Norman Solomon

Joe Biden Needs an Intervention: An Open Letter to DNC Chair Tom Perez

By Norman Solomon

Whatever our political differences, vast numbers of Democrats and others agree that it’s imperative to defeat Donald Trump. But with scarcely five months to go before the voting starts, Joe Biden is not helping to assemble a broad tactical alliance. Instead, he’s ignoring the wisdom that Jesse Jackson offered at the Democratic National Convention in 1988: “It takes two wings to fly.”

Right now, Biden is idling in the cockpit of a political aircraft with one wing.

As chair of the Democratic National Committee at a time when the party’s presumptive nominee for president seems likely to crash and burn, you should be openly working to fix the problem rather than merely proclaiming that Biden is a great candidate.

Indications are profuse that Biden is proceeding with a business-as-usual campaign while elevating establishment figures. His rhetorical nods toward Bernie Sanders supporters have been notably superficial, while the nitty-gritty of policy is being placed in corporate hands.

On April 27, The Nation summed up one of the latest ominous signs: “Larry Summers is a dead albatross around Biden’s neck. Why should we believe Biden’s promises of progressive reforms, when he seeks out the advice of this plutocrat-loving economist?”

I have often heard you talk about the “north star” of party principles. Surely that must involve democracy. Yet the cancellation of the New York presidential primary is a flagrant Machiavellian maneuver by that state’s Democratic Party leadership.

“This means that our campaign will receive no delegates from New York, weakening our ability to fight for a progressive platform and progressive rules at the Democratic convention,” the Sanders campaign pointed out in a statement on April 29. “It also means our voters are less likely to turn out, which will hurt progressive New York candidates who are still facing primaries.” Using the pandemic as an excuse for the cancellation was clearly bogus, since the entire New York election on June 23 could be conducted by mail.

The corrosive ill will created by such machinations -- heightening progressives’ distrust of the Democratic Party -- will weaken support for the Biden general-election campaign across the country. As the Sanders campaign put it, what Democratic Party power brokers did in New York “is an outrage, an assault on democracy.”

But where is your voice to challenge this “assault on democracy”? The corporate cats seem to have your tongue. With silence, you’re an enabler of this travesty. You should firmly declare that New York will be stripped of all its national-convention delegates unless this decision is reversed and the state’s presidential primary is reinstated.

A related situation looms in California and some other states, threatening to deny Sanders his statewide allocation of delegates beyond congressional districts. The threat involves undemocratically depriving Sanders of delegates that he -- and millions of people who voted for him -- are entitled to. But again, your voice is silent.

You might think it’s all well and good for you to claim a “hands off” approach of deferring to decisions by state party leaders. But in mid-March you didn’t hesitate to flatly proclaim that Illinois, under a Democratic governor, should go ahead with an in-person presidential primary election, thereby aiding Biden’s momentum to widen his delegate lead over Sanders. To the detriment of public health, you publicly and emphatically sought to influence a state decision about a Democratic primary.

But now, your enabling silence is conspicuous as hundreds of duly elected Sanders delegates are in jeopardy nationwide.

As in New York, the bogus pretext in various states is that Sanders is no longer a candidate -- even though, when he announced the suspension of his campaign three weeks ago, the senator explicitly stated that “I will stay on the ballot in all remaining states and continue to gather delegates.” And, he added, “we must continue working to assemble as many delegates as possible at the Democratic convention, where we will be able to exert significant influence over the party platform and other functions.”

The committees and delegates of the national convention will make key decisions on crucial platform issues, such as healthcare as a human right, student debt, immigration reform, institutional racism, the climate emergency, economic justice and much more. Also on the line are major choices about whether the party will democratize or slam the door on internal reforms.

In a mass email that the DNC sent out last weekend, you declared with ample self-congratulation: “Today, the DNC looks massively different than it did in the wake of the 2016 election. That’s a good thing. In early 2017, we were rudderless. . . . [I]t was obvious we had to rebuild our party from the ground up.” You wrote of “rebuilding trust with Democrats across the country” -- and asserted “that is exactly what our new leadership did.”

But whatever trust has been rebuilt over the last three years is now being damaged by your refusal, as DNC chair, to speak up for party democracy in the states where it is now under threat.

