside Job.

Fury Is An Entirely Appropriate Response To A System That Sends Young People To Kill Other Young People In A War That Never Should Have Been Waged. Yet The American Right Is Forever Trying To Pathologise Anger As Something Menacing And Abnormal, Dismissing War Opponents As Hateful And, In The Latest Slur, "wild-eyed". This Is Much Harder To Do When Victims Of Wars Begin To Speak For Themselves: No One Questions The Wildness In The Eyes Of A Mother Or Father Who Has Just Lost A Son Or Daughter, Or The Fury Of A Soldier Who Knows That He Is Being Asked To Kill, And To Die, Needlessly.

The World Now Has A New Kind Of Hero, One Who Listens More Than Speaks, Who Preaches In Riddles Not In Certainties, A Leader Who Doesn't Show His Face, Who Says His Mask Is Really A Mirror. And In The Zapatistas, We Have Not One Dream Of A Revolution, But A Dreaming Revolution.

It (the Chinese Move To Embrace Capitalism In 1989) Is A Mirror Of The Corporatist State First Pioneered In Chile Under Pinochet: A Revolving Door Between Corporate And Political Elites Who Combine Their Power To Eliminate Workers As An Organized Political Force. The Creation Of Today's Market Society Was Not The Result Of A Sequence Of Spontaneous Events But Rather Of State Interference And Violence.

The Triumph Of Economic Globalization Has Inspired A Wave Of Techno-savvy Investigative Activists Who Are As Globally Minded As The Corporations They Track.

Economic Globalization

The Anti-war Movement Should Turn Itself Into A Pro-democracy Movement

Communication Is My Thing.

The Creation Of Today's Market Society Was Not The Result Of A Sequence Of Spontaneous Events But Rather Of State Interference And Violence.

So If The Meaning Of The Trump Brand Is Being The Ultimate Boss Who Has The Power Because He's So Rich, The Way You Undermine That Brand Is By Making Him Look Like A Puppet, And By Showing That While He's Playing Gold And Admiring His Properties, It's Actually Other People Making The Key Decisions And He Doesn't Really Know What's Going On.

Democracy Is Not Just The Right To Vote, It Is The Right To Live In Dignity.

Hope Has Never Trickled Down, It Has Always Sprung Up.

So The Need For Another Economic Model Is Urgent, And If The Climate Justice Movement Can Show That Responding To Climate Change Is The Best Chance For A More Just Economic System.

Economic Models

Terrorism Doesn't Just Blow Up Buildings; It Blasts Every Other Issue Off The Political Map. The Spectre Of Terrorism - Real And Exaggerated - Has Become A Shield Of Impunity, Protecting Governments Around The World From Scrutiny For Their Human Rights Abuses.

This Same Economic System, Based On Short-term Growth And Endless Profits Is Also The Reason For Pretty Much Everything Else That Is Lousy In Our Society, From Private Prisons To Fox News. What I'm Arguing Is That, In Fact, What We've Been Told Is A Lie.

And That Is What Is Behind The Abrupt Rise In Climate Change Denial Among Hardcore Conservatives: They Have Come To Understand That As Soon As They Admit That Climate Change Is Real, They Will Lose The Central Ideological Battle Of Our Time—whether We Need To Plan And Manage Our Societies To Reflect Our Goals And Values, Or Whether That Task Can Be Left To The Magic Of The Market.

We Are Looking To Brands For Poetry And For Spirituality, Because We're Not Getting Those Things From Our Communities Or From Each Other.

But We Need To Be Very Clear: Because Of Our Decades Of Collective Denial, No Gradual, Incremental Options Are Now Available To Us.

There Is Plenty Of Room To Make A Profit In A Zero-carbon Economy; But The Profit Motive Is Not Going To Be The Midwife For That Great Transformation.

With Most Electronic Music I Hear Now, The Things I Like Will Be The Things That Have Soul. It Has To Have A Feeling In It, Where It Feels Warm, Or Feels Epic. I Like To Play With That In My Music As Well, There Will Always Be A Piano Chord Or Something Underneath It To Make You Feel At Home. I Always Try And Make Sure Even With Vocals And Layering That You Still Feel Like You Know Me, No Matter Whether You're Into Grime Or Hip Hop.

When It Comes To Paying Contractors, The Sky Is The Limit; When It Comes To Financing The Basic Functions Of The State, The Coffers Are Empty.

