
Democrats Should Constantly Talk About a Minimum Wage Hike
An obvious way to win the support of the working class is to support some actual pro-worker policies. An obvious starting point: raising the minimum wage, and well above $15 an hour.

An obvious way to win the support of the working class is to support some actual pro-worker policies. An obvious starting point: raising the minimum wage, and well above $15 an hour.

Rather than focusing on the actual harms Republicans are inflicting on the American working class, Democrats are using the Signal group chat leak to obsess over violations of norms and protocols. This strategy is doomed to fail.

In an interview, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain argues that the era of “free-trade” deals like NAFTA has been a disaster for the US working class and that smart tariffs can help bring back good auto jobs.

Donald Trump is hoping his tariffs will goad his liberal opponents into touting free trade and scoffing at the working class. Democrats don’t have to take the bait.

Bernie Sanders has repeatedly denounced the brutality of Israel’s occupation and stood up for Palestinian rights. He’s the only candidate who has a chance of breaking the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus.

Joan C. Williams argues that progressives and leftists aren’t doomed to keep losing working-class voters — if they can stop dismissing the cultural principles that grant average Americans’ lives dignity.

A crop of progressive-minded veteran congressional candidates say they are aiming to break from the mold of military service candidates — hawkish, corporate-friendly, and weak on labor questions — favored by the Democratic Party establishment.

Yesterday, we were treated to a telling contrast: Joe Biden bombed Syria without congressional authorization, and then refused to lift a finger when the Senate parliamentarian slapped down a minimum wage increase. It’s a pathetic reflection of Biden’s twisted priorities.

Battered by poverty and coronavirus, South Texas should have been deep blue turf for Joe Biden. It wasn’t. But in the Rio Grande Valley, the story is less about growing conservatism than about the rise of nonvoting — and despair.

Average Americans want to cut the military budget, but a constant stream of defense contractor cash to Congress makes such cuts unlikely. Perhaps the best way to argue against the continued expansion of the gargantuan budget for war: insist that we need that money for measures like $2,000 survival checks.

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.

Bernie Sanders is absolutely right to insist we should ignore the Senate parliamentarian’s ruling against a minimum wage increase. Reducing poverty is far more important than adhering to fusty, old Senate rules.

Joe Biden’s statement yesterday about the Amazon union drive in Alabama hit pro-labor notes. But he’ll have to back up his rhetoric with concrete action: Biden must fight to pass the PRO Act.

Eight Democrats joined with Republicans yesterday to prevent Bernie Sanders from moving to add a $15 minimum wage to the COVID relief bill. History will not absolve them.

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.

Much of the news these days is unhinged, but nothing can compare, in terms of pure lunacy, with QAnon. The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, longtime observer of the far right, spoke with Jacobin to explain QAnon’s origins and evolution — and why he thinks the movement is here to stay even if "Q" and "The Storm" are never heard from again.

The Democratic Party’s leadership must immediately kill the filibuster and move key legislation — because the GOP is one heartbeat away from reclaiming control of the Senate.

Inspire Brands — which owns Jimmy John's, Arby’s, Sonic, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Dunkin’ — bragged in internal documents about its role preventing workers from getting a living wage. $15 an hour and a union is the least we should be demanding from predatory corporations.

Conservatives in the Democratic Party are willing to go to the mat for the rich, to the point of threatening to take down Joe Biden’s infrastructure and climate plan. But the left wing of the party has not yet been willing to play the same kind of hardball for the working class.

At the turn of the last century, Alexandra Kollontai identified the problem with elite feminism.