By Norman Solomon

The arrogance of power is especially ominous and despicable when a government leader risks huge numbers of lives in order to make a provocative move on the world’s geopolitical chessboard. Nancy Pelosi’s plan to visit Taiwan is in that category. Thanks to her, the chances of a military confrontation between China and the United States have spiked upward.

Long combustible over Taiwan, the tensions between Beijing and Washington are now close to ablaze, due to Pelosi’s desire to be the first House speaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years. Despite the alarms that her travel plans have set off, President Biden has responded timidly — even while much of the establishment wants to see the trip canceled.

“Well, I think that the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now,” Biden said about the prospective trip on July 20. “But I don’t know what the status of it is.”

Biden could have put his presidential foot down and ruled out Pelosi’s Taiwan trip, but he didn’t. Yet, as days went by, news trickled out that opposition to the trip was extensive in the upper reaches of his administration.

“National security adviser Jake Sullivan and other senior National Security Council officials oppose the trip because of the risk of escalating tension across the Taiwan Strait,” Financial Times reported. And overseas, “the controversy over the trip has sparked concern among Washington’s allies who are worried that it could trigger a crisis between the U.S. and China.”

Underscoring that the U.S. commander in chief is anything but an innocent bystander in terms of Pelosi’s trip, officials disclosed that the Pentagon intends to provide fighter jets as escorts if she goes through with the Taiwan visit. Biden’s unwillingness to clearly head off such a visit reflects the insidious style of his own confrontational approach to China.

More than a year ago — under the apt New York Times headline “Biden’s Taiwan Policy Is Truly, Deeply Reckless” — Peter Beinart pointed out that from the outset of his presidency Biden was “chipping away” at the longstanding U.S. “one China” policy: “Biden became the first American president since 1978 to host Taiwan’s envoy at his inauguration. In April, his administration announced it was easing decades-old limitations on official U.S. contacts with the Taiwanese government. These policies are increasing the odds of a catastrophic war. The more the United States and Taiwan formally close the door on reunification, the more likely Beijing is to seek reunification by force.”

Beinart added: “What’s crucial is that the Taiwanese people preserve their individual freedom and the planet does not endure a third world war. The best way for the United States to pursue those goals is by maintaining America’s military support for Taiwan while also maintaining the ‘one China’ framework that for more than four decades has helped keep the peace in one of the most dangerous places on earth.”

Now, Pelosi’s move toward a visit to Taiwan has amounted to further intentional erosion of the “one China” policy. Biden’s mealy-mouthed response to that move was a subtler type of brinkmanship.

Many mainline commentators, while very critical of China, acknowledge the hazardous trend. “The Biden administration remains committed to being more hawkish on China than its predecessor,” conservative historian Niall Ferguson wrote on Friday. He added: “Presumably, the calculation in the White House remains, as in the 2020 election, that being tough on China is a vote-winner — or, to put it differently, that doing anything the Republicans can portray as ‘weak on China’ is a vote-loser. Yet it is hard to believe that this calculation would hold if the result were a new international crisis, with all its potential economic consequences.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal summed up the current precarious moment with a headline declaring that Pelosi’s visit “would likely sink tentative rapprochement between U.S., China.”

But the consequences — far from being only economic and diplomatic — could be existential for all of humanity. China has several hundred nuclear weapons ready to use, while the United States has several thousand. The potential for military conflict and escalation is all too real.

“We keep claiming our ‘one China’ policy hasn’t changed, but a Pelosi visit would clearly be precedent setting and can’t be construed as in keeping with ‘unofficial relations,’” said Susan Thornton, a former acting assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the State Department. Thornton added: “If she goes, the prospect of a crisis goes way up as China will need to respond.”

Last week, a pair of mainstream policy analysts from elite think tanks — the German Marshall Fund and the American Enterprise Institute – wrote in the New York Times: “A single spark could ignite this combustible situation into a crisis that escalates to military conflict. Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan could provide it.”

But July ended with strong indications that Biden has given a green light and Pelosi still intends to go ahead with an imminent visit to Taiwan. This is the kind of leadership that can get us all killed.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State,” published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include “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.

By Norman Solomon / Truthout

Mainstream media and politics routinely assume that the United States is a well-meaning global giant, striving to keep dangerous adversaries at bay. So, it was just another day at the imperial office on July 19 when FBI Director Christopher Wray declared: “The Russians are trying to get us to tear ourselves apart. The Chinese are trying to manage our decline, and the Iranians are trying to get us to go away.”

