By Norman Solomon

There's nothing like an illegal and utterly reckless U.S. act of war to illuminate the political character of presidential candidates. In the days since the assassination of Iran’s top military official, two of the highest-polling Democratic contenders have displayed the kind of moral cowardice that got the United States into — and kept it in — horrific wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Eager to hedge their bets, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg have offered merely tactical critiques of President Trump’s decision to kill Qassim Suleimani. In sharp contrast to Elizabeth Warren and especially Bernie Sanders, the gist of the responses from Biden and Buttigieg amounted to criticizing the absence of a game plan for an atrocious game that should never be played in the first place.

Many journalists have noted that only in recent days has foreign policy become prominent in the race for the 2020 nomination. But what remains to be addressed is the confluence of how Biden and Buttigieg approach the roles of the U.S. government in class war at home and military war abroad — both for the benefit of corporate elites.

Let’s be clear: More than 50 years ago, when Martin Luther King Jr. bravely condemned “the madness of militarism,” he was directly challenging those who included the political ancestors of the likes of Buttigieg and Biden — Democratic politicians willing to wink and nod at vast death and destruction, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, equivocating while claiming that the war machinery would operate better in their hands.

On war-related issues, Buttigieg’s rhetorical mix offers something for just about anyone. “Mr. Buttigieg is campaigning as an antiwar veteran,” the New York Times oddly reported in a Jan. 5 news article. Yet on the same day, during a CNN interview about the drone killing, Buttigieg functioned more as a war enabler than opponent.

In response to anchor Jake Tapper’s first question — “Are you saying that President Trump deserves some credit for the strike?” — Buttigieg equivocated: “No, not until we know whether this was a good decision and how this decision was made, and the president has failed to demonstrate that.” His elaborations were littered with statements like “we need answers on whether this is part of a meaningful strategy.”

As for Biden, in recent months his shameful war-enabling history has drawn more attention while he continues to lie about it. And — given how hugely profitable endless wars have been for military contractors — Biden’s chronic enabling should be put in a wider context of his longtime service to corporate profiteering on a massive scale.

Biden has no interest in discussing his actual five-decade history of serving corporate power, which can only discredit the renewed “Lunch Bucket Joe” pretenses of his campaign. Meanwhile, as Buttigieg gained in the polls amid a widening flood of donations from Wall Street and other bastions of wealth, he moved away from initial claims of supporting such progressive measures as Medicare for All.

The military-industrial complex, inherently corporate, needs politicians like Biden and Buttigieg. One generation after another, they claim special geopolitical (Biden) or technocratic (Buttigieg) expertise while striving to project warm personas in front of cameras. The equivalents, one might say, of happy-face stickers on corpses.

Such dedicated political services to militarism are also political services to the corporate power of oligarchy.

Political positions on class warfare don’t always run parallel to positions on military warfare. But they have now clearly aligned in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Days ago, Bernie Sanders summed up: “I know that it is rarely the children of the billionaire class who face the agony of reckless foreign policy, it is the children of working families.”

One of the many reasons I’m actively supporting Sanders for president is that (although hardly flawless) his track record on military spending, war and foreign policy is much better than the records of his opponents.

Devastating impacts of nonstop war are all around us in the United States, from deadly federal budget priorities to traumatic effects of normalized violence. And it’s difficult to grasp the magnitude of harm to so many millions of human beings in other countries. Sometimes, while trying to clear away the fog of the USA’s political and media abstractions, I think of people I met in Baghdad and Kabul and Tehran, their lives no less precious than yours or mine.

     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.

By Norman Solomon

In a recent New Yorker profile of Pete Buttigieg, one sentence stands out: “Watch Buttigieg long enough and you notice that he uses abstraction as an escape hatch.” Evasive platitudes are also routine for Joe Biden, the other major Democratic presidential candidate running in what mainstream journalists call “the center lane.”

Jim Hightower has observed that “there’s nothing in the middle of the road except yellow lines and dead armadillos.” Or, we might say, party lines and deadening politics.

Like other so-called “moderate” politicians, Buttigieg and Biden dodge key questions by plunging into foggy rhetoric. They’re incapable of giving a coherent and truthful account of power in the United States because they’re beholden to corporate-aligned donors. Those donors want to hear doubletalk that protects their interests, not clear talk that could threaten them.

“Forty 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,” Forbes reported last month.

The magazine added: “More than one third of Buttigieg’s wealthy benefactors got rich in finance and investments. That group includes seven who built their fortunes from hedge funds, including Bill Ackman, Philippe Laffont and Seth Klarman.”

