Norman Solomon

Omnicide Joe?

By Norman Solomon

President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Biden’s crucial role earned him the name “Genocide Joe.”

That nickname might seem shrill, but it’s valid. Although Biden will not be brought to justice for serving as a key accomplice to the horrific crimes against humanity that continue in Gaza, the label sticks -- and candid historians will condemn him as a direct enabler of genocide.

Biden could also qualify for another nickname, which according to Google was never published before this article: “Omnicide Joe.”

In contrast to the Genocide Joe sobriquet, which events have already proven apt, Omnicide Joe is a bit anticipatory. That’s inevitable, because if the cascading effects of his foreign policy end up as key factors in nuclear annihilation, historians will not be around to assess his culpability for omnicide -- defined as “the destruction of all life or all human life.”

That definition scarcely overstates what scientists tell us would result from an exchange of nuclear weapons. Researchers have discovered that “nuclear winter” would quickly set in across the globe, blotting out sunlight and wiping out agriculture, with a human survival rate of perhaps 1 or 2 percent.

With everything -- literally everything -- at stake, you might think that averting thermonuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers, Russia and the United States, would be high on a president’s to-do list. But that hardly has been the case with Joe Biden since he first pulled up a chair at the Oval Office desk.

In fact, Biden has done a lot during the first years of this decade to inflame the realistic fears of nuclear war. His immediate predecessor Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of two vital treaties -- Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies -- and Biden did nothing to reinstate them. Likewise, Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration, and Biden let it stay dead.

Instead of fulfilling his 2020 campaign promise to adopt a U.S. policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, two years ago Biden signed off on the Nuclear Posture Review policy document that explicitly declares the opposite. Last year, under the euphemism of “modernization,” the U.S. government spent $51 billion -- more than every other nuclear-armed country combined -- updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come.

Before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, Biden showed a distinct lack of interest in actual diplomacy to prevent the war or to end it. Three days before the invasion, writing in the Financial Times, Jeffrey Sachs pointed out: “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized -- NATO enlargement -- there has been no American diplomacy at all. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

While Russia’s invasion and horrible war in Ukraine should be condemned, Biden has compounded Putin’s crimes by giving much higher priority to Washington’s cold-war mania than to negotiation for peace -- or to mitigation of escalating risks of nuclear war.

From the outset, Biden scarcely acknowledged that the survival of humanity was put at higher risk by the Ukraine war. In his first State of the Union speech, a week after the invasion, Biden devoted much of his oratory to the Ukraine conflict without saying a word about the heightened danger that it might trigger the use of nuclear weapons.

During the next three months, the White House posted more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiques about the war in Ukraine. They all shared with his State of the Union address a stunning characteristic -- the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers -- even though many experts gauged those dangers as being the worst they’d been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Rahm Emanuel Is a Terrible Choice for DNC Chair

By Norman Solomon / The Hill

If the Democratic National Committee is trying to find a new leader proficient at alienating Black voters, it couldn’t do better than Rahm Emanuel.

Emanuel has indicated in recent days that he’s interested in the job. If he goes for it at the party’s upcoming meeting, much of the old Democratic guard is likely to back him, setting up an intra-party brawl.

Last week, David Axelrod served as a digital advance man for his former Obama White House colleague, posting that “Dems need a strong and strategic party leader, with broad experience in comms; fundraising and winning elections,” while touting Emanuel as just the man for the job: “Dude knows how to fight and win!”

In terms of well-connected power-brokering, Emanuel’s ties with Democratic elites and corporate donors have been second to none. And he can boast an impressive political resume — senior advisor to President Bill Clinton, congressman from Illinois, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Democrats’ 2006 sweep, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, and White House chief of staff for Barack Obama, before becoming mayor of Chicago in 2011.

But his eight-year record as mayor could trip up Emanuel if he runs for DNC chair. Long before leaving office in 2019, Emanuel had fallen into disrepute. By the end of 2015, a poll found that his approval rating among Chicago residents had sunk to 18 percent. No wonder he decided not to run for a third term.

Emanuel stands out at provoking bitter enmity from Black people, crucial voters in the Democratic Party base.

He earned notoriety for the cover-up of a video showing how Chicago police killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald one night in October 2014. For 13 months, during Emanuel’s campaign for reelection, his administration suppressed a ghastly dashboard-camera video showing the death of McDonald, an African American who was shot 16 times by a police officer while walking away from the officer. (A jury later convicted the officer of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery.)

