Kentucky’s Attack on Unions Provides a Glimpse into the GOP’s Impending War on Workers
Governor Matt Bevin’s anti-union crusade, coming soon to a jurisdiction near you.
Ownership and Government
Ownership, President Bush told the Republican national convention last August, brings security, and dignity, and independence. It is an assertion few Americans would dispute — and one that we should welcome. For it turns out that Bush’s proposed policies would frustrate his stated goal. Bush’s version of an ownership society is both ideological and tactical.…
The Price of a Free Society
By Paul Starr These are times that try liberal spirits. On one side, the Bush administration has taken up the agenda of the Christian right and sought to use the power of the state to shape how Americans live and die. On the other, it is undermining many of the positive accomplishments of government, such…
The Vanishing State?
More permeable borders seem to make it more difficult for a nation to maintain a mixed economy, regulate capital in the public interest, provide decent wages, and foster a political coalition to defend all of the above. Indeed, there is an extensive conservative literature contending that the global market renders the role of the state…
Deepening the Religious Divide
In the religious war now being waged by the Republican Party, battles are designed not to be won but to mobilize troops for larger battles to come. The ultimate goal is not to dismantle the wall between church and state, although this would be a byproduct. It is to bring the majority of Americans who…
Center Court
Two weeks past Congress’ spring break, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist still could not “with certainty” fulfill his oft-repeated vow to squelch Democratic filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominations. Skeptics in his own caucus deny him the 51-to-50 majority (including the vice president’s tiebreaking vote) he needs to execute a maneuver known as the “nuclear…
Under the Radar
The news from Washington is filled with debates about safeguarding Americans’ Social Security, proposals to make tax cuts permanent, and sweeping federal budget reductions in a time of looming deficits. In the meantime, the 50 states, various territories, and close to 90,000 counties, cities, towns, and other local jurisdictions struggle with their own concrete budgetary…
The Non-Nuclear Option
Promoting the healthy development of children is both an ethical imperative and a critical economic and social investment. A decent and wise society protects and nurtures all its children, particularly those disadvantaged early in life, so that they grow up to be productive adults, and because it’s the right thing to do. Public policy regarding…
Best in Show
On May 2, 2005, Tony Blair’s government will begin its ninth year of running the United Kingdom. That tenure makes Blair the nation’s longest-sitting Labour leader in the history of his party, and one of the longest of any party in the modern history of the nation. Indeed, Blair, who turns 52 on May 6,…
Bigger and Better
Remember those bumper stickers during the early-1990s fight over the Clinton health plan? “National Health Care? The Compassion of the IRS! The Efficiency of the Post Office! All at Pentagon Prices!” In American policy debates, it’s a fixed article of faith that the federal government is woefully bumbling and expensive in comparison with the well-oiled…
Big-Think Central
In adopting neoconservatism as its grand strategy, the Bush administration took a breathtaking gamble. It broke from the conventional foreign-policy wisdom of both parties, cleaving to an aggressive but idealistic new vision of America’s role in the world. The strategy would either succeed spectacularly, touching off the promised domino effect of freedom in the Middle…
Texas-Sized Problem
On successive days in mid-November 2002, Tom DeLay was elected House majority leader, replacing the retired Dick Armey, and Nancy Pelosi was chosen as the House Democrats’ leader, succeeding Dick Gephardt. One of those had amassed a capable but relatively quiet record of service in the House of Representatives, stirring controversy only once (by supporting…
Thinking About the Government
Tom: You got dances, too? Caretaker: We got the best dances in the county every Saturday night. Tom: Say, who runs this place? Caretaker: The government. — The Grapes of Wrath, 1940 (screenplay by Nunnally Johnson) “I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and…
Hammered
Just when you’re on the edge of despair about the resilience of American democracy, an ancient pattern reasserts itself. People drunk with their own self-importance overreach and begin to destroy themselves. Names like Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and Newt Gingrich come to mind. And now, perhaps, Tom DeLay. The House majority leader is in trouble…
Knot For All
Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz (Viking, 448 pages, $25.95) Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America by Jonathan Wauch (Times Books, 224 pages, $22.00) Marriage is a shape-shifting institution if there ever was one. Those…
The Mess In Mexico
Mexico’s fragile democracy is under attack from its own government — and may not survive. Yet the Bush administration’s neoconservatives, who almost daily proclaim their commitment to protect — and indeed impose — free elections in the world’s every nook and cranny, are silent. Turns out that their defense of democracy extends only to candidates…
A Real Killing
Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth by Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro (Princeton University Press, 392 pages, $29.95) This book about the unlikely success of a small band of the anti-tax rich and their hired hands in attacking the estate tax, the most progressive element of the federal…
Half Credit
During George W. Bush’s first term and especially after his re-election, Washington settled on a conventional wisdom about his presidency: Bush may be prone to dangerous policy blunders, but his political instinct is unerring. The unpleasant predicament in which the White House finds itself on its signature second-term domestic-policy initiative — revising Social Security by…
Snapped Judgments
The views of the loser do not typically fill prominent chapters in the history books. We know what Julius Caesar thought of the barbarous tribes in Gaul and Britannia, but almost nothing about what they thought of him. His descriptions of savage resistance to his military campaigns suggest just how much the latter wanted to…
Sun Still Rising
For those who claim to understand the global economy, here’s a pertinent question: Which East Asian economic powerhouse recently announced the largest current-account surplus in world history? The answer is Japan, although very few readers of the American press are likely to have noticed. Given the continuing media obsession with China, little news about East…
The Taxonomist: Wild Pitch
Late in the evening of St. Patrick’s Day, while much of America was out carousing, our hardworking U.S. senators stayed in session. It was time for the Senate to take its first stab at addressing Social Security’s long-term financial health since President Bush began his push to restructure the program. The result wasn’t pretty. Did…
Can We Housebreak Capitalism?
This year marks the centennial of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and it’s sobering to imagine how that exposé of working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants might fare before the Bush administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the contemporary gatekeeper for proposed regulations. The lightly fictionalized novel’s most grisly passage showed workers slipping, falling, and…
Dossier: The United Nations Works
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) shipped 5,612,257 student kits, 201,416 cartons of chalk, and 5,106,885 school bags for primary and intermediate-level schoolchildren in Iraq from the start of the Iraq War in 2003 through November 2004 … Through UNICEF’s “Immunization plus” program, the distribution of high-dose vitamin A capsules has averted at least 1…
Blocked Out
Here’s one way to sound the alarm about the impending death of a federal program that tens of millions benefit from and almost no one has heard of: Accuse President Bush of copycatting al-Qaeda. At a February meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, National League of Cities, and National Association of Counties, Baltimore Mayor…
