Lever Time

For decades, major labor unions like the Teamsters have endorsed the Democratic ticket in presidential elections — but not this year. In a surprise move, the Teamsters declined to endorse either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. The development — and Trump’s surprising levels of support from blue-collar and union voters — suggests something’s changing in the world of w...

Donald Trump is heading to Aurora, Colorado, on Friday — a city that Trump has repeatedly portrayed as crime-ridden and taken over by Venezuelan gangs, despite the refut ations of city officials and police. Ahead of Trump’s Colorado rally on Friday, David Sirota joined the podcast City Cast Denver to explain why Trump has focused on Aurora and the signal he’s sending with his rally in the Denver s...

Millions in the Southeastern United States recently endured one cataclysm after another. First, Hurricane Helene left chaos and destruction across a trail of states. Then, in Georgia, a catastrophic chemical plant fire released plumes of toxic chlorine gas, forcing thousands to evacuate or shelter in place. Both disasters share a troubling backstory: regulatory failures fueled in part by corporate...

Vice President Kamala Harris has built a broad coalition that stretches from climate activists to a former oil company CEO, all of them aligned against former President Donald Trump. But if Harris wins in November and Trump’s out of the picture, what happens to this band of strange bedfellows, who frequently find themselves split on core issues like taxation and corporate power? What kind of a man...

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a tobacco industry lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, penned a memo calling on conservatives and business interests to make the nation’s legal system far more friendly to corporate power. A few years later, a lawyer named Michael Horowitz penned a follow-up memo calling for conservatives to indoctrinate generations of lawyers as the right’s foot soldiers on the ground....

When Kamala Harris first ran for president in 2019, she promised to deliver Medicare for All to the people — but that changed. Early in her campaign, she frequently referred to a 2017 bill she co-sponsored with Sen. Bernie Sanders that would have effectively abolished private health insurance. But when political winds didn’t look good, Harris changed course, and ultimately released her own, very d...

In television commercials, at speeches, and on the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris frequently boasts that she stood up to big banks as California's attorney general. But her sloganeering obscures a sometimes-ugly record . Today on Lever Time , Arjun Singh looks back at Harris' early years as a district attorney and then state attorney general to see what they show us about the preside...

The Lever ’s David Sirota reports on his adventures at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, sharing his on-the-ground reporting on Democrats’ fear of another Trump presidency and their rhetoric loathing the corporate takeover of politics. Sirota spotlights the tension between the convention’s populist framing and its corporate sponsors footing the bill. Sirota also talked to Democratic s...

Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascent to presumptive Democratic nominee has upended the presidential contest and energized Democratic voters — but what’s the policy behind the vibes? On Friday, Harris unveiled a series of economic policies, including a proposed federal ban on grocery price gouging and plans to lower prescription drug and housing costs . It was a good step, but one that came after H...

For more than a decade, global politics have been rocked by the rise of right-wing nationalist governments. Similar to Donald Trump’s rise in the United States, countries like India, Hungary, Brazil, and Italy have seen the emergence of far-right governments who’ve channeled popular anger into support for nativist and anti-immigrant platforms. It turns out we’re largely to blame for it. Today on L...

On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, a move that drew praise from a wide swath of the party, from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Sen. Joe Manchin.  Though Walz was relatively unknown until recently, his stock within Democratic politics skyrocketed in the last few weeks. As governor, Walz passed legislation Democrats have long championed,...

Floods, heat waves, wildfires and other climate extremes are becoming a way of life for millions around the world — and tragically a way of death. After a historic, record-breaking flood in France killed her mother, a daughter wants to hold oil companies criminally responsible for her death, joining seven other plaintiffs in a lawsuit. Today on Lever Time , senior investigative reporter Lois Parsh...

As Vice President Kamala Harris becomes the presumptive Democratic nominee, her party is facing an uphill battle to defeat Donald Trump and his attempt to frame his corporate agenda as populism. In a wide-ranging interview on The Brian Lehrer Show on New York’s largest public radio station, David Sirota discusses his recent essay in The Lever about how Democrats must do a better job making clear t...

