By Norman Solomon

California Governor Gavin Newsom has made headlines this winter by vowing to defeat a proposal for a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires in the state. Many national polls now rank him as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, but aligning with the ultra-wealthy is not auspicious for wooing the party’s voters. Last year, Reuters/Ipsos pollsters reported that a whopping 86 percent of Democrats said “changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority.”

Newsom has drawn widespread praise for waging an aggressive war of words against President Trump. But few people outside of California know much about the governor’s actual record. Many Democratic voters will be turned off to learn that his fervent opposition to a billionaire tax is part of an overall political approach that has trended more and more corporate-friendly.

A year ago, Newsom sent about 100 leaders of California-based companies a prepaid cell phone “programmed with Newsom’s digits and accompanied by notes from the governor himself,” Politico reported. One note to the CEO of a big tech corporation said, “If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away.” While pandering to business elites, Newsom has slashed budgets to assist the poor and near-poor with healthcare, housing and food – in a state where 7 million live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are the highest in the nation.

The latest Newsom budget, released last month, continues his trajectory away from social compassion. “The governor’s 2026-27 spending plan balances the budget by dodging the harsh realities of the Republican megabill, H.R. 1, and maintains state cuts to vital public supports, like Medi-Cal, enacted as part of the current-year budget,” the California Budget & Policy Center pointed out. “Governor Newsom’s reluctance to propose meaningful revenue solutions to help blunt the harm of federal cuts undermines his posture to counter the Trump administration.” The statement said that the proposed budget “will leave many Californians without food assistance and healthcare coverage.”

So far, key facts about Newsom’s policy priorities have scarcely gone beyond California’s borders. “National media have focused on Newsom as a personality and potential White House candidate and have almost completely ignored what he has and has not done as a governor,” said columnist Dan Walters, whose five decades covering California politics included 33 years at The Sacramento Bee. “It’s a perpetual failing of national political media to be more interested in image and gamesmanship rather than actual actions, the sizzle rather than the steak, and Newsom is very adept at exploiting that tendency.”

Walters told me that Newsom “has generally avoided direct conflicts with his fellow millionaires, such as discouraging tax increases, and has danced between corporations and labor unions on bread-and-butter issues such as minimum wages. He’s also quietly moved away from environmental issues, most notably shifting from condemnation of the oil industry for price gouging and pollution to encouraging the industry to increase production and keep refineries operating.”

Newsom angered climate activists last fall by signing his bill to open up thousands of new oil wells. Noting that “Newsom just championed a plan to dramatically expand oil drilling in California,” the Oil and Gas Action Network said that he “can’t claim climate leadership while giving Big Oil what it wants.” Third Act, founded by Bill McKibben, responded by denouncing “Newsom’s Big Oil backslide” and accused the governor of “backtracking on key climate and community health commitments.”

Great efforts to curb the ubiquitous toxic impacts of PFAS “forever chemicals” hit a wall in October when Newsom vetoed legislation to ban them in such consumer items as cookware, dental floss and cleaning products. “This bill had huge support from both within the state and beyond, and yet, apparently, the governor was interested only in the one sector opposing it – the cookware industry,” said Clean Water Action policy director Andria Ventura. The organization put the veto in context, observing that “the governor seems determined to move away from his pro-environment past.”

By Norman Solomon

The past year has completely discredited any claim that choosing between the Democratic and Republican parties would be merely a matter of “pick your poison” with the same end result. In countless terrible ways, the last 12 months have shown that Donald Trump’s party is bent on methodically inflicting vast cruelty and injustice while aiming to crush what’s left of democracy and the rule of law.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s leadership persists with the kind of elitist political approach that helped Trump win in 2024. Hidebound and unimaginative, Senate leader Chuck Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries have been incapable of inspiring the people whose high-turnout votes will be essential to ending Republican control of Congress and the White House.

The Democratic establishment shuns the progressive populism that’s vital to effectively counter bogus right-wing populism. And so, the fight to defeat the fascistic GOP and the fight to overcome the power of corporate Democrats are largely the same fight.

Advocates for progressive change will remain on the defensive as long as the Trump party is in power. With the entire future at stake, social movements on the left should have a focus on organizing to oust Republicans from control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections.

The point isn’t that Democrats deserve to win – it’s that people certainly don’t deserve to live under Republican rule, and ending it is the first electoral step toward a federal government that serves the broad public instead of powerfully destructive and violent elites. Like it or not, in almost every case the only candidates in a position to defeat Republicans for the House and Senate this year will have a “D” after their name.

Democratic Party leaders have dodged coming to terms with reasons why their party lost the White House in 2024, preferring to make a protracted show of scratching their chins and puzzling over the steep falloff of support from working-class voters of all colors. The Democratic National Committee’s refusal to release its autopsy report, assessing what went wrong in the election, underscores the party’s aversion to serious introspection.