Biden is a weak candidate in grave danger of losing a decisive number of progressive votes in the fall. Consider the latest polling data that has just appeared under this USA Today headline: “Nearly 1 in 4 Sanders Supporters Not on Board Yet with Voting for Biden.”

That’s what happens when a presidential campaign is all set to fly with one wing.

     Norman Solomon is co-founder and national director of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Some Progressives Are in Denial About Trump’s Fascist Momentum

By Norman Solomon

Two years after Donald Trump won the presidency, the author of “How Fascism Works” assessed him in a video. “It might seem like an exaggeration to call Trump a fascist,” Yale professor Jason Stanley said. “I mean, he’s not calling for a genocide or imprisoning his own people without due process. But . . . if you use history and philosophy as a guide, it’s easy to see parallels between Trump’s words and those of the most reviled fascists in history. That scares me, and it should scare you too.”

Drawing on his decade of studying fascist propaganda, Stanley concluded: “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.”

We’re all in trouble.

Trumpism has started to feel normal. Trump stands a good chance of winning re-election in November. And his odds have improved because the Democratic Party is expected to nominate an abysmal candidate.

For ample good reasons, many progressives disdain Joe Biden. He has a long record as a corporate servant, ally of racial injustice and avid supporter of the military-industrial complex. Now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, he scarcely seems able to articulate anything worthwhile.

In short, as the two contenders with a chance to win the presidential race, Biden and Trump are offering a choice between neo-liberalism and neo-fascism.

To hear a small but significant portion of the U.S. left tell it these days, that’s not a meaningful choice. Some say preventing the re-election of Trump isn’t important. That amounts to ignoring political reality, an evasion with potentially vast consequences.

“We should make no mistake,” longtime progressive journalist Juan González said days ago, “that this country is edging closer and closer to neo-fascist authoritarianism.”

That reality doesn’t stop some on the left from evading it -- preferring to conflate the two major parties to a degree akin to denial.

Earlier this month, I listened to a discussion that included an eminent left author who flatly declared that on “all major issues” there is “no real difference between the Democratic and Republican parties.” A preposterous claim.

Soon afterward, I read an article by an editor at a high-quality left magazine that displayed odd complacency about whether or not Trump gets a second term: “The most likely outcome if he wins re-election is not a crude dictatorship, but further erosion of civil liberties within the existing political framework. Opposition parties and media will still be able to function. The people who suffer the worst forms of oppression under Trump will be the immigrants and ethnic minorities whose rights are routinely violated under Republican and Democratic presidencies alike.”

Really? It won’t matter to “immigrants and ethnic minorities” whether Trump is president for another four years?

When there’s a genuine threat of sliding into fascism, the left has an overarching responsibility to fight against the momentum of the extreme right. Sometimes that requires a broad coalition.

The left in France was correct when, in 2017, it united with a corporate centrist to defeat neo-fascist National Front candidate Marine Le Pen in the runoff election for president. In 2020, for the United States, the dangers are no less grave.

It’s true that leading “moderate” Democrats and even some self-described “progressives” have routinely functioned as enablers for the rightward tilt of national politics -- a bad dynamic that has continued on Capitol Hill in the midst of the pandemic under leadership from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Not wanting to seem obstructionist often ends up being helpful to right-wing agendas.

But here’s a key point: People who deny or downplay the real threat of neo-fascism consolidating itself via Trump’s re-election are, in effect, serving as enablers for the forces of the virulent extreme right that already controls so much of the U.S. government.

“It’s important to remember that right now, the issue of greatest urgency is to get rid of the malignancy in the White House,” Noam Chomsky said in an interview last week. “If we don’t do that, everything else pales into insignificance. To keep this for another four years means racing to the abyss on global warming, possibly reaching irreversible tipping points, sharply increasing the threat of nuclear war, stuffing the judiciary with young, ultra-right, mostly unqualified lawyers who will guarantee that anything to the left of Attila the Hun can’t survive for a generation, and on and on. This is top priority.”

