My grandmother was born in the 1880s, died in the late 1940s, and lived what I have come to think of as a nineteenth-century life.

As the daughter of Irish immigrants, she was born into a family and culture of working class poverty. She was literate but otherwise poorly educated. She married young, lost one child and raised five others, including my mother, who was her youngest. Grandma helped support her family first by working as a laundress for a wealthy Park Avenue family, and later by running a boardinghouse on the West Side of Manhattan.

My grandmother’s life was very tightly circumscribed – her family, relatives, neighbors, the Catholic Church, and the endless struggle of the poor to stay alive, stay employed, stave off illness, and educate their children in the hope that they would have a safer and better life. Continue reading →

When I was young and living in New York, I wandered one day into a political storefront at the other end of my neighborhood and began one of the great adventures of my life.

For the next ten years, I immersed myself in the nuts and bolts of the New York City political system, first as a street-level campaign volunteer and then as an elected member of the Democratic Party hierarchy and leader of the Party’s operations in my community. Continue reading →

I have always loved the opening lines of William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming – his words seem at once mystical, haunting, and as meaningful in our time as in his:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer/ Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats wrote those words in 1919, in the aftermath of The Great War, when it must have seemed that the whole world had lost its way. Americans have been spoiled because in our lifetime war has taken place “over there” instead of “over here.”  We know little of what it is like to watch the structures and institutions that provide order and meaning disintegrate overnight. Continue reading →

The Long Slump is economist Joseph Stiglitz’s name for the stubbornly weak state of the US economy. Writing in Vanity Fair magazine, Stiglitz argues that the conditions that led up to the present recession eerily mirror the conditions that caused the Great Depression of the 1930s.

If he is correct, it means that the current war against spending and economic investment  in Washington, DC will have two drastic effects. First, it will prolong our economic stagnation and suffering. Second, it will delay the profound changes that are necessary to put our economy back on a growth path. Continue reading →