Memories of Emanuel’s malfeasance have remained vivid. In 2020, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) expressed a widely held view when she tweeted: “Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering up a murder is disqualifying for public leadership.”

Last weekend, amid reports that Emanuel was weighing a bid for DNC chair, Ocasio-Cortez denounced him as a symptom of what ails the party: “There is a disease in Washington of Democrats who spend more time listening to the donor class than working people. If you want to know the seed of the party’s political crisis, that’s it.”

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

Looming Fascism and the Question of Hope

By Norman Solomon

When some leading thinkers at the London School of Economics saw fascism take hold in the 1930s, Oxford history professor Ben Jackson said in a recent BBC interview, they “argued that in those circumstances the people with economic power in society, the property owners, are willing to cancel democracy, cancel civil liberties, and make deals with political organizations like the Nazis if it guarantees their economic interest.”

That analysis has an ominous ring to it now as many tech industrialists swing behind President-elect Trump. They can hardly be unaware that Gen. Mark Milley, who served as the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman under Trump, described him as “fascist to the core.” 

“Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos tweeted the morning after the election. Weeks earlier, as the owner of the Washington Post, Bezos had blocked an endorsement of Kamala Harris by the newspaper’s editorial board.

Bezos could lose billions of dollars in antitrust cases, but now stands a better chance of winning thanks to a second Trump administration. During the last decade, Amazon Web Services gained huge contracts with the federal government, including a $10 billion deal with the National Security Agency.

No wonder Bezos’ post-election tweet laid it on thick -- “wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”

Not to be left behind at the starting gun in the tech industry’s suck-up-to-Trump derby, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”

As a nine-figure donor and leading purveyor of online lies for the 2024 Trump campaign, Elon Musk has been working closely with Trump. The Tesla magnate, X (formerly Twitter) owner and SpaceX mogul is well-positioned to help shape policies of the incoming administration. A week after the election, news broke that Musk has been chosen by Trump to co-lead an ill-defined “Department of Government Efficiency” with an evident mission to slash the public sector.

Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg rank first, third and fourth respectively on the Forbes list of the world’s richest individuals. The three of them have combined wealth of around $740 billion.

“In recent years, many tech elites have shrugged off the idealism once central to Silicon Valley’s self-image, in favor of a more corporate and transactional approach to politics,” the Washington Post gingerly reported after the election. The newspaper added: “A growing contingent of right-wing tech figures argue that Trump can usher in a new era of American dominance by removing red tape.”

For amoral gazillionaires like Bezos and Musk, ingratiating themselves with Trump is a wise investment that’s calculated to yield windfall returns. Evidently, the consequences in human terms are of no real concern. In fact, social injustice and the divisions it breeds create the conditions for still more lucrative political demagoguery, with the richest investors at the front of the line to benefit from corporate tax cuts and regressive changes in individual tax brackets.

After Election Day, the fascism scholar Jason Stanley offered a grim appraisal: “People who feel slighted (materially or socially) come to accept pathologies -- racism, homophobia, misogyny, ethnic nationalism, and religious bigotry -- which, under conditions of greater equality, they would reject. And it is precisely those material conditions for a healthy, stable democracy that the United States lacks today. If anything, America has come to be singularly defined by its massive wealth inequality, a phenomenon that cannot but undermine social cohesion and breed resentment.”

The threat of fascism in the United States is no longer conjectural. It is swiftly gathering momentum, fueled by the extremism of the party set to soon control both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government as well as most of the federal court system.

It’s not only that, as Stanley notes, “the Republican Party’s domination of all branches of government would render the U.S. a one-party state.” Already set in motion are cascading toxic effects on social discourse and political dynamics, marked by widening acceptance and promotion of overt bigotries and brandished hatreds.

Biden’s post-election pep talk was pathetic — Democrats must prepare to fight

By Norman Solomon / The Hill

After years of serving as enablers for a faltering President Joe Biden, Democrats in Congress must finally break away from his leadership — for the sake of their party and the survival of democracy in this country.

Donald Trump, the man whom Gen. Mark Milley called “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country,” does not deserve to have the blue carpet rolled out for him at the White House. Yet such hospitality was key to Biden’s message in his Rose Garden speech on Thursday.