Such statements harmonize with the prevailing soundscape. The standard script asserts that the United States is powerful and besieged — mighty but always menaced — the world’s leading light yet beset by hostile nations and other sinister forces aiming to undermine the USA’s rightful dominance of the globe.

A fortress mindset feeds the U.S. government’s huge “defense” budget — which is higher than the military budgets of the next 10 countries combined — while the Pentagon maintains about 750 military bases overseas. But victimology is among Washington’s official poses, in sync with a core belief that the United States is at the center of the world’s importance and must therefore police the world to the best of its capacity.

In recent decades, U.S. military power has faced new challenges to retain unipolar leverage over the planet in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. (Heavy is Uncle Sam’s head that wears the crown.) Along with the fresh challenges came incentives to update the political lexicon for rationalizing red-white-and-blue militarism.

[ Continue reading here. ]

By Norman Solomon

Pundits are focused on Joe Biden’s tanking poll numbers, while progressives continue to be alarmed by his dismal job performance. Under the apt headline “President Biden Is Not Cutting the Mustard,” last week The American Prospect summed up: “Young people are abandoning him in droves because he won’t fight for their rights and freedom.” Ryan Cooper wrote that “at a time when Democrats are desperate for leadership — especially some kind of strategy to deal with a lawless and extreme Supreme Court — he is missing in action.”

Yes, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema team up with Republicans to stymie vital measures. But the president’s refusal to issue executive orders that could enact such popular measures as canceling student debt and many other policies has been part of a derelict approach as national crises deepen. Recent events have dramatized the downward Biden spiral.

Biden’s slow and anemic response to the Supreme Court’s long-expected Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade spotlighted the magnitude of the stakes and the failure. The grim outlook has been underscored by arrogance toward progressive activists. Consider this statement from White House communications director Kate Bedingfield last weekend as she reacted to wide criticism: “Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party. It’s to deliver help to women who are in danger and assemble a broad-based coalition to defend a woman’s right to choose now, just as he assembled such a coalition to win during the 2020 campaign.”

The traditional response to such arrogance from the White House toward the incumbent’s party base is to grin — or, more likely, grimace — and bear it. But that’s a serious error for concerned individuals and organizations. Serving as enablers to bad policies and bad politics is hardly wise.

Polling released by the New York Times on Monday highlighted that most of Biden’s own party doesn’t want him to run for re-election, “with 64 percent of Democratic voters saying they would prefer a new standard-bearer in the 2024 presidential campaign.” And, “only 26 percent of Democratic voters said the party should renominate him.”

A former ambassador to Portugal who was appointed by President Obama, Allan Katz, has made a strong case for Biden to announce now that he won’t run for re-election. Writing for Newsweek under the headline “President Biden: I’m Begging You — Don’t Run in 2024. Our Country Needs You to Stand Down,” Katz contended that such an announcement from Biden would remove an albatross from the necks of Democrats facing tough elections in the midterms.

In short, to defeat as many Republicans as possible this fall, Biden should be seen as a one-term president who will not seek the Democratic nomination in 2024.

Why push forward with this goal? The #DontRunJoe campaign that our team at RootsAction launched this week offers this explanation: “We felt impelled to intervene at this time because while there is a mainstream media debate raging over whether Joe Biden should run again, that discussion is too narrow and lacking in substance — focused largely on his age or latest poll numbers. We object to Biden running in 2024 because of his job performance as president. He has proven incapable of effectively leading for policies so badly needed by working people and the planet, including policies he promised as a candidate.”

It’s no secret that Republicans are very likely to win the House this November, probably by a large margin. And the neofascist GOP has a good chance of winning the Senate as well, although that could be very close. Defeating Republicans will be hindered to the extent that progressive and liberal forces circle the political wagons around an unpopular president in a defense of the unacceptable status quo.

While voters must be encouraged to support Democrats — the only way to beat Republicans — in key congressional races this fall, that should not mean signing onto a quest to renew Biden’s lease on the White House. RootsAction has emphasized: “While we are announcing the Don’t Run Joe campaign now, we are urging progressive, anti-racist, feminist and pro-working-class activists to focus on defeating the right wing in this November’s elections. Our all-out launch will come on November 9, 2022 — the day after those midterm elections.”

