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New Web Column at The Washington Post
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
I've started writing a weekly web column for washingtonpost.com. I'll be posting every Tuesday at noon. Here's the first one. I welcome your comments.
I intend to feature independent and progressive thinking about politics, policies and activism--and engage the Right and "conservadems" in the battle of ideas. I look forward to challenging the limits of the insider/mainstream political conversation and reporting on what's in the news, what's not and what should be. I'll expose obstacles to change and, at a time when so many are demoralized by our politics, I'll propose ways to reinvigorate our democracy! I'll also keep posting my blog at Editor's Cut.
Check out my column every Tuesday at washingtonpost.com/opinions.
(31) CommentsFebruary 9, 2010
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Welcome to Palinland
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
With a nod to Rick Perlstein, Welcome to Palinland. Atop Palinland's Mount Rushmore are Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater. Palinland's Bill of Rights has been edited and redacted, reordered and revised with red ink: in Palinland, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments that ensure due process and the rights of the accused are merely suggestive measures to be administered based on the emotional whim of a carefully-harnessed fear and a fervently-stoked anger. And in Palinland, the Tenth Amendment's reservation of power for the individual states is paramount, a necessary protection for a people whose government is supposedly hell-bent on destroying them.
Though Sarah Palin's National Tea Party Convention keynote garnered more robust bursts of applause when she invoked birthday boy Ronald Reagan (he would have been 99), the real sage behind her speech was Barry Goldwater. Careful to sidestep some of Goldwater's more piquant rhetoric, Palin nonetheless delivered a speech steeped in the late Arizonan's extremist brand of conservatism. In his 1960 manifesto The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater wrote, "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden." Palin took an equally extremist anti-Washington/anti-government stance, fulminating against the 2009 Recovery and Reinvestment Act by condemning the "fat strings attached" to federal stimulus dollars and by accusing the Obama administration of baldly using the stimulus as a power grab that "disrespect[s] the Tenth Amendment of our Constitution." (Never mind the denunciation of Miranda Rights that she herself had made minutes earlier.)
Palin continued to further explicate the tenets of Goldwater, Version 2.0, as she spelled out her "common-sense conservatism" platform: "The government that governs least governs best...The constitution provides the best road map towards a more perfect union...Only limited government can expand prosperity and opportunity for all." In Palin's universe, Obama hates the American system of government and represents a threat to American security, prosperity, and freedom.
(279) CommentsFebruary 7, 2010
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Around The Nation
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
Hopefully you've read Professor Lawrence Lessig's provocative new essay, "How to Get Our Democracy Back." Lessig's piece is essential reading for people across the political spectrum, and we're doing what we can to reach everyone concerned about the future of our democracy. Lessig appeared on Democracy Now and on Bill Moyers Journal, but also on the conservative Hugh Hewitt radio show, and his piece was reprinted at Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com. As Lessig argues, whether you are a progressive who wants healthcare reform or a conservative who wants smaller government, none of it is possible unless we fix Congress first. You can view the Bill Moyers Journal segment here.
Also Around the Nation this week:
Super Super Bowl reading from The Nation:
(35) CommentsFebruary 6, 2010
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Question Time in Our Democracy
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
"We live in a world that increasingly demands more dialogue than monologue."
Those are words from the founding manifesto issued earlier this week by a diverse group of bloggers, journalists, commentators, techies and politicos calling for more question-and-answer sessions, or "Question Time," between the President and the opposition party.
I am one of those, along with Grover Norquist, who has signed on. Here's why: these are times when unfiltered, unfettered public debate--rigorous, substantive, candid and civil--is rare and hard to find. I believe that "Demand Question Time" could help us nurture a more informed, more vibrant democracy.
(92) CommentsFebruary 5, 2010
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No Defense for This Budget
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
Deficit hysteria has reached new levels yet where is the attention to an out of control defense budget that is now the largest since World War II? While the Obama Admistration's three-year freeze on discretionary spending is a bad idea, it's made even worse because unprecedented Pentagon spending is exempted from it.
