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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.
Critics of the demand to “defund the police” cite current polling snapshots as supposed proof of protesters’ electoral malpractice. They’re politically shortsighted — and confused about the key role of mass protest movements in dragging such demands from the margins to the mainstream.
Republicans are simply outraged at calls to defund the police. But for years, they’ve had no problem defunding the agencies tasked with enforcing laws against the world’s most hardened, powerful criminals: corporations.
Our cities have siphoned money away from public goods like education and social services, and funneled the cash into ever-larger, ever-more-militarized police forces. It’s time to reverse that.
Donald Trump and other right-wing politicians like Sen. Tom Cotton are beating the drums to ramp up the authoritarian brutality already on display all across the country by staging an actual military invasion of American cities. If we don’t stop them, the results will be dire.
Andrew Cuomo, New York’s state Democratic Party, and the state’s legislative leaders have refused to enact a bill proponents say would deter police violence. They have also raked in more than $1 million from police unions.
Democrats have done a miserable job of acting as an opposition party to Trump — but not because they don’t have significant power to halt his authoritarianism. Here are 10 things Democrats could do to push back right now. If they don’t use their power, Democrats are complicit in Trump’s barbarities.
America is a country that eagerly hands out get-out-of-jail-free cards to the rich and powerful, and rubber bullets, tear gas, and jail sentences to the rest. The protesters on the street this weekend were trying to change that.
We live in an Orwellian era, in which working-class people pilfering convenience store goods is called “looting.” Rich people stealing hundreds of billions of dollars, on the other hand, is just well-functioning “public policy.”
Lawmakers across the country are using identical legislative language to shield hospital and nursing home corporations from prosecution for COVID–19-related illness and deaths — after those companies pumped huge amounts of cash into state elections.
As nursing-home deaths spike during the COVID-19 crisis, hospital and nursing-home companies are pushing for state laws all over America that would shield their executives and owners from responsibility — and trying to convince lawmakers by spending serious cash.
In 2018, hospitals, nursing homes, and their lobbyists gave $2.3 million to New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s political apparatus. Now health care executives are getting immunity for their deadly negligence during the coronavirus pandemic. Critics say New York’s liability shield is linked to higher nursing-home death rates during the pandemic.
The state of Wisconsin plowed ahead with an in-person election last month despite the many clear dangers. A new study suggests exactly what many feared: a direct link between voting in person and spreading COVID–19.
Even during a pandemic, health insurance companies are both raking in huge profits and cooking up new ways to justify denying their customers’ claims. Do we really want to keep using public resources to prop up a barbaric system like this instead of establishing Medicare for All?
Joe Biden has named several progressives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sara Nelson, to newly announced policy “task forces.” This beats him just sneering at leftists — but it’s no great progressive victory that a few good people are on a random list of names for toothless task forces.
If you’re curious about who both Republicans and Democrats are prioritizing in providing coronavirus relief, look no further than the new legislation proposed by House Democrats that would give away enormous amounts of money to corporate lobbyists and dark money groups under the guise of aiding average workers.
We’re in the middle of a devastating pandemic and economic crisis — but that hasn’t stopped both Democrats and Republicans from coming up with new ways to assault and destroy Social Security.
George W. Bush and Donald Trump are both monsters. If you want to criticize Trump — which I encourage — find a way to do it without touting or pining for a war criminal.
A chorus from politicians and mainstream media is rising to demand we “look forward, not backward” on the criminally negligent US response to coronavirus. The aim of these arguments is simple: to block efforts to hold Donald Trump and his cronies accountable for their incompetence and malice.
David Sirota, a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign, argues that a key mistake of the campaign was Sanders’s refusal to more forcefully articulate the contrasts between his record and Joe Biden’s.