Author: Norman Solomon

  • How the News Media Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Rumsfeld

    The nation’s top dog of war is frisky again. Donald Rumsfeld has returned to high visibility — after a couple of months in the media doghouse following revelations about torture at the Abu Ghraib prison — now openly romancing the journalistic pack with his inimitable style of tough love as he growls and romps across…

  • A Time of Butterflies and Bombers

    We saw butterflies turning into bombers. And we weren’t dreaming. At the time when the Woodstock festival became an instant media legend in mid-August 1969, melodic yearning for peace was up against the cold steel of American war machinery. The music and other creative energies that drew 400,000 people to an upstate New York farm…

  • A Global Perspective on Defeating Bush

    written with Jeff Cohen The U.S.-centric nature of American politics often affects the U.S. left. It’s hard to get out of USA mindsets long enough to grasp the global implications of decisions made here at home. Yet the effects of U.S. government policies are so enormous across the planet that some people have suggested —…

  • From Attica to Abu Ghraib – and a Prison Near You

    A recent obituary in the New York Times told about Frank Smith, “who as an inmate leader at Attica prison was tortured by officers in the aftermath of the prisoner uprising of 1971 and then spent a quarter century successfully fighting for legal damages.” Working as a paralegal after his release, Smith was a pivotal…

  • Hope Is Not On the Way, But Hopefully Bush Is On the Way Out

    No, hope does not gallop in like Paul Revere. And it certainly doesn’t arrive breathless from a corporate party convention. Movements for peace and social justice can bring realistic hope — not with rhetoric but with the tough daily tedious uplifting work of political organizing. Yes, we’d be better off with John Kerry in the…