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.
The good news: in passing the American Rescue Plan, Democrats are finally rejecting the logic of austerity. The bad news: the party did not use the bill to secure essential long-term economic protections for Americans, nor do anything that would anger the wealthy.
Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema was once a Green Party member and a committed antiwar activist. Now she’s best known for a viral thumbs-down on a $15 minimum wage vote. It’s the timeless story of an earnest do-gooder turned Washington monster and what happens when we don’t hold politicians accountable.
We’ve learned recently that Senator Joe Manchin is wielding enormous power in US politics right now. But he can be defeated — if Democrats vote down the must-pass COVID-19 bill until it includes an increase in the minimum wage.
A confidential memo now circulating spells out exactly how Vice President Kamala Harris to help push through a $15 minimum wage. There are no excuses for inaction.
A new study reveals some grim consequences of Wall Street's move into senior care: between 2004 and 2016, more than 20,000 Americans died as a consequence of living in nursing homes run by private equity firms.
Our press corps is wielded as a partisan and corporate weapon, making journalists averse to covering corruption and avarice if leaders from both parties are implicated in shilling for corporate power. Which is why the press is unable to handle a scandal like Gov. Andrew Cuomo's alleged mismanagement of nursing home policy during the pandemic.
New York legislator Ron Kim confronted Governor Andrew Cuomo over his move to give nursing home executives immunity for their deadly negligence during COVID. Cuomo responded with threats of retribution. We talk to Kim about the episode.
Governor Andrew Cuomo is threatening retribution against progressive elected officials demanding answers about underreported COVID-19 deaths and his effort to help an industry group shield nursing home executives from liability. Between his cover-ups and his bullying, Cuomo might as well be New York’s Richard Nixon.
The media made the Lincoln Project and New York governor Andrew Cuomo into heroes of 2020. Now they’re both engulfed in scandal, and it’s time to hold them accountable.
Mainstream news outlets like the Washington Post are working overtime to argue against the $2,000 survival check we were promised by the Democrats.
For years now, fact-checking has been wielded by mainstream journalists against Bernie Sanders’s left agenda. Case in point: Jeff Bezos’s newspaper’s recent attacks on Sanders for telling the truth about how the Republican tax cuts benefited the rich like Bezos.
Democrats promised to provide a near-universal benefit of $2,000 checks. Billionaire-owned media is trying to convince them to ignore history and gut their proposal — a move that would be politically disastrous and worsen Americans’ already brutal suffering.
New research shows stay-at-home orders and eviction bans are key to stopping the spread of COVID-19. But Gov. Gavin Newsom is ignoring that research and reopening California with a weak eviction moratorium.
After whittling down the originally promised $2,000 checks to $1,400, Joe Biden is now saying he’s open to negotiating on the $1,400. Democrats need to stop preemptively compromising and use their electoral mandate to deliver immediate material benefits to workers.
The mainstream media claims to prize objectivity above all else. But for every story scrutinizing corporate power, you’ll find 10 or 20 depicting CEOs and corporations as the great saviors of America.
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.