Norman Solomon

Reporting from Around the World, Reese Erlich Was a Beacon of Independent Journalism

By Norman Solomon

When Reese Erlich died in early April, we lost a global reporter who led by example. During five decades as a progressive journalist, Reese created and traveled an independent path while avoiding the comfortable ruts dug by corporate media. When people in the United States read or heard his reporting from more than 50 countries, he offered windows on the world that were not tinted red-white-and-blue. Often, he illuminated grim consequences of U.S. foreign policy.

The first memorable conversation I had with Reese was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on the way to Iraq in September 2002 -- as it turned out, six months before the U.S. invasion. He was one of the few journalists covering a small delegation, including Congressman Nick Rahall and former Senator James Abourezk, which the Institute for Public Accuracy sponsored in an attempt to establish U.S.-Iraqi dialogue and avert the looming invasion.

As the organizer of the trip, I was on edge, and I asked Reese for his assessment. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the Middle East, he provided cogent insights and talked about what was at stake.

After filing stories from various parts of Iraq, Reese returned home to California and we worked together to write alternating chapters of a book that came out two months before the invasion -- “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.” (The book is posted online.) Reese’s eyewitness reporting and analysis were crucial to the book.

Reese critiqued the basic flaws in U.S. media coverage then beating the war drums, and he also wrote about the “professional” atmosphere that led U.S. journalists to conform.

As President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair methodically lied the U.S. and Britain into a war on Iraq, Reese pointed out: “The Bush and Blair administrations are fighting a two-front war: one against Iraq, another for public opinion at home. The major media are as much a battleground as the fortifications in Baghdad. And, for the most part, Bush and Blair have stalwart media soldiers manning the barricades at home.”

In a chapter titled “Media Coverage: A View from the Ground,” Reese wrote: “The U.S. is supposed to have the best and freest media in the world, but in my experience, having reported from dozens of countries, the higher up you go in the journalistic feeding chain, the less free the reporting. . . . The journalist’s best education is on the job. In addition to journalistic skills, young reporters also learn about acceptable parameters of reporting. There’s little formal censorship in the U.S. media. But you learn who are acceptable or unacceptable sources. Most corporate officials and politicians are acceptable, the higher up the better.”

Reese summed up: “Money, prestige, career options, ideological predilections -- combined with the down sides of filing stories unpopular with the government -- all cast their influence on foreign correspondents. You don’t win a Pulitzer for challenging the basic assumptions of empire.”

While Reese won prizes, including a Peabody Award, he did something far more important -- skillfully and consistently challenging “the basic assumptions of empire.”

Reese did so with balance and accuracy as a freelancer reporting for such outlets as the Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times Syndicate, Dallas Morning News and Chicago Tribune.

I saw Reese at work in Iran in 2005 and Afghanistan in 2009. He was meticulous and good-natured even when the journey became exhausting and stressful. Unusual stories were usual for him. It was all in a day’s work when Reese lined up an interview with a grandson of the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Khomeini or got us to a women’s rights protest at Tehran University, or when he located an out-of-the-way refugee camp in Kabul where we could interview victims of the war.

Along with his radio reports and articles, Reese went in-depth as the author of “Inside Syria,” “The Iran Agenda Today,” “Dateline Havana” and “Conversations with Terrorists.” Reese’s firsthand reporting, multilayered knowledge and wry humor enrich those books. Meanwhile, he reached many people via interviews and public appearances, even when he was fighting cancer in his last months (as when he spoke about U.S.-Iranian relations and the Iran nuclear deal in February).

During recent years, Reese’s “Foreign Correspondent” column for The Progressive magazine appeared in kindred online outlets like Common Dreams and the San Francisco-based 48 Hills. His last article -- “My Final Column?” -- embodies the honesty and deep humanity that made Reese such a wonderful journalist.

Reese Erlich’s work and spirit live on.

     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.

Contrary to What Biden Said, U.S. Warfare in Afghanistan Is Set to Continue

By Norman Solomon

When I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma at a refugee camp in Kabul a dozen years ago, she told me that bombs fell early one morning while she slept at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. With a soft, matter-of-fact voice, Guljumma described what happened. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.

Troops on the ground didn’t kill Guljumma’s relatives and leave her to live with only one arm. The U.S. air war did.

There’s no good reason to assume the air war in Afghanistan will be over when -- according to President Biden’s announcement on Wednesday -- all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from that country.

What Biden didn’t say was as significant as what he did say. He declared that “U.S. troops, as well as forces deployed by our NATO allies and operational partners, will be out of Afghanistan” before Sept. 11. And “we will not stay involved in Afghanistan militarily.”

But President Biden did not say that the United States will stop bombing Afghanistan. What’s more, he pledged that “we will keep providing assistance to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces,” a declaration that actually indicates a tacit intention to “stay involved in Afghanistan militarily.”

And, while the big-type headlines and prominent themes of media coverage are filled with flat-out statements that the U.S. war in Afghanistan will end come September, the fine print of coverage says otherwise.

