Robert L. Borosage

The dire threat facing America, according to Mitt Romney and Republicans this week, is debt, not mass unemployment. We face "a prairie fire of debt," Mitt Romney warned in Iowa. Debt is "a grave threat to freedom," intoned House Speaker John Boehner in Washington,...

"I know you are asking today, "How long will it take?"....
"I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again.
"How long? Not long, because no lie...

Mitt Romney opened the general election campaign last night in Manchester, New Hampshire, using his acceptance speech to unleash a fierce attack on Barack Obama's "false promises and failed leadership."

He said little about his own policies, preferring to contrast his free enterprise vision with what he...

Take a good look at Europe -- bloody riots in Athens and Madrid, rising unemployment, spreading poverty and suicide, and a deepening recession -- because the current American elite consensus bizarrely wants to drive America down that same path.

Europe's miseries come from imposing austerity before...

In 2010, as the economy began its slow recovery from the Great Recession, a new study shows the richest 1% of Americans captured a staggering 93% of all income growth, while the incomes of most Americans stagnated. 93%. Occupy that. The 1% are back

The stock market --...

Yesterday, House Republicans rolled out their budget plan in the Washington version of a Hollywood movie opening. There was a star turn for Budget Chair Paul Ryan at a conservative think tank. Gaseous rhetoric -- "liberties endangered, time to choose" -- fouled the air. There were dueling videos,...

"I believe for every drop of rain that falls,
A flower grows."
-Tom Jones

"I believe that for every tax that is cut,
The deficit falls."
-Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney's victories in Michigan and Arizona establish him as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Now...

The Obama administration released a "framework" for corporate tax reform yesterday, proposing to lower corporate tax rates, and pay for that by closing various corporate tax loopholes.

The "framework" isn't really a corporate tax reform proposal. It is a message document, framed in a bitterly partisan election...

Last night in his State of the Union, President Obama presented himself as the champion of the American dream, or in his words, "the American promise" -- "that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and...

When Newt Gingrich maligned our "truly stupid" child labor laws, and suggested that kids 14 and under be put to work cleaning their schools, he sparked the outrage the former Speaker relishes. Less attention was paid to the other casualty of his proposition: "get rid of...

Democrats are salivating -- or as Rachel Maddow put it -- cheering, screaming, crying -- at the prospect of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich becoming the Republican presidential nominee.

And why not? Gingrich, conservative George Will writes, "embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive."...

Yesterday, Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected the effort to revoke basic worker rights, delivering a stunning rebuke to conservative Governor John Kasich. That spark was lit in Madison, Wisconsin last winter when workers took over the state capitol and launched unprecedented recall elections that sobered right-wing Governor Scott Walker and the...

Wall Street's excesses blew up the economy. Now the question is who pays to clean up the mess. Across the country, our children are already paying part of the bill -- as their schools are hit with deep budget cuts. A new report -- Starving America's Public Schools:...

Once Occupy Wall Street demonstrations started to sweep across America, the mainstream media began to pay attention -- and sounded a chorus of criticism. The movement was disorganized; it had no agenda. It wasn't organized like the Tea Party. Fox News trotted out ace reporter Geraldo Rivera -- really --...

Washington is waiting for Obama. Next week, the president has scheduled a big speech to propose new measures to create jobs and get the economy going. Reports are that the administration is still undecided whether to put forth a bold plan or propose measures that might pass the...

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
....
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
-William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

"It is clear we must enter an era of austerity; to reduce the deficit through shared sacrifice," reads the...

Republicans won't take yes for an answer in the debt ceiling negotiations. As conservative columnist David Brooks writes in the New York Times, this should be the "mother of all no brainers."

Republicans have achieved everything they might have imagined at the beginning of the process...

Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders committed common sense on the floor of the US Senate. It's amazing that he wasn't cited for an ethics violation.

Sanders called on the president to leave the beltway, go across the country and talk sense to the American people about the cruel obscenities...

"It's an employer's world," said Rebecca Penny, a 55-year-old widow who was laid off over a year ago from her job at a Chevrolet plant in Tennessee. "I lost my benefits the night I was laid off. Now I can't afford medicine. And I can only find minimum wage jobs...

This is not a high bar.

Will the president name the indisputably best leader -- Elizabeth Warren -- to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that she conceived, championed and constructed?

Senate Republicans, eager to curry favor with the big banks, have vowed to block ANY nominee to...