In that video interview with The Intercept, Chomsky added: “There’s a thing called arithmetic. You can debate a lot of things, but not arithmetic. Failure to vote for Biden in this election in a swing state amounts to voting for Trump. Takes one vote away from the opposition, same as adding one vote to Trump. So, if you decide you want to vote for the destruction of organized human life on Earth. . . then do it openly. . . . But that’s the meaning of ‘Never Biden.’”

In “How Fascism Works,” Professor Stanley addressed “fascist politics” -- and repeatedly used that term when describing the Trump-led Republican Party.

For those in the USA who recoil at applying such a phrase to today, preferring to call it hyperbole, Stanley’s book sheds clear light on an insidious process that normalizes and obscures: “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. 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.”

Meanwhile, Stanley wrote, “Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncements of a single individual, or perhaps a political party. Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space. A fascist leader can replace truth with power, ultimately lying without consequence. By replacing the world with a person, fascist politics makes us unable to assess arguments by a common standard. The fascist politician possesses specific techniques to destroy information spaces and break down reality.”

Sound familiar?

     Norman Solomon is co-founder and national director of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Bernie’s Pivot for Biden Isn’t Pleasant. But Trump Must Be Defeated.

By Norman Solomon

This week, soon after Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign, one of its most effective message-crafters summed up a vital challenge ahead. “The best hope to defeat Trump is to positively and constructively motivate a large Democratic turnout,” David Sirota wrote. “The best way to do that is to show progressive voters they are actually valued, rather than taken for granted. And the best way to show them that they are valued is to actually embrace an agenda that they want.”

Progressives should never stop fighting for policies that truly represent our values. And activists, unlike even the best politicians, can avoid the pitfalls of making diplomatic statements that aren’t true.

While announcing the deactivation of his campaign on April 8, Bernie said that Joe Biden is “a very decent man.” But decency is not a word that remotely applies to Biden’s political record that spans several decades (as I’ve described in one article after another after another after another after another after another after another).

Ironically, at this historic juncture, Biden -- a longtime eager corporate tool -- is now the only electoral implement available to progressives for preventing the re-election of Trump. At this point, there’s simply no other plausible way to prevent this monstrous president from winning a second term.

And so, in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Bernie spelled out a choice: “Do we be as active as we can in electing Joe Biden and doing everything we can to move Joe and his campaign in a more progressive direction? Or do we choose to sit it out and allow the most dangerous president in modern American history to get re-elected?”

Bernie started this week by endorsing Biden in an awkward video duet with the presumptive nominee. Symbolically, if not intentionally, when the video went to full screen while Bernie spoke, one object was clearly visible behind him -- a chessboard.

There are reasons to criticize some of Bernie’s recent tactical moves. (I wish he hadn’t suspended his campaign before the end of primary voting.) But, looking ahead, he’s being sensible about current political realities.

Crucially in swing states, Trump can only be defeated by votes for the Democratic presidential nominee, who’s now virtually certain to be Biden, and there’s no point in pretending otherwise. Magical thinking might be a wondrous literary device, but it’s useless -- or worse -- in politics.

“We had a contentious campaign,” Bernie told AP as he noted differences with Biden. “We disagree on issues. But my job now is to not only rally my supporters, but to do everything I can to bring the party together to see that (Trump) is not elected president.”

(A bit paradoxically, Bernie said that he’s hoping people will vote for him in the 20 or so states that have upcoming primaries -- so that there’ll be more Sanders delegates for the Democratic National Convention in August. More of those delegates will increase progressive leverage when the convention adopts a platform and sets future party rules.)

If anyone thinks it doesn’t matter much whether Trump is re-elected, they’re living in some kind of bubble. To those outside of such a soundproof bubble, Bernie is now sending an unequivocal message: “I believe that it’s irresponsible for anybody to say, ‘Well, I disagree with Joe Biden -- I disagree with Joe Biden! -- and therefore I’m not going to be involved.’”

Bernie Sanders is saying that progressives have a profound responsibility to fight against -- and oust -- the extreme right-wing forces that have gained control of the U.S. government’s executive branch and, increasingly, the federal judiciary. Of course, in political terms, progressives wish that we were in a very different place. But this is where we are.

     Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Bernie’s Decision: Retreat Should Not Be Confused with Surrender

By Norman Solomon                       

Politics is ultimately about life and death, as the current pandemic horrors make clear. Policies that can seem abstract not only routinely harm quality of life; they also kill.

