What the Coronavirus Emergency Has to Do with Biden vs. Sanders, by Norman Solomon

On the surface, the coronavirus emergency has nothing in particular to do with Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

What’s obvious is that Donald Trump’s unhinged bluster and inaction let the pandemic get a lethal jump on the United States, people are dying while huge numbers of lives are in jeopardy, and quick drastic steps are imperative.

Yet at the same time, the differences between what Biden and Sanders are advocating have enormous implications for what could be done to curb the deadly virus in this country.

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

“It is time to ask how we got to where we are, not only our lack of preparation for the virus, but how we end up with an economy where so many people are hurting at a time of massive income and wealth inequality,” Sanders said at the close of his recent debate with Biden.

“It is time to ask the question of where the power is in America. Who owns the media? Who owns the economy? Who owns the legislative process? Why do we give tax breaks to billionaires and not raise the minimum wage?” 

While so-called “moderate” Democrats like Biden don’t want to answer -- or even hear -- such questions, Sanders insists on continuing to ask them. Such perseverance has never been more needed than at this pivotal moment, with so many lives in the balance.

“Where the power is in America” has everything to do with why the U.S. government’s response to the unfolding coronavirus catastrophe has continued to be so anemic, foreshadowing so many more deaths and so much more grief. It’s urgent to implement all-out measures to contain the coronavirus spread (seriously aiming for containment rather than merely “flattening the curve”).

Meanwhile, policies are needed to make sure that insurance-industry profiteers and other sectors of corporate America don’t get away with rapaciously benefiting from catastrophe in ways that would cause untold misery for vast numbers of people. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Warren: Which Side Are You On?, by Norman Solomon

The night before Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren spoke to several thousand people in a quadrangle at East Los Angeles College.

Much of her talk recounted the heroic actions of oppressed Latina workers who led the Justice for Janitors organization.

Standing in the crowd, I was impressed with Warren’s eloquence as she praised solidarity and labor unions as essential for improving the lives of working people.

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

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

Facing the fact that her campaign reached a dead end, Warren basically has two choices: While Bernie Sanders and Biden go toe to toe, she can maintain neutrality and avoid the ire of the Democratic Party’s corporate establishment. 

Or she can form a united front with Sanders, taking a principled stand on behalf of progressive ideals. For much of the past year, in many hundreds of speeches and interviews, Warren has denounced the huge leverage of big money in politics.

And she has challenged some key aspects of corporate power. But now we’re going to find out more about how deep such commitments go for her.

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

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

The urgency of Warren’s decision can hardly be overstated. Sanders and Biden are fiercely competing for votes in a half-dozen states with March 10 primaries including Michigan (with 125 delegates), Washington (89 delegates) and Missouri (68 delegates).

A week later, primaries in four states -- Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio -- will determine the allocation of 577 delegates.

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

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

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

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

At the Epicenter of Super Tuesday, the Sanders Coalition Is Set to Shake the Political World, by Norman Solomon

For many years, corporate media outlets said it couldn’t be done. Now, they say it must not be. To the nation’s punditocracy -- tacitly or overtly aligned with the nation’s oligarchy -- nominating Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential candidate would be catastrophic.

But the 17,000 people who jammed into the Los Angeles Convention Center to hear Sanders speak on Sunday night are part of a progressive populist upsurge that shows no sign of abating. What I saw at the rally was a multiracial, multigenerational coalition with dimensions that no other candidate can come near matching.

With scant support from people of color, the media-pumped campaign of Pete Buttigieg has ended and Amy Klobuchar’s candidacy is about to collapse. Tom Steyer’s self-financed escapade has folded. Despite his win in South Carolina, Joe Biden’s campaign is hollow with “back to the future” rhetoric. 

Mike Bloomberg -- the quintessential “Not Us. Me.” candidate -- might soon discover that he can’t buy elections no matter how much money he plows into advertisements, endorsements and consultants. 

As for Elizabeth Warren: after impressive seasons of articulating a challenge to corporate power last year, she has recently diluted her appeal with murky messages of “unity” while gratuitously sniping at Sanders.

Looking ahead, it’s unclear whether Warren will renew her focus on denouncing the political leverage of wealth. Top Democratic Party power brokers don’t want her to. Before the end of spring, we’ll know whether “nevertheless, she persisted.” 

Meanwhile, media coverage remains saturated by the Sanders-can’t-beat-Trump mantra, but that claim is eroding. 

The New York Times -- which, like other major outlets, has racked up a long record of thinly veiled hostility toward Sanders and has been amplifying the panicked alarms from top Democrats -- recently published two cogent opinion pieces, “The Case for Bernie Sanders” and “Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump. Here’s the Math.” 

Even the Times news department, a bastion of hidebound corporate centrism, acknowledged days ago that Sanders “appeared to be making headway in persuading Democratic voters that he can win the general election.

A Fox News poll released on Thursday showed about two-thirds of Democrats believe that Mr. Sanders could beat President Trump, the highest share of any candidate in the field.” 

But make no mistake about it: The bulk of powerful corporate media and entrenched corporate Democrats will do all they can to prevent the nominee from being Sanders. (I actively support him, while not affiliated with the official campaign.) 

More than ever, the current historic moment calls for a commensurate response: All left hands on deck.

A chant that filled the big hall in Los Angeles where Sanders spoke on Sunday night -- “Sí, se puede” -- came from a crowd that was perhaps half Latino. 

A coalition has emerged on the ground to topple longstanding political barriers of race, ethnicity, language and culture, with shared enthusiasm for the Bernie 2020 campaign that is stunning, deep and transcendent. 

“Look around,” said Marisa Franco, co-founder of the Latinx and Chicanx activist hub Mijente, during her powerful speech that introduced Sanders at the LA rally. 

“We are perched at the edge of history. There is so much at stake in the 2020 election. The world around us is bursting with problems and bursting with possibilities. And that’s making some people very very nervous. You know why? Because we’re winning.” 

Franco added: “Bernie Sanders presents the clearest alternative to Trump. He is willing to name the problems, what’s causing them, and proposes the bold solutions that we need to solve them. . . . We want -- and we demand -- elected officials who are going to fight like hell for us.”

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

As a Corporate Tool, Buttigieg Is Now a Hammer to Bash Sanders, by Norman Solomon

Soon after his distant third-place finish in the Nevada caucuses, Pete Buttigieg sent out a mass email saying that “Senator Sanders believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans.”

The blast depicted “the choice before us” in stark terms: “We can prioritize either ideological purity or inclusive victory. We can either call people names online or we can call them into our movement. We can either tighten a narrow and hardcore base or open the tent to a new, broad, big-hearted American coalition.”

The bizarre accusations of being “narrow” and not “inclusive” were aimed at a candidate who’d just won a historic victory with one of the broadest coalitions in recent Democratic Party history.

Buttigieg has gone from pseudo-progressive to anti-progressive in the last year, and much of his current mission involves denouncing Bernie Sanders with attack lines that are corporate-media favorites (“ideological purity. . . call people names online. . . a narrow and hardcore base”). 

Buttigieg’s chances of winning the 2020 presidential nomination are now tiny, but he might have a bright future as a rising leader of corporate Democrats.

Weirdly, Buttigieg’s claim that Sanders has “a narrow and hardcore base” came from someone who appears to be almost incapable of getting votes from black people. In Nevada, columnist E.J. Dionne noted, Buttigieg “received virtually no African American votes.”

