Booktv Monthly Program with bestselling author naomi klein. Her books on economics and Public Policy include no logo, the shock doctrine and the recently published on fire, the case for the Green New Deal. Thanks for joining us in our studios in new york on booktv. We are in midtown manhattan were branding and marketing is a big business. Let me begin with your first book. What did you learn about nike, microsoft, starbucks . Guest its great to be with you and have this time. It came out at the very beginning of 2000, so almost exactly 20yearsold. I was researching it for years before that. It was a period a lot was changing in the corporate world and you had the first kind of fullblown lifestyle brand which is an idea that we all take for granted now but these were companiesco that for the first time were declaring that their Business Model wasnt to sell products but so ideas and the lifestyle of belonging that they could then extend into kind of selfimposed branded cocoons and they could sort of celebrating in this logo. Nike was the first one to do this. The main thing i learned when i was researching is that there was a relationship between the aggressive kind of marketing that was constantly trolling the Youth Culture to find the mostin cuttingedge ideas to get ad ads into places they never had them before like schools to co brand with the free Music Festival and so on but there was a relationship between that aggressive marketing and the kind of good jobs that were offered in the economy because the way th the companies were freeing up money to spend on this much more aggressive Lifestyle Marketing was by divesting from their factories from the idea they should be producers at all so they kind of paved the way because they never owned their factories in the first place. They made their Running Shoes through contractors they put against one another but could provide issues for the lowest price and this was such a profitable Business Model to for competitors started quoting the factories and never reopening it. That was the key thing they never reopened their factories. We often talk about the factories moving from north america to mexicory or china or vietnam, but in fact it wasnt just that they weree moving locations, theyha were never owning their factories and they didnt see themselves as producers so it is intimately related to the deindustrialization id precariousness of work the sort of take for granted today. Host you point out my key in particular getting criticism from its customers. Host guest at the time because it was new. This was still an america that remembered the manufacturing model that you understood the product you are buying into the car you were biting you knew where it was made in this was an economic anchor for that community, the idea that people making the car should have enough money to buy the car so it was culturally shocking for people to discover that these Companies Like nike or disney who are spending so much money putting out images of themselves that were very progressive or in disneys case, very p free familyfriendly they could pull back the curtain and wait a minute, it gives in some cases children or people just a little bit out of being children, people in their early 20s who are making these products under abusive conditions. So, when that was exposed, it was a scandal and 20 years later i think people take it for granted that almost all the products in our lives are made under conditions that are pretty dubious. Weve got electronic factories in china that have them catch people at risk of suicide on the job. The sense of shock like i cant believe these shoes are made by 18yearolds who are sleeping in crammed dormitories and not getting paid for their overtime or having to p. In bottles and other sewing machines. The scandals were coming up and they were genuine scandals. I think people sense of shock and outrage has been doled and some of the jokes on my television latenight television. Host starbucks into the coffee shop opened up trying to essentially run away from the starbucks brand. Host that was an example from the tenyearr anniversary where in the original edition that came out in 2000 i had to say a bit about this company who told us what they called the third place and they were really using the discourse of the public sphere almost like a town square and it was interesting that this was happening in the 90s after this aggressive privatization so the corporations had to come along and say but then when i wrote this for the tenth Anniversary Edition they just opened up a coffee shop in seattle that was completely unbranded. You didnt see their logo anywhere but seemed to be a bit of a marker for how they followed it if in order to recapture any sense of newness they had to unbranded themselv themselves. Host you talk about president obama and did he live up to his change. Guest it was early in the years that i wrote that. I think there was always something a little bit about the brand that its hard to pin him down to a clear political platform and its another interesting where we are now because if you look at the democratic primaries right now, i think theres more of an expectation that candidates have a specific and fully formed platform, labor policy platform and environmental policy platform if i think about the Obama Campaign of 2008 it was pretty big like im going to recapture the sense of optimism youre not going to be ashamed of america. People are tired from eight years of bush and thats why i wrote about that in the First Political campaign that used the same tools that the Corporate Lifestyle brands have been using to base themselves in the progressivism. So the question did obama live up to it its a complicated question in the sense that it