Harold Meyerson

Ask any liberal to identify the force in American politics most intent on destroying progressive prospects and causes and you’re sure to hear that it’s the Bush administration or the Republican right or some such reactionary power. Let me gently suggest, however, that a very different force has wormed its way onto this list, and […]

Few things in contemporary American politics have been more certain than the Senate’s support for free trade. While the critics and criticisms of global laissez-faire have been growing in number and the House’s support for free trade has become increasingly iffy, the Senate has rolled merrily along, Republicans and Democrats alike ratifying whatever trade bill […]

In Europe, the year 1968 has always meant only half of what it’s meant here in the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, 1968 was the year of the great youth uprising, of the emergence of a distinct New Left. The protesters who took to the streets from Chicago to Paris weren’t simply […]

If the administration’s foreign-policy apparat (minus the increasingly isolated Colin Powell) were placed under one roof — Rice, Rumsfeld, and Reich; Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Bush — what watchword would be inscribed over the door? No, not “Abandon all hope, ye who enter.” There are any number of supplicants who should not abandon hope — […]

Some doctrinaire conservatives are growing a bit cranky over the ideological impurities of George W. Bush. California Republicans rebelled when he promoted the candidacy of Richard Riordan — Horrors! An electable moderate! — for governor. Free-market ideologues blanched when he supported protections for the steel industry. “Steel tariffs are not just anti-market,” grumped Sebastian Mallaby […]

Okay, let’s take the Bush administration at its word, however mutable that word may be. Let’s say only a handful of officials–the commerce and treasury secretaries, and (according to a subsequent clarification) several lesser officials at Treasury, and (oh, yes, we forgot) White House Chief of Staff Andy Card–knew about Ken Lay’s phone calls imploring […]

Fast track has gone to the Senate, where its passage, alas, is assured. “I don’t think we stand a chance of defeating it,” says one dispirited union official. Indeed, labor lobbyists aren’t even focusing on the trade legislation itself, but on an expansion of assistance for displaced workers that they hope the Senate will muster […]

The old order still governs here; the future will not be rushed. Considering all the changes Los Angeles has gone through in just the past decade–white flight and immigrant influx, the displacement of the business elite, the rebirth of the union movement, the rise of a labor-Latino alliance–the idea that a new urban progressive coalition […]