The Financial Crisis Presents a Huge Opportunity for Change — We Can’t Let Obama Blow It

By Naomi Klein, AlterNet. Posted June 13, 2009.

There is nothing undemocratic about pushing through a set of radical policies that will actually solve the crisis.

The above is the text of Naomi Klein’s speech to the Momentum Plenary 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 …

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