Who would know from all of the whining about budget deficits that military spending is the largest discretionary item in the federal government? Exempting all security-related expenditures from common sense cuts will have serious consequences for almost everything the government does--from job creation, poverty reduction and alternative energy development, to aid for cash-strapped state and local governments. In fact, the Economic Policy Institute reports that non-security-related discretionary spending is already at near-historic lows as a share of GDP. At a time when foreclosures are still rising, and we face double-digit unemployment, this freeze will make digging out from the Great Recession more difficult.
On Monday, the Obama Administration requested $708 billion for the Defense Department next year--including $549 billion for its base budget and $159 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This doesn't even include the $33 billion supplement the White House will request for its escalation in Afghanistan this year.
(132) CommentsFebruary 2, 2010
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Around The Nation
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
Hopefully everyone had a chance to read what Jeremy Scahill calls the saddest and most moving story he's ever written: his interview with Mohammed Kinani, father of the youngest victim of the Blackwater mass shooting in Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007. Here is a powerful slideshow from the interview, with images of Kinani's beloved son Ali. We'll have video of the interview up this week, and will continue to follow Kinani's struggle for justice. To date, Blackwater remains unaccountable for their actions in 2007.
A few things from our orbit this week:
A new video and a major forum on the future of journalism ...
(29) CommentsFebruary 1, 2010
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True Populism
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
A very sweet victory in Oregon this week, where voters passed two ballot initiatives to raise taxes on the wealthiest 3 percent of its residents--individuals earning over $125,000 and couples exceeding $250,000 annually--and also on businesses which have until now enjoyed " one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the nation."
The $1 billion in increased revenues will go towards public education and social services, averting significant cuts which would have been made worse by the loss of approximately $250 million in matching funds from the federal government.
Charles Sheketoff, executive director of the Oregon Center for Public Policy (OCPP), told the New York Times this was a victory for "true populism" and that conservatives and tea partiers had "tried to hijack the term."
(269) CommentsJanuary 29, 2010
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Corporations Ain't People: Top 10 Responses
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people, free to flood campaigns with cash contributions so that the voices of, well--real people--are drowned out, the stakes and emotions around this issue are high. Rightly so. Here are 10 creative replies to this monstrous decision (in no particular order). I welcome your own suggestions below.
1) "If corporations are 'people' then HEY it's time to re-institute the draft..." --ddeclue, Democratic Underground
2) "Corporations are legally people. And it makes sense, folks. They do everything people do except breath, die, and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River." --Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report
(175) CommentsJanuary 26, 2010
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Around The Nation
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
This was a rough week for progressives. But will it be our Waterloo--or a turning point? Here's a piece I did for the Wall Street Journal, "Give Up on Post-Partisanship." And here are some suggestions from William Greider to the President on how to regain the public trust.
A few other things this week:
The Breakdown: Can Healthcare Reform Be Saved ...
(152) CommentsJanuary 22, 2010
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Taking on the Banksters
By Katrina vanden Heuvel
As I've written previously, The Nation is a community defined by spirited--often fractious--debate. But when it comes to what we're taking away from the Democratic loss in Massachusetts, it's safe to say there is a consensus of sorts emerging: moving forward, Democrats need to show they are on the side of working people every step of the way. (Read Greider, Nichols, and me.)
The Obama Administration's proposed bank tax was a start, though it should be larger and also extend to a windfall tax on excessive bonuses. But raising $117 billion from the Too Big To Fail financial institutions which brought us this economic meltdown is a good and smart step down the populist path Democrats should have stayed true to post-2008.
And today, a bolder proposal from the Administration--much overdue--to limit the size of banks and their ability to take people's deposits and engage in casino-like investment banking. The New York Times reports that the regulation targets the Big Five--Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs. There are indications this is a move towards restoring the kind of protective firewalls enacted through Glass-Steagall following the Great Depression.
(193) CommentsJanuary 21, 2010
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Thoughts on politics, current affairs, riffs and reflections on what’s in the news and what’s not--but should be.
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