Mexico’s Hopeful New President

The election of the left populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as president of Mexico is an historic breakthrough for progressives there. It could also offer progressives in the United States a path out of their own political stalemate on immigration…

How What We Do There Drives Central Americans Here

The “caravan” of some 200 Central American refugees at our southern border has given Donald Trump another opportunity to inflame the already incendiary debate over immigration from the south. Tweeting that “our country is being stolen,” he called out the National…

Ron Blackwell (1946–2018)

Ron Blackwell, a friend to the Economic Policy Institute since its early days, died on February 25. Ron had a long career in the labor movement, starting with the Amalgamated Textile Workers Union in New York, moving to the AFL-CIO in…

Davos is Trump’s Kind of Town

The global punditry is all a twitter this week with the prospect of Donald Trump going to Davos – the chic winter gathering place of the world’s rich and powerful. The media narrative is that this will be a titanic…

Trump: No Isolationist

Denis MacShane is correct to criticize the U.S. pullout of UNESCO as unproductive (The Globalist, October 25, 2017). But to label Trump an “isolationist” who is taking the United States back to the 1920s is a misdiagnosis. Given Trump’s manic instability…

A Short History of American Empire

Review of The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the birth of American Empire, by Stephen Kinzer   Toward the end of this history of the domestic conflict over U.S. overseas expansion at the close of the nineteenth century, Stephen…