“When you are in Washington, remember what the voters back home want – less government and more freedom”[1]

(Jim DeMint, welcoming tea-party backed victors in the 2010 mid-term elections)

This is no ordinary day in American politics. This is the day power officially shifted in the House of Representatives from Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats to John Boehner’s Republicans. This is the day the inmates retook the asylum. READ FULL POST

The community college in my small North Carolinian city received a  presidential visit on Monday. The President came, spoke and left, in a visit that would have been only locally newsworthy but for the importance of what he said. READ FULL POST

The Monday morning quarterbacks are in full flow, and the post-mortem is already on. The alternatives are being immediately staked, and the relevant policy changes demanded. Depending on whom you read, the Democrats lost so many seats in the mid-term election because Obama wasn’t centrist enough or because he was too centrist. READ FULL POST

What a difference two years make in times as serious as these. Two Novembers ago, all was hope and glory on the center-left in American politics, all was despair and despondency on the center-right. But that is not how things stand now. The political momentum has shifted back, and shifted back very quickly,  into the hands of the very conservative forces whose future looked so bleak when Obama first entered the White House. Since those conservative forces are now not simply back on the offensive, but are also significantly more conservative in policy and ideology than were their defeated predecessors, this shift in momentum is both critical and potentially dangerous for those of us committed to progressive change. The rise of the new conservatism, unless stopped, will move the whole agenda of American politics even further to the right than it was in the Bush years. Stopping it requires many things: but it must begin with a clear understanding of why the tidal wave of progressive enthusiasm that swept Obama to the presidency has now dissipated.

So why have we seen this rapid change of fortunes?  Some mixture of the following four reasons at least.

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…Our imperial endeavors alone, if Chalmers Johnson is right, “will, sooner or later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency.”[1] READ FULL POST

“Obama envisions no major changes in Afghan strategy.

Despite discouraging news from Afghanistan and growing doubts in Congress and among the American public, the Obama administration has concluded that its war strategy is sound and that a December review, once seen as a pivotal moment, is unlikely to yield any major changes”

(The Washington Post, September 18, 2010)

When announcing the end of the American combat mission in Iraq on August 31, READ FULL POST

Have I missed something? Perhaps I have. Or is one of the troubling undersides of the Glenn Beck rally on the Lincoln Memorial last Saturday not yet receiving the full coverage that it deserves?[1]

• The rally has rightly been criticized as a questionable attempt to exploit the legacy of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement which he led. This country has no history of excluding white males from voting or from sitting at food counters; and certainly no history of white men being lynched simply for looking at an African-American woman. Many of Glenn Beck’s overwhelmingly white supporters at the rally may feel persecuted and unloved, but in the full story of persecution and racial hatred in this country they don’t even make the front row. Indeed, when Glenn Beck was reminded by Chris Wallace on Fox News immediately after the rally that the original civil rights movement had an economic agenda as well as a political one – that the original March on Washington was one for jobs as well as for freedom – Beck explicitly rejected the legacy of that wider agenda.[2] But rights without resources, as Lyndon Johnson once said, are not full rights at all. ‘The man who is hungry, who cannot find work or educate his children, who is bowed by want, that man is not fully free.”[3] Martin Luther King understood that – it was what took him to Memphis and his death – but Glenn Beck clearly does not.

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(co-authored with Peter Siavelis)

It is less than a year (November 2009) since Janet Napolitano – the Homeland Security Secretary and the administration’s point person on immigration – announced her and the President’s commitment to a three-pronged approach to the issue of immigration reform. READ FULL POST

“Social Security is not the trouble; it’s just the target.”[1]

It would appear that there will be a new battle awaiting us on the other side of the mid-term elections – as though we did not already have battles enough – one about Social Security and its future. [2] READ FULL POST

We face a political season in the fall that will be full of Republican calls to continue the Bush tax cuts and conservative demands to scale back government spending. Those calls are already in full cry, and with the mid-terms looming, we can only expect more of the same – arguments like this, placed by Arthur Laffer in the August 2^nd edition of The Wall Street Journal.

“Few things are as clear in economics as the fact that high tax rates don’t succeed in raising revenue or increasing the burden on the wealthy….Not only do the direct tax consequences of higher tax rates on those in the highest brackets lead to higher deficits, the indirect effects magnify the tax revenue losses many fold. As a result of higher tax rates only on those people in the highest tax brackets, there will be less employment, output, sales, profits and capital gains – all leading to lower payrolls and lower total tax receipts. There will also be higher unemployment, poverty and lower incomes, all of which require more government spending. It’s a Catch-22. Higher tax rates on the rich create the very poverty and unemployment that is used to justify their presence.”[1]

Really? Oh that it was that simple. But it is not – not, for at least the following four sets of reasons, no one of which appeared alongside the Laffer piece in the paper most widely read in US business circles.

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