Archive
Progressive Breakfast - 3/26/2009
House, Senate Budgets Leave Key Details For Later The Hill on how Congress is trying to save fights over health care and climate for later: "Though the budget plans put forth by Obama, Spratt and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) are largely...
The Obama Budget: A Stick In The Eye For Banks
With all the fuss over Wall Street bailouts and AIG bonuses, one banking breakthrough is going unnoticed. Obama's proposed budget completely eliminates an unnecessary, obsolete bank subsidy: College student loans – where the subsidy goes to the bank, not the student....
Learning Deficits
Will Obama's transformative budget survive? As his press conference last night illustrated, it runs a serious risk of drowning in a swamp of cant. The budget is getting strafed by politicians in both parties for its deficits and debt. (The deficit is the annual...
Time to Deliver: Seven Steps to Revolution, Revisited
Terrance Heath kicked off our conversation by invoking Alexis de Tocqueville's observation that change comes about as a "revolution of expectations." Since how people greet and adapt to transformative change is a subject I'm rather passionate about, I'd like to riff...
The Populist Moment
I discuss with American News Project's Harry Hanbury and Nick Penniman what's next for the populist uprising spurred by today's economic crisis. This video traces how progressives helped shaped the New Deal and the post-World War II recovery, and I talk about the...
Progressive Breakfast - 3/25/2009
President Makes Case For Bold Budget At prime-time presser, President Obama responds to whether he'd accept budget without cap on carbon pollution and middle-class tax cut: JAKE TAPPER (ABC): ... Senate Democrats are writing a budget ... they're not including the...
Incendiary Data in a Plain Paper Journal
Of all the people in the United States, 99.99 percent have never perused the pages of the Statistics of Income Bulletin, a research journal the IRS publishes four times a year. For the power suits on Wall Street, that’s a good thing. If more Americans ever really...
Time To Deliver
Last week, when the fury over AIG bonuses was just peaking, I read something that jolted me out of own anger and into a realization: After a transformational election and at the beginning of a transformational presidency, progressives need to remember: the real...
An Uneven Journey
Earlier this year, I visited my father, who lives in the Bay Area. As we drove from the Oakland airport, the conversation quickly turned to the Obama presidency. Born in 1923, my dad survived the Great Depression, fought in World War II, endured vicious Jim Crow...
Progressive Breakfast - 3/24/2009
Targeting The Obstructionists Hotline On Call previews next stage in Campaign for America's Future effort to pressure obstructionists to support Obama budget: "Campaign for America's Future co-director Robert Borosage and USAction president William McNary will join...
