Norman Solomon

Who’s Afraid of Nina Turner?

By Norman Solomon

Nina Turner is very scary -- to power brokers who’ve been spending big money and political capital to keep her out of Congress. With early voting underway, tensions are spiking as the decisive Democratic primary race in northeast Ohio nears its Aug. 3 finish. The winner will be virtually assured of filling the seat in the deep-blue district left vacant by Rep. Marcia Fudge when she became President Biden’s HUD secretary. What’s at stake in the special election is whether progressives will gain a dynamic champion in the House of Representatives.

For the Democratic Party establishment, the specter of “Congresswoman Nina Turner” is alarming. The former national co-chair of the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign has a proven capacity to stir fervent energy on the left around the country. Her ability to inspire at the grassroots is far beyond what mainstream party leaders can do.

All politics is local when the votes are finally counted -- but in the meantime, this contest is a national clash of political forces. Turner’s endorsements include 15 progressive House and Senate members along with numerous left-leaning organizations. Her main opponent, Shontel Brown, has supporters who include the upper ranks of Democratic Party leaders as well as corporate heavy hitters.

Hillary Clinton’s mid-June endorsement of Brown was later eclipsed by the third-ranking House Democrat, majority whip Jim Clyburn. He recorded a TV ad for Brown with a swipe at Turner while identifying himself as “the highest-ranking African American in Congress.” In the process of throwing his political weight against Turner -- who is a strong advocate of Medicare for All -- Clyburn didn’t mention his exceptional record of receiving hefty donations from the pharmaceutical industry.

Last fall, a newspaper in his home state of South Carolina, the Post and Courier, spelled out details under the headline “Clyburn Has Taken More Than $1 Million in Pharma Money in a Decade, Far Surpassing Peers.” The paper reported that Clyburn “has collected more in the last decade from powerful political action committees attached to the pharmaceutical industry than anyone else in the House or Senate.” Clyburn has been vocally in tune with his benefactors, warning against Medicare for All and “socialized medicine.”

That Clyburn would try to undercut Turner’s campaign is logical, especially given her emphatic support for Medicare for All. Likewise, one of her major campaign planks -- calling for “environmental justice” and “re-inventing our energy and transportation systems through a Green New Deal” -- would hardly appeal to the fossil-fuel mogul who is the biggest funder of the Democratic Majority for Israel super PAC, now intervening with huge ad buys to defeat Turner.

The megadonor behind that intervention is “an oil and gas executive who belongs to a billionaire family,” the Intercept pointed out days ago. “Stacy Schusterman, heir and chair of Samson Energy, a fossil fuel company that owns at least 11 oil and gas wells in Wyoming, donated $1.55 million to Democratic Majority for Israel in 2019 and 2020, a super PAC that has in turn spent over $660,000 on ads” supporting Brown and attacking Turner.

Those ads have descended into blatant deception. “Brown has gained momentum in recent weeks with hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC, who funded flagrantly false mailers smearing Turner,” the Cleveland Scene newspaper reported last week. The methodical lies included claims that Turner has opposed universal healthcare -- an assertion that earned the label “wildly dishonest” from Washington Post journalist Dave Weigel and the adjective “sleazy” from Rep. Mark Pocan, chair emeritus of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Democratic Majority for Israel is led by Mark Mellman -- a longtime strategist for AIPAC, the powerful right-wing group more formally known as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which remained closely aligned with Benjamin Netanyahu throughout his long and racist tenure as Israel’s prime minister. Another spinoff from AIPAC that’s also spending big bucks on advertising against Turner is a rightward-leaning outfit called Pro-Israel America. Its founder and executive director, Jeff Mendelsohn, worked as a high-level AIPAC operative for more than 10 years.

The massive amounts of advertising and vitriol being dumped on Nina Turner leave Israel and foreign policy virtually unmentioned. And she has said little about the Middle East or other aspects of foreign affairs. But her occasional comments have been clear enough to convey principled independence. In a tweet two months ago, during Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza, she wrote: “Palestinian lives matter.” The same week, she expressed solidarity with American Jews and Palestinians who had gathered in front of the State Department to call for an end to Israeli apartheid.

While well-heeled groups that demand unequivocal support for Israel’s policies are funding anti-Turner ads, Shontel Brown has gone out of her way to express fulsome devotion to Israel as well as gratitude to Democratic Majority for Israel. Meanwhile, people who actually live in the congressional district have much to consider about the close-to-home records of the two leading candidates. Turner served on the Cleveland City Council and in the Ohio State Senate. Brown is a local elected official and chairs the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party.

Early this month, when Cleveland’s daily newspaper weighed in with an endorsement, it wasn’t a close call. “There is one person in this crowded field who has shown she isn’t afraid to stand up to power and to partisan shibboleths, who has the guts to say what she thinks and do what’s right for her constituents and country, who is passionate about public service and knows the issues, the personalities, the challenges better than anyone else in this race,” the Plain Dealer editorialized. “That person is Nina Turner.” In sharp contrast, the editorial described Shontel Brown as “a pleasant but undistinguished member of Cuyahoga County Council who has little to show for her time in office.”

