The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina raises urgent policy challenges, for both the immediate future and the long term. Tragically, there is no sign that the administration is rising to either of them. It is now painfully clear that both prevention and relief in the case of disasters like Katrina requires something that conservatives reject — […]
Robert Kuttner
Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Notes for Next Time: Surviving Tyranny, Redeeming America. Follow Bob at his site, robertkuttner.com, and on Twitter.
Posted inArticle
Storm Surge
What will the twin hurricanes do to the U.S. economy? The Federal Reserve seems to think not terribly much. This past week, the Fed continued hiking interest rates, the eleventh such increase since June 2004. This tighter-money policy is intended to cool an overheated economy — but the economy suddenly doesn’t seem all that strong. […]
Posted inArticle
The Eye Of The Relief Effort
One thing we learned from Hurricane Katrina is that America still has a lot of poor people, who are disproportionately black and mostly invisible to the affluent and to the media. Behind the glitzy stage set of the quaint New Orleans tourist economy was a grindingly poor city. Most poor people work for a living, […]
Posted inColumns
Leadership, Please
George W. Bush’s cynicism and incompetence have come back to haunt him, earlier than might have been predicted. As a result, history has dealt Democrats an opportunity. Whether they will rise to the occasion remains to be seen. Michael Tomasky addresses the politics of the New Orleans catastrophe elsewhere in this issue. Although Hurricane Katrina […]
Posted inFeatures
The Defectors
Rick Larsen is a third-term Democratic representative from Lake Stevens in Washington state. A balding former publicist for the Washington State Dental Association, Larsen, 40, is a proud member of the New Democrat Coalition. His district, Washington’s 2nd, runs north from the Seattle suburbs to the Canadian border. It is, on balance, fairly liberal — […]
Posted inArticle
Boon Or Burden
It’s an ill wind that blows no good. But how will the political winds shift as the enormity of the Katrina disaster sinks in? We face two opposite prospects. The first is that Americans will finally grasp that what connects the catastrophes in New Orleans and Iraq is a witches’ brew of self-delusion, deliberate deception, […]
Posted inArticle
The Young And The Debtless
This Labor Day, wage-workers have little to celebrate. Though unemployment is down, job insecurity is up. Health and pension benefits are dwindling. Weakened worker bargaining power is reflected in flat earnings. According to a new report from the Census Bureau, real wages of fulltime workers fell 2.3 percent for men and 1 percent for women […]
Posted inArticle
E-mail Addiction
I recently took a short vacation. The very best thing about it was not the lovely walks, the concerts, the tennis, or just lazing and reading. The best thing was being away from e-mail. (And the worst thing was coming back to 482 messages.) The stuff is like kudzu. I’m not even talking about spam […]
Posted inArticle
Independence Over Iraq
Ordinary American public opinion on the Iraq war is nearing a tipping point. The question is how elites — the White House, the military, Republicans and Democrats in Congress — will now respond. The public has grasped that the Bush Iraq policy has made the Middle East more dangerous, for U.S. armed forces and for […]
Posted inArticle
Beyond Red And Blue
To hear network commentators and read innumerable press stories, you would think the United States was divided into two bitterly opposed cultural worlds known as red states and blue states. As widely used political concepts, these phrases actually date back only to the 2000 presidential elections, when all the networks used the same color-coded maps […]
