If all you’ve got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone will be treated as criminal. This is increasingly the American way of life, a path that involves “solving” social problems (and even some non-problems) by […]

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I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called In Search of the Constitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document. By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of […]

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The headlines haven’t been particularly kind to America’s most relentlessly greedy over the past year. In just the last month alone, the world’s two most visible religious leaders—Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama—have once again dramatically denounced our global concentration of income and wealth. And the world’s most powerful political leader, Barack Obama, has chimed […]

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(Source: AP) Channeling the spirit of the holiday season, key lawmakers managed to set aside dysfunction and take the first step in a small budget deal for the 2014 fiscal year. Back in October, Congress ended the 16-day government shutdown that cost this country 120,000 jobs by appointing a 29-member, bipartisan Budget Conference Committee to […]

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Next month, we celebrate two anniversaries—the beginning of the War on Poverty (1964) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, 1994). So it is a good time to consider how these two programs affected the working class and how they continue to shape working-class political attitudes toward the Democratic Party. The War on Poverty […]

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