From leading Europe into the disaster of the Iraq war, a banking and financial collapse and now foot-dragging on financial reform, the UK has been more destructive than Greece.

Few countries need a reality check as much as Britain. Leading British political figures are rattling their...

In 2009, then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel infamously said that progressives are "fucking retarded." Lately I've begun to think he was correct -- though not for the same reasons as Emanuel, who thought that progressives held unrealistic expectations for his boss, President Barack Obama. Progressives are...

Dear Senator Feinstein,

Thank you for your response* to my letter, but I completely disagree with your position. The filibuster is anti-majoritarian, as is the US Senate itself. Senator Feinstein, you and Sen Boxer represent 38 million Californians while the two Senators from Wyoming represent a half a million...

China must have the best public relations maestros in the world. How else would a country with a lower per capita income than Iran, Mexico and Kazakhstan, one of the worst environmental records of any major nation, endemic corruption, jails stuffed with dissenters, and a dictatorship, besides, be hailed by...

My interview with PM Papandreou was preceded by one with his Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Spyros Kouvelis. I was ushered into a pleasant yet not extravagant office, decorated tastefully with various artworks of Greek culture and personal artifacts. The Deputy Minister was joined by some of his staff, including...

The New York Times is doing a series on Japan that it describes as an examination of "the effects on Japanese society of two decades of economic stagnation and declining prices." Reading the series is about as cheery a task as rubbernecking at a car wreck on I-95....

With Congressional elections around the corner, Social Security has become part of the anti-big government mantra of Tea Party candidates. So far, the "debate" over Social Security has been between those deficit busters who say it must be cut to reduce government debt, and others who want to maintain it...

To mark the 75th anniversary of Social Security, the Next Social Contract Initiative of the New America Foundation has published a provocative new study by Steven Hill, a leading expert in comparative social policy. Noting that, in the wake of the Great Recession, most Americans are even more...

With the Greek default crisis still hanging over Europe, it may seem like Europe can't do anything right. But with millions of gallons of toxic black oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the United States could learn plenty from Europe about energy policy.

By forging ahead with widespread implementation...

The recent battle over health care reform in the United States, in which the Obama administration was barely able to pass weak reform, is just further proof of how far the U.S. has fallen behind Europe. Yet all the media has been able to obsess over for the last couple...

Most Americans seem to regard April 15 -- the day income tax returns are due to the Internal Revenue Service -- as a recurring tragedy on the order of a Biblical plague. Particularly this year, with U.S. government deficits soaring, everyone from the Tea Partiers to Glenn Beck and Senate...

Greece's debt situation has pundits taking out their crystal balls trying to divine the future not only of Greece, but also the euro and Europe. Every news outlet from the New York Times to National Public Radio has joined the chorus of gloom and doom. But what all these experts...

Over a year ago, the world economy suffered a massive economic quake of 8.0 on the Richter scale. Since then different countries have been experiencing a number of aftershocks. Two such events have grabbed headlines, one recently in Greece and another last summer in California. A comparison of these two...

I thought President Barack Obama's "State of the Union" speech was strong. He genuflected long enough at the important points to show that, more than any other top politician in this country, he has a clear grasp of the direction our nation badly needs to go. And he made some...

As we await President Barack Obama's first State of the Union speech, there are clear signs of "Obama fatigue" setting in. Recently I spent a lot of time with some relatives and old friends, so when the president's happy or frowning visage came on the tube I could gauge the...

By Dmitri Iglitzin and Steven Hill

A pitched battle is taking place behind closed doors over the Obama administration's appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It's unfortunate that the conflict has avoided the glare of the public spotlight, because the outcome of this partisan skirmish may be...

Europe's Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age.

The Copenhagen summit on climate change taught Europe a hard lesson about its trans-Atlantic partner. Great hope had greeted President Obama when he replaced George W. Bush at the American helm, but a year...

With the nation's unemployment rate at 10 percent, the highest in a generation, President Barack Obama could learn a thing or two about job creation by heading down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

On display is an exhibit of New Deal-era paintings that show men building...

The 40 Republican U.S. Senators represent barely a third of all Americans, yet with one added Democratic vote they can stymie what most Americans want.

The health care drama in the U.S. Senate is cresting. After months of hearings -- and decades of dithering -- it is time to...

Watching the torturous turns of the health care debate in Congress is mind-numbing, even for the most savvy policy wonks, let alone for members of the public. Each side in this debate has its own set of facts and scare statistics, and the resulting FUD -- fear, uncertainty and doubt...