NAOMI (CONT’D): In tracking the history of this very dangerous right-wing ideology, what was so striking to me was that it was always more dangerous to these right-wing ideologues to have democratic socialism or Scandinavian-style social democracy, rather than iron-rule, Soviet-style totalitarianism. That’s an easy enemy. That’s fun. The Cold War was  fun. What is much more challenging for the Right is when people start experimenting with combinations of democracy, socialism and markets. For instance, in Poland, the first Eastern-bloc country to have elections, the party that came to power was Solidarity. And Solidarity’s vision for an alternative was not Reaganism. It was the idea that the factories could be turned into workers’ co-ops. This was Upton Sinclair’s idea in 1934 when he ran for governor of California — all of these abandoned farmlands and factories that are closing should be given to workers to run democratically. And in the rare places where they have been tried — these are the so-called “third ways” — they usually turn out to be some of the best places in the world to live, like the Scandinavian countries, or parts of Northern Italy where you have a large portion of the economy run by co-ops.

JOAN: When I read The Shock Doctrine I got so angry. Has that feeling of frustration that you communicate, of frustration and horror, has that abated a bit for you, or is it worse?

NAOMI: It hasn’t abated. What enrages me more than anything is impunity. I am in a state of rage about the impunity of the elites at the moment. I’m very disturbed by this idea that we just have to keep looking forward, we can’t look backward. That is a declaration in favor of legal impunity for the elites, whether we’re talking about torture, whether we’re talking about the financial crimes that created this crisis, whether we’re talking about what happened under TARP and the first $700 billion. Elizabeth Warren has done such a fantastic job and has raised some very, very deep legal issues about what happened with that money, and there seems to be no desire to prosecute. This brings us back to that 17-year-old girl who broke a window. You can’t have a society where the elites enjoy this flagrant impunity and expect people to respect the rule of law.

That’s why I dwell on Summers. I think that somebody who played a key role in pushing shock therapy economic policy on Russia in the ‘90s, when 72 million people were thrown into poverty, should not be declared a genius. I’ve really been struck recently by the fact that this is such a boys’ club that we’re talking about. Men get sort of deified and their intelligence inflated beyond all reason and evidence — the “maestro” Alan Greenspan and the “oracle” Larry Summers, as he was recently declared in The New Republic — really projecting onto these guys otherworldly intelligence, otherworldly powers. And I’m calling this the “brain bubble” because I actually think it’s more dangerous than the real-estate bubble, and I think it’s more dangerous than the subprime mortgage crisis.

JOAN: It infantilizes the watcher.

NAOMI: It infantilizes all of us because these men are just too smart for us, so that we just have to trust them, no matter how spectacularly and repeatedly wrong they have been. I’ve also been struck by how spectacularly right a few key women have been in this process, and, interestingly, women never get the “brain bubble” treatment.

JOAN: OK, who?