December 19, 2012
Co-authored with Don Frey[1] As reports thicken of a possible deal between the White House and the House Republicans – a deal which will supposedly avoid the rest of us going over some fiscal cliff on January 1 – it is worth remembering at least four reasons why such a deal is probably […]
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December 5, 2012
Public conversation in and around Washington D.C. is currently preoccupied with the question of the fiscal cliff. And rightly so, for very big things are at stake. Not least whether or not a political crisis will tip the economy back into recession, and whether an election result that mandated a tax increase on the […]
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November 15, 2012
It is lobbying week in Washington DC. Tuesday was labor’s day at the White House. Wednesday it was the turn of the business community. Friday it will be the usual politicians – Boehner, Cantor, McConnell, Pelosi, Reid – in other words, the usual political gridlock masquerading as democracy in action.[1]
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November 2, 2012
Basic belief systems, if regularly reinforced by carefully orchestrated advertising campaigns, are enormously difficult things to shift. Paradigms of thought, once established in dominance, are hard to get rid of. We have just lived through 30 years of an orchestrated consensus on the wonders of free-market capitalism. No matter that the business deregulation it […]
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October 17, 2012
(co-authored with Eileen Coates: National Board Certified Public School Teacher) One of the most telling questions in the second of the debates between the presidential candidates focused on the gender pay gap: asking in what ways the candidates would “rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females only making 72 percent of what […]
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October 15, 2012
If you listen only to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, you could be forgiven for thinking that the United States is not simply in need of strong interventionist leadership abroad. It is also short of military hardware and troops.
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September 22, 2012
Central to the Republican critique of the Obama Administration in this election cycle has been the Administration’s supposed failure to address and resolve the problem of America’s growing debt. There is much wild and loose talk in beltway circles these days about federal over-spending, about federal over-borrowing, about the nation steadily going broke, and […]
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September 8, 2012
Charles Dickens came to mind again this week – his opening to A Tale of Two Cities – his intriguing contrast between “the best of times….the worst of times…the age of wisdom…the age of foolishness.” His cities were London and Paris. Ours were Tampa and Charlotte, but the contrasts remain the same. As […]
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September 5, 2012
I was privileged to join Melissa Harris-Perry and her other guests in the New York studios of MSNBC on the Saturday morning after the Republican convention in Tampa. Melissa was keen to explore with us why so many of the statements made by leading Republicans at the convention failed to pass the ‘fact-checker’ test. She […]
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August 24, 2012
Unless the Republican convention in Tampa is swept away by hurricane force winds – itself a fascinating prospect for a party, so many of whose activists claim to be in regular and direct contact with the Almighty – the media will make next week an entirely R week.
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