With all the bad news and negative polling about Biden in recent weeks, the folly of touting him for a second term has come into sharp focus. While the president insists that he plans to run again, he has left himself an escape hatch by saying that will happen assuming he’s in good health. But what we should do is insist that — whatever his personal health might be — the health of the country comes first. Democratic candidates this fall should not be hobbled by the pretense that they’re asking voters to support a scenario of six more years for President Biden.

It’s time to create a grassroots groundswell that can compel Joe Biden to give public notice — preferably soon — that he won’t provide an assist to Republican forces by trying to extend his presidency for another four years. A pledge to voluntarily retire at the end of his first term would boost the Democratic Party’s chances of getting a stronger and more progressive ticket in 2024 — and would convey in the meantime that Democratic candidates and the Biden presidency are not one and the same.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State,” published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include “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. 

By Norman Solomon

I’ve just finished going through the more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiques about the war in Ukraine that the White House has released and posted on its website since Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in early March. They all share with that speech one stunning characteristic — the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers. Yet we’re now living in a time when those dangers are the worst they’ve been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

You might think that the risks of global nuclear annihilation would merit at least a few of the more than 25,000 words officially released on Biden’s behalf during the 100 days since his dramatic speech to a joint session of Congress. But an evasive pattern began from the outset. While devoting much of that speech to the Ukraine conflict, Biden said nothing at all about the heightened risks that it might trigger the use of nuclear weapons.

A leader interested in informing the American people rather than infantilizing them would have something to say about the need to prevent nuclear war at a time of escalating tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. A CBS News poll this spring found that the war in Ukraine had caused 70 percent of adults in the U.S. to be worried that it could lead to nuclear warfare.

But rather than publicly address such fears, Biden has dodged the public — unwilling to combine his justifiable denunciations of Russia’s horrific war on Ukraine with even the slightest cautionary mention about the upward spike in nuclear-war risks.

Biden has used silence to gaslight the body politic with major help from mass media and top Democrats. While occasional mainstream news pieces have noted the increase in nuclear-war worries and dangers, Biden has not been called to account for refusing to address them. As for Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, party loyalties have taken precedence over ethical responsibilities. What’s overdue is a willingness to insist that Biden forthrightly speak about a subject that involves the entire future of humanity.

Giving the president and congressional leaders the benefit of doubts has been a chronic and tragic problem throughout the nuclear age. Even some organizations that should know better have often succumbed to the temptation to serve as enablers.

In her roles as House minority leader and speaker, Nancy Pelosi has championed one bloated Pentagon budget increase after another, including huge outlays for new nuclear weapons systems. Yet she continues to enjoy warm and sometimes even fawning treatment from well-heeled groups with arms-control and disarmament orientations.

And so it was, days ago, when the Ploughshares Fund sent supporters a promotional email about its annual “Chain Reaction” event — trumpeting that “Speaker Pelosi will join our illustrious list of previously announced speakers to explore current opportunities to build a movement to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons once and for all.”

The claim that Pelosi would be an apt person to guide listeners on how to “build a movement” with such goals was nothing short of absurd. For good measure, the announcement made the same claim for another speaker, Fiona Hill, a hawkish former senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council.

Bizarre as it is, the notion that Pelosi and Hill are fit to explain how to “build a movement to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons” is in sync with a submissive assumption — that there’s no need to challenge Biden’s refusal to address nuclear-war dangers.

The president has a responsibility to engage with journalists and the public about nuclear weapons and the threat they pose to human survival on this planet. Urgently, Biden should be pushed toward genuine diplomacy including arms-control negotiations with Russia. Members of Congress, organizations and constituents should be demanding that he acknowledge the growing dangers of nuclear war and specify what he intends to do to diminish instead of fuel those dangers.

Such demands can gain momentum and have political impact as a result of grassroots activism rather than beneficent elitism. That’s why this Sunday, nearly 100 organizations are co-sponsoring a “Defuse Nuclear War” live stream – marking the 40th anniversary of the day when 1 million people gathered in New York’s Central Park, on June 12, 1982, to call for an end to the nuclear arms race.

That massive protest was in the spirit of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964: “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.”

