A Gilded Planet

Antiwar activists, foreign policy realists and fans of Woodrow Wilson's principle of national self-determination should celebrate as the New York Times reports that many within both the Obama Administration and the military are skeptical of General Stanley McChrystal's plan to escalate the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan with a massive new commitment of additional troops and resources. It seems that the president is considering other options for moving forward in Afghanistan, including focusing a smaller number of troops on fighting terrorists rather than a directing larger number of troops to undertake a long-term project of nation-building with a necessarily imperialistic character. I am ecstatic at this news. It shows that the White House is realistic about its approach to the Middle East but more importantly it demonstrates that there are people in the Obama Administration who are seriously opposed to an indefinite occupation of the Middle East on the basis of muddily de...

Imagine your ideal health insurance plan. First of all, it’s there when you need it; so when you get sick, you get care. It can’t be cancelled because of a loophole. It allows you to make your own health care decisions with consultation from your doctor and no interference from insurance company bureaucrats. It won’t discriminate against you because of gender or a preexisting condition. It’s affordable, which means no exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles or co-pays. There’s also no arbitrary cap on how much care you can get over your lifetime or in any given year. It doesn’t disappear if you lose your job and it doesn’t change if you change jobs. And it fully covers all check-ups and tests that helps you avoid getting sick in the fist place. The Medicare-like public insurance plan included in the bill that has passed four out of five congressional committees and the health care agenda that President Obama campaigned on last fall fits the ideal health insurance plan I describe...

Aside from the indispensable Ezra Klein , I don’t usually read the Washington Post because it seems to have adopted a policy of deliberately misleading its readers on its editorial page while its news section…well, the less said , the better . But the other day as I was walking into Moffitt Library, a WaPo headline caught my eye and I had to stop to see if I was hallucinating. The headline read “World's Wealthy Pay a Price In Crisis.” I blinked and rubbed my eyes in disbelief. The richest people in America were richer in 2007 than at any time since the 1920s. Similar statistics showed the same story around the world. Many economists and policy analysts further believed that the rich were the only people seeing real income gains from growth across the entire economy for many years before the recession. Since the recession began, I understand that the rich became slightly poorer than before. Instead of being unimaginably wealthy, they are now only obscenely wealthy. But...

William Safire died today . Many have memorialized him as an oracle of language and a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist, but I will always remember him as the man who wrote speeches for a president who committed war crimes against millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia while simultaneously abusing executive power to harass and terrorize his political enemies at home. Some may argue that it would be more polite to ignore his ignoble past serving the worst president in US history in order to eulogize him for his more positive contributions. But that would mean sweeping aside his more recent work spreading lies and disseminating distortions for another terrible president in order to promote yet another needless war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. I would always prefer to be charitable towards the recently deceased, but this is a man who did not seem to feel much remorse for his role in manipulating language in service of an ideology of deception and destruc...

Earlier this year, President Obama asked Congress to send him legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy in America. Democratic leaders in Congress have been quick to respond. The House of Representatives has already passed a major climate and energy bill that will transform our energy economy. The US Senate is taking the proposal up as you read this. But even as the wheels of progress have begun to move the country forward, a growing chorus on the right have begun to challenge the president’s ambitious agenda as bad for American business and therefore bad for the American consumer. Setting legal limits on the allowable amounts of climate change pollution seems to attract controversy despite its firm grounding in the longstanding tradition of using regulation to preserve public goods. The public has long supported – by large margins – regulating the dangerous byproducts produced by the burning of fossil fuels in ord...

President Obama has set a clear goal of comprehensive health care reform before the end of this year. He has boldly determined that deferring urgent changes to the American health care system cannot wait another year. But in accomplishing this goal, Congress has a responsibility to make sure health care reform serves the public interest and not the narrow goals of Washington lobbyists. In the growing debate over President Obama's health care plan, insurance companies have made very clear their opposition to the provision of the option of an afforable public health insurance plan to every American. This opposition is based entirely on the insurance industry's fear that a viable public insurance option will cut into the potential future profits of the industry. From the beginning of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama has argued that every American has right to an affordable health insurance plan that will be there when it's needed. The not-for-profit, Medicare-like ...