Newsweek

Winning Over the Values Voters

Ron Tang — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:32:00 -0400

In Barack Obama's now famous remarks to rich donors in San Francisco in early April, he attributed the fact that white Democrats in small towns were resisting his candidacy to their anger over their economic misfortune. "They get bitter," Obama said, "and cling to guns or religion... as a way to explain their frustration." Obama seemed to be implying that social conservatism is a toxic byproduct of economic distress -- and it may have hurt him in Pennsylvania last week, where he lost the primary contest to Hillary Clinton.

Yet the notion expressed by Obama is hardly new. Way back in… more

Columnist Howard Fineman Quotes Len Nichols on Coverage

Communications — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 13:47:00 -0400

New America in the News:

June 18, 2007 issue - Michael Moore is a uniquely American hybrid: the profit-making, anti-establishment agitator. In that line of work, your instincts have to be sharp. His are. In films that mix brave journalism and brazen agitprop, he has been ahead of the curve on the demise of heavy industry; the deadly blend of teenage rage and the gun culture, and the shaky reasoning behind, and execution of, the Iraq War. In person, he is a friendly bear of a guy—until the tape is rolling. Then the populist piranha pops out. I watched him working the lobby of one of his Washington premieres. He had a film crew in tow...

Now Moore is back with "Sicko," his docu-tribe about our health-care "system." Once again, Moore's timing is perfect. Aside from Iraq, there is no bigger issue on the minds of voters. Two presidential candidates, John Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama, have come forth with ambitious plans that call for vastly extending coverage...

It would be nice to think that the urgency is the result of outrage at our mediocre infant-mortality and life-expectancy numbers, which are among the worst in the developed world. With a sure sense of how to be annoying, Moore praises Cuba's record (which in some respects is better than ours), and heaps kudos on France, the health-care paragon.

But the real reason the topic is atop the agenda is that the middle class is scared—again. In 1991, in the midst of a recession, Democrat Harris Wofford scored an upset victory in a U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania with an ad, written by James Carville and Paul Begala. It asked: if every criminal is entitled to a lawyer, why isn't every family entitled to a doctor? Carville and Begala migrated to Bill Clinton's presidential campaign; a promise to push for universal health care went with them. "Back then, the concern was that people were losing jobs, and, with them, their health care," says Len Nichols, an economist at the New America Foundation. "Now it's not that you will lose your job, but that you simply can't afford the coverage." Twenty years ago, Nichols's figures show, health spending comprised 7 percent of the average family's income and compensation. Today that number is 20 percent...

For the complete article, please visit the Newsweek website.

Newsweek Credits Terry Tamminen with Schwarzenegger's Green Plan

Communications — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 19:08:00 -0400

New America in the News:

"Pimp My Ride" isn't the sort of television program one watches for a lesson in eco-consciousness. Each week on the MTV reality show, one lucky teenager's old clunker is transformed into an outrageously appointed dream car...For today's episode, "Pimp My Ride" has invited a man who knows a thing or two about muscle. Peering under the crimson and white hood of a pimped-out '65 Chevy Impala, Arnold Schwarzenegger all but caresses the new 800-horsepower engine, which has been overhauled to run on bio-diesel for a special Earth Day episode of the show. "You can have an engine that's fast and furious and still reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 to 40 percent," Schwarzenegger declares for the cameras. "This is the future..."

Schwarzenegger traces his green sensibilities to his childhood in postwar Austria, where he grew up with rationed food and electricity--and had to haul bath water from a well...

After marrying Maria, Schwarzenegger soaked up even more environmental activism from her cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted environmental lawyer. When Schwarzenegger first ran for office during the 2003 election to recall California Gov. Gray Davis, Kennedy recommended his friend Terry Tamminen, a well-known ocean advocate from Santa Monica, as the campaign's environmental adviser. Tamminen helped the novice candidate craft an environmental-action plan, which included generous subsidies for hydrogen and solar power, as well as the establishment of huge nature conservancies in the Sierras and a ban on offshore drilling...

For the complete article, please visit the Newsweek website.

