Here’s the latest dispatch from the global marketplace. Dozens of Vietnamese women working in a sweatshop in American Samoa were beaten, deprived of food and not paid minimum wages as they carried out their assigned role in our great borderless economy. The workers were making clothes for a Ko

Last summer, after the Republican National Convention made history by nominating the son of a former president as its standard-bearer, the writer Andrew Sullivan raised an issue that only now is beginning to make its way onto op-ed pages. How was it, Sullivan wondered, that in a supposedly meritocra

Nobody seems quite sure what the immigrant-returning immigrant ratio might be today, but I suspect it is higher than most people might think. Labor is following the lead of capitalit is fickle, it follows the market, and it is decidedly unsentimental. To cite just one example: thousands of Irish imm

Two nights before Thanksgiving, and no president-elect yet. A remarkable turn of events! Morning news anchors, cable-television pundits and op-ed sages insist that Americans are demanding a quick end to the madness. A quick end? Madness? Why, I don’t know a soul who feels that way! Most people

When, in early August, I had to back out of a social engagement on Long Island because I was heading to Philadelphia to cover the Republican National Convention, neither my prospective host nor any would-be fellow guests were particularly impressed. In fact, some insinuated that there was a more nef

The moment the names of Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman were added to this year’s national tickets, it should have been clear that the entertainment industry would become an issue in the 2000 campaign. Both the senator and Lynne Cheney, wife of the Republican vice-presidential nominee, have been

Upon hearing that Al Gore had chosen Joseph Lieberman to be his running mate, a friend remarked: Very interesting. He’s religious. He’s for school vouchers. He’s against partial-birth abortion. Pause for effect. I guess the bishops have their man!As the would-be No. 2 put it, only

Is there a public institution in America more reviled than our national political conventions? (Picking on Congress doesn’t count.) Every four years the punditry class informs us that conventions are little more than glorified political commercials, which enlightened people ought to avoid for

This year’s parades will be a test of the great new arrangement in Northern Ireland. The new power-sharing government is back in business in Belfast, and one day people will find it hard to believe that it could be otherwise. In that perhaps not-so-distant day, full-fledged citizens of the thi

Poor George W. Bush. It was bad enough when, during the primary season, a Boston reporter surprised him with a snap quiz about foreign leaders, including some from nations that Rand McNally himself might have had trouble spelling. Bush’s tentative answers inspired snickers in some quarters, al