[on Climate Change:] What If It's All A Hoax And We've Created A Better World For Nothing?

Because It Is Such A Huge Crisis, Because It Puts Us On A Firm Science-based Deadline, It's A Once-in-a-century Opportunity To Build A Better Society And Address Raging Inequality, Create Huge Numbers Of Jobs, Rebuild Our Public Infrastructure. But, We Can't Do It Unless We Break Every Single Rule In The Free-market Playbook. Which Is Why The Worst People In The World All Deny Climate Change.

The Widespread Abuse Of Prisoners Is A Virtually Foolproof Indication That Politicians Are Trying To Impose A System--whether Political, Religious Or Economic--that Is Rejected By Large Numbers Of The People They Are Ruling. Just As Ecologists Define Ecosystems By The Presence Of Certain "indicator Species" Of Plants And Birds, Torture Is An Indicator Species Of A Regime That Is Engaged In A Deeply Anti-democratic Project, Even If That Regime Happens To Have Come To Power Through Elections.

Free Speech Is Meaningless If The Commercial Cacophony Has Risen To The Point Where No One Can Hear You.

Freedom Of Speech

Most Of You Didn't Think That Helping People Share Books Would Be A Subversive Act...yet The Fact Is That You Have Chosen A Profession That Has Become Radical.

If This Really Is True, Then Greed Really Isn't Good, After All. It Really Isn't The Way To Maximize The Best Possible Outcome. We Really Do Need To Come Together And Act Collectively. Government Isn't Always The Problem. It's Sometimes The Solution. And, So Their Whole Intellectual Scaffolding Collapses. So, They'd Rather Deny The Science.

You Actually Cannot Sell The Idea Of Freedom, Democracy, Diversity, As If It Were A Brand Attribute And Not Reality -- Not At The Same Time As You're Bombing People, You Can't.

People Without Memory Are Putty.

It Has No Denim-toned House Paint. Levi Makes What Is Essentially A Commodity: Blue Jeans. Its Ads May Evoke Rugged Outdoorsmanship, But Levi Hasn't Promoted Any Particular Life Style To Sell Other Products.

Trump Walked Into A Media Setting For Which He Was Far Better Suited Than The Other Contenders Because He Actually Knows How To Do Reality Tv And Made Them All Look Like Pretenders. And I Would Argue That Our News Media Has Only Gotten Worse Since Trump Got In Office. Trump Is Media Crack. The Ratings Have Never Been Higher. The Reason Cnn Would Run An Hour Of An Empty Podium Waiting For Him To Show Up During The Campaign Is Because They Were Terrified If They Turned Away From Trump Their Rating Would Go Down.

Protected Businesses Never, Never Become Competitive ... Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, Kpmg, Rti, Blackwater And All Other U.s. Corporations That Were In Iraq To Take Advantage Of The Reconstruction Were Part Of A Vast Protectionist Racket Whereby The U.s. Government Had Created Their Markets With War, Barred Their Competitors From Even Entering The Race, Then Paid Them To Do The Work, While Guaranteeing Them A Profit To Boot - All At Taxpayer Expense.

It Is Eminently Possible To Have A Market-based Economy That Requires No Such Brutality And Demands No Such Ideological Purity. A Free Market In Consumer Products Can Coexist With Free Public Health Care, With Public Schools, With A Large Segment Of The Economy -- Like A National Oil Company -- Held In State Hands. It's Equally Possible To Require Corporations To Pay Decent Wages, To Respect The Right Of Workers To Form Unions, And For Governments To Tax And Redistribute Wealth So That The Sharp Inequalities That Mark The Corporatist State Are Reduced. Markets Need Not Be Fundamentalist.

One Of The Most Disturbing Ways That Climate Change Is Already Playing Out Is Through What Ecologists Call "mismatch" Or "mistiming." This Is The Process Whereby Warming Causes Animals To Fall Out Of Step With A Critical Food Source, Particularly At Breeding Times, When A Failure To Find Enough Food Can Lead To Rapid Population Losses.

It Doesn't Have The Ability To Think Rationally This Economic Model. It Thinks Like A Drug Addict: 'where Can I Get My Next Fix?' It Doesn't Learn Wisely. Any Kind Of Measure Of Natural Wisdom Would Be: You Make A Mistake, You Correct It The Next Time Around. But A Drug Addict Feels Terrible... And Then Says: 'i Want More'. Unfortunately We Have An Economic Model That Thinks Like A Crack Addict.