In 2022, the real possibility of such a hell for the entire world has become unmentionable for the president and his enablers. But refusing to talk about the dangers of thermonuclear destruction makes it more likely.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State,” published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include “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.

By Norman Solomon

New outcries for gun control have followed the horrible tragedies of mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo. “Evil came to that elementary school classroom in Texas, to that grocery store in New York, to far too many places where innocents have died,” President Biden declared over the weekend during a university commencement address. As he has said, a badly needed step is gun control — which, it’s clear from evidence in many countries, would sharply reduce gun-related deaths.

But what about “gun control” at the Pentagon?

The concept of curtailing the U.S. military’s arsenal is such a nonstarter that it doesn’t even get mentioned. Yet the annual number of deadly shootings in the United States — 19,384 at last count – is comparable to the average yearly number of documented civilian deaths directly caused by the Pentagon’s warfare in the last two decades. And such figures on war deaths are underestimates.

From high-tech rifles and automatic weapons to drones, long-range missiles and gravity bombs, the U.S. military’s weaponry has inflicted carnage in numerous countries. How many people have been directly killed by the “War on Terror” violence? An average of 45,000 human beings each year — more than two-fifths of them innocent civilians — since the terror war began, as documented by the Costs of War project at Brown University.

The mindset of U.S. mass media and mainstream politics is so militarized that such realities are routinely not accorded a second thought, or even any thought. Meanwhile, the Pentagon budget keeps ballooning year after year, with President Biden now proposing $813 billion for fiscal year 2023. Liberals and others frequently denounce how gun manufacturers are making a killing from sales of handguns and semiautomatic rifles in the United States, while weapons sales to the Pentagon continue to spike upward for corporate war mega-profiteers.

As William Hartung showed in his Profits of War report last fall, “Pentagon spending has totaled over $14 trillion since the start of the war in Afghanistan, with one-third to one-half of the total going to military contractors. A large portion of these contracts — one-quarter to one-third of all Pentagon contracts in recent years — have gone to just five major corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.”

What’s more, the United States is the world’s leading arms exporter, accounting for 35 percent of total weapons sales — more than Russia and China combined. The U.S. arms exports have huge consequences.

Pointing out that the Saudi-led war and blockade on Yemen “has helped cause the deaths of nearly half a million people,” a letter to Congress from 60 organizations in late April said that “the United States must cease supplying weapons, spare parts, maintenance services, and logistical support to Saudi Arabia.”

How is it that countless anguished commentators and concerned individuals across the USA can express justified fury at gun marketers and gun-related murders when a mass shooting occurs inside U.S. borders, while remaining silent about the need for meaningful gun control at the Pentagon?

The civilians who have died — and are continuing to die – from use of U.S. military weapons don’t appear on American TV screens. Many lose their lives due to military operations that are unreported by U.S. news media, either because mainline journalists don’t bother to cover the story or because those operations are kept secret by the U.S. government. As a practical matter, the actual system treats certain war victims as “unworthy” of notice.

Whatever the causal mix might be — in whatever proportions of conscious or unconscious nationalism, jingoism, chauvinism, racism and flat-out eagerness to believe whatever comforting fairy tale is repeatedly told by media and government officials — the resulting concoction is a dire refusal to acknowledge key realities of U.S. society and foreign policy.

To heighten the routine deception, we’ve been drilled into calling the nation’s military budget a “defense” budget — while Congress devotes half of all discretionary spending to the military, the USA spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (most of them allies), the Pentagon operates 750 military bases overseas, and the United States is now conducting military operations in 85 countries.

Yes, gun control is a great idea. For the small guns. And the big ones.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State,” published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include “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.

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

Three years ago, we helped write a report for RootsAction.org targeting 15 corporate Democrats in Congress who deserved to be “primaried.” We called the report “Bad Blues.” A common reaction back then was that those establishment pols were too strong and entrenched to be defeated.

On Tuesday, yet another “Bad Blue” apparently went down to defeat – with seven-term Congressman Kurt Schrader of Oregon running way behind community activist Jamie McLeod-Skinner in the slowly tallied Democratic primary.

Schrader is not the first “Bad Blue” on our list to face defeat by a progressive challenger. And he’s unlikely to be the last.

The incumbent heavily outspent McLeod-Skinner – thanks to lavish funding from big pharma and other corporate PACs – but Schrader was out-organized on the ground. McLeod-Skinner called him “the Joe Manchin of the House.”

