The American Prospect

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.

Definitely read Noam Scheiber's new piece at The New Republic. He was the one who originally said “deep dissatisfaction.” In this piece he says “deep ambivalence.” He's ostensibly disagreeing with me, but I don't actually disagree that a substantial ...

The Israel-Palestine issue was probably not intended to be the headline item from President Barack Obama's long-awaited speech on the Middle East yesterday, yet it is in danger of becoming so following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's aggressive push-back. The section of the speech Obama devoted to Israeli-Palestinian peace adopted a position for which some advocacy groups and commentators, including in the Israeli press, have been advocating for the past year.

Bank of America's announcement last week that it was placing a moratorium on foreclosures suggests the financial sector is finally taking seriously widespread reports of document fraud in the buying, selling, and servicing of mortgages. While the full implications of the problems are still unclear, evicted homeowners may see some compensation, even if they probably can't get their homes back. Banks will at least see delays in foreclosure and potentially serious sanctions. They could also see loans they thought they sold boomerang back and end up on their balance sheets.

The mortgage mess isn't going away. Loans, sold as many as 12 times before ending up in a complex security or on a financial institution's balance sheet, have been found with key legal paperwork misplaced or incorrectly transferred. If you've followed the issue, you know documentation problems prevent mortgage servicers from foreclosing on homes: They lack proof of their legal right to do so. It's a symptom of underlying irregularities, not the end of the story.

Months of agonizing, days of rumors, and plenty of consternation come to an end today with the appointment of Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor and government watchdog, to a new joint position at the Treasury and the White House. She will be tasked with jump-starting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a newly created financial regulator that is in many ways her brainchild.

... two of the shrewdest California-ologists now practicing -- Joe Mathews, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and Schwarzenegger biographer, and Mark Paul, a former Sacramento Bee editorialist and deputy state treasurer, both now affiliated with the New America Foundation. In California Crackup, Mathews and Paul provide the best explanation we've yet had of the scope and sources of the state's governmental dysfunctionality. ...

Original article

Connecticut could become the first state to offer its own public-plan option, even before most of national health reform unfolds.

The battle for the passage of health reform may have been won, but the battle over putting it into practice is just beginning. That conflict will unfold not only in Congress, on K Street, and in the courts but also in the states, which are charged with identifying and enrolling the millions of Americans without insurance coverage.

When the latest scores of our country's national reading test arrived this spring, they were as depressing as usual: Two-thirds of American fourth-graders, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, cannot read at grade level. Among Hispanic and African American children, it's even higher.