David Sirota is editor-at-large at Jacobin. He edits the Lever and previously served as a senior adviser and speechwriter on Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Earlier this year, New York governor Andrew Cuomo helped a donor shield health care executives from COVID-19–related lawsuits. Washington Democrats are weighing similar legislation. Now, new data shows that a lobbying group funneled campaign cash to New York Democrats as the bill was being passed.
Donald Trump deployed unidentified Department of Homeland Security agents to Portland, where they abducted protesters off the street into unmarked vehicles, and he wants to do the same elsewhere. House Democrats rightly say they’re horrified by Trump’s actions — yet are refusing to do anything substantive to stop them.
When Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was under fire, a dark money group called Judicial Crisis Network came to his aid. According to recently obtained documents, more than half of JCN’s funding came from one mysterious, unnamed donor who gave $15.9 million towards the effort.
Supreme Court Justice John Roberts has been praised recently as a heroic force for moderation. But his court’s recent ruling just helped Wall Street giants stomp on thousands of public-sector workers and retirees in one of America’s poorest states.
The government has taken the extraordinary step of giving prosecutorial power to a law firm that has worked for Chevron — and is allowing that prosecutorial power to be aimed at Chevron’s chief adversary, who has been under house arrest for the past year.
As the social safety net is shredded, new data show that billionaires and corporations are refusing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars of owed taxes every single year. It really puts all the hand-wringing about “looting” into perspective.
Donald Trump’s labor secretary Eugene Scalia has been busy lately: 1. helping money managers shift workers’ retirement savings into high-risk private equity schemes to enrich Wall Street, 2. relaxing rules dictating that money managers work in clients’ best interests, and 3. stopping the moving of workers’ savings into low-risk, environmentally sustainable investments.
Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, is trying to prolong her father’s endless war in Afghanistan. You would think that every Democrat would be united in opposing such a policy, right? Well, you would be wrong.
In 2005, Chief Justice John Roberts was nominated to the Supreme Court because the business lobby believed he would turn the court into a corporate weapon — and that’s precisely what he has been doing ever since.
The American public helped pay for the development of remdesivir, a COVID-19 drug. That same American public will now be charged $3,000 for a treatment — a treatment that experts say costs less than $10 to produce.
The Supreme Court has made some surprising recent rulings defending rights for LGBT people and immigrants. Those rulings should be applauded — but they also shouldn’t distract us from how the court is continuing to erode democracy and worsen inequality with new rulings that are huge boons for the rich.
Securities and Exchange Commission regulators recently issued a scathing report that reads like a last-ditch plea for help in reeling in private equity billionaires, who have all but free rein to fleece whoever they want, whenever they want.
Robbing workers’ pension funds has long been central to Wall Street’s business model. In last week’s Supreme Court ruling, Brett Kavanaugh and his conservative cadre of justices opened the door for financial managers to take their looting of those pension funds even further.
The Democratic donor class does not want progressives anywhere near the levers of power — even in races where they could clearly win. That’s why they’re backing centrist millionaire Democrat John Hickenlooper over a proponent of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal for a Colorado Senate seat.
Since 2008, the US has spent $20–35 trillion on corporate bailouts. It’s about the same “unaffordable” amount that Medicare for All has been projected to cost — used for lining corporate pockets instead of providing health care to people who need it.
Trump just changed the rules to let Wall Street’s most predatory industry get its hands on hundreds of billions of dollars of ordinary workers’ retirement savings. Now his friends in private equity are celebrating.
Don’t let opponents of the current racial justice protests fool you by citing public opinion polls — such polls often showed the majority of American opposed to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Public opinion is not immovable through protest.
Critics of the demand to “defund the police” cite current polling snapshots as supposed proof of protesters’ electoral malpractice. They’re politically shortsighted — and confused about the key role of mass protest movements in dragging such demands from the margins to the mainstream.
Republicans are simply outraged at calls to defund the police. But for years, they’ve had no problem defunding the agencies tasked with enforcing laws against the world’s most hardened, powerful criminals: corporations.
Our cities have siphoned money away from public goods like education and social services, and funneled the cash into ever-larger, ever-more-militarized police forces. It’s time to reverse that.