Democrats are fueling a corporate counter-revolution against progressivesDavid Sirota

Democrats in Washington are not just passively failing to mount an opposition to Trump. They are actively helping Republicans

Tue 26 May 2020

‘This corporate counterrevolution is easiest to see in Democrats’ enthusiastic support for Republicans’ legislative response to the coronavirus crisis.’ Photograph: Michael Brochstein/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock
These are bleak days for America’s progressive movement. The Democratic primary process handed the party’s nomination to the candidate with the most conservative record. Corporate-friendly politicians like the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, are using the pandemic to brandish their images and install billionaires to run things. Progressive lawmakers in Congress are being steamrolled, even by their own party’s leadership. And a recession is battering the state and local budgets that fund progressive priorities like education and the social safety net.

Joe Biden pushed to embrace radicalism of FDR by scale of economic crisis
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Perhaps this is a temporary stall-out – a fleeting moment of retreat in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back trajectory. After all, polls continue to show that from workers’ rights to universal healthcare, a majority of Americans support a progressive policy agenda.

The problem, though, is that Democrats in Washington are not just passively failing to mount a strong opposition to Donald Trump – they are actively helping Republicans try to fortify the obstacles to long-term progressive change well after this emergency subsides.

This corporate counter-revolution is easiest to see in Democrats’ enthusiastic support for Republicans’ legislative response to the coronavirus crisis. Democrats’ entire 2018 electoral campaign told America that the opposition party needed to win back Congress in order to block Trump’s regressive agenda. And yet, when the Republicans proposed a bill to let Trump’s appointees dole out government cash to their corporate allies with no strings attached, this same opposition party mustered not a single recorded vote against the package. Not one.

Thanks to that, Trump appointees and the Federal Reserve can now hand out $4tn to politically connected corporations as they lay waste to our economy and steamroll progressive reforms. Private equity firms and fossil fuel companies get new tax breaks as they buy elections and try to lock in permanent climate change.

These bailouts were part of a larger legislative package that included good things like expanded unemployment benefits – and so you could argue that Democrats simply had to swallow a bitter pill and vote yes. Except, they subsequently proposed their own standalone legislation that would further strengthen the corporate opponents of progressive reform.


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For example, there is the Democrats’ push to alter the so-called paycheck protection program (PPP). Those loans were designed to help employees of mom-and-pop enterprises throughout the country. House Democrats’ new stimulus legislation would open up the small business lending program to what they call “small nonprofits”, but their language was crafted to provide the forgivable loans to industry trade associations. Those lobby groups represent the planet’s biggest corporations – and their political action committees have delivered more than $191m of campaign cash to lawmakers in the last two decades.

Democrats have pitched their legislation as a “message” bill that declares their values – and in this case, they are reassuring Washington power-players that money meant for workers at neighborhood restaurants, local shops and other mom-and-pop concerns can be raided by the front groups representing giant drug companies, health insurers and Wall Street firms. If the legislation passes, it would not merely be an epic tale of greed – the new funding stream for corporate lobbying groups would bolster the very forces that make sure federal policy disempowers workers, maximizes private profit and generally protects the ruling class.

The tragedy is we’re already moving in that wrong direction, and chances to change the dynamic don't come around often

It’s an even worse story on healthcare. As 43 million Americans face the prospect of losing private health insurance, Democrats had a huge opportunity. After Trump himself suggested he wanted the government to pay healthcare providers directly for treating uninsured Covid-19 patients, they could have called his bluff and passed existing legislation to expand a Medicare program that provides actual medical care. Instead, House Democrats passed a bill to support lightly regulated private insurance marketplaces and to subsidize existing private insurance plans through a Rube Goldberg machine known as Cobr

Taken together, the spectacle was more confirmation that whatever resistance exists in the nation’s capital, it is so often performance art, rather than anything real.

“Outside groups and House lawmakers need to work together to build a populist bloc – probably inclusive of moderate Democrats and perhaps even an occasional Republican – who will stand united to force votes to ensure that our economy does right by ordinary people,” said David Segal of Demand Progress, pointing to news of a potential Democratic coalition to buck the party’s leadership and support a plan to float businesses’ payrolls through the crisis. “We must make sure that America does not go in the wrong direction and become even more inequitable because we let unemployment soar, compel cities and states to implement austerity, force small businesses to shutter and let large corporations backstopped by the Fed roll them up.”

The tragedy is that we’re already moving in that wrong direction, and chances to change the political dynamic do not come around often. As Barack Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel (now an investment banker and TV talking head) said more than a decade ago during the financial crisis: “Never allow a good crisis to go to waste – it’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible.”

Billionaires and corporations are clearly following that advice, aiming to use the pandemic to grow their wealth and political power in previously unfathomable ways. It would be better if the opposition party put up a real fight – or at least refused to be complicit in postponing progress for yet another generation.


David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and Jacobin editor at large who served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter. He also publishes Too Much Information newsletter.