Thing that we wanted to do was redefine what a green job was, what a climate job was. We said: "Wait a minute. There's all these people out there who are doing low-carbon work." It's not just guys in hard hats putting up solar panels. Teaching is low carbon. Caring for the sick is low carbon. Daycare is a green workplace. Overwhelmingly, this is work that is done by women, overwhelmingly women of color, on the frontlines of austerity clawbacks.
Naomi KleinIt is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy -- like a national oil company -- held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.
Naomi KleinIt (the Chinese move to embrace capitalism in 1989) is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.
Naomi KleinIf enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one.
Naomi KleinBut we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.
Naomi KleinThe world now has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn't show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a dreaming revolution.
Naomi KleinThing that we wanted to do was redefine what a green job was, what a climate job was. We said: "Wait a minute. There's all these people out there who are doing low-carbon work." It's not just guys in hard hats putting up solar panels. Teaching is low carbon. Caring for the sick is low carbon. Daycare is a green workplace. Overwhelmingly, this is work that is done by women, overwhelmingly women of color, on the frontlines of austerity clawbacks.
Naomi Klein