Next Social Contract: Latest Articles

The inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States, along with the deepening of the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, marks more than a shift in the pendulum swings of partisan politics. In these pages I have suggested that it marks the dawn of a Fourth American Republic, in the way that the New Deal marked the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt's Third Republic of the United States and the Civil War and Reconstruction began Lincoln's Second… more

Six days before Thanksgiving, a truck driver heading south on Interstate 81 through Shenandoah County, Virginia,ploughed his tractor trailer into a knot of cars that had slowed on the rain-slicked highway. The collision killed an eighty-year-old woman and her one- and four-year-old grandchildren, and brought traffic to a standstill along a ten-mile stretch of road for the better part of the afternoon.

Even before President Bush announced that billions of dollars in aid from the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Recovery Program will soon flow to America's automobile manufacturers, a third wave of relief-seekers was already washing up on the shores of the Potomac.

With Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick’s announcement that the Bush administration had agreed to increase and extend its support for Massachusetts’s bold health-care reform initiative, we witnessed the kind of bipartisan leadership that has thus far eluded those trying to stabilize the financial markets.

Tough love, in the form of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, may well be the best course for the automotive Big Three. But the catastrophic ripple effect of Ford, Chrysler and GM's insolvency would threaten the economies of several states and the jobs of millions of Americans, including many who have never spent a day in the employ of the woefully mismanaged trio.

It is hard to imagine any incoming administration, never mind one that rode to power on the promise of hope and change, allowing this… more