[This article was originally published by Truthdig.]

By Norman Solomon

Oligarchy prevents democracy. That explains the gist of why the United States became more undemocratic in 2017.

With vast income inequality and corporate power, this country’s oligarchy keeps consolidating itself — largely hidden in plain sight — normalized and embossed on the wallpaper of mass-media echo chambers. Several decades of ominous trendlines have brought us to dire tipping points.

“In the American republic the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us,” historian Walter Karp wrote. “By their subjugation of the press, the political powers in America have conferred on themselves the greatest of political blessings — Gyges’ ring of invisibility.” Those words appeared in 1989.

Nearly 30 years later, the power of billionaires, huge banks and Wall Street over U.S. politics is far more dominant, while a propaganda fog diverts attention from their antidemocratic leverage. An array of news media (including big “public” outlets like NPR) and corporate politicians, unwilling to acknowledge let alone challenge the reality of an oligarchy in the United States, love to point accusatory fingers elsewhere.

Days before the end of 2017, I googled the phrase “American oligarchs” and found that it appeared scarcely one-tenth as often as “Russian oligarchs.” Yet the gravest injuries and threats to democracy in the USA are overwhelmingly coming from massively capitalized individuals and corporations at the top of the U.S. power structure.

Oligarchs like Sheldon Adelson, Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, David Koch, Robert Mercer and Rupert Murdoch are wielding enormous power at many levels of the political economy and social zeitgeist, while corporate America functions with expanding latitude and increasing impunity. The extreme concentrations of wealth and economic power are extreme concentrations of political power.

“The fact of oligarchy” that Walter Karp cited at the end of the 1980s now looms larger than ever. In the next few years, reversing the catastrophic momentum will require finding ways to defeat the partisan right arm of oligarchic forces. Noam Chomsky is correct when he calls the present-day Republican Party “the most dangerous organization in world history.”

Fighting the GOP right is only part of the imperative. We need an ongoing and escalating grassroots challenge to the national leadership of the Democratic Party, which remains aligned with Wall Street and the warfare state. The tasks ahead involve strengthening progressive populist movements to gain power inside and outside of electoral arenas.

In 2018, whether the races are for U.S. House and Senate seats or for state offices, the path ahead will require fighting for progressive candidates in Democratic primaries and then fighting to defeat Republicans in general elections with Democratic nominees. There will simply be no other way to wrest majority control of Congress away from the Republican Party in the November 2018 election.

The chair of the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus, former union organizer Karen Bernal, has a long history of working inside and outside the party. As the author of a section of “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis” (produced by a task force that I was also part of), she wrote: “Social movements cannot be understood as tools to get Democrats elected. The ebb and flow of social movements offer a rising tide in their own right that along the way can lift Democratic Party candidates — if the party is able to embrace the broad popular sentiment that the movements embody.”

The report added: “The Democratic Party is badly positioned to present itself as a foe of the powerful forces causing widespread economic distress for working people, the poor and ‘near poor,’ the elderly, millennials, people of color — in short, the party’s purported base. Weakness of messaging is directly related to the comfort that corporate power enjoys not only in legislative halls across the nation but also within the party itself. Such corporate dominance prevents the party from truthfully projecting itself as an ally of the working class.” That must change.

While we see all too clearly how a lack of democracy can — and does — coexist with elections, it is inconceivable that we could have true democracy without elections. They’ll be crucial for advancing a progressive agenda to end the undemocratic power of economic elites.

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[This article was originally published by Truthdig.]

By Norman Solomon

He was one of the most acclaimed—and ultimately destructive—liberal icons in American history. Four decades after his death, Democratic politicians rarely mention his name. Yet Hubert H. Humphrey haunts the Democratic Party.

The ghost of HHH is hovering over a party led by people who support endless war abroad while claiming to be champions of humane policies at home.

Fifty years ago, Humphrey was a major cog in the U.S. war machine as it inflicted mass carnage in Vietnam.

Today, he’s a prototype for conformist Democratic politicians who go along to get along with the warfare state.