Mega-money manipulators are bullish on Buttigieg. “The financial sector, blamed by progressives for spawning the 2008 economic collapse, is lining up behind Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign,” the Associated Press explained in late December. He “has collected more campaign cash from donors and political action committees tied to the financial, insurance and real estate sector than any other White House hopeful, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.”

AP added: “One top Wall Street law firm could pose particular challenges for Buttigieg with progressives. He’s the top recipient of cash this cycle from Sullivan & Cromwell, which has worked on some of the biggest corporate mergers in recent history, including Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner and Bayer’s merger with Monsanto. The firm also represented some of the largest financial institutions that received federal bailout money.”

Buttigieg is a very new darling of corporate America compared to his main centrist rival. Biden — who has a decades-long record of scarcely legal corruption while serving corporate interests in Washington — is also heavily reliant on wealthy donors and foggy abstractions.

But the basic contradiction — between serving enemies of working people and claiming to be a champion of working people — is an increasingly difficult circle to square. And a barrier to credibility with many voters.

“The mainstream Democratic storyline of victims without victimizers lacks both plausibility and passion,” said the report Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis, released in October 2017. “The idea that the Democrats can somehow convince Wall Street to work on behalf of Main Street through mild chiding, rather than acting as Main Street’s champion against the wealthy, no longer resonates.”

That report (written by a task force I was part of) anticipated that a continuing upsurge in populism “will be filled by some political force or other — either the cruel and demagogic forces of the far right and its billionaire backers, or a racially diverse and morally robust progressive vision that offers people a clear alternative to the ideological rot of Trumpism.”

Most of the Democrats running for president don’t want to acknowledge the actual power wielded by economic elites. Biden is the most experienced at blowing smoke to obscure those elite forces, as if no fundamental conflicts of interest exist between billionaires and the huge numbers of people badly harmed by extreme income inequality.

That was a subtext when Biden declared in May 2018: “I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we're in trouble. . . The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.” (At last count, 44 billionaires and their spouses have donated to Biden’s campaign.)

Abstractions and evasions of the sort practiced daily by Buttigieg and Biden amount to papering over class conflicts. In sharp contrast, Elizabeth Warren and even more so Bernie Sanders (whom I actively support) are willing to name the names of corporations and billionaires growing even wealthier in ways that undermine the lives of most Americans.

It’s understandable that corporate-backed candidates don’t want to be cornered by questions that touch on realities of political and economic power. They’d much rather take evasive action than be candid. It’s not enticing to name victimizers when they’re funding your campaign.

     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."

By Norman Solomon

A central premise of conventional media wisdom has collapsed. On Thursday, both the New York Times and Politico published major articles reporting that Bernie Sanders really could win the Democratic presidential nomination. Such acknowledgments will add to the momentum of the Bernie 2020 campaign as the new year begins — but they foreshadow a massive escalation of anti-Sanders misinformation and invective.

Throughout 2019, corporate media routinely asserted that the Sanders campaign had little chance of winning the nomination. As is so often the case, journalists were echoing each other more than paying attention to grassroots realities. But now, polling numbers and other indicators on the ground are finally sparking very different headlines from the media establishment.

From the Times: “Why Bernie Sanders Is Tough to Beat.” From Politico: “Democratic Insiders: Bernie Could Win the Nomination.”

Those stories, and others likely to follow in copycat news outlets, will heighten the energies of Sanders supporters and draw in many wavering voters. But the shift in media narratives about the Bernie campaign’s chances will surely boost the decibels of alarm bells in elite circles where dousing the fires of progressive populism is a top priority.

For corporate Democrats and their profuse media allies, the approach of disparaging and minimizing Bernie Sanders in 2019 didn’t work. In 2020, the next step will be to trash him with a vast array of full-bore attacks.

Along the way, the corporate media will occasionally give voice to some Sanders defenders and supporters. A few establishment Democrats will decide to make nice with him early in the year. But the overwhelming bulk of Sanders media coverage — synced up with the likes of such prominent corporate flunkies as Rahm Emanuel and Neera Tanden as well as Wall Street Democrats accustomed to ruling the roost in the party — will range from condescending to savage.

When the Bernie campaign wasn’t being ignored by corporate media during 2019, innuendos and mud often flew in his direction. But we ain’t seen nothing yet.

With so much at stake — including the presidency and the top leadership of the Democratic Party — no holds will be barred. For the forces of corporate greed and the military-industrial complex, it’ll be all-out propaganda war on the Bernie campaign.

