Harold Meyerson

The president has spoken, and it’s now clear that one of the things Hurricane Katrina washed up from the deep was Jack Kempism. Jack Kempism is the way the Republican Party has dealt with issues of race and poverty since the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. By definition, the Republican Party since the start of […]

UNITE-HERE has left the AFL-CIO, and what I want to know is whether the name of the union is being changed to UNITE-THERE. On Tuesday, the executive board of the 450,000-member union — the product of a merger last year between UNITE (formerly the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees) and HERE (the Hotel […]

SACRAMENTO — The Arnold is on the stump again. California’s embattled Gov. Schwarzenegger is careening around America’s mega-state once more, a blur of Hummer fumes, cigar smoke and tanning-salon-run-amok orange glow, in a desperate attempt to save his floundering political career. The collapse of Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the marvels of current American politics. […]

We’re not number one. We’re not even close. By which measures, precisely, do we lead the world? Caring for our countrymen? You jest. A first-class physical infrastructure? Tell that to New Orleans. Throwing so much money at the rich that we’ve got nothing left over to promote the general welfare? Now you’re talking. The problem […]

What I want to know is, who walked the Earth first: the dinosaurs or Strom Thurmond? It seems that the advocates of fast-forward “intelligent design” — the folks who, by totaling up the biblical begats, believe that the universe was created in 4004 B.C. — are erecting mini-theme-parks that feature secondhand dinosaur sculptures they’ve acquired […]

A mere 157 years and six months after two European political philosophers concluded a pamphlet with the words “Workers of the world, unite,” it may actually be beginning to happen. Last Thursday, August 25, a number of unions from around the world came to Chicago to announce that they are forming a new alliance that […]

It looks increasingly as if President Bush may have been off by 74 years in his assessment of Iraq. By deposing the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, Bush assumed he would bring Iraq to its 1787 moment — the crafting of a democratic constitution, the birth of a unified republic. Instead, he seems to have brought […]

The most acute problem faced by the labor movement in the wake of the disaffiliation of three of the AFL-CIO’s largest unions — the decimation of the local AFL-CIO bodies that run labor’s electoral campaigns — seems abruptly closer to solution this morning with a forthcoming announcement from AFL-CIO President John Sweeney that would permit […]

They’ll be bowling alone at Guardsmark tonight. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) doesn’t want the employees chatting it up off the job. On June 7 the three Republican appointees on the five-member board that regulates employer-employee relations in the United States handed down a remarkable ruling that expands the rights of employers to muck […]

CHICAGO — The AFL-CIO has, as I write, completed just the first day of its four-day convention, but the drama of the event has already run its course. The split — foreseeable but not easily explicable — has happened. The rest is footnotes, some of them terribly grim. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and […]