Last Sunday, America’s paper of record devoted its entire Sunday magazine to its “1619 Project,” named for the year when slaves were first brought to the American colonies. In introducing the book-length collection of essays and literary works, The New York Times editors wrote that Americans are mistaken to view 1776 as their founding. Rather, […]
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How the Media Should Cover Corporations Now
Yesterday’s restatement of corporate purpose from the Business Roundtable is a clear acknowledgment that America’s economic pooh-bahs have realized they’re about as popular as a strain of bacteria. There is much to be said about this about-face, in which the Roundtable said that the purpose of American corporations is no longer to maximize shareholder value […]
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Another Senator Kennedy for Massachusetts?
Justice Democrats, the grassroots group that recruited AOC to successfully challenge Representative Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th Congressional District, has taken heat for breaking the unwritten rule that Democrats are not supposed to take down their own incumbents. So far, the group has endorsed six new challengers for 2020, generally progressives taking on centrists. […]
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The Other Reason to Impeach—Trump’s Increasing Lunacy
In all of the calculations about whether there is sufficient evidence to impeach, and what effect impeachment would have on the 2020 election, the most obvious reason keeps being ignored. Trump is plainly unfit to govern. He makes impulsive decisions, makes stuff up, alienates allies, refuses to vet prospective nominees, doesn’t read briefing materials, reverses […]
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To Perform “God Bless America” You Should Be Required to Perform “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor”
Ken Cuccinelli, President Trump’s new man at the Citizenship and Immigration Services Agency, has now famously opined that a proper understanding of Emma Lazarus’s poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty—the one that begins, “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” should be revised to include the caveat, “so long […]
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Trump’s Incompetence to the Rescue
America’s ace in the hole is Donald Trump’s impulsive incompetence. In 2017, history handed Trump an economy on the mend, with interest rates at historic lows, no inflation in sight, low unemployment, and a booming stock market. With automation and low-wage competition making products ever more plentiful and cheaper, economists forecasted sunshine. As unemployment kept […]
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How the Rich Are Different from You and Me
They keep coming, these papers by economists, chock full of equations I can’t decipher and an economists’ jargon I have to translate into English, but all of which conclude what has been obvious for some time: A massive redistribution of wealth from labor to capital has been ongoing for decades. That’s not to denigrate these […]
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The Stakes in 2020
I have long argued that neglect by Democratic presidents of the long slide of America’s working families paved the way for Trumpism. The rules and rewards were increasingly tilted to elites. Legitimate economic grievances were then racialized, by Bannon, Trump and company, and the stench of racism lingers. Now democracy itself is at stake. So […]
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Here Come Several Primary Challenges to Corporate Democratic Incumbents
I spent some time last week with Alex Morse, the 30-year-old mayor of Holyoke, Massachusetts, who has just announced his primary challenge to Ways and Means Chair Richie Neal, 70, the most corporate of congressional Democrats. Neal’s constituents in western Massachusetts are rather more liberal than he is. Morse has gained national attention for running […]
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Walmart and Guns, Part II
In my Tuesday On Tap, I noted that a number of Walmart employees, in the wake of the mass murder at an El Paso mega-store, had begun expressing concern about the company’s policy of selling guns (Walmart is the nation’s leading gun retailer) and allowing open carry in stores in the states that permit it. […]