“I did not become vice president with Lyndon Johnson to cause him trouble,” Humphrey said in 1965, shortly after reaching the nation’s second-highest office. Expediency and party unity were top priorities. Decency was gone. And escalation of the war in Vietnam went on … and on … and on.

Like countless Democratic officeholders since then, Humphrey relied on his image to induce the party faithful to cut him some slack. After all, he was known to be a real good guy.

Of course, Humphrey tried to coast on his reputation. He had spoken out for civil rights before it was popular, while exuding an avuncular devotion to progressive social change. From the time of his stirring speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention— telling the party to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” infuriating Dixiecrats in the process—Hubert Humphrey seemed to personify the virtues of American liberalism.

HHH was a beacon of that liberalism in the U.S. Senate from 1949 to 1964. And then, after the landslide triumph of the Johnson-Humphrey ticket, he soon became a beacon of craven ambition. At the start of the 1960s, he’d represented the best of the Democratic Party. Midway through it, he was well on his way to representing the worst.

Humphrey could not, would not get off the war train. His party loyalty and ambition were too great. He had plenty of company in Washington. Year after year, hundreds of Democrats in Congress, along with Republicans, kept selling their souls to aid the slaughter of the Vietnamese people.

Today, in the Senate, there are many Democrats akin to Hubert Humphrey. They can be heard demanding protection of civil rights and calling for more funds on behalf of social programs, safety nets, education and housing. The routine is to tout support for such domestic programs while fueling militarism.

So, in September, when the Senate voted 89-8 for a $700 billion military budget, boosting largesse for the Pentagon by $80 billion, only four Democrats—Kirsten Gillibrand, Patrick Leahy, Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden—joined with independent Bernie Sanders and three Republicans to vote against the measure. Little attention went to the fact that such lavish spending could instead be applied to actually helping people instead of further revving up the United States’ killing engines.

Perpetual war—like its twin, mass surveillance—became normalized as bipartisan during the eight years of the Obama presidency. Even the strongest anti-war voices in Congress among Democrats tended to tamp down the outrage while one of their own was in the Oval Office. Most, in effect, were echoing the Hubert Humphrey of 1965. They were not in the Senate or House under party leader Barack Obama “to cause him trouble.”

Very few congressional Democrats have stood up to the pro-war avalanche from the mass media. The ritual is to go with the kind of hand-wringing statements favored by the likes of The New York Times editorial board (which Adam Johnson deconstructed in a piece for the media watchdog group FAIR, headlined “NYT Laments ‘Forever Wars’ Its Editorials Helped Create”).

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By Norman Solomon

For several months we’ve been hearing a crescendo of outcries that Russia used social media to sway the 2016 presidential election. The claim has now been debunked by an unlikely source — one of the most Russiagate-frenzied big media outlets in the United States, the Washington Post.

Far away from the media echo chamber, the Post news story is headlined: “There’s Still Little Evidence That Russia’s 2016 Social Media Efforts Did Much of Anything.”

The article focuses on “what we actually know about the Russian activity on Facebook and Twitter: It was often modest, heavily dissociated from the campaign itself and minute in the context of election social media efforts.”

In fact, the ballyhooed Facebook ads were notably not targeted to be seen in swing states, the piece by Post journalist Philip Bump reports. As for the much-hyped tweets, they were smaller than miniscule in quantity compared to overall election-related tweets.

But don’t expect the fervent canard about Russian manipulation of social media to fade away anytime soon. At this point, the Russiagate atmosphere has become so toxic — with incessant propaganda, credulity, fear-laced conformity and partisan opportunism — that basic logic often disintegrates.

One of the weirdest aspects of claims that Russia undermined the election with social media has involved explaining away the fact that few of the ads and posts in question actually referred to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump or the election. Instead, we’re told, the wily Russians tried to help Trump by inflaming social divisions such as racial tensions. It’s a rampant storyline (rendered here by NBC News political director Chuck Todd) that’s reminiscent of the common claim during the civil rights movement that “outside agitators,” such as Russian-directed reds, were inflaming and exploiting racial tensions in the South.