Both Bernie Sanders campaigns for president have brought a principled seriousness to the national discourse that no other candidate has come near matching. Now, we seem to be entering new terrain. Or are we?

You might not like “war” metaphors -- but a vicious reality is that various types of warfare are constantly happening against billions of people on this planet. Humanity is under siege from structured injustice due to anti-democratic power.

We don’t have a choice of whether or not we’re in a class war. It’s going on perpetually -- waged with enormous financial, political and media firepower. The firepower of class warfare against Bernie Sanders has been ferocious and unrelenting. The Bernie campaign is dissipating, but class war is sure to remain unrelenting.

Our choices revolve around whether and how to fight back against the centralized wealth and huge corporate interests waging that endless war. Now, as the era after the Bernie 2020 campaign gets underway, I’d like to tell you a little about one of the countless inspiring activists I’ve met -- and why his outlook is so connected to the moment we’re in now.

Fifty years ago, Fred Branfman saw the human consequences of war in Laos -- an airborne genocide that took place courtesy of U.S. taxpayers and the Orwellian-named Defense Department. Fred was a humanitarian-aid volunteer in Laos when he discovered that his country was taking the lives of peasants there by the thousands.

Fred assembled Voices from the Plain of Jars. Published in 1972, with the subtitle “Life Under an Air War,” the book included essays by Laotian people living under long-term U.S. bombardment as well drawings by children who depicted the horrors all around them. As one bookseller put it, “This is the story of the first society to be totally destroyed by aircraft.”

In 2006, when I talked with Fred, he said: “At the age of 27, a moral abyss suddenly opened before me. I was shocked to the core of my being as I found myself interviewing Laotian peasants, among the most decent, human and kind people on Earth, who described living underground for years on end, while they saw countless fellow villagers and family members burned alive by napalm, suffocated by 500-pound bombs, and shredded by antipersonnel bombs dropped by my country, the United States.”

Fred moved to Washington, where he worked with antiwar groups to lobby Congress and protest the inflicting of mass carnage on Indochina. He saw the urgent need to work inside and outside the political system to change policies and save lives.

More than three decades after his experiences in Laos, Fred wrote about “the effect on the biosphere of the interaction between global warming, biodiversity loss, water aquifer depletion, chemical contamination, and a wide variety of other new threats to the biospheric systems upon which human life depends.” He was far from optimistic. And that’s where, in April 2020, Fred has much to convey to us with a spirit that remains powerful several years after his death.

Many people who pay attention to national and global realities are in despair, and the loss of the Bernie campaign now adds to the weight of pessimism. Fred would have understood. Looking toward the future, he said, “I find it hard to have much ‘hope’ that the species will better itself in coming decades.”

But, Fred went on, “I have also reached a point in my self-inquiries where I came to dislike the whole notion of ‘hope.’ If I need to have ‘hope’ to motivate me, what will I do when I​ see​ no rational reason for hope? If I can be ‘hopeful,’ then I can also be ‘hopeless,’ and I do not like feeling hopeless.”

He added: “When I looked more deeply at my own life, I noticed that my life was not now and never had been built around ‘hope.’ Laos was an example. I went there, I learned to love the peasants, the bombing shocked my psyche and soul to the core, and I responded -- not because I was hopeful or hopeless, but because I was alive.”

And human.

That should be reason enough for solidarity and determination. We will often lose. We will not give up. We must not give up.

     Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

The Pandemic Makes the Bernie 2020 Campaign More Vital Than Ever

By Norman Solomon

Pressure on Bernie Sanders to quit the presidential race is intensifying. Over the weekend, the Washington Post splashed a major story under the headline “Some Top Sanders Advisers Urge Him to Consider Withdrawing.” While sheltering at home, comedian Larry David couldn’t curb his enthusiasm for an end to the campaign, telling a New York Times columnist: “I feel he should drop out. Because he’s too far behind. He can’t get the nomination.”

OK, at this point it’s highly unlikely -- though still possible -- that Sanders can gain enough delegates to become the Democratic nominee. But the Bernie 2020 campaign has never been only about winning. It has always also been about strengthening vital progressive movements while widening public discourse and political space.