And Buttigieg made his claim in the midst of a Nevada vote count showing that Sanders received more than three times as many votes as he did. The Washington Post reported that Sanders “even narrowly prevailed among those who identified as moderate or conservative.”

As chances that Buttigieg could win the nomination slip away -- the latest polling in South Carolina indicates his vote total there on Saturday is unlikely to be any higher than it was in Nevada -- his mission is being steadily repurposed.

After increasingly aligning himself with the dominant corporate sectors of the party -- vacuuming up millions of dollars in bundled checks along the way -- Buttigieg is hurling an array of bogus accusations at Sanders.

Four months ago, while Buttigieg’s poll numbers were spiking in Iowa and big donations from wealthy donors poured in, I wrote an article with a headline dubbing him a “Sharp Corporate Tool.” 

The piece cited an influx of contributions to Buttigieg from the health insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries -- while he executed a U-turn from proclaiming support for Medicare for All to touting a deceptive rhetorical concoction called “Medicare for all who want it.” 

I concluded that Buttigieg is “a glib ally of corporate America posing as an advocate for working people and their families.”

Since then, continuing his rightward swerve, Buttigieg has become even more glib, refining his campaign’s creation myth and fine-tuning his capacity to combine corporate policy positions with wispy intimations of technocratic populism. 

Buttigieg is highly articulate, very shrewd -- and now, in attack mode, more valuable than ever to corporate patrons who are feverishly trying to figure out how to prevent Sanders from winning the nomination. During last week’s Nevada debate, Buttigieg warned that Sanders “wants to burn this party down.”

Over the weekend, the Buttigieg campaign sent out email that tried to obscure its major support from extremely wealthy backers. 

“At the last debate,” Buttigieg’s deputy campaign manager Hari Sevugan wrote indignantly, “Senator Bernie Sanders condemned us for taking contributions from billionaires. That’s interesting. Because what that tells us is in the eyes of Bernie Sanders, the donations of 45 folks (that’s .0054% of our total donor base) are more important than the donations of nearly 1,000,000 grassroots supporters.”

But Sevugan left out the pivotal roles that very rich contributors have played in launching and sustaining the Buttigieg campaign, with lobbyists and corporate executives serving as high-dollar collectors of bundled donations that add up to untold millions. Buttigieg’s corresponding shifts in policy prescriptions make some sense if we follow the money.

In a detailed article that appeared last week, “Buttigieg Is a Wall Street Democrat Beholden to Corporate Interests,” former Communications Workers of America chief economist Kenneth Peres summed up: “Buttigieg and his supporters like to portray him as a ‘change agent.’ 

However, he has proven to be a change agent that will not in any significant way challenge the current distribution of power, wealth and income in this country. Given his history, it is no surprise that Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Health Insurers, Real Estate Developers and Private Equity have decided to invest millions of dollars into Buttigieg's campaign.”

In the aftermath of the Nevada caucuses, Buttigieg is escalating his attacks on Sanders (who I actively support), in sync with “news” coverage that is especially virulent from some major corporate outlets. 

Consider, for example, the de facto smear article that the New York Times printed on Sunday. Or the venomous hostility toward Sanders that’s routine on Comcast-owned MSNBC, which has stepped up its routine trashing of Sanders by journalists and invited guests.

More than ever, corporate Democrats and their media allies are freaking out about the grassroots momentum of the Bernie 2020 campaign. No one has figured out how to stop him. But Buttigieg is determined to do as much damage as he can.

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

The Escalating Class War Against Bernie Sanders, by Norman Solomon

More than ever, Bernie Sanders is public enemy number one for power elites that thrive on economic injustice. 

The Bernie 2020 campaign is a direct threat to the undemocratic leverage that extremely wealthy individuals and huge corporations constantly exert on the political process. 

No wonder we’re now seeing so much anti-Bernie rage from leading corporate Democrats -- eagerly amplified by corporate media. In American politics, hell hath no fury like corporate power scorned.

Flagrant media biases against Sanders are routine in a wide range of mainstream outlets. (The media watch group FAIR has long documented the problem, illuminated by one piece after another after another after another just this month.) In sharp contrast, positivity toward Sanders in mass media spheres is scarce. 

The pattern is enmeshed with the corporatism that the Sanders campaign seeks to replace with genuine democracy -- disempowering great wealth and corporate heft while empowering everyday people to participate in a truly democratic process. 

Big media are continually amplifying the voices of well-paid reporters and pundits whose jobs involve acceptance of corporate power, including the prerogatives of corporate owners and sponsors. 

And, in news coverage of politics, there’s an inexhaustible supply of former Democratic officeholders and appointees who’ve been lucratively feeding from corporate troughs as lobbyists, consultants and PR operatives. 

Their corporate ties usually go unmentioned. An important media headquarters for hostility toward the Sanders campaign is MSNBC, owned by Comcast -- a notoriously anti-labor and anti-consumer corporation. 

“People need to remember,” I pointed out on Democracy Now! last week, “that if you, for instance, don’t trust Comcast, why would you trust a network that is owned by Comcast? These are class interests being worked out where the top strata of ownership and investors hires the CEO, hires the managing editors, hires the reporters. And so, what we’re seeing, and not to be rhetorical about it, but we really are seeing a class war underway.”

Routinely, the talking heads and go-to sources for mainline news outlets are far removed from the economic pressures besetting so many Americans. And so, media professionals with the most clout and largest megaphones are quite distant from the Sanders base. 

Voting patterns in the New Hampshire primary reflected whose economic interests the Sanders campaign is promising to serve. With 10 active candidates on the Democratic ballot, Sanders “won 4 in 10 of voters with household incomes under $50,000 and nearly 3 in 10 with incomes between $50,00 and $99,000,” the Washington Post reported.

Meanwhile, a trio of researchers associated with the Institute for New Economic Thinking -- Thomas Ferguson, Jie Chen and Paul Jorgensen -- found that “the higher the town’s income, the fewer votes cast” for Sanders. 

“Lower income towns in New Hampshire voted heavily for Sanders; richer towns did the opposite.” The researchers saw in the data “further dramatic evidence of a point we have made before: that the Democratic Party is now sharply divided by social class.” It’s a reality with media implications that are hidden in plain sight.

The often-vitriolic and sometimes preposterous attacks on Sanders via powerful national media outlets are almost always coming from affluent or outright wealthy people. Meanwhile, low-income Americans have virtually zero access to the TV studios (other than providing after-hours janitorial services). 

With very few exceptions, the loudest voices to be heard from mass media are coming from individuals with wealth far above the financial vicinity of average Americans. Virtually none of the most widely read, seen and heard journalists are on the low end of the nation’s extreme income inequality.

Viewed in that light -- and keeping in mind that corporate ownership and advertising dominate mainstream media -- it shouldn’t be surprising that few prominent journalists have much good to say about a presidential campaign fiercely aligned with the working class.

“If there is going to be class warfare in this country,” Bernie Sanders told the Iowa AFL-CIO convention last summer, “it’s time that the working class of this country won that war and not just the corporate elite.” To the corporate elite, goals like that are unacceptable.

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

Why the Buttigieg Campaign Tried to Have Me Arrested for Handing Out Information About Medicare for All, by Norman Solomon

You’d think that a presidential campaign backed by 40 billionaires and untold numbers of bundled rich people wouldn’t worry about just one leaflet on Medicare for All. 

