Special Report

Something was wrong on my credit-card bill, so I placed a call to the issuing bank’s customer-service line. The computerized voice told me to press “1” for customer-service inquiries on existing accounts, then to press “3” for credit cards. Following that, I entered my account number, and then my personal-identification number. After listening to an […]

I. WHAT’S RIGHT WITH THIS PICTURE? LAS VEGAS — In the middle of his life, Sylvester Garcia decided he’d had enough of the cold and the heat. He’d been a welder in the copper-mining towns of New Mexico for almost a quarter of a century, but, he says, “I got tired of welding, […]

In the past three years, U.S manufacturers have suffered their most dramatic job losses since the Great Depression. Even with the turnaround in job creation reported this fall, manufacturing lost another 19,000 jobs in November. The sector’s low-skilled and lowest-paid workers have been especially hard hit because they engaged in repetitive work at outmoded plants. […]

From the archives: Why the current battle over holding Nevada caucuses in casinos? It comes down to the power of the hotel worker’s union which transformed dead-end jobs into middle-class careers.

When America’s most recent economic boom ended in 2001, the economy was turning out $7 trillion worth of consumer goods and services a year — enough to provide every man, woman and child with almost $25,000 worth of food, housing, transportation, medical care and other things every year. If all that stuff had been divided […]

When word leaked that the Department of Defense had funded a scheme to allow investors to use futures-market analysis to predict the likelihood of terrorist acts or international incidents — and to profit if their predictions were correct — the public reacted with both shock and awe. The $8 million idea, known as the Futures […]

President Bush got one thing right: The greatest threat to American security is a rogue state providing a terrorist group with a weapon of mass destruction and the means to deliver it in the United States. Unfortunately, almost everything he has done since September 11 has made this problem worse rather than better. We need […]

The hallmark of the Bush foreign policy has been a naive radicalism married to an operational incompetence. A small clique with a preconceived blueprint took advantage of a national emergency and a callow president, blowing a containable threat into war while dismissing more ominous menaces. These people are out to remake the world, with little […]