Ever since Barack Obama’s election in 2008 there has been an ongoing discussion of where the political center is in America. Conservatives and Republican leaders have made the contention that this is a Center-Right country and that the Reagan Revolution of the 1980’s permanently shifted the political center of gravity to the right. I think [...]
Although the move to ban earmarks to corporations in the House yesterday was a belated step in the right direction, another story about the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC), shows that the system is still badly broken and in need of fundamental reform. For five years we have witnessed an epic battle between Boeing and Northrop-Grumman to [...]
Barack Obama took off the gloves yesterday and gave Republicans and wavering Democrats a sneak preview of the fall election campaign.
Appearing before 1,800 students and other members of the public at Arcadia University, just outside Philadelphia, Mr. Obama cast himself almost as an outsider in Washington, expressing disdain for “the sport of politics” and saying [...]
I’ve been writing for the last two years on the stranglehold of Monopoly Capitalism on Washington’s policy agenda. But in reality it is more like “Duopoly Capitalism” because we make sure that there are always two potential providers like Boeing and Northrup Grumman to feed at the troth. Duopolies are easy to manage because price [...]
It is only fitting on the morning of the debut of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland that we visit the world of the Mad Hatter (personified by RNC Chair Michael Steele) and where “up is down”.
Steele’s Mad Hatter has of course been attending a lot of tea parties recently because he believes he can convince [...]
The Pew Research Center has just come out with a comprehensive report on the Millennial Generation that should put a smile on the face of progressives everywhere.
Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials — the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium — have [...]
Thomas Frank (What’s the Matter with Kansas?) adds his eloquent voice to those of us questioning the Democrats blind embrace of Free Trade. He tells us why middle class workers are abandoning the Democrats for the easy solutions of the Tea Party Populists.
For the moment, let’s leave aside the question of whether the conservative rebels [...]
Obviously some in Washington still long for the days of the old-fashioned arm-twisting that Lyndon Johnson was so good at. Here he is while still Majority leader with the hapless Senator Green of Rhode Island.
I mention this because the Times ran a piece this morning about the Obama persuasion style in the lead up to [...]
I’ve been arguing for the last four months that we have entered a New Normal era in which the combination of a naive embrace of free trade, aggressive use of automation and a substandard education and retraining system, has left the United States in a position where it can no longer create enough jobs for [...]
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 [...]