NAOMI: I’m not saying Obama is corrupt. But I’m saying that, so far, what he has actually done is go to great lengths to reassure Wall Street and it’s very much a top-down recovery model, which is the opposite of what he campaigned on. He campaigned on the idea of a bottom-up recovery. Reinvesting in Main Street, reinvesting in manufacturing. That can happen, but only if we demand it, because in Washington the momentum for the status quo is so tremendous. That’s the problem with the bailout. His stimulus package has some very, very good things in it. The news is not all bad. But the problem is that the bank bailout is so bad that it practically cancels everything else out, in the sense that taxpayers have taken on so much risk, so much debt in the interest of bailing out the banks, that they’ve created a crisis down the road which will then be used to justify cutting social security, cutting health care and not making good on those promises. That’s the real concern.

JOAN: You really think that’s going to happen?

NAOMI: I really believe that this bailout is not a bailout for the economy. The best writing about this has been done by Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs. These are very, very respected economists. Two of them with Nobel prizes. What’s really shocking to me is that they’re in the position of criticizing from the sidelines, as opposed to being in the administration. This administration is trapped in the kind of thinking that created the crisis and I think it should be just gloves-off criticism on this, because it’s very, very serious. It’s very serious that Joseph Stiglitz has not been invited to play a pivotal role in the administration, that Paul Krugman is seen as too extreme. That’s why Summers matters, because Summers is the gatekeeper. Summers appears to be keeping people away from Obama. He’s defining the terms of the debate, and they are outrageously narrow. I think we should take Stiglitz and Krugman and Sachs at their word on the bailout: It’s worse than we thought. The debts that these banks hold are enough to swallow the country’s entire GDP and then some, if we keep throwing money into that black hole. It happened in Iceland. We just saw a national economy be wiped out by the debts accumulated by private banks.

JOAN: Just start with the Icelandic protests. Why are there no protests in the streets in America?

NAOMI: This comes back to the problems of hero worship. It’s hard to protest your hero. But it’s more than that. It’s also that the virulence of the Right in the United States is so frightening and the problem is that it is the merger of the extreme far right and large corporations, in the form of media conglomerates. So Glenn Beck on Fox or Lou Dobbs on CNN have these unbelievable megaphones to attack Obama, and to spread fear, which makes reasonable people feel that their main political role is to defend the Obama administration against this very frightening right-wing onslaught. It’s understandable but it’s also hard to do that while being in the streets protesting that administration’s bailout – which is what’s happening in Britain, which is what’s happening in France, what’s happening in Italy. I think the problem in the U.S. is that many people who were part of the campaign to get Obama into power now see their role as being kind of an unofficial arm of the administration, with some groups even taking talking points from the White House. It’s a recipe for political failure, because what actually makes space for Obama to do more of what we want him to do is to make him look less radical, by being more radical ourselves.

JOAN: A very good point.