But minutes after Pete Buttigieg finished speaking in an auditorium at Keene State College in New Hampshire on Saturday, a Pete for America official confronted me outside the building while I was handing out a flier with the headline “Medicare for All. Not Healthcare Profiteering for the Few.”

“You can’t pass that out,” the man told me. I did a double take, glancing at the small “Pete” metal badge on his lapel while being told that he spoke on behalf of the Buttigieg campaign. We were standing on the campus of a public college. I said that I understood the First Amendment.

When I continued to pass out the flier, the Buttigieg campaign official (who repeatedly refused to give his name) disappeared and then quickly returned with a campus policeman, who told me to stop distributing the leaflet.

Two Keene city police soon arrived. The Buttigieg official stood a few feet behind them as the police officers threatened me with arrest for trespassing. Ordered to get off the campus within minutes or be arrested, I was handed an official written order (“Criminal Trespass Notice”) not to set foot on “Keene State College entire campus” for a year. So much for freedom of speech and open election discourse in public places. 

Why would a representative of the mighty Buttigieg campaign resort to such a move? A big clue can be found in a deception that Buttigieg engaged in during the debate on Friday night. Buttigieg’s dishonesty arose when Amy Klobuchar, a vehement foe of Medicare for All, attacked Bernie Sanders for allegedly seeking to “kick 149 million Americans off their current health insurance in four years.” 

Klobuchar was reciting a key insurance-industry distortion that neglects to mention how a single-payer system would provide more complete health coverage, at less cost -- by eliminating wasteful bureaucracy and corporate profiteering. But Klobuchar then pivoted to attack Buttigieg:

“And Pete, while you have a different plan now, you sent out a tweet just a few years ago that said henceforth, forthwith, indubitably, affirmatively, you are for Medicare for All for the ages, and so I would like to point out that what leadership is about is taking a position, looking at things, and sticking with them.” 

Buttigieg was far from candid in his response: “Just to be clear, the truth is that I have been consistent throughout in my position on delivering healthcare for every American.” That answer directly contradicted an early 2018 tweet from Buttigieg: “Gosh! Okay. . . I, Pete Buttigieg, politician, do henceforth and forthwith declare, most affirmatively and indubitably, unto the ages, that I do favor Medicare for All, as I do favor any measure that would help get all Americans covered.” 

No doubt if the flier I was handing out at Keene State College had praised Buttigieg, his campaign would not have called the police to have me ejected. But the Buttigieg for President staffer recognized that Buttigieg’s spin on healthcare was undermined by facts in the flier (produced and financed by RootsAction.org, which is completely independent of the official Sanders campaign). 

“Buttigieg is claiming that Medicare for All would dump people off of health coverage and deprive them of ‘choice,’” our flier pointed out. “Those are insurance-industry talking points. He is deliberately confusing the current ‘choice’ of predatory for-profit insurance plans with the genuine full choice of healthcare providers that enhanced Medicare for everyone would offer.” 

Apparently, for the Buttigieg campaign, such truthful words are dangerous. 

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

Iowa Fiasco Raises the Stakes for New Hampshire, Where Sanders Could Win Big, by Norman Solomon

While journalists pick through the ashes of the Iowa caucuses meltdown, thousands of progressive activists are moving forward to make election history in New Hampshire. In sharp contrast to the prattle of mainstream punditry, the movements behind Bernie Sanders are propelled by people who engage with politics as a collective struggle because the future of humanity and the planet is at stake. As a result, the Granite State’s primary election on Feb. 11 could be a political earthquake.

Whether or not the Democratic Party’s corporate backers truly understand what progressive populism is all about, they’re determined to crush its strongest electoral manifestation in our lifetimes -- the Bernie 2020 campaign. And, since the bottom fell out of Iowa’s capacity for dramatic political impact, New Hampshire now looms larger than ever.

Monday night’s collapse of the caucus vote-counting process in Iowa has amped up the spotlight on -- and political consequences of -- what will happen in the New Hampshire primary. A clear Sanders victory would make him the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Perpetuating passivity is a key undercurrent when corporate media report on election campaigns. Routinely, the coverage is rendered as entertainment, historic events to be individually consumed rather than collectively created.

Progressive social movements have the opposite approach. Propagandistic attacks on Sanders and his campaign are likely to reach new depths between now and the New Hampshire election. Effectively countering the distortions and smears will require concerted individual efforts on a large scale. Full disclosure: As an active Bernie supporter, I’m part of an expanding team set to do independent on-the-ground outreach in New Hampshire until Election Day. (Information available: nh@rootsaction.org.)

Whatever its budget or priorities, no presidential campaign can possibly maintain a presence in every neighborhood to do what ideally would be done. The success of the Sanders campaign depends on supporters taking the initiative rather than waiting for a national campaign to fill the gaps.

I often think about how Bernie used the opportunity to make a closing statement at a Democratic presidential debate last June. Instead of tooting his own horn and touting his leadership, he got to the core of terrible realities that won’t change unless people organize effectively from the grassroots. 

After reeling off a few lowlights of the status quo -- “for the last 45 years wages have been stagnant for the middle class. . . we have the highest rate of childhood poverty. . . 45 million people still have student debt” -- he asked: “How can three people own more wealth than the bottom half of America?”

Then he closed by saying: “And here is the answer. Nothing will change unless we have the guts to take on Wall Street, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the military industrial complex, and the fossil fuel industry. If we don’t have the guts to take them on, we will continue to have plans, we will continue to have talk, and rich will get richer and everybody else will be struggling.”

Whether they agree with Bernie or not, people widely understand that he absolutely means what he says. And that helps to explain why, during the next seven days, in national media and across New Hampshire, corporate forces will be in overdrive to prevent a Bernie Sanders victory in the New Hampshire primary.

It’s not mere happenstance that the sound system at a Bernie rally often blasts out the song “Power to the People” as he takes the stage. Only the power of people, determined and mobilized, can overcome the forces arrayed against the Bernie Sanders campaign and the movements supporting him at this pivotal historic moment.
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Norman Solomon is cofounder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

The Creation Myth of the Buttigieg Campaign, by Norman Solomon

This weekend, Pete Buttigieg told supporters that he became a viable candidate for president “on the strength of our vision” and “the urgency of our convictions.” Such rhetoric fits snugly into a creation myth about his campaign that Buttigieg has been promoting since early 2019.

Summing up the gist of that myth, Buttigieg began this year by standing at a whiteboard and looking into a camera while he talked about the genesis of his run for the presidency. “We launched as an exploratory committee, not even a full year ago, with a few volunteers, zero dollars in the bank,” he said -- and “without the personal wealth of a millionaire or a billionaire.” 

And Buttigieg offered reassurance to those concerned about big money in politics, saying: “What we built in 2019 we were able to put together without any contributions from federal lobbyists, or from fossil-fuel executives, and not one dollar from corporate PACs.” But, as Aldous Huxley wrote in the introduction to his classic novel of dystopian technocracy, Brave New World, “the greatest triumphs of propaganda” are accomplished by maintaining “silence about truth.” 

Buttigieg has remained silent about what made the ascent of his campaign possible -- the early, major and continuing support from extremely rich people enmeshed with powerful and destructive corporate interests -- enabling the Pete for America campaign to get off the ground and gain altitude. Buttigieg’s rise was propelled by the rocket fuel of funding from -- and bonding with -- wealthy corporate operators, who bundled big checks from other donors and provided an establishment seal of approval that resonated with mainstream media. 