The banner headline across the top of the New York Times homepage during much of Wednesday proclaimed: “Withdrawal of U.S. Troops in Afghanistan Will End Longest American War.” But, buried in the thirty-second paragraph of a story headed “Biden to Withdraw All Combat Troops From Afghanistan by Sept. 11,” the Times reported: "Instead of declared troops in Afghanistan, the United States will most likely rely on a shadowy combination of clandestine Special Operations forces, Pentagon contractors and covert intelligence operatives to find and attack the most dangerous Qaeda or Islamic State threats, current and former American officials said."

Matthew Hoh, a Marine combat veteran who in 2009 became the highest-ranking U.S. official to resign from the State Department in protest of the Afghanistan war, told my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy on Wednesday: “Regardless of whether the 3,500 acknowledged U.S. troops leave Afghanistan, the U.S. military will still be present in the form of thousands of special operations and CIA personnel in and around Afghanistan, through dozens of squadrons of manned attack aircraft and drones stationed on land bases and on aircraft carriers in the region, and by hundreds of cruise missiles on ships and submarines.”

We scarcely hear about it, but the U.S. air war on Afghanistan has been a major part of Pentagon operations there. And for more than a year, the U.S. government hasn’t even gone through the motions of disclosing how much of that bombing has occurred.

“We don’t know, because our government doesn’t want us to,” diligent researchers Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies wrote last month. “From January 2004 until February 2020, the U.S. military kept track of how many bombs and missiles it dropped on Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and published those figures in regular, monthly Airpower Summaries, which were readily available to journalists and the public. But in March 2020, the Trump administration abruptly stopped publishing U.S. Airpower Summaries, and the Biden administration has so far not published any either.”

The U.S. war in Afghanistan won’t end just because President Biden and U.S. news media tell us so. As Guljumma and countless other Afghan people have experienced, troops on the ground aren’t the only measure of horrific warfare.

No matter what the White House and the headlines say, U.S. taxpayers won’t stop subsidizing the killing in Afghanistan until there is an end to the bombing and “special operations” that remain shrouded in secrecy.

     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 Liberal Contempt for Martin Luther King’s Final Year

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

The anniversary of his assassination always brings a flood of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr., and this Sunday will surely be no exception. But those tributes -- including from countless organizations calling themselves progressive -- are routinely evasive about the anti-militarist ideals that King passionately expressed during the final year of his life.

You could call it evasion by omission.

The standard liberal canon waxes fondly nostalgic about King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963 and his efforts against racial segregation. But in memory lane, the Dr. King who lived his last year is persona non grata.

The pattern is positively Orwellian. King explicitly condemned what he called “the madness of militarism.” And by any reasonable standard, that madness can be diagnosed as pervading U.S. foreign policy in 2021. But today, almost all politicians and mainstream media commentators act as though King never said such things, or if he did then those observations have little to do with today.

But they have everything to do with the USA now in its twentieth year of continuous warfare. The Pentagon’s constant bombing in the Middle East and elsewhere is the scarcely noticed wallpaper in the U.S. media’s echo chamber.

What compounds the madness of militarism in the present day is the silence that stretches eerily and lethally across almost the entire U.S. political spectrum, including the bulk of progressive organizations doing excellent work to challenge economic injustice and institutionalized racism here at home.

But as for the institutionalized militarism that terrorizes, wounds and kills people overseas -- overwhelmingly people of color -- a sad truth is that most progressive U.S. organizations have little to say about it. At the same time, they eagerly and selectively laud King as a visionary and role model.

King didn’t simply oppose the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967 speech at New York’s Riverside Church delivered exactly a year before he was assassinated -- titled “Beyond Vietnam” -- he referred to the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and broadly denounced the racist and imperial underpinnings of U.S. foreign policy. From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, our country was on the “wrong side of a world revolution” -- suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Global South, instead of supporting them. 

King critiqued the economics of U.S. foreign policy, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries." And he castigated U.S. federal budgets prioritizing militarism: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” 

Mainstream media today pretend that King’s anti-militarism pronouncements were never uttered, but that was not the case in 1967. Condemnation was swift, emphatic and widespread. Life magazine denounced the “Beyond Vietnam” speech as “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The New York Times and Washington Post both published harsh and patronizing editorials.

Today, it’s not just a problem of elite media -- but also a vast spectrum of organizations that are taking a dive in the fight against the warfare state. This problem undermines the political resonance and social mission of countless organizations that do wonderful work but are betraying a crucial part of the living legacy of Dr. King, whom they never tire of claiming to be emulating and venerating.

This crisis is now heightened under the Biden administration. In an ominous echo of the mid-1960s, when King began speaking out against the warfare state, the kind of split between somewhat progressive domestic policies and militaristic foreign policies that occurred under the Lyndon Johnson presidency now appears to be occurring under the presidency of Joe Biden.

In the persistent “guns vs. butter” reckoning, it’s clear that federal funds needed to uplift poor and working-class people as well as our planet keep getting diverted to militarism and war.

Dr. King pointed out that, in effect, what goes around comes around. As he put it, “the bombs in Vietnam explode at home.” But there is a dire shortage of large progressive organizations willing to say that the bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere have been exploding at home for two decades.

Twenty-first century bombs that have been exploding overseas, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, also explode at home in terms of the further militarization of the economy, police, culture and consciousness -- as well as the misdirection of vital resources to the Pentagon rather than human needs.

