Robert Kuttner

A lot of Democrats breathed a big sigh of relief yesterday when John Kerry named John Edwards as his running mate. At the most obvious level, Edwards brings two things that Kerry has sometimes lacked. He brings personal excitement plus a capacity to connect with non-rich voters on pocketbook issues. If Kerry sometimes seems patrician […]

Thank God for the Supreme Court, or at least for the six members who ruled clearly that the president’s claims of wartime powers do not trump the rule of law. The court has now exposed the authoritarian nonsense of the administration’s claim that a detainee who has not been tried can be held captive as […]

Assume you are John Kerry. You’ve just been elected president in a close race. One House of Congress has gone narrowly Democratic, but not enough to give you a working legislative majority. The other has stayed narrowly Republican. By now, it has dawned on you that you lack either the votes in Congress or the […]

America’s hidden issue of poverty WBUR, Boston’s fine public radio station, has been flogging this promotion: 16 million poor kids, through federal aid, get nutritious breakfasts and lunches throughout the school year. But now it’s summer, and school’s out. So send WBUR a hundred bucks, and $25 of it will go to a local food […]

What have we learned so far about officially sponsored torture by the U.S. government? First, it is unambiguously clear that the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo, and at Abu Ghraib was official policy. Lawyers for the Pentagon and the White House, reporting directly to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush, wrote contorted […]

Alan Greenspan is a gold-plated hypocrite. Last week the Federal Reserve Chairman, speaking at a conference in Chicago, warned that the endless federal deficits had become “a significant obstacle to long-term security because the budget deficit is not subject to correction by market forces.” What does Greenspan think caused the deficit – sunspots? He doesn’t […]

For the most part, John Kerry has a far more sensible Iraq policy than George W. Bush does, and this should serve him well in the campaign. Yet if Kerry is not careful, Bush’s quagmire could turn into Kerry’s. In his speeches, Kerry has warned that we need to remove the “Made in America” label […]

Last week I addressed the dilemma of job outsourcing. I promised some remedies in this column. In truth, the outsourcing of American jobs is one relatively small facet of the larger problem — the steady erosion of jobs that pay middle-class wages. A global economy makes this challenge more difficult because it puts many American […]