Cogent answers are readily available, but top Democrats like Schumer and Jeffries refuse to heed them. If the party wants to regain and expand support from working-class voters, it must fight for programs that they clearly want.

By Norman Solomon

If the DNC isn’t open and transparent about why they lost, then how can we be sure they will learn their lesson this time?

The Democratic National Committee’s decision to block the release of its own autopsy report on the 2024 election is stunning but not surprising. Averse to unpleasant candor, the Democrats’ governing body functions more like a PR firm than a political organization devoted to grassroots capacities for winning elections. The party’s leaders pose as immune from critique, even if they have led the party to disaster.

Unwilling to depart from the party establishment’s culture of conformity, the DNC has remained under the Biden-Harris shadow throughout 2025. Release of an official autopsy might have shown that party leaders actually want to encourage public discourse about the missteps that enabled Donald Trump to become president again. But the DNC is proceeding as if there’s nothing to be learned from the tragic debacle of 2024 that its leaders don’t already know – and they don’t need to share their purported wisdom with anyone else.

In early December, the DNC featured Kamala Harris as the keynote speaker at the semi-annual meeting of its 450 members. Predictably, her formulaic speech received a standing ovation. No matter that in recent months, on the long book tour promoting her campaign memoir, Harris was notably incapable of responding with any coherence to questions about why as vice-president she claimed that Biden was fit to run for president in 2024 or, for that matter, to be president for another four years.

The DNC’s refusal to release its autopsy is in keeping with a pattern of evading hard truths that led virtually every elected Democrat in Washington to go along with President Biden’s insistence on running for re-election until his awful debate performance in late June 2024. Meanwhile, big majorities of Democratic voters were continually telling pollsters that they didn’t want Biden to run again.

An autopsy report with any value would not dodge such matters. Nor would it elide sensible questions about how much money went to insider consultants and advertising contractors as the Harris campaign managed to spend $1.5bn during the hallowed 107 days of her presidential campaign last year. An autopsy might also probe the moral and political consequences of nominee Harris continuing to toe the Biden line for huge arms shipments to Israel while its military continued to slaughter Palestinian civilians in Gaza; during the campaign and afterward, polling showed that she would have gained a substantial boost of votes by calling for an arms embargo.

Months ago, news accounts surfaced that release of the DNC’s autopsy would be postponed until after the November election. The draft autopsy reportedly avoided casting blame on Biden or Harris or other Democratic leaders. But as it turned out, even such a tepid autopsy would be too hot for the DNC leadership to handle.

In mid-December, when DNC chair Ken Martin announced the decision to withhold the autopsy from public view, his rationale reeked of elitism, perfumed as pragmatism: “Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.” The actual message to the party’s base – including millions of loyal volunteers and small donors – was that they couldn’t be trusted to know what party chiefs have learned from a report based on hundreds of interviews with people in all 50 states. At the DNC, the political calculus is that the basis for sharing such information should be need-to-know, and ordinary Democrats don’t need to.

Martin’s explanation for hiding the autopsy – his claim that winning in the future would be hampered by the “distraction” of assessing the past – is backwards. Public candor about why Democrats lost the White House is not a “distraction” – it’s vital for disrupting the party’s repeated compulsion of making the same mistakes all over again.

[Click here to real full article on The Guardian website]

By Norman Solomon

Ten years after Donald Trump first ran for president, he stands at the helm of Titanic America. How did this happen?

No factors were more pivotal than the outlooks and actions of the Democratic Party leadership. Scrutinizing them now is vital not only for clarity about the past. It also makes possible a clear focus on ways to prevent further catastrophe.

Here’s actual history that corporate Democrats pretend didn’t happen:

2016:  Hillary Clinton offers more of the status quo. Her allies in the Democratic Party pull out all the stops so she can win the party’s presidential nomination. With a big assist from the Democratic National Committee, she prevails over the strong primary challenge from Bernie Sanders – but her campaign trail goes downhill from there. After rallying behind Sanders’s genuine progressive populism, many young people don’t trust the pseudo-populism of Clinton’s campaign. She has earned a millennial problem, and it prevents her from becoming president.

2017:  Democratic Party leaders can hardly blame themselves or their nominee for the virtually unbelievable circumstance of the Trump presidency. A critical focus on Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street won’t do. Neither will critiquing her thinly veiled contempt for the progressive wing of the party. But blaming Trump’s victory on Russia becomes an obsessive theme.

2018:  The Democratic leadership is mapping out a battle plan for the midterm elections in November. At the same time, a key priority is to thwart the inside threat posed by progressive forces. Establishment Democrats are keeping a watchful eye and political guns trained on Bernie Sanders.

2019:  Democrats take control of the House, and a large cast of political characters is off and running for the party’s presidential nomination. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren are at the left edge, while more than a dozen others jostle for media attention. For elites determined to retain undemocratic power, seeing either Sanders or Warren in the Oval Office would be the worst possible outcome.

