62
" The private sector is ill suited to provide most of these services (subways, streetcars, light rail systems, energy efficient affordable housing along transit lines, smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy, research efforts to ensure we are using the best methods possible) because they require large up-front investments, and if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector. "
― Naomi Klein , On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal
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" That is the untold story of what the IMF calls "stabilization programs," as if countries were ships being tossed around on the market's high seas. They do, eventually, stabilize, but that new equilibrium is achieved by throwing millions of people overboard: public sector workers, small-business owners, subsistence farmers, trade unionists. The ugly secret of "stabilization" is the vast majority never climb back aboard. They end up in slums, now home to 1 billion people; they end up in brothels or cargo ship containers. They are the disinherited, those described by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke as "ones to whom neither the past nor the future belongs. "
― Naomi Klein , The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
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" All these so-called bread-and-butter provisions (for job security, health care, child care, education, and housing) are fundamentally about creating a context in which the rampant economic insecurity of our age is addressed at the source. And that has everything to do with our capacity to cope with climate disruption, because the more secure people feel, knowing that their families will not want for food, medicine, and shelter, the less vulnerable they will be to the forces of racist demagoguery that will prey on the fears that invariably accompany times of great change. Put another way, this is how we are going to address the crisis of empathy in a warming world. "
― Naomi Klein , On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal
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" What we cannot do, under any circumstances, is precisely what the fossil fuel industry is determined to do and what your government is so intent on helping them do: dig new coal mines, open new fracking fields, and sink new offshore drilling rigs. All that needs to stay in the ground.
What we must do instead is clear: carefully wind down existing fossil fuel projects, at the same time as we rapidly ramp up renewables until we get global emissions down to zero globally by mid-century. The good news is that we can do it with existing technologies. The good news is that we can create millions of well-paying jobs around the world in the shift to a postcarbon economy - in renewables, in public transit, in efficiency, in retrofits, in cleaning up polluted land and water. "
― Naomi Klein , On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal
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" A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centers, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy - that we must take care of our own first, that migrants are out to destroy "our way of life" - will be marshaled to rationalize these monstrous decisions. We are making this rationalization already, if only implicitly. Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst, whether they are abandoned on the rooftops of New Orleans during hurricane Katrina or are among the thirty-six million who, according to the United Nations, are facing hunger due to drought in souther and east Africa. "
― Naomi Klein , On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal