Michael Lind: All Related Content

Washington has fallen in love with "comprehensive reform" -- legislation aimed at solving all aspects of a big problem in one dramatic and history-making move.

We saw it with health care. Now comprehensive financial regulatory reform has passed in the House, with a Senate vote expected soon. Up next may come energy legislation, following President Obama's Oval Office speech last month proclaiming a new "national mission" to wean America off fossil fuels.

... country's corporate elites, including many establishment Democrats, than the views of the majority of Americans (see Michael Lind's excellent analysis). ...

The new conventional wisdom in Washington is that more spending to promote job creation is out of the question, because the public has changed its priorities and its obsessed with the danger of federal deficits.

Really? What public? The Paraguayan public? The Moroccan public?

In the summer of 2010, even as the United States was still dealing with the consequences of the global financial crisis and the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, an asteroid struck the East Coast. Early warning systems permitted most of the region’s population to be evacuated, so that only a few lives were lost when the meteor fragmented and exploded above lower Manhattan, leveling Wall Street in the biggest impact of this kind since an interplanetary object detonated above Tunguska in Siberia on June 30, 1908.

... each year from violating our nation's immigration laws with impunity is the central law-and-order issue of our time," writes commentator Michael Lind. ...

Andrew J. Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 304 pp., $25.00.

Writing for Salon, Michael Lind of the liberal New America Foundation tells his friends on the left that they need to abandon two of their favorite policy ...

The Texas State Board of Education, the most astringently reactionary body since the Spartan Ephorate, has decreed that textbooks for the schoolchildren of Texas are to include Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address along with the first inaugural of Abraham Lincoln.

Does America need a VAT? The short answer is "yes."

Influential figures, including Bruce Bartlett on the right, Paul Volcker in the center and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the center-left, have suggested that a value-added tax of the kind used by other modern governments be considered as a principal means to reduce the federal deficit. Although the White House has emphasized that there are no immediate plans for a VAT, President Obama told CNBC that a VAT is one of the major tax-reform alternatives being considered to close the budget gap.

"The fear was that if we withdraw from Afghanistan there will be civil war and external great powers will take sides. Is that worse than losing American soldiers day after day? So there's a civil war. So the regional great partners take sides. Why wouldn't they? It's their neighbours. It's their borders.” said Michael Lind, policy director of the Economic Growth Programme at the New America Foundation, at Monday's conference.

Arizona's new immigration law has provoked a firestorm of denunciation from progressives. The portion of the law that allows police to stop and question individuals who might be illegal immigrants has rightly been denounced as encouraging racial profiling. That provision is all too reminiscent of "vagrancy" and "loitering" laws from the segregationist South, which gave law enforcement officers broad discretion in harassing and arresting blacks and low-income whites.

Michael Lind, Policy Director of The Economic Growth Program at The New America Foundation, discusses immigration reform and the radical center with Lou Dobbs on his radio show.

Original article.