ehm1212

Harold Meyerson on new SEIU leader Mary Kay Henry: When Mary Kay Henry graduated from Michigan State in 1979 with a degree in industrial labor relations, it took her the better part of a year to land a job with a union, chiefly because most unions in those days hired few if any women. During […]

Harold Meyerson explains why we need — but won’t get — a new version of the WPA: In the autumn of 1933, Harry Hopkins was worried about the coming winter. Since May, he had served in Franklin Roosevelt’s administration as head of the federal government’s new — in fact, its first — program to distribute […]

Gabriel Arana explains that veering to the right on immigration will ultimately make comprehensive reform harder to achieve: After Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a draconian new immigration bill last week, immigration reform vaulted to the top of the progressive priority list. On Saturday, immigrant-rights demonstrators in nearly a hundred cities will call on […]

Gershom Gorenberg on negotiations in the Middle East: A worldly colleague of mine once complained that with the demise of the Soviet-era Pravda, the intellectual joy went out of newspaper reading — the satisfaction of examining photos for who wasn’t on the dais, of studying statements for what wasn’t said, in order to reason out […]

Mark Schmitt on the dilemma of private foundations setting the public agenda: Yesterday in Washington, D.C., the Peter G. Peterson Foundation convened the 2010 Fiscal Summit: America’s Crisis and A Way Forward to, in its words, “launch a national bipartisan dialogue on America’s fiscal challenges.” Top billing as participants in the six-and-a-half-hour session on reducing […]

James Lardner on the corruption of credit-rating agencies: Credit-rating agencies exist to evaluate the safety of debt securities. Imagine for a moment that they had done their job when financial go-getters began churning out bonds backed by sketchy loans and the dream of endlessly rising home prices. Properly labeled as junk, those bonds would have […]

Tim Fernholz asks if the congressional grilling of Goldman execs obscure the real solutions to the crisis: Sen. Jon Tester will tell you that he is just a simple Montana farmer. He’s savvier than the image he presents, but nonetheless he played the role of the outraged populist well yesterday, joining Sens. Carl Levin of […]

Robert Kuttner considers what Barack Obama can learn from Harry Truman‘s inspired use of partisanship: When President Barack Obama took office, at a time of grave financial crisis and disgraced laissez-faire economics, many of us hoped that he would be the next Franklin D. Roosevelt. That hope, to put it mildly, has not materialized. In […]

Matthew Yglesias asks if the next major offensive in Kandahar a misguided application of counterinsurgency: The war in Afghanistan isn’t a major front in partisan political struggles, so it’s substantially slipped off the radar. But the U.S. military is already in the early phases of what will soon (exactly how soon is secret, of course) […]

Paul Waldman on constitutional originalism and the possession of crush videos: When the Founders wrote the words “freedom of speech” into the Bill of Rights, they certainly didn’t considered the possibility that one day, Americans would buy and sell “crush videos,” which depict women stepping on small animals with their high heels. Yet the Supreme […]