Harold Meyerson

It wasn’t until the final night of the Republican Convention that I realized George W. Bush has no white friends. Oh, I knew that most of those he had designated to speak for him, both from the podium and the floor of the convention, were African-American or Latino. But last......

I. Kinder, Gentler, Compassionate Philadelphia, Wednesday morning -- Something’s wrong with our TV sets. What we‘re seeing is the photographic negative of the actual Republican National Convention. During the convention’s first night, all the speakers were black. All the delegates, however, were white. (Well, 89 percent of them. A whopping......

So where exactly do our city leaders propose that demonstrators at next month‘s Democratic Convention should rally? Zuma Beach? The Angeles National Forest? Vegas? By revoking their earlier decision to authorize demonstrations in Pershing Square, the members of our City Council have placed the city in a pickle. For the......

L.A.Weekly executive editor Harold Meyerson interviewed Ralph Nader shortly before the start of the Green Party Convention. HAROLD MEYERSON: What's different about America and the American political economy now from what it was when you wrote Unsafe at Any Speed? How has the balance of power shifted in the last......

Photo by Greg SkinnerI. SEATTLE MAN DENVER -- SO NOW SEATTLE HAS ITS CANDIDATE. Longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic, economic democrat and public citizen Ralph Nader has emerged from last weekend's national convention of the Green Party with a new identity, combining and transcending all the rest. Nader is now......

Photo by Ted Soqui For a moment last week, it was as if Newt Gingrich and impeachment and the whole damn Republican revolution had never come along. Since November 1994, the Democrats have marched in unaccustomed lock step, Clinton alongside Gephardt, New Democrat alongside Old, suppressing their differences in a......

Photos by Robert Yager (left) and Slobodan Dimitrov Here’s a question: Say there’s this vast, powerful public institution in L.A., which the public clearly wants to shape up but which resists every mandate and opportunity to change. Its civilian governing board is largely the creature of the administrative bureaucracy, which......

Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov I. Choose Your Miracle There are any number of ways to gauge just how much the three-week strike of L.A.’s janitors has changed, and electrified, Los Angeles. We could begin with the cult that’s arisen around the janitors’ T-shirts, that sea of red that rolled through......

Photo by Ted Soqui As their strike moves through its third week, it’s abundantly clear that the janitors have won Los Angeles’ heart. It’s not clear at all, however, whether they’ve won its pocketbook. (As we go to press, we’re told a settlement may be imminent. Then again, we ran......

I. Where Are We? Toto, I don‘t think we’re in Los Angeles anymore. We‘re talking L.A., remember: a city whose original raison d’etre was to be the West Coast‘s bastion of anti-unionism, and more recently, a city whose labor movement was both somnolent and invisible. It’s a city where Westsiders......