“It challenges the imagination to contemplate what lives we could transform if we were to cease killing,” Dr. King said as the Vietnam War raged. The massive U.S. military budget still functions the way King described it -- “some demonic, destructive suction tube.” Yet the silences across so much of the U.S. political spectrum, including the liberal establishment and a great many progressive groups, persist in contempt of what Martin Luther King stood for during the final year of his life.

     Jeff Cohen is an activist, author and co-founder of RootsAction.org. He was an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, and founder of the media watch group FAIR. In 2002-2003, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC. He is the author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media."

     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 Urgent Need for a Biden-Putin Summit

By Norman Solomon

Last week’s outbreak of rhetorical hostilities between the White House and the Kremlin has heightened the urgent need for a summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin. The spate of mutual denunciations is catnip for mass media and fuel for hardliners in both countries. But for the world at large, under the doomsday shadow of nuclear arsenals brandished by the United States and Russia, the latest developments are terribly ominous.

Whatever you think of Biden’s assertion during an ABC News interview that Russia’s President Putin is “a killer” -- and whether or not you think the label might apply to Biden, given his pro-war record -- the existential imperative of U.S.-Russian relations is to avert a nuclear war. Biden’s claim during the same interview that Putin does not have “a soul” indicates that much of the new president’s foreign-policy thinking is stuck in a cold-war rut.

No doubt many Americans have welcomed Biden’s holier-than-thou stance toward Putin. But an overarching reality is routinely hidden in plain sight: Everyone’s survival on this planet hinges on Washington-Moscow conflicts not spinning out of control.

Let’s face it: Biden is playing to the domestic anti-Russia gallery in the U.S. media and “defense” establishment, while making a dangerous mockery of his own claims to be a champion of diplomatic approaches to foreign affairs.

“Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy,” Biden said when he spoke at the State Department in early February. Those who’ve been heartened by such statements during the first two months of Biden’s presidency should insist that he live up to that vow by meeting with the head of the Russian government.

But it’s now clear that much more is needed from Biden than just willingness to sit down with Putin. Biden also needs a major attitude adjustment. He would greatly benefit from pondering what happened in a small New Jersey town for a few days in the early summer of 1967.

Keep in mind that at the time, the Soviet Union was in the iron grip of Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev and Premier Alexei Kosygin, who saw to it that freedom of the press or the right to publicly dissent did not exist inside their nation. Compared to those days, Russia under Vladimir Putin in 2021 has far more freedom in terms of media, politics and society as a whole.

The Soviet repression and violation of human rights didn’t stop President Lyndon B. Johnson from trying to reduce the chances of the world blowing up. He engaged in real summitry with Kosygin. Their extended talks on the campus of Glassboro State College gave rise to what became known as “the Spirit of Glassboro.”

That spirit signified only a limited breakthrough. It did not prevent the next year’s Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, or the continuing horrific American escalation of the war in Vietnam. Yet it was genuine diplomatic dialogue -- at the highest levels of government -- and it decreased the chances of nuclear annihilation.

In the process, LBJ wouldn’t have dreamed of proclaiming his Soviet counterpart “a killer” or declaring him to be without a soul. After more than a dozen hours of direct talks, Johnson stood next to Kosygin and, in effect, made a plea for safeguarding human survival. “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions,” Johnson said.

Fifty-four years later, with mutual hostility now at fever pitch in Washington and Moscow, such understanding is essential. But President Biden is not showing that he has the wisdom to seek it.

A former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack F. Matlock, wrote last month that “the vital interests of both countries are endangered when their governments treat the other as a threat, or worse, an enemy, rather than as a potential and necessary partner.” He noted that the shared challenges include dealing with threats posed by “nuclear weapons, pandemics, global warming and ever more destructive technologies if used in warfare.”

Matlock, who served as the top American envoy in Moscow from 1987 to 1991, added: “Presidents Biden and Putin now have the opportunity to find ways to cooperate in dealing with global threats, and encouraging others to do so as well. That would constitute a new operating system, suited to the threats of the present and future rather than replaying follies of the past.”

No matter how much we might wish to forget or deny it, we are tied together -- as a matter of survival -- by a fraying thread of relations between the United States and Russia.

For those in the USA’s government, media and general public who don’t want a Biden-Putin summit to happen, I have a simple question: “Do you want to reduce the chances of nuclear war?” Assuming the answer is yes, any opposition to such a summit is illogical at best.

If the leaders of the two countries with more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads can’t have a summit meeting and talk with each other, we’re in trouble. Real trouble.

     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. 

Rahm Emanuel Is in the Running for a Top Ambassador Post. The Prospect Is Appalling.

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

Rahm Emanuel has never been associated with the word “diplomatic,” but news reports say that President Biden is seriously considering him for a top position as U.S. ambassador to Japan or China. Naming Emanuel to such a post would be an affront to many of the constituencies that got Biden elected. The saga of Emanuel’s three decades in politics is an epic tale of methodical contempt for progressive values. 

One thing Emanuel can’t be accused of is inconsistency. During his political career, he has steadily served elite corporate interests, and rarely the interests of the broad public or the causes of racial justice or peace.

