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The Housing Crisis: Caused by the Bush Tax Cuts

by James Livingston

I don’t know about you, but watching the markets get crazy has been great fun for me.  Once upon a time I wrote a book on the origins of the Fed, so every time I read about the “moral hazard” involved in bailing out insolvent lenders—or borrowers—I have to laugh.  This hazard lies in thwarting the logic of the market, according to the old-school economists and journalists who preach it. 

The Housing Crisis: Caused by Lax Regulation

by Robert Brent Toplin

After Wall Street went into a tailspin because of problems with sub-prime mortgages, Democratic presidential candidates demanded stronger standards for the mortgage industry. Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and Christopher Dodd asked Congress to exercise more control over the risky lending practices that have harmed homebuyers and frightened investors. We've heard such sage advice before. But in the past, no one heeded it. Now it's time for leaders in Washington to stop the abuses.

What Murdoch Won't Want to Change at the Wall Street Journal

by Robert Brent Toplin

Recently, the board of Dow Jones & Co decided to accept Rupert Murdoch's offer to purchase the organization. Murdoch's apparent success in adding this substantial investment to his portfolio has aroused a good deal of concern in newspaper and television commentaries. Critics worry that the media giant will be expanding his already extraordinary influence over the world's news and entertainment businesses. They note, too, that control over Dow Jones will enable Murdoch to affect the Wal

The Scary Origins of Chief Justice Roberts's Decision Opposing the Use of Race to Promote Integration

by Nancy MacLean

Chief Justice John G. Roberts reversed a half-century of precedent and progress on civil rights with his decision on school desegregation. That was the prerogative granted him by the President and the party who entrusted him to shift the Supreme Court to the right. But no one should grant Roberts a free pass when he says “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. ” His opinion has its lineage in a well-documented con

Will We Ever Get National Health Insurance?

by Jill Quadagno

Last year nearly a million more people were uninsured compared to the year before, nearly 48 million in all. The employer-based system that most people of working age have relied on since the 1950s is unraveling at the seams.  Each year for more than a decade the percentage of employers offering health benefits has declined.  The only reason the situation doesn’t look worse is that the government is picking up the slack - through Medicare and Medicaid and through the coverage

Did Fred Thompson Marry a Trophy Wife?

by Rick Shenkman

The picture in the paper the other day of Fred Thompson and his wife was eye-catching and it wasn’t because he towered over her like some giant out of an old circus. (At six foot six he would be the tallest president in United States history.) It’s because he looked old enough to be her father. He’s sixty-four, she’s forty: a twenty-four year difference.

Was the Culture War Ever as Important to Republican Victories as Democrats Think?

by Mark A. Smith

According to many scholars and journalists, America continues to wage an internal “culture war.” For most of the twentieth century, the account goes, domestic politics were fought over economic and class-based issues. In recent decades, however, those concerns have been overtaken by intense cultural conflicts. Stoked by Republican candidates for electoral gain, hot-button issues like abortion, homosexuality, and religious expression in public life have come to dominate our pol

Chasing the Elusive Ghost of RFK in 2008

by Leonard C. Robinson

“The modern Democrats are more a party of tragedy than of triumph. . . . And at the heart of the Democrats' quasi-tragic account, at the very center of the wistful might-have-been-but-wasn't-quite-to-be narrative, is the leader who was cut down before he had the chance fully to lead: Robert Kennedy.”-- William Kristol, Time, March 29, 2007Nearly 40 years after this death, Robert Kennedy remains an iconic figure within the Democratic Party. A

What Barack Obama (and the Democratic Party) Can Learn About Religion from W. E. B. Du Bois

by Edward J. Blum

Barack Obama and W. E. B. Du Bois have a lot in common. Both had absent fathers whom they likened to dreamers; both relied on their mothers; both earned advanced degrees from Harvard University; both traveled extensively throughout the world; both ran for United States Senate (Du Bois lost his bid as a labor candidate from New York in 1950); both elicited questions of racial authenticity, of whether they could represent African Americans since they had mixed-ancestries and were highly educated

What's Scary About the Anti-Immigration Debate

by Jean Pfaelzer

When we think of ethnic cleansing we think Darfur, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia.  Maybe its time we started thinking Fortuna, California; Hazleton, Pennsylvania; Cherokee, Georgia; and Whitewater, Wisconsin. Once, 1.5 million Native American Indians lived here; by 1900 250,000 survived the roundups, slaughter, and wars of extermination.  Between the Gold Rush and the turn of the 20th century, in town after town, Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and field workers, p

Will Hispanic Immigrants Vote for the Democrats or Republicans?

