[Peace-discuss] Naomi Klein on a Palin moment

[Brussel Morton K.]

A stirring and prescient talk. --mkb

Naomi Klein: Let's Put an End to Sarah Palin-Style Capitalism
By Naomi Klein, The Progressive
Posted on July 30, 2009, Printed on July 31, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141656/

The following was adapted from a speech on May 2, 2009 at The  
Progressive’s 100th anniversary conference and originally printed in  
The Progressive magazine, August 2009 issue:

We are in a progressive moment, a moment when the ground is shifting  
beneath our feet, and anything is possible. What we considered  
unimaginable about what could be said and hoped for a year ago is now  
possible. At a time like this, it is absolutely critical that we be as  
clear as we possibly can be about what it is that we want because we  
might just get it.

So the stakes are high.

I usually talk about the bailout in speeches these days. We all need  
to understand it because it is a robbery in progress, the greatest  
heist in monetary history. But today I'd like to take a different  
approach: What if the bailout actually works, what if the financial  
sector is saved and the economy returns to the course it was on before  
the crisis struck? Is that what we want? And what would that world  
look like?

The answer is that it would look like Sarah Palin. Hear me out, this  
is not a joke. I don't think we have given sufficient consideration to  
the meaning of the Palin moment. Think about it: Sarah Palin stepped  
onto the world stage as Vice Presidential candidate on August 29 at a  
McCain campaign rally, to much fanfare. Exactly two weeks later, on  
September 14, Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering the global  
financial meltdown.

So in a way, Palin was the last clear expression of capitalism-as- 
usual before everything went south. That's quite helpful because she  
showed us-in that plainspoken, down-homey way of hers-the trajectory  
the U.S. economy was on before its current meltdown. By offering us  
this glimpse of a future, one narrowly avoided, Palin provides us with  
an opportunity to ask a core question: Do we want to go there? Do we  
want to save that pre-crisis system, get it back to where it was last  
September? Or do we want to use this crisis, and the electoral mandate  
for serious change delivered by the last election, to radically  
transform that system? We need to get clear on our answer now because  
we haven't had the potent combination of a serious crisis and a clear  
progressive democratic mandate for change since the 1930s. We use this  
opportunity, or we lose it.

So what was Sarah Palin telling us about capitalism-as-usual before  
she was so rudely interrupted by the meltdown? Let's first recall that  
before she came along, the U.S. public, at long last, was starting to  
come to grips with the urgency of the climate crisis, with the fact  
that our economic activity is at war with the planet, that radical  
change is needed immediately. We were actually having that  
conversation: Polar bears were on the cover of Newsweek magazine. And  
then in walked Sarah Palin. The core of her message was this: Those  
environmentalists, those liberals, those do-gooders are all wrong. You  
don't have to change anything. You don't have to rethink anything.  
Keep driving your gas-guzzling car, keep going to Wal-Mart and shop  
all you want. The reason for that is a magical place called Alaska.  
Just come up here and take all you want. "Americans," she said at the  
Republican National Convention, "we need to produce more of our own  
oil and gas. Take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska,  
we've got lots of both."

And the crowd at the convention responded by chanting and chanting:  
"Drill, baby, drill."

Watching that scene on television, with that weird creepy mixture of  
sex and oil and jingoism, I remember thinking: "Wow, the RNC has  
turned into a rally in favor of screwing Planet Earth." Literally.

But what Palin was saying is what is built into the very DNA of  
capitalism: the idea that the world has no limits. She was saying that  
there is no such thing as consequences, or real-world deficits.  
Because there will always be another frontier, another Alaska, another  
bubble. Just move on and discover it. Tomorrow will never come.

This is the most comforting and dangerous lie that there is: the lie  
that perpetual, unending growth is possible on our finite planet. And  
we have to remember that this message was incredibly popular in those  
first two weeks, before Lehman collapsed. Despite Bush's record, Palin  
and McCain were pulling ahead. And if it weren't for the financial  
crisis, and for the fact that Obama started connecting with working  
class voters by putting deregulation and trickle-down economics on  
trial, they might have actually won.
The President tells us he wants to look forward, not backwards. But in  
order to confront the lie of perpetual growth and limitless abundance  
that is at the center of both the ecological and financial crises, we  
have to look backwards. And we have to look way backwards, not just to  
the past eight years of Bush and Cheney, but to the very founding of  
this country, to the whole idea of the settler state.