Economic Models

Africa Is Poor Because Its Investors And Its Creditors Are Unspeakably Rich.

I Do Think That At This Moment In Late Capitalism It Is Easier In Our Minds To Imagine Raising Florida 30 Feet To Escape The Rising Seas Than It Is To Regulate Capitalism To Make It Serve Human Beings.

Indeed The Three Policy Pillars Of The Neoliberal Age-privatization Of The Public Sphere, Deregulation Of The Corporate Sector, And The Lowering Of Income And Corporate Taxes, Paid For With Cuts To Public Spending-are Each Incompatible With Many Of The Actions We Must Take To Bring Our Emissions To Safe Levels.

And If There Is One Thing We Can Be Sure Of, It’s That Extreme Weather Events Like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan In The Philippines, And The British Floods—disasters That, Combined, Pummeled Coastlines Beyond Recognition, Ravaged Millions Of Homes, And Killed Many Thousands—are Going To Keep Coming.

What Haunts Me Is Not Exactly The Absence Of Literal Space So Much As A Deep Craving For Metaphorical Space: Release, Escape, Some Kind Of Open-ended Freedom.

It Seems To Me That Our Problem Has A Lot Less To Do With The Mechanics Of Solar Power Than The Politics Of Human Power—specifically Whether There Can Be A Shift In Who Wields It, A Shift Away From Corporations And Toward Communities, Which In Turn Depends On Whether Or Not The Great Many People Who Are Getting A Rotten Deal Under Our Current System Can Build A Determined And Diverse Enough Social Force To Change The Balance Of Power.

Anybody Who Claims That They Know Where This Whole Thing Is All Going Is Just Lying.

The Deeper Message That Is Resonating With People Is That It Is Possible To Build. It Is Possible To Invest In People; It Is Possible To Invest In Green Infrastructure; It's Possible To Change.

We Can Save Ourselves, But Only If We Let Go Of The Myth Of Dominance And Mastery And Learn To Work With Nature.

Our Economy Is At War With Many Forms Of Life On Earth, Including Human Life. What The Climate Needs To Avoid Collapse Is A Contraction Of Humanity's Use Of Resources; What Our Economic Model Demands To Avoid Collapse Is Unfettered Expansion. Only One Of These Sets Of Rules Can Be Changed, And It's Not The Laws Of Nature

Economic Models

That's What's Happening Now. The World Is Being Held Up A Mirror: "all Roads Lead Here. Do You Like It?" A Lot Of People Don't Like It. A Lot Of People Are Saying, "wait A Minute, If Our System Can Produce That, There's Something Wrong With This System." That Opening Is Ours To Seize. It Matters How We Name It: It's Not Called Donald Trump. It's Called Capitalism.

Ads And Logos Are Our Shared Global Culture And Language, And People Are Insisting On The Right To Use That Language, To Reformulate It In The Way That Artists And Writers Always Do With Cultural Material,.

We Have Not Done The Things That Are Necessary To Lower Emissions Because Those Things Fundamentally Conflict With Deregulated Capitalism. ... We Are Stuck Because The Actions That Would Give Us The Best Chance Of Averting Catastrophe - And Would Benefit The Vast Majority - Are Extremely Threatening To An Elite Minority That Has A Stranglehold Over Our Economy, Our Political Process, And Most Of Our Major Media Outlets.

The Powerful Feed Ideology To The Masses Like Fast Food While They Dine On That Most Rarefied Delicacy: Impunity.

What We Have Been Living For Three Decades Is Frontier Capitalism, With The Frontier Constantly Shifting Location From Crisis To Crisis, Moving On As Soon As The Law Catches Up.

Our Enslavement To Oil Has Required The Repression Of Millions Of Arab People. As They Shake Off Their Bonds, So Must We.

Our Problem Is That The Climate Crisis Hatched In Our Laps At A Moment In History When Political And Social Conditions Were Uniquely Hostile To A Problem Of This Nature And Magnitude-that Moment Being The Tail End Of The Go-go '80s, The Blastoff Point For The Crusade To Spread Deregulated Capitalism Around The World. Climate Change Is A Collective Problem Demanding Collective Action The Likes Of Which Humanity Has Never Actually Accomplished. Yet It Entered Mainstream Consciousness In The Midst Of An Ideological War Being Waged On The Very Idea Of The Collective Sphere.

