Are you better off today than you were four years ago? Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign zinger is back in 2012.

Let's see. Four years ago ... four years ago. That was September 2008. Oh yes, I remember it well.

It was a time of white-knuckled panic that a new Great Depression was upon us. The banks were teetering, then insurance companies, then other big corporate names, notably General Motors. Stock prices were plunging along with house values. But even before that craziness started, the federal budget was snowing blizzard-condition deficits — the inevitable pile-up from reckless tax cuts and accelerated spending.

These were the last months of the George W. Bush administration. It was when Bush launched both the Wall Street and Detroit bailouts, not because he found them ideologically agreeable, but because it was that or the abyss.

Do you remember Sept. 29, 2008, when Republican hotheads in the House, helped by some on the left, rejected the bank bailout? As they cast their votes, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 800 points. Minds changed quickly after that.

By October, credit had tightened up so that even great corporations couldn't borrow. Unemployment started rising fast.

The following February, the new Obama administration had to run stress tests to see whether the too-big-to-fail banks could survive a worsening downturn on their own. At the same time, it was laying out the conditions for extending further taxpayer assistance to GM. The terrifying possibility existed then that the American auto industry would collapse and the industrial Midwest with it. By August 2009, unemployment hit a peak of 10 percent. Remember all this? My stomach remembers, as do many other stomachs.

Reports started coming in of mounting health and emotional ...

Startling new evidence of the torture, unlawful rendition, and other abuse of Libyan anti-Gaddafi rebels in U.S. detention facilities during the George W. Bush administration was revealed Wednesday by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The groundbreaking report, “Delivered into Enemy Hands: U.S.-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya”, was made public one week after Attorney General Eric Holder announced the Justice Department’s decision to cease investigations of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials who may have been responsible for the deaths of two prisoners.

The investigation, which initially began with the examination of 101 prisoner cases, was reduced to that of only two already dead prisoners. Additionally, the investigation only encompassed the abuses which were unauthorised by Bush.

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We’ve all heard it said by our teachers when we were in school, we’ve all heard it said by politicians, including presidents: “Democracies don’t start wars.”

And yet we have had the decades-long American war on Vietnam, the Reagan invasion of Grenada, the LBJ invasion of the Dominican Republic, the George H.W. Bush invasion of Panama, the G.W. Bush back-to-back invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now we have President Obama talking about launching an unprovoked war on Iran.

Is the much touted axiom wrong?

I don’t think so. I believe that in a democracy, where the will of the people is paramount, it would be very unlikely to have a country start a war. People generally don’t like war. They need to feel truly threatened or even under attack before they will accept the idea of their or anyone’s fathers, husbands, brothers and sons (and now mothers, wives, daughters and sisters) being marched off to face the horrors of war.

Clearly the reason we have seen the US starting so many wars is that the US is and has not for a very long time been anything approaching a democracy.

Democracy in the US is a purely formalistic thing. People get to vote once every two and four years to chose from a narrow list of pre-selected candidates approved by the real rulers of the country, who are the wealthy owners of the large business interests, many of which prosper when there’s a war on, and many more of which are happy to have periodic wars, or the threat of wars, to keep people in line and willing to tolerate the kind of abuse that is typically heaped on the average working person: financially starved school districts, starvation-level welfare grants, no public health system, rusting bridges, pot-holed roads, almost no public transit, and falling real wages, etc.

I think it’s largely true that real democracies do not ...

While on The David Pakman Show yesterday, host David Pakman asked me why I thought Mitt Romney has proven to be such a bad candidate.

The conventional wisdom is that Romney is weird, aloof, socially awkward, and removed from the lives of average Americans. All that may be true, but it's also true of plenty of successful politicians. Politics is not the profession for the well-adjusted.

Instead, I noted that Romney is having such a hard time because of the fundamental incoherence of his and party's issue platform.

The Republican Party and the conservative movement simply have done no significant soul-searching following the debacle of the George W. Bush presidency. They have admitted no error, and in turn, have refused to make any adjustments to convince the public they are ready to return to power.

In Romney's case, he appears to have some basic understanding that he can't take Tea Party anti-government talking points and expect to win the middle of the country. But he also can't speak truth to the Tea Party either.

He won't offer policies that are any different from President Bush's, because to do so would require admitting that something out of the Conservative 101 playbook -- lower taxes on the rich, fewer rules on corporations -- didn't work.

Instead he dances around nearly every question on policy, and panders to every audience he sees, in hopes no ...

America is not going the way of Greece, and North Dakota has shown us why. Residents were given the opportunity Tuesday to vote their property taxes out of existence, and they chose not to take it.

Why? Property taxes fund local government. Without it, communities would lose power to set their spending priorities. Lawmakers in Bismarck would have had to come up with over $800 million to replace the property tax revenue lost in 2012. The state is flush right now with gas and oil money, but energy-based economies can go bust as well as boom. Anyway, serious tax reform should be done in a comprehensive fashion, with personal income taxes, corporate incomes taxes and sales taxes also taken into account.

North Dakota's voters snubbed a ploy by anti-tax forces to grab a tax cut with little thought for the immediate consequences or the future. Let's be clear: Accepting taxation as a reality of modern civilization in no way implies that we like paying taxes or think they're fair or approve of everything they support.

If only self-described conservatives in Washington were so grown-up. Leading Republican voices blame only spending for our debt. They warn that if America follows the Democrats' vision, it will end up broke like Greece.

But spending does not cause debt if enough revenues are raised to cover it. During the George W. Bush era, Republicans engaged in the double insanity of manic spending and reckless tax cuts. By demonizing the surplus left by Bill Clinton as over taxation, they fed an anti-tax culture that has also made us more like Greece.

Greece's economic crisis stems both from heedless spending and a proud tradition of tax evasion. For example, when a tax collector on the island of Naxos recently went looking for cheats, a radio station reportedly broadcast his car's plate number.

Italy is also plagued by a culture of tax dodging.

"Only fools pay," goes an ...

Christine Todd Whitman, Environmental Protection Agency chief under George W. Bush, urged the EPA Tuesday to use its authority under the Clean Air Act to impose stricter safety standards on American chemical facilities vulnerable to accidents or terrorist attacks.

“I cannot understand why we have not seen some action when the consequences of something happening are so potentially devastating,” Whitman said in a teleconference that included representatives of labor and environmental groups.  

As Bush’s EPA administrator, Whitman was prepared to unveil a proposal requiring chemical plants to use safer processes in the months after 9/11. Under the Clean Air Act’s general duty clause, Whitman said, the EPA had the authority to require hazard reduction at facilities at risk of catastrophic chemical releases.

But the plan was scuttled by the White House, which maintained that chemical hazards could be better addressed by legislation, Whitman said. Congress had moved quickly to pass bills on water safety and bioterrorism, and the EPA thought it was “on the right track” to pass a bill on chemical security as well.

Bob Bostock, Whitman’s homeland security adviser at the time, said EPA officials expected litigation from the chemical industry if it used the general duty clause. “It wasn’t so much that we were afraid we’d lose the litigation,” Bostock said. “We didn’t want to be tied up in litigation for years and years, leaving this unaddressed.”

Legislation never came. Now, Whitman and others are pressing the EPA to act on its own. In March, the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council wrote a