This July 4 feels different. We no longer have a president in the White House who questions our patriotism if we disagree with him. We now have a president who understands that loyalty to country is neither conservative nor liberal. President Barack Obama recognizes that the ways we Americans express...

Many celebrities will be in the stands to watch the Los Angeles Lakers play the Orlando Magic in the NBA finals at Amway Arena tonight, and even more Hollywood stars and political types will be at Staples Center Tuesday night if a 6th game is necessary. But outside both arenas,...

Los Angeles magazine -- the slick monthly targeted to young affluent readers who need to keep up with which restaurants, neighborhoods, celebrities, and clothing boutiques are hip -- slapped the word "Failure" across a photo of LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the cover of its June issue. This was not...

In its first 100 days, the Obama administration did more to address global warming and the environmental crisis than the Bush administration did in eight years.

The new president is moving on many fronts. So far, Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider California's request to regulate pollution...

More than 15,000 admirers celebrated Pete Seeger's 90th birthday with him at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, which included a greeting from President Barack Obama.

Since the late 1930s, Seeger has been a political activist and a troubadour for social justice in the U.S. and human rights around the...

Economics is sometimes called the "dismal science," but sociologists are better at examining the human side of economic hard times. What they've learned is that when the economy is hurting, people are more likely to hurt -- and kill -- themselves and others.

Every day, week, and month that...

You don't expect to see school superintendents leading a protest march. But after facing several years of cutting staff, slashing already tight budgets, and begging foundations and businesses to help pay for education basics, the state's local school administrators have reached the limits of their patience.

California currently ranks...

Now that Pete Seeger has sung at Barack Obama's inaugural celebration Sunday at the Lincoln Memorial -- leading more than half a million people on the mall and millions of people watching on TV in a rendition of "This Land is Your Land" -- what is left for the 89-year...

Since Friday, 240 members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), a small but feisty union that has always been in the progressive wing of the labor movement, have displayed uncommon courage. They have illegally occupied their Chicago factory after their employer abruptly told them that...

By Peter Dreier and Kelly Candaele

Three weeks before the November election, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story that asked, "Will Gun-Toting, Churchgoing White Guys Pull the Lever for Obama?"

When the polls closed, the question was answered: Nationwide, white men, white women, working-class whites, white...

For the first time in history, Americans elected a former community organizer as their President. Barack Obama is going to need all those organizing skills to be an effective leader. To achieve a progressive agenda, Obama will have to win over some reluctant Democrats and a few moderate Republicans. Like...

Forget Joe the Plumber. One of America's real working class heroes is Jeff the truck driver.

Jeff Wallace, 43, has been on the picket lines for six weeks. He's fighting for good healthcare for his kids and to make sure he has something to walk away with when he...

The death of Nick Reynolds, one of the Kingston Trio, on October 1 at age 75, provoked fond memories of one era and painful reminders of another.

The fond memories are of the folk music revival that began in the late 1950s with the clean-cut, college-boy Kingston Trio and...

Wall Street is in meltdown. Banks are collapsing. Developers can't get loans to build homes. Housing values are plummeting. Millions of Americans are facing foreclosure.

But in Los Angeles last week, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, speaking at a crowded union hall to an enthusiastic group of...

Here's the problem with the nation's troubled financial system in a nutshell: Americans don't have enough money to pay their mortgages.

President Bush's plan to bail-out the banks by having the US government buy troubled mortgage-backed securities is the wrong way to fix this problem. This is like handing a...

At Friday's debate at the University of Mississippi, John McCain said: "As far as our other issues that he brought up are concerned, I know the veterans. I know them well. And I know that they know that I'll take care of them. And I've been proud of their...

**Peter Dreier and David Moberg**

When Republican leaders at their St. Paul convention belittled Senator Barack Obama's early work as a community organizer, they probably expected a modest push back on behalf of organizers, not a figurative fish in the face from a wildlife journalist.

But in a column...

Senator John McCain was a foot soldier in the deregulation revolution, which triggered the current banking crisis and the wave of foreclosures. In Michigan, his party wants to deny the right to vote to victims of the GOP's misguided economic policies and the sleazy banking practices they encouraged.

James...

** By John Atlas and Peter Dreier **

We've been here before -- in the 1930s Depression, when the entire economy collapsed, and in the 1980s, when the savings-and-loan industry imploded. Both times, citizens demanded that the federal government do something to rescue the economy. In the Depression, President Roosevelt...

Twenty-year-old Tobin Van Ostern finished his sophomore year last spring at George Washington University, but this fall he's enrolled in the Barack Obama campaign as a full-time organizer. The Richmond, Virginia, native started Students for Obama on his campus last year as a Facebook group. It now has...