While reasons for pessimism are abundant, so are ample reasons to understand that a Sanders presidency is a real possibility. The last places we should look for political realism are corporate media outlets that distort options and encourage passivity.

Bernie is fond of quoting a statement from Nelson Mandela: “It always seems impossible until it is done.”

From the grassroots, as 2020 gets underway, the solution should be clear: All left hands on deck.

     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."

By Norman Solomon

For the United States, oligarchy is the elephant — and donkey — in the room. Only one candidate for president is willing to name it.

Out of nearly 25,000 words spoken during the Democratic debate last Thursday night, the word “oligarchy” was heard once. “We are living in a nation increasingly becoming an oligarchy,” Bernie Sanders said, “where you have a handful of billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and politicians.”

Sanders gets so much flak from corporate media because his campaign is upsetting the dominant apple cart. He relentlessly exposes a basic contradiction: A society ruled by an oligarchy — defined as “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes” — can’t really be a democracy.

The super-wealthy individuals and huge corporations that own the biggest U.S. media outlets don’t want actual democracy. It would curb their profits and their power.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post editorialized that the agendas of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “probably would fail at the polls and, if not, would carry extreme risks if they tried to implement them.” The editorial went on to praise “the relative moderates in the race” — Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar — for “offering a more positive future.”

But “a more positive future” for whom? Those “moderates” are certainly offering a more positive future for the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who usually ranks as the richest person in the world. He wants to acquire even more extreme personal wealth beyond his current $108 billion.

The Washington Post‘s routinely negative treatment of Sanders, which became notorious during his 2016 presidential run, remains symptomatic of what afflicts mass-media coverage of his current campaign — from editorial pages and front pages to commercial TV news and “public” outlets like the “PBS NewsHour” and NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.”

The essence of a propaganda system is repetition. To be effective, it doesn’t require complete uniformity — only dominant messaging, worldviews and assumptions.

Prevailing in news media’s political content is the central, tacit assumption that oligarchy isn’t a reality in the United States. So, there’s scant interest in the fact that the richest three people in the USA “now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined.” As for the damaging impacts on democracy, they get less attention than Melania Trump’s wardrobe.

Now, as Sanders surges in Iowa and elsewhere, there’s a renewed pattern of mass-media outlets notably ignoring or denigrating his campaign’s progress. Like many other Sanders supporters, I find that disgusting yet not surprising.

In fortresses of high finance and vast opulence — with no ceiling on the often-pathological quests for ever-greater wealth — defenders of oligarchy see democratic potential as an ominous weapon in the hands of advancing hordes. Media outlets provide a wide (and shallow) moat.

For mass media owned by oligarchs and their corporate entities, affinity with the “moderate” orientations of Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar is clear. Any one of them would be welcomed by corporate elites as protection against what they see as a hazardous upsurge of progressive populism.

While Buttigieg has emerged as a sharp corporate tool for the maintenance of oligarchy, Joe Biden is an old hand at such tasks. Meanwhile, ready to preempt the politician-intermediaries for plutocracy, Michael Bloomberg is offering a blunt instrument for direct wealthy rule. Estimated to be the eighth-richest person in the United States, he was urged to run for president this year by Bezos.

During the next few months, Bloomberg will continue to use his massive class-war chest to fund an advertising onslaught of unprecedented size. In just weeks, he has spent upwards of $80 million on TV ads, dwarfing all such spending by his opponents combined. And, with little fanfare, he has already hired upwards of 200 paid staffers, who’ll be deployed in 21 states.

If Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar or Bloomberg win the Democratic presidential nomination, that would be a triumph for oligarchy in the midst of rising grassroots opposition.

Right now, two corporate Democrats are the leading contenders to maintain corrupted business-as-usual at the top of the party. As the executive director of Our Revolution, Joseph Geevarghese, aptly put it days ago, “Almost every problem facing our country — from runaway greed on Wall Street, to high prescription drug prices, to locking kids in private detention facilities, to our failure to act against the climate crisis — can be traced back to the influence of the kind of donors fueling Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden’s campaigns for president.”

While uttering standard platitudes along the lines of making the rich and corporations “pay their fair share,” you won’t hear Buttigieg or Biden use the word “oligarchy.” That’s because, to serve the oligarchy, they must pretend it doesn’t exist.

     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."

