The Nation

"Shovel ready."

It's the magic incantation to fix our economic woes. Many states and federal agencies have already gone from scouring their budgets for things to cut to green- lighting construction projects. The Obama administration's $787 billion stimulus package is sure to muster many shovels in an effort to rouse a despondent economy and put Americans back to work.

In the days between Christmas and New Year's Eve, Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, sat at his desk in Lower Manhattan and reached out to people who had lavished generous donations on his organization during the long, benighted tenure of George W. Bush. It was a heady moment: the era of Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales was winding to a close, and Barack Obama was about to assume office, having vowed to rescind some of his predecessor's more egregious assaults… more

In 1979 Gus Speth, a Yale-trained lawyer and co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), became chair of President Carter's Council on Environmental Quality. He was 37. Approached by two scientists concerned about the rise in the earth's temperatures as a result of increased carbon emissions, Speth commissioned a study. "It created quite a stir," he says. "It got a lot of media attention.... In 1981 we knew enough that I'm quoted in the New York Times saying we ought to cap greenhouse [gases]

Leo Hindery, the chair of the Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation, and former Michigan Senator Donald Riegle, a Democrats who ...

The House of Representatives is a body that produces few stars, but Jim Cooper of Tennessee is a household name inside the Beltway. David Brooks has called him "one of the most thoughtful, cordial and well-prepared members of the House." He is viewed by the well-funded budget-hawk constituency as one of its most articulate advocates. Among his colleagues he has a reputation as a wonk and an intellectual--he even teaches a class at Vanderbilt University on health policy--and as the philosopher for the caucus of forty-nine

Odds are you've never heard of Gary Gensler, the man President Obama has nominated to run the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). But it's slightly more likely you've heard of Brooksley Born, the woman who held that position under Clinton in the late 1990s. Amid the cascading financial crisis and cries of "Nobody could have predicted!" from many of those who were instrumental in bringing it about, Born has emerged as one of the rare voices that warned of the perils ahead. In 1997 she began to… more

Three hours before Barack Hussein Obama took the oath of office to become the nation's first African-American president, the crowd already looked impossible. Gazing west from the Capitol, you could see them: an incomprehensible mass of peaceful citizens, overwhelming every monument, impediment and security banner that had been put up to contain them. The sight was so arresting that when the senators marched out onto the rostrum, Patrick Leahy and Orrin Hatch stopped to snap photos.

Advocates of a Grand Bargain, such as Flynt Leverett and Hilary Mann Leverett, suggest forcefully that the talks should cover the entire spectrum of issues ...

The great financial bubble of the Clinton-Bush years has ended in tears--in home foreclosures, bank failures and what promises to be the most severe global economic recession since the Great Depression. As President-elect Obama puts together his economic recovery program, he needs to understand that the economic crisis is the result not just of unscrupulous mortgage lenders and unregulated investment bankers on Wall Street but of the globalization of finance and trade that key members of his economic team set… more

By proposing a $100 billion "green stimulus" package to create jobs and cut carbon emissions, President-elect Obama has wisely decided not to let the economic crisis get in the way of addressing climate change. He may even see the crisis as a way of tackling climate change faster. In September his campaign's energy adviser, Jason Grumet, told a Harvard crowd that the conversation about climate change would be transformed when legislation addressing it is seen as "the next big American… more