An Interview With Naomi Klein

L.G.: The one who got himself into a spot of bother with the Canadians. [During the primary campaign, Goolsbee's private meeting with Canadian government officials caused a flap when reports surfaced that he told them not to take seriously Obama's criticisms of the North American Free Trade Agreement.]

N.K.: Yes. Austan Goolsbee, as I said in a recent column, is certainly to the left of the very narrow spectrum at the University of Chicago—he's by no means a Friedmanite. It's a very conservative place, and the range of debate at the business school, in the economics department, and even in the law school, is notably narrow. And, there's a way in which the fundamentals of the Chicago school are shared by everyone. And I think we saw a little of this from Obama himself, with his first reaction to whether or not the government should be involved in keeping people from being evicted from their homes in the subprime mortgage crisis. He said he was worried about moral hazard. He wasn't talking about the lenders, he was talking about low-income people and the moral hazard of them not dealing with the eviction from having accepted these mortgages—which is a pretty "University of Chicago" reaction.

L.G.: And what's your critique from what we know of his economic ideas? What is your critique of Obama today, and how do you compare him with McCain? Is he too much of a free trader?

N.K.: Well I think the biggest problem we have is that we just don't know enough, and there's far too much ambiguity.

L.G.: Isn't ambiguity the way people win the presidency?

N.K.: [Laughs] It would seem, it would seem, but it makes it difficult to offer a cogent critique.

L.G.: But you have a critique of McCain. That's less ambiguous to you?

N.K.: Well, I do think that with McCain, there's not going to be a major departure from what we have now with Bush, and I think what we have now is a disaster.

L.G.: And you've expressed concern about Obama's current economic adviser, Jason Furman, saying that he was a protégé of Bob Rubin.

N.K.: Look, the point is that I think this is a political moment where, precisely because of the multiple crises that we are facing, there is a real opportunity to question some of the fundamentals that have been in place since Reagan: about what the role of government should be, in terms of simply enabling economic growth at all, and equating any kind of economic growth with benefits for everyone. And this is essentially what is being questioned. It's what somebody like Jim Webb, and also John Edwards, managed to articulate so well—the fact that the problem is not that the economy wasn't growing, it's that there was a major crisis that trickle-down didn't solve. And you did end up with two countries, to the extent where when the levees broke in New Orleans, the mainstream press was surprised that there were poor people in America. They were going, "Who are these people?" And suddenly there was a discussion for a few days about class. But the very fact that there can be that disconnect, this is what inequality means. It means that it is possible to feel and be absolutely convinced that everything is going fine, and that anybody who doesn't see this is a bunch of whiners, to quote one of McCain's advisers.

L.G.: "A nation of whiners," Phil Gramm said.

N.K.: I'm sure it seems that way. I think the disappointment with Obama is less than the specifics of Goolsbee and Furman. It is that this is a moment where there could be a real boldness in economic policy and environmental policy, and I actually think it's bad political strategy to triangulate, to move to the center. I think that the energy of the Obama campaign had to do with the fact that people were able to project this idea of real change onto him. He's an incredibly skilled politician, and was able to be vague enough about what that change was.

L.G.: He just announced that he raised $52 million dollars in June, average contribution $68, so apparently it's working.

N.K.: We'll see. I hope so.

L.G.: So you can't vote but you're supportive of Obama anyway?

N.K.: I support Obama over McCain, yeah. But I think we've seen this strategy with the Democrats fail time and time again, and I really hope they're not making the same mistakes.

L.G.: Okay, are there any big corporations that you think are doing things the right way? Or are they just inherently evil by definition?