2020:  Early in the year, the economic populism of the Sanders campaign continues to catch fire, while many forces team up to function as fire extinguishers. The Democratic Party establishment acts to smother the grassroots blaze. After Joe Biden’s fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary puts his campaign on life-support, rescue comes eighteen days later from South Carolina, where Biden wins a landslide primary victory – and then several corporate-friendly contenders quickly drop out of the race and effusively endorse him. When Biden clinches the nomination, progressives largely close ranks behind him to defeat Trump. Biden squeaks through.

By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch

The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes. But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn’t the United States provide for the basic needs of its people?

Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political narratives. When someone can’t make ends meet and suffers dire consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has caused it.

While “income inequality” is now a familiar phrase, media coverage and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the results are extremely far-reaching.

“We have the highest rate of childhood poverty and senior poverty of any major country on earth,” Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out. “You got half of older workers have nothing in the bank as they face retirement. You got a quarter of our seniors trying to get by on $15,000 a year or less.”

Such hardship exists in tandem with ever-greater opulence for the few, including this country’s 800 billionaires. But standard white noise mostly drowns out how government policies and the overall economic system keep enriching the already rich at the expense of people with scant resources.

This year, while Donald Trump and Republican legislators have been boosting oligarchy and slashing enormous holes in the social safety net, Democratic leaders have seemed remarkably uninterested in breaking away from the policy approaches that ended up losing their party the allegiance of so many working-class voters. Those corporate-friendly approaches set the stage for Trump’s faux “populism” as an imagined solution to the discontent that the corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.

While offering a rollback to pre-Trump-2.0 policies, the current Democratic leadership hardly conveys any orientation that could credibly relieve the economic distress of so many Americans. The party remains in a debilitating rut, refusing to truly challenge the runaway power of corporate capitalism that has caused ever-widening income inequality.

“Opportunity” as a Killer Ideology

The Democratic Party establishment now denounces President Trump’s vicious assaults on vital departments and social programs. Unfortunately, three decades ago it cleared a path that led toward the likes of the DOGE wrecking crew. A clarion call in that direction came from President Bill Clinton when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he exulted that “the era of big government is over.”

Clinton followed those instantly iconic words by adding, “We cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” Like the horse he rode into Washington — the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which he cofounded — Clinton advocated a “third way,” distinct from both liberal Democrats and Republican conservatives. But when his speech called for “self-reliance and teamwork” — and when, on countless occasions throughout the 1990s he invoked the buzzwords “opportunity” and “responsibility” — he was firing from a New Democrat arsenal that all too sadly targeted “handouts” and “special interests” as obsolete relics of the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society.

The seminal Clintonian theme of “opportunity” — with little regard for outcome — aimed at a wide political audience. In the actual United States, however, touting opportunity as central to solving the problems of inequity obscured the huge disparities in real-life options. In theory, everyone was to have a reasonable chance; in practice, opportunity was then (and remains) badly skewed by economic status and race, beginning as early as the womb. In a society so stratified by class, “opportunity” as the holy grail of social policy ultimately leaves outcomes to the untender mercies of the market.

By Norman Solomon / The Hill

The new book by Kamala Harris, released today, is not only an instant bestseller. “107 Days” is also a launchpad for the former vice president to reach millions of voters likely to see her on presidential primary ballots in 2028.

During the next few weeks, the book will combine with media interviews and a speaking tour of nearly 20 major cities to propel her back into the Democratic limelight.

The book is a smooth read. Its 300 pages present Harris as a complex woman, sometimes openly vulnerable and even self-critical, while necessarily tough-minded about politics. Behind-the-scenes anecdotes are plentiful, and even include a marital spat with her husband Doug Emhoff during the stretch drive of the grueling 2024 campaign.

“107 Days” could do a lot to buff up Harris’s image. It is less likely to solve key political barriers she’s going to face if she opts to seek the next Democratic presidential nomination.

Harris strives to surmount one of the main hurdles — her record of publicly insisting that Joe Biden’s evident cognitive decline wasn’t really happening over the course of his presidency. That reality was obvious from afar, so how could Harris be working so closely with the president and pretend there was no problem?

Such questions are sure to linger in the political air, and “107 Days” fails to answer them satisfactorily. The book says about Biden’s decision to run again that “in retrospect, I think it was recklessness.” Yet Harris provides an explanation for her own conduct that many will read more as an excuse: “Of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty.”

Ironically, when Harris writes that it would look “incredibly self-serving” for her to push for Biden to step aside, that rationale is itself rather self-serving. It goes a long way toward letting her off the hook — rather than admitting deference to party conformity and a calculus about her own political future.

In the book, Harris falls back on a timeworn riff about Biden: “On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best.” But knowing more, having better judgment and being more compassionate than Trump is merely a high jump over an abysmally low standard.

[Click here to real full article on The Hill website.]