Harold Meyerson

Spreading democracy is one thing. But do we really want America to be known for spreading the pricing practices of our drug companies? In Guatemala, the United States has become the sales rep for the pharmaceutical industry. Citing urgent public health concerns, the Guatemalan legislature enacted a law last year that permitted the marketing of […]

For a while last week, Illinois was home to the kind of union-against-union labor war that America hasn’t seen since American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions used to clobber each other while fighting for new members, in the days before the two federations merged 50 years ago. Hundreds […]

For Tom DeLay, Terri Schiavo came along just in the nick of time. “One thing that God brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America,” DeLay told a group of Christian conservatives last Friday. And what, exactly, is going on in the United States? “Attacks […]

LAS VEGAS — “I think John Sweeney’s administration is rhetorically prepared to embrace any and all proposals for change to stay in power,” one of American labor’s dissident leaders told me in January. “If John Sweeney is re-elected, he’s out of gas. Nothing is going to change over there” at the AFL-CIO, and American labor’s, […]

Phil Angelides looks like a nerd. Gangly and elongated, earnest in manner, liberal in politics, he is in almost every way the polar opposite of the current governor of California — whom, Angelides announced yesterday, he is seeking to replace in next year’s gubernatorial election. Angelides’ declaration came as no surprise. California’s treasurer since 1999, […]

LOS ANGELES — Someone once asked Jean Renoir, the great French filmmaker whose flight from the Nazis plunked him down in Los Angeles in 1941, why he’d never made a film about his adopted city. After all, even after World War II ended, Renoir continued to split his time between France and L.A. “Wilshire Boulevard,” […]

How do the Democrats win back the allegiance of the white working class? The problem may be deeper than even the most pessimistic Democrats fear it is. The redoubtable and unpronounceable Ruy Teixeira, Democratic poll analyst par excellence, has been rooting around in the raw data newly released from the 2004 exit poll and has […]

LOS ANGELES — The street lamps are festooned with banners reminding people about the Academy Awards, as if anyone here needed reminding. The police are scrambling to mollify the African American community after the latest South Central car chase, in which a cop shot and killed a black motorist who turned out to be a […]