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Harold Meyerson
For Harold Meyerson's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 7, 2016
These veep guys sure don't feel like leaders
Tuesday's debate between the two vice presidential nominees won't alter the course of the election, but it did drop hints about the future of the Democratic and Republican parties.
Japan Times
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 5, 2016
Why the GOP still won't rally around Trump
Americans with a sense of common decency are likely to regard Republicans who know better but stick with Trump as unworthy of the public trust.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 23, 2013
Don't let Wal-Mart bring Southern wages north
Wal-Mart operates as if its goal is to erase the differences in U.S. wage levels between the South and North by making every store it opens "the South.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 1, 2013
Fence against cheap labor set too deep in south
If Washington wants to build a fence to keep back the dangers of cheap labor, the fence should run from Virginia to Texas — not along the Mexican border.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 22, 2013
Black Cubans still struggle against discrimination
An independent movement for racial equality in Cuba is a refutation of the idea that, after a half-century in power, communism has delivered equality.
COMMENTARY / World
Jun 4, 2013
Apple isn't the core of a taxing U.S. problem
There may be a better way to tax multinational corporations: tax them on their revenue in a country rather than on their profits.
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 4, 2013
Austerity poses perils when productivity lags
If a Mediterranean diet lengthens life spans as reported, inhabitants of southern Europe can look forward to long lives — of anxiety and privation.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 30, 2012
U.S. presidential election needs another Teddy
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.
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 10, 2012
Thomas Jefferson's view of equality under siege
A week after the 236th anniversary of the birth of the United States — which was squalling to the world in its very first utterance that all men were created equal and endowed with unalienable rights — the essence of our politics is still about who are those people who are self-evidently equal and inherently vested with those rights.
Jun 23, 2012
U.S. middle-class fortunes fade as unions decline
Are American unions history?
COMMENTARY / World
Mar 28, 2012
Choosing sides once again in Europe
Even as many European nations recoil from the obligations of economic union (because neither borrowers nor lenders are very happy these days), a radical cross-border European politics is being born.
COMMENTARY / World
Feb 1, 2012
The dawning of a new American industrial era?
So much for postindustrial America. After decades of our leaders and sages assuring us that the United States would thrive as we moved beyond manufacturing, President Barack Obama used his State of the Union address to officially declare post-industrial America an unqualified bust.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 14, 2012
GOP candidates dyeing their white collars blue
With attacks on Mitt Romney's career as a venture capitalist coming fast and furious from his primary opponents, the Republican presidential campaigns have entered strange new territory for the GOP: economic reality, or, more precisely, the economy that most people experience.
COMMENTARY / World
Jan 11, 2012
U.S. no longer a land of opportunity
"Over the past three years, Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an Entitlement Society," Mitt Romney wrote in USA Today last month. The coming election, Romney told Wall Street Journal editors last month, will be "a very simple choice" between Obama's "European social democratic" vision and "a merit-based opportunity society — an American-style society — where people earn their rewards based on their education, their work, their willingness to take risks and their dreams."
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 30, 2011
Clash of democracy and capitalism
Do capitalism and democracy conflict? Does each weaken the other?
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 12, 2011
The eurozone's turmoil is bound to continue
Italy and Greece are not Germany. Until recently, Germany did not want them to be. They were lands of the sunny south, of less work-driven, more pleasure-oriented cultures. To Germans, they smelled of sex (see Thomas Mann) and good food.
COMMENTARY / World
Oct 8, 2011
Rescuing America from Wall Street
Better late than never, the movement to take America back from Wall Street has arrived. This week the ranks of the Occupy Wall Street encampment swelled as MoveOn.org members, union activists and ordinary disgruntled citizens joined the demonstration against our financial sector's misrule of the American economy.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 8, 2011
America's post-industrial society going bust
Of all the lies that the American people have been told the past four decades, the biggest one may be this: We'll all come out ahead in the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial society.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 5, 2011
Jobs could reboot working class
In the week since he announced he was stepping down as Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs has been accorded the kind of demigod status that Americans bestow on the handful of their countrymen who invent, manufacture and market the goods that change their lives for the better.
COMMENTARY / World
Aug 27, 2011
The GOP's tax increase hits the wrong target
America's presumably anti-tax party wants to raise your taxes. Come January, the Republicans plan to raise the taxes of anyone who earns $50,000 a year by $1,000, and anyone who makes $100,000 by $2,000.

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A statue of "Dragon Ball" character Goku stands outside the offices of Bandai Namco in Tokyo. The figure is now as recognizable as such characters as Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man.
Akira Toriyama's gift to the world