Harold Meyerson

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 […]

Unless someone pulls a last-minute rabbit out of an eleventh-hour hat, the biennial convention of the AFL-CIO, which begins on Monday in Chicago, will be radically smaller than originally planned. As things now stand, the four dissident unions that have raised the specter of disaffiliation from the labor federation will announce over the weekend that […]

Now Karl Rove has become “fair game.” That was the term that the president’s consigliere applied to Valerie Plame, according to Newsweek, in a conversation with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews immediately after the publication of Robert D. Novak’s column that identified Plame as a CIA operative. And, of course, Plame was fair game: Her identity was […]

In this week when we commemorate the first proclamation of American ideals to the wider world, we should pause to contemplate which of our ideals are taking root today. Consider, for instance, the very self-interested testimony of Fu Chengyu, the chief executive of CNOOC Ltd., the oil company owned by the Chinese government, which is […]

By every measure but one, the Gonzalez family of Jefferson City, Mo., are model citizens. Marvin was a courier for then-Missouri Governor Bob Holden, delivering messages and screening the governor’s mail. Marina taught Spanish and was the after-school care director at her parish grade school. Their daughter Marie was a star pupil at Helias High, […]

So let’s try to get this straight. We invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, except he didn’t, and because he was tied in to the attacks of September 11, except he wasn’t. We’re staying in Iraq, President Bush said Tuesday night, because terrorists with the same ideology as those behind 9-11 […]

In the absence of an antiwar movement, the American people have turned against the war in Iraq. Those two facts, I suspect, are connected. There was a very real antiwar movement early on. In the months before, during, and immediately after our invasion, hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets to oppose the […]

The dissident unions of the AFL-CIO are meeting in Washington today to announce that they are building a halfway house. The Change to Win Coalition — and boy, is that ever a provisional-sounding and utterly clunky name — will begin life neither entirely within nor without the AFL-CIO. One of its founders, the Service Employees […]

America has a problem with its public employees. They are not downwardly mobile enough. Policemen, firefighters, teachers, hospital nurses — they still belong to the one part of the U.S. economy where the New Deal hasn’t been repealed. Fully 90 percent of them have defined-benefit pensions as of old. In the private sector, just 60 […]