Earlier this month, the Biden administration automatically discharged student debt for more then 800,000 borrowers. The move shows that, if he wanted to, Joe Biden could cancel debt for everyone else right now. He’s not doing that.
Joe Biden will likely govern to the left of Barack Obama. But his willingness to spend has everything to do with capital’s relaxation of deficit worries — and where capital says “no,” no one should expect Biden to say “yes.”
Joe Biden’s speech about democracy on Thursday — in which he argued that Trumpism simultaneously has taken over the GOP and is rejected by a majority of Republicans — was emblematic of the confused and incoherent nature of today’s Democratic messaging.
Dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal Amy Klobuchar was the most effective messenger for an anti–Bernie Sanders coalition. She would have made a worthy opponent — but party elites were too inept to seize the opportunity.
Joe Biden is signaling he has no intention of offering cabinet slots to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Despite spin to the contrary, it's the latest sign that the Biden team is planning to govern from the extreme center — and that we'll have to push him to win any progressive gains.
Pundits have lauded the Biden administration for replacing the free-market consensus with supply-side liberalism. But it is geopolitical tensions with China and labor’s weakness that have made elites feel comfortable with a milquetoast industrial policy.
Joe Biden ran for president promising student debt relief. His administration now appears to be doing the opposite, trying to overturn a recent ruling that helps those bankrupted by student loans.
With Joe Biden in the White House, the adults were meant to be back in charge, running a well-managed foreign policy. Instead, it’s been a series of embarrassments and growing tensions with the rest of the world.
Despite continued proclamations that Joe Biden is a transformative president, his agenda has been much more about placating business interests than shifting power to workers.
Voters aren’t even telling pollsters that crime is a top issue for them. That isn’t stopping President Joe Biden from shifting to the right on crime anyway.
Joe Biden didn’t campaign on significant coronavirus relief measures despite the incredible pain felt across the country right now. It’s up to the Left to demand he pursue such measures in office, centered on three issues: addressing economic misery, expanding health care, and paying for it all by taxing the rich.
Joe Biden used to brag that he practically wrote the Patriot Act, the Bush-era law that massively increased government surveillance powers. Given his purported plan to pass a new domestic terrorism law once in office, the danger is real that the January 6 Capitol attack will be used as an excuse to severely curtail our civil liberties.
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.
The New York Times attack yesterday on socialists who won’t endorse Joe Biden isn’t actually about convincing socialists to vote for him — it’s about performatively denouncing leftists as irresponsible, for the edification of the liberals who are watching.
Once again, Joe Biden has pledged to cure cancer. At the same time, his campaign is being bankrolled by the very industries that profit from keeping treatment prohibitively expensive.
Instead of pushing a promised public health care option or expanding Medicare or any of the other health reforms the United States desperately needs, Joe Biden's health care reform draws from proposals from for-profit health insurance companies.
Until recently, denying refugees the right of asylum, sending migrants to be killed in Mexico, and keeping kids in cages were policies considered so evil that for liberal America there was no higher priority than ending them. Then Joe Biden became president.
A new survey conducted by a Biden-linked firm is workshopping Biden’s own attacks against Medicare for All. His campaign is part of a multifront corporate effort to defeat the policy.
In 2016, an alarmed Republican establishment tried to force Donald Trump out of the race over his history of sexual assault — not because they were feminists, but because they thought it looked bad. But today, the Democratic establishment is simply dismissing the same allegations against Joe Biden.
Despite the strange circumstances and urgency of the coronavirus pandemic, last night’s debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders highlighted two visions of our political crises that largely haven’t changed: Biden arguing for a return to normalcy, Sanders insisting that something is deeply wrong in our society.