But the national forces arrayed against Nina Turner are preoccupied with other matters -- like protecting the pharmaceutical industry’s leverage over health care, or maximizing the profits of fossil-fuel companies, or maintaining Israel’s power to suppress the rights of Palestinian people. In pursuit of such goals, the mission is clear: Don’t let Nina Turner get to Congress.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Bernie Sanders Has Bonded with President Biden. Is That Good?

By Norman Solomon

So far, most of the Biden presidency has been predictable. Its foreign policy includes bloated Pentagon spending and timeworn declarations that the United States should again “lead the world” and “sit at the head of the table.” Many corporate influence peddlers have settled into jobs in upper reaches of the executive branch. The new administration has taken only baby steps toward student debt relief or progressive taxation. On health care, the White House keeps protecting the interests of insurance companies while rebuffing public opinion that favors Medicare for All.

And yet -- Joe Biden is no longer on the narrow corporate road that he traveled during five decades in politics.

President Biden’s recent moves to curtail monopolies have stunned many observers who -- extrapolating from his 36-year record in the Senate -- logically assumed he would do little to challenge corporate power. Overall, Biden has moved leftward on economic policies, while Sen. Bernie Sanders -- who says that “the Biden of today is not what I or others would have expected” decades ago -- has gained major clout that extends into the Oval Office.

This month has seen a spate of news stories about Sanders’ new political leverage, not only as chair of the Senate Budget Committee but also due to his close working relationship with Biden. Under the headline “Vermont’s Longtime Outsider Has Become a Trusted Voice in the Biden White House,” CNN summed up: “The Biden-Sanders connection is not a love story; it’s more a marriage of convenience. But as Biden pushes an unprecedented progressive White House agenda, it’s crucial.” Sanders told the network that Biden “wants to be a champion of working families, and I admire that and respect that.”

But if Biden is pushing “an unprecedented progressive White House agenda,” it’s a high jump over a low bar. Leaving aside President Lyndon Johnson’s short-lived Great Society program that was smothered by Vietnam War spending, no White House agendas since the 1940s really merit the term “progressive.” And the current president hardly passes as “a champion of working families” unless he’s graded on an unduly lenient curve.

One danger of Bernie’s tight political embrace of Biden is that “progressive” standards will be redefined downward. Another danger is that Biden’s international policies and conformity to militarism will be further swept off the table of public debate.

For instance, targeting Venezuela, Iran, Cuba and other disfavored nations, Biden continues to impose sanctions that are killing many thousands of people each month, with children especially vulnerable. A truly progressive president would not do such a thing.

Meanwhile -- despite strong efforts by Sanders, some other lawmakers and many human-rights activists -- Biden is still abetting Saudi Arabia’s warfare in Yemen that continues to cause the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. “While he is a welcome change from the incompetence, venality, and cruelty of the Trump administration,” epidemiologist Aisha Jumaan and attorney Charles Pierson wrote days ago, “Biden has continued the Obama and Trump administrations’ support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen.” A truly progressive president would not do such a thing.

And then there’s the enormous U.S. military budget, already bloated during the Trump years, which Biden has opted to raise. A truly progressive president would not do such a thing.

There is political and moral peril ahead to the extent that Bernie Sanders -- or others who oppose such policies -- feel compelled to tamp down denunciations of them in hopes of reaping progressive results by bonding, and not polarizing, with Biden.

In the aftermath of his two presidential campaigns that achieved huge political paradigm shifts, Sanders is now in a unique position. “Sanders already influenced a leftward shift in the Democratic Party through his time on the campaign trail in 2016 and 2020,” Bloomberg News reported last week. “Biden has embraced a series of progressive priorities, including an expanded child tax credit and subsidies for clean energy, and made an attempt at increasing the national minimum wage earlier this year.”

Sanders routinely combines his zeal for the art of the morally imperative with the art of the possible. So, four months ago, he helped push the American Rescue Plan through the Senate and onto Biden’s desk for signing. It resulted in upwards of 160 million direct cash payments to individuals, but did not boost the minimum wage. Sanders commented: “Was it everything we wanted? No. Was it a major step for the working class of this country. You bet it was.”

His approach has been similar this week in the midst of negotiations for a multitrillion-dollar budget plan. After a private White House meeting with Biden that Sanders called a “very good discussion,” the senator told reporters: “He knows and I know that we’re seeing an economy where the very, very rich are getting richer while working families are struggling.”

For genuine progressives, the Sanders-Biden bond is positive to the extent that it helps sway the president’s policies leftward -- but negative to the extent that it restrains Sanders, and others in his extended orbit, from publicly confronting Biden about policies that are antithetical to the values that the Bernie 2020 presidential campaign embodied. Today, Sanders’ role is appreciably and necessarily different than the needed roles of grassroots movements that have inspired and been inspired by him.

In 18 Months, Republicans Are Very Likely to Control Congress. Being in Denial Makes It Worse.

By Norman Solomon

Since the Civil War, midterm elections have enabled the president’s party to gain ground in the House of Representatives only three times, and those were in single digits. The last few midterms have been typical: In 2006, with Republican George W. Bush in the White House, his party lost 31 House seats. Under Democrat Barack Obama, his party lost 63 seats in 2010 and then 13 seats in 2014. Under Donald Trump, in 2018, Republicans lost 41 seats. Overall, since World War II, losses have averaged 27 seats in the House.

Next year, if Republicans gain just five House seats, Rep. Kevin McCarthy or some other right-wing ideologue will become the House speaker, giving the GOP control over all committees and legislation. In the Senate, where the historic midterm pattern has been similar, a Republican gain of just one seat will reinstall Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader.

To prevent such disastrous results, Democrats would need to replicate what happened the last time the president’s party didn’t lose House or Senate seats in a midterm election -- two years after Bush entered the White House. The odds are steeply against it, as elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich points out: “Bush was very popular in 2002 in the aftermath of 9/11. According to a retrospective FiveThirtyEight average of polls at the time, he had a 62 percent approval rating and 29 percent disapproval rating on Election Day 2002. And in this era of polarization -- where presidential approval ratings are stuck in a very narrow band -- it’s hard to imagine (President) Biden ever reaching that level of popularity.”

It’s not just history that foreshadows a return to Capitol power for the likes of McCarthy and McConnell. All year, Republican officeholders have been methodically doing all they can to asphyxiate democracy. And they can do a lot more.

With new census data, the once-in-a-decade chance to redistrict means that Republican-dominated state legislatures can do maximal gerrymandering. “Because Democrats fell short of their 2020 expectations in state legislative races,” FiveThirtyEight politics reporter Alex Samuels says, “Republicans have the opportunity to redraw congressional maps that are much more clearly in their favor.” All this year, awaiting census figures to manipulate, Republican legislatures have been enacting outrageous new voter-suppression laws, many of the sort recently greenlighted by the Supreme Court and calculated to destroy voting rights.

In the face of impending election disasters in 2022 and beyond, denial might be a natural coping mechanism, but it only makes matters worse. Reality should now spur a sustained all-out effort -- in courts, legislatures, Congress and public venues -- to safeguard as many democratic processes as possible for next year’s elections, while organizing against the dozens of major voter-suppression tactics of recent years.

At the same time, truly bold political actions -- culminating in landmark legislation to improve the economic and social well-being of vast numbers of Americans -- will be essential to improve the slim chances that Biden’s presidency won’t lead to a Republican takeover of Congress midway through his term. Though largely drowned out by the din of mainstream punditry urging “bipartisan” approaches, many astute voices are urgently calling for measures that could transform political dynamics before the 2022 general elections.

*  “We've got to go big, and take it to another level,” first-term Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman said in an email to supporters this week. “We've got to deliver and get this done for our communities. So why on earth are we wasting time trying to compromise with Republicans?” Bowman added: “If we do not fight for our communities and put them in the center of the work we do -- if we continue to prioritize the myth of ‘bipartisanship’ over the people we were elected to fight for and represent in Washington -- we will lose elections. If we want to maintain control and the opportunity to do great work beyond 2022, Democrats need to deliver in this very moment.”

*  Nina Turner, who’s likely to become a member of Congress in November after a special election for a vacant seat in a northeast Ohio district, said recently: “When are we going to learn? Republicans plan for the long term. What can we do right now before the next election cycle and get it done and go big? Because power is fleeting. You’ve got to use it while you’ve got it.”

*  Days ago, in a Washington Post column, The Nation’s editorial director Katrina vanden Heuvel posed “the critical question” as Congress reconvened after a holiday break: “Are Democrats ready to act?” She wrote: “While President Biden is selling the bipartisan infrastructure deal as a ‘generational investment,’ the real effort will come from using the budget reconciliation process to pass vitally needed public investments with Democratic votes only. For all the focus on Biden’s ability to work across the aisle, the true challenge is whether he and the congressional leadership can work with all Democrats. That test will do much to determine whether the party can retain or increase its majorities in the next election -- and whether the country will begin to address the cascading crises that it faces.”

What remains to be determined is whether such warnings will end up being the tragically prophetic voices of Cassandras -- or clarion calls for action that are heeded in time to prevent an unhinged Republican Party from taking control of Congress when 2023 begins.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

The Empire Strikes Back at the Left in Buffalo and Cleveland

By Norman Solomon

The two biggest cities on the shores of Lake Erie are now centers of political upheaval. For decades, Buffalo and Cleveland have suffered from widespread poverty and despair in the midst of urban decay. Today, the second-largest cities in New York and Ohio are battlegrounds between activists fighting for progressive change and establishment forces determined to prevent it.

For Buffalo’s entrenched leaders, a shocking crisis arrived out of the blue on June 22 when socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary for mayor, handily defeating a 15-year incumbent with a deplorable track record. “I am a coalition builder,” Walton said in her victory speech that night. But for the city’s power brokers, she was a sudden disaster.

“This is organizing,” Walton said as rejoicing supporters cheered. “When we organize, we win. Today is only the beginning. From the very start, I said this is not about making India Walton mayor of Buffalo -- this is about building the infrastructure to challenge every damn seat. I’m talking about committee seats, school board, county council. All that we are doing in this moment is claiming what is rightfully ours. We are the workers. We do the work. And we deserve a government that works with and for us.”

To the people running City Hall, the 38-year-old victor seemed to come out of nowhere. Actually, she had come out of grassroots activism and a campaign that focused on key issues like “food access,” “pandemic recovery,” education, climate, housing and public safety. And for corporate elites accustomed to having their hands on Buffalo’s levers of power, there would not be a GOP fallback. Mayor Byron Brown had appeared to be such a shoo-in for a fifth term that no Republican bothered to run, so India Walton will be the only name on the November ballot.

Alarm sirens went off immediately after election night. The loudest and most prominent came from wealthy (net worth $150 million) real-estate developer Carl Paladino, a strident Trump supporter and former Republican nominee for governor, who became notorious in 2016 for racist public comments about Michelle and Barack Obama. Walton’s victory incensed Paladino, who made it clear that he vastly preferred the black incumbent to the black challenger. “I will do everything I can to destroy her candidacy,” Paladino said, and he urged fellow business leaders in Buffalo to unite behind Brown as a write-in candidate.

In tacit alliance with Paladino while keeping him at arm’s-length, Brown announced on Monday evening that he will mount a write-in campaign to stay in the mayor’s office. Brown cited among his mayoral achievements “the fact that the tax rate in Buffalo is the lowest it’s been in over 25 years.” Then he began scaremongering.

“I have also heard from voters that there is tremendous fear that has spread across this community,” Brown said. “People are fearful about the future of our city. They are fearful about the future of their families. They are fearful about the future of their children. And they have said to me that they do not want a radical socialist occupying the mayor’s office in Buffalo City Hall. You know, we know the difference between socialism and democracy. We are going to fight for democracy in the city of Buffalo. The voters have said that they don’t want an unqualified inexperienced radical socialist trying to learn on the job on the backs of the residents of this community. We will not let it happen. It will not stand.”

Such attacks, with McCarthyite echoes of Trumpism, are likely to be at the core of Brown’s strategy for winning the general election. But he’ll be in conflict with the formal apparatus of his party in Buffalo. After the write-in campaign announcement, the chair of the Erie County Democratic Party issued an unequivocal statement about India Walton, “to strongly affirm once again that we are with her, now and through the general election in the fall.” It added: “Last Tuesday, India proved she has the message and the means to move and inspire the people of Buffalo. It was a historic moment in Western New York politics. The voters heard her message and embraced her vision for the city’s future, and we look forward to working with her and her team to cross that final finish line on November 2.”

Two hundred miles away, in northeast Ohio, the clash between progressives and corporatists has been escalating for several months, ever since Rep. Marcia Fudge left a congressional seat vacant when she became President Biden’s HUD secretary. Early voting begins next week, and the district is so heavily Democratic that the winner of the Aug. 3 primary is virtually certain to fill the vacancy this fall.

On Tuesday, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, Rep. Jim Clyburn, went out of his way to be emphatic that he doesn’t want the frontrunner in the race, progressive stalwart Nina Turner, to become a colleague in Congress. Though nominally endorsing Turner’s main opponent, Shontel Brown, the clear underlying message was: Stop Turner.

Why Corporate Democrats Are Desperately Trying to Keep Nina Turner Out of Congress

By Norman Solomon

When Hillary Clinton endorsed Nina Turner’s main opponent last week, it was much more than just an attempt to boost a corporate Democrat. Clinton’s praise for candidate Shontel Brown was almost beside the point. Like other power brokers and the big-money PACs now trying to sway the special election for a vacant congressional seat in northeast Ohio, Clinton is doing what she can to keep the deeply progressive Turner out of Congress.

Time is short. Polling shows Turner with a big lead, early voting begins in two weeks, and Election Day is August 3. What scares the political establishment is what energizes her supporters: She won’t back down when social justice is at stake.

That reality was clearly audible Tuesday night during the first debate of the campaign, sponsored by the City Club of Cleveland. “I am running to be a voice for change, to uplift the downtrodden, including the poor, the working poor and the barely middle class,” Turner began. “You send me to Congress, I’m going to make sure that we tax the wealthy, make them pay their fair share, and to center the people who need it the most in this district.”

The contrast was sharp with Brown, who chairs the Democratic Party in populous Cuyahoga County. The discussion of healthcare was typical: Brown voiced a preference for a “public option,” but Turner strongly advocated Medicare for All while calling the current healthcare situation “absurd” and “asinine.” Brown sounded content to tinker with the status quo. Turner flatly declared: “The employer-based system, the commodification of healthcare, does not work in the United States of America. Almost 100 million people are either underinsured or uninsured right now.”

After Brown emphasized that “we have to be able to compromise so we can get some things done,” Turner closed with a jab at those eager to block the momentum of her campaign for Congress: “You need to have somebody that will lead this community, who does have a vision and understands being a partner does not mean being a puppet, that working with does not mean acquiescing to…. You will always know whose side I am on.”

That’s exactly the problem for the party establishment. Its backers know full well whose side Turner is on.

And so, the attacks are escalating from Brown’s campaign. It sent out a mailer -- complete with an out-of-focus photo of Turner, made to look lurid -- under the headline “Nina Turner Opposed President Biden and Worked Against Democrats.” A more accurate headline would have been: “Nina Turner Supported Senator Sanders and Worked Against Neoliberal Democrats.” The Brown campaign’s first TV ad, which began airing last month, features her saying that she will “work with Joe Biden… that’s different than Nina Turner.”

A former editorial page editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Brent Larkin, wrote: “Brown will be a well-financed candidate with deep-pocketed supporters who aren’t afraid to play rough. That’s because Turner can’t be beaten unless opponents plant seeds of doubt about her fitness, convincing voters her harsh criticisms of President Joe Biden would make it impossible for her to get things done for her community. The notion that Biden might punish a constituency important to him because Turner represents that constituency in Congress is far-fetched. During the 2020 campaign, Sen. Kamala Harris was bitterly critical of Biden’s civil rights record. Nevertheless, Biden chose her as his running mate, effectively rewarding her with the vice presidency.”

Brown’s backers are eager to “play rough” because corporate power is at issue. It’s not only that Turner crisscrossed the nation, speaking eloquently in support of both of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, serving as a national co-chair during the last one. Powerful backers of the Democratic Party’s top leadership -- cozy and enmeshed with corporate America and the military-industrial complex -- realize that “Congresswoman Nina Turner (D-OH)” would significantly increase the leverage of genuinely progressive members of the House. For the Clinton wing of the party, that would be a frigging nightmare.

If Dennis Kucinich Becomes the Mayor of Cleveland, It’ll Be a Shock to the System. Again.

By Norman Solomon

Cleveland has been spiraling downward. It’s one of the poorest cities in the country, beset by worsening violent crime, poverty and decaying infrastructure. Now, 42 years after the end of his first term as mayor, Dennis Kucinich is ready for his second.

Kucinich won a race for mayor of Cleveland at age 31 and promptly infuriated the power structure, which could not accept his insistence that the city’s electric utility should remain under public control. Mayor Kucinich challenged and mocked the greed and anti-democratic zeal of the banks that drove the city into bankruptcy when he refused to accede to the corrupt demands that the Municipal Light Plant be sold off. After defeating a recall campaign in 1978, he lost a bid for re-election the next year -- but left an enduring legacy.

Today, the local Center for Public History describes the events this way: “In a political battle with the City Council, Kucinich agreed to ask the voters to decide: would Cleveland sell the Municipal Light Plant, or nearly triple the income tax rate of residents? The election was an overwhelming landslide in the favor of Kucinich and the Municipal Light Plant. Though this only worsened Cleveland’s financial situation and prevented Kucinich’s re-election, the decision helped Cleveland maintain its own municipal light system even to this day.”

As years went by, it became clear even to many of his foes, including corporate media, that Dennis Kucinich was correct -- that he’d been willing to sacrifice his political fortunes for the good of city residents rather than private profits. The reality sunk in that his principled tenacity saved Clevelanders millions of dollars. In 1996, Kucinich won a congressional seat, and he kept being re-elected until 2012, when power brokers in the Ohio legislature gerrymandered him out of Congress.

Now, while he’s well known around the nation, Kucinich is focused laser-like on his city. “My first responsibility is to the people of Cleveland,” he told me, hours before filing his official papers with the board of elections on Wednesday afternoon. Talking about a widespread sense of “desperation” among many in the city, he reeled off grim numbers about “an extraordinary rise in crime.” Many neighborhoods, he said, “are teetering on the brink of disaster.”

To hear Kucinich tell it, crime and poverty are twin evils, and both must be stopped. “There’s no question that crime is the number one concern in Cleveland,” he said. And, “We can’t talk about having a truly peaceful community when so many people are suffering.”

Kucinich went on to discuss his plans for a “civic peace department,” an echo of his tireless advocacy as a Congress member for a Department of Peace in the federal government. Noting that Cleveland’s mayor is in charge of public schools, he spoke of the need for a “peace curriculum.”

While the Kucinich for Mayor campaign revs up, his new book -- titled “The Division of Light and Power” -- is drawing a lot of praise. It’s a stunning page-turner and barnburner that combines the genres of political memoir and real-life narrative thriller -- a luminous book that goes to shadowy places with the resolve of Diogenes holding a lantern high. While offering the inside story of historic events, the book also implicitly takes us to the real time of the present.

The book’s narrative travels through a potentially uplifting yet often debilitating political landscape. The achievements of the book mirror its subject and its author -- truth-telling and courage despite political taboos and illegitimate power -- showing how people from many walks of life can work together to overcome the forces of petty opportunism and corporate greed.

In 2021, Kucinich has returned to municipal politics in an era of mayoral mediocrity across the country. Try to think of the names of big-city mayors who’ve shown determination and ability to implement a truly progressive agenda rather than bend to corporate domination. There aren’t many.

While progressive rhetoric and populist posturing are routine, so is acquiescence to the brutal economic and political forces symbolized by tall steel-and-glass office buildings. Rare bright spots can be found in a few mid-sized cities, such as Jackson, Mississippi (Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba) or Durham, North Carolina (Mayor Steve Schewel).

Such bright spots could widen and grow brighter. In St. Louis a promising new mayor, Tishaura Jones, took office two months ago. In Pittsburgh another progressive-leaning politician, Ed Gainey, won the Democratic primary and is almost certain to be elected mayor in November. Now, in Buffalo, early voting has begun in a race where a strongly progressive mayoral candidate, India Walton, is challenging the incumbent.

If Kucinich can emerge from the September primary and November runoff as Cleveland’s next mayor, City Hall could become a beacon for progressive change in urban America.

I asked what he has concluded from his several decades of work as a city, state and federal elected official. “Government has become an exclusive, closed-loop system,” he replied, “a secret society, which does not grant entry unless, as in my first successful election, you remove the doors. Access to government has become, then, ever more exclusive. Only an enlightened, active citizenry can remove the barriers.”

He added: “Big money and corporate leverage have driven Cleveland politics for the past four decades. City Hall is a Potemkin village. Break through the facade and you see corporate interests which control local government, with no discernible benefit to people who live in the city.”

You can bet that the Kucinich for Mayor campaign has already set off alarm bells among economic elites in Cleveland and far beyond. Mayor Kucinich could set an example for what a city government can do to serve everyone instead of just the interests of the wealthy.

Announcing his campaign for mayor earlier this week, Dennis Kucinich spoke with forceful yet nuanced eloquence about the city’s grave ills and its possibilities to create a nurturing future for its residents. His speech foreshadowed another epic battle between progressive populism and the forces of cruel corporate greed.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

How Democrats and Progressives Undermined the Potential of the Biden-Putin Summit

By Norman Solomon

No matter what happens at Wednesday’s summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin in Geneva, a grim reality is that Democratic Party leaders have already hobbled its potential to move the world away from the worsening dangers of nuclear war. After nearly five years of straining to depict Donald Trump as some kind of Russian agent -- a depiction that squandered vast quantities of messaging without electoral benefits -- most Democrats in Congress are now locked into a modern Cold War mentality that endangers human survival.

In the new light of atomic weaponry, Albert Einstein warned against “the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms.” But the concept is flourishing as both parties strive to outdo each other in vilifying Russia as a locus of evil. Rather than coming to terms with the imperative for détente between the two countries that brandish more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, the Democratic leadership at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue has been heightening the bilateral tensions that increase the chances of thermonuclear holocaust.

President Biden has excelled at gratuitous and dangerous rhetoric about Russia. As this spring began, he declared on national television that President Putin is “a killer” -- and boasted that he told the Russian leader that he has “no soul” while visiting the Kremlin in 2011. It was a repeat of a boast that Biden could not resist publicly making while he was vice president in 2014 and again while out of office in 2017. Such bombast conveys a distinct lack of interest in genuine diplomacy needed to avert nuclear war.

Meanwhile, what about self-described progressives who see themselves as a counterweight to the Democratic Party establishment? For the most part, they remained silent if not actively portraying Russia as a mortal enemy of the United States. Even renowned antiwar voices in Congress were not immune to party-driven jingoism.

Never mind that the structurally malign forces of corporate America -- and the numerous right-wing billionaires heavily invested in ongoing assaults on democracy -- appreciated the focus on Russia instead of on their own oligarchic power. And never mind that, throughout the Trump years, the protracted anti-Russia frenzy was often a diversion away from attention to the numerous specific threats to electoral democracy in the United States.

Two years ago, when the Voting Rights Alliance drew up a list of “61 Forms of Voter Suppression,” not one of those forms had anything to do with Russia.

Capacities to educate, agitate and organize against the profuse forms of voter suppression were hampered by the likes of MSNBC star Rachel Maddow, whose extreme fixation on Russian evils would have been merely farcical if not so damaging. Year after year, she virtually ignored a wide range of catastrophic U.S. government policies while largely devoting her widely watched program to stoking hostility toward Russia. Maddow became a favorite of many progressives who viewed her show as a fount of wisdom.

Progressives -- who are supposed to oppose the kind of “narrow nationalisms” that Einstein warned against at the dawn of the nuclear age -- mostly steered clear of challenging the anti-Russia orthodoxy that emerged as an ostensible way of resisting the horrific Trump presidency. Routinely, many accepted and internalized the scapegoating of Russia that was standard fare of mainstream media outlets -- which did little to shed light on how threats to democracy in the United States were overwhelmingly homegrown, rooted in corporate power.

Now, on the verge of the Biden-Putin summit, U.S. media outlets are overflowing with calls to confront Russia as well as China, pounding on themes sure to delight investors in Pentagon contracting firms. Leading Democrats and Republicans are in step with reporters and pundits beating Cold War drums. How much closer do they want the Doomsday Clock to get to midnight before they call off their zeal to excite narrow nationalisms?

It scarcely seems to matter to anti-Russia zealots, whether “progressive” or not, that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began this year with an ominous warning: “By our estimation, the potential for the world to stumble into nuclear war -- an ever-present danger over the last 75 years -- increased in 2020. An extremely dangerous global failure to address existential threats -- what we called ‘the new abnormal’ in 2019 -- tightened its grip in the nuclear realm in the past year, increasing the likelihood of catastrophe.”

Far from the maddening crowd of reckless cold warriors, the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord released an open letter last week that made basic sense for the future of humanity: “The dangerous and in many ways unprecedented deterioration in relations between the United States and the Russian Federation must come to an end if we are to leave a safer world for future generations. . . . We believe that the time has come to resurrect diplomacy, restore and maintain a dialogue on nuclear risks that’s insulated from our political differences like we did during the Cold War. Without communication, this increases the likelihood of escalation to nuclear use in a moment of crisis.”

