No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics

by Naomi Klein

roughly 40 percent—than chose to cast a ballot for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, who each got roughly 25 percent of total eligible voters. That is a staggering level of disengagement in a democracy.

History is important. If you don’t know history it’s as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it. —HOWARD ZINN You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, 2004 documentary

one of the first things Jeff Sessions did as Trump’s attorney general was rescind the Obama administration’s decision to move away from for-profit jails for the general prison population.

When you massively cut taxes so that you don’t have money to spend on much of anything besides the police and the military, this is what happens.

So, the poorest people in the United States subsidized the contractor bonanza twice: first, when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate handouts, providing neither decent jobs nor functional public services; and second, when the few programs that directly assist the unemployed and working poor nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills.

As indicated by his early deployment of the most powerful conventional weapon in the US arsenal—the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB—Trump is drunk on the allure of showing the world he’s top dog.

Dodd–Frank wasn’t tough enough, but its absence will liberate Wall Street to go wild blowing new bubbles, which will inevitably burst, creating new economic shocks.