Portside

Reader Comments: GOP's Secret Health Bill - not popular in Red states; Across the Country, Verdicts Protect Cops Who Kill; Naomi Klein; Mueller's Trump Investigation - Follow the Money; Readers respond to various Portside posts - Progressive Electoral Politics, People's Summit, Socialists and Electoral Politics; On the United Front; Gig Work; and more...

Naomi Klein offers five steps on how to recognize—and fight back against—the president's "wildly pro-corporate policies"

Trump, she suggests in her new book, No Is Not Enough, exploited that phenomenon (personal branding) to become the first incarnation of president as a brand, doing to the US nation and to the planet what he had first practised on his big gold towers: plastering his name and everything it stands for all over them.

"Trump is not the crisis. He is a symptom of the crisis." Interviews for Resistance, Sarah Jaffe with Naomi Klein.

Rising inequality is largely to blame for this electoral upset. Continuing with business as usual is not an option. People have lost their sense of security, status and even identity. This result is the scream of an America desperate for radical change. People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs. Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein offer up interesting analysis.

I respond that I am not here to broker a merger between the secular climate movement and the Vatican. However, if Pope Francis is correct that responding to climate change requires fundamental changes to our economic model—and I think he is correct—then it will take an extraordinarily broad-based movement to demand those changes, one capable of navigating political disagreements.

Naomi Klein rightly blames capitalism for climate change. But she doesn't go far enough.

On the eve of the latest United Nations Climate Summit in Lima, Peru, even the New York Times noted November 30 that scientists and climate-policy experts "warn that it now may be impossible to prevent the temperature of the planet's atmosphere from rising by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. With so much at much at stake, why have world leaders done so little to embrace comprehensive, mandatory solutions, relying instead on modest, market-based proposals for voluntary reductions?