I keep hearing that Mitt Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan “enables the country to have the debate it needs to have,” or “permits us to have a grownup discussion,” or “finally presents America with a real choice.” The New York Times oped page proclaims: “Let the Real Debate Begin!”

Debate? What debate? 

Romney isn’t even standing by Ryan’s budget plan. He’s been distancing himself from it from the moment he tabbed Ryan for the ticket.  “I’m the one running for President,” he keeps saying in response to reporters’ questions about whether he agrees with Ryan.

Not even Ryan will say publicly what the Romney economic plan entails. “We haven’t run the numbers yet,” he repeats – as if there were numbers in the Romney plan to run. But the numbers in Romney’s plan are like the numbers in Romney’s tax returns — they’re invisible to anyone who might have an interest in knowing. 

But even if Romney were to adopt Ryan’s budget plan intact we still wouldn’t have a real debate because Ryan’s own plan itself lacks specifics that add up.

None of the budgets Ryan has come up with as chair of the House Budget Committee indicate which tax loopholes he’d close and exactly which programs for lower-income Americans he’d eliminate in order to balance the budget.

Ryan claims that his revenue targets can be met by “broadening the tax base,” but he hasn’t said how he’d do it.  He’s insisted on keeping two of the biggest loopholes that overwhelmingly favor the wealthy —the preferential tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

In fact, Ryan’s budget is larded with so much defense spending and so many tax cuts for the ...

It is late afternoon. The grounds are quiet and sun-drenched. The waters of Puget Sound lap against the nearby shoreline and a gentle summer breeze blows through. There is a restorative calm to the site, which makes the reality of what took place here seventy years ago all the more jarring.

On March 30, 1942, 227 children, women, and men of Japanese ancestry living on Bainbridge were taken from their homes, rounded up by soldiers armed with rifles fixed with bayonets, and herded onto the Eagledale Ferry Dock. After being transported to nearby Seattle they were sent by train to concentration camps in either Manzanar in California or Minidoka in Idaho. The Bainbridge Island contingent was the first group to be incarcerated under President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, authorized the military to exclude people of Japanese descent from much of the West Coast. Eventually 120,000 people were forced into 10 remote camps across the western U.S. until the end of World War II.

Like many of us, I was taught to call these sites “internment camps,” a term designed to make a distinction between confinement and punishment, which sometimes refers to detaining belligerent armed forces, as spelled out in the Second There is, however, a long history of referring to “a guarded compound for the detention or imprisonment of aliens, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents” as a “concentration camp,” beginning as early as the 18th century in Poland. There is some evidence that FDR himself referred to the U.S. sites as concentration camps. A vigorous discussion about the appropriate term has ensued for decades, with some commentators contesting the ...

We Americans are taught it in school. The propaganda put out by Voice of America repeats the idea ad nauseum around the globe. Politicians refer to it in every campaign speech with the same fervor that they claim to be running for office in response to God’s call: America is a model of democracy for the whole world.

But what kind of democracy is it really that we have here?

Forget that only half of eligible voters typically vote in quadrennial presidential elections (less than 30% in so-called “off-year” elections for members of the House and a third of the Senate, and less than 25% in municipal and state elections). Forget that the government is increasingly trampling on the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, with a burgeoning surveillance program and a growing militarization of the police.

The US government doesn’t even do what the majority of the citizens want. In fact, these days it flat out ignores what we the people want.

Consider the polls, and what they show public sentiment to be on key issues, and then look at what the government, composed of supposedly elected representatives and an elected president, actually does:

1. Military spending

Most polls show that Americans, tired of the endless wars that have been raging almost without pause since the end of World War II, and the huge amount of taxes devoted to the military (currently over $1 trillion per year!), favor cutting the military. Just recently, the Center for Public Integrity conducted a poll and found that when asked whether they wanted to cut funding for education, veterans’ benefits, homeland security and other areas, or military spending, 65% of people said they wanted military spending to get the axe. Overall, people favored an 18% cut in the military budget. Democrats wanted a 22% cut, while even Republicans, usually perceived as pro-military, ...

If Julian Assange is granted asylum in Ecuador, he will become a resident of Latin America, where the trove of classified U.S. State Department cables he strategically disseminated through WikiLeaks has generated hundreds of headlines, from Mexico to Chile. A year after thousands of cables on Latin America were first released, the revelations have had different results -- in two countries it led to the forced departure of the U.S. ambassador; in another it helped change the course of a presidential election. We're joined by Peter Kornbluh, guest editor of "WikiLeaks: Latin America," a recent edition of The Nation magazine devoted to exploring the impact of WikiLeaks across the region. Kornbluh is a senior analyst on Latin America at the National Security Archive.

You might think Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of and spokesman for the mighty American gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, has an almost cosmic sense of timing. In 2007, at the NRA’s annual convention in St. Louis, he warned the crowd that, “Today, there is not one firearm owner whose freedom is secure.” Two days later, a young man opened fire on the campus of Virginia Tech, killing 32 students, staff and teachers.

Just last week, LaPierre showed up at the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty here in New York and spoke out against what he called “anti-freedom policies that disregard American citizens’ right to self-defense.” Now at least 12 are dead in Aurora, Colorado, gunned down at a showing of the new film, The Dark Knight Rises, a Batman movie filled with make-believe violence. One of the guns the shooter used was an AK-47 type assault weapon that was banned in 1994. The ban ran out in 2004.

Obviously, LaPierre’s timing isn’t cosmic, just coincidental and unfortunate; as Shakespeare famously wrote, the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves. In other words, people -- people with guns. There are some 300 million guns in the United States, one in four adult Americans owns at least one and most of them are men. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, over the last 30 years, “the number of states with a law that automatically approves licenses to carry concealed weapons provided an applicant clears a criminal background check has risen from eight to 38.”

