The following is the text of Naomi Klein's speech on June 3, 2009 at the America's Future Now conference in Washington. It has been edited for length and clarity.
[The previous speech by activist Gabriela Sanchez] made me think of this idea of whether we should have Obama's back, or whether we should be pushing him further. You know Bob says both, and I think that's a good answer, but I also want to say something else, which is, Rahm Emanuel has Barack Obama's back. He is a great politician, Obama. He's doing fine and has people like Gabriela Sanchez and the people who work with her, who need us to have their back. It's a basic principle. A solidarity.
The president of the most powerful country in the world is doing all right. But there are a lot of people in this country who are not doing all right, and we need to rediscover these basic principles of solidarity in this moment more than any other.
There's another reason for having Obama's back when he gets criticized, which is the corporate media in this country is insane. This city is crazy; I don't know if you know this. So he gets attacked for all kinds of things -- everything -- including many, many things that are not at all progressive.
So, if our job is to just protect him when he's getting attacked, then we're going to end up protecting him from all kinds of things that we don't actually believe in. We believe in a lot more than that.
So, you end up in a situation where he gets attacked for releasing a memo on torture, but our goal isn't to have memos on torture released. Our goal, as [previous speaker Rep.] Keith Ellison reminded us, is to prosecute the people to the full extent of the law, who committed those crimes.
So let's not forget. Let's not forget what we believe in. He gets attacked in this city for not allowing the workers of General Motors to just screw off and die. That's cast as progressive, but what's actually happening at GM is not progressive, this downscaled, sort of vulture capitalist model of a bailout. We don't want that -- we want transformation.
Michael Moore just wrote a great piece, and a lot of economists, like Sam Gindin... -- he was the in-house researcher and economist for the Canadian Auto Workers Union, and he's been writing now for many months about the fact that we could be transforming the factories that are being closed down, all the feeder factories as well, into the engines of our new economy.
You think about a factory like Republic Windows & Doors. You know this factory that was making windows, energy-efficient windows, was shut down in the middle of this global economic crisis, and the workers in that factory -- the kind of people that need us to have their back, said, "No, I don't think we'll get fired this week."
And they went back into their factory. They occupied it, they guarded the machines with their bodies and said, "You're not going to auction off these machines to pay off the creditors. We're the creditors." They put Bank of America on trial, who had gotten all of this bailout money in the name of bailing out factories, bailing out creditors, and it turned out that they hadn't extended the line of credit at Republic Windows & Doors.
Anyway, they protected their factory. Now there's another buyer that's come in, realized they could get some stimulus money from the weatherization program ... so this factory is going to stay open.
But it's happening only because of these incredibly brave workers and their unions. It shouldn't just be left to that. This is a model. No factory in this country should be closed down before there is an environmental audit where you find out what sort of technological investment would it take to keep this factory open and producing for the supposed green new future.
And if the bosses don't want to run that factory, then the workers as the creditors should be given the first chance to turn it into a worker-run cooperative. That's progressive ... that's progressive.
Obama's under fire right now for being tough on Israel ... to standing up to [Benjamin] Netanyahu Apparently because he won't let Netanyahu expand settlements. I'm sorry, that's not progressive. Ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, ending the embargo is progressive ... do not let this city let you lose your mind.
Umm ... the bailout, you know, it's the same thing. He's being accused of being this rabid Marxist socialist for the stimulus package and the bailout of Wall Street. That's not socialism, as the Democratic Socialists said. They're upset because of the Republican Party going around saying they want to redeem the Democrats, the Democrat Socialists of America. They don't think that's fair. It's giving socialism a bad name. They said this is the second most capitalist party in the world -- they're not socialists.
So we have to be clear about what that bailout is. It's crony capitalism of the absolute worst kind, of the most criminal kind -- and the stimulus package is the absolute mildest form of Keynesian light, because it actually does not have a vision for the manufacturing sector, no vision for full employment. And I know Lea, hope Lea will talk more about this ...
I also thought about mentioning to you, we are starting to regain some of the lost years of the Bush years, there's no doubt about that. And that's a victory and that's important, but we also have to remember how much we've lost.
Ten years ago this fall was the so-called Battle in Seattle. That was an incredibly progressive moment. There happened to be Democrats at the time, but there were amazing coalitions between students, environmentalists, organized labor, on the streets, and they weren't asking, you know, "Is this going to help the Democrats in the next election?" They weren't wondering how it was polling.
They were building a movement; they were joining, in fact, a global movement that was putting not globalization on trial, as the media kept insisting at the time, but corporate rule on trial. Corporatism on trial, casino capitalism on trial and the very policies that then proceeded to implode our global economy.
The reason why I believed in the "anyone but Bush" line in 2004, was because I argued at the time that Bush was making us stupid. Because he was so extreme that we were forgetting everything that we had learned in building that progressive movement, in terms of the connections between the parties. Because they were both being run by corporations in terms of identifying this global system, you know; we were only talking about the American Empire, not remembering that it's actually transnational.
So we retreated to a very, very simplistic analysis, so I said we need to get rid of Bush so that we can get back to work. That's what I said in 2004, but I'm worried a little bit that something else is happening now, which is that Obama is making us stupid, too. You know love can make you stupid ... and ummmm (laughter in the audience) ... All right, I'll leave it there.
I guess I just want to say, maybe we have this moment here; maybe we have this opportunity because the Democrats actually seem to know how to do politics all of a sudden. You know, they have majorities in the House and the Senate, have the White House, going to get a couple of decent people on the Supreme Court it looks like -- so maybe it's a moment when we can forget about them and worry about us for a little while.
Because there is no such things as a transformative president without many, many transformative movements. Transformative movements are never built around corporate political parties. They're built around clear principles, clear goals that everybody understands.
And something else about transformative movements, and Rep. Ellison alluded to this: They are always mocked by the elites as dogmatic, as simplistic, as unrealistic ... and people who are part of these movements do not care. They are not stung, because they are building movements that are self-consciously opposed to those elites, and if they were not getting attacked by them, they would think that they were doing something wrong. And that is entirely bipartisan.
That doesn't mean that transformative movements shouldn't be strategic; of course we should be strategic. Of course, we should look for teachable moments when we can interject and make our case, like looking at the trillions of dollars that have been spent on this bailout and talking about the other things that money could be spent on.
Early on, after the election -- I think it was actually before the inauguration -- Rahm Emanuel was quoted in the press, saying, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." A lot of people on the right made a lot of fun at this and argued at this saying that this was going to be a socialist shock doctrine; that this proved the thesis of my book wrong, because I was arguing that it was the right that used crisis to push through their radical, unpopular policies.
Now I do argue that in the book, but I stress "unpopular." What's wrong with using a crisis in a way that the Milton Friedmans of the world use crisis, is that they use crisis to get around democracy -- to say it doesn't matter what you voted for, we've got an economic crisis on our hands, we have to push through the opposite of what you voted for, which is exactly what they did in 1993.
We have a very special moment, because there is a crisis that is a message to us in every way that is telling us this financial system is a crisis-creation machine that it is connected to our ecological crisis. It's sending all of these messages, telling us that we need to change the system.
And at the very same time as we had this crisis, we also had an election, and there was a candidate who turned the election into a referendum on precisely those policies, and he won.
There is nothing undemocratic about taking advantage of that crisis to push through a set of radical policies that will actually solve the crisis -- and prevent it from happening again, and again, and again, and again. I would say to Rahm Emanuel, you are blowing this crisis. You are blowing this crisis, and we will not -- we will not -- let them.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute
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