Harold Meyerson

Days of the Locust

Harold Meyerson
Illustration by Juan Alvarado Like the earth beneath it, social and political California erupts in all manner of ways. There are inner-city riots; Los Angeles was the only American city in the second half of the 20th century that was home to two of them. For the past decade, there......

Friend of the Workingman

Harold Meyerson
CHICAGO — Gray Davis blew into the windy city this Monday, unheralded, to talk to the union presidents gathered here for the AFL-CIO’s summertime executive-council meeting and to put the touch on them for 10 million bucks. I report this not in anger, for any pol confronted with the kind......

The Recall Is Not Our Friend

Harold Meyerson
It’s an odd perspective that mistakes gang rape for courtly love, but I fear some of my friends may be doing just that. In recent articles, two terrific writers whose work has graced this paper have seen silver linings in the Gray Davis recall movement that just plain aren’t there......

Others and Brothers

Harold Meyerson
If you’d ignored all the news of the past three years and just read Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision last Thursday striking down the Texas sodomy law and proclaiming — damn near shouting — that gays and lesbians are “entitled to respect for their private lives,” you might have thought we......

The Recall’s Reach

Harold Meyerson
I have a problem. I can no longer go to a party, a dinner or even a lunch in D.C. without someone asking me about the Davis recall in California. Problem is, there’s no short way to discuss the recall. For a while, I would just shoot my questioner an......

The Godfather

Harold Meyerson
“Deron has his godfather, it’s Nate,” L.A. County Federation of Labor chief Miguel Contreras noted as he sat down in his office to talk about what was then the upcoming City Council election to replace Nate Holden. It was Tuesday, April 29, three weeks before the runoff election in L.A.’s......
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Which Black L.A.?

Harold Meyerson
If you’re old enough and have been in L.A. long enough, you can remember a time when the city’s black community was at the center of local progressive politics. From the late ’50s, when the stirrings of the civil rights movement began to reanimate American liberalism, through the early or......

Neocons Run Amok!

Harold Meyerson
Whom the gods would destroy, they would first lead to military victory in Iraq. With the resounding success of the military campaign in Iraq, the neoconservatives have gone utterly manic. Any force that they see as standing in their way is fair game, and in the last week they have......

Perle the Impervious

Harold Meyerson
Richard Perle looks to be a genius at breaking, or at least bending, the rules, but recently he found one to live by: If you have to resign in disgrace, it’s best to do so in the opening weeks of a war. Perle, who stepped down late last month as......

The Neocons’ War

Harold Meyerson
When the histories of the U.S.-Iraqi war are written, someone is going to have to track down when exactly the neoconservatives sold the Brooklyn Bridge to our president. I don’t mean the idea of the war itself, though the neocons have been promoting it ever since Poppy Bush let Saddam......