May 8: Naomi Klein

Writer, social activist, and red-diaper baby Naomi Klein was born in Montreal on this date in 1970. Her parents had moved there from the U.S. three years earlier as resisters to the Vietnam War. Klein’s books include No Logo (2000), an anti-corporate and anti-globalization manifesto, and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), an attack on Milton Friedman’s free-market capitalist prescriptions as applied to countries in times of tumultuous change (such as post-Communist Eastern Europe or in Chile under Pinochet). The Shock Doctrine has been translated into some 30 languages. An emerging leader of the environmental movement, which has become the focus of much of her journalism, Klein has also been a supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel’s occupation policies since 2009. She is one of North America’s best-known intellectual-activists, and one of the corporate world’s most clear-sighted critics. To see her interviewed by Bill Moyers on climate change and capitalism, see below.

“Around the world in Britain, the United States, Asia and the Middle East, there are people with power who are cashing in on chaos; exploiting bloodshed and catastrophe to brutally remake our world in their image.” —Naomi Klein