As unemployment continues to rise, deficit hawks are upping their efforts to use the economic crisis as a pretext for gutting basic social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. The idea keeps surfacing for a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission, supposedly insulated from politics, which would agree to mandatory caps on spending and perhaps increased taxes as well. The latest ploy to promote such a commission is to use the upcoming vote on increasing the national debt, scheduled for late November. But the whole approach is bad economics and bad politics on several grounds.
Genuine leadership means setting the agenda. It means taking tough stands. Leadership is a quality Barack Obama showed on the campaign trail. It is a quality he has failed to show as president.
The current custodian of America's wealth, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, is not doing a good job. The time for corrective action is now.
The fall of the Berlin Wall led Francis Fukuyama to famously declare "the end of history." Twenty years on, what does Fukuyama think about where history has gone since?
Here is a quick everyman's guide to economic statistics. Making sense of the figures demands a large measure of skepticism and an eye for misrepresentation and forgery.
All of the lobbying you read about is minor league compared to the telephone industry. Read on and you will get a first-hand look at the power of a real major league lobbying organization.
Women like Brooksley Born have a long history of being whistle-blowers in systems dominated by men. Perhaps this time Congress -- and the American people -- will listen.
As commentators seem ready to over-interpret tomorrow's election results in three jurisdictions, they should instead consider how four long-term trends show the GOP engaged in political slow-motion suicide.
Issue 2 will amend Ohio's state constitution to create a small regulatory panel to oversee all of Ohio's livestock. Corporate agribusinesses love the idea, but family farms will be crushed.
Here, in Afghanistan, the election has been in crisis since it took place. And though so many are ready for it to finally be over, no one could move on until Abdullah made his withdrawal official.
Anyone who has ever worked with victims of various tragedies will know that there is a great deal of difference between what happened and how the person responds to what happened.
Dede Scozzafava was driven out of the New York race by Doug Hoffman's out-of-state money and dirty tricks. This might explain why she declined to endorse Hoffman in her resignation.
For the first time in over a decade, with the swing of a pen, President Obama turned his back on the right wing's ridiculous rhetoric by doing the right thing, and signing the Hate Crimes Bill.
Chris Christie, the Republican candidate for Governor of New Jersey, has created an election commercial that steals copyright-protected material from Monty Python without permission or credit.
The only way to re-frame the issue of marriage equality amongst those who voted against It, is to engage voters at their point of reference...religion.
What can an investor do? For advice, I sat down with Marc Harris of RBC, one of the few large banks that maneuvered a clear course through the economic turmoil.
New York became a black-hole-like force, sucking the energy from Philadelphia, stealing everything from our college grads to tourists. New York got Broadway, the UN, the World's Fair -- and baseball.
Stand Up To Cancer's call-to-action at Saturday's World Series game tapped into the best of baseball, and the best in corporate sponsorship on an issue that affects us all.
Has President Obama done a good job in office, or is he destined to suffer the same fate of Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush, as unmemorable, ineffective one-term chief executives?
