Jay Inslee entered the presidential race for the right reasons, and he made a profound difference by moving the Democratic field to recognize the extent of the climate crisis and the need for bold solutions. He should be applauded for his effort. The bigger thing to say about his exit, along with the other winnowing […]
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How We Should See ‘The Irishman’
The current kerfuffle over Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming picture, The Irishman, raises a lot of questions about the future of movies. As described in today’s New York Times, it pits Scorsese and theater owners against the film’s producer and funder, Netflix, over the question of how the picture is to be distributed: widely on screen, or, […]
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Race: America at Its Best and Worst
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 […]
