Christopher Hayes Christopher Hayes is the Washington, D.C. editor of The Nation and a fellow at the New America Foundation. Since 2002, he's written on issues including union organizing and economic democracy, the culture of right-wing email forwards, the worldview of the anti-globalist right and the culture of technology. His essays, articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The American Prospect, The New Republic,The Washington Monthly,The Guardian, and The Chicago Reader. From 2005 to 2006, Hayes was a Schumann Center Writing Fellow at In These Times. Chris grew up in the Bronx, graduated from Brown University in 2001 with a BA in Philosophy. He now lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Kate.

The Secret Government

Writing for The Nation, Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Christopher Hayes reminds us that as the temperature rises, what methods a society uses to adjust do, in fact, matter.
It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered.

Though these words echo his famous endorsement of working “the dark side” in order to triumph in the “war…

New Pecora Commission will give rise to public anger…which is why elites fear it

Are suppositions about the complexity of the financial crisis just another way of keeping the real story from public scrutiny? Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Christopher Hayes investigates. 

If there’s one thing that everyone seems to agree on, it’s that the current financial crisis is complicated. There are two problems with this. First, it’s not, fundamentally, true. The causes for the crisis are fairly simple when you strip away the artifice and lingo. (Most notably an $8 trillion housing bubble that the financial over-class insisted wasn’t a bubble.) But more importantly, the perceived complexity of the issues are being cynically manipulated by those…

Banks are ‘Crying Sheep’

Ever since the stress tests were announced, it’s always been unclear what their purpose was. Some argued it was a backdoor into nationalization; that is, the administration could put the biggest, most precarious banks through the ringer and emerge with a plausible account of their insolvency. That would pave the way for more dramatic, high-stakes government takeover. Another school of thought was that the tests would act essentially as an official white-wash, allowing the government to restore confidence to the markets and to continue to lubricate lending by giving an official pronouncement of (relative) health. The results leaked today, that the…