Trump's Act Of Construction Is Not Building A Building. It Is Building The Meaning Of The Name "trump." Because His Revenue Really Comes From Selling His Name To People Who Do Actually Build Things. They Pay Enormous Sums Of Money For The Supposed Privilege Of Being Associated With The Name Trump Or The Name Ivanka, Because Of That Image Construction. That's Why It Seemed Like A Good Idea For Trump To Run For President In The First Place.

The Net Is More Than An Organizing Tool - It Has Become An Organizing Model, A Blueprint For Decentralized But Cooperative Decision-making. It Facilitates The Process Of Information Sharing To Such An Extent That Many Groups Can Work In Concert With One Another Without The Need To Achieve Monolithic Consensus.

Information Sharing

In Pragmatic Terms, Our Challenge Is Less To Save The Earth From Ourselves And More To Save Ourselves From An Earth That, If Pushed Too Far, Has Ample Power To Rock, Burn, And Shake Us Off Completely.

Those Looking For Ideology In The White House Should Consider This: For The Men Who Rule Our World, Rules Are For Other People.

The Parties With The Most Gain Never Show Up On The Battlefield.

I See The Gap Ads As Being A Great Example Of How Branding Has Changed. Those Gap Campaigns Are Pop Culture. They've Been Incredibly Powerful. They Have Had The Kind Of Effect On Culture That A Hit Band Has. Just Look At The Gap's Khaki Swing Ads, Which Were Music Videos. They Had This Tremendous Impact On The Industry - Suddenly Everything Started Looking Like Gap Ads And It Became Difficult To Know Who Was Co-opting Whom And Who Was Creating Culture.

That Is The Meaning Of The Trump Brand - Being The Boss Who Is So Rich And So Powerful He Can Do Whatever He Wants. So The Way In Which He Ran For President Was To Embody That Idea As Fully As He Possibly Could With His Outrageousness. I Don't Think He Actually Thought He Would Win. I Think The Original Idea Was Purely A Marketing Idea. It Seemed A No-lose Situation, Because He Would Get So Much Free Publicity. And This Has Always Been His Genius - I Shouldn't Use The Word "genius" When Talking About Trump - But He's Always Understood The Value Of Free Publicity.

We Can't Leave Everything To The Free Market. In Fact, Climate Change Is, I Would Argue, The Greatest Single Free-market Failure. This Is What Happens When You Don't Regulate Corporations And You Allow Them To Treat The Atmosphere As An Open Sewer.

I Do Believe That Our Ability To Jam The Trump Brand Is Somewhat Limited. I Think We Can Chip Away At It, But Ultimately The Way To Undermine The Trump Brand Is A Better Product In The Political Marketplace, If You'll Forgive The Capitalist Metaphor. I Do Think That The Negative Messaging On Trump Is Severely Limited Because He Is Tapping Into A Very Deep, And In Many A Rightful, Desire For Deep Change, And A Feeling That The Whole System Is So Broken And So Corrupt That You Might As Well Raise A Middle Finger As Some Kind Of Act Of Agency.

There Are Lots Of Incredible People Who Are Working In Very Flawed Structures That Are Designed To Keep Us Apart, So We're Going To Have To Figure This Out. The First Stage Is Just Talking About It Openly: We Are All Working Within Structures Where There Is A Disincentive To Do What We Most Need To Do, Which Is Come Together. I Don't Know What The Answer Is But I Definitely Think That That First Stage Is Just Being Honest About It And Trying To Speak About It In A Way That Is Not Just Accusatory.

A Lot Of People Voted For Trump Because Of The Promises He Made Around Jobs. And So It's A Failed Political Strategy If The Goal Actually Is To Get Trump Impeached. Trump's Not Going To Get Impeached If He's Still Useful To The Republican Party, And The Only Thing That Makes Him Not Useful To The Republican Party Is If His Base Turns On Him. And That's Not Going To Happen Over Russia. That's Going To Happen Over Economic Betrayal. But That's Not Going To Happen If No One Knows That It's Happening.