By Norman Solomon

We’re now seven weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, the first voting in the Democratic presidential race. After that, frontloaded primaries might decide the nominee by late spring. For progressives torn between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — or fervently committed to one of them — choices on how to approach the next few months could change the course of history.

As a kindred activist put it to me when we crossed paths last weekend, “Bernie speaks our language” — a shorthand way of saying that the Bernie 2020 campaign is a fight for a truly transformative and humanistic future. “Not me. Us.”

I actively support Bernie because his voice is ours for genuine democracy and social justice. Hearing just a few minutes from a recent Bernie speech is a reminder of just how profoundly that is true.

At the same time, many thoughtful and well-informed progressives are supporting Warren. While I’m wary of the conventional foreign-policy outlook that she laid out early this year and reaffirmed days ago, there’s much to applaud in Warren’s record and proposals on economic and social issues. Notwithstanding her declaration of being “a capitalist to my bones,” Warren has earned corporate America’s hostility.

Overall, Wall Street despises Elizabeth Warren. With some exceptions, the titans of “the Street” are highly averse to her regulatory agenda, fear her plans such as a wealth tax, and definitely don’t want her to become president.

What’s more, the power structure of top corporate Democrats is out to crush the Warren campaign as well as the Sanders campaign. Not coincidentally, corporate media attacks rose along with Warren’s poll numbers. The corporate system’s antipathy toward her isn’t as high as it is toward Sanders, but it’s pretty damn high.

Meanwhile, powerful status-quo interests are eager to see acrimony develop between Sanders and Warren forces.

“The year began with a weak-looking Sen. Elizabeth Warren posing no threat to Sanders; by summer, Warren had jumped past Sanders and the rest of the field,” the Washington Post’s David Weigel noted days ago. “Now, with Warren’s momentum fading, the two Democrats most broadly acceptable to the left have been splitting endorsements and capturing separate swaths of the electorate.”

Let’s face it. Supporters of Sanders and Warren will probably need each other if one of them is going to win the nomination.

Scenarios for Sanders or Warren to ultimately go it alone at the mid-July national convention in Milwaukee are unlikely. Much more probable is a necessity of teaming up to combine the leverage of their delegates.

In the shorter term, given the structure and rules of the Iowa caucuses coming up on February 3, tacit teamwork between Sanders and Warren supporters would benefit both while undermining the corporate Democrats in contention.

The approach taken so far by Sanders and Warren on the campaign trail suggests how their supporters ought to proceed in relation to each other — illuminating real and important differences without rancor, while teaming up to fend off policy attacks from corporate-backed opponents.

What continues to be in effect between Sanders and Warren — and what is needed among their supporters on the ground — is the equivalent of a nonaggression pact. At the same time, we should be willing to draw clear distinctions between the policy positions of those two candidates.

The need is for supporters to openly explain reasons for preferring Warren or Sanders while avoiding the start of a mutual demolition derby. In the process of strengthening progressive forces, it’s vital to defeat corporate Democrats, before proceeding to defeat Donald Trump.

“Electability” can be debated endlessly, but anyone claiming total certainty as to which candidate would be more likely to beat Trump is overreaching. At the same time, the need for a Sanders-Warren united front should be clear — as clear as the imperative of rolling back the monstrous right-wing power that has controlled the presidency during the last three years.

     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."

By Norman Solomon

From three different vectors, the oligarchy is on the march to capture the Democratic presidential nomination. Pete Buttigieg has made big gains. A timeworn ally of corporate power, Joe Biden, is on a campaign for his last hurrah. And Michael Bloomberg is swooping down from plutocratic heights.

Those three men are a team of rivals — each fiercely competitive for an individual triumph, yet arrayed against common ideological foes named Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

The obvious differences between Buttigieg, Biden and Bloomberg are apt to distract from their underlying political similarities. Fundamentally, they’re all aligned with the nation’s economic power structure — two as corporate servants, one as a corporate master.

For Buttigieg, the gaps between current rhetoric and career realities are now gaping. On Tuesday, hours after the collapse of the “nondisclosure agreement” that had concealed key information about his work for McKinsey & Company, the New York Times concluded that “the most politically troubling element of his client list” might be what he did a dozen years ago for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan — “a health care firm that at the time was in the process of reducing its work force.”

The newspaper reported that “his work appeared to come at about the same time the insurer announced that it would cut up to 1,000 jobs — or nearly 10 percent of its work force — and request rate increases.”

