Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
The story of Senator Kyrsten Sinema — a former Green Party–aligned activist who happily rejected a minimum wage hike recently and is now one the most right-wing Democrats in the Senate — is about how a desperate thirst for power can debase even the most idealistic progressive.
In their sequel to 2016’s Shattered, Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen give a behind-the-scenes look at Joe Biden’s 2020 run — a campaign even more inept than Hillary Clinton’s, driven first and foremost by defeating Bernie Sanders, and saved in the end only by blind luck and historical accident.
Everyone wants schools to reopen, but the Biden administration seems to be ignoring what mounting evidence from overseas shows: many of the newest COVID variants do in fact infect children and promote community spread.
On this day in 1981, Bernie Sanders became Burlington’s first socialist mayor by a margin of just ten votes. Here’s a definitive history of how Bernie beat the political establishment with a working-class coalition behind him and how we can do the same today.
The Biden administration’s preemptive surrender on the $15 minimum wage is nothing like its guns-blazing approach to getting union-buster Neera Tanden confirmed for a White House job. The contrast demonstrates Biden’s lack of sincerity when he claims to be a working-class fighter.
After promising to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen,” Joe Biden is staying silent as Amazon workers try to unionize in Alabama. It could be because he’s just being Joe Biden — or it could be because of the massive leverage and influence the company exerts through its size.
With the Chicago Tribune’s publishing company on the verge of being swallowed up by the hedge fund industry, capitalism’s ongoing destruction of the free press through downsizing and asset-stripping has become the number one threat to American democracy.
In a viral moment last night, Joe Biden told an eight-year-old girl at a CNN town hall that kids rarely contract or transmit the coronavirus. But the science says otherwise — yet the media recklessly let Biden get away with spreading misinformation.
One of the top national security think tanks backing the Biden administration, the Center for a New American Security, has been taking money from every major defense contractor while pumping out a steady stream of research supporting those companies’ interests. It’s yet another sign that Biden’s promised “return to normal” has, unfortunately, arrived.
Progressives are swooning and right-wingers are hyperventilating. But a closer look at Joe Biden’s first month in office shows a presidency that — for better and for worse — looks a lot like Barack Obama’s so far.
If you want to see the future, imagine a finger clicking “mute” on anything criticizing an establishment presidential candidate, forever.
Believe it or not, the data all point to television, not social media, as the most powerful reality-warping medium for most Americans. Unsurprisingly, that is not the impression you’d get from listening to the cable news–driven discourse on the subject.
Convinced his state capitol was set to be attacked by violent, far-right extremists, a Florida man called for armed resistance on social media and was promptly jailed. The episode is a case study of how easily a domestic “war on terror” will be turned on the Left.
Now that hedge funds are losing billions to Redditors buying stocks like GameStop, Wall Street wants heavy-handed intervention into the market, and brokerages have clamped down on the upstarts. It’s a reminder that there’s no such thing as “people’s capitalism” or “shareholder democracy” — the capitalist economy is structured to do what’s best for the business elite.
Not long after his inauguration, where he assured Americans that they “can overcome this deadly virus,” Joe Biden announced that as many as hundreds of thousands of coronavirus deaths are unavoidable in the coming months. But there’s only one reason for that — Biden preemptively ruled out pursuing a national stay-at-home order two months ago.
In the end, Donald Trump didn’t destroy the American political system. He showed the world how corrupt, undemocratic, and reactionary it already was.
A massive law enforcement failure led to last week’s disastrous Capitol riot. Now, many, including liberals, are pushing to give those agencies even more power as part of a “domestic terrorism” crackdown. This is the wrong way to combat the threat of far-right violence — we should start instead with an investigation of white supremacist infiltration of local police forces.
Last week’s riot was an attempt to undermine the nation’s democratic procedures. The response from some political elites is unwittingly trying to do the same through calls for unnecessary new terror laws.
The kid-glove treatment of yesterday’s far-right protesters was a shocking departure from the wanton police brutality that is the norm for leftist protesters of any kind. When racial justice or antiwar protesters take to the streets, police repression is fierce and unrelenting. When right-wingers protest, they’re given free rein.
Though Tuesday’s gratifying Democratic victories in Georgia are unlikely to move the needle of politics very far, they came as a satisfying vindication of arguments the Left has been making for years.