Like the movements fueling -- and being fueled by -- both of the Sanders campaigns for president, those campaigns have organized to challenge the dominant narrow, corporate-power concepts of what is possible or desirable. That has meant continually throwing down gauntlets against systemic injustices that routinely cause preventable catastrophes -- individual, social and environmental.

By now, corporate media outlets often acknowledge that the Sanders campaigns brought into the political mainstream many proposals that were commonly labeled as “fringe” or “radical” just a few years ago. Positions like a $15-an-hour minimum wage, free public-college tuition and Medicare for All have reached center stage for the Democratic Party and the country as a whole.

Yet now, to hear mass media and the party establishment tell it, Sanders should immediately cease expanding the public discourse during this election cycle. Demands that Sanders quit the race are getting louder by the day -- insisting that he function like a traditional politician rather than a movement candidate.

But those calls for normal political behavior are coming at a time when conditions are anything but normal. The coronavirus pandemic is a truly unprecedented life-and-death emergency on a scale so vast that it’s difficult to comprehend. The conditions -- and timeworn assumptions -- that have made it so deadly in the United States go far beyond the criminal negligence of top officials in the Trump administration.

For decades, assaults on the public sector, led by Republicans and often abetted by Democrats in Washington, have crippled government capacities to protect public health. While defending for-profit insurance, Democratic leaders have refused to support comprehensive healthcare coverage for all.

At a time when the structural failures of a corporatized society have never been more glaring and deadly, we desperately need Sanders’ voice to be heard far and wide. That can and should happen between now and June -- a month when more than a dozen states are scheduled to hold presidential primaries.

The status of “frontrunner” does not change the reality that Joe Biden has failed to step up to the challenge of responding to the pandemic. Biden’s severely limited capacities to speak clearly -- or to offer proposals commensurate with the extreme crisis -- continue to be on display.

Meanwhile, consistent with his approach over several decades, the Sanders campaign has provided a flood of position statements, online messaging, virtual roundtables, vibrant interviews and proposals that amount to the “boldest legislation in history.”

Solid reasons for Sanders to stay in the presidential primaries are hardly appreciated by party power brokers and big media outlets that have been hostile toward the Bernie 2020 campaign from the beginning.

There’s no doubt that Bernie Sanders will do all he can to help defeat Donald Trump. That imperative would not be served by stifling a campaign that continually enhances public understanding of what will be necessary to finally guarantee healthcare as a human right -- and create a truly humane society.

     Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Trump’s Mass Negligent Homicide Doesn’t Let Democratic Leaders Off the Hook

By Norman Solomon

In the last few days, New York and Pennsylvania postponed voting in presidential primaries from April until June. A dozen other states have also rescheduled. Those wise decisions are in sharp contrast to a failure of leadership from Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee.

Just two weeks ago, the party establishment was vehemently pushing back against efforts to delay several mid-March primaries in response to the coronavirus emergency. DNC Chair Tom Perez issued a statement that The Hill newspaper summed up with the headline “DNC Calls on States Not to Postpone Primaries.” Perez put out the statement on the day that three states were holding primary elections.

Ohio was also scheduled to have a presidential primary that day, but at the eleventh hour it was postponed thanks to the state’s Republican governor. Incredibly, Perez quickly criticized the prudent delay of Ohio’s election, saying it “only bred more chaos and confusion.”

In Illinois, with the DNC’s encouragement, Governor J.B. Pritzker -- a billionaire whose billionaire sister Penny Pritzker was Barack Obama’s 2008 national campaign finance chair and later became his Secretary of Commerce -- refused to reschedule the March 17 primary. Just three days later, he announced a “stay-at-home” order for the whole state.

Think about it: On Tuesday, the governor enables an Illinois election that draws about a million voters and thousands of election workers to voting sites that day. On Friday, the same governor orders everyone in the state to stay home.

Perez -- who became DNC chair three years ago as the candidate of the party’s Clintonite so-called “moderate” (corporate) wing -- is clearly aligned with Biden, as Perez’s appointments to key committees for the party’s 2020 national convention have underscored. Postponing primary races in states where Biden was way ahead in opinion polls, as in Illinois, would risk slowing his momentum against Bernie Sanders.

