On this holiday celebrating the courage of America's brave revolutionary founders, all Americans can celebrate. But progressives should take special pride in this holiday, for it was the ultimate achievement of progressive values that brought us this day.

As I discuss in my book, The Progressive Revolution: How the...

Check out this sad story in the New York Times: apparently Morgan Stanley has been doing the right thing by taking fewer risks in their trading than their competitors at Goldman Sachs and Citibank. But in the perverse Wall Street system we have allowed to remain in place in...

There have been some good pieces out in the last few days by Dean Baker and Bob Kuttner on the politics of a modern version of the 1930s Pecora Commission on what happened to cause the Great Depression. The original Pecora Commission was an essential reason why FDR...

I hate the phrase "jobless recovery." If people are not getting decent employment, there is no such thing as a recovery. It doesn't matter if corporate profits go up, if the Dow Jones rebounds, if Goldman Sachs honchos got record bonuses, if the Gross National Product rises. What matters is...

With the possible exception of the health care fight, there is no more important battle for the future of our economy and democracy than breaking up these too-big-to-fail financial institutions. Limiting their size, their economic power, and their political power is urgent and absolutely essential. The problem is that these...

A couple of items in the financial sector, but both can be summarized in these words: the powerful and greedy continue to run things with impunity in the financial world.

First there's the news that Goldman Sachs is making record bonus payments for the first half of the year....

This won't be a long post, because I just need to ask a simple question. With Ted Kennedy too sick to come down to DC and make the committee vote, Democrats will need every Senator on the HELP committee to produce a strong bill, a bill that fights for what...

Tom Daschle has been a friend to me for many years, a mentor and some who has done a great deal for me personally. I admire him greatly, and will always be appreciative to him. But I have to break from him on this issue: Tom Daschle is dead...

Having been in the Clinton Health Care War Room, I knew that moments like this would come, times I would describe as "the troubles." Health care is such a massive issue, with so many land mines and pit falls, that the monumental effort to reform it will always run...

I have sometimes been quite critical of President Obama's approach to financial issues, and I still believe he should push harder and go further than he is going. However, I think the regulatory reform package he put out today is a solid start. It does not go far enough for...

Arianna Huffington has a terrific piece on the bankers on Wall Street returning to their old habits, and I have a couple of observations on this urgently important topic.

The first is about the precarious balancing act the White House is forced to have on the economy. They have...

Issues related to high finance and the banking industry were never something I had spent a lot of time focusing on, but last September's financial collapse was a moment not unlike 9/11 and national security: suddenly it became really obvious to all people who care about their country that it...

One of my most dominant memories of my years in the Clinton White House were the budget discussions at the very beginning of Clinton's first term in early 1993. It was a heady time for us Clintonites, winning the presidency for the first time since 1976, having control by big...

CNN interviewed me earlier this week (full CNN video at the bottom of the post) for a story they were doing on the differences between this health care fight and the last one, during the Clinton years. The story Jim Acosta did is here, but I made a couple...

We had another one of those stories this week: economists delighted because we only lost 345,000 jobs last month because that was not as bad as expected. Forecasters think the pace by which we are sinking is slowing, but even in the best-case scenario, they expect unemployment will continue to...

There has been some interesting writing lately on the whole Obama and the left thing, a wave of discussion that started when Obama declared his candidacy for president, and won't end until humans stop writing history books.

The first was kind of a silly article by Josh Gerstein in...

That sound of high pitched whining you hear from Republicans abut the new Pew analysis showing more positive than negative stories about Obama so far is pretty funny, but I have to say it's pretty easy to dismiss. Trends on positive and negative stories about presidents and presidential candidates tend...

There's been a lot of talk in Washington, DC lately of a "new, centrist compromise" gaining momentum in terms of how to fund health care reform, and that is taxing health care benefits. The problems? It's not new, it's only centrist in the bizarre inside-the-Beltway world of what qualifies for...

In every major legislative battle, there are a few critical moments that decide the fate of that legislation. In health care reform, we have already seen two: the first when President Obama insisted that we do health care reform this year; the second when Senate Democrats had the guts to...

I have been meaning to write about this topic for several days now, in part because of Cheney and the right-wing movement's proud defense of torture, and in part because of having finally finished (after much delay because of my book tour) Rick Perlstein's masterful book Nixonland. I got started...