The deft spin from the Buttigieg apparatus and the huge media hype about him have obscured the significance of his deep-pocketed backers. Key information about those ties has rarely gotten into the mass-media echo chamber. Yet, occasional reports have offered a window into the big-money support for Buttigieg that he is eager to leave unmentioned.

Buttigieg may have started his presidential campaign a year ago “with a few volunteers” and “zero dollars in the bank” -- but it wasn’t long before plenty of millionaires and billionaires flocked to back him with their own money and piles of checks from wealthy associates. “Pete Buttigieg Is the Only Top 2020 Democrat Taking Money from Lobbyists,” HuffPost reported in April. “Buttigieg’s campaign said the donations wouldn’t influence his policy positions and noted he isn’t taking donations from corporate PACs or fossil fuel interests.” 

Later, the Center for Public Integrity explained in mid-summer, Buttigieg “reversed his stance and refunded more than $30,000 from federal lobbyists. . . . But Buttigieg has nonetheless continued to rely on wealthy and well-connected ‘bundlers’ to help him fundraise -- and to great effect, raising more money of late than most other 2020 presidential candidates.” 

As summer began, Buttigieg’s star was ascending on Wall Street. There, the New York Times reported, “donors are swooning over Mr. Buttigieg enough to open their wallets and bundling networks for him.” By October, under the headline “Pete Buttigieg Takes Lead as Big Business Candidate in 2020 Field,” Fortune magazine was reporting that “when it comes to opening hearts (and wallets) of business leaders across America, Buttigieg is shining.” 

It was the middle of October when Buttigieg defended his reliance on big donors with a memorable comment: “We’re not going to beat Trump with pocket change.” However, as Common Dreams pointed out, “Critics noted that (Bernie) Sanders and (Elizabeth) Warren are the top fundraisers of the Democratic primary, raising $46 million and $35 million mainly through small donations.”

In early November, the Washington Post reported that “Wall Street donors have a new favorite candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential field: Pete Buttigieg. . . . Buttigieg leads his rivals in collecting contributions from the securities and investment industry, pulling in $935,000 through the first three quarters of this year, according to figures from the Center for Responsive Politics.”

By then, Buttigieg was neck-and-neck with frontrunner Joe Biden for largesse from billionaires. In December, Forbes documented that “40 billionaires and their spouses have donated to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, according to an analysis of federal election filings, making the South Bend, Indiana mayor a favorite among America’s richest people.” 

The outlines of Buttigieg’s high-roller fundraising strategy came into sharper focus in mid-December when his campaign released the names of about 150 wealth-connected supporters who had each “raised at least $25,000 for our campaign.” At the same time, Newsweek reported, “disappointed Twitter followers are requesting their money back from Buttigieg under the #RefundPete hashtag. Some say they are disappointed by his taking large donations, some say they're disappointed by his consultation work, some say they felt ‘fooled’ by his behavior and donated earlier in his campaign.” 

The effectiveness of the Buttigieg campaign’s creation myth will soon be gauged by vote totals. Running for president in an era of oligarchy, Pete Buttigieg has chosen to be an antithesis of Bernie Sanders (who I actively support), resembling countless politicians so eager to take big money from the wealthy that it’s unclear if they have any priority higher than trying to win the next election. ______________________________

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

Nancy Pelosi’s Bad Attitude Toward Progressives, by Norman Solomon

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine that a letter from the billionaire real-estate broker George M. Marcus was hand-delivered to the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asking to meet with her. What are the chances that Pelosi would find time on her calendar? Hint: Marcus gave $4.5 million to Pelosi’s House Majority PAC during the 2018 election cycle.

Or, if the letter had come from the hedge-fund billionaire James H. Simons -- who gave $10 million to that PAC during the last election cycle -- would his request for a meeting with Speaker Pelosi be granted?

In contrast, we don’t need to speculate about what would happen if Pelosi received a letter from seven progressive organizations “urgently” requesting a meeting to discuss her recent dismissive comments about four progressive congresswomen -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib. That’s what happened on July 17, when a letter was hand-delivered to Pelosi’s office in Washington.

It was signed by progressive groups with millions of active supporters -- Demand Progress, Democracy for America, Just Foreign Policy, Our Revolution, Progressive Democrats of America, and RootsAction (where I’m national coordinator). It was also signed by the largest caucus of the biggest state party, the Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party.

After a delay of more than two weeks, Pelosi’s office replied on August 2: “Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi is unable to meet at this time. We will be sure to let you know if anything changes in her schedule.”

Pelosi has earned a reputation as a highly skilled legislative manager and a prodigious fundraiser. But her solicitous skills at cultivating wealthy patrons (the top 15 donors gave a total of $37 million to her House Majority PAC during the 2018 cycle) are matched with her rather contemptuous attitude toward progressives who don’t fit into the equations that compute for her on Capitol Hill.

Our letter pointed out that “the ultimate fate of legislative and electoral efforts will depend on active support from millions of people at the grassroots.” But inside the Capitol bubble, Democratic leadership seems to see progressive grassroots energy as more of a threat than an asset.

A month ago, Pelosi went out of her way to disparage Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley and Tlaib for voting against a bill that lacked adequate refugee protections at the U.S.-Mexico border. Pelosi told the New York Times: “All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.” Pelosi later met with Ocasio-Cortez, but that did little to repair the damage.

Lost in the media hubbub was the reality that Pelosi didn’t only express thinly veiled contempt toward four deeply progressive congresswomen; she was also conveying a similar attitude toward millions of Americans who share their political outlooks, while many have been drawn into political engagement due to their achievements.

As our letter put it, “Dismissive comments about new progressive members of Congress have given the impression of a disdainful attitude toward like-minded progressives and Democratic activists across the country.” 

Nor have Trump’s racist tweets about the four congresswomen changed the realities of how destructive it is for Speaker Pelosi to disparage those emerging leaders and their truly national grassroots constituencies. If Pelosi is supposed to strive for evenly piloting the Democratic aircraft as House speaker, why is she periodically throwing smoke bombs at its left wing? The party should be called to account when its leaders let their ostensible principles slide.

Pelosi’s ire at the four dissenting Democratic congresswomen was triggered by their strong opposition to inadequate protection for refugees. As our letter to Pelosi said: “At a time when flagrant institutionalized cruelty, racism, xenophobia, misogyny and other forms of bigotry have reached new depths from Republican leaders, we can ill afford the slightest wavering from unequivocal opposition to such extremism. Efforts to strengthen our resolve should be welcomed.” 

At the same time, a key underlying reality is Pelosi’s alignment with corporate Democrats who worry about being primaried in 2020. Two of the four congresswomen in “The Squad” -- Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley -- won their seats by defeating incumbents in Democratic primaries last year. They’ve set a good example for progressives while making many House Democrats nervous. 

This week, several thousand constituents have used a RootsAction webpage to send individual emails to House Democrats, telling their representative: “I realize that the Speaker is powerful on Capitol Hill, but I ask you to summon the courage to speak up and push her to permanently stop taking sides against progressive lawmakers.” 

As I wrote nine months ago, “progressives should recognize the longstanding House Democratic leader as a symptom of a calcified party hierarchy that has worn out its grassroots welcome and is beginning to lose its grip. Increasingly at odds with the Democratic Party’s mobilized base, that grip has held on with gobs of money from centralized, deep-pocket sources -- endlessly reinforcing continual deference to corporate power and an ongoing embrace of massively profitable militarism.” 