Biden’s interest in going ahead with the March 17 primaries -- public health be damned -- was expressed by his campaign’s spokeswoman Symone Sanders during a March 15 interview on CNN. “I encourage people to get out there and vote on Tuesday,” she said. The spin included upbeat, patriotism-tinged rationales like: “In times of war, in times of strife, our country has always upheld our need to uphold our democracy. We have voted in war time; votes were held many times in this country after times of strife.”

In their zeal to boost the number of Biden delegates as fast as possible, the Biden campaign and the DNC chair ignored or distorted the guidelines that were in effect at the time from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Deeply disappointed that the DNC is willfully choosing not to listen to scientists during one of the most critical moments in recent history,” biologist Dr. Lucky Tran tweeted on March 17, when voters in three states were casting Democratic primary ballots.

By then, as CBS News noted, even the White House had “issued new guidelines designed to slow the rapid spread of coronavirus, asking nearly every American to stay home from work or school for the next 15 days.”

Power in a Time of Coronavirus

By Norman Solomon

Every day now we’re waking up into an extreme real-life nightmare, while responses are still routinely lagging far behind what’s at stake. Urgency is reality. The horrific momentum of the coronavirus is personal, social and political. In those realms, a baseline formula is “passivity = death.” The imperative is to do vastly better.

Consistent individual actions -- such as “social distancing” and extensive handwashing -- are absolutely necessary. People should stay home if at all possible. Other steps include disinfecting potentially contaminated surfaces and following the admonition to not touch your face.

Meanwhile, a huge social burden has fallen onto charities and other nonprofit organizations with resources that are tiny in relation to the scale of this catastrophe. Even in normal times they can’t do much more than slightly ameliorate the shredding of government social safety nets, the shrinking of the public sector and the profit-obsessed cruelties of corporate capitalism.

Under the weight of the coronavirus emergency, the crucial political challenges involve fighting the bastions of dominant political malfeasance, lies and plunder at the top of the U.S. government.

“In order to save lives, protect working families, and boost our economy in sustainable and healthy ways,” Oxfam concludes, “we need to take actions that are swift, bold, and well beyond what Congress has thus far been willing to approve.” After partnering with Data for Progress to do national polling, Oxfam released a report that shows public opinion favors much more drastic legislation in response to the coronavirus rampage.

“Registered voters in the U.S. strongly support immediate, aggressive action in response to both the public-health and economic crises,” the March 20 report says. “Among the measures they endorse: paid sick leave for all workers, emergency funding for food supplies for those affected by the crisis, free testing for the virus, and moratoriums on evictions, foreclosures, and utility shutoffs.”

An immediate necessity is to galvanize political power from the grassroots to step up the pressure for an all-out government mobilization against this pandemic. That means continually pushing to generate maximum resources toward people who need them most -- now and for a long time to come.

Rather than being a respite from political power struggles, the coronavirus emergency is greatly intensifying them. More aid for those immersed in greed will mean less for those in desperate need. The quest by corporate profiteers to mercilessly exploit dire situations has never flagged.

Showing the vital importance of his national voice as a presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders has outlined some of the gluttonous corporate maneuvers now underway.

“Just in the last few days,” he pointed out on Sunday, “we've seen numerous examples of lobbyists and their agents fighting for special favors: the airline industry is asking for $50 billion, the private space industry is asking for $5 billion, the hotel industry wants $150 billion, the National Association of Manufacturers wants $1.4 trillion, the International Council of Shopping Centers wants a guarantee of up to $1 trillion, Adidas wants to sneak in a long-sought provision allowing people to use pretax money to pay for gym memberships and fitness equipment -- even when many gyms and retail stores are closed nationwide, and corporate pork producers are using the coronavirus to push Congress to expedite guest worker visas, even at a time when international travel and immigration is largely shut down.”

In this time of “unprecedented crisis,” Sanders said, “we need an unprecedented legislative response that focuses on the emergency health care needs of the American people and that puts working families and the poor ahead of CEOs and huge corporations.”

With this pandemic, fueled by the intentional neglect and greedy stupidity of Trump and Company, we have profuse reasons to heed words from legendary labor organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones: “Mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

To fight like hell for the living -- to protect people from the ravages of the coronavirus and a harsh economic system -- will require unrelenting work from progressive movements willing and able to organize effectively in every political arena.

     Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

What the Coronavirus Emergency Has to Do with Biden vs. Sanders

By Norman Solomon

On the surface, the coronavirus emergency has nothing in particular to do with Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. What’s obvious is that Donald Trump’s unhinged bluster and inaction let the pandemic get a lethal jump on the United States, people are dying while huge numbers of lives are in jeopardy, and quick drastic steps are imperative. Yet at the same time, the differences between what Biden and Sanders are advocating have enormous implications for what could be done to curb the deadly virus in this country.

The absence of a public health system is consistent with a timeworn pattern of massive holes in the public sector. Biden merely wants to patch up some of the holes, while Sanders wants to build strong structures on truly democratic foundations.

“It is time to ask how we got to where we are, not only our lack of preparation for the virus, but how we end up with an economy where so many people are hurting at a time of massive income and wealth inequality,” Sanders said at the close of his recent debate with Biden. “It is time to ask the question of where the power is in America. Who owns the media? Who owns the economy? Who owns the legislative process? Why do we give tax breaks to billionaires and not raise the minimum wage?”

While so-called “moderate” Democrats like Biden don’t want to answer -- or even hear -- such questions, Sanders insists on continuing to ask them. Such perseverance has never been more needed than at this pivotal moment, with so many lives in the balance. “Where the power is in America” has everything to do with why the U.S. government’s response to the unfolding coronavirus catastrophe has continued to be so anemic, foreshadowing so many more deaths and so much more grief.

It’s urgent to implement all-out measures to contain the coronavirus spread (seriously aiming for containment rather than merely “flattening the curve”). Meanwhile, policies are needed to make sure that insurance-industry profiteers and other sectors of corporate America don’t get away with rapaciously benefiting from catastrophe in ways that would cause untold misery for vast numbers of people.

A pair of campaign documents released this week -- the Biden “Plan to Combat Coronavirus (Covid-19) and Prepare for Future Global Health Threats” and the Sanders “Emergency Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic” -- convey big differences in approach to the current unprecedented crisis.

Biden proposes to tweak the health care system and aid only some who suffer economic distress. In sharp contrast, Sanders is proposing far-reaching measures that include free health care for all (“Medicare will ensure that everyone in America, regardless of existing coverage, can receive the health care they need during this crisis”) and major financial assistance to all (“emergency $2,000 cash payments to every person in America every month for the duration of the crisis”).

Calling for programs that would spend at least $2 trillion in response to the coronavirus emergency, Sanders laid out commensurate programs -- to “mobilize on a scale not seen since the New Deal and World War II to prevent deaths, job losses, and economic ruin.”

Joe Biden vs. Bernie Sanders is not only an electoral contest between presidential candidates. It’s also a contrast of patchwork fixes vs. profound structural changes. Refusal to upset the apple carts of corporate power vs. willingness to fight that power. Tepid adjustments vs. truly transformational agendas.

Sanders was correct when he said last week that “poll after poll, including exit polls, show that a strong majority of the American people support our progressive agenda.” Days ago, the Bernie 2020 campaign sent out a mass email declaring that “our campaign has won the battle of ideas.”

Whether the ideas that Sanders is championing can appreciably shape the government’s response to the coronavirus will have a lot to do with how successful the United States can be in limiting its terrible effects.

     Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

‘In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See’: The Bernie 2020 Campaign Represents a Fight That Must Continue

By Norman Solomon

“In a dark time,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “the eye begins to see.”

No matter who wins the Democratic presidential nomination, many millions of people will refuse to unsee what has become all too clear. On the verge of spring 2020, we can see what we’re up against:

**  A crowing media establishment, eager to relegate the Bernie Sanders campaign to the political margins.

**  A gloating Democratic Party establishment, glad to rally around Potemkin candidate Joe Biden and extol his carefully crafted façade.

**  Overall, interlocking systems based on greed and corporate power instead of shared resources and genuine democracy.

On Tuesday night, there was no mistaking the smug joy of studio pundits and Democratic Party operatives on networks like AT&T-owned CNN and Comcast-owned MSNBC. Meanwhile, the New York Times rushed into print yet another all-out attack piece masquerading as a “news” article about Sanders.

