Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
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.
Donald Trump didn’t get the figure of $2,000 from nowhere. Since the start of the pandemic, monthly direct payments worth that amount have been a core demand of democratic-socialist politicians like Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Documents from the Bill Clinton Library tell the story of the disastrous 1994 crime bill. They reveal the cynicism and callousness of Clinton administration officials — including Rahm Emanuel and Ron Klain, who Biden is considering for his own administration — who shepherded the bill through Congress for naked political gain.
US leaders are split between a hard right that would happily sacrifice millions of lives to let businesses keep operating and a liberal center that seems unable to merge the goals of stemming the pandemic and meeting the economic needs of Americans whose livelihoods have been disrupted by it. The truth is, fixing one means fixing the other.
After winning the election on a “listen to the scientists” message, Joe Biden is actually rejecting the global scientific consensus on how to handle the pandemic.
So far, Joe Biden’s transition has hired liberally from Wall Street and corporate America, chosen appointees who have made multiple trips through the revolving door, and recruited fans of fossil fuels in the middle of a climate crisis. It’s little different than what we saw under Donald Trump.
Forty-five years ago, under a cloak of secrecy, Operation Condor was officially launched: a global campaign of violent repression against the Latin American left by the region’s quasi-fascist military dictatorships. The US government not only knew about the program — it helped to engineer it.
From the mutant animals of Chernobyl and Marie Antoinette’s perverted orgies, to QAnon and Russiagate, conspiracy theories flourish in times of crisis and collapse of political legitimacy.
Joe Biden’s most consistent pledge since launching his campaign in 2019 has been to “heal the soul of the nation” after four years of Donald Trump. Yet on immigration, he’s already signaling alarming continuity with the most outwardly racist part of Trump’s agenda.
Medicare for All backers won in safe Democratic districts and Trump country alike this year, while its opponents lost in both. Yet centrists are now leading a campaign to blame M4A for the party’s devastating down-ballot losses this year. They’re wrong.
Looking beyond Joe Biden’s unexpectedly modest victory, the 2020 election was a historic failure for the Democratic Party. On the other hand, despite some painful hitches coming out of this campaign season, the Left has reason to be hopeful.
In an oligarchic system, there are few better predictors of how a president will govern than where they got their money. Here’s who’s funded both the Biden and Trump campaigns.
Since Donald Trump’s election, hyperbolic warnings about a descent into fascism have been constant background noise, even as he has repeatedly shown his weakness. But that noise has made it harder to hear the alarming signals of the past several months, as the White House has prepared the ground for a major power grab in a second Trump term.
The details of the kidnapping plot targeting Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer are disturbing and show the real danger of the far right. But given the FBI’s very recent history of using undercover informants as provocateurs to push people into planning “terror plots” that otherwise would have never happened, we should examine its narrative closely.