Andrew Perez is senior editor and a reporter at the Lever covering money and influence.
Companies like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup that paid speaking fees to Joe Biden’s Treasury and State nominees also have business before the departments they are set to run — potentially a serious conflict of interest.
Chuck Schumer spent New Year’s morning pretending he and establishment Democrats are fighting Republicans for $2,000 survival checks — right before he went to the Senate floor to surrender on live television. It’s January 1 and the mask is already off.
Democrats and Beltway pundits helped Mitch McConnell undermine Bernie Sanders’s push for direct aid to millions of Americans facing eviction, starvation, and bankruptcy through $2,000 checks. Even for a party that is constantly disappointing, Democrats’ complete capitulation to McConnell and austerity ideology was shockingly pathetic.
Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue could actually force a Senate vote on $2,000 checks for almost two thirds of Georgia households. After all, their state is in the middle of a calamity. Instead, they are issuing belated, meek platitudes.
House Republicans and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell represent voters who are disproportionately struggling — yet they’re blocking $2,000 survival checks. It’s American politics in a nutshell.
Vice president–elect Kamala Harris made headlines earlier this year pushing $2,000 checks for all American. But suddenly, despite being desperately needed right now, she’s nowhere to be found on the issue.
Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden need to do everything in their power to call Donald Trump’s bluff and force a vote to increase the proposed $600 relief checks to $2,000. The fact that they don’t seem to be says a lot about what’s wrong with the Democratic Party.
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson led the fight to give himself a tax cut of up to $205,000. Now he is citing budget concerns to block emergency $1,200 checks as America faces mass starvation.
In a major sop to business interests, a Senate proposal would allow corporations to avoid COVID-related lawsuits from workers and patients. Corporate immunity is the last thing we need.
Billionaire Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman bragged that his firm “was a huge winner coming out of the global financial crisis” in 2008. Today, he’s boasting about his firm’s big earnings off high rents, even as millions of tenants face eviction.
Tax records we’ve reviewed show a health care industry front group run by a former Hillary Clinton aide has already amassed millions to block a public health insurance option. Even small reform isn’t possible without confronting powerful interests.
Xavier Becerra advocated Medicare for All and tough action against Big Pharma. Too bad the incoming Biden administration he’s set to be a part of as Health and Human Services head has refused to take on the health insurance industry.
In praising the pro-corporate Washington hacks Joe Biden has chosen to staff his administration, liberal groups are betraying their missions in order to try to gain influence — despite that appeasement strategy rarely working in American history.
Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo has presided over one of the deadliest COVID outbreaks in the country — as she also helped protect nursing home corporations from accountability. Now she may be picked for Joe Biden’s top health care job.
Joe Biden’s first national security hires have been consulting for defense contractors or working for industry-funded think tanks. The picks are of a piece with Biden’s entire career of backing US imperialism rather than bucking it.
Tucker Carlson pitches himself as a tribune of the people. But new documents reveal that he and other media elites get paid top dollar to speak at fancy conferences hosted by private equity firms, some of the most rapacious, anti-worker actors in American capitalism.
Joe Biden says confronting climate change is one of his top priorities. But today, he appointed as his liaison to the climate movement a congressman who has raked in big money from the fossil fuel industry while voting to help oil and gas companies.
Never Trumpers are pushing the narrative that their efforts, like the Lincoln Project, played a key role in securing Joe Biden’s victory. All you have to do is take a cursory glance at the numbers to see that isn’t true at all.
The Lincoln Project said it would win over Republican voters from Donald Trump. Instead, Trump consolidated his base as the group burned $67 million that could’ve been spent better on real political organizing.
Democrats based much of their 2020 campaign on support for the Affordable Care Act. But the law has become less popular as the pandemic has exposed its flaws while continuing to enrich insurance companies.