Look out for Naomi's cover story on "Durban II" in the September issue of Harper's, on sale August 25th. Subscribers can read the article online.

Here's the announcement from Harper's press office:

Reporting from Geneva, Naomi Klein, a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, reveals the grudges and absurdities of Durban II, the follow-up convention to the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, which took place in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. Such issues as reparations for slavery—and the correction of other immense historical imbalances resulting from colonialism and racism—are overshadowed, in the months leading up to the conference, by supporters of Israel, who seize on fears that the conference will promote an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic agenda. In reality, the U.N. goes to great lengths to ensure the neutrality of the proceedings, but the objections reduce Durban II to an event that nobody (except anti-Israel crusader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) wants to touch, and the bare-knuckles fight seems convincingly won. Meanwhile, U.S. public-policy activists report the word that the White House is interested only in hearing about projects that are “race neutral”—and not in anything that targets disadvantaged constituencies. Which all leads to the question of whether the relatively thin charge of anti-Semitism was, for many developed nations, an excuse to avoid Durban II’s questions about what the rich countries of the world might reasonably owe on their debts to the peoples they once exploited. Klein pays particular attention to the Obama Administration’s legislative inaction on racial issues—and what it means for all of us.

[Adapted from a speech on May 2, 2009 at The Progressive’s 100th anniversary conference and originally printed in The Progressive magazine, August 2009 issue]

We are in a progressive moment, a moment when the ground is shifting beneath our feet, and anything is possible. What we considered unimaginable about what could be said and hoped for a year ago is now possible. At a time like this, it is absolutely critical that we be as clear as we possibly can be about what it is that we want because we might just get it.

So the stakes are high.

I usually talk about the bailout in speeches these days. We all need to understand it because it is a robbery in progress, the greatest heist in monetary history. But today I'd like to take a different approach: What if the bailout actually works, what if the financial sector is saved and the economy returns to the course it was on before the crisis struck? Is that what we want? And what would that world look like?

Now that Washington has ruled out an immediate bailout for California, we know who will pay the ultimate price for the crisis born on Wall Street: the state’s most vulnerable citizens. And with many states facing similar crises, this could be a preview of where the country as a whole is headed.

California is facing a $24.3 billion dollar budget gap, and the governor wants to attack it with cuts to social programs alone. If Schwarzenegger has his way, the price will be paid by 1.9 million people who lose their health care coverage, 1.3 million who lose basic welfare, thousands of state workers who get fired, schools that lose $5 billion in funding, having already survived brutal cuts earlier this year.

In 2004, we made a documentary called The Take about Argentina's movement of worker-run businesses. In the wake of the country's dramatic economic collapse in 2001, thousands of workers walked into their shuttered factories and put them back into production as worker cooperatives. Abandoned by bosses and politicians, they regained unpaid wages and severance while re-claiming their jobs in the process.

As we toured Europe and North America with the film, every Q&A ended up with the question, "that's all very well in Argentina, but could that ever happen here?"

Well, with the world economy now looking remarkably like Argentina's in 2001 (and for many of the same reasons) there is a new wave of direct action among workers in rich countries. Co-ops are once again emerging as a practical alternative to more lay-offs. Workers in the U.S. and Europe are beginning to ask the same questions as their Latin American counterparts: Why do we have to get fired? Why can't we fire the boss? Why is the bank allowed to drive our company under while getting billions of dollars of our money?

Note: The Sunday Outlook section of the Washington Post has a "Spring Cleaning Special" in which ten writers make the case for something that deserves to be tossed out this spring. On the trash heap is everything from academic tenure to the White House press corps to the phrase "Muslim world." I chose to argue for the elimination of Barack Obama's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers.

Published in The Washington Post

I vote to banish Larry Summers. Not from the planet. That wouldn't be nice. Just from public life.

The criticisms of President Obama's chief economic adviser are well known. He's too close to Wall Street. And he's a frightful bully, of both people and countries. Still, we're told we shouldn't care about such minor infractions. Why? Because Summers is brilliant, and the world needs his big brain.