Real Climate Solutions Are Ones That Steer These Interventions To Systematically Disperse And Devolve Power And Control To The Community Level, Whether Through Community-controlled Renewable Energy, Local Organic Agriculture Or Transit Systems Genuinely Accountable To Their Users.

Glhr... Has Used Greenpeace-style Media Antics To Draw More Public Attention To The Plight Of Sweatshop Workers Than The Multimillion - Dollar International Trade Union Movement Has Achieved In Almost A Century.

It's Certainly Something We Haven't Seen Before In Terms Of A Fully Commercial Global Brand - Really A Family Of Brands - Not Just Trump But Also Ivanka, Who Has A Sub-brand. We've Never Seen This Before. We've Had Presidents In Financial Conflicts Of Interest Before, But This Phenomenon Where A Sitting President Image Avatar Is Out There Selling Golf Courses And Condominiums, Even As He Is In Office And Having The Value Of His Personal Brand Inflated Dramatically By Fact Of His Being President, Is New Territory.

Regardless Of The Overall State Of The Economy, There Is Now A Large Enough Elite Made Up Of New Multi-millionaires And Billionaires For Wall Street To See The Group As "superconsumers," Able To Carry Consumer Demand All On Their Own.

Extreme Violence Has A Way Of Preventing Us From Seeing The Interests It Serves.

There's A Property In Panama Where Trump Has Collected Somewhere Around $30 Million Just From Selling His Name To This Property - It's Somewhere Between $30 Million And $50 Million. It Would Be So Easy For A Developer To Slap On An Extra $6 Million To A Trump Licensing Deal And Have That Be A Backdoor Bribe. Who Are We To Say What That Is Worth? It's So Ephemeral. And This Is The Appeal Of Selling Something As Ephemeral As A Brand Name, Is That It Can Be Inflated Beyond All Reason.

The Theory Of Economic Shock Therapy Relies In Part On The Roleof Expectations On Feeding An Inflationary Process. Reining In Inflation Requires Not Only Changing Monetary Policy But Also Changing The Behavior Of Consumers, Employers And Workers. The Role Of A Sudden, Jarring Policy Shift Is That It Quickly Alters Expectations, Signaling To The Public That The Rules Of The Game Have Changed Dramatically - Prices Will Not Keep Rising, Nor Will Wages.

Live Shows Are Where I Can Just Go Off, I Do The Most. I Can Recreate Songs Live And Take One Element And Build On That That For Like 40 Minutes And I Like Seeing People's Faces When I'm Making Something Live.

I Think There Is A Danger That An Environmental Crisis Can Be Used In Precisely The Same Way As The Terrorist Threat Can Be Used In Terms Of Giving Up Freedom.

Either Greed Belongs In A War Zone, Or It Doesn't. You Can't Unleash It In The Name Of Sparking An Economic Boom And Then Be Shocked When Halliburton Overcharges For Everything From Towels To Gas, When Parsons' Sub, Sub, Sub-contractor Builds A Police Academy Where The Pipes Drip Raw Sewage On The Heads Of Army Cadets And Where Blackwater Investigates Itself And Finds It Acted Honorably. That's Just Corporations Doing What They Do And Iraq Is A Privatized War Zone So That's What You Get. Build A Frontier, You Get Cowboys And Robber Barons.

Information Is Shock Resistance. Arm Yourself.

So We Are Left With A Stark Choice: Allow Climate Disruption To Change Everything About Our World, Or Change Pretty Much Everything About Our Economy To Avoid That Fate. But We Need To Be Very Clear: Because Of Our Decades Of Collective Denial, No Gradual, Incremental Options Are Now Available To Us.

It Is Our Great Collective Misfortune That The Scientific Community Made Its Decisive Diagnosis Of The Climate Threat At The Precise Moment When An Elite Minority Was Enjoying More Unfettered Political, Cultural, And Intellectual Power Than At Any Point Since The 1920s.

My Favorite Sign Here Says, "i Care About You." In A Culture That Trains People To Avoid Each Other's Gaze, To Say, "let Them Die," That Is A Deeply Radical Statement.

The Fact That Trump's Refused To Divest From His Labyrinth Of Business Holdings, The Fact That He's Continuing To Profit From His Brand And Indeed Create All Kinds Of New Opportunities To Profit Off The Presidency Is Outrageous. The Flip Side Is That He's Left Out A Lot Of Levers Through Which To Pressure Him. You Know, The Reason You Want A President To Divest From His Business Holdings Is That Foreign Governments Can Try To Exert Pressure On Him By Becoming Customers Of These Hotels And Inflating The Value Of How Much They're Willing To Pay For A Trump Brand.