Why We're the New Irish

Articles — Mon, 23 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Antonio Villaraigosa may not realize it, but his election as mayor of America's second largest city borrows a page from Al Smith. Like a lot of Irish-American politicians of his day, Smith knew how to play the ethnic card to great effect. After all, "shamrock politics" had helped the Irish establish a firm grasp on power throughout the Northeast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But as Smith rose through the ranks in New York politics, from speaker of the Assembly to the statehouse in the 1910s, both he and Irish-controlled Tammany Hall, the powerful Manhattan Democratic Party… more

The Arrogant Empire

Articles — Mon, 24 Mar 2003 00:00:00 -0500

The United States will soon be at war with Iraq. It would seem, on the face of it, a justifiable use of military force. Saddam Hussein runs one of the most tyrannical regimes in modern history.

For more than 25 years he has sought to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and has, in several documented cases, succeeded. He gassed 60,000 of his own people in 1986 in Halabja. He has launched two catastrophic wars, sacrificing nearly a million Iraqis and killing or wounding more than a million Iranians. He has flouted 16 United Nations resolutions over 12 years that have… more

Bush Whistles Dixie

Articles — Mon, 23 Dec 2002 00:00:00 -0500

When it comes to foreign policy, George W. Bush has broken radically with the bipartisan tradition of liberal internationalism, shared by both his father and Bill Clinton. Even before 9-11, he was repudiating treaties, ignoring the United Nations and sidelining NATO allies. The administration has announced a grandiose global strategy of unilateral American domination, even as it has abandoned its time-honored role of honest broker in the Middle East and embraced, almost completely, Ariel Sharon's war of occupation against millions of Palestinians.

How to explain this dramatic break with tradition? Where does the Bush administration's profoundly conservative America-firstism come from?… more

Era of Big Government Has Just Begun

Articles — Mon, 23 Sep 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Conservatives who support "regime change" in Iraq might reflect that the forthcoming war for Baghdad is likely to change the government here in the U.S. as well. Indeed, a close look at a new document published on Friday by the White House, "The National Security Strategy of the United States," shows that the despairing wisdom of the early- 20th-century American anti-war radical Randolph Bourne -- "war is the health of the state" -- has been proven yet again.

Put simply, President Bush, once a small-government governor with a unilateralist bent, is morphing into a big-government presidential multilateralist. Maybe that was… more

Book Review of David Bollier's Silent Theft

Articles — Mon, 10 Jun 2002 03:00:00 -0400

It's almost human nature: if you're allowed the use of something for enough time, you begin to think you have a right to it, even that you own it. Take broadcast television. Its signals travel by means of the electromagnetic spectrum, specifically that segment known colloquially as the airwaves. The spectrum is a fact of the physical universe. Capital didn't create it. It can't be improved by way of adding value. It's inherently a public resource.

Yet broadcasters treat it like a birthright. When in 1996 they won new frequencies for high-definition television -- at no charge -- they were… more

Israel Is Not America's Greatest Ally

Articles — Mon, 08 Apr 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Once again, conflict is raging between Israel and the Palestinians--and once again, the U.S. government can see fault only on one side. Even as Israeli soldiers were demolishing his compound and threatening his life, Palestinian Authority chairman Yasir Arafat was instructed by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to end terrorism against Israel, including that committed by groups Arafat cannot control. What passes in the United States as an evenhanded stance is perceived, not only in the Middle East but in Europe and throughout the world, as unquestioning American support of bully tactics by Israel. In fact, with his uncritical… more

Now, Just Staying at Your Job Is Heroism

Articles — Tue, 16 Oct 2001 00:00:00 -0400

The Terror War has inverted the familiar socioeconomic pattern of dying for one's country.

Usually, it's been young men, mostly poor and working class, who went off to the front to do and die. But in this war, so far at least, the home front has been the fearful killing field -- at the World Trade Center, in airliners, and in the offices of media companies and prominent politicans. And so the gold stars of mourning go to a new group as well: the bereaved relatives of white-collar knowledge-workers.

Since World War II, the trend in American life has been the distancing,… more