The Washington Monthly

Confessions Of a Sweatshop Inspector

Ron Tang — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:53:00 -0400

I remember one particularly bad factory in China. It produced outdoor tables, parasols, and gazebos, and the place was a mess. Work floors were so crowded with production materials that I could barely make my way from one end to the other. In one area, where metals were being chemically treated, workers squatted at the edge of steaming pools as if contemplating a sudden, final swim. The dormitories were filthy: the hallways were strewn with garbage -- orange peels, tea leaves -- and the only way for anyone to bathe was to fill a bucket with cold water. In a… more

No Torture. No Exceptions.

Ron Tang — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

In a Manhattan courtroom in May 2001, four men were convicted for their roles in al-Qaeda's bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania three years earlier. The evidence against them had been collected without recourse to torture, coercion, or unorthodox interrogation techniques. The attacks had killed a dozen Americans and more than two hundred Africans, and family members of some of the victims attended the trial and testified about the devastating loss of their loved ones.

The trial had other benefits, too: media coverage revealed to the world that al-Qaeda had tried to acquire material for a nuclear… more

No Torture. No Exceptions.

Ron Tang — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648, effectively established an entity that most of us today take for granted: the nation-state. In the nation-state, it is the duty of the state to protect the nation and of the nation to remain loyal to the state. When security threats to the nation arise, the state must defend against them, and, in times of danger, liberty is often at odds with security. For authoritarian states, such tension is easily resolved: err on the side of security.

The tradeoff becomes more problematic in constitutional democracies such as the… more

Ask Not!

adminn — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:35:00 -0500

John F. Kennedy is not running for anything in 2008, but you'd never know it. A front-page photo in the New York Times recently showed his electability in Serbia, of all places, where local candidates are vying to establish their credentials as the latest citizens of the New Frontier. Back in the U.S., no candidate has captured the reflected glory of JFK more than Barack Obama, thanks to his youth, eloquence, and message of change. The Kennedy-Obama parallel has been played up by the press, and Obama's campaign has not discouraged those comparisons -- indeed, it has brought in Ted… more

Done Right

Articles — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 12:51:00 -0400

As even the most committed conservatives have begun to recognize the scale of the debacle, foreign and domestic, of the seven years during which they have held unchecked power, they have begun to plot a slick escape from the consequences. "Oh, that?" they will say. "That wasn't conservatism. That was something completely different." It started out as conservatism, they say, but was corrupted by the culture of Washington, by Jack Abramoff or Tom DeLay. Or, they say, so sorry, we misjudged George W. Bush, failed to see how incompetent he was. Or, as in recent tributes to Karl Rove on… more

Divide and Concur

Articles — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:38:00 -0400

There's no doubt that America's political parties have undergone a major transformation in the last two decades, and that we now have, for better or for worse, a center-left party and a center-right party(although at the moment, more right than center), pitted against one another, rather than the jumble of the past. The question is whether this process, which Ron Brownstein, until recently a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, calls the "Great Sorting-Out," is a bad thing, a good thing, or just a fact of life that isn't going away.

For most establishment pundits, the situation is self-evidently bad, and… more

Newtered

Articles — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 11:36:00 -0400

If you’ve never suffered the agony of low back pain, don’t worry -- chances are you will. About two-thirds of adults are hit with low back pain at some time in their lives, and for many the pain is sufficiently unbearable to send them hobbling into the doctor’s office. Yet although back pain is one of the most common conditions around, and although it costs billions of dollars each year in lost productivity, doctors still disagree over everything from how to diagnose the cause to what to do about it. The vast majority of low back pain -- even the… more

Best Care Everywhere

Articles — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 08:37:00 -0400

Back in July, while trying to justify his opposition to expanding government health care coverage for children, President Bush made a telling comment. The uninsured, he said, "have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room."

That remark stuck many as blithe and callous, and in many ways it was. The uninsured don’t receive in ERs anything like the full array of health care they need. Indeed, one of the abiding arguments for universal health care is that patients often wind up in the emergency room with acute illnesses that could have been treated… more

Ben Adler Quotes Mead and Dannenberg on Higher Ed Lobby

Communications — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 03:38:00 -0400

New America in the News:

Sara Mead and Michael Dannenberg are quoted in a Washington Monthly article by Ben Adler, the editor of CampusProgress.org, at the Center for American Progress. Adler examines the actions of higher ed lobby organizations and how they impact policy reform.

To read this article, please visit Washington Monthly's web site.

Islamophobes Rejoice! EU Countries are Becoming More Christian

Articles — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 06:50:00 -0400

Americans of all political stripes tend to see what they want to see in the European Union. For progressives, its example is supposed to show how a robust welfare state, including universal health care, is consistent with prosperity. It’s also supposed to show how separation of church and state, multilateralism, multiculturalism, opposition to the death penalty, embrace of gay marriage, state-sponsored preschool, gun control, the Kyoto Treaty, and other progressive causes are all consistent with a just and sustainable civilization -- indeed, with becoming a "moral superpower."

And so we have received books like Mark Leonard’s Why Europe Will Run the… more