Search Results for

In times like this, I find myself suspicious of language. The very act of stringing sentences together seems to aid and abet inertia; there is something far too “business as usual” about paragraphs. On Friday I sweated in a sea of protestors. We gathered to share our grief, our rage, our exhaustion. What was missing was a plan. The sound system wasn’t working, or was too weak to reach most of the crowd; we stood and listened to the distant crackle of magnified anguish we couldn’t quite make out, and we cheered when others cheered, and we read each other’s signs, and we fervently, ironically, sadly, gratefully agreed. But now what?

The tortuous game of will-they-won’t-they cancel student debt continues. Biden’s decision this week to cancel $5.8 billion in debt held by 560,000 former students of the systematically fraudulent, now-defunct Corinthian Colleges seems to signal a willingness (finally!) to wield executive authority on higher ed issues. Meanwhile, a historic coalition of over 500 labor, civil rights and advocacy groups continues to press Biden for sweeping cancellation. The labor movement has been ramping up its calls for student debt cancellation, and more unions, including the Amazon and Starbucks unions and several traditionally blue-collar unions, are joining the fight. This show of force from a broad labor base could help Biden overcome his political reservations, with organized labor actively refuting the Republican talking point that student debt relief is a handout to elite university graduates.

Over the past week Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to require that the ingredients necessary for baby formula go to formula manufacturers first, and initiated Operation Fly Formula, using military planes to fly the equivalent of 1.5 million bottles of hypoallergenic formula across the Atlantic. It’s good to see the White House roused to take action, and to use emergency presidential powers to protect people in need. That’s what emergency powers are for.

Tuesday dawned with the unwelcome news that Antitrust Chief Jonathan Kanter has been indefinitely barred from working on the anti-monopoly case against Google while the Justice Department decides whether his past work representing Google’s critics should require his recusal. This, despite the fact that none of his past clients are parties in the Google case at issue.

On Earth Day 2021, President Biden affirmed his administration’s commitment to bold climate action that would set the world on a path to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. In the days leading up to this year’s Earth Day, in contrast, his Interior Department announced that it would reopen oil and gas lease sales on public lands. That’s bad enough. At least as alarming, however – if not more, quite frankly – is what his administration still isn’t doing to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Across the Biden administration, officials have promised (long overdue) accountability for corporate criminals. But talk is cheap. We at the Revolving Door Project are eager to see serious action to back it up. Our latest analysis, released yesterday, shows the administration is falling short of its ambitious rhetoric. We found that it “pursued at least 24 prosecutions and rulemakings to crack down on white-collar crime this winter, but took no action against at least 48 crimes or abuses.” You can read more about those cases in our brand new tracker. Our team will add updates regularly and share a biweekly news round-up with newsletter subscribers.