Paul London

The old white marble D.C. Library is in a park in a rapidly gentrifying part of Washington in front of the new Convention Center. It is now partly a glittery Apple Store. We were driving by it the other night and it reminded me of my early days in Washington, the capit...

Paul Volcker died on December 9. He was a man of integrity and deserves to be celebrated.  The obituaries, however, give him too much credit for breaking inflation in the 1980s and that is very important. First, it was President Jimmy Carter not Volcker who took all th...

“Civilization is repression.” Repression means suppressing wishes that if acted on would enrage others, destroy communities and even be suicidal. We need to understand that “civilization is repression” because dangerous, combative urges that have been repressed are ree...

Lawrence H. Summers, in his July 3 op-ed, “Jobs for all? It’s not so simple.,” looked at a “federal job guarantee” from the wrong end of the telescope. He was wrong to think of a job guarantee as a “last-resort” program with governments trying to figure out what the ri...

House Republicans voted 95 to 1 in April, 1935 to block the creation of Social Security. Those 95 GOP representatives were voting “to recommit” the social security bill to the Ways and Means Committee with instructions to “strike out the old-age and unemployment insura...

Democrats need to put forward a positive program that appeals to all Americans and that does not generate the backlash inherent in “identity politics” and emphasis on social issues. The foundations of a positive program should be three ideas that almost all Americans s...

The U.S. still has what Alexander Hamilton called “the adventurous spirit, which distinguishes the commercial character of America.” Hamilton knew that British monopolists feared that spirit 250 years ago[i] and China ought to be fearful of it today. Yet in 2017 we hav...

An emerging lament of congressional Republicans, recently voiced by Carl Rove in the Wall Street Journal, is that President Trump’s awful behavior makes it more difficult to achieve Republican goals.  Actually, the good thing about this vicious man’s behavior is that h...

The ancient city of Mosul is in ruins. Racca in Syria is next. Aleppo, Ramadi, Kobane, and a dozen other cities in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Libya have been destroyed. What a price the World has paid for the American decision that the 9.11 attack on the World Trade Tower...