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.
If Democrats had used their huge 2008 congressional majorities to rescue families thrown out of their homes during the financial crisis, we may have averted Donald Trump’s narrow victory in 2016.
Presidents Obama and Biden yukked it up this weekend in a video celebrating the Affordable Care Act. But the real thrust of Obamacare was always finding ways to pretend to address the health care crisis while protecting the health insurers fueling it.
For years, Bernie Sanders took trips to Canada to spotlight how Big Pharma was ripping off US patients. Now, Joe Biden has the chance to allow lower-priced imported drugs — giving patients much-needed relief and reining in Big Pharma’s exorbitant profits.
Barack Obama is now trying to pretend he was a finance industry critic who was deeply pained by being forced to bail out Wall Street — even though he was Wall Street’s biggest cheerleader and enabler.
Bernie Sanders is trying to restrict a proposed $52 billion subsidy for already wildly profitable microchip companies.
The Sackler family behind Purdue Pharma became incredibly rich off of America’s opioid crisis. Now, they are trying to shield themselves from the punishment for creating that crisis.
The Washington Post’s website — owned, of course, by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — became a giant native ad Tuesday for Amazon. Bezos is using the paper as his personal megaphone to push back against criticism over wages and working conditions.
A slew of local laws passed during the pandemic slowed the avalanche of evictions around the country. Bankrolled by real-estate interests, Republicans want to restart kicking families out of their homes.
The wealthiest 1 percent are evading about a quarter trillion dollars of owed taxes every year, and corporations are audited at half the rate of poor people. Something is deeply wrong here.
Billionaire Charles Koch has bankrolled the campaign to end eviction bans during the pandemic. At the same time, his company has been buying up real estate, giving him a strong financial incentive to kick tenants out.
In the last week and a half, Texas Republicans moved to block $8 billion worth of pandemic unemployment benefits for 1.3 million people — just days after voting to extend a corporate subsidy program that is enriching fossil fuel companies and has already cost the state $10 billion.
New polling shows many Republican voters now consider trampling voting rights a legitimate tactic. It’s a worrying trend — and a threat to democracy.
The US Chamber of Commerce is leading the charge to cut off expanded unemployment benefits for workers. Business interests want millionaire CEOs protected and austerity for unemployed workers.
To supply bosses with exploitable low-wage workers during a deadly pandemic, Republicans are reviving a grotesque lie: the myth of the “welfare queen.”
The $13 billion debt collection industry is funneling huge amounts of cash to lawmakers in a bid to kill legislation that would finally put some limits on their predatory business model.
Joe Biden and many of his appointees have links to drug companies trying to delay and weaken the COVID vaccine patent waiver he’s now promising to negotiate.
Against the opposition of AOC and other progressives, key Democrats are demanding a tax break for their wealthy donors more regressive than even Trump’s notorious tax cuts.
Weeks after voting to kill a $15 minimum wage, senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin will discuss “finding bipartisan solutions” at the conference of a major lobbying group fighting minimum wage and labor legislation. They know which side they’re on.
West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is threatening to block President Joe Biden’s higher corporate tax rate as part of Biden’s infrastructure bill — a move that could shield private equity firms whose executives boosted Manchin’s campaign and bet big on Trump’s tax bill.
Conservatives in the Democratic Party are willing to go to the mat for the rich, to the point of threatening to take down Joe Biden’s infrastructure and climate plan. But the left wing of the party has not yet been willing to play the same kind of hardball for the working class.