Our Impending Crisis: Climate Change, Failing Elites, and Economic Transformation

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Christian Parenti, author and journalist, will give a talk examining the social and economic dislocations promised by climate change, and the seeming inability of American economic and policy elites to addressthis crisis. Why are American elites so inept? At a time of great peril the country has a president that neither major party wanted, yet neither could stop him. Rich and self-satisfied, yet facing the greatest challenge in their history, American elites appear more short-sighted and incompetent than ever. What caused this?

Parenti’s talk will unpack the strange economic history of America’s rise and slow, corrupt decline. Drawing on his work as a journalist reporting from conflict zones hit by climate-change driven crisis, and on his more recent research into the economic history of American capitalism, Parenti will explore how the US could be rediscovering its own overlooked traditions of state planning and public investment to drive the economic transformations necessary to effectively mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis.

Parenti is associate professor of economics at John Jay College, City University of New York. His books include Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2011); The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (2004); The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror (2002); and Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (2000/second edition 2008). He has reported extensively from Afghanistan, Iraq, and various parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America for The Nation, Fortune, The London Review Books, The New York Times, and other publications.