It will take a long time and a lot of effort to rebuild the American middle class and restore the balance between the 99 percent and the 1 percent. The Wall Street bankers and other big corporate types have been winning so long, have been so entrenched in their power,...

The settlement talks still aren't settled. For about 16 months, we have been hearing that the settlement talks are just about to close, but once again another day goes by, and the settlement talks still aren't settled. In the past, there have been lots of reasons this was the case,...

The completely mind-blowing story "A Mortgage Tornado Warning, Unheeded," by Gretchen Morgenson in the Feb. 4 New York Times, along with a ProPublica story a couple of weeks back on how Freddie Mac had placed multi-billion dollar bets for years that paid off if homeowners stayed trapped in...

The struggles around a potential settlement with the bankers over crimes they committed have been fascinating. Beyond the immediate settlement talks on robo-signing, the bigger saga about whether Wall Street will be held accountable, and whether the housing market recovers any time soon, is going to take as long to...

I have changed a lot of my religious beliefs since my childhood, but have never changed this one: that how we will ultimately be judged (by ourselves, by other people, by history, and by a God if one exists) will be on how we will treat the people Jesus called...

It has been a fascinating last few weeks in the great banking/housing debates. The administration is growing less and less tentative in its rhetoric against Wall Street, and is opening up multiple new fronts to take on the black hole of the housing market that is throwing a wet blanket...

Big breaking news about the long-fought over bank settlement: senior sources high up in the negotiations have outlined the terms of the legal release. Here's what I was told:

1. No release on any fair housing, fair lending, or civil rights claims.
2. No release on any Federal Housing Finance Agency or...

President Obama delivered a strong populist, pro-middle class speech last night. And being a strong populist pro-middle class kind of guy, I naturally liked it a lot. I wasn't the only one: voters loved it. Check out this dramatic overnight report from Stan Greenberg. The numbers jump off...

A few months back, before all the sit-ins and other activity, spurred in great part by friends and family back home (I am from Nebraska), I was asking a friend in the administration about the Keystone Pipeline issue. They told me that it really wasn't all that important a policy...

I was having a very quiet Monday -- only a couple of phone meetings, no pressing deadlines -- when two bolts of news lightning made my day. The first was Mitt Romney's open admission that "I like being able to fire people." I never had a moment's doubt about that,...

The conventional wisdom line is set: with his victory(?) in Iowa, Mitt Romney is sure to win the Republican nomination, and he is the strongest candidate against Obama, so yesterday settled things in a good way for the Republicans. But I'm feeling like this was a very good morning for...

Been quite a year, huh? We'll remember this one for a long time.

This new generation of Republicans, the self-styled Tea Partiers, want to repeal just about all of the 20th century. They don't like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, or any of those Kennedy brothers. They say they...

The way you know a movement is starting to have an impact is when the powers that be start to respond to it. This has been happening for quite a while now with the 99er Movement (it's Occupy but a lot more than Occupy). Republican politicians have been lashing out,...

It is fashionable in political circles today to say that speeches don't matter much. What's important isn't what people say, so this line of thinking goes, but what they do. Presidents and many other politicians break promises -- they fail to follow up on strong words -- they sometimes start...

One of the things I love about politics is the outsized credit people who are involved with presidential campaigns take for what happens. Don't get me wrong: competent campaigns are important, and a campaign with big flaws can easily blow it. In 1988, 2000, and 2004, a better Democratic candidate/campaign...

I have had a somewhat up-and-down history with the folks in the Obama administration. I was proud to be their liaison to the progressive community during the Obama-Biden Presidential transition, and have labored mightily to help them at several key junctures during this first term. I have been quite critical...

There's a reason a big majority of the country approves of the Occupy Wall Street folks in spite of all the media derision and right-wing attacks, and a reason that demonstrators all over the country and world are organizing in their wake. The reason is that most people know what...

There was an absurdly apologetic pro-Scott Brown piece in the Boston Globe suggesting that Scott Brown isn't Wall Street's favorite Senator, so critics like Elizabeth Warren should just back off in criticizing him. Having watched Brown operate on the financial reform bill and on financial issues since, it...

President Obama's speech last night was one of his best ever delivered, and thank goodness he is making a huge political push on the all-important jobs issue. It was a good night for him, and he needed this badly for his political standing. But progressive activists should neither fall into...

Most of the time, in political history and in economics, things travel along a fairly predictable and relatively stable pathway. Debate is contained within a fairly narrow set of conventional and familiar choices. When it comes to economic policy, the Federal Reserve can lower interest rates or raise them a...