From there, it’s just a hop skip and jump to smearing Americans who dissent from U.S. orthodoxies as useful idiots who serve the interests of plotters in the Kremlin.

Of course history is not exactly repeating itself, but it’s rhyming an awful lot. There are real parallels between the McCarthy Era and today’s anti-Russia fervor in the United States.

Despite all the information and analysis that have strengthened progressive understanding in this country during the last few decades, fixating on Russia as culpable for the election of Trump has been widely irresistible. Perhaps that fixation is less upsetting than deeper realization of just how rotten the U.S. corporate system of injustice has become — and how the forces that brought us the horrors of the Trump presidency are distinctly homegrown.

Narratives scapegoating Russia now have an extremely powerful grip on the USA. The consequences include heightened U.S.-Russia tensions that absolutely mean heightened risks of nuclear war — and worsening threats to democratic discourse at home.

The conditioned reflex to label as somehow “pro-Putin” any opinion that overlaps with a Kremlin outlook is becoming part of the muscle memory of much of the American body politic. Countless journalists, pundits, activists and politicians have fallen under the Russiagate spell. They include the liberal primetime lineup on MSNBC, where — as the media watchdog group FAIR pointed out last month — Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes routinely bypass stories of great importance in order “to lead with minutiae from the ongoing Russia investigation that has consumed MSNBC‘s coverage like no other news event since the beginning of the Trump presidency.”

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By Norman Solomon

Movie critics are already hailing “The Post,” directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Millions of people will see the film in early winter. But the real-life political story of Graham and her newspaper is not a narrative that’s headed to the multiplexes. 

“The Post” comes 20 years after Graham’s autobiography Personal History appeared and won enormous praise. Read as a memoir, the book is a poignant account of Graham’s long quest to overcome sexism, learn the newspaper business and gain self-esteem. Read as media history, however, it is deceptive.

"I don’t believe that whom I was or wasn’t friends with interfered with our reporting at any of our publications," Graham wrote. However, Robert Parry — who was a Washington correspondent for Newsweek during the last three years of the 1980s — has shed some light on the shadows of Graham’s reassuring prose. Contrary to the claims in her book, Parry said he witnessed "self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-Newsweek executives and senior national security figures."

Among Parry’s examples: "On one occasion in 1987, I was told that my story about the CIA funneling anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua’s Catholic Church had been watered down because the story needed to be run past Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house guest that weekend. Apparently, there was fear among the top editors that the story as written might cause some consternation." (The 1996 memoir of former CIA Director Robert Gates confirmed that Parry had the story right all along.)

Graham’s book exudes affection for Kissinger as well as Robert McNamara and other luminaries of various administrations who remained her close friends until she died in 2001. To Graham, men like McNamara and Kissinger — the main war architects for Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — were wonderful human beings.

In sharp contrast, Graham devoted dozens of righteous pages to vilifying Post press operators who went on strike in 1975. She stressed the damage done to printing equipment as the walkout began and "the unforgivable acts of violence throughout the strike." It is a profound commentary on her outlook that thuggish deeds by a few of the strikers were "unforgivable" — but men like McNamara and Kissinger were lovable after they oversaw horrendous slaughter in Southeast Asia.

Graham’s autobiography portrays union stalwarts as mostly ruffians or dupes. “Only a handful of [Newspaper Guild] members had gone out for reasons I respected,” she told readers. “One was John Hanrahan, a good reporter and a nice man who came from a longtime labor family and simply couldn’t cross a picket line. He never did come back. Living your beliefs is a rare virtue and greatly to be admired.”

But for Hanrahan (whose Republican parents actually never belonged to a union) the admiration was far from mutual. As he put it, “The Washington Post under Katharine Graham pioneered the union-busting ‘replacement worker’ strategy that Ronald Reagan subsequently used against the air-traffic controllers and that corporate America — in the Caterpillar, Bridgestone/Firestone and other strikes — used to throw thousands of workers out of their jobs in the 1980s and the ’90s.”