With Trump last night becoming the GOP nominee and now having his largest polling lead — and with Biden reportedly on the verge of dropping out — David Sirota, Arjun Singh, and The Atlantic ’s Tyler Austin Harper review what is one of the wildest moments in American political history. The biggest question of all: Will the Democrats decide to lose the election, or will they actually fight to win? I...

Should he stay or should he go? President Joe Biden’s decision to remain in the presidential race has consequences for hundreds of millions of people — and it has at least one Democratic National Committee member and convention delegate inquiring whether the party can force him off the ticket. But if Biden’s out, corporate lobbyists who’ve embedded themselves into the party could help select the n...

Today on Lever Time , we unpack how corporations built and then broke the supply chain — and more importantly, how they took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to price gouge everybody else.  During the COVID-19 pandemic, it felt like we ran out of everything: toilet paper, hand sanitizer, microchips, exercise bikes, and more. High demand and supply shortages rocked the economy. Now we know that i...

How is it that the Democrats’ main bulwark between America and a Trump regime is an impaired president whose White House reportedly tried to hide his decline? On this episode of Lever Time , we talk to the Democratic operative who first tried to sound the alarm to avert this disaster — and who then faced a “quiet throat-slitting” by party bosses.  We also explore how Democrats are trying to blackm...

Last night’s debacle of a presidential debate raised a huge question: Why did Democratic Party powerbrokers prevent a serious, contested presidential primary against Joe Biden?  It’s a question that our podcast Lever Time dared to explore a while ago when it was a taboo topic. At the time, we were criticized for even discussing it — even though this morning, it seems everyone in America is now fin...

Today on Lever Time , David Sirota sits down with Semafor co-founder and editor-in-chief Ben Smith to grapple with journalism’s industry-wide reckoning — and explore why independent news might come out on top. There’s a crisis in journalism. Major media outlets like The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NPR, and NBC News have laid off hundreds of staff this year, while other publications like Vi...

The National Basketball Association wants you to gamble. Since 2014, the league has championed the legalization of sports betting nationwide, partially due to its own business interests in gambling. But the emergence of online gambling has coincided with a rise in troubling health outcomes like increased rates of depression and substance abuse. Today on Lever Time , we explore the recent growth of...

Yesterday, the government introduced a new rule to remove $49 billion in medical debt that’s currently listed on Americans’ credit reports. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) wants to go even further by establishing a grant program to actually cancel the  $220 billion in medical debt that Americans owe. If signed into law, the program could relieve the debt burden for more than 100 million people.  Today o...

Today, we're excited to share the first episode of a new series from our friends over at the podcast City Cast Denver . City Cast Denver is a daily news podcast that connects listeners with what's happening in and around Denver. In their first spinoff series, "Lauren Boebert Can't Lose," the team at City Cast Denver look at key moments from Congresswoman Lauren Boebert's life just ahead of Colorad...

Is the TurboTax era over? Recently, the IRS announced they plan to roll out a free program that will let Americans directly file their taxes online without using expensive tax-assistance programs. The move could have happened more than two decades ago, if not for corporate lobbyists. Today on Lever Time , we look at the 20-year war waged by tax-prep companies like Intuit and H&R Block to stop...

Behind nearly every hamburger or chicken nugget handed out in a school cafeteria is JBS Foods, a multi-billion dollar conglomerate run by a billionaire butcher family who bribed their way to become the world’s largest meat processor. Today on Lever Time , we look at how JBS captured the meat market, harmed workers, pulverized the environment, and generally tainted all your lunch meats with a hefty...

Is Ticketmaster too big to fail? It’s the question some musicians and small venue owners are asking in the wake of the Justice Department’s decision to sue Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment over its alleged monopoly in the music industry. Today on Lever Time , Morgan Harper, an antitrust expert, and Greg Saunier, founder of the indie band Deerhoof, debate the strength o...