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norman solomon
Fury Grows Over Democratic Complacency in Face of Looming War of Choice in Iran
"It's embarrassing that some problematic far-right figures are speaking out more forcefully against direct military action than the so-called leaders of the opposition," said the executive director of Our Revolution.
Jun 19, 2025
With just a relative handful of Democratic lawmakers backing legislation that would compel President Donald Trump to obtain congressional approval for an attack on Iran and many more