From the category archives:
Do we know how corrosive the culture of corruption is? Call it a global virus or a weapon of mass destruction; call it a cancer. It’s that bad. To be sure it is an enemy of democracy. When it infests the institutions that we rely on for the very core of our national existence – [...]
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When the Evan Bayhs feel that they must leave the political arena in despair, we must stop and think why and begin the difficult process of repair. We Americans have been defined by our sacred democratic rule of law, which gave us the tools – the will and the skills to improve our society. It [...]
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Thank you to Edgar Gorke for his thoughtful Jan. 6 response to my Jan. 3 letter. He might be interested to know that I am neither an advocate of socialism nor an ideologue of any other political or economic philosophy. I do believe that the Founders believed in our inalienable rights to life, liberty and [...]
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That question has plagued me for months! I’ve been appalled by my smart and feisty New York friends and colleagues who are not up in arms about the audacious manipulation of law by Mayor Blumberg in order to run for a third term! I’m not at all convinced that he is the only leader who [...]
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By virtue of the audacity of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s choice of Barak Obama as its 2009 recipient, the world is changed. This is not a radical impulsive group. If anything I would say its actions are by and large conservative and measured. So what did this esteemed body recognize in Obama that impelled [...]
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It has become clear that the real hope for the sustainability of the global effort to strengthen democracy and the culture of interdependence lies with the independent sector—with civic, cultural, educational and religious organizations that can embrace the principal tenets of the emerging movement and integrate them into the very core of their work. Charities [...]
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Between March 2008 and March 2009 I made three visits to Rwanda and two to Kenya. Not far from each other geographically, these nations are very different in the ways they work. With regard to ethnicity, their attitudes, customs and laws are very different indeed. In post-genocide Rwanda, under the leadership of President Paul Kagame, [...]
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The responses to President Obama’s firm commitment to health care reform in our country and to the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, one of our most distinguished scholars and public intellectuals, brought one of our less noble American traits to mind—complacency. In 1992 the noted American economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, wrote a small but [...]
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We Americans are proud of our democracy and the exceptional opportunities it has offered us. Why then are we possessed of a near pathological aversion to taxes? We are the richest country in the world and the oldest of its democracies. And yet, because of this tax phobia, we do not have access to health [...]
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