It’s a sad irony that such clarity and wisdom can scarcely be found among prominent Democrats in Congress, or among many of the groups that do great progressive work when focused on domestic issues. The recent fear-mongering over Russia has been a factor in refusals to embrace the anti-militarist message of Martin Luther King’s final year.

In the United States, the political context of the Biden-Putin summit should have included widespread progressive support for genuine diplomacy with Russia. Instead, overall, progressives went along with Democratic Party leaders and corporate liberal media as they fueled the momentum toward a nuclear doomsday.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Biden’s Eloquence About George Floyd Will Ring Hollow if Rahm Emanuel Gets Ambassador Nomination

By Norman Solomon

If Joe Biden fully meant what he said after meeting with George Floyd’s family in the Oval Office on Tuesday, he won’t nominate Rahm Emanuel to be the U.S. ambassador to Japan. But recent news reports tell us that’s exactly what the president intends to do.

After the meeting, Biden declared that the murder of Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer “launched a summer of protest we hadn’t seen since the Civil Rights era in the ’60s -- protests that peacefully unified people of every race and generation to collectively say enough of the senseless killings.” The words were valuable, and so was the symbolism of the president hosting loved ones of Floyd on the first anniversary of his death.

But the value of the White House event will be weakened if Biden names Emanuel to one of this country’s top diplomatic posts -- despite his well-earned notoriety for the cover-up of a video showing the police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.

When McDonald was shot dead by Chicago police one night in October 2014, Mayor Rahm Emanuel was facing a tough re-election fight. Fortunately, a dash camera on a police car captured the murder on video. Unfortunately, Emanuel’s administration suppressed the video for 13 months, until after Emanuel won re-election.

Imagine if -- when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed Floyd by kneeling on him for 9 minutes and 29 seconds -- there had been no civilian with a cell phone able to record the murder, and the only visual record of what happened was a police video. And imagine if the city of Minneapolis had suppressed that video for 13 months, until a judge’s order finally forced its release.

That would be Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Chicago.

When reports surfaced last November that Biden was considering Emanuel for a cabinet position, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) pointed out: “Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering up a murder is disqualifying for public leadership.” Then-Congressman-elect Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) tweeted: “That he's being considered for a cabinet position is completely outrageous and, honestly, very hurtful.”

Two weeks ago, responding to news that Biden had decided to nominate Emanuel as ambassador to Japan, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) sent out a cogent tweet: “Black Lives Matter can’t just be a slogan. It has to be reflected in our actions as a government, and as a people. Rewarding Rahm Emanuel’s cover up of Laquan McDonald’s murder with an ambassadorship is not an act that reflects a value of or respect for Black lives.”

The post of ambassador to Japan would put Emanuel in the thick of economic and military policies. Japan has the world’s third-largest economy. The U.S. currently has two dozen military bases in Japan. A recklessly confrontational military approach in East Asia would get a boost if the next U.S. ambassador to Japan is Emanuel, a longtime hawk who supported the Iraq war even after many Democratic leaders turned against it.

For decades, Emanuel's career has been the opposite of diplomatic as he bombastically denounced progressives and served corporate interests while enriching himself. And his record of running interference for racist police violence while mayor of Chicago underscores what a terrible mistake it would be for the Senate to confirm him as ambassador.

Impunity for American men in uniform who commit violent crimes is a deeply emotional subject in Japan. Outrage has long festered especially on Okinawa, where women and children have been subjected to sexual assaults by U.S. military personnel stationed at bases there.

Blocking the nomination of Rahm Emanuel to be the USA’s top envoy to Japan won’t bring back Laquan McDonald or any of the other African Americans murdered by police. But it would send a strong signal to mayors and other public officials that covering up brutal police violence is bad for career advancement.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Why Israel Blows Up Media Offices and Targets Journalists

By Norman Solomon

Israel’s missile attack on media offices in Gaza City last weekend was successful. A gratifying response came quickly from the head of The Associated Press, which had a bureau in the building for 15 years: “The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today.”

For people who care about truth, that’s outrageous. For the Israeli government, that’s terrific.

The AP president, Gary Pruitt, said “we are shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza.”

There’s ample reason to be horrified. But not shocked.

Israel’s military began threatening and targeting journalists several decades ago, in tandem with its longstanding cruel treatment of Palestinians. Rather than reduce the cruelty, the Israeli government keeps trying to reduce accurate news coverage.

The approach is a mix of deception and brutality. Blow up the cameras so the world won’t see as many pictures of the atrocities.

Of course, there’s no need to interfere with journalists documenting the also awful -- while relatively few -- deaths of Israelis due to rockets fired by Hamas. In recent days the Israeli government has spotlighted such visuals, some of them grimly authentic, others fake.

The suffering in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is tragically real on both sides, while vastly asymmetrical. During the last 10 days, as reported by the BBC, 219 people have been killed in Gaza. In Israel, the number was 10. In Gaza, at least 63 of the dead were children. In Israel, two.

In the midst of all this, shamefully, President Biden is pushing ahead to sell $735 million worth of weapons to Israel, a move akin to selling more whips and thumbscrews to torturers while they’re hard at work tormenting their victims.

On Wednesday, a few members of Congress introduced a bill that seeks to do what the Israeli targeting of media seeks to prevent -- the galvanizing of well-informed outrage. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Mark Pocan introduced a resolution opposing the sale of those weapons.

