Norman Solomon

It's the End of the World, and I Feel Terrible

[This article was originally published by Truthdig.]

By Norman Solomon

 

I’ve written many hundreds of columns. The one below has caused me the most uncertainty about going public with it.

I’m accustomed to writing about facts, quotes, documented history, while offering assessments. But this piece extrapolates from the current zeitgeist, going into realms of events that must be speculative and—until too late—unprovable.

 

Diary

So lucky to be here. Tiny island of dreams. 

The serenity is unbelievable, except I want to believe it. Bluest waves with silver froth. Sun through the palms is damn near orgasmic. And solitude! If I can’t finish the book here, it’ll be my own fault.

***

Sort of knew I shouldn’t bring the shortwave. That’ll teach me to donate to NPR. Just can’t resist a “thank you gift.” Will crank it tomorrow.

***

Wish I hadn’t turned on the radio. BBC World Service all there is. Downbeat.

Swim, then write. Plenty of sunblock. As for writer’s block, perish the thought.

***

Latest newscast unnerving. Need to concentrate. I blow this deadline, I’m seriously screwed.

OK, no distractions, beautiful isle all to myself. A thousand words a day and I’ll be in clover.

***

Radio getting scary. What’s coming out of Washington and Moscow, not to be believed.

Stop worrying and get to work!

***

Worse. Can’t listen any more. Can’t not.

Wish I could call home.

***

BBC now mostly static. What I could make out this morning left me shaky. “Standoff” … “ultimatum” … “hair trigger” … “nuclear alert” … “drills.” Threats escalating.

Is that idiot trying to prove he’s not Putin’s bro after all?

***

Radio gone silent. Can’t write.

Should have packed some valium.

***

Trump traumatized us. Despicable lunatic president. Groundhog day after day, one alarm after another, real-life nightmare.

So whatever he said had to be wrong. Easy to forget that even a broken clock, once in a great while …

Early on, so much scorn when Trump said would be better to get along with Russia. Now I wish.

***

When I was a kid, most liberals wanted détente with Russia. After Trump got in, a very different approach. (Putin more odious than Brezhnev?) Righteous flamethrowers over nuclear powder keg.

Still nothing on shortwave. Cold sweat in this heat. Staring at waves and worrying.

Just realized: All the talk about climate change and hardly a word about the ultimate climate disaster—nuclear winter—in which case, forget about agriculture. Or human life on earth. All it would take is a nuclear war with Russia. For all I know, about to happen!

When we kept baiting Trump as a Putin tool, maybe we were even crazier than Trump.

***

Somehow a zeitgeist switch got pulled. By early ’17, the “Russiagate” juice was pulsing like Times Square. Hypnotic.

Didn’t think much about where the frenzy might plausibly lead. I certainly made no objection. Who wants to be a bull’s-eye, Kremlin’s useful idiot? Now I feel like an idiot all right. For never really asking: Where’s all this headed? Just keep increasing the chances of blowing up the whole friggin’ world?

***

Oscillating between numbed, frightened, outright terrified.

Should have been so obvious, where all the hostile rhetoric was taking us. Should have slammed on the brakes. But so much easier to fixate on Putin, the creepy bad guy with bare chest on a horse. Forget about the nuclear horseman of the apocalypse.

New Polls Show Anti-Trump Isn’t Enough to Beat GOP

By Norman Solomon

With six months to go before the midterm election, new national polls are showing that the Democratic Party’s much-touted momentum to gain control of the House has stalled out. The latest numbers tell us a lot about the limits of denouncing Donald Trump without offering much more than a return to the old status quo.

Under the headline “Democrats’ 2018 Advantage Is Nearly Gone,” CNN reported Wednesday that nationwide polling found “the generic congressional ballot has continued to tighten” -- “with the Democrats’ edge over Republicans within the poll’s margin of sampling error for the first time this cycle.”

With so many gerrymandered districts as well as widespread voter-ID laws and other GOP-engineered voter suppression, Democrats will need a substantial margin in vote totals to prevent Republicans from retaining a majority in the House of Representatives. (The prospects are worse in the Senate, where Democrats are defending a lopsided number of seats this year.)

While “47 percent of registered voters say they back the Democratic candidate in their district, 44 percent back the Republican,” according to CNN. “Voters also are divided almost evenly over whether the country would be better off with the Democrats in control of Congress (31 percent) or with the GOP in charge (30 percent). A sizable 34 percent -- including nearly half of independent voters (48 percent) -- say it doesn't matter which party controls Congress.”

The CNN survey comes on the heels of other grim national polling. Released last week, a Reuters poll concluded that “enthusiasm for the Democratic Party is waning among millennials.”

“The online survey of more than 16,000 registered voters ages 18 to 34 shows their support for Democrats over Republicans for Congress slipped by about 9 percentage points over the past two years, to 46 percent overall,” Reuters reported. “And they increasingly say the Republican Party is a better steward of the economy.”

Young people overwhelmingly supported Bernie Sanders during his 2016 campaign for president. With their votes in Democratic Party primaries and caucuses two years ago, the young showed that they want truth about the destructive effects of corporate power -- and forceful action against its manifestations, whether economic injustice or climate change.

Overall, the latest generation of adults is negative about the demagogue in the White House. But most Democratic leaders aren’t offering a clear and compelling alternative. As Reuters put it, “Although nearly two of three young voters polled said they do not like Republican President Donald Trump, their distaste for him does not necessarily extend to all Republicans or translate directly into votes for Democratic congressional candidates.”

