In the orgy of Reagan revisionism and capitalist triumphalism that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, we have largely forgotten how and why the Cold War came to an end. It would be almost impossible to discern its real origins from today's Disney style celebration of...

On the plane to Copenhagen where he will make the case for Chicago as an Olympic city, President Obama ought to screen Ken Burns' National Parks television series. Not because it is Burn's masterpiece (it is) and tells an extraordinary story about America ambivalent relationship to nature (it does), but...

In the parochial universe defined by Fox/Murdoch mass media, Muslims have replaced communists as America's generic enemies and brown-skinned foreigners who invoke Allah instead of God and look sort of Middle Eastern-Arabic are regarded as ideological twins.

Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffi (who actually is African, not Middle Eastern) and...

Some commentators think Ted Kennedy's passing can reignite President Obama's health care bill. But I think it is likely to fail unless the President begins to defend the democratic principles undergirding the term "public option."What he and the Democrats need to do now, in Kennedy's honor, is tell the American...

We've had advice on digging out of the global financial hole from the bankers who put us in the hole, and we've had advice from the government bureaucrats who aspire to get us out -- sometimes they are the very same people! But we have yet to climb very far...

In an irony typical of the New York Times' tin ear for democracy, a recent article (May 22) on New York Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein carried the headline "Big Thinking and Radical Dreaming." In a puff piece passing as news, Susan Dominus gave us this choice in thinking about...

Tim Geithner has two faces. This is bad news and good news for those who believe market fundamentalism is responsible for the current fiscal hole we are in, and that climbing out will require a fundamental revision of fundamentalist market ideology.

The bad news, reinforced on this past Wednesday morning...

This week on Charlie Rose, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner said explicitly what has been implicitly all along in President Obama's approach to ailing banks and financial institutions. Responding to Rose's unusually tough questioning about why government has asked so little of the banks getting billions in bailouts, Geithner...

Yesterday, an epochal day in American history, 146 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation proclamation, as Barack Obama was being sworn in as the first African-American president of the United States, a persistent schizophrenia of the American soul was laid bare.

As the president-elect placed his hand on the...

The media has been waiting breathlessly for the moment when it can pierce the bubble of sanctimony that has enveloped President Elect Obama - a bubble created not by him but by the very media now eager to puncture it. And what better occasion than a lug-headed governor's oblivious grandstanding...

Americans seem mesmerized by the emerging list of potential cabinet members being interviewed for jobs. Brilliant! Assertive! "The Genius Cabinet" gushes Slate writer Jacob Weisberg. Larry Summers? Wow! Joel Klein? Whew!

Calm down, folks. What's wanted in anyone's cabinet is not brilliance but judgment. Not genius but...

Here is the irony of this endless Presidential campaign, and the reason why Senator Obama is likely to win with an electoral landside: the election has been pitched to the world as a transformative moment in which the old, conservative, white establishment is finally overtaken by the new multicultural, post-racial...

Economic remedies for the fiscal crisis continue to frustrate their political backers. On that black Monday when the U.S. Congress refused to pass the 700 billion dollar bailout, the market plummeted 477 points. A few days later, after Congress reversed itself and passed the 700 billion dollar bailout, the market...

QUESTION: What's the difference between capitalism and socialism according to Henry Paulson?

ANSWER: Socialism is when big government steals from the banks to bail out the people; capitalism is when big government steals from the people to bail out the banks.

At the bottom of the over-leveraged credit tower (where...

I participated last Monday night in the BBC "Economist Debates" on the economic meltdown broadcast from the heart of the City, London's financial district. Nearly all of the CEOs, financial consultants and bankers on our over sized debate panel echoed the media coverage, treating the crisis as a technical problem,...

It seems forever since the Democrats completed their triumphant Convention in Denver with its Obama/Biden/Clinton/Kennedy unity ticket and its intoxicating sense of take-it-to-the-finish line momentum. What happened? Not Sarah Palin. How could a small-time Alaska mayor and first term Governor derail the Obama freight train? No it was not Sarah...

Hey kids! Time to be thinking about summer camp! Tired of sailboats and archery? Drama camp too much like school? Weight loss camp too depressing? I have just the ticket for you and your anxious parents!

Worried your kid can't get into sports camp? Listen to Becky Ross of Louisville,...

I have just returned from two weeks in Europe and Istanbul, where, as is apparent to all American travelers, the world is watching the US elections with fervent hope, if also some trepidation. A possible Obama presidency is seen everywhere as a potentially transformational moment for American leadership in the...

The presidential candidates in the endless primary go on about leadership and unity and change and experience, but meanwhile in Congress its politics as usual. i.e., bipartisan pandering to special interests.

That's right, here comes the Farm Bill -- a whopping $300 billion plus dollars, passed over President Bush's...

If you've been watching the John Adams chronicles on HBO, you know that the birth of the young American Republic was accompanied by enough controversy, bitterness, infighting and rage to sink the project before it ever got off the ground. If it hadn't been for the fact that democracy, rough...