never was very specific so its hard to say whether he lived up to it or not because there wasnt that much of their although he did specifically promise im going to revise and take on wall street and i think there was a huge amount of disappointment. People hoped that there was going to be a reinvestment in that Small Businesses and ma mae more factory jobs. We are very disappointed by that and its part of a global phenomenon where the centrist liberal politicians come to power with sort of a progressivism in change but the economy continues to meet people feel excluded, more insecure and that is the stage for the spopulism we see worldwide. There are specific factors to obama being the first black president and the racial backlash in the United States. But its also important to remember that there is a global phenomenon of the rise of the rightwing populism that we see everywhere. Host you can join us on twitter at the tv. Our guest for the next two hours, naomi klein and also get a phone call 202 7488200 in the eastern and pacific time zones. 7488201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zones. You are teaching at rutgers university. How do you frame this in the classroom in terms of your book and the tenyear anniversary anedition . Guest teaching at rutgers looks at the integration of the human and corporation and the corporations trying to act more like humans which the original brands were all about putting a sort of comforting space like uncle bens or aunt jemima, much of it racialized in the nostalgia about plantation life so we look at the racial history of branding. And then where the no logo and, remember this is written in the late 1990s and this then completely new idea that humans like everyday humans, not celebrities needed to become their own brand in order to succeed in thiss newly precarios job environment. Nobody can expect the jobs that these are the way to get ahead is to find your inner brand and project it onto the world and this is after we have seen celebrities do this. In the book i talk about michael jordan, the first super brand, but then we look at what is happening now with social media because when i wrote that 20 years ago, it was a pretty notional idea that anybody could be their own brand because anybody doesnt have the money to take up advertisements and actually do the work of projecting an image of oneself, but today because of social media, everybody who has computer access has the capacity a market themselves and an idea of themselves to think about what is my brand which is different from who am i. So, what we are unpacking, and i have a Wonderful Group of students we talked about how even though theyve grown up with this idea, its a relatively new idea. It wasnt always the case he would have been looked at as if you were mad 30 years ago to say to a 15yearold kid, but not what you want to be when you grow up what is your brand. We try to make visible some of the things they took for granted and then what does it mean to have to separate yourself from the idea of your self to have that distancing and what does that do to friendships and relationships and social movements. So its fascinating to unpack this with them because of course they know more about social media than i do and they are teaching me all the time the latestes phase of this are intimately connected to the fact we are living our lives online and the constant performance of our personal brand is that the Tech Industry sees that as the new oriole as it is often repeated, so they are mining all the information that we are sharing for their Business Model that we are not getting any part of. We are not paying for the data that we are providing for free so we are looking at all these questions are the Surveillance Data mining. So thats interesting once again to see how much has changed since i wrote t that host tour next book for the burning case on the Green New Deal. You wrote a lot about how that essentially transform the country and the world. Guest there was inspiration to be taken and also some very important warnings because so many people were excludedti. Many africanamerican workers were excluded, domestic workers, women, Agricultural Workers and there was systemic discrimination and segregation. Its also true that the United States transformed itself at the speed and scale that is comparable to the speed and scale of change that we need to embrace if we are going to lower emissions in line with what the scientists are telling us. A year ago the panel on Climate Change, the foremost gathering of scientific experts t that advises the government on the state of Climate Science issued a report a yearr ago saying we need to cut global emissions in half. And this is a quote from the summary of the report that would require unprecedented transformation in every aspect of the society. This is the time we solve the scale of transformation one is during the Second World War when you have americans planting Victory Gardens and getting 40 of their products from the gardens and they transformed themselves very rapidly but the new deal is another era that ise less topdown and which is why its a useful historical precedence for us h to look at because i dont think we want the government telling everybody what they should do. I think we should worry about that kind of authoritarianism so digging the new deal era you saw america electrified more than ten millions directly employed at the renaissance of the publicly funded art. All kinds of public infrastructures, reservoirs and much of the infrastructure today is a legacy of the new deal. Anotheanother part that ise quie public into thinking about the Green New Deal is 50 hours civilian conservation corps was probably the most popular of the new deal programs