This year, Buttigieg’s vaguely progressive rhetoric has become more and more unreliable, most notably with his U-turn away from supporting Medicare for All. Meanwhile, wealthy donors have flocked to him. Forbes reports that 39 billionaires have donated to the Buttigieg campaign, thus providing ultra-elite seals of approval. (Meanwhile, Biden has 44 billionaire donors and Warren has six. Forbes couldn’t find any billionaires who’ve donated to Sanders; he did receive one contribution from a billionaire’s spouse.)

Not surprisingly, the political orientations of the leading candidates match up with the spread of average donations. The latest figures reflect candidates’ proximity to the class interests of donors, with wealthier ones naturally tending to give more sizable amounts. Nearly two-thirds (64.9 percent) of Biden’s donations were upwards of $200 each, while such donations accounted for a bit more than half (52.5 percent) of the contributions to Buttigieg. Compare those numbers to 29.6 percent for Elizabeth Warren and 24.9 percent for Bernie Sanders.

Buttigieg’s affinity for corporate Democrats — and how it tracks with his donor base — should get a lot more critical scrutiny. For example, Washington Post reporter David Weigel tweeted in early November: “Asked Buttigieg if he agreed w Pelosi that PAYGO should stay in place if a Dem wins. ‘We might want to look at a modification to the rules, but the philosophical premise, I think, does need to be there… we've got to be able to balance the revenue of what we're proposing.’”

But the entire “philosophical premise” of PAYGO amounts to a straightjacket for constraining progressive options. To support it is to endorse the ongoing grip of corporate power on the Democratic Party. As Buttigieg surely knows, PAYGO — requiring budget cuts to offset any spending increases — is a beloved cause for the farthest-right congressional Democrats. The 26 House members of the corporatist Blue Dog Coalition continue to be enthralled with PAYGO.

As for Joe Biden, since the launch of his campaign almost eight months ago, progressives have increasingly learned that his five-decade political record is filled with one repugnant aspect after another after another after another. Any support for him from progressives in the primaries and caucuses next year will likely come from low-information voters.

In sharp contrast to Sanders and Warren, who refuse to do high-dollar fundraising events, Biden routinely speaks at private gatherings where wealthy admirers donate large sums. His campaign outreach consists largely of making beelines to audiences of extraordinarily rich people around the country– as if to underscore his declaration in May 2018 that “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we're in trouble… The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

One of those folks who presumably isn’t a “bad guy” is Bloomberg, who — with an estimated net worth of $54 billion — has chosen to pursue a presidential quest by spending an astronomical amount of money on advertisements. Writing for The Nation magazine this week, Jeet Heer aptly noted that Bloomberg “is utterly devoid of charisma, has no real organic base in the Democratic Party, and is a viable candidate only because he’s filthy rich and is willing to inundate the race by opening up his nearly limitless money pit.”

More powerfully than any words, Bloomberg’s brandishing of vast amounts of ad dollars is conveying his belief that enormous wealth is an entitlement to rule. The former New York mayor’s campaign is now an extreme effort to buy the presidency. Yet what he’s doing tracks with more standard assumptions about the legitimacy of allowing very rich people to dominate the political process.

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By Norman Solomon

On Thursday afternoon, the Washington Post sent out a news alert headlined “John Kerry Endorses Biden in 2020 Race, Saying He Has the Character and Experience to Beat Trump, Confront the Nation’s Challenges.” Meanwhile, in Iowa, Joe Biden was also touting his experience. “Look,” Biden said as he angrily lectured an 83-year-old farmer at a campaign stop, “the reason I’m running is because I’ve been around a long time and I know more than most people know, and I can get things done.”

But Kerry and Biden don’t want to acknowledge a historic tie that binds them: Both men were important supporters of the Iraq war, voting for the invasion on the Senate floor and continuing to back the war after it began. Over the years, political winds have shifted — and Biden, like Kerry, has methodically lied about his support for that horrendous war.

The spectacle of Kerry praising Biden as a seasoned leader amounts to one supporter of the Iraq catastrophe attesting to the character and experience of another supporter of the same catastrophe.

The FactCheck.org project at the Annenberg Public Policy Center has pointed out: “Kerry agreed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and should be overthrown, and defended his war authorization vote more than once — including saying in a May 2003 debate that Bush made the ‘right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein.’ . . . Kerry also told reporters in August 2004 that he would have voted for the resolution even if he had known that the U.S. couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction.”

As for Biden, he can’t stop lying about his major role in pushing the war authorization through the Senate five months before the March 2003 invasion. During his current presidential campaign, more than 16 years after the invasion, Biden has continued efforts to conceal his pro-war role while refusing to admit that he was instrumental in making possible the massive carnage and devastation in Iraq.