by Andrea Althoff

Should Democrats be worried that recent Hispanic immigrants will vote for the GOP? The debate about immigration raises this vital question, especially with regard to Latino renewalists, that is, Hispanic evangelicals 1 Without a doubt this ethnic-religious group will play a decisive role in the presidential election in 2008. Does the fact that Latino renewalists are strongly anti-abortion, anti-homosexual and pro-family mean that they

Should the Children of Undocumented Immigrants Pay More to Go to College?

by Joseph Yannielli

On June 26, 2007, Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell vetoed a controversial bill that would have allowed the children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at public colleges. As it is now, aspiring students without citizenship papers must pay the full out-of-state tuition, a difference of about $14,000 per year. Supporters of the bill argue that this effectively denies a hig

Excerpts: House Hearings on the Commutation of Scooter Libby's Prison Sentence

by Lee Winningham

In the aftermath of President Bush’s commutation of I. Lewis Libby’s 30-month prison sentence, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee conducted a hearing in which some testimony invoked references associated with the history of the presidential clemency.  Excerpts follow.

Articles and Excerpts Related to Social Security

Editor's Note: These articles were published at TomPaine.com in 2000. Dean Baker & Mark Weisbrot: Privatizing Social Security ... A Cure Worse than the Cold Dean Baker & Mark Weisbrot: The Numbers Game Dean Baker & Mark Weisbrot: A Social Security Primer Max Skidmore: Viewing Social Security Calmly Mark Weisbrot: Bush and Gore Are Mislead

Even the Founding Fathers Had to Worry About Gay-Baiting

by Thomas A. Foster

If the Senate passes the Matthew Shepard Act -- known also as the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act -- a long and ugly history of violence and hate based on sexual orientation may finally approach an end. The legislation was stalled for years in Congress, but with Democrats now in control it passed the House of Representatives and will be voted on by the Senate this summer.What few people realize is that the culture of terror that has long affected gays and lesbians also threatens heterosexuals. Though the hate-inspired murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998 garnered national attention, too many other offenses go largely unreported in mainstream media. Some would argue that to focus on barbaric killings obscures the run-of-the-mill abuse that gays and lesbians suffer. Such a climate of hate, backed by the ever-present threat of violence, keeps gays and lesbians from holding hands in public, embracing at an airport, or from being comfortable in workplaces where heterosexual family photos are ubiquitous. Such strictures also harm heterosexuals by enforcing narrow norms of how to act in public as men and women.

Should We Be Cheering the Democrats God-Talk?

by John Fea

As Republicans have long done, Democrats are beginning to speak openly about their religious faith, as they did recently during a nationally televised forum sponsored by CNN and Sojourners, an evangelical social justice ministry. It's now clear that the two parties differ sharply in their views on faith's meaning and significance. Democrats have a much better handle than their rivals on the role religion should play in the public arena. For many Republicans, particularly those

Is Your Older Brother Smarter than You Are?

by Stephen Murdoch

In the early 20th century, many Americans were terrified of the "feebleminded." The mentally retarded seemed to be up to no good everywhere: committing crimes, getting pregnant while unwed, prostituting themselves, drinking too much, and standing in long soup-kitchen lines. Low intelligence, so the thinking went, led to many of society's ills.Psychologists, composing a young and mainly untried field, saw opportunity in the fear of the feebleminded, for they had a new tool, the I

President Bush's Pardons

by Gene Gerard

HNN EditorThis article was first published in January 2005. On July 2, 2007 President Bush commuted the sentence of Scooter Libby.Traditionally, over the holiday season each year, the president approves of various actions of clemency. George W. Bush recently approved of pardons to four individuals convicted of embezzlement, misapplication of bank funds, possession of counterfeit obligations, and theft. Over the course of his first term, Bush has issued a mere 31 pardons and sen

The Federal War on Immigrants Is a War on All Workers

by Elliott Young

President Bush's immigration reform legislation appears to be dead in the U.S. Congress, but the ground war against undocumented immigrants continues to escalate. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has dramatically changed its tactics by its increased use of well-publicized workplace raids to terrorize immigrant communities. Although immigrants bear the brunt of these attacks, the raids undermine the position of all workers in the United States. The number of immi

FREEDOM! LIBERTY! -- How Presidents Exploit Words

by Kevin Coe

As the 2008 presidential campaign continues its long crescendo, we can expect to hear a lot of talk about freedom and liberty. After all, the candidates are trying to sound presidential and there is no more certain way to do so than to rely on what have long been presidents’ favorite symbols. So popular are freedom and liberty with the current president that in his second Inaugural address Bush used some form of these terms 49 times—more than two references for every 100 words he