Norman Solomon

Health Care and Ghosts of War

Speaking in a time of war, Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Somehow this madness must cease.”

Forty-one years later, young soldiers are returning to the United States from terrifying zones of carnage. The old claims of a justified war have melted away. So have the promises of a humane society back home.

Statistics about the war dead tell us very little about human realities. And familiar downbeat numbers about health care — 47 million Americans with no health insurance, perhaps an equal number woefully under-insured — tell us very little about the actual consequences or other options.

“The shocking facts about health care in the United States are well known,” Yes! Magazine noted in the autumn of 2006. “There’s little argument that the system is broken. What’s not well known is that the dialogue about fixing the health care system is just as broken.”

That’s an apt description. For all the media focus and political rhetoric on health care, the mainline discourse is stuck in a corporate-friendly rut. But there are signs that a movement for a rational, humanistic health care system in this country is now gaining strength...

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Deadly ‘Diplomacy’

With 223 days left in his presidency, George W. Bush laid more flagstones along a path to war on Iran. There was the usual declaration that “all options are on the table” — and, just as ominously, much talk of diplomacy.

Three times on Wednesday, the Associated Press reports, Bush “called a diplomatic solution ‘my first choice,’ implying there are others. He said ‘we’ll give diplomacy a chance to work,’ meaning it might not.”

That’s how Bush talks when he’s grooving along in his Orwellian comfort zone, eager to order a military attack.

“We seek peace,” Bush said in the State of the Union address on January 28, 2003. “We strive for peace.”

In that speech, less than two months before the invasion of Iraq began, Bush foreshadowed the climax of his administration’s diplomatic pantomime...

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Obama, Clinton and Anger to Burn

In politics, as in so many other aspects of life, anger is a combustible fuel. Affirmed and titrated, it helps us move forward. Suppressed or self-indulged, it’s likely to blow up in our faces. With the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination coming to a close, there’s plenty of anger in the air. And the elements are distinctly flammable. As Bob Herbert just wrote in the New York Times, “the Clinton and Obama partisans spent months fighting bitterly on the toxic terrain of misogyny, racism and religion.”

Herbert doesn’t spread the blame evenly. And, as an elected Obama delegate to the national convention, I don’t either. But at this stage in the nomination process, the returns of blame aren’t merely diminishing — they’re about to go over a cliff.

The anger that’s churning among many Hillary Clinton supporters is deserving of respect. For a long time, she’s been hit by an inexhaustible arsenal of virulent sexism, whether from Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh or Chris Matthews...

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