Public Infrastructure Around The World Is Facing Unprecedented Stress, With Hurricanes, Cyclones, Floods And Forest Fires All Increasing In Frequency And Intensity. It's Easy To Imagine A Future In Which Growing Numbers Of Cities Have Their Frail And Long-neglected Infrastructures Knocked Out By Disasters And Then Are Left To Rot, Their Core Services Never Repaired Or Rehabilitated.

Despite Different Cultures, Middle-class Youth All Over The World Seem To Live Their Lives As If In A Parallel Universe. They Get Up In The Morning, Put On Their Levi's And Nikes, Grab Their Caps And Backpacks, And Sony Personal Cd Players And Head For School.

It Is Always Easier To Deny Reality Than To Allow Our Worldview To Be Shattered, A Fact That Was As True Of Die-hard Stalinists At The Height Of The Purges As It Is Of Libertarian Climate Change Deniers Today.

A Term Like Capitalism Is Incredibly Slippery, Because There's Such A Range Of Different Kinds Of Market Economies.

When Nike Says, Just Do It, That's A Message Of Empowerment. Why Aren't The Rest Of Us Speaking To Young People In A Voice Of Inspiration?

Like Russia's Gangsterism And Bush's Cronyism, Contemporary Iraq Is A Creation Of The Fifty-year Crusade To Privatize The World. Rather Than Being Disowned By Its Creators, It Deserves To Be Seen As The Purest Incarnation Yet Of The Ideology That Gave It Birth.

I Am Convinced That Climate Change Represents A Historic Opportunity On An Even Greater Scale.

We Live In This Culture Of Endless Extraction And Disposal: Extraction From The Earth, Extraction From People's Bodies, From Communities, As If There's No Limit, As If There's No Consequence To How We're Taking And Disposing, And As If It Can Go On Endlessly. We Are Reaching The Breaking Point On Multiple Levels. Communities Are Breaking, The Planet Is Breaking, People's Bodies Are Breaking. We Are Taking Too Much.

If You're Not Arguing, Your Coalition Isn't Wide Enough.

I'm Not Talking About Trump's Brand But Rather The Intimately Connected Brand Called "make America Great Again" That He Created To Make All These Promises To Working Americans - Is Intensely Vulnerable, If There Is Sustained Scrutiny Of The Kind We've Seen About Comey And Russia. He's Appointed Five Goldman Sachs Former Executives To His Cabinet, His Commerce Secretary Is Renegotiating Nafta To Make It Far Better For Corporations And Worse For Workers, And They're Talking About This Right Out In The Open... I Mean, How Much News Have You Seen About That?

And Most Of All, It Means Continually Drawing Connections Among These Seemingly Disparate Struggles—asserting, For Instance, That The Logic That Would Cut Pensions, Food Stamps, And Health Care Before Increasing Taxes On The Rich Is The Same Logic That Would Blast The Bedrock Of The Earth To Get The Last Vapors Of Gas And The Last Drops Of Oil Before Making The Shift To Renewable Energy.

The Reason Why Nothing Sticks To Trump - Or Very Little Sticks To Trump - Is That Trump Created His Brand Idea That Has To Do With Being The Guy Who Gets Away From It. It's This Ultimate Power Through Wealth And This Dream That Represents In An Age Of Tremendous Economic Precariousness And Constrained Options For So Many People - That Watching Trump Be Able To Do Whatever He Wants To Whoever He Wants Is This Obvious Vicarious Kind Of Thrill For A Certain Demographic.

It's Cnn Who Really Should Hold Trump Accountable. And Because They Are Trading The Short-term Fix Of Increased Ratings By Focusing On Trump Drama - And I'm Not Saying They Shouldn't Cover The Russian Investigations, Of Course They Should - But The Blanket Coverage, It's Not About News Values. It Is About Ratings. And It Comes At A Tremendous Cost Because Trump Supporters Are Fully Defended Against This. As Far As They're Concerned, This Is A Vast Conspiracy, It's Fake News, It Doesn't Impact Their Daily Lives, It Makes Them See Trump As A Victim, Which He Wants To Be Seen As.

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