At a time when the virulent racism of the Trump regime is becoming more flagrant, it might seem a divergence to challenge the Democratic Party’s leadership. On the contrary. The imperative of preventing Trump’s re-election will require massive engagement and huge turnout of the Democratic base -- exactly what doesn’t happen when party leaders are aloof, elitist, enthralled with Wall Street and dismissive of genuinely progressive principles.

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

There’s Nothing Moderate About “Moderates.” A Primary Example Is Joe Biden, by Norman Solomon

The comedian George Carlin liked to marvel at oxymorons like “jumbo shrimp” and “military intelligence.” Now, as the race for the Democratic presidential nomination intensifies, reporters and pundits at corporate media outlets are escalating their use of a one-word political oxymoron -- “moderate.” 

As a practical matter, in the routine lexicon of U.S. mass media, “moderate” actually means pro-corporate and reliably unwilling to disrupt the dominant power structures. “Moderate” is a term of endearment in elite circles, a label conferred on politicians who won’t rock establishment boats. “Moderate” sounds so much nicer than, say, “enmeshed with Wall Street” or “supportive of the military-industrial complex.” 

In the corporate media environment, we’re accustomed to pretty euphemisms that fog up unpretty realities -- and the haze of familiarity brings the opposite of clarity. As George Orwell wrote, language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” 

If Joe Biden is a “moderate,” the soothing adjective obscures grim realities. The framing was routine hours after the debate Wednesday night when the front page of the New York Times began its lead story by reporting that Biden “delivered a steadfast defense of his moderate policies in the Democratic primary debate.” 

But, how are policies really “moderate” when they perpetuate and increase extreme suffering due to vast income inequality? Or when they support U.S. wars causing so much death and incalculable anguish? Or when they refuse to challenge the fossil-fuel industry and only sign onto woefully inadequate measures in response to catastrophic climate change? 

Biden’s record of words and deeds is “moderate” only if we ignore the extreme harm that he has done on matters ranging from civil rights and mass incarceration to student debt and the credit card industry to militarism and war. 

Although Biden again tangled with Kamala Harris during the latest debate, she is ill-positioned to provide a clear critique of his so-called “moderate” policies. Harris has scarcely done more than he has to challenge the systemic injustice of corporate domination. So, she can’t get far in trying to provide a sharp contrast to Biden’s corporate happy talk on the crucial issue of healthcare. 

Harris began this week by releasing what she called “My Plan for Medicare for All.” It was promptly eviscerated by single-payer activist Tim Higginbotham, who wrote for Jacobin that her proposal would “further privatize Medicare. . . keep the waste and inefficiency of our current multi-payer system. . . cost families more than Medicare for All. . . continue to deny patients necessary care” and “fall apart before it’s implemented.”

In keeping with timeworn rhetoric from corporate Democrats, Harris repeatedly said during the debate that she wants to guarantee “access” to healthcare -- using a standard corporate-friendly buzzword that detours around truly guaranteeing healthcare as a human right. No matter whether journalists call Harris “moderate” or “progressive” (a term elastic enough to be the name of a huge insurance company), her unwillingness to confront the dominance of huge corporations over the economic and political life of the USA is a giveaway.

Whatever their discreet virtues, 18 of the 20 candidates who debated this week have offered no consistent, thoroughgoing challenge to corporate power. Among the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, only Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are providing a coherent analysis and actual challenge to the realities of corporate power and oligarchy that are crushing democracy in the United States.

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

Corporate Team of Rivals: Biden and Harris, by Norman Solomon

The odds are now very strong that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic presidential nominee. New polling averages say they account for almost 70 percent of support nationwide, while no other candidate is anywhere near.

For progressives who want to affect the news instead of just consume it, active engagement will be essential. Biden is the most regressive Democrat with a real chance to head the ticket. After amassing a five-decade record littered with odious actions and statements, he now insists that the 2020 campaign “shouldn’t be about the past” -- an evasive and ridiculous plea, coming from someone who proclaims himself to be “an Obama-Biden Democrat” and goes to absurd lengths to fasten himself onto Obama’s coattails, while also boasting of his past ability to get legislation through Congress. 

As he campaigns, Biden persists with disingenuous denials. During the June 27 debate, he flatly -- and falsely -- declared: “I did not oppose busing in America.” On July 6, speaking to a mostly black audience in South Carolina, he said: “I didn’t support more money to build state prisons. I was against it.” But under the headline “Fact Check: Joe Biden Falsely Claims He Opposed Spending More Money to Build State Prisons,” CNN reported that “he was misrepresenting his own record.” 

Biden used the Fourth of July weekend to dig himself deeper into a centrist, status quo trench for his war on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. During a repeatedly cringeworthy interview, Biden told CNN that what can’t be done includes Medicare for All, tuition-free public college and student debt cancelation. Bernie Sanders quickly responded with a tweet calling Medicare for All, debt-free college and a Green New Deal “the agenda American needs -- and that will energize voters to defeat Donald Trump.” 

No one has summed up Biden’s political stance better than Elizabeth Warren, who told the California Democratic Party convention five weeks ago: “Some Democrats in Washington believe the only changes we can get are tweaks and nudges. If they dream, they dream small. Some say if we all just calm down, the Republicans will come to their senses.” She added: “When a candidate tells you about all the things that aren't possible, about how political calculations come first . . . they’re telling you something very important -- they are telling you that they will not fight for you.” 

Being preferable to Joe Biden is a low bar, and Kamala Harris clears it. But, like Biden, she stands to lose potential support from many self-described liberals and progressives to the extent they learn more about her actual record. Overall, Harris’s work as San Francisco’s DA and the California attorney general was not progressive. Lara Bazelon, former director of the LA-based Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent, wrote in a New York Times column early this year:

“Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.” 

Last week, Bazelon said: “Kamala Harris claims to be a champion of criminal justice reform. But as a prosecutor . . . she was anything but. She needs to make the case to the voters that her change of heart is genuine. Crucial to that case is reckoning with her past.” That past needs scrutiny, especially since Harris has refused to acknowledge there was anything wrong with it. “As the top law enforcement official” of San Francisco and then California, the New York Times reported in a February news article, “she developed a reputation for caution, protecting the status quo and shrinking from decisions on contentious issues.”

Reporter Kate Zernike wrote:“Years before ending mass incarceration became a bipartisan cause, she started programs to steer low-level drug offenders away from prison and into school and jobs. At the same time, she touted her success in increasing conviction rates, and as attorney general remained largely on the sidelines as California scrambled to meet a federal court order to reduce its swollen prison populations. She also repeatedly sided with prosecutors accused of misconduct, challenging judges who ruled against them.”

When Harris first ran statewide, for California attorney general in 2010, “she had campaigned to the right of her Republican opponent on the question of easing the state’s tough three-strikes law. Once in office, she declined to take positions on ultimately successful ballot initiatives intended to reduce prison populations -- one expanding opportunities for parole, the other reducing many nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors.”

“After the Supreme Court upheld the judges’ overcrowding order, the state promised to ‘promptly’ release a significant number of nonviolent prisoners, giving credit for time served. A delay in meeting that promise drew a judicial scolding in 2014. The state’s response proved embarrassing, and unsuccessful: Reducing the prison population, Ms. Harris’s office maintained, would hurt California’s ability to fight wildfires by shrinking the pool of forced labor.”

