Harold Meyerson

WASHINGTON — You should probably be sitting down when you read this, but the thing I miss most since I moved from L.A. to D.C. in 2001 is the driving.Have four years in Washington during the presidency of George W. Bush driven me batty? Could be. Nonetheless, hear me out.In......

ST. LOUIS — And then there were two.America picked up a second labor federation here on Tuesday, and it doesn’t bear all that much resemblance to the first. The AFL-CIO is a full-service federation — or was, before cutbacks necessitated by the defection of the unions gathered here in St......

The Arnold is repositioning. With his three signature ballot measures already going down in flames, he has endorsed a fourth, limiting the political activities of public-sector unions, not only because they continually frustrate his efforts to shrink the public sphere, but because he needs to win at least one contest......

Government begins with disaster — in fact, in response to floods. The earliest civilizations were riverbank cultures along the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates. And the first truly large-scale collective human endeavor was to build levees to prevent those rivers from overflowing their banks and destroying humankind’s first crops. Which......

Looks like George W. Bush has gotten his British political philosophers all bollixed up. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, he promised that Iraq would move to a Lockean social contract, a democratic compact enshrining majority rule and minority rights in the new Iraq. Instead, Iraq seems headed more toward......

Roxbury Drive was always the centerpiece of the Old Hollywood tour I gave to out-of-town friends when they came to L.A. The two blocks north of Sunset featured Jack Benny’s house, Lucille Ball’s and Jimmy Stewart’s. My late friend Jim Chapin, probably the most brilliant political historian of his generation,......

Breaking up is hard to do. And for an American labor movement currently splitting in two, nowhere more so than in California.The impact of the secession of three of the AFL-CIO’s four largest unions is particularly acute in California because the departed three — the Service Employees International Union (SEIU),......

CHICAGO — The hardest thing to explain is how labor got here. How it reached the point where it now looks as if we may have two separate and distinct labor federations come September. After all, it’s not as if the two groups wanted to represent different elements within the......

The seat assignments moved around right up to the start of the ceremony. Everybody wanted to be close to Antonio. Ninety minutes before Antonio Villaraigosa took the oath as mayor last Friday, while the mayor-elect and his family, friends and assorted dignitaries were still at the pan-religious service up Temple......

Illustration by Miguel Valenzuela Is there a political consultant in America who would have advised Antonio Villaraigosa to take the jobs he took if he one day wanted to be elected to a major political position? Let’s see — there was organizing immigrant workers in the 1970s, before the great......