Naomi Klein: What is your counsel? | Naomi Klein | Big Think

Naomi Klein: What is your counsel?

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Citizens need to take back their political systems, says Klein.

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Naomi Klein:

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the New York Times and #1 international bestseller, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In 2008 it won the Canadian Booksellers Association’s Libris Award for Non-Fiction Book of the Year and is longlisted for the inaugural 2009 Warwick Prize for Writing (UK). The six minute companion film, created by Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men, was an Official Selection of the 2007 Venice Biennale and Toronto International Film Festivals and was a viral phenomenon, downloaded over a million times.

Her first book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies was also an international bestseller, translated into over 28 languages with more than a million copies in print. A collection of her work, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate was published in 2002.

Naomi Klein writes a regular column for The Nation and The Guardian that is syndicated internationally by The New York Times Syndicate. In 2004, her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s Magazine won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Also in 2004, she co-produced The Take with director Avi Lewis, a feature documentary about Argentina’s occupied factories. The film was an Official Selection of the Venice Biennale and won the Best Documentary Jury Prize at the American Film Institute’s Film Festival in Los Angeles. She is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Naomi Klein:

I think there needs to be a citizen’s revolt against the corporate takeover of politics. And we have to get out of this reality TV show that is just the endless popularity contest of elections. You know it’s an incredible distraction, and Americans are in an endless election campaign. It never ends. So the idea that after the election then there will be policy, there is no after the election. There is always another election, another fundraising campaign, and you know it never ends. It’s a big business unto itself. It’s entertainment. And it’s politics deferral. So you know before . . . Before this can actually lead to political change, we need to change the rules. We need to get corporate money the hell away from politics; or at least a huge separation. It has to . . . It’s the most pressing issue of our time. It’s the most pressing issue of our time because it’s what needs to happen before anything else can happen. Recorded on: 11/29/07