Harold Meyerson

Both in general and on Friday, the entirely manufactured crisis of whether the U.S. will raise its debt ceiling is obscuring a very real crisis — the ongoing collapse of the American economy. Friday’s news on the real crisis was the government’s report on gross domestic product growth for the second quarter of this year, […]

Are congressional Democrats and President Obama looking better than congressional Republicans in the current debt standoff? You bet they are. And how are they doing in the larger battle of ideas? They’re getting clobbered. A new Pew Poll released Tuesday shows that by a 50 percent to 35 percent margin, the public believes the Republicans […]

The trickiest two-step in Washington as the debt-ceiling deadline looms is the one that House Republican Leader Eric Cantor has been called on to perform. Even more than his boss, John Boehner, Cantor answers to two masters whose interests have diverged: Wall Street and the Tea Party. Until the past few days, Cantor has tilted […]

One of the few pleasures, perverse though it be, of watching the debt-ceiling idiocy unfold has been the spectacle of the very powers who helped create the American far right — helped elect it, and contributed mightily to its ideology — pleading with the congressional Tea Party acolytes to support legislation (John Boehner’s latest effort […]

Of all the reasons that business and the right adduce for the failure of the American economy to rebound, “uncertainty” is surely the most bogus. Their definition of “uncertainty,” for starters, is entirely political. They are not referring to the uncertainty that comes with the weather or to the uncertainty we experienced during the meltdown […]

One of the first things that Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Mao’s Communists did upon taking power was to repudiate the debts incurred by the regimes they’d overthrown. Debt, shmet, the commies said. These were payments to capitalist institutions and treasuries that took bread out of people’s mouths. To hell with ’em. How the wheel has turned. […]

Joe Hansen says he’s “pissed,” and it’s no mystery why. Hansen, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents the nation’s unionized supermarket workers, is dismayed that when first lady Michelle Obama meets tomorrow at the White House with representatives of retailers who have markets in underserved areas, Wal-Mart will be in […]

Whenever liberals note that the rich are getting richer while everyone else is either treading water or sinking, or that profits are up while wages are down, or, worse yet, that profits are up because wages are down, those liberals are invariably accused by conservatives of fomenting class warfare. Well, goodness knows, we at the […]

From yesterday’s New York Times, a front-page headline and its sub-headline: Assassination in Afghanistan Creates a Void Karzai’s Half-Brother Was Divisive Force So now they have to come up with another divisive force?

Democrat Janice Hahn’s victory last night over Republican Craig Huey in a Los Angeles-area special congressional election should not have come as a surprise. For the past couple weeks, the political class was abuzz (well, mildly abuzz) with speculation that Huey, who spent $883,000 of his own money on his campaign, could pull an upset […]