Dominant media have routinely slanted coverage to make Sanders look bad, often bypassing context and skewing facts. It was just another day at the office last week when the Times front-paged a flagrant smear of Sanders as a supposed propaganda tool of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. A former U.S. ambassador to Moscow quickly denounced the story as a “distortion of history.”

Such regular deceptions from a range of corporate media shouldn’t surprise us, but they should never cease to outrage us. The same is true of the rampant corporate sleaziness in the upper reaches of the Democratic National Committee.

Corporate media and corporate Democrats want the Bernie 2020 campaign -- and the grassroots energy behind it -- to melt away. That’s not going to happen.

Movements that have been propelling the Sanders campaign are here for the long haul -- as determined to keep fighting for social justice as top corporate executives are determined to keep collecting huge paychecks. (And that’s saying something.)

The chances of Bernie winning the nomination have sharply diminished, but it’s still possible. And no matter what: movements for basic social change and democracy will vitally persist with long-term struggles to wrest power out of the hands of oligarchs and their functionaries.

Candidates who rushed to endorse Biden after his big victory in South Carolina -- Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker -- each personify, in their own way, what’s so corrosive about standard-issue Democratic Party leaders. Their backgrounds and personalities vary widely, but they share a political space of opportunism and ultra-coziness with corporate power. (Meanwhile, during the crucial aftermath of her withdrawal from the race after Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren shed new light on her political character when she decided not to endorse Sanders.)

The antidote to anti-democratic poisons has nothing to do with cynicism, passivity or defeatism. The solutions will come from realism, activism and ongoing insistence that a better world is possible -- if we’re willing to keep fighting for it.

     Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Elizabeth Warren: Which Side Are You On?

By Norman Solomon

The night before Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren spoke to several thousand people in a quadrangle at East Los Angeles College. Much of her talk recounted the heroic actions of oppressed Latina workers who led the Justice for Janitors organization. Standing in the crowd, I was impressed with Warren’s eloquence as she praised solidarity and labor unions as essential for improving the lives of working people.

Now, days later, with corporate Democrat Joe Biden enjoying sudden momentum and mega-billionaire Mike Bloomberg joining forces with him, an urgent question hovers over Warren. It’s a time-honored union inquiry: “Which side are you on?”

How Warren answers that question might determine the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. In the process, she will profoundly etch into history the reality of her political character.

Facing the fact that her campaign reached a dead end, Warren basically has two choices: While Bernie Sanders and Biden go toe to toe, she can maintain neutrality and avoid the ire of the Democratic Party’s corporate establishment. Or she can form a united front with Sanders, taking a principled stand on behalf of progressive ideals.

For much of the past year, in many hundreds of speeches and interviews, Warren has denounced the huge leverage of big money in politics. And she has challenged some key aspects of corporate power. But now we’re going to find out more about how deep such commitments go for her.

“After Warren's bleak performance in the Super Tuesday primaries, her associates, as well as those of Sanders and former vice president Joe Biden, say she is now looking for the best way to step aside,” the Washington Post reported on Wednesday -- and “there is no certainty she will endorse Sanders or anyone else.”

A laudable path now awaits Warren. After winning just a few dozen delegates, she should join forces with Sanders -- who has won more than 500 delegates and is the only candidate in a position to defeat Biden for the nomination.

The urgency of Warren’s decision can hardly be overstated. Sanders and Biden are fiercely competing for votes in a half-dozen states with March 10 primaries including Michigan (with 125 delegates), Washington (89 delegates) and Missouri (68 delegates). A week later, primaries in four states -- Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio -- will determine the allocation of 577 delegates.

In the midst of these pivotal election battles, Warren should provide a vehement endorsement of Sanders and swiftly begin to campaign for him. Choosing, instead, to stand on the sidelines would be a tragic betrayal of progressive principles.

“Here’s the thing,” Warren said in a speech to a convention of the California Democratic Party nine months ago. “When a candidate tells you about all the things that aren’t possible, about how political calculations come first . . . they’re telling you something very important -- they are telling you that they will not fight for you.”

We’ll soon find out whether Elizabeth Warren will fight for us.

     Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.