“Ms. Harris won praise for releasing statewide data in a way that informed rather than inflamed the brutality debate: It included numbers on the use of police force but also on use of force against officers. She instituted body cameras for police agents who worked in her office, and offered implicit-bias training for police statewide. But she declined to support statewide regulations for the use of body cameras, agreeing with local departments that they should set their own standards. And she did not support a bill that would have required the attorney general to investigate police shootings.”

Early in this decade, responding to the house foreclosure crisis, “the banks agreed to $18 billion in debt reduction that Ms. Harris said would allow California homeowners to stay in their homes, and the national agreement included $2.5 billion for a fund to provide educational counseling and other services for those in danger of foreclosure. But critics, especially on the left, have long said that the settlement was no grand bargain. It did not require banks to pay much out of pocket; $4.7 billion of the $18 billion in relief came from forgiving second mortgages, many of which the banks would have written off anyway because they were so severely underwater, and $9 billion came from homeowners selling their homes for less than the value of their mortgages, meaning that homeowners did not stay in their homes.”

The New Republic recently summed up: “From her role in a California prison labor debate to her prosecutions of sex workers,” Kamala Harris “has a past of her own to defend.” It's sometimes difficult to gauge what Harris really believes in, especially in light of her tactical backsliding and flip-flops. Longtime observers had no reason to be surprised last week when she walked back her forceful debate position that the federal government shouldn’t leave it to localities to assist school desegregation with busing. “Harris muddied the waters,” the Associated Press reported, when “she told reporters she too did not support federally mandated busing and supported it only as an option for local governments.”

On foreign policy, the little that Harris has to say is often hazy while conforming with mainstream Democratic Party militarism. In the Senate, she has voted for six of eight major military spending bills. Harris -- who cosponsored a bill to withhold U.S. dues to the United Nations because of a UN Security Council resolution that condemned illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank -- pandered to AIPAC while delivering 2017 and 2018 speeches to the Israel-can-do-no-wrong organization.

While acquiescing to requests from MoveOn and other groups that presidential candidates not speak to AIPAC’s 2019 conference in late March, she pulled off a smooth maneuver, as Mondoweiss pointed out: “Harris is a very pragmatic politician, and the conference came to her yesterday! She met leading AIPAC officials at her office and then tweeted her devoted support to Israel.” Harris’s tweet shared the news: “Great to meet today in my office with California AIPAC leaders to discuss the need for a strong U.S.-Israel alliance, the right of Israel to defend itself, and my commitment to combat anti-Semitism in our country and around the world.”

But progressive journalist Ben Norton did not share in the upbeat mood as he tweeted: “Far-right Israeli PM Netanyahu just formed an alliance with a literal fascist party, and is bombing people trapped in the Gaza concentration camp right now, but fake ‘progressive’ Kamala Harris is meeting with AIPAC and praising the apartheid regime.” 

Yet Harris does not adhere completely to AIPAC positions. She cosponsored the Yemen war powers bill introduced by Bernie Sanders. And she has expressed support for the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama that was canceled by President Trump. The military-industrial complex might prefer Biden to Harris. But from all indications, that complex would be quite comfortable with a President Harris, and vice versa. 

The same goes for Wall Street and other big corporate sectors. No wonder they’re pouring many millions of dollars into the Biden and Harris campaign coffers. However tense and testy the current relations between Biden and Harris might be, their falling out is likely to be temporary. “I adore Joe Biden,” she proclaimed in mid-spring when he was on the verge of announcing his campaign. 

Anyone who doubts the prospect of a rapprochement -- and even a shared ticket -- is forgetting how easily campaign-trail conflicts can be jettisoned a little bit down the road. In 1980, George H.W. Bush fought Ronald Reagan for the GOP presidential nomination all the way to the convention, even after losing the vast majority of primaries, and tensions were raw; then came the Reagan-Bush ticket. 

Among the Democratic presidential candidates, the viable alternatives to the Biden and Harris corporatist duo are the progressive candidate Elizabeth Warren and the more progressive candidate Bernie Sanders. While Warren is impressive in many ways, I continue to actively support Sanders. As an eloquent essay by Shaun King recently underscored, Sanders -- like no other member of the Senate or candidate for president -- has boldly participated in progressive movements for his entire adult life. 

That orientation toward social movements is crucial in a time of profound needs for fundamental change, in an era of multiple and concentric crises -- from record-breaking economic inequality to extreme corporate greed to racist xenophobia to the climate emergency to rampant militarism and so much more. No matter how distasteful or repugnant, the electoral process is an opening for progressive forces to be influential and potentially decisive.

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

After Biden’s Sharp Decline, Investors Are Reassessing Other Blue Chips, by Norman Solomon

Investors are pondering where to put their money this week after the sudden decline in the assessed value of presidential candidate Joe Biden.

On Wall Street and in other corporate quarters where financiers were heavily invested in Biden, hopes have eroded in recent days amid reduced investor confidence.

Some prominent donors began to openly question the wisdom of devoting more capital to the national marketing campaign for the former vice president.

After the leading blue chip closed sharply lower at the end of last week, even declaring “my time is up,” many top investors felt overexposed and looked for shelter.

Gathering new topline data and considering several prospectuses that had been previously submitted, investors are now reassessing assets and liabilities as well as potential growth in market share during the next quarter and beyond.

Venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, powerful CEOs and other wealthy individuals -- sensing a political emergency that may require swift and decisive action -- are moving to widen financing spigots for Kamala Harris.

With contingency planning, there is elevated interest in Pete Buttigieg. One previously hot startup, Beto O’Rourke, is now considered to be too underperforming to warrant reinvestment.

The overarching goals are to quickly shore up capitalization of aligned political products and to implement sustained brand enhancement.

While great appreciation remains for Biden’s nearly five decades of massive financial benefits to investors, some have concluded that he is now unreliable in view of current political turbulence.

Yet Biden is hardly in penny-stock territory. Many rich investors remain bullish on the former vice president. 

Politico reported Sunday that “sources say Biden walked away with a $1 million haul after two fund-raisers in San Francisco alone this weekend.” 

One of those gatherings drew about 200 wealthy guests to the backyard of a former Twitter vice president for global media, Katie Jacobs Stanton. 

But an erstwhile Biden fundraiser, Tom McInerney, didn’t show up at the Stanton poolside event, even though he was listed on the invitation. 

McInerney, who was a member of Biden’s national finance committee, said he notified the Biden campaign on June 20 that he would no longer fundraise for it, citing the candidate’s recent fond comments about segregationist senators. 

Actually, Biden had been on the record for many years with such warm reminiscences. And in a report first published on April 11, CNN had exposed Biden’s letters to racist senators in 1977 and 1978, seeking support for his legislation against school busing for desegregation. 

Quoting McInerney as saying that “I would imagine I’m not alone,” CNBC reported on the day after Biden’s debate pratfall:

“While McInerney is the first financier to publicly withdraw his support after Biden’s controversial round of comments, the loss is significant because it could be a harbinger of further defections.” 

Overall, market conditions have abruptly changed, in the midst of fierce competition for big-investor dollars. The New York Times did some candid reporting in mid-June under the headline “Wall Street Donors Are Swooning for Mayor Pete. (And They Like Biden and Harris, Too.)” 