The current vote count indicates that constituents in that Oregon district will no longer be represented by a Democrat who obstructs progressive initiatives on Capitol Hill, such as drug pricing reform and Build Back Better. (Despite his blockage of Democratic measures, Schrader was endorsed in the primary by Joe Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi.)

Next Tuesday in South Texas, Henry Cuellar – now the only anti-abortion House Democrat – may be ousted in a Democratic primary runoff by progressive immigrants’ rights lawyer Jessica Cisneros. As we wrote in our 2019 “Bad Blues” report, Cuellar is so corporate that he gets funded by the Republican-allied Koch Industries PAC.

But it’s not just Koch Industries that supports Cuellar against Cisneros. It’s also Pelosi. And that’s the crux of the problem – a blue wall of corruption and incumbency.

Bad Blues in the House rely on support from old-line Democratic leaders like Pelosi and Jim Clyburn, and cash from corporate PACS that fund the leadership of both political parties.

The good news is that Bad Blues are being ousted by progressives who rely on small donors and support from grassroots activists.

Speaker Pelosi reaffirmed her endorsement of Cuellar against Cisneros even after the FBI raided Cuellar’s home and campaign headquarters last January as part of a corruption probe. Then she doubled down on her endorsement of the anti-choice incumbent just days ago, even after the Supreme Court draft to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked. Meanwhile, as the number-three House Democrat, Clyburn recently campaigned in Texas for Cuellar against Cisneros.

It’s worth remembering – and might be a source of inspiration – that the top of the blue wall of corruption is getting weaker and near retirement. The Democratic House leadership trio of Pelosi, Bad Blue Steny Hoyer and Clyburn are aged 82, 82 and 81 respectively. Well-funded by corporate interests, they serve the status quo. Running on an aggressive change agenda (Green New Deal, Medicare for All, etc.), the grassroots-funded Jessica Cisneros is not yet 30.

Of the 15 Bad Blues we identified in 2019, two have chosen to retire from Congress, and two were primaried and defeated back in 2020. Democrat-in-name-only Dan Lipinski was defeated in the North Chicago suburbs by liberal activist Marie Newman. And then in one of the most stunning upsets in recent U.S. politics, 16-term Rep. Eliot Engel from New York – the hawkish chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee – was ousted from Congress by educator Jamaal Bowman, who promptly joined the progressive “squad.”

Bowman, after being recruited as a candidate by Justice Democrats, got into Congress because of a grassroots campaign that involved activists from many groups, including the Working Families Party and Democratic Socialists of America.

On his path to Washington, Bowman owed no favors to big donors or to the status quo Democratic leadership. He arrived in Washington ready to fight for the progressive reforms needed by his working-class constituents in the Bronx and Westchester.

Jamie McLeod-Skinner, as the replacement for Bad Blue Kurt Schrader, would not be beholden to any of the many corporate PACs that supported him.

And if Jessica Cisneros can defeat Cuellar on Tuesday in South Texas, she’ll be ready to fight for the interests of her working-class district.

And the rest of us will gain a congresswoman who can help chip away at a blue wall of corruption.

     Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

Sometimes one decision speaks volumes. And so it was when the Congressional Progressive Caucus — with 98 members in the House — recently chose to have its PAC endorse a corporate “moderate” against the strong progressive candidate Nina Turner. In the process, the Progressive Caucus underscored its loyalty to establishment Democrats while damaging its credibility among progressives nationwide.

The endorsement of Congresswoman Shontel Brown against Turner in their upcoming May 3 rematch came just five months after Brown took office following last year’s special election in a Cleveland area district. In last August’s Democratic primary, Brown defeated Turner with the help of funding from big corporate, Republican and hawkishly pro-Israel donors — as well as support from Republicans who voted for Brown in Ohio’s open primary. (Brown’s two most notable national endorsers were Hillary Clinton and Rep. Jim Clyburn.)

Brown is such an establishment politician that she didn’t just join the Progressive Caucus — she also quickly joined the rival New Democrat Coalition, an alliance of the most corporate Democrats in the House.

By siding with Brown against Turner, the Progressive Caucus appears to be operating like much of official Washington does — as an incumbent protection racket.