Every year there are 30,000 gun deaths and 300,000 gun-related assaults in the U.S. Firearm violence costs our ...

Who’s an economy for? Voters in France and Greece have made it clear it’s not for the bond traders.

Referring to his own electoral woes, Prime Minister David Cameron wrote Monday in an article in the conservative Daily Telegraph: “When people think about the economy they don’t see it through the dry numbers of the deficit figures, trade balances or inflation forecasts — but instead the things that make the difference between a life that’s worth living and a daily grind that drags them down.”

Cameron, whose own economic policies have worsened the daily grind dragging down most Brits, may be sobered by what happened over the weekend in France and Greece – as well as his own poll numbers. Britain’s conservatives have been taking a beating.

In truth, the choice isn’t simply between budget-cutting austerity, on the one hand, and growth and jobs on the other.

It’s really a question of timing. And it’s the same issue on this side of the pond. If government slices spending too early, when unemployment is high and growth is slowing, it makes the debt situation far worse.

That’s because public spending is a critical component of total demand. If demand is already lagging, spending cuts further slow the economy – and thereby increase the size of the public debt relative to the size of the overall economy.

You end up with the worst of both worlds – a growing ratio of debt to the gross domestic product, coupled with high unemployment and a public that’s furious about losing safety nets when they’re most needed.

The proper sequence is for government to keep spending until jobs and growth are restored, and only then to take out the budget axe.

If Hollande’s new government pushes Angela Merkel in this direction, he’ll end up saving the euro and, ironically, the jobs of many conservative leaders throughout Europe ...

There’s just something about manufacturing. Ask Rosie the Riveter. Ask the computer geeks and artists across America who create “Hacker Space” workshops to help each other invent and fabricate to their imaginations’ content.

Yeah, it’s cool to make stuff. The “maker,” whether an inventor or engineer or welder gets a thrill out of performing work that results in visible, viable products. Manufacturing also gives the “makers” the feeling of empowerment that can be seen all over Rosie the Riveter’s face.

Manufacturing is powerful. And power is coveted. That’s why mother America always loved manufacturing most. Since the early days of this country, visionary political leaders like Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln nurtured manufacturing. They knew manufacturing builds a country’s economic strength. And the capacity to manufacture secures a nation’s military might. So President Obama’s focus on reviving American manufacturing, including his proposal last week to give American manufacturers a small tax break, is wise, even if the banking brother and service sector sister feel aggrieved as a result.

President Obama said in his State of the Union address that his goal was to forge an economy built to last. That, he said, would be based on American manufacturing and American know-how, American-made energy and skilled American workers.

Since then, he has talked up his plans to reinvigorate manufacturing during several factory tours. At Master Lock in Milwaukee, Wis., he applauded the company for bringing 100 jobs back to America from overseas. The tax code should reflect that, the President said. He proposed the government give tax breaks to companies that on-shore jobs, instead of ...

"We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

What a paragraph! Whatever happened to that BIG idea of America — the creation of a society that embraces and fosters such egalitarian values as justice, tranquility, common effort, the welfare of all and liberty?

We know, of course, that our nation has never attained the fullness of this ideal, but over the decades, generation after generation has at least strived to get closer to it — and made impressive progress. But today, some 224 years after the penning of the preamble, America's corporate-financial-political establishment is insisting that it's no longer possible or even desirable to pursue those democratic ideals that make our country important — and make it work.

What's happened is that, from Wall Street to Washington, we now have too many 5-watt bulbs sitting in 100-watt sockets. As a result of our leaders' dimness, America's uniting and constructive ethic of "We're all in this together" and "Together we can" is being supplanted by a shriveled, dispiriting ethic that exalts plutocratic selfishness and scorns the public interest as intrusive, wasteful, ideologically impure and morally ruinous. They're pushing us toward a forbidding Kochian jungle in which there is no "we" — money rules, everyone's on their own, and such matters as justice, general welfare, tranquility and posterity are none of society's damned business.

So here we are, the wealthiest nation on earth, with massive needs and an industrious population eager to get working on those needs, yet our leaders throw up their hands and say, "No ...

Some 40 years ago, when I entered Oxford University as a graduate student, I declared my interest in the Middle East. I was told that this part of the world came under the rubric of “Oriental Studies,” and that I would be assigned an appropriate professor. But when I arrived for my first meeting at the professor’s office, his bookshelves were lined with volumes bearing Chinese characters. He was a specialist in what was, at least for me at the time, the wrong Orient.

Something akin to this mistake has befallen American foreign policy. The United States has become preoccupied with the Middle East – in certain ways, the wrong Orient – and has not paid adequate attention to East Asia and the Pacific, where much of the twenty-first century’s history will be written.

The good news is that this focus is shifting. Indeed, a quiet transformation is taking place in American foreign policy, one that is as significant as it is overdue. The US has rediscovered Asia.

“Rediscovered” is the operative word here. Asia was one of the two ...

The United States has a classic multilateral trade imbalance. While it runs a large trade deficit with China, it also runs deficits with 87 other countries. A multilateral deficit cannot be fixed by putting pressure on one of its bilateral components. But try telling that to America’s growing chorus of China bashers.

America’s massive trade deficit is a direct consequence of an unprecedented shortfall of domestic saving. The broadest and most meaningful measure of a country’s saving capacity is what economists call the “net national saving rate” – the combined saving of individuals, businesses, and the government. It is measured in “net” terms to strip out the depreciation associated with aging or obsolescent capacity. It provides a measure of the saving that is available to fund expansion of a country’s capital stock, and thus to sustain its economic growth.

In the US, there simply is no net saving any more. Since the fourth quarter of 2008, America’s net national saving rate has been negative – in sharp contrast ...