It’s one thing to pledge to “ensure a peaceful and orderly transition,” as Biden did. It’s quite another to proceed as though this is a normal transition and a normal incoming president.

Instead of rising to the historical moment with clarity about the grave and imminent challenges ahead, Biden opted for ominous silence about the clear and present danger to the republic that America will face beginning Jan. 20, 2025.

To the tens of millions of Americans who are deeply alarmed about the future of this country under a second Trump administration, Biden offered only some of his usual aphorisms, along with vague pep-talk phrases like “setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable.”

When Biden assured the nation that “we’re going to be okay,” the statement failed to live up to his responsibilities as someone who took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

That Constitution is now under dire threat. But you wouldn’t know it from what Biden had to say. Instead, what screamed out were his silences, as though the well-founded and widespread worries about Trump’s fascistic qualities are no longer of great moment.

In effect, Biden began to blaze a post-election trail of conciliation toward the extremist politics of the present-day Republican Party. If congressional Democrats follow along that path, they will compound their grievous error of serving as yes-men and yes-women for Biden’s insistence on running for reelection, until his disastrous debate performance.

A huge looming question now is whether Democrats in office will fold up their tents and retreat — or fight back against the Trump forces that are on the march.

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

Trump’s Victory and Elite Power Over the Democratic Party

By Norman Solomon

A pair of quotes, separated by eight years, spotlight a chronic political mentality at the top of the Democratic Party:

“The path to victory in a state like Michigan, Harris campaign officials are betting, is through suburban counties that are home to many college-educated and white voters,” the New York Times reported three weeks ago.

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin,” Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer said in July 2016.

The same basic approach of Democratic Party elites that first opened the door to the White House for Donald Trump has done it again.

After losing a national election, political parties sometimes muster the wisdom to compile an “autopsy” report -- assessing what went wrong and what changes are needed for the future. But after Hillary Clinton lost as a corporate war-hawk candidate in 2016, the Democratic National Committee showed that it had no interest in doing any such report.

So, at RootsAction we decided to do it ourselves, with a task force of researchers and activists who wrote “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis.” Many of our key findings about the 2016 election apply to the latest one. For example:

• “The Democratic National Committee and the party’s congressional leadership remain bent on prioritizing the chase for elusive Republican voters over the Democratic base: especially people of color, young people and working-class voters overall.”

• One of the large groups with a voter-turnout issue is young people, “who encounter a toxic combination of a depressed economic reality, GOP efforts at voter suppression, and anemic messaging on the part of Democrats.”

• “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 Democratic Party’s claims of fighting for “working families” have been undermined by its refusal to directly challenge corporate power, enabling Trump to masquerade as a champion of the people.

• “What must now take place includes honest self-reflection and confronting a hard truth: that many view the party as often in service to a rapacious oligarchy and increasingly out of touch with people in its own base.” The Democratic Party should disentangle itself -- ideologically and financially -- from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and other corporate interests that put profits ahead of public needs.

Four weeks ago, when asked on ABC’s The View if she would have done anything differently than President Biden, the reply from Kamala Harris was more than notable: “Not a thing comes to mind.”

Such loyalty to the powerful is a repetition compulsion disorder with horrendous consequences. Harris’s reply -- after a full year of ongoing mass murder and genocide in Gaza, made possible by U.S. military aid -- was a moral failure and a prelude to electoral disaster. Harris stuck with her patron in the Oval Office and his role as an accomplice to Israel while disregarding the clear wishes of the Democratic Party’s base.

Now that a fascistic party has won the presidency along with the Senate and apparently the House as well, the stakes for people and planet are truly beyond comprehension. Grassroots organizing should include maximum possible nonviolent pressure on officials in government and other institutions, insisting that compromise with Republican leaders is completely unacceptable.

"If you're not worried about encroaching fascism in America, before long it will start to feel normal. And when that happens, we're all in trouble,” the author of How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley, warned in a video. That was six years ago.

"Normalization of fascist ideology, by definition, would make charges of 'fascism' seem like an overreaction, even in societies whose norms are transforming along these worrisome lines,” Stanley wrote in his 2018 book. “Normalization means precisely that encroaching ideologically extreme conditions are not recognized as such because they have come to seem normal. The charge of fascism will always seem extreme; normalization means that the goalposts for the legitimate use of 'extreme' terminology continually move."

Resisting such normalization is now imperative.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," was published in paperback this fall with a new afterword about the Gaza war.