Harold Meyerson

The Financial Times is reporting that the Republican platform to be unveiled in Tampa next week calls for establishing a commission to examine whether the United States should go back on the gold standard. The theory behind this antiquarian fantasy, much loved by Ron Paul and his cult, is that by de-linking the dollar from the value of gold—a move begun by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and completed by President Richard Nixon in 1971—America’s leaders have debased our currency and loosed the genies of inflation, since the Federal Reserve can print as many dollars as it likes.
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What America feared above all was the growing concentration of wealth and political power. A Republican alliance with big business had flooded election campaigns with torrents of money, and it threatened to reduce — if not eliminate — whatever influence ordinary Americans had with their elected officials. Wall Street and the oil industry wielded outsize power and received commensurate criticism.

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Another day, another survey charting the decline of the American middle class. Yesterday, the Pew Research Center weighed in with “The Lost Decade of the Middle Class,” to which they appended the kicker, “Fewer, Poorer, Gloomier.”

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Anyone who lives in Los Angeles can tell you in gruesome detail what it’s like to sit in traffic. Though crisscrossed by a maze of freeways, L.A. annually leads the nation in time spent idling. And while the city’s air pollution has visibly diminished over the years, smog, like traffic, remains an axiom and a curse of L.A. life.

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Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, who's served on the five-member county board since 1980, is trying to persuade his colleagues to put a measure on November's ballot that would extend the number of four-year terms a supervisor can serve from three to five. L.A. County voters established supervisorial term limits by initiative in 2002. They weren't retroactive, so Antonovich's clock began to tick when he was reelected in 2004. Now, with time's winged chariot threatening to run him down in 2016, he wants voters to let him serve longer.

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The reporting and commentary on the bankruptcies of California cities over the last month haven't been journalism's finest hour. From reading the voluminous accounts of the fiscal woes of Stockton and San Bernardino, you'd think that municipal unions and feckless city officials are primarily what led these cities down the path to fiscal ruin.

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