Sarah Palin Capitalism and future of mankind
Naomi Klein
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.
Bailout works
Sarah Palin. Courtesy: Google.lk |
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 US 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 have 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 favour 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.
Financial crisis
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 labour. 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.
Economic system
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.
Gloomy economy forecast. Courtesy: Google.lk |
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 have 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.
Financial markets
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
neighbours 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.
The writer is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist
and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The
Shock Doctrine. |