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America’s Failed Model for the World
By Steven Hill, September 16, 2009, The Guardian
Europeans are shaking their heads over their American friends again. Whether talking to people in the street, in the cafés or to journalists or political leaders, everyone here asks me the same question: Has America lost its mind? Town halls filled with angry citizens, shouting at their elected leaders, some of them armed with guns and threatening signs?…
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Don’t Want Swine Flu with Lunch? Then Offer Paid Sick Leave
By Steven Hill, June 18, 2009, New York Daily News
The spread of the swine flu contagion has yet to reach scary “I Am Legend” proportions, but things are getting pretty hairy out there. The World Health Organization has declared a pandemic, the first flu pandemic in 41 years, as infections continue to climb in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and elsewhere.…
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Moderate Muslims are the World’s Swing Voters
By Steven Hill, Huffington Post, May 6, 2009
There are millions of moderate Muslims in the world, and they, too, are looking for a “new deal.” A president with the name of Barack Hussein Obama presents an opportunity, but the opening may not last long.
Some political observers see the world as divided into two hostile camps, a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the west.…
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What Obama Can Learn from European Health Care
By Steven Hill, March 3, 2009, The Globalist
Imagine a place where doctors still do house calls. When I was visiting my friend Meredith, living in the small rural town of Lautrec about an hour’s drive outside Toulouse, France, one day she was stung badly by a wasp, causing a sizable and painful swelling on her hand.…
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The Missing Element of Obama’s Economic Plan
By Steven Hill, January 18, 2009, openDemocracy
Imagine a place where doctors still do house calls. Or where childcare is affordable, professional and widely available. Or where all new parents are paid to stay home and care for their newborns, and receive a monthly stipend to pay for diapers, food and other daily needs.…
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Learning from Europe
By Steven Hill, Providence Journal, January 16, 2009
The inauguration of the 44th president of the United States looks like the most dramatic debut since the Beatles arrived in New York. But now that the buildup and the hype are over and it’s time for Team Obama to produce, President Obama would do well to look to Europe for guidance, particularly when it comes to three of the president-elect’s top priorities: energy and climate change, health care and jump-starting the economy.…
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The Housing Crisis: Main Street Needs Help, Too
By Steven Hill with John Bartlett, October 23, 2008, The Guardian and Capitol Weekly
Seven hundred billion dollars to bail out the banking and financial industries is a lot of money. But let’s not forget where this crisis started: in a failing housing market, the initial domino in the meltdown. The banks are being bailed out – but what about housing?…
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China’s Robber-Baron Ways
By Steven Hill, September 23, 2008, New York Times
Only a short time after China’s magnificent Olympic coming-out party, the land of Mao’s successors found itself making less celebratory news.
“Tainted Milk Formula Sickens Thousands of Chinese Infants” read one of many recent headlines. Twenty-two companies that produce or distribute milk powder had been secretly adding melamine, normally used for making plastics and glue, into milk powder, making thousands of infants sick and causing several deaths.…
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China and the Long Road Ahead
By Steven Hill, World Policy Blog, September 6, 2008
During the Olympics, China showed the world that it can throw a heck of a coming out party. But traveling here afterward, one sees the many complexities and challenges facing this vast and ancient land.
Especially in the rural areas–where most people still live–the impressive economic rise of China has penetrated only superficially.…
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The Trans-Atlantic Clash over Political Economy and Fulcrum Institutions
By Steven Hill, Social Europe Journal, January 1, 2008
While the United States and Europe share much in common, they also exhibit basic differences, an “American Way” and a “European Way,” that are diverging and had been leading to frequent clashes even before the U.N. rift over Iraq. In a globalized capitalist world, where all nations are seeking models of development that allow “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for its people, this clash within the West is every bit as elemental as the clash with Arab-Islam because it is multidimensional — economic, political, social, and international in scope.…
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Five Myths About Sick Old Europe
By Steven Hill, October 7, 2007, Washington Post
In the global economy, today’s winners can become tomorrow’s losers in a twinkling, and vice versa. Not so long ago, American pundits and economic analysts were snidely touting U.S. economic superiority to the “sick old man” of Europe. What a difference a few months can make.…
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Legislators Fiddle While Earth Warms
By Steven Hill, August 3, 2007, San Francisco Chronicle
Crazy weather patterns have appeared recently in the form of humidity in usually foggy San Francisco, California-like weather in Washington, D.C., torrential downpours and massive flooding in Britain and torrid temperatures in the Mediterranean. These and other episodes such as Hurricane Katrina add more evidence to the scientific studies that say we are at the outset of an era of blowback, environmentally speaking.…
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Real Democracy… Or Dystopia?
By Steven Hill, February 16, 2007, TomPaine.com
Imagine that it is Election Day 2016. Imagine yet another presidential election that boils down to the same two battleground states — Ohio and Florida — which is not unrealistic, given demographic trends.
Candidates will spend most of their time in these two states and perhaps a handful of other swing states, ignoring all others.…
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Time for a Tex-Mex Marshall Plan
By Steven Hill, Washington Post, April 23, 2006
Immigration issues are always ripe for demagoguery, particularly in an election year. But the solution to the very real problems along the U.S.-Mexican border can be found, ironically, in that other part of the world that American demagogues love to ridicule: old Europe.…