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.
In his inauguration speech yesterday, Joe Biden rightly identified a crisis of ignored truth and unending lies in American politics. Donald Trump enflamed that crisis, but the political class, the media industry, and Biden himself helped create it.
President Joe Biden now has a choice: make friends with congressional Republicans or actually make progress on the multiple overlapping crises facing the United States. He can’t do both.
Corporate Democrats are backing off a chance to push for a new round of $2,000 survival checks. And some of them are even floating tax breaks for the wealthy instead. We should rally against this backsliding.
According to recent reporting, Joe Biden wants to strike a deal with Republicans on a new round of COVID-19 relief, rather than ramming through a package without their support. After everything that has happened in recent weeks and years with the GOP, how is Biden still naive enough to think he can strike a deal with them?
Corporations are being lauded for halting PAC donations to the Republicans after the Capitol riot — but they are not shutting down the $500 million pool of cash that bankrolled authoritarian extremists.
GOP lawmakers are resisting new metal detectors at the Capitol building — less than three years after voting to install them at schools all across the country.
The $2,000 survival checks for all Americans would immediately deliver enormous benefits to the millions facing eviction, starvation, and bankruptcy. The case against those checks that is currently being argued by Joe Manchin and Mitch McConnell is bogus.
Last week’s right-wing riot at the Capitol was egged on by politicians and organizations that have received substantial dark-money funding from corporate interests. It’s past time to enact reforms to end the era of dark money — and find out who exactly is bankrolling the anti-democratic far right.
Joe Manchin, the Democratic West Virginia senator who is a Republican in all but name, represents a state suffering immense economic hardship under COVID-19. Yet he is threatening to block a new round of $2,000 survival checks that his constituents — and all of us — badly need.
Corporate-backed conservative groups like the US Chamber of Commerce, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, and companies like Chevron have all issued statements decrying Wednesday’s occupation of the Capitol — without acknowledging the role they played in helping elect the politicians who egged on and fueled the attempt to overturn the presidential election.
Yesterday’s events were the expression of a dangerous authoritarian movement that has been long in the making.
Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress can rescind recently passed Trump administration rules that weaken protections for workers and the environment. Will Democrats use that power?
The lawless behavior of Donald Trump and Georgia’s GOP senators recently captured on tape is, like so much about Trump, appalling. But it reflects an American political culture in which the powerful are never held accountable for any kind of wrongdoing, no matter how blatant or evil.
Joe Biden is no friend to progressive politics of any kind. But after constant pressure, the president-elect has changed his stance on $2,000 survival checks if Georgia Democrats win.
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.
Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth increased more every second of 2020 ($2,800) than Congress is considering giving Americans who are facing eviction, starvation, and bankruptcy ($2,000).
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.
Bernie Sanders is prepared to fight to win $2,000 survival checks for all. While Senate Democrats were prepared to do nothing to challenge Mitch McConnell, Sanders is pledging to filibuster a Pentagon veto override to provide real help for millions of Americans struggling to survive.
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.