Emanuel rose to prominence as the finance director for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. He excelled at pulling in large checks from super-wealthy individuals. As a high-level Clinton administration aide, he played a major role -- and bragged about it -- in the passage of the disastrous NAFTA trade bill, which was strongly opposed by unions, environmentalists and most Democrats in Congress. He also was a sparkplug for passage of the mass incarceration-oriented 1994 Crime Bill, with prison term-lengthening provisions like “three strikes.”

In 1996, Emanuel boasted to a Washington Post reporter of the administration’s “tough” policies on “wedge issues -- crime, welfare, and recently immigration.” In a memo that year, he urged Clinton to move rightward on immigration policy by working to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.” The next year, Emanuel’s approach was explained by a senior staffer at the Immigration and Naturalization Service who worked closely with him: “As long as we dealt with illegal immigration, we could be to the right of Atilla the Hun. Rahm felt that Americans believed too many people were coming into this country, too many foreigners, so he wanted to show the administration returning people, deporting them, putting up bigger fences, sending them back.”

In July 1996, the Republican-controlled Congress pushed through its punitive "welfare reform" bill that ended the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, added work requirements and gave states the power to slash support. In the intense White House debate over whether to sign the bill, Emanuel was one of the strongest voices urging Bill Clinton not to veto the bill, as the president had done with earlier GOP welfare bills. Clinton signed the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996,” prompting an outcry from anti-poverty activists and high-level administration resignations. 

After leaving the Clinton administration in 1998, Emanuel made a quick $18 million in two and a half years as managing director of the Wall Street investment bank Wasserstein Perella, working out of its Chicago office.

Elected to Congress in November 2002, Emanuel supported George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq invasion, and defended the war after most Democrats in Congress and most of the public had turned against it. As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, Emanuel seemed oblivious to the change in public opinion. While he took credit for Democrats regaining the House majority, his selection of right-leaning candidates, including Iraq war supporters like himself and former Republicans, ultimately led to GOP gains.

While serving as President Obama’s chief of staff in 2009 and 2010, Emanuel argued for mollifying healthcare reform opponents by significantly weakening Obamacare. (He acknowledged years later it was a good thing Obama didn’t listen to him.) In a 2010 meeting with liberal leaders who planned to publicly pressure the Democratic Party’s conservative wing into supporting healthcare reform, Emanuel famously called them “fucking retarded.”

Emanuel was known in D.C. for hyper-combativeness (earning him the nickname “Rahmbo”) and his ability to gain positive spin from corporate media: “He is on a first-name basis with every political reporter in Washington,” a Washington Post columnist asserted.

After being elected mayor of Chicago in 2011, Emanuel’s administration faced a series of scandals that included concerted warfare against the teachers’ union and the closing of 49 public schools, many in black neighborhoods.

In his 2015 bid for re-election, he was forced into a runoff by progressive challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a contest that would be decided largely by African American voters. Emanuel very likely would have lost the election except for the fact that for 13 months, through the duration of the campaign, his administration suppressed a horrific dashcam video showing the death of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, an African American who’d been shot 16 times by a police officer as he walked away from the officer. (The city had paid $5 million to McDonald’s family without a lawsuit having been filed.)

Soon after a judge ordered the city of Chicago to release the video, polls found that only 17 percent of Chicagoans believed Emanuel when he said he’d never seen the video and that most city residents wanted him to resign as mayor. 

When it was reported last November that Biden was considering him for a cabinet post, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering up a murder is disqualifying for public leadership.” Then-Congressman-elect Mondaire Jones added: “That he's being considered for a cabinet position is completely outrageous and, honestly, very hurtful.”

Emanuel’s 30-year campaign against pro-working-class policy reforms is unending. Asked last August how he would advise the Biden administration, he told CNBC: “Two things I would say if I was advising an administration. One is there's no new Green Deal, there's no Medicare for All.”

If Rahm Emanuel becomes the ambassador to China or Japan -- countries with the world’s second- and third-largest economies -- he will gain new leverage in a region bristling with ethnic and military tensions. Everything about his record indicates that such power would be vested in the wrong hands.

Days after Biden’s election, AOC told the New York Times that Emanuel’s inclusion in the Biden administration “would signal, I think, a hostile approach to the grassroots and the progressive wing of the party.”

We’ll soon find out whether Biden is willing to send such a signal.

     Jeff Cohen is an activist, author and co-founder of RootsAction.org. He was an associate professor of journalism and the director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College and founder of the media watch group FAIR. In 2002-2003, he was a producer and pundit at MSNBC. He is the author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media."

     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.

Republican Hypocrisy Is No Reason to Support Neera Tanden

By Norman Solomon

Most corporate media outlets have depicted President Biden’s effort to win Senate confirmation of Neera Tanden as a battle to overcome Republican hypocrisy about her “mean tweets,” name-calling and nasty partisanship. But there are very important reasons to prevent Tanden from becoming the Office of Management and Budget director. They have nothing to do with her nasty tweets and everything to do with her political orientation.

Tanden has a record as one of the most anti-progressive operators among Democratic Party movers and shakers. Long enmeshed with corporate elites, she has been vehemently hostile to the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. Progressive activists have ample cause to be alarmed at the prospect of her becoming OMB director -- one of the most powerful and consequential positions in the entire Executive Branch.

Yet some leaders of left-leaning groups have bought into spin that carefully ignores Tanden’s fervent embrace of corporate power and touts her as eminently suitable for the OMB job. Media coverage has been a key factor. The newspaper owned by the richest person on the planet, Jeff Bezos, is a good example.