Three months ago, during a debate on ABC, Biden claimed that he voted for the war resolution so it would be possible to get U.N. weapons inspectors into Iraq — saying that he wanted “to allow inspectors to go in to determine whether or not anything was being done with chemical weapons or nuclear weapons.” But that’s totally backwards.

It was big news when the Iraqi government announced on September 16, 2002 — with a letter hand-delivered to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan — that it would allow the U.N. weapons inspectors back in “without conditions.” The announcement was a full 25 days before Biden joined with virtually every Republican and most Democratic senators voting to approve the Iraq war resolution.

That resolution on October 11 couldn’t rationally be viewed as a tool for leverage so that the Iraqi government would (in Biden’s words) "allow inspectors to go in.” Several weeks earlier, the Iraqi government had already agreed to allow inspectors to go in.

Biden keeps trying to wriggle out of culpability for the Iraq war. But he won’t be able to elude scrutiny so easily. In a mid-October debate, when Biden boasted that he has a record of getting things done, Bernie Sanders (who I actively support) made this response: "Joe, you talked about working with Republicans and getting things done. But you know what you also got done? And I say this as a good friend. You got the disastrous war in Iraq done.”

Indeed, Biden — as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — presided over one-sided hearings that greased the war-machine wheels to carry the war resolution forward. He was the single most pivotal Senate Democrat for getting the Iraq invasion done. While sometimes grumbling about President George W. Bush’s diplomatic performance along the way, Biden backed the invasion with enthusiasm.

Now, dazzled by Kerry’s endorsement of Biden, mainstream news outlets are calling it a major boost. Media hype is predictable as Kerry teams up with Biden on the campaign trail.

“The Kerry endorsement is among Mr. Biden’s most significant to date,” the New York Times reports. “His support provides Mr. Biden the backing of the Democratic Party’s 2004 presidential nominee and a past winner of the Iowa caucuses.” Kerry praised Biden to the skies, declaring that “I believe Joe Biden is the president our country desperately needs right now, not because I’ve known Joe so long, but because I know Joe so well.”

This year, many progressives have become accustomed to rolling their eyes at the mention of Biden’s name. A facile assumption is that his campaign will self-destruct. But that may be wishful thinking.

The former vice president has powerful backers in corporate media, wealthy circles and the Democratic Party establishment. Deceitful and hidebound as he is, Joe Biden stands a good chance of becoming the party’s nominee — unless his actual record, including support for the Iraq war, catches up with him.

     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."

By Norman Solomon

Anyone who’s been paying attention should get the picture by now. Overall, in subtle and sledgehammer ways, the mass media of the United States — owned and sponsored by corporate giants — are in the midst of a siege against the two progressive Democratic candidates who have a real chance to be elected president in 2020.

Some of the prevalent media bias has taken the form of protracted swoons for numerous “center lane” opponents of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The recent entry of Michael Bloomberg has further jammed that lane, adding a plutocrat “worth” upwards of $50 billion to a bevy of corporate politicians.

The mainline media are generally quite warm toward so-called “moderates,” without bothering to question what’s so moderate about such positions as bowing to corporate plunder, backing rampant militarism and refusing to seriously confront the climate emergency.

Critical reporting on debate performances and campaign operations has certainly been common. But the core of the “moderate” agenda routinely gets affirmation from elite journalists who told us in no uncertain terms four years ago that Hillary Clinton was obviously the nominee who could defeat Donald Trump.

This year, Sanders has taken most of the flak from reporters and pundits (often virtually indistinguishable), serving as a kind of “heat shield” for Warren. But as Warren gained ground in polling this fall, the attacks on her escalated — to the point that she now has a corporate media bullseye on her political back.

The disconnect between voters and corporate media is often huge. Meanwhile, with fly-on-the-wall pretenses, media outlets that have powerfully distorted proposals like Medicare for All are now reporting (with thinly veiled satisfaction) that voters are cool to those proposals.

The Washington Post, owned by the world’s richest person Jeff Bezos, has routinely spun Medicare for All as some sort of government takeover. In a prominent Nov. 30 news story that largely attributed Warren’s recent dip in polls to her positioning on healthcare, the Post matter-of-factly — and falsely — referred to Medicare for All as “government-run healthcare” and “a government-run health plan.”

