NAOMI: In the ‘90s I wrote a lot about branding and how corporations were tapping into the deeply human need to be part of something bigger than just consumerism. “We’re not just selling sneakers. We’re not just selling laptops. We’re selling transcendence and a connection and community.” That trend actually made me feel hopeful that, actually, we don’t just want things, and all of this expensive market research was telling Microsoft and Starbucks and Nike that what we actually want is to be part of something larger. Even though I thought the phenomenon was culturally insidious, I felt, in many ways, the same sense of responsibility. Like, hey, they’ve done our market research for us, but they’re actually not offering community and political engagement. They’re offering lattes and laptops and running shoes. So it’s actually up to progressive movements to provide the real deal. I do believe that the Yes We Can movement started pretty empty, and it was really tapping into just the deep shame of the Bush years and the desire for something different, and using these very creative marketing techniques where you’re able to project your own longings onto this blank slate.

JOAN: And can Obama provide the real deal?

NAOMI: What gave me hope was that when the economic crisis hit, Obama got serious and his analysis became more concrete. It’s really worth remembering that he started winning the election when Lehman collapsed and he started putting the ideology of Reaganism on trial. He started saying, “This economic crisis is the result of the policies of deregulation and trickle-down economics that have dominated this country.” But he said, “for the last eight years.” That was wrong. And that was part of the problem.

JOAN: Because it’s the last 30.

NAOMI: It’s the last 30 and, you know, that was a piece of intellectual dishonesty that I think has cost us dearly. That was a good electoral line because we all wanted to be able to blame it all on Republicans, because that was a much more sellable election slogan. “Everything was fine in the ‘90s when you had Clinton and we just need to get back to that.” And what that did was gloss over the absolutely central role that Robert Rubin and Larry Summers played in creating this crisis. And lo and behold, they’re back with their protégés in tow. There’s really a shared responsibility, and it’s an argument for more intellectual honesty, more principled stands and fewer strategic calculations. What worries me so much is that it’s fine for politicians to be strategic. But social movements should be principled. They shouldn’t always be thinking about what’s the right strategy, what’s the sellable message, what’s the talking point, because then you end up in a situation like this. Larry Summers is back. Larry Summers was given a pass during the entire election.

JOAN: Is it effective what Obama’s doing? What do you think of it?

NAOMI: If you mean the bank bailout, I think it’s a disaster, crony capitalism at the absolute worst. I think the timing of the release of Larry Summers’s financial records from last year is really interesting. He worked at a hedge fund one day a week and was paid $5.2 million. He was paid $135,000 for one speech to one of the bailed-out banks. And when he got the post he was presented as an egghead academic, as if he wasn’t coming from Wall Street.  In fact he wasn’t just working for one bank; he was working for all of them. He collected $8 million in these fees in one year. The question people have been asking about the bank bailout is, “Why is this happening?” And I think part of the answer is that in the United States, there’s so much mythology around the purity of American intentions. There’s always this desire to blame incompetence as opposed to greed. But sometimes things are just what they look like.