Harold Meyerson

Just a few minutes after 8 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, with the bombs still falling on Pearl Harbor, Pacific Fleet intelligence officer Lt. Cmdr. Edwin Layton, who’d been predicting a Japanese attack for that very weekend, was scurrying through fleet headquarters when two of his superiors stopped him. “Here is the young man we […]

Until last week, U.S. trade law belonged to big business. Corporations routinely petitioned our government to threaten other countries with sanctions if their products were being knocked off or undersold by foreign manufacturers with state subsidies, and our government frequently complied. The solicitude the Bush White House and its predecessors showed for shareholders, however, was […]

They are, by conservative estimate, the two most goddamn tenacious unions in the United States. The Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), which Thursday announced their intention to merge, are each known for two of the most remarkable long-term campaigns in American labor […]

Ralph Nader is running for president again. Four reasons why this is a big mistake.

Things are going unusually well for the Democrats right now, in large part because they’ve found their voice again. Whether that voice ultimately is John Kerry’s (and a bit circumlocutory) or John Edwards’s (and trial-lawyer smooth), the message that they and their fellow Democrats have been delivering on the campaign trail sounds more classic Democratic […]

Though it’s not listed on the agenda as such, on Feb. 18 the Federal Election Commission plans to rule on the suspension of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Not all speech, of course, just effective political speech. On that day, the FEC will take up an advisory opinion from its general counsel, […]

ST. LOUIS, Mo. — John Kerry and John Edwards will be duking it out for a little while yet, which means there will be populist rhetoric aplenty on the campaign trail. “At the heart of this campaign,” Kerry said at his Seattle victory rally on Tuesday night, “is a commitment to fairness for all, not […]

ST. LOUIS — I’ve been channel surfing out here and haven’t seen a political ad yet. It’s not just my myopia, according to Sunday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The fact is that this state tilts so heavily toward John Kerry that nobody’s buying much airtime in Missouri. According to the Post-Dispatch, the Kerry and John Edwards […]

ST. LOUIS — I’ve been channel surfing out here and haven’t seen a political ad yet. It’s not just my myopia, according to Sunday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The fact is that this state tilts so heavily toward John Kerry that nobody’s buying much airtime in Missouri. According to the Post-Dispatch, the Kerry and John Edwards […]

ST. LOUIS — Over at Pat’s Bar and Grill on Thursday night, the Kerry campaign reached the limits of its momentum. One day earlier, it had been able to turn out roughly 1,000 people to a hastily called rally at the community college just down the street, for which the candidate flew in straight from […]