Such pervasive mass-media reporting smoothed the way for deceptions that have elevated Pete Buttigieg in polls during recent weeks with his deceptive “Medicare for all who want it” slogan. That rhetoric springboards from the false premises that Medicare for All would deprive people of meaningful choice and would somehow reduce coverage.

In late September, with scant media scrutiny, Buttigieg launched an ad campaign against Medicare for All that has continued. Using 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 top-quality Medicare for everyone would offer.

Mainstream media outlets are ill-positioned to refute such distortions since they’re routinely purveying such distortions themselves. Warren’s backtracking step on Medicare for All in mid-November was a tribute to media pressure in tandem with attacks from centrist opponents.

The idea of implementing some form of a substantial “wealth tax” has also been denigrated by many corporate-employed journalists. Countless pundits and political beat reporters have warned that proposals like a wealth tax, from Warren and Sanders, risk dragging Democrats down with voters. The truth is that such proposals are unpopular with the punditocracy and the extremely wealthy — while it’s a very different matter for most voters, who strongly favor a wealth tax.

On the same day this fall, the New York Times and the Washington Post published stories on Democratic elites’ “anxiety” about the presidential election. The Post wrote that Democrats “fret” Warren and Sanders “are too liberal to win a general election.” (With disdain, the article made a matter-of-fact reference to “the push for liberal purity.”) The Times similarly wrote of “persistent questions about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s viability in the general election.” Contrary voices were absent in both news stories.

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By Norman Solomon

Last week, the Democratic leadership put an extension of the Patriot Act into a “continuing resolution” that averted a government shutdown. More than 95 percent of the Democrats in the House went along with it by voting for the resolution. Both co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan, voted yes. So did all 11 of the CPC’s vice chairs.

It didn’t have to be that way. House progressives could have thrown a monkey wrench into the Orwellian machinery. Instead, the cave-in was another bow to normalizing the U.S. government’s mass surveillance powers.

“There’s no other way to spin this,” a progressive staffer on Capitol Hill told The New Republic. “This was a major capitulation. The Progressive Caucus has touted itself as an organization that can wield power and leverage the votes of its 90 members. And they didn’t lift a finger. Democratic leadership rammed this down their throats.”

A gag reflex was needed from progressive lawmakers, who should have put up a fight rather than swallow rationales for going along with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s maneuver. With the Fourth Amendment on life support, basic civil liberties were at stake.

There were opportunities to push back — if CPC leaders had moved to throw down a gauntlet.

"You could go through and name any strategy for me, and I would tell you why it would fail,” Jayapal said. But if you don't put up a fight, you're sure to fail. And showing some strength on a matter of principle can build momentum while marshalling grassroots support in the process.

With a show of resolve, just a few dozen Democrats could have blocked the resolution. Instead, it passed the House on Nov. 19 by a 231-192 margin, thus extending the Patriot Act for three months instead of letting it expire.

“No” votes came from all four members of The Squad — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib.

The list of “yes” votes from House members with progressive reputations was stunningly long. Here are just a dozen: Karen Bass, Raul Grijalva, Ro Khanna, Barbara Lee, Zoe Lofgren, Jim McGovern, Jerrold Nadler, Chellie Pingree, Jamie Raskin, Jan Schakowsky, Maxine Waters and Peter Welch.

One factor: Even the best progressives in the House spend a lot more time with congressional colleagues and leaders than they do with constituents. Call it an occupational hazard. Peer pressure and conformity tend to be cumulative. The power of the Democratic leadership is quite tangible and often stern, whereas the power of constituents is routinely diffuse and unrealized.

To the extent that progressives at the grassroots don’t effectively pressure members of Congress, party authorities like Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer maintain a tremendous advantage. To the extent that avoiding conflict with the Democratic leadership is more important than standing up for principles, even the best progressive incumbents succumb to the Capitol bubble. Given the strength of that bubble, it can only be burst with methodical intervention from the grassroots.

Congressman Pocan was on target when he commented a year ago: “People in D.C. think we’re the center of the universe, but we’re not — the people who elect us are the center of the universe. It’s when you have that kind of activism in the districts, you’re really going to be impactful.”

In the case of the Patriot Act-laden continuing resolution, which President Trump signed into law shortly after passage, the contrasts between avowed commitments and conformist acquiescence were striking among many progressive luminaries in the House. A few examples:

**  In his first House race, when he unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Tom Lantos in 2004, now-Congressman Khanna was emphatic in his opposition to the Patriot Act. He declared: “We have a chance to do something absolutely extraordinary in this election: to hold a congressman responsible based on his voting record. Mr. Lantos has had a distinguished career in public service, but his votes for the war and the Patriot Act don’t represent the will of this district.”

