Have you noticed that all the great social movements of the past half-century have been led by the young? The sit-ins and freedom rides, Mississippi Freedom Summer, the antiwar movement, the Dump Johnson children’s crusade. Now comes the long-deferred backlash against the lunacy of the NRA, which has held too many Democrats as well as […]
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It took forever (nearly eight years), but a key provision of Dodd-Frank is finally being implemented
Public corporations have finally begun to report the ratio between their CEO’s pay and the pay of their median worker. Dodd-Frank mandated that these companies calculate and release these numbers in their annual filings to the SEC. Honeywell (a company whose CEO, before he became W’s vice president, was Dick Cheney) has gone first, reporting […]
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Armageddon by Degree
I’m no expert in cyber-security, but I’ve given a lot of thought to the health of American democracy. It was in none too robust a condition even before Vladimir Putin let loose his army of covert trolls and bots to wreak havoc. Thus, anybody who cares about our democracy needs to care about cyber-security. Lurking […]
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Maybe the kids can do what the grown-ups can’t: beat the GOP and the NRA.
The anti-gun-insanity Children’s Crusade (well, really, a teenagers’ crusade) that is emerging in reaction to the Parkland massacre has clear potential to a sweep away the roadblocks that congressional Republicans have long placed before any efforts to institute universal background checks on gun buyers and to ban the sale of semi-automatic weapons. Whatever the kids […]
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Our Thoughts and Prayers Are Wearing Thin
Our thoughts and prayers. One possibly redeeming consequence of the latest massacre of school children is that the scapegoating of mental illness and the parade of politicians who take NRA money expressing “thoughts and prayers” for dead children and grieving parents are wearing thin. It’s time to take over the national narrative. These are not […]
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Pelosi, sí. Feinstein, no.
The above sloganeering is my response to an interview with me that was aired as part of a story on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday. Last week, the redoubtable Ina Jaffe, intrepid NPR veteran, called me to talk about Dianne Feinstein. The reason she called was that I had written an L.A. Times op-ed some months […]
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Ban Entitlements
My friend Drew Westen, author of the classic book on political language, The Political Brain, observes that Republicans run rings around Democrats when it comes to the Orwellian use of political language, and that Democrats often step on their own strengths. For instance, as Westen observes, Democrats should never, ever use the budgetary term entitlements […]
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As the Senate begins its deliberations on DACA, the ICE Deport Anyone Campaign rolls on
On the Prospect home page today, we’ve posted an article by David Bacon on the efforts of California unions to defend immigrants—and not just their own members—from expulsion, and co-published a piece with Capital & Main on the 5,000 DACA recipients in California who are teachers. In its zeal to meet deportation quotas, ICE has […]
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Can you dig this?
Trump’s $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan is another bait and switch. For starters, it’s dead on arrival, since Congress just concluded a two-year budget deal after massive horse-trading. Legislators are not about to reopen negotiations. It’s bizarre that Trump releases his budget after rather than before this deal. It’s one more sign of his irrelevance. As […]
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Now that Trump is in, deficits suddenly don’t matter
When Obama was president, Republicans made a huge deal about deficits bankrupting the country, refusing to adequately fund the recovery program and demanding deep cuts in federal spending. Now that Trump is in, deficits suddenly don’t matter. The tax cut will add a trillion dollars to the national debt. The budget deal that was recently […]
