Our sacred dollar, reigning deity of the world’s currencies, has able prophets and apostles. And it needs them. Though it has soared this past decade, the dollar now faces rising domestic and global forces that seek to humble it. Do …
In his book Edge City, Joel Garreau tells the story of Bridgewater Township, a community of about forty thousand people located in New Jersey. Like earlier cities that were situated at the intersection of transportation routes, it owes its location …
Let us take Ellen Willis’s argument at its strongest points—something she does not do with ours. The core of her response is that supporting “a nationally visible challenge” to the corporate consensus helps “movement-building,” which in turn promotes “dealing with …
With the events of late in the year 2000, the United States left behind the era of constitutional republicanism and turned to a different form of government. It is not, however, a new form. It is, rather, a transplant, highly …
What is going on? The richest Americans are about to give themselves a big tax cut. The bigger the cut, the less money there will be for government programs that many less-than-rich Americans need. Ordinary greed is at work here, …
The “third way” is the subject of countless articles, op-ed columns, policy papers, international conferences, and the public pronouncements by heads of state from Bill Clinton to Gerhard Schroeder to Tony Blair. Anthony Giddens is clearly the most visible and …
I voted for Ralph Nader for several intertwined reasons. At a time when both major parties and the culture’s conventional wisdom uncritically embrace corporate power and free-market ideology, I felt it was important to support a nationally visible challenge to …
What are the prospects for labor rights in the next four years? The question would seem to require some estimate, first, of what the Republicans intend and, second, of their capacity to do it. But current labor law is not …
The Fierce and Beautiful World by Andrei Platonov, translated by Joseph Barnes, introduction by Tatyana Tolstaya New York Review Books, 2000, 288 pp., $12.95 In Andrei Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit, Nastya—a beautiful and precociously ideological, kulak-baiting little girl on …
Much ink has been spilled proclaiming the recent Mexican presidential elections epochal, monumental, even revolutionary. The election of Vicente Fox, the candidate of the National Action Party (PAN), ended seventy-one years of rule by the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party (PRI). No …
A few short days after Bill Clinton vacated the White House this January, Federal Reserve Board head Alan Greenspan publicly endorsed the new tenant’s $1.6 trillion tax cut. Democrats who had been convinced by both Clinton and Greenspan to give …
TO: THOSE WHO SUPPORTED THE NADER CAMPAIGN FROM: TODD GITLIN AND SEAN WILENTZ RE: THE OBVIOUS So here we are in the Bush II era. No small thanks to Antonin Scalia—and you. If there is a sourness in the air, …
If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? by G. A. Cohen Harvard University Press, 2000, 233 pp., $35 Philosophy and Social Hope by Richard Rorty Penguin Books, 2000, 288 pp., $13.95 W.H. Auden said that “poetry makes …
Policy makers in Washington need good news in the Balkans, but have never been willing to lay out the resources necessary to make things turn out well. Instead, they have searched for good guys, effective leaders who might bring good …
There has been much discussion in magazines, newspapers, and the nightly news about genetically modified organisms. Why did French farmers attack a McDonald’s fast food restaurant that used genetically modified vegetables (with introduced genes to generate pesticides) and modified beef …