Six months ago, the independent report Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis pointed out that young people “increasingly want politics to be for something profoundly positive rather than just against Republicans.” As a member of the task force that worked on the report, I was struck by how the top echelon of the Democratic Party keeps trying to insulate itself from -- and fend off -- the tremendous energy that mobilized behind Sanders during the primaries.

In short, the Democratic Party is still dominated by elected officials and power brokers who appear to be deeply worried that a future progressive upsurge of political engagement could loosen -- or even end -- their corporate-funded grip on the party. As the Autopsy report said, “Emerging sectors of the electorate are compelling the Democratic Party to come to terms with adamant grassroots rejection of economic injustice, institutionalized racism, gender inequality, environmental destruction and corporate domination. Siding with the people who constitute the base isn’t truly possible when party leaders seem to be afraid of them.”

The Sanders campaign was “mostly propelled by millennials,” the report noted, and the campaign “turned what conventional wisdom had pegged as an obscure, 2-percent campaign into a photo finish with the establishment’s preferred candidate. Once the nomination was settled, much of this grassroots energy dissipated as the Clinton campaign declined to adopt positions like single-payer health care and free public college that resonated with young voters.”

Those kinds of positions have gained some traction in the aftermath of 2016, but they still have a steep climb in the hidebound upper reaches of Democratic Party power. For the people atop the party, it’s so much easier and more comfortable to selectively denounce Trump -- while opposing genuinely progressive agendas that would really challenge income inequality or take aim at the warfare state’s bloated budget or cross up the big donors who funnel vast quantities of money into the party.

With the world facing the dual threats of climate change and nuclear holocaust, it’s no exaggeration when Noam Chomsky describes the present-day Republican Party as “the most dangerous organization in human history.” The latest national polling reflects the reality that Democrats’ feeble partisan maneuvers are ill-suited to ousting the Republicans from power. Methodical grassroots organizing will be necessary -- to bring down the GOP’s deranged leadership, and to defeat the forces of corporate power and militarism that continue to hold sway at the top of the Democratic Party.

     Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

The Ghosts of 'New Democrats' Are Haunting Us

[This article was originally published by Truthdig.]

By Norman Solomon

Twenty-five years ago, the so-called New Democrats were triumphant. Today, their political heirs are eager to prevent the Democratic Party from living up to its name. At stake is whether democracy will have a chance to function.

A fundamental battle for democracy is in progress—a conflict over whether to reduce the number of superdelegates to the party’s national convention in 2020, or maybe even eliminate them entirely. That struggle is set to reach a threshold at a party committee meeting next week and then be decided by the full Democratic National Committee before the end of this summer.

To understand the Democratic Party’s current internal battle lines and what’s at stake, it’s important to know how we got here.

After a dozen years of awful Republican presidencies, Bill Clinton and running mate Al Gore proved to be just the ticket for the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. Clinton settled into the White House in early 1993 as the leader of pathbreaking New Democrats. Many media outlets hailed him as a visionary who had overcome left-leaning liberalism to set the party straight.

Although candidate Clinton had criticized Republican trickle-down economics and spoken about the need for public investment by the federal government, as president he proceeded along the lines of what Washington Post economics reporter Hobart Rowan described as a formula of “fiscal conservatism and social liberalism.” That formula provided a template that the next Democratic president, Barack Obama, deftly filled.

Both Clinton and Obama were youthful and articulate, breaths of fresh air after repugnant Republican predecessors in the White House. Yet our two most recent Democratic presidents were down with corporate power—not as far down as the GOP, but nevertheless in the thrall of Wall Street and the big banks.

From the outset of the Clinton and Obama administrations, top appointees reflected and propelled the deference to oligarchic power. Robert Rubin went from being co-chair of Goldman Sachs (paid $17 million in 1992) to serving wealthy interests as director of Clinton’s National Economic Council, a post so powerful that it earned him the title of “economic czar.” Two years later, Rubin began a long stint as secretary of the treasury, succeeding former Texas senator and big-business tool Lloyd Bentsen. They were just two of the numerous corporate functionaries in the upper realms of the Clinton administration.

“Ron Brown, corporate lawyer and lobbyist for American Express and Duvalier’s Haiti, would supervise a Clinton industrial policy at the Department of Commerce,” economic analyst Doug Henwood wrote after eight months of Clinton’s presidency. “Mickey Kantor, corporate lawyer, would negotiate trade deals. Warren Christopher, corporate lawyer, would oversee the New World Order. Hillary Rodham Clinton, corporate lawyer and board member at Walmart, the low-wage retailer that’s destroyed countless rural downtowns, would supervise health care.”

While that kind of lineup went over big with moneyed interests, its policy pursuits would end up driving a wedge between the Democratic Party and the working class. Of course the guys driving Clinton’s economic train loved the North American Free Trade Agreement. Why wouldn’t they? Workers were costs, not people. Corporate trade deals were profit boosters.

Weeks after pushing NAFTA through Congress with an alliance of Republicans and corporate-friendly Democrats, Clinton signed the trade pact in December 1993—a move that was unpopular with working-class voters across the political spectrum. A year later, Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, a GOP grip over the body that went uninterrupted for 12 years.

During his first term, Clinton’s signature accomplishments to serve economic elites went beyond NAFTA to include the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996. That same year, riding a wave that included ample undertows of misogyny and racism, Clinton celebrated his signing of the welfare “reform” bill into law. The legislation created a gold rush for media conglomerates to gobble up broadcast stations, while low-income women found their financial plights becoming even more dire.