**  Congresswoman Lee has been denouncing the Patriot Act for the better part of two decades, as when in 2005 she issued a news release headlined “Barbara Lee Opposes Extension of the Patriot Act, Blasts ‘Big Brother Attack.’”

**  In 2015, Rep. Lofgren minced no words in opposing even a brief Patriot Act extension. She signed a letter with five colleagues that stated: “We will not vote to reauthorize this program, even for a short period of time.”

**  In autumn 2016, just before she won election to Congress for the first time, Jayapal told an interviewer “why I stepped up to fight back against the Bush administration, against the Patriot Act, against civil-liberties violations. It was very, very personal, in a way, but it was also very political. It was not just about me. It was, ‘Wait a second. We as a country cannot undermine the deepest values that make us who we are.’”

It’s telling that Khanna, Lee, Lofgren and Jayapal — and so many other self-identified progressives in the House — chose to take the path of least resistance last week when faced with a choice of whether to buck their party’s leadership or facilitate the extension of the Patriot Act that they have long opposed. Heightening the sad irony is the fact that the newly reauthorized provisions have enabled far more aggressive surveillance than was envisioned when the Patriot Act first passed — at which time Lee, McGovern, Nadler, Schakowsky, Waters and others who just voted for the reauthorization felt compelled to oppose it.

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By Norman Solomon

Last week, I attended Joe Biden’s first rally in California since he launched his presidential campaign more than six months ago.

It was revealing.

The Biden for President campaign had been using social media and its email list in the Los Angeles area to urge attendance. Under sunny skies, near abundant free parking, the outdoor rally on the campus of LA’s Trade-Technical College offered a chance to hear the man widely heralded as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

No more than 500 people showed up.

Admittedly, as an active Bernie Sanders supporter, I didn’t have high expectations. But what struck me about the rally went beyond the dismal turnout and the stale rhetoric from a corporate Democrat posing as a champion of working people.

Biden’s slow decline in polls is empirical, but what ails his campaign — as reflected in that California kickoff rally — is almost ineffable. Biden is a back-to-the-future product who often seems clueless about the present. In view of so many deep and widespread concerns, from income inequality to healthcare disparities to the climate emergency, his talking points are simply beside the point.

The Biden base has two main components: the corporate media outlets that routinely protect him from critical scrutiny, and the rich people who routinely infuse his lackluster campaign with cash. When and where he isn’t getting fuel from either component of that base, the campaign sputters.

Contrasts with the large and passionate rallies for Sanders and Elizabeth Warren could hardly be greater. Not coincidentally, those two candidates are glad to rely on large numbers of small donations, while Biden relies on small numbers of large donations.

Biden is so afraid of Democratic activists that — for the second time this year — he declined an invitation to join other candidates in speaking to a convention of the California Democratic Party. The latest convention heard from eight presidential candidates on Nov. 16, two days after Biden’s kickoff rally, no more than an hour’s drive away in Long Beach.

While careful to stay away from engaged grassroots Democrats, Biden made a beeline for wealthy donors immediately after his sparsely attended rally. First, he hurried over to a reception in West Los Angeles (tickets up to $1,000 each). Later that evening, a local TV station noted, Biden’s fundraising schedule took him to “the Pacific Palisades home of Rick Lynch, the owner of the entertainment marketing firm BLT Communications, and music video producer Lanette Phillips,” with tickets “priced at $500 and $2,800, the maximum individual contribution during the primary campaign.”

The Los Angeles Times reported that Biden “previously made eight fundraising trips to California since entering the race in late April, visiting at least once a month. He has headlined 21 fundraisers in the state, raising money at the homes of Hollywood executives, Silicon Valley tech leaders and other affluent Democrats.”

Among some who roll their eyes about Biden, a kind of conventional wisdom now says that he is sure to fade from contention. But — in the absence of comparable polling numbers from the numerous other corporate candidates in the race — the Biden campaign is likely to be the best bet for deep-pocketed political investors seeking to prevent the nomination of Sanders or Warren.

Biden’s decision last month to greenlight super PACs on his behalf has underscored just how eager he is to bankroll his AstroTurf campaign against grassroots progressives no matter what. As he said during an interview in January 2018, “you shouldn’t accept any money from a super PAC, because people can’t possibly trust you.” But ultimately, Biden doesn’t need people’s trust. He needs their acquiescence.

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