Michael Lind: All Related Content

“The largest squeezed group today are people with high-school diplomas working in the service sector,” says Michael Lind, author of a forthcoming economic history of America. “Most of them are living in the suburbs and watching TV. ...

In a presidential primary season distinguished so far by the absence of substantive debates, the controversy over whether Mitt Romney and his partners at Bain Capital should be considered job creators or job destroyers raises a profoundly important issue.

Beyond the concerns about the loss of American jobs to off-shoring or automation and the food-fight tactics of Romney's rivals is a legitimate question about what kind of capitalism 21st century Americans should want.

Any renaissance of American manufacturing must begin by fundamentally reversing our trade policies—both in general and in particular toward China. Over the past two decades, leading U.S. manufacturers, both the venerable (like General Electric) and the new (like Apple), have offshored millions of jobs—by one recent estimate, 2.9 million—to China to take advantage of the cheap labor, generous state subsidies, and low currency valuation that are linchpins of China’s mercantilist development strategy.

On July 28, 1932, at the command of President Herbert Hoover, police and soldiers led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur attacked and destroyed the camp of the Bonus Army, a group of thousands of World War I veterans and their families and allies who had spent the spring and summer protesting the unemployment created by the Great Depression. The violence, in which two veterans were killed and dozens of people were injured, shocked the American public and helped to ensure the victory of Franklin D. Roosevelt over Hoover in that fall’s presidential election.

"People have lower expectations of future income to pay debts, and they responded rationally by reducing consumption," said Michael Lind, policy director of the economic growth program for the New America Foundation and a liberal. ...

Democrats and Republicans alike are failing to convince the American people that they have the answer to their country's problems. Underneath, however, lies a deeper intellectual confusion. The two most plausible visions developed by the US centre-left and centre-right – the "knowledge economy" and the "ownership society" – lie in tatters, leaving a void in America's discussion of its economic future.

Writing at Salon.com, Michael Lind puts the racism charge in less personal terms. "In the House of Representatives," he writes, "the Tea Party faction that has used the debt ceiling issue to plunge the nation into crisis is overwhelmingly Southern in ...

As US author-essayist Michael Lind noted last month in a Salon comment piece about energy trends, it now appears that the age of fossil fuels has only just begun. “Suddenly it appears that there may be enough accessible hydrocarbons to power industrial ...

If Michael Lind's intention, in his Salon article published Tuesday, "Everything You've Heard About Fossil Fuels May Be Wrong," was to throw so many bombs at once that critics would be too buried by shrapnel to respond, then he at least partially ...

Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated public have been taught to believe in the past generation. According to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other industrial nations must undertake a rapid and expensive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy for three reasons: The imminent depletion of fossil fuels, national security and the danger of global warming.

News that Mexican authorities found 513 would-be illegal immigrants packed tightly into trucks, with the United States as their destination, should shock Americans into action. They were from Mexico, Japan, China, India and Nepal, and authorities said each had paid $7,000 to gangsters to be smuggled in.