Harold Meyerson

Every so often, for good or ill, Los Angeles astonishes itself. Twice in the past half-century, the city that most embodied the post-World War II American dream was wracked by massive racial rioting that shook the city to its core. Twice in the past half-century, L.A. also became the first American mega-city to elevate racial-minority […]

In case you’ve been worrying about how the war in Iraq will end, or the coming of avian flu, or the extinction of the universe as we drift into the cosmic void, well, relax. Here’s something you should really fret about: the future of the U.S. economy in the age of globalization. For a discussion […]

Last week, even as Congress with great fanfare was protecting the American people against whatever mischief the harbor barons of Dubai were contemplating, it quietly decided to strip some long-standing protections from the same American people at the behest of our very own food industry. Last Wednesday the House passed the National Uniformity for Food […]

This may be my mother’s doing. About 20 months ago, in a column I wrote at the time of her 90th birthday, I noted that Estelle had been peppering me with questions about why we weren’t impeaching the president. I gave her what I thought were sufficient reasons: He could be ousted in the coming […]

In the middle of the past century, Los Angeles was both America’s fastest-growing big city and a tight little town. Every year, miles of farmland were transformed into housing tracts for the immigrants who’d come west to work in the aerospace and auto plants and studios. And the immigrants weren’t coming predominantly from the Midwest […]

We’re selling our harbors to an Arab government. Our biggest Internet companies are complicit in the Chinese government’s censorship of information and suppression of dissidents. Welcome to American capitalism in the age of globalization. Here the market rules. National security and freedom of speech are all well and good, but they are distinctly secondary concerns […]

WIXOM, Mich. — From the outside, the Ford assembly plant here, about 40 minutes west of Detroit, isn’t much to look at — a sprawling, bland mid-1950s monument to an architecturally forgettable decade. On the inside, though, Wixom is a thing of beauty, a marvel of American production. Most auto factories turn out the same […]

Everybody talks about globalization; nobody ever does anything about it. The world labor market looms over every horizon with its promise of cheaper goods and lower pay. The public is skeptical, rightly, about the benefits of globalization, but the process of harnessing it, of writing enforceable rules that would benefit not just investors but most […]

Old lies die hard. We grow inured to the administration’s howlers in defense of its Iraq policy, so much so that the preposterous case the president made in his State of the Union address for our continued presence in Iraq went almost unnoticed. But he actually said this: “A sudden withdrawal of our forces from […]