The Washington Post deserves credit for publishing sections of the Pentagon Papers immediately after a federal court injunction in mid-June 1971 stopped the New York Times from continuing to print excerpts from the secret document. That’s the high point of the Washington Post’s record in relation to the Vietnam War. The newspaper strongly supported the war for many years.

Yet Graham’s book avoids any semblance of introspection about the Vietnam War and the human costs of the Post’s support for it. Her book recounts that she huddled with a writer in line to take charge of the editorial page in August 1966: “We agreed that the Post ought to work its way out of the very supportive editorial position it had taken, but we couldn’t be precipitous; we had to move away gradually from where we had been.” Vast carnage resulted from such unwillingness to be “precipitous.”

Although widely touted as a feminist parable, Graham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography is notably bereft of solidarity for women without affluence or white skin. They barely seemed to exist in her range of vision; painful realities of class and racial biases were dim, faraway specks. Overall the 625-page book gives short shrift to the unrich and unfamous, whose lives are peripheral to the drama played out by the wealthy publisher’s dazzling peers. The name of Martin Luther King Jr. does not appear in her star-studded, history-drenched book.

Katharine Graham’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers was indeed laudable, helping to expose lies that had greased the wheels of the war machinery with such horrific consequences in Vietnam. But the Washington Post was instrumental in avidly promoting the lies that made the Vietnam War possible in the first place. No amount of rave reviews or Oscar nominations for “The Post” will change that awful truth. 

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

By Norman Solomon

With the Democratic Party’s “Unity Reform Commission” now history, major political forces are entering a new stage of contention over the future of the party. Seven months after the commission’s first meeting — and nine months after Hillary Clinton backer Tom Perez won a close election over Bernie Sanders supporter Keith Ellison to become chair of the Democratic National Committee — the battle lines are coming into focus for next year.

The commission’s final meeting adjourned on Saturday after a few steps toward democratizing the party had won approval — due to the grassroots strength of progressives. But the recommendations from the commission will go to the Rules and Bylaws Committee, which was one of the DNC decision-making bodies that Perez subjected to a purge two months ago. Now, in the words of Jim Zogby (who was removed from the Executive Committee by Perez), “There are virtually no Bernie supporters on the Rules and Bylaws Committee.”

When the latest Unity Reform Commission meeting got underway, Perez talked a lot about unity. But kicking Sanders supporters off of key DNC committees is the ugly underside of an ongoing dual discourse. (Are we supposed to believe Perez’s soothing words or our own eyes?) And party unity behind a failed approach — internally undemocratic and politically hitched to corporate wagons — would hardly be auspicious.

“Emerging sectors of the electorate are compelling the Democratic Party to come to terms with adamant grassroots rejection of economic injustice, institutionalized racism, gender inequality, environmental destruction and corporate domination,” says the recent report “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis” (which I co-authored). The report adds: “Siding with the people who constitute the base isn’t truly possible when party leaders seem to be afraid of them.”

DNC Chairman Perez and allied power brokers keep showing that they’re afraid of the party’s progressive base. No amount of appealing rhetoric changes that reality.

“We pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming to all,” the Democratic National Committee proclaimed anew at the start of this month, touting the commission meeting as “open to the public.” Yet the DNC delayed and obscured information about the meeting, never replying to those who filled out an online RSVP form — thus leaving them in the dark about the times of the meeting. In short, the DNC went out of its way to suppress public turnout rather than facilitate it.

One member of the task force that wrote the Autopsy, Karen Bernal, is the chair of the Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party. After traveling across the country and sitting in the sparse audience during the first day of the Unity Reform Commission meeting, she took the liberty of speaking up as the second day got underway. Bernal provided a firm rebuke of the DNC’s efforts to suppress public attendance.

“For all of the talk about wanting to improve and reform and make this party more transparent, the exact opposite has happened,” Bernal told the commission. (Her intervention, which lasted a little more than two minutes, aired in full on C-SPAN.)

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The Democratic Party in Crisis

The Real News interviewed Norman Solomon in late September about Bernie Sanders' major speech on foreign policy:

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