Published in The Village Voice.

Naomi Klein, the Canadian journalist famous for her anti-corporatist books No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, spoke to the protesters at Occupy Wall Street yesterday evening, telling them their movement can follow through on the promises of the global trade protests she participated in a decade ago.

Speaking through cycles of call-and-response because the protesters have been denied a sound permit, Klein urged the protesters not to lapse into structureless disorganization.

"Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful," she told them. "But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen."

The complete text of Klein's speech can be found here.

Published in The Nation.

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I said had to be repeated by hundreds of people so others could hear (a.k.a. “the human microphone”), what I actually said at Liberty Plaza had to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.

I love you.

And I didn’t just say that so that hundreds of you would shout “I love you” back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder.

Published in The New York Times.

Naomi was asked by the New York Times to contribute to an edition of "Room for Debate" about Occupy Wall Street: "The protesters are getting more attention and expanding outside New York. What are they doing right, and what are they missing?" Here is her response.

I can’t help but compare the Occupy Wall Street protests to the movements that sprang up against corporate globalization at the end of 1990s, most visibly at the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Like today’s protests, those demonstrations were also marked by innovative coalitions among students, trade unions and environmentalists.

An introduction from Naomi: "Please take a look at this thoughtful essay by my friend Arun Gupta, editor of The Indypendent. If I were in New York (I'm based in British Columbia, Canada at the moment), I would certainly be spending time at the Wall Street occupation, and I urge those of you who do live in the area to go in person to Liberty Park and check it out. Keep in mind that any attempt to create a genuinely open space to share political ideas is necessarily going to be chaotic and at times embarrassing. But Gupta's point is a crucial one. This is not the time to be looking for ways to dismiss a nascent movement against the power of capital, but to do the opposite: to find ways to embrace it, support it and help it grow into its enormous potential. With so much at stake, cynicism is a luxury we simply cannot afford." --Naomi

The Revolution Begins at Home
An Open Letter to Join the Wall Street Occupation
By Arun Gupta

Published in The Los Angeles Times.

Naomi was asked by the Los Angeles Times to revisit her early reflections on the September 11 attacks. Here is her short piece for the Times' "9/11: A Decade After" series.

Naomi gave the following speech at the Tar Sands Action in Washington DC on September 3, 2011. Special thanks to Dahlman Cook Productions.

Time Magazine just released its list of the "best and most influential" nonfiction books written in English since 1923, and Naomi's No Logo was chosen. Check out the list here.

Published in The Nation.

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens, or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion—a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

Posted on Huffington Post

Although he passed away in 2006, states are now grappling with many of the toxic notions left behind by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.

In her groundbreaking book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein coined the term "disaster capitalism" for the rapid-fire corporate re-engineering of societies still reeling from shock. The master of disaster? Privatization and free market guru Milton Friedman. Friedman advised governments in economic crisis to follow strict austerity measures, combining radical cuts in social services with the full-scale privatization of their more lucrative assets. Many countries in Latin America auctioned off everything standing -- from energy and water utilities to Social Security -- to for profit multinational firms, crushing unions and other dissenters along the way.

Published in the Los Angeles Times

"We're a disaster area," Alexis Bonogofsky told me, "and it's going to take a long time to get over it."

Bonogofsky and her partner, Mike Scott, are all over the news this week, telling the world about how Montana's Exxon Mobil pipeline spill has fouled their goat ranch and is threatening the health of their animals.

But my conversation with Bonogofsky was four full days before the pipeline began pouring oil into the Yellowstone River. And no, it's not that she's psychic; she was talking about this year's historic flooding.

"It's unbelievable," she said. "It's like nothing I've experienced in my lifetime. It destroyed houses; people died; crops didn't get in the fields…. We barely were able to get our hay crop in."