The righteousness of our cause shouldn’t prevent us from asking why so many people around the world who aren’t terrorists hate America and from seeking ways to reduce their hatred. Recognizing America’s past failing in this regard isn’t justifying terrorism. Finding means of ameliorating the hatred isn’t appeasing terrorists. Rather, it’s looking at terrorism’s larger […]
Robert Reich
Robert B. Reich, a co-founder of The American Prospect, is a professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, one of the books featured in the Prospect’s High School Essay Contest.
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Good and Bad Nationalism
The Boston Globe With Congress’s recent rejection of the nuclear test ban treaty and an upcoming World Trade Organization meeting that’s already causing a storm, it’s useful to remind ourselves that there are two faces of nationalism. The negative face turns away from global responsiblities. The positive one embraces domestic ones. Both give priority to […]
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Will Terrorism Stall Globalization?
Broadcast November 2, 2001 Will the war on terrorism enhance globalization, further immersing America in the global economy? Or will it cause us to retreat or try to retreat from the rest of the globe? At first glance, the war seems to have generated a flowering of multilateralism. Western Europe and America haven’t been closer […]
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Russian Capitalism
Broadcast April 26, 2001 Attention all thrill-seekers. You can now be a launched into outer space — if you re willing to pay the freight. Just call up the Russians. That s what Dennis Tito did. And this Sunday — after paying the Russians a mere $20 million — Dennis will lift off from the […]
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The Global Economy Is Teetering
The Los Angeles Times The White House is working with other nations to fight global terrorism. It also should be working with them to stave off a global economic meltdown. There’s no longer any doubt that we’re in a recession. More than 400,000 jobs were lost last month, the biggest job loss in two decades. […]
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Fiscal Irresponsibility
It’s time to strike the term “fiscalresponsibility” from responsible political rhetoric. Few terms in publicdiscourse have moved as directly as this one has from imprecision tomeaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence. Democrats have been particularly loose-lipped about it lately. HouseMinority Leader Richard Gephardt, recently campaigning in Iowa for a fellowDemocrat, was quoted in The […]
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Of Our Time: The Missing Options
H ow the national debate is framed, and what options are put before the public, can be more important ultimately than the immediate choices made. The framing defines the breadth of the nation’s ambition, and thus either raises or lowers expectations, fires or depresses imaginations, ignites or deflates political movements. A future generation pondering the […]
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The Big Split
I t would be bad enough if the Republicans’ tax plans were merely extravagantly regressive, rewarding the rich and leaving a big budget hole for everyone else to fill. But they appear just when the income gap has grown wider than it has been in more than a century. It’s a double whammy. Al Gore […]
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Eliminating the Debt
One party claims that the budget surplus will be small and that the most important goal is to eliminate the debt. The other says the surplus will be big and we can do ambitious things with it. You’d be forgiven if you thought that the first party was the Democrats and the second the Republicans. […]
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No Tax Cut. Period.
Democrats should draw a bright line: No tax cut. Period. The surplus should be used instead for the three things regular working families need most: affordable health care (including prescription drugs), child care, and better schools. Instead Democrats are putting all their energies behind keeping Bush’s tax cut closer to the $1.2 trillion they squeezed […]