I have been arguing for a while that there is a strange bedfellows coalition forming between progressives and libertarians around ending America’s Imperial adventures and beginning Life After Empire. Yesterday Ron Paul gave an extraordinary speech calling for the end of empire in front of the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual convention. When the speech [...]
I am serious about reimagining America After Empire. Whether we embrace the mission of converting our economy and our government spending from military to more peaceful pursuits, or that mission is forced on us by the reality of the fiscal straits we find ourselves in;make no mistake–America in 2020 will look very different. Dwight Eisenhower [...]
Every one is wondering what Obama’s next move will be and the house organ of the global financial elites, The Financial Times has this grim assessment.
At the end of Barack Obama’s worst week since taking power a year ago, the US president’s fortunes look set only to deteriorate over the coming days. Following the shock defeat of [...]
The most striking figures in the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll are the Congressional Approval Figures.
Approval of the job Congress is doing-21%
Positive feelings towards the Democratic Party-38%
Positive feelings towards Republican Party-30%
Positive feelings towards Barack Obama-52%
There are many other good insights in the poll, which I will write about later, but I think Larry Lessig’s [...]
Someone in the White House (my guess is David Axelrod), has figured out that Larry Summers and Tim Geithner are politically clueless and that sucking up to their former employers in the Big Banks was exactly the wrong strategy for 2009. The possibility of a loss on Tuesday in the Massachusetts Senate race has focused [...]
My colleague Orville Schell, who is a Senior Fellow at the USC/Annenberg Center for Communication Leadership, has published a very smart list of what works and doesn’t work in America. Orville is a globetrotter and what he says is worth paying attention to. You should read the whole article, to get what he thinks does [...]
My favorite Greek Philosopher, Epicurus, believed the good life was made up of three components.
The company of good friends
The freedom and autonomy to enjoy meaningful work
The willingness to live an examined life with a core faith or philosophy
It appears from a Conference Board research study published yesterday, that the second element is [...]
So here begins a series of musings about the fate of the reform movement and my essential belief that it must begin from the bottom-up, i.e. at the level of the city and county government that provide most of the services we think of as “the public good” (Schools, police, fire,hospitals, road repair, water, power, [...]
Even as the market moves lower this morning due to the crash of Dubai World (those wonderful folks Bush wanted to turn all of our port management over to) The Wall Street Journal reports that one in four home owners are underwater on their mortgage.
The proportion of U.S. homeowners who owe more on their mortgages than [...]
A few brave California Republican State Senators broke with the Ayatollahs this morning and passed a budget. It raises the sales tax and the income tax on the very wealthy. That move , along with the funds from the Recovery Act should allow us time to get our house in order.
Wednesday had begun in uncertainty, with [...]