Modern capitalism was born with the so-called discovery of the  
Americas. It was the pillage of the incredible natural resources of  
the Americas that generated the excess capital that made the  
Industrial Revolution possible. Early explorers spoke of this land as  
a New Jerusalem, a land of such bottomless abundance, there for the  
taking, so vast that the pillage would never have to end. This  
mythology is in our biblical stories-of floods and fresh starts, of  
raptures and rescues-and it is at the center of the American Dream of  
constant reinvention. What this myth tells us is that we don't have to  
live with our pasts, with the consequences of our actions. We can  
always escape, start over.

These stories were always dangerous, of course, to the people who were  
already living on the "discovered" lands, to the people who worked  
them through forced labor. But now the planet itself is telling us  
that we cannot afford these stories of endless new beginnings anymore.  
That is why it is so significant that at the very moment when some  
kind of human survival instinct kicked in, and we seemed finally to be  
coming to grips with the Earth's natural limits, along came Palin, the  
new and shiny incarnation of the colonial frontierswoman, saying: Come  
on up to Alaska. There is always more. Don't think, just take.

This is not about Sarah Palin. It's about the meaning of that myth of  
constant "discovery," and what it tells us about the economic system  
that they're spending trillions of dollars to save. What it tells us  
is that capitalism, left to its own devices, will push us past the  
point from which the climate can recover. And capitalism will avoid a  
serious accounting-whether of its financial debts or its ecological  
debts-at all costs. Because there's always more. A new quick fix. A  
new frontier.

That message was selling, as it always does. It was only when the  
stock market crashed that people said, "Maybe Sarah Palin isn't a  
great idea this time around. Let's go with the smart guy to ride out  
the crisis."

I almost feel like we've been given a last chance, some kind of a  
reprieve. I try not to be apocalyptic, but the global warming science  
I read is scary. This economic crisis, as awful as it is, pulled us  
back from that ecological precipice that we were about to drive over  
with Sarah Palin and gave us a tiny bit of time and space to change  
course. And I think it's significant that when the crisis hit, there  
was almost a sense of relief, as if people knew they were living  
beyond their means and had gotten caught. We suddenly had permission  
to do things together other than shop, and that spoke to something deep.

But we are not free from the myth. The willful blindness to  
consequences that Sarah Palin represents so well is embedded in the  
way Washington is responding to the financial crisis. There is just an  
absolute refusal to look at how bad it is. Washington would prefer to  
throw trillions of dollars into a black hole rather than find out how  
deep the hole actually is. That's how willful the desire is not to know.

And we see lots of other signs of the old logic returning. Wall Street  
salaries are almost back to 2007 levels. There's a certain kind of  
electricity in the claims that the stock market is rebounding. "Can we  
stop feeling guilty yet?" you can practically hear the cable  
commentators asking. "Is the bubble back yet?"

And they may well be right. This crisis isn't going to kill capitalism  
or even change it substantively. Without huge popular pressure for  
structural reform, the crisis will prove to have been nothing more  
than a very wrenching adjustment. The result will be even greater  
inequality than before the crisis. Because the millions of people  
losing their jobs and their homes aren't all going to be getting them  
back, not by a long shot. And manufacturing capacity is very difficult  
to rebuild once it's auctioned off.

It's appropriate that we call this a "bailout." Financial markets are  
being bailed out to keep the ship of finance capitalism from sinking,  
but what is being scooped out is not water. It's people. It's people  
who are being thrown overboard in the name of "stabilization." The  
result will be a vessel that is leaner and meaner. Much meaner.  
Because great inequality-the super rich living side by side with the  
economically desperate-requires a hardening of the hearts. We need to  
believe ourselves superior to those who are excluded in order to get  
through the day. So this is the system that is being saved: the same  
old one, only meaner.

And the question that we face is: Should our job be to bail out this  
ship, the biggest pirate ship that ever was, or to sink it and replace  
it with a sturdier vessel, one with space for everyone? One that  
doesn't require these ritual purges, during which we throw our friends  
and our neighbors overboard to save the people in first class. One  
that understands that the Earth doesn't have the capacity for all of  
us to live better and better.

But it does have the capacity, as Bolivian President Evo Morales said  
recently at the U.N., "for all of us to live well."

Because make no mistake: Capitalism will be back. And the same message  
will return, though there may be someone new selling that message: You  
don't need to change. Keep consuming all you want. There's plenty  
more. Drill, baby, drill. Maybe there will be some technological fix  
that will make all our problems disappear.

And that is why we need to be absolutely clear right now.

Capitalism can survive this crisis. But the world can't survive  
another capitalist comeback.


Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist  
and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The  
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, now out in paperback.  
Her earlier books include the international best-seller, No Logo:  
Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and  
Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate  
(2002). To read all her latest writing visit www.naomiklein.org
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