Don't count on the latest round of good economic news to have much of an impact on the elections. There are very few undecided voters left and these minor changes aren't likely to change anyone's mind.
(Photo By Mike Groll)All around America, we've watched the devastation of Hurricane Sandy with a sense of shock and heartbreak. For millions of people who suffered from the storm, some of the hardest questions seem to be about the simplest things. When will the power be back? How do I get to work? When will I be able to send my kids to school?
Joseph Stiglitz has a decent résumé. He won the Nobel Prize in economics and served as chairman of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers before being named chief economist of the World Bank. His C.V. , however, pales before his passionate commitment to pushing for economic policies that help the poor and powerless — inside and out of the United States.
Which Mitt Romney will we see on foreign policy, if he’s elected? The slightly right of center cautious international consensus builder? Or the reckless neocon sock puppet? These questions have been nagging me for the past couple of months, but I think I’ve found the answer.
Last week The Washington Post published a three-part series on the U.S. government’s dramatic increase in targeted killing, and the steps being taken to institutionalize extra-judicial assassination as standard operating procedure far into the future. “Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it,” the series reports.
Three months ago, anticipating that the media and presidential campaigns wouldn’t focus on the struggles of the poor and near poor in a substantive way, TheNation.com kicked off a new campaign: “#TalkPoverty: Questions for Obama and Romney.”
Will the Congressional Democrats recover the House of Representatives from the clutches of the cruelest, most corporately monetized, anti-people Republican Party since 1858? (see the House Democratic Caucus report) Amazingly, the answer, less than a week before the election, is no, according to veteran House Democrats, pollsters and the Washington D.C. punditry.
