Primaries offer opportunities. General elections bring imperatives — to defeat right-wing forces — and that's certainly true this time around.

     Now, many progressives are working feverishly to limit the looming disaster. That means pulling together.

     War continues to escalate far away — in our names and with our tax dollars.

     Early this month, on the ninth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Marin Independent Journal published my article War's Grim Echoes at Home.

     About the inspiring new documentary on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, The Most Dangerous Man in America: People who missed the recent broadcast of the film on PBS can watch it online anytime through October 27. 

     Let's find more ways to emulate Dan Ellsberg's activation of conscience.

     At last — after more than 18 months of public forums, hearings, research and countless discussions in many parts of Marin and Sonoma counties — the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay has issued a report. I've learned a lot as co-chair of the commission.

     Release of the Green New Deal report has led to coverage in several newspapers, including an in-depth piece in the Pacific Sun — A Whole New Deal, written by Peter Seidman. 

     A lot of details are now online, including the full text of the commission's report, "Vital Change: Reconsidering Water, Food, Conservation, Healthcare and Commerce."

By Norman Solomon

Take it from David Axelrod. "Almost the entire Republican margin is based on the enthusiasm gap," the president's senior adviser said last week. "And if Democrats come out in the same turnout as Republicans, it's going to be a much different election."

But we don't get to have a different election. After more than 20 months of White House insistence that the only useful role for progressive canaries is to keep singing the president's tune, the electoral coal mine is filled with the political equivalent of carbon monoxide and methane.

Like canaries in mines — providing early warnings — an increasing number of progressives reacted to politically toxic gases. The base was crumbling.

But the purportedly savvy guys at the top of the administration publicly expressed scorn for that base. Instead of viewing its continual erosion as a harbinger of disaster for the midterm election, the dismissive responses included gratuitous verbal swipes from the White House. But public insults have been the least of the problem. The essence has been the policies of governance.

Blaming the messengers — the canaries in the mines — has occurred in sync with intensifying policy commitments that many progressives find repugnant: whether escalation of war in Afghanistan, promulgation of extensive corporate agendas in the guise of "reform," promoting dangerous oxymorons like "clean coal" and "safe nuclear power," or continuing encroachment on precious civil liberties such as habeas corpus.

Now, the midterm Election Day is threatening to bring down a congressional majority that would be replaced by the extreme right-wing entity known as the Republican Party. "The Democrats" may deserve to lose, but the country does not deserve the Republican rule that would take their place on Capitol Hill.

Any progressive who thinks it doesn't matter much whether the House speaker is Nancy Pelosi or John Boehner is seriously mistaken.

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This article appeared in the Marin Independent Journal on October 7, 2010:

By Norman Solomon

     Today, the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan is beginning its tenth year, with 100,000 American troops in that country nearly a decade after the invasion started on Oct. 7, 2001. 

     When I returned home from a brief visit to Afghanistan a year ago, my life resumed in the pleasant, familiar surroundings of Marin County. Yet my head was still in Kabul, with people whose voices are routinely drowned out by the foghorns of war.

     In the media echo chambers, many of the buzz phrases that were popular during the Vietnam War — “cut and run,” “stay the course” and the like — are still blaring. And many of the political dynamics are eerily similar.

     History may not repeat itself, as the saying goes, but it tends to rhyme an awful lot.

     It’s not easy to challenge an escalating war, especially when the president is in the same political party. But, as John F. Kennedy once said — and as his brother Robert later embodied when he spoke out against the Vietnam War — “sometimes party loyalty asks too much.”

     When I listened to children from Helmand province at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul, it was clear that they didn’t know or care whether the man in the Oval Office had a “D” or an “R” after his name. They, and their surviving parents, were trying to stay alive.

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This letter was published in The Nation [October 11, 2010 print edition]:

     The "Debating Obama" forum spotlighted some big obstacles to progressive change, but the discourse was notably hazy about presidential accountability for calamitous policies. It was a bad sign that the word "Afghanistan" did not appear anywhere in the forum's seven pages. (What would we say about a "Debating Johnson" forum in August 1966 that didn't mention Vietnam?) Whatever the limits to the president's options, he wields gargantuan power—and makes fateful choices.

     While the political terrain is cemented with structural factors, no systemic analysis should absolve government leaders of moral responsibility or basic accountability. "The system" may be to blame, but since when does that let the president—or anyone else—off the hook?