The story explained that “the behind-the-scenes competition for Wall Street money in the 2020 presidential race is reaching a fevered peak . . . as no less than nine Democrats are holding New York fund-raisers in a span of nine day.” 

And, “with millions of dollars on the line, top New York donors are already beginning to pick favorites, and three candidates are generating most of the buzz” -- Biden, Harris and Buttigieg. The Times reported: 

“Interviews with two dozen top contributors, fund-raisers and political advisers on Wall Street and beyond revealed that while many are still hedging their bets, those who care most about picking a winner are gravitating toward Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, while donors are swooning over Mr. Buttigieg enough to open their wallets and bundling networks for him.” 

At the same time, the newspaper noted, “Not everyone is chasing Wall Street cash: Two candidates in the top tier of polls, [Bernie] Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have railed against the financial industry and opted against the kind of fancy fund-raisers with catering and $2,800 admission prices that lubricate the donor industry.” 

The antipathy is mutual: Wall Streeters understand that Sanders and Warren would be bad investments anyway. In sharp contrast, the Times summarized a bit of the investment frenzy: 

“Hamilton E. James, the executive vice chairman of Blackstone and a top fund-raiser, hosted Mr. Buttigieg at his home on Thursday. The short-selling hedge fund manager James Chanos will hold an event for Mr. Biden on Monday. And on Tuesday, Marc Lasry, the hedge fund manager and co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, is gathering checks for Ms. Harris. Co-hosts of that event include Blair W. Effron, an investment bank co-founder and an influential Democratic financier, and Ray McGuire, vice chairman of Citigroup.” 

Deep-pocket investors are lined up from coast to coast. The night before she gave a speech at the California Democratic Party convention a month ago, Kamala Harris held a campaign fund-raiser at the San Francisco home of oil billionaires Ann and Gordon Getty, with the price of admission reportedly up to $28,000.

While Harris was attending that fund-raiser, the San Francisco Chronicle observed, “Sanders was stopping by the Latino and labor caucuses at the convention.” 

For his part, Biden skipped the California state party convention entirely. 

But the same weekend, he sent top aides to the same city to meet with “more than two dozen bundlers -- people who raise money from high-dollar donors -- at the San Francisco home of Sandy Robertson, co-founder of private equity firm Francisco Partners,” CNBC reported. 

“Other financiers at the private huddle included Richard Blum, an investment banker and husband of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein; veteran trial lawyer Joseph Cotchett; Steve Westly, founder of tech investment firm the Westly Group; Denise Bauer, former U.S. ambassador to Belgium; and Wade Randlett, the president of Dashboard Technology.” 

Eager for lucrative stability in the electoral marketplace, corporate Democratic investors are keen to block threats to their dominance from the Sanders and Warren campaigns. 

Now that Joe Biden is looking shaky -- with a damaged brand and a faltering business plan -- prudence requires a new set of calculations. 

Biden may have outlived his usefulness. If “politics ain’t beanbag,” neither is political investment.

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

Clueless and Shameless: Joe Biden, Staggering Frontrunner, by Norman Solomom

Joe Biden just put a spotlight on his mindset when he explicitly refused to apologize for fondly recalling how the Senate “got things done” with “civility” as he worked alongside some of the leading racist lawmakers of the 20th century.

For Biden, the personal is the political; he knows that he’s virtuous, and that should be more than good enough for African Americans, for women, for anyone. “There’s not a racist bone in my body,” Biden exclaimed Wednesday night, moments after demanding: “Apologize for what?” His deep paternalism surfaced during the angry outburst as he declared: “I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career, period, period, period.” 

 Biden has been “involved” in civil rights his “whole career” alright. But at some crucial junctures, he was on the wrong side. He teamed up with segregationist senators to oppose busing for school desegregation in the 1970s. And he played a leading role -- while pandering to racism with a shameful Senate floor speech -- for passage of the infamous 1994 crime bill that fueled mass incarceration. 

Such aspects of Biden’s record provide context for his comments this week -- praising an era of productive “civility” with the virulent segregationist Dixiecrat Senators Herman Talmadge of Georgia and James Eastland of Mississippi (known as the “Voice of the White South”), who often called black people “an inferior race.” Said Biden at a New York fundraiser Tuesday night: “Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished.” 

To Biden, any assessment of his past conduct that clashes with his high self-regard is unfair; after all, he really means well. On the campaign trail now, his cloying paternalism is as evident as his affinity for wealthy donors. Biden shuttles between the billionaire class and the working class -- funded by the rich while justifying the rich to everyone else. 

His aspirations are bound up in notions of himself as comforter-in-chief. “I get it, I get it,” Biden said during his brief and self-adulatory non-apology video in early April to quiet the uproar over his invasive touching of women and girls. He was actually saying: I get it that I need to seem to get it. “I want to talk about gestures of support and encouragement that I’ve made to women and some men that have made them uncomfortable,” Biden said in the video.

“In my career I’ve always tried to make a human connection -- that’s my responsibility, I think. I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and say, ‘You can do this’. . . It’s the way I’ve always been. It’s the way I’ve tried to show I care about them and I’m listening.” Weeks later, appearing on ABC’s The View, he declared: “I have never in my life, never, done anything in approaching a woman that has been other than trying to bring solace.”

It was not a credible claim; consider Lucy Flores, or the countless other women and girls he has intrusively touched over the years. For several decades, Biden has made his way through the political terrain as a reflexive glad-hander. But times have changed a lot more than he has. “What the American people do not know yet is whether Biden has actually internalized any of the blowback he’s earned over the years for his treatment of women,” journalist Joe Berkowitz wrote last week. “So far, it’s not looking good.” 

What’s also looking grim is Biden’s brazen adoration of wealthy elites who feed on corporate power. His approach is to split the rhetorical difference between the wealthy and the workers. And so, days ago, at a fundraiser filled with almost 180 donors giving his campaign the legal limit of $2,800 each -- an event where he tried and failed to get funding from a pro-Trump billionaire -- Biden declared: “You know, you guys are great but Wall Street didn’t build America. You guys are incredibly important but you didn’t build America. Ordinary, hard-working, middle-class people given half the chance is what built America.”

The formula boils down to throwing the “hard-working middle class” some rhetorical bones while continuing to service “you guys” on Wall Street. Given his desire to merely revert the country to pre-Trump days, no wonder Biden keeps saying that a good future can stem from finding common ground with Republicans. But for people who understand the present-day GOP and really want a decent society, Biden’s claims are delusional. 

Biden sees his public roles of winking patriarch, civility toward racists and collaborator with oligarchs as a winning political combination. But if he becomes the Democratic presidential nominee, Biden will suppress turnout from the party’s base while providing Republicans with plenty of effective (albeit hypocritical) fodder. Already the conservative press is salivating over the transparently fraudulent pretenses of Lunch Bucket Joe, as in this headline Tuesday in the right-wing Washington Examiner: “Biden Rubs Elbows With Billionaires in $34M Penthouse.” 

When Bernie Sanders (who I continue to actively support) denounces the political power of billionaires and repeats his 2020 campaign motto -- “Not Me. Us.” -- it rings true, consistent with his decades-long record. But Biden can’t outrun his own record, which is enmeshed in his ongoing mentality. And so, the former vice president is in a race between his pleasant image and unpleasant reality. 

As the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden is the biggest threat to Joe Biden’s political future. He continues to be who he has been, and that’s the toxic problem.