“For decades, the U.S. has sold billions of dollars in weaponry to Israel without ever requiring them to respect basic Palestinian rights. In so doing, we have directly contributed to the death, displacement and disenfranchisement of millions,” Ocasio-Cortez pointed out.

Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress, said: “The harsh truth is that these weapons are being sold by the United States to Israel with the clear understanding that the vast majority of them will be used to bomb Gaza. Approving this sale now, while failing to even try to use it as leverage for a ceasefire, sends a clear message to the world -- the U.S. is not interested in peace, and does not care about the human rights and lives of Palestinians.”

As usual, Israel’s latest killing spree can avail itself of deep pockets provided by U.S. taxpayers, currently $3.8 billion a year in military assistance. An article published last week by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace makes a strong case that the massive subsidy is legally dubious and morally indefensible.

Not many members of Congress can be heard calling for an end to doling out huge sums to the Israeli government. But some progress is evident.

A bill introduced last month by Congresswoman Betty McCollum, H.R.2590, now has 21 co-sponsors and some activist momentum. Its official purpose flies in the face of routine congressional evasion: “To promote and protect the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and to ensure that United States taxpayer funds are not used by the Government of Israel to support the military detention of Palestinian children, the unlawful seizure, appropriation, and destruction of Palestinian property and forcible transfer of civilians in the West Bank, or further annexation of Palestinian land in violation of international law.”

Right now, the government of Israel is exerting deadly force on a large scale to underscore an assertion of impunity -- in effect, wielding power to subjugate Palestinian people with methodical disregard for their basic human rights. The process involves reducing as much as possible the eyewitness news coverage of that subjugation.

Israeli leaders know that truth about human consequences of their policies is horrific when illuminated. That’s why they’re so eager to keep us in the dark.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Congresswoman Jayapal Misses the Mark by Saying Biden Deserves an ‘A’ Grade

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

It’s the job of progressive advocates and activists to tell inconvenient truths, without sugarcoating or cheerleading. To effectively confront the enormous problems facing our country and world, progressives need to soberly assess everything -- good, bad and mixed.

Yet last week, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal, made headlines when she graded President Biden’s job performance. “I give him an ‘A’ so far,” Jayapal said in an otherwise well-grounded interview with the Washington Post. She conferred the top grade on Biden even though, as she noted, “that doesn’t mean that I agree with him on every single thing.”

Overall, the policies of the Biden administration have not come close to being consistently outstanding. Awarding an “A” to Biden is flatly unwarranted.

It’s also strategically wrongheaded. If we’re going to get maximum reforms in this crucial period, President Biden needs focused pressure -- not the highest rating -- from progressives.

In school, an “A” grade commonly means “excellent performance” or “outstanding achievement.” Rendering such a verdict on Biden’s presidency so far promotes a huge misconception and lowers the progressive bar.

Biden does deserve credit for some strong high-level appointments (Deb Haaland as Interior Secretary jumps to mind), a number of important executive orders (many simply undoing four years of horrific Trumpism), and one crucial legislative achievement -- the American Rescue Act. The proposed American Jobs Act (a small step toward a Green New Deal) and American Families Act (education/anti-poverty) are also quite progressive.

But Biden has made several major appointments that overtly kowtowed to corporate America -- for example, “Mr. Monsanto” Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture and former venture capitalist Gina Raimondo as Commerce Secretary. To mark Biden’s first 100 days, the Revolving Door Project issued an overall grade of B- in its report card on how Biden had done in preventing “corporate capture” of the executive branch by industries such as fossil fuels, Big Pharma and Big Tech.

In an improvement over the Obama era, the Biden administration earned a B/B+ in keeping Wall Streeters from dominating its economic and financial teams. On the other hand, as graded by the Revolving Door Project, Biden got a D- on limiting the power of the military-industrial complex over U.S. foreign policy: “We are particularly alarmed by Biden’s hiring of several alumni of the Center for a New American Security, a hawkish think tank funded by weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.”

Much as “personnel is policy” in the executive branch, the federal budget indicates actual priorities. Biden’s budget reflects his continuing embrace of the military-industrial complex, a tight grip that squeezes many billions needed for vital social, economic and environmental programs. The administration recently disclosed its plan to increase the basic military budget to $753 billion, a $13 billion boost above the last bloated Trump budget. (All told, the annual total of U.S. military-related spending has been way above $1 trillion for years.) And Biden continues to ramp up spending for nuclear weapons, including ICBMs -- which former Defense Secretary William Perry aptly says are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world.”

Meanwhile, Biden is heightening the dangers of an unimaginably catastrophic war with Russia or China. In sharp contrast to his assertion on Feb. 4 that “diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy,” Biden proceeded to undermine diplomacy with reckless rhetoric toward Russia and a confrontational approach to China. The effects have included blocking diplomatic channels and signaling military brinkmanship.

Biden won praise when he announced plans for a not-quite-total U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, but he has not committed to ending the U.S. air war there -- and some forms of on-the-ground military involvement are open-ended.

Unfortunately, little attention has gone to the alarming realities of Biden’s foreign policy and inflated budget for militarism. Domestic matters are in the spotlight, where -- contrary to overblown praise -- the overall picture is very mixed.