With the Tanden battle intensifying last weekend, the Washington Post launched an opinion spree to defend her while repeatedly expressing alarm and indignation that she might not be confirmed. The day after news broke that Tanden’s nomination was in serious trouble, the newspaper’s barrage started with a piece by right-wing pundit Hugh Hewitt, who urged Senate Republicans “to forgive the small stuff and encourage the recruitment of talent.” That was on Saturday.

On Monday, the Post’s editorial board weighed in, proclaiming the newspaper’s official position: “Yes, Ms. Tanden has been undiplomatic,” but hypocritical GOP senators had approved Donald Trump’s nominees who were even nastier, and the Senate should confirm her.

By then, the national media mold was set, and countless words quickly poured into it -- including six more pro-Tanden pieces that the Post published in the next two days. On Tuesday, the Tanden defenders were staff columnists Greg Sargent and Karen Tumulty as well as the paper’s chief political correspondent Dan Balz. On Wednesday, staff columnists Dana Milbank and Jennifer Rubin shared the polemical duties with feminist author Jill Filipovic.

The Post’s writers denounced conservative objections to confirming Tanden as director of OMB, which the newspaper has aptly described as “the nerve center of the federal government.” Meanwhile, there was no space for substantive criticism of Tanden; the paper’s opinion section didn’t offer a pixel with a contrary outlook, let alone a progressive critique.

Much of the left has a strong aversion to Tanden. Days ago, Common Dreams reported on “her history of pushing cuts to Social Security, disparaging Medicare for All and other popular ideas, and raising money from massive corporations.” As president of the Center for American Progress, she sought and received between $1.5 million and $3 million in donations from the United Arab Emirates monarchy; later, CAP remained silent about a bipartisan congressional resolution to end the U.S. government’s assistance to the continual Saudi-UAE warfare killing huge numbers of Yemeni civilians.

But some progressive organizations have voiced support for Tanden’s nomination, turning a blind eye to such matters as her close fundraising ties with corporate elites, Big Tech, Wall Street, Walmart, health insurers and military contractor Northrop Grumman. Yet ties like that would create foreseeable conflicts of interest in the top OMB job, which oversees regulatory processes across the federal government.

It was not a good sign when a usually-laudable progressive organizer told CNN viewers that Tanden should be confirmed. And -- given Tanden’s record of opposing Medicare for All, opposing a $15 federal minimum wage and advocating for collaboration with Republican leaders in potential cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- something is seriously amiss when a leading advocate for women’s health rights urges confirmation.

In a tweet last week, NARAL’s president Ilyse Hogue called Tanden “a committed progressive” and added: “How about assessing her work, competence and vision instead the tone her tweets? Stop sinking good women because they are outspoken.”

Oddly, the director of the excellent Revolving Door Project, Jeff Hauser, publicly defended Tanden days ago, telling the New York Times: “The last decade has seen mediocre or worse cabinet appointments rubber-stamped by the Senate with regularity. It is unconscionable that the rare exception to that norm might be based on feelings hurt by imprudent tweets and suggests that senators vote more on egos than substance.”

I contacted Hauser for clarification, since it seemed that he was using the hypocrisy of Senate Republicans to justify support for Tanden’s nomination. In effect, he appeared to be adding some drops of WD-40 to hinges on the particular revolving door that Tanden is trying to move through.

When I asked Hauser if he supported confirmation of Tanden and whether he considered her to be part of the revolving-door phenomenon, he replied: “We oppose the arguments actually endangering her confirmation, which are from [Sen. Joe] Manchin and [Sen. Susan] Collins and the like and hold that it makes sense to confirm the likes of Richard Grenell and Brett Kavanaugh but not Neera Tanden. But we do not lobby, so we do not formally urge votes one way or another once a person is actually nominated for a job.”

Hauser added: “I don't think Tanden is ‘revolving door,’ but I stand by the concerns I raised about CAP fundraising in the Washington Post.” Ironically, the Post news article that Hauser was citing, published in December 2020, scrutinized Tanden’s longtime corporate entanglements via her Center for American Progress and reported: “Founded in 2003 by allies of Bill and Hillary Clinton, CAP is widely viewed as a Democratic administration-in-waiting, with a revolving door between the think tank and the White House.”

At RootsAction, which has been working to defeat Neera Tanden’s nomination, my colleague Jeff Cohen has a very different perspective than what can be heard from Tanden’s enablers: “We’ve opposed Tanden not because of her ‘mean tweets’ but because of her close funding relationships with corporate titans and foreign governments. What's stunning is the silence from Senate Democrats about the potential conflicts of interest raised by her decade of aggressive fundraising from powerful interests.”

That kind of silence, whether from the U.S. Senate or from big-budget progressive groups, could dangerously help the Biden administration to do its worst instead of its potential best.

     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.

Cuomo and Newsom Symbolize the Rot of Corporate Democrats -- and the Dire Need for Progressive Populism

By Norman Solomon

The governors of New York and California -- the most populous states led by Democrats -- now symbolize how slick liberal images are no substitute for genuinely progressive priorities.