and its a reminder that the new deal was not only responding to an economic crisis but to an ecological crisis because of the dust bowl and the crisis of deforestation so they sent more than 2 million poor young people to the hundreds of camps in rural parts of the United States and they did things like plant to 3 billion trees which is more than half so that kind of scale is important and its also the kind of thing we need to do to pull carbon out of the atmosphere in the face of the Climate Crisis. Host part of what makes Climate Change is a very difficult for many of us to grasp is that we live in a culture of the perpetual present one that is separated from the past that created us and in the future we are shaping with our actions. Guest a lot of what im doing in this book is trying to make visible the Economic Systems and a relatively new social models born of the particular capitalism w capitald since the reagan era which is all about privatization and generating shopping with democracy and the good wife and that has produced an accelerated culture that offend people point to and say its just human nature we cant deal with a crisis Like Kind Exchange because clearly we are too selfish, too individualistic and its required us to have a timeframe to put the collective good ahead of something that you might want right now to satisfy an individual urge. Theres been a lot written that has made this argument about why we will never respond to this crisis and what i find when im talking about what we need to do in the face of this crisis, i find that the biggest obstacle that we are up against a small climatis notClimate Change denis definitely on the way, and its not the lack of technology or understanding of what needs toat be done. It is the sense of doom that as human beings we are incapable of doing thema things necessary and thats why it is important to draw on these historical precedent in the lifespan of people alive today, people were able to think longer term and were able to put their collective good ahead of their individual desires and their indigenous peoplthere areindigeh america who teach their children to think seven generations into the future and the past so im trying to p do is problem with ties these appeals that we hear a lot and say that i it is equipping a particular relatively recent form of deregulated consumer capitalism with the idea of what it means to begin with and wh within whyt change the law of nature we can change the systemm that we can create ourselves if they are threatening life on earth. Not that its easy but im just saying its possible. Guest i was born in canada and montreal and my parents are american. My parents were peace activists in the 1960s. My father did not want to go to vietnam and he had to choose between jail and canada and like many of his peers, he chose canada so we moved to montreal and later moved back to the United States for a few years when i was very young before i was 5yearsold and they decided that they liked canada better, so i sometimes say that we left because of the war but h we stad for the universal public healthcare. She worked for the National Film board of canada and made for the feminist movement i grew up with political parents and my father worked in the Canadian Health care system and was involved in bringing midwives into hospitals and an advocate for natural childbirth. Ive had friends that have had serious radical president pair in. Going to regular schools in the 1980s i sort of felt pulled between. Thats why i wrote of no logo. Host welcome to the conversation. Caller nice to speak with you. My main problem is the amount of energy that is required is impossible. The technologies just are not going to be there to this pie in the sky type thinking. How do you explain host we wont get a response. Guest i would urge you to look up the work of Mark Jacobson at stanford university. Hes a professor of engineering who has a big team giving specific research about how effective is it to get to 100 Renewable Energy very rapidly for electricity first and transportation afterwards in line with what the scientists are telling us we need to do. Thereve been huge breakthroughs in Battery Storage and price breakthroughsea as well in the cost of Renewable Energy so i would disagree. I think it is possible. Im not saying its easy but the barriers are much more political than they are technological and thats precisely what the panel on Climate Change said when they set the target of halving the global emissions in 12 years in that fateful report, and i want to stress that they report that drew in 6,000 sources so its not just a oneoff paper. There is a few factors one is a highaltitude volcano that is one of the main reasons, and another reason i talk about in the book is this followed the genocide against Indigenous Peoples in america and there is a new science that looks at how this huge loss of life over many millions of people in the americas led to and that was part of that as well. Host norwalk connecticut, steve. Go ahead. Ea caller [inaudible] host if you can turn the volume down and go ahead with your question. Caller good morning. Can you hear me . First, lets eliminate batteries to make electric power to go into a battery using fossil fuel, you dont eliminate one molecule of co2, so i cant believe youou wouldnt know tha, but you evidently dont know that. I cannot believe that all these senators running for president never mentioned Hydrogen Fuel cells which happened to be the only remedy to eliminate the co2 because there is no co2 when you use Hydrogen Fuel cells period. Its that simple. I sent messages on your facebook numerous times. I dont know if youve actually read this or just dismiss it or what you do, but anyway, you never m