     After eighteen months, we should be discussing how progressives might try to bell this cat—a president who has clearly embraced what Martin Luther King Jr. called "the madness of militarism," in tandem with an array of other grim policies, including promulgation of extensive corporate agendas in the guise of "reform" and continuing encroachment on precious civil liberties like habeas corpus. The discussion is spreading inside the Democratic Party.

     In mid-August, the entire leadership of the California Democratic Party's Progressive Caucus—by most measures the largest caucus in the state party—mustered a directness in addressing the president that eluded the seven writers in the Nation forum. "We worked very hard for your election as we do for all candidates who seem able and willing to work for progressive social change, and to make a better life for our citizens and for the world," the caucus's executive board wrote in a letter to President Obama. "Your rhetoric often suggests that you share this goal, but your actions frequently prove otherwise. We do not simply disagree with you on a single small issue. Unfortunately our unhappiness and disappointment has a broad scope."

     The letter said, "You campaigned against the Bush imperial presidency, and then you expanded it…. In our opinion you have failed, in whole or in part, to deliver on many of your commitments. Instead, you have continued and supported some of the Bush policies that many hoped and believed, based on your utterances, you would quickly terminate." And the letter declared that presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs, like chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, "is not the real problem, Mr. President. We fear you are."

     Such deep concerns are widespread—and increasingly corrosive for the Democratic base. Bleak poll data on inclinations to vote this November reflect the demoralizing and demobilizing effects of Obama's triangulation. Below the radar, many party activists are agonizing and questing for strategies as we try to prevent Republican gains and push for progressive policies. If progressives seem to be making excuses for Obama's corporate policies, it casts us as defenders of an untenable status quo—and helps corporate-funded "populists" of the right wing to masquerade as the agents of change.

NORMAN SOLOMON, national co-chair
Healthcare Not Warfare

By Norman Solomon

     Autumn 2010 is a time of disillusionment for many who deplore the USA’s current political trajectory. Some who’ve been active for progressive causes are now gravitating toward hope that individual actions — in tandem with higher consciousness, more down-to-earth lifestyles and healthy cultural alternatives — can succeed where social activism has failed. It’s an old story that is also new.

     From economic inequities to global warming to war, the nation’s power centers have repulsed those who recognize the urgency of confronting such crises head-on. High unemployment has become the new normal. Top officials in Washington have taken a dive on climate change. The warfare state is going great guns.

     When social movements seem to be no match for a destructive status quo, people are apt to look around for alternative strategies. One of the big ones involves pursuing individual transformations as keys to social change. Forty years ago, such an approach became all the rage — boosted by a long essay that made a huge splash in The New Yorker magazine just before a longer version became a smash bestseller.

     The book was “The Greening of America,” by a Yale University Law School teacher named Charles Reich. In the early fall of 1970, it created a sensation. Today, let’s consider it as a distant mirror that reflects some similar present-day illusions.

     On the front cover of “The Greening of America,” big type proclaimed: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act.”

     That autumn, I was upbeat about Reich’s new book — including its great enthusiasm for “the revolution of the new generation.” (Hey, that was me and my friends!)  The book condemned the war, denounced the overcapitalized Corporate State, panned the rigidity of schools, lauded the sensuality that marijuana was aiding, and dismissed as pathetically venal the liberalism that had driven the country to war in Vietnam.

     At the time, I scarcely picked up on the fact that “The Greening of America” was purposely nonpolitical. Its crux was personal and cultural liberation — in a word, “consciousness,” which “plays the key role in the shaping of society.” And so, “The revolution must be cultural. For culture controls the economic and political machine, not vice versa.” In effect, the author maintained, culture would be a silver bullet, able to bring down the otherwise intractable death machine.

     Let’s freeze frame those two dreamy claims and mull them over. Consciousness “plays the key role in the shaping of society.” And culture “controls the economic and political machine, not vice versa.”

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By Norman Solomon  

A pithy idea — now going around in some progressive circles — is that elections are a waste of time.

The idea can be catchy. It all depends on some tacit assumptions.

For instance: elections are a waste of time if you figure the U.S. government is so far gone that it can’t get much worse.

Elections are a waste of time if you’ve given up on grassroots organizing to sway voters before they cast ballots.

Elections are a waste of time if you think there’s not much difference on the Supreme Court between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, or Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel Alito.

Elections are a waste of time if you’re so disgusted with Speaker Pelosi that you wouldn’t lift a finger to prevent Speaker Boehner.

Elections are a waste of time if you don’t see much value in reducing — even slightly — the extent of injustice and deprivation imposed on vulnerable people.

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