Columns

American consumers no longer have the buying power to absorb the goods and services the U.S. economy is capable of producing.

The Department of Labor is considering a change to the Family and Medical Leave Act that would single out employees with chronic illnesses.

Obama’s campaign shows how a democracy-minded reform movement and community organizing have transformed the Democratic Party. Like Reagan, Obama is as much a product of a movement as the creator of one.

The financial economy is a confidence game and nobody wants to be the Cassandra who triggers the crash. But we need to address the fact that the next president will face an economic crisis unlike any since 1933.

Every week, it seems, it’s taking another minute or so to get from point A to point B. What happened to public transportation? It seems obvious that we should invest in high-speed rail and mass transit, but we don’t.

After so many years with “white male” as the default political identity, we’re all suddenly forced to think about how much a candidate’s race, gender, and background should matter.

The Senate is where ambitious presidencies die. To be effective, the next Democratic president will need to bring in new senators, make subtle institutional changes, and engineer cross-party alliances.

Here’s what the Democrats could do to prevent the race for the nomination from stretching into late summer and turning into an ugly donnybrook in Denver.

Brown University announced that it will give a $10 million endowment to local public schools to atone for its involvement in the slave trade. But reparations alone will not address the ongoing segregation of the American education system.

It’s strange that the incarceration rate is not as big an issue in the U.S. now as it was in Dostoevsky’s Russia, not to mention Dickens’ England. When will the United States wake up to the problem of our growing prison population?