And the endorsement brought questions to the surface that have been festering for a long time. Such as:

Does the Progressive Caucus represent the interests of progressive constituencies to the establishment? Or does the Progressive Caucus represent the interests of the establishment to progressives? And if the answer is “both,” then how does that work?

Unless such questions are answered with clarity, illusions will undermine the efforts of grassroots progressives to assess situations accurately and organize effectively.

While the endorsement of Brown is a bellwether event, it is not an isolated incident. After a long history of backing down rather than use its leverage (as when it abandoned its demand in 2009 that a “public option” be part of the Affordable Care Act), the Progressive Caucus appeared to wield some real clout during the early months of the Biden presidency. Most importantly, its leadership insisted that it would not back last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill unless it moved through Congress in tandem with the Build Back Better legislation proposed by President Biden with major input from Senator Bernie Sanders.

Build Back Better was crucial for economic and social justice as well as for substantively addressing the climate emergency. And for a time, it seemed that the Progressive Caucus, under the leadership of Rep. Pramila Jayapal, was holding firm onto the necessity of passing Build Back Better along with the infrastructure measure. Simultaneity was crucial because Senate obstructionist Joe Manchin badly wanted the infrastructure bill signed into law but was hostile to Build Back Better.

The Progressive Caucus leadership vowed to not back down. And then it caved, opting to wave the infrastructure bill through the House. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was concise when she said: “I’m a No. This is bullshit.”

Other members of the expanded Squad — including Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman and Ayanna Pressley — also voted against the stand-alone infrastructure measure (and took plenty of abuse as a result).

AOC, Omar, Bush, Tlaib, Bowman and Pressley saw what was coming, as a result of the Progressive Caucus’s surrender. The infrastructure bill got through Congress, and Biden signed it on November 15. Progressives immediately lost their leverage for Build Back Better. It died.

In December, RootsAction.org (which we co-founded) published an in-depth report on the Congressional Progressive Caucus, documenting that many of its members fail to support the CPCs main priorities (like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal) and that some in the caucus are just PINOs — “Progressive In Name Only.” Those lawmakers obviously believe the “progressive” label helps them with activists and constituents back in their districts, but in Washington they tend to legislate on behalf of the corporate status quo.

The PINO report found that “16 CPC members are also part of the ideologically corporatist New Democrat Coalition” — a “moderate” caucus that advocates “market-oriented” and “fiscally responsible” policies to solve the big economic and environmental crises of our time. Add Shontel Brown to this list of dual members. (When the CPC’s PAC endorsed Brown this month, it also announced its endorsement of several of the worst PINOs running for re-election, including Jimmy Panetta.) 

The report analyzed the lack of cohesion in the Progressive Caucus and cited that deficiency in asking how one of Congress’ biggest caucuses did not muster the power to get Build Back Better across the finish line.

The Progressive Caucus leadership approach that gave up leverage for Build Back Better is akin to the one that just endorsed Shontel Brown against Nina Turner. Progressives around the country should take note and not forget: We can’t depend on the Congressional Progressive Caucus to provide the kind of leadership we need. It must come from the grassroots.

     Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College, and author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

By Norman Solomon

Ever since Joe Biden ended his speech in Poland on Saturday night by making one of the most dangerous statements ever uttered by a U.S. president in the nuclear age, efforts to clean up after him have been profuse. Administration officials scurried to assert that Biden didn’t mean what he said. Yet no amount of trying to “walk back” his unhinged comment at the end of his speech in front of Warsaw’s Royal Castle can change the fact that Biden had called for regime change in Russia.

They were nine words about Russian President Vladimir Putin that shook the world: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

With a reckless genie out of the bottle, no amount of damage control from the president’s top underlings could stuff it back in. “We do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Sunday. Such words might plausibly have less than full weight; Blinken was chief of staff at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when, in mid-2002, then-Senator Biden wielded the gavel at crucial hearings that completely stacked the witness deck in support of the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, with the explicit goal of regime change.

The USA’s commander in chief, brandishing the power to launch one of the world’s two biggest nuclear arsenals, would be out of his mind to consciously announce a goal of dethroning the leader of the world’s other nuclear superpower. Worst case would be that he was blurting out his government’s actual secret goal, which would not speak well of impulse control.

