Robert Kuttner

Should we mourn the fact that this will be the last Christmas season with Filene’s as a Boston landmark? I think so, and I was surprised at the lack of outcry when the giant retailing conglomerate, Federated Department Stores, announced last summer that it would close the flagship store and retire the Filene’s name as […]

The New York Times recently reported that in a North Carolina strangulation-murder trial, prosecutors introduced as evidence the fact that the defendant’s Google searches had included the words “neck” and “snap.” The Times noted that the evidence had come from the defendant’s home computer, but could just as easily have come from Google. Google’s business […]

Editor’s Note: It is astonishing that it took his current conflict of interest for the press to start questioning Bob Woodward’s iconic status as an investigative reporter rather than an enabler of those in power. We are re-posting Robert Kuttner’s Prospect review from last year of Woodward’s book, “Plan of Attack,” one of the […]

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms. Back in the day, this observation by an obscure Italian radical named Antonio Gramsci was oft-quoted. His words, written in the 1920s from an […]

Republicans in Congress this week suffered an implosion unprecedented in the Bush era, as moderates in both Houses rebelled against a budget measure in which the leadership tried to combine cuts in programs for the working poor with new tax cuts for the rich. The collapse reflected several factors, including President Bush’s deepening unpopularity, the […]

After his re-election, President Bush set two top domestic priorities: privatization of Social Security, and “reform” of the tax system. Privatization ran into a wall of opposition once the public grasped that the price would be a big cut in guaranteed retirement checks. On Tuesday, Bush’s blue-ribbon commission on tax reform issued its recommendations, and […]

With the indictment of Lewis Libby and possible indictment of Karl Rove, President Bush faces a fateful choice. Bush can adopt a bunker mentality and try to appease his base of social ultra-conservatives and military hawks, who have brought him such grief. Or he can reach out to the broad mainstream of American politics, as […]

The United Auto Workers union (UAW) has agreed to save General Motors over a billion dollars a year in health insurance costs. This is a disguised pay-cut, since workers will now pay more out of pocket for their healthcare. The union agreed to this desperation deal to help keep GM alive. The once-dominant auto-maker posted […]

Are you one of those people who loves voice-recognition software — a machine posing as a virtual person — when you are trying to change a flight, straighten out a bill, or get your phone line fixed? American business is training consumers to follow this routine — and like it. If anybody should know how […]