After 10 years as New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo is facing an uproar over revelations that his administration intentionally and drastically undercounted the deaths from COVID in nursing homes. Meanwhile, in California, the once-bright political glow of Gavin Newsom has dimmed, in large part because of personally hypocritical elitism and a zig-zag “middle ground” approach to public-health safeguards during the pandemic, unduly deferring to business interests.

The political circumstances differ: Cuomo has been in conflict with New York progressives for many years over key policy matters, whereas Newsom was somewhat of a golden boy for Golden State progressives -- if they didn’t look too closely at his corporate-friendly policies. But some underlying patterns are similar.

Both Cuomo and Newsom know how to talk progressive, but they’re corporate Democrats to the core. On many issues in the state legislature, Cuomo has ended up aligning himself with Republican lawmakers to thwart progressive initiatives. In California, where a right-wing petition drive is likely to force Newsom into a recall election, the governor’s moderate record is hardly cause for the state’s huge number of left-leaning voters to be enthusiastic about him.

Anyone who thinks that the current Cuomo scandal about nursing-home deaths is a recent one-off problem, rather than reflecting a deep-seated corporate orientation, should take a look at investigative reporting by David Sirota that appeared nine months ago under the headline “Cuomo Gave Immunity to Nursing Home Execs After Big Donations -- Now People Are Dying.” Sirota wrote:

“As Gov. Andrew Cuomo faced a spirited challenge in his bid to win New York’s 2018 Democratic primary, his political apparatus got a last-minute boost: a powerful health care industry group suddenly poured more than $1 million into a Democratic committee backing his campaign. Less than two years after that flood of cash from the Greater New York Hospital Association, Cuomo signed legislation last month quietly shielding hospital and nursing-home executives from the threat of lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. The provision, inserted into an annual budget bill by Cuomo’s aides, created one of the nation’s most explicit immunity protections for health care industry officials, according to legal experts.”

On the other side of the continent, Newsom is second to none in sounding the alarm about climate change and the need to move away from fossil fuels. But Newsweek reports that during his first two years as governor, Newsom’s administration “approved more than 8,000 oil and gas permits on state lands.” He continues to issue many fracking permits. (As the Wall Street Journal noted days ago, fracking is now “the source of most oil and gas produced in the U.S.”)

Gov. Newsom’s immediate predecessor, Jerry Brown, became fond of crowing that he governed the way a person would steer a canoe, paddling sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right. The metaphor did not answer the question of where the boat was headed.

It may be relevant that Cuomo and Newsom grew up in the nurturing shadow of extraordinary privilege, making them ill-positioned to see much beyond the comfortable bubbles surrounding them.

Andrew Cuomo’s father Mario was New York’s governor for three terms. At age 35, the younger Cuomo was appointed to be assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development by President Clinton, who promoted him to HUD secretary four years later. Such powerful backers propelled him toward the governor’s mansion in Albany.

From the outset, Newsom has been enmeshed with power. As longtime California journalist Dan Walters recently pointed out, “Gov. Gavin Newsom wasn’t born to wealth and privilege but as a youngster he was enveloped in it as the surrogate son of billionaire Gordon Getty. Later, Getty’s personal trust fund -- managed by Newsom’s father -- provided initial financing for business ventures that made Newsom wealthy enough to segue into a political career as a protégé of San Francisco’s fabled political mastermind, Willie Brown.”

It’s possible to transcend such pampered upbringings -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt certainly did -- but failures to show credible concern for the working class and serve their interests have put both Cuomo and Newsom in today’s political pickles.

Like all politicians, Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom are expendable as far as the corporate system is concerned. If their individual brands lose appeal, plenty of other corporate-power servants are eagerly available.

When elected officials like Cuomo and Newsom fade, the solution is not to find like-minded replacements with unsullied images. The problem isn’t the brand, it’s the quality of the political product.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. And some trends are encouraging.

Genuine progressive populism -- insisting that government should strive to meet widespread social needs rather than serve the special interests of the wealthy and corporate elites -- is threatening to disrupt the complacency of mainline Democratic leaders who have long coasted on merely being better than Republicans.

More than ever, many entrenched Democrats are worried about primary challenges from the left. Such fears are all to the good. Progressive activism and shifts in public opinion have strengthened movements that are recruiting, supporting and sometimes electing candidates who offer far better alternatives.

     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.

Hidden in Plain Sight: The “Unimpeachable” Offenses

By Norman Solomon

Impeachment dramas on Capitol Hill have routinely skipped over a question that we should be willing to ask even if Congress won’t: “What about a president’s unimpeachable offenses?”

The question is the flip side of one that Republican Gerald Ford candidly addressed when he was the House minority leader 50 years ago: “What, then, is an impeachable offense? The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

By narrowly defining which offenses are impeachable, political elites are implicitly telling us which offenses aren’t.

So, when the House approved two articles of impeachment on Donald Trump in December 2019 and one impeachment article last month, the actions were much too late and much too little.

On Feb. 6, 2017, less than three weeks into Trump’s term, I wrote in The Hill newspaper: “From the outset of his presidency, Trump has been violating the U.S. Constitution in a way that we have not seen before and should not tolerate. It’s time for members of Congress to get the impeachment process underway.” I pointed out that “the president continues to violate two ‘emoluments’ clauses in the Constitution. One prohibits any gifts or benefits from foreign governments, and the other prohibits the same from the U.S. government or any U.S. state.”