But it’s not much more reassuring to think that the president simply got carried away with his emotions. The day after, that was part of the messaging from Biden’s cleanup detail. “Administration officials and Democratic lawmakers said Sunday the off-the-cuff remark was an emotional response to the president’s interactions in Warsaw with [Ukrainian] refugees,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

However — before the cosmetics began to cover Biden’s unscripted statement — the New York Times provided a quick news analysis under the headline “Biden’s Barbed Remark About Putin: A Slip or a Veiled Threat?” The piece, by seasoned establishment reporters David Sanger and Michael Shear, noted that Biden’s off-script close to his speech came with “his cadence slowing for emphasis.” And they added: “On its face, he appeared to be calling for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to be ousted for his brutal invasion of Ukraine.”

Mainstream journalists have avoided putting a fine point on the likelihood that World War III just got closer thanks to Biden’s words, whether or not they were “a slip” or “a veiled threat.” In fact, it might never be possible to know which it was. But that ambiguity underscores that his slip and/or threat was mind-blowingly irresponsible, endangering the survival of humanity on this planet.

Outrage is the appropriate response. And a special onus is on Democrats in Congress, who should be willing to put humanity above party and condemn Biden’s extreme irresponsibility. But prospects for such condemnation look bleak.

Biden’s impromptu nine words underscore that we must not take anything for granted about his rationality. Russia’s murderous war in Ukraine does not give Biden any valid excuse to make a horrendous situation worse. On the contrary, the U.S. government should be determined to promote and pursue negotiations that could end the killing and find long-term compromise solutions. Biden has now made it even more difficult to pursue diplomacy with Putin.

Activists have a special role to play — by emphatically insisting that members of Congress and the Biden administration must focus on finding solutions that will save Ukrainian lives as well as put a stop to the slide toward military escalation and global nuclear annihilation.

To even hint that the U.S. is seeking regime change in Russia — and to leave the world wondering whether the president is slipping or threatening — is a form of imperial insanity in the nuclear era that we must not tolerate.

“I’m addressing the people in the United States,” former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said during an interview on Democracy Now just one day before Biden’s speech in Poland. “How many times have an attempt by the American government to effect regime change anywhere in the world worked out well? Ask the women of Afghanistan. Ask the people of Iraq. How did that liberal imperialism work out for them? Not very well. Do they really propose to try this out with a nuclear power?”

Overall, in recent weeks, President Biden has jettisoned all but the flimsiest pretenses of seeking a diplomatic solution to end the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Instead, his administration keeps ratcheting up the self-righteous rhetoric while moving the world closer to ultimate catastrophe.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State,” published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include “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.

By Norman Solomon

Russia’s war in Ukraine — like the USA’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — should be understood as barbaric mass slaughter. For all their mutual hostility, the Kremlin and the White House are willing to rely on similar precepts: Might makes right. International law is what you extol when you aren’t violating it. And at home, rev up the nationalism to go with the militarism.

While the world desperately needs adherence to a single standard of nonaggression and human rights, some convoluted rationales are always available in a quest to justify the unjustifiable. Ideologies get more twisted than pretzels when some people can’t resist the temptation to choose up sides between rival forces of terrible violence.

In the United States, with elected officials and mass media intensely condemning Russia’s killing spree, the hypocrisy can stick in the craw of people mindful that the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions started massive protracted carnage. But U.S. hypocrisy in no way excuses the murderous rampage of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

At the same time, hopping on a bandwagon of the U.S. government as a force for peace is a fantasy journey. The USA is now in its twenty-first year of crossing borders with missiles and bombers as well as boots on the ground in the name of the “war on terror.” Meanwhile, the United States spends more than 10 times what Russia does for its military.

It’s important to shed light on the U.S. government’s broken promises that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Expanding NATO to Russia’s border was a methodical betrayal of prospects for peaceful cooperation in Europe. What’s more, NATO became a far-flung apparatus for waging war, from Yugoslavia in 1999 to Afghanistan a few years later to Libya in 2011.

The grim history of NATO since the disappearance of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military alliance more than 30 years ago is a saga of slick leaders in business suits bent on facilitating vast quantities of arms sales — not only to longtime NATO members but also to countries in Eastern Europe that gained membership. The U.S. mass media are on a nonstop detour around mentioning, much less illuminating, how NATO’s dedication to avid militarism keeps fattening the profit margins of weapons dealers. By the time this decade began, the combined annual military spending of NATO countries had hit $1 trillion, about 20 times Russia’s.

After Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, denunciations of the attack came from one U.S. antiwar group after another after another that has long opposed NATO’s expansion and war activities. Veterans For Peace issued a cogent statement condemning the invasion while saying that “as veterans we know increased violence only fuels extremism.” The organization said that “the only sane course of action now is a commitment to genuine diplomacy with serious negotiations — without which, conflict could easily spiral out of control to the point of further pushing the world toward nuclear war.”

The statement added that “Veterans For Peace recognizes that this current crisis did not just happen in the last few days, but represents decades of policy decisions and government actions that have only contributed to the building of antagonisms and aggressions between countries.”

While we should be clear and unequivocal that Russia’s war in Ukraine is an ongoing, massive, inexcusable crime against humanity for which the Russian government is solely responsible, we should be under no illusions about the U.S. role in normalizing large-scale invasions while flouting international security. And the geopolitical approach of the U.S. government in Europe has been a precursor to conflict and foreseeable calamities.

Consider a prophetic letter to then-President Bill Clinton that was released 25 years ago, with NATO expansion on the near horizon. Signed by 50 prominent figures in the foreign-policy establishment — including a half-dozen former senators, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and such mainstream luminaries as Susan Eisenhower, Townsend Hoopes, Fred Ikle, Edward Luttwak, Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes, Stansfield Turner and Paul Warnke — the letter makes for chilling reading today. It warned that “the current U.S.-led effort to expand NATO” was “a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability.”

The letter went on to emphasize: “In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement, and galvanize resistance in the Duma to the START II and III treaties. In Europe, NATO expansion will draw a new line of division between the ‘ins’ and the ‘outs,’ foster instability, and ultimately diminish the sense of security of those countries which are not included.”

That such prescient warnings were ignored was not happenstance. The bipartisan juggernaut of militarism headquartered in Washington was not interested in “European stability” or a “sense of security” for all countries in Europe. At the time, in 1997, the most powerful ears were deaf to such concerns at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. And they still are.

While apologists for the governments of Russia or the United States want to focus on some truths to the exclusion of others, the horrific militarism of both countries deserves only opposition. Our real enemy is war.

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State,” published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include “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.

By Norman Solomon

Fifty-nine years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio for a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:

I’ve learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It’s them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side

In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn.

Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war easily become faraway abstractions. “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”

During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions — shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are so easy to ingest and internalize.

On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.

The reverence and adulation gushing from the Capitol and corporate media (including NPR and PBS) toward NATO and its U.S. leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones, we would hear labels like “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.

Glimmers of inconvenient truth have flickered only rarely in mainstream U.S. media outlets, while a bit more likely in Europe. “Biden has said repeatedly that the U.S. is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized — NATO enlargement — there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Financial Times as this week began. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”

As Sachs noted, “Many insist that NATO enlargement is not the real issue for Putin and that he wants to recreate the Russian empire, pure and simple. Everything else, including NATO enlargement, they claim, is a mere distraction. This is utterly mistaken. Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin…. Neither the U.S. nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging no NATO enlargement is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

Whether or not they know much about such history, the USA’s media elites and members of Congress don’t seem to care about it. Red-white-and-blue chauvinism is running wild. Yet there are real diplomatic alternatives to the collision course for war.

Speaking Monday on Democracy Now, Katrina vanden Heuvel — editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert — said that implementing the Minsk accords could be a path toward peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”

Desperately needed is a new European security framework, to demilitarize and defuse conflicts between Russia and U.S. allies. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.

The last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union before it collapsed, Jack Matlock, wrote last week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.”

But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. Less obvious was the realized goal of turning Eastern European nations into customers for vast arms sales.

A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Huge Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin were downcast about the dissolution of the USSR and feared that military sales would keep slumping. But there were some potential big new markets on the horizon.

“One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. There was one minor impediment: the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”

By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997 — “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era” — the expansion was already happening.

As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.”

If you think those weapons transactions were about keeping up with the Russians, you’ve been trusting way too much U.S. corporate media. “As of late 2020,” Cockburn’s book explains, NATO’s collective military spending “had hit $1.03 trillion, or roughly 20 times Russia’s military budget.”

Let’s leave the last words here to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists. “Masters of War.”

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could?

     Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State,” published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include “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.