Why An “Apology Tour” Is Needed: An Open Letter To Joe Biden, by Norman Solomon

Dear Mr. Biden:

News outlets are reporting that you’re determined to prevent your campaign from turning into an “apology tour” this summer. But your only other option is a campaign of denial -- sinking deeper into a quagmire of unsustainable pretense.

After your flip-flop late last week that finally renounced your 40 years of support for the Hyde Amendment’s discriminatory limits on reproductive rights for low-income women, the New York Times reported that your campaign’s “larger concern” has been “the implications of Mr. Biden spending too much time reversing or expressing remorse for his past policy stances.”

Those implications are easy to understand. Your “past policy stances” have done so much harm -- to so many people for so long -- that if you start “expressing remorse,” there might be no end in sight. 

“Before entering the race,” the Times reported, “Mr. Biden and his inner circle resolved that while he would have to take steps to assuage liberal reservations about his record, he could not afford to make the first few months of the campaign an extended apology tour.” 

But an extended apology tour would be entirely appropriate. Pretending that you don’t have much to apologize for is not viable. That’s because the Democratic Party of your political glory days is gone. 

At the grassroots, millions of attentive voters -- the ones most likely to volunteer, to repeatedly donate money (albeit not in the large bundles you’re relying on), and to vote in all kinds of weather -- are more informed and better networked than during the last decades of the 20th century.

The days are past when vast numbers of Democrats won’t notice that you’re uttering platitudes about the middle class and being touted as “Lunch Bucket Joe” after serving the interests of corporate giants as Wall Street Joe. 

And a whole lot of people will really care as they learn about your political backstory of not-so-subtle appeals to racism on such matters as busing for school desegregation and the draconian 1994 crime bill that fueled mass incarceration. 

In the current campaign, your above-the-fray strategy probably won’t work. As the Iowa Poll released over the weekend reflects, support for you has started to recede: “About six weeks after he announced he would run, Biden’s support has fallen by a third,” The Hill reports. “Biden’s declining support came even before this week’s controversy over his flip-flop on the Hyde Amendment.” 

While I’m an active Bernie Sanders supporter, I have to say that I don’t believe any of your Democratic opponents have nearly as much to apologize for as you do. The more you deny the need to apologize, the more your denials seem off-kilter.

Even while you were executing that Hyde flip-flop with a speech in Atlanta days ago, the Times pointed out “Mr. Biden took pains to state explicitly that he was not repudiating his previous stance on abortion funding and would make ‘no apologies’ for it.” 

For decades, you helped block federal funding for low-income women to have access to abortions. Then you affirmed the same position on Wednesday last week, only to do a 180 the next day after putting your finger to the political wind -- and you make “no apologies”?

What might an apology tour look like? Here are five recommendations for acknowledging key realities and expressing remorse: 

** Teaming up with segregationist senators to oppose busing for school desegregation: “I’m sorry I joined forces with bigots.”

** Treatment of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas hearings: “I deeply regret that I ended up showing more concern for the sensibilities of Republican colleagues than respecting Ms. Hill’s rights.”

** Leading role -- while pandering to racism on the Senate floor -- in passage of the 1994 crime bill: “I was wrong, and I wince while watching video of my Senate floor speech.”

** Career-long services to corporate elites with avid mutual support that continued during the launch of this campaign: “I apologize for catering to credit card companies and other huge corporations.”

** Powerfully supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq: “I hate to think of how many people have suffered and died because of the Iraq war that I helped bring about as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

For such aspects of your political record, apologies are long overdue. They won’t bring back the dead, undo suffering, retroactively nourish those who’ve gone hungry or repay the debts that millions of Americans continue to face.

But unless you clear the air hovering over your campaign, its messages will be enveloped in an unforgettable stench of evasion.

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

Why Joe Biden Was Afraid To Face California’s Democratic Party, by Norman Solomon

Joe Biden’s glaring absence from the California Democratic Party convention has thrown a national spotlight on his eagerness to detour around the party’s progressive base. 

While dodging an overt clash for now, Biden is on a collision course with grassroots Democrats across the country who are learning more about his actual record and don’t like it. 

Inside the statewide convention in San Francisco over the weekend, I spoke with hundreds of delegates about Biden while leafletting with information on his record. 

I was struck by the frequent intensity of distrust and even animosity; within seconds, after glancing at his name and photo at the top of the flyer, many delegates launched into some form of denunciation.

I often heard delegates bring up shameful milestones in Biden’s political history -- especially his opposition to busing for school desegregation, treatment of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas hearings, leading role in passage of the 1994 crime bill, career-long services to corporate elites, and powerful support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

It may have been a dumb tactical move for Biden to stay away from the convention. Its 3,400 delegates included core Democratic activists and leaders from around the state.

Even some of the pro-Biden delegates said they were miffed that he wasn’t showing up -- in contrast to the 14 presidential candidates who accepted invitations to address the convention. 

Biden chose to be in Ohio instead, speaking at a Human Rights Campaign gala in support of LGBTQ rights.

Nationwide, Biden generated headlines like this one in USA Today: “Biden Faces Stiff Criticism from Democrats for Skipping California Convention.” 

Interviewed for that news story, I said: “He was not going to be very popular at this convention, but his refusal to show up only reinforces the idea that he’s an elitist and he is more interested in collecting big checks in California than being in genuine touch with grassroots activists and people who care about the Democratic Party’s future.” 

Yet if Biden had shown up, it’s quite likely he would have been met with a storm of protest on the convention floor. 

That’s because so many of the state’s Democratic delegates are vocally opposed to the root causes and effects of institutionalized racism, war, systemic assaults on the environment and overall corporate power. 

Looking ahead, Biden will strive to avoid, as much as possible, any uncontrolled situation that could disrupt his pose as an advocate for the middle class and the poor. He least needs wide circulation of accurate information about his political record.

I worked with a few other delegates to blanket the convention with a RootsAction flyer that included some revealing quotes from Biden and facts about his record.

We got some pushback from people who didn’t like seeing distribution of such critical material. But many more said that they appreciated it.

Polls show that Biden has little support among young people. Many share the basic outlook of a 19-year-old Sanders supporter at the convention, Yvette Flores, who told Bloomberg News: “Everything he stands for is against the interests of the working class and young Democrats.” 

While a dozen of the presidential contenders who spoke were unimpressive or worse, two were far and away the progressive standouts. Bernie Sanders (whom I actively support) delivered a cogent and fiery speech on Sunday.

“There is a debate among presidential candidates who have spoken to you here in this room -- and those who have chosen for whatever reason not to be in this room -- about the best way forward,” he said.

“In my view, we will not defeat Donald Trump unless we bring excitement and energy into the campaign, and unless we give millions of working people and young people a reason to vote and a reason to believe that politics is relevant to their lives.” 

And: “We have got to make it clear that when the future of the planet is at stake there is no middle ground.” 

The other great speech came from Elizabeth Warren, who also deftly skewered Biden along the way. “Big problems call for big solutions,” she said.

“And some Democrats in Washington believe the only changes we can get are tweaks and nudges. If they dream, they dream small. Some say if we all just calm down, the Republicans will come to their senses.” 

Warren added: “Here’s the thing. When a candidate tells you about all the things that aren't possible, about how political calculations come first . . . they’re telling you something very important -- they are telling you that they will not fight for you.”

Her reference to the distant Joe Biden was crystal clear. 

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