But, at the outset, treating President Trump as unimpeachable -- despite those flagrant violations of the Constitution -- greased the wheels for the runaway madness of his presidency in the years that followed. As Trump’s destructive joyride went on, reasons to impeach him proliferated. Researchers easily drew up dozens of articles of impeachment. But in the eyes of political elites, as with previous presidents, Trump’s offenses were seen as unimpeachable.

Two decades earlier, President Bill Clinton became the second impeached president in U.S. history. The frenzy was akin to vilifying Al Capone for tax evasion. “We all seem to have lost our sense of proportion,” historian Howard Zinn wrote five weeks before Clinton’s impeachment. “Why are the political leaders of the United States and the major media talking of impeaching Bill Clinton for lies about sex, surely not the most important sins of his administration?”

Writing in November 1998, Zinn added: “If Clinton is to be impeached, why do it for frivolous reasons? I can think of at least 10 reasons to impeach him, for acts far more serious than his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky or his lies to Kenneth Starr. I am speaking of matters of life and death for large numbers of people.”

Zinn cited such matters as missile attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan; Clinton’s refusal to accept a Canadian proposal to ban land mines; continuation of “embargoes on Cuba and Iraq, causing widespread misery in Cuba for lack of food and medicine, and hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq according to U.N. statistics”; and squandering vast funds on the U.S. military while people were suffering and dying at home and abroad due to lack of health care, nutrition and housing.

There was no second impeachment of Clinton after he used a “diplomatic” scam called the Rambouillet accords to justify launching intensive U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, without congressional authorization. Clinton persisted with a continuous air war for more than two months -- making history by blatantly violating the War Powers Resolution.

Trump -- like Barack Obama and George W. Bush before him -- was able to order missile strikes and deploy troops in numerous war-torn countries without congressional constraints. And there was no reason to be concerned that Congress might impeach him for war crimes. The reasons for such impunity are rooted in the history of “unimpeachable” offenses.

Don’t Grade President Biden on a Curve

By Norman Solomon

Unless consciously resisted, one of Donald Trump’s lasting triumphs will be the establishment of such a low bar that mediocre standards will prevail for his successor. Of course, providing a clear contrast to the atrocious Trump presidency is irrefutably necessary -- but it’s hardly sufficient.

To give high marks merely for excelling in comparison to right-wing Republicans is to cheer high jumps over very low standards. And the opening months of President Biden’s term are an especially bad time to grade him on a curve, as top appointees take charge and policy directions are set.

With corporate forces fully mobilized and armies of their lobbyists deployed to constantly push the new administration, the need for activating grassroots counterpressure from the left should be obvious. Yet an all-too-common progressive refrain now is along the lines of “Step back and give Biden a chance!”

The refrain is understandable. And mistaken. It’s essential to vigorously advance progressive agendas that are morally compelling and tactically effective -- to deliver notable improvements in people’s lives and prevent the Republicans from recapturing Congress (as happened in 1994 and 2010 with big GOP victories just two years after the corporate-friendly Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama took office).

One of Trump’s overarching “achievements” was to move the frame of feasible political options rightward. Now, the achievable options must be moved in a decidedly progressive direction -- not simply back to the future with a “third Obama term” aiming to reinstate the gist of a pre-Trump status quo.

Encouraging as some of Biden’s first executive orders may be, they’re not transformative. Last week, under the headline “Biden’s Executive Actions Just Scratch the Surface,” the editor of The American Prospect offered a sober assessment. “What Biden is doing, even if it extends only to reversing Trump-era rules and actions, will help a lot of people,” David Dayen wrote. But, “in a lot of ways on these executive actions, the style is doing a fair bit more than the substance.”

On January 28, when Biden signed an executive order on Obamacare, he emphasized his self-imposed restraint. “There’s nothing new that we’re doing here other than restoring the Affordable Care Act and restoring Medicaid to the way it was before Trump became president,” Biden said. And: “I’m not initiating any new law, any new aspect of the law. This is going back to what the situation was prior to Trump’s executive order.”

Prior to Trump, tens of millions of people in the United States were already uninsured or underinsured -- and that was before Covid struck.

Some reporting indicates Biden might now realize that chasing after Republican partners in Congress would be a fool’s errand. Yet Biden has a bad history of reaching across the aisle to make harmful deals. “Mr. Biden finds himself managing the outsize aspirations of the progressive wing of his party while exploring the possibilities of working with a restive opposition that has resisted him from the start,” the New York Times reported in a front-page story on Sunday.

Whatever the phrase “outsize aspirations” means, a key reality is that progressives must keep building pressure during this time of extreme crises -- with several thousand Americans dying from the coronavirus every day, economic catastrophes deepening for many, racial injustice continuing to fester, and the climate emergency still worsening.

Much of what Biden can do would require no congressional action. Dayen points out that, as per the Constitution, presidents “are implementers” -- and “they should implement to the maximum potential allowed by law.”

When gauging the Biden presidency, we should throw away yardsticks that are designed to measure its distance from the Trump presidency.

