Naomi Klein: Capitalism, Sarah Palin-Style

[G_j]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/25-3

Published on Saturday, July 25, 2009 by The Progressive

Capitalism, Sarah Palin-Style
by Naomi Klein
Excerpted from the August issue of The Progressive magazine:

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.

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. 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.

..more..

[pbrower2a]

1. Palin's non-solution

Sarah Palin demonstrated that she believed that so long as a society can consume more and more petroleum it will prosper. Are there no limits? Because we don't want them, they don't exist, or so what passes as thinking goes. As for Wal-Mart, we buy their crappy stuff made to meet a price because we have no economic certainty and must seek bargains that "grab" us, only to find that we buy stuff already obsolete or junky. We go to Wal-Mart, spend money, buy stuff that we expect to last, use it a few times or for a few months, find it inadequate, and then scrap it.

We don't prosper because we use up natural resources and fill landfills with stuff that we bought from Wal-Mart because it "met our price". Sarah Palin's ideal is well made for people who still have hunter-gatherer resources but modern technology. Of course such is a contradiction, but that seems not to bother someone who contradicts an independent clause and a dependent clause in the same sentence. Yes, she is that bad!

We will eventually have to live better on less.

[Jackpine Radical]

6. "better on less."

Well, yes, in a way. Less resources ripped from the earth, lowered toxic emissions, etc. but not necessarily less overall. More information, more appropriate technology including green energy, more community, better health, etc.

In about 1680, England was in dire straits for energy. They had mostly cut down their forests and were hard-pressed to cook their food and heat themselves in the winter. That's when they made a major switch to coal, and the whole industrial revolution (with all its good and bad consequences) arose out of that switch. We are now on the verge of making another change in our social ecology that will be at least as profound as the conversion to fossil fuels was in the last 2 centuries.

[saltpoint]

2. Ya gotcher Naomi Klein and ya gotcher Sarah Palin.

Wow.

I like Klein's writing. I think she's insightful and talented. She can filter and layer and ably present Gov. Palin as a caricature of a public servant.

It certainly doesn't seem as if "gals from the north slope of Alaska" are or should be the arbiters of energy policy in the modern world.

[KittyWampus]

4. I find Klein's writing shallow and uni-dimensional. Although if you buy into her myth

of how the world works, it certainly makes processing the news much simpler. Just insert current events into Klein's handy-dandy formula and you're good to go...

[saltpoint]

5. Ok. I just was offering praise for an insightful writer.

I like others out there, too. I like Joan Didion's political writing especially and complain only that she doesn't do enough of it. I'd read her on just about any topic, but she's dynamite on politics. She savaged Dick Cheney in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, for example.

[KittyWampus]

3. Naomi Klein has her forumula and nothing else. it isn't Capitalism that's the problem,

it's Materialism and rampant Individualism.

Too bad Klein has so many regurgitating her spiel now. She might has more incentive to become a bit more insightful if more people took the time to critique her.

[Time for change]

7. Have you read any of Klein's books

You have stated a very simple-minded characterization of her work. "The Shock Doctrine" was one of the most thoroughly researched and well explained books I've ever read.

Rather than make simple minded assertions about her work, why don't you cite something specific that she said that you don't agree with, and why you don't agree with it? Why don't you take the time to critique her yourself, rather than simply make insulting statements about her?

[G_j]

8. yes, The Shock Doctrine

was extremely well researched as far as I could tell.

:shrug:

[Supersedeas]

9. it's a start

[applegrove]

10. It's richism.

[ShamelessHussy]

11. The framework she points out in her books is critical in understanding how the powerful operate

I am only surprised that so many are apparently now interested in the archaic topic of high finance and politics.