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Robert Kuttner

Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, as well as a distinguished senior fellow of the think tank Demos. He was a longtime columnist for Business Week and continues to write columns in The Boston Globe. He is the author of Obama's Challenge and other books.

Recent Articles

Out of Los Angeles, a Resurgence for Labor

Robert KuttnerDec 19, 2001

You may not have heard of Antonio Villaraigosa, but in about a month he is likely to
be on the cover of Time and Newsweek.

Villaraigosa is the front-runner to become the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles in the June 5
election. Almost more important, his likely win is the fruit of a remarkable resurgence of the
labor movement in LA, based substantially on the organizing of the immigrant and low-wage
work force. His emergence is an emblem of the most interesting social movement since the civil
rights era.

Comment: After Triumphalism

Robert KuttnerDec 19, 2001

What a wonderful world it seemed in the 1990s. The
United States had not only won the Cold War; it had demonstrated the economic,
political, and moral superiority of its own system, the free market. Those abroad
who had long resented U.S. global policies were finally revealed to be
self-defeating nationalists or superannuated Marxists. Even the Latin Americans
were scrambling to catch the laissez-faire wave, firing their planners, hiring
Chicago-trained economists, slashing antiquated welfare outlays, privatizing
state enterprises, and, above all, opening themselves to foreign private capital.

Of Our Time: Globalism Bites Back

Robert KuttnerDec 19, 2001

T
he Asian financial crisis is a practical rebuttal to the naive
internationalism that is America's foreign economic policy. Naive globalism
includes these precepts:




  • The freest possible movement of
    goods and services maximizes economic efficiency, hence human well-being. If
    free competition is good nationally, it is even better globally.

  • With a few basic ground rules, such
    as respect for private property and equal access to markets, liberal capitalism
    is essentially self-regulating.

Globalization and Its Critics

Robert KuttnerDec 19, 2001

What is Tom Daschle up to? "In this divided government," he declared upon becoming Senate majority leader, "we are required to find common ground and seek meaningful bipartisanship." He told the press he would not seek repeal of even the most ill considered portions of President Bush's tax cut. In an op-ed in The New York Times, Daschle added, "I believe the only way forward is to embrace a spirit of principled compromise." He invoked campaign finance reform as a bill on which both parties compromised and moved forward.


US Needs New Thinking On Global Trade

Robert KuttnerDec 19, 2001

The administration is trying to move a global trade agenda that was blocked two years
ago in Seattle by protesters in the streets and skepticism in the Third World. This time, the
World Trade Organization talks have been moved to the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a despotic
oil emirate where protesters, foreign and domestic, are simply not permitted.

But it remains to be seen whether the current talks will produce what the US government considers
progress and whether such progress is really in the national or the global interest.

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