So many people are dying from lack of health care, and Biden has yet to take -- or call for -- the magnitude of steps that are urgently needed to save lives. One proposal, initiated by Rep. Ilhan Omar and gaining support in the House, would provide recurring stimulus payments. A comprehensive plan, put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders, would establish free health care as a human right for everyone in the United States, in effect Medicare for All, for the duration of the pandemic.

How to pay for such momentous programs? One bill, introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio, provides for a transaction tax on Wall Street that would raise vast amounts of revenue from people most able to afford it. One bill after another has sought to substantially cut the military budget and make the funds available to meet crying human needs.

Only continuous and intense pressure from grassroots activism can induce Biden to support such vital measures.

“We should have learned a lesson from the Obama-Biden years, where many progressive forces gave a honeymoon to the administration, believing that they needed space and believing that they were gonna be under a lot of pressure so we should back off. It was the worst possible thing that we could have ever done,” said Bill Fletcher Jr., a former senior AFL-CIO staffer who is now executive editor of GlobalAfricanWorker.com. “We need to stand behind Biden-Harris at nose length so that they cannot retreat without running smack into us.”

Progressive journalist Sonali Kolhatkar said: “Biden has already faced relentless calls for so-called ‘unity’ from pro-Wall-Street and pro-war corporate Democrats and media pundits, which is of course code for capitulating to centrism and even conservatism. He needs to hear even stronger calls from his constituency, calls that are loud enough to drown out the Wall Streeters and warmongers.”

In the words of progressive populist Jim Hightower, “The question is not whether Biden will produce the transformative change that America urgently needs. He won’t. Rather the question is how hard, far and persistently we progressives will push him.”

If President Biden is pushed hard and far and persistently enough, some truly great changes are possible.

     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.

Don’t Let President Biden ‘Make Us the Dupes of Our Hopes’

By Norman Solomon

At inauguration time, journalist I. F. Stone wrote, incoming presidents “make us the dupes of our hopes.” That insight is worth pondering as Joe Biden ascends to the presidency. After four years of the real-life Trump nightmare, hope is overdue -- but it’s hazardous.

Stone astutely warned against taking heart from the lofty words that President Richard Nixon had just deployed in his inaugural address on January 20, 1969. With the Vietnam War raging, Stone pointed out: “It’s easier to make war when you talk peace.”

That’s true of military war. And class war.

In 2021, class war is the elephant -- and the donkey -- in the national living room. Rhetoric aside, present-day Republican politicians are shameless warriors for wealthy privilege and undemocratic power that afflicts the non-rich. Democratic Party leaders aren’t nearly as bad, but that’s an extremely low bar; relatively few are truly champions of the working class, while most routinely run interference for corporate America, Wall Street and the military-industrial complex.

Rarely illuminated with clarity by corporate media, class war rages 24/7/365 in the real world. Every day and night, countless people are suffering and dying. Needlessly. From lack of social equity. From the absence of economic justice. From the greed and elite prerogatives cemented into the structures of politics and a wide range of institutions. From oligarchy that has gotten so extreme that three people in the United States (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett) now possess more wealth than the entire bottom half of the population.

Yes, there are some encouraging signs about where the Biden presidency is headed. The intertwined economic crisis and horrific pandemic -- combined with growing grassroots progressive pressure on the Democratic Party -- have already caused Biden to move leftward on a range of crucial matters. The climate emergency and festering racial injustice also require responses. We can expect important steps via presidential executive orders before the end of this month.

At the same time, if past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, we should not expect Biden to be a deserter from the class war that he has helped to wage, from the top down, throughout his political career -- including via NAFTA, welfare “reform,” the bankruptcy bill and financial-sector deregulation.

How far Biden can be pushed in better directions will depend on how well progressives and others who want humanistic change can organize. In effect, most of mass media will encourage us merely to hope -- plaintively and passively -- holding onto the sort of optimism that has long been silly putty in the hands of presidents and their strategists.

Hope is a human need, and recent Democratic presidents have been whizzes at catering to it. Bill Clinton marketed himself as “the man from Hope” (the name of his first hometown). Barack Obama authored the bestseller “The Audacity of Hope” that appeared two years before he won the White House. But projecting our hopes onto carefully scripted Rorschach oratory, on Inauguration Day or any day, is usually a surrender to images over realities.

The standard Democratic Party storyline is now telling us that greatness will be in reach for the Biden administration if only Republican obstacles can be overcome. Yet what has led to so much upheaval in recent years is mostly grounded in class war. And the positive aspects of Biden’s initiatives should not delude progressives into assuming that Biden is some kind of a class-war ally. For the most part, he has been the opposite.

“Progressives are not going to get anything from the new administration unless they are willing to publicly pressure the new administration,” David Sirota and Andrew Perez wrote days ago. “That means progressive lawmakers are going to have to be willing to fight and it means progressive advocacy groups in Washington are going to have to be willing to prioritize results rather than White House access.”

The kind of access that progressives need most of all is access to our own capacities to realistically organize and gain power. It’s a constant need -- hidden in plain sight, all too often camouflaged by easier hopes.

More than being a time of hope -- or fatalism -- the inauguration of President Joe Biden should be a time of skeptical realism and determination.

The best way to not become disillusioned is to not have illusions in the first place. And the best way to win economic and social justice is to keep organizing and keep pushing. What can happen during the Biden presidency is up for grabs.

     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.