I heard a terrific speech last Friday by the Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke.
In his address, to a Russell Sage-Century Foundation Conference on the causes and cure of the financial crisis, Chairman Bernanke said just about everything a progressive would want to hear. Read it for yourself and see if you agree.
The financial industry, he [...]

Paul Volcker deserves better. In the hands of Tim Geithner's Treasury, the Rule named for Volcker supposedly limiting speculative mischief by government-guaranteed banks is fast becoming a cumbersome parody of itself.
Financial regulatory officials, at the behest of Wall Street, have turned a simple bright line into a convoluted monstrosity. The questionnaire alone, inviting comments, runs [...]

Last week, the New York City hotel workers union announced a stunning 7-year contract with the Big Apple's hotel industry providing for wage increases averaging 27 percent. The contract is due to be ratified by the membership Monday. The City's hotel trades council, whose master contract covers nearly every large hotel [...]

President Obama is exceptionally lucky when it comes to the weaknesses of the Republican field and its stunning penchant for mutually assured destruction. Who would have expected, for instance, that Newt Gingrich's billionaire-backed super-PAC, aiming to destroy front-runner Mitt Romney, would produce a documentary advertisement on private equity slightly to [...]

A well-funded, faux-reformist group known as Americans Elect is promoting a third party presidential candidacy and anticipates qualifying its candidate to be on the ballot in nearly all states. It is doing this by collecting millions of petition signatures, over 2.2 million so far, taking advantage of voter frustration with political [...]

In January 2010, after Scott Brown's upset victory in the special Massachusetts Senate election, a panicky President Obama managed to sound like a populist for a couple of days. He called for a tax on banking profits and drafted Paul Volcker to appear at a quickie press conference so that the [...]

"There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them." –Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, French politician (1807-1874).
When elected leaders largely ignore a disgrace like the financial collapse of 2008, sooner or later popular protest fills the vacuum. The Wall Street protests are heartening — but also a measure of [...]

If President Obama's health reform, the Affordable Care Act, backfires politically, one reason will be the staggering political power of the drug industry. If, for example, the health reform had used the bargaining power of the federal government to lower the cost of prescription drugs bought by Medicare and Medicaid, instead [...]

After every financial debacle or war, there is a huge political struggle over whether creditors and financial speculators get to stand in the way of an economic recovery. When the creditors win, ordinary people who had nothing to do with the crisis are typically the victims. Today, the entire political elite [...]

Paris — The apparent self-destruction of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a New York hotel is emblematic of a European left that has ceased to be much of a progressive alternative, either in terms of lifestyle or policy alternatives. Strauss-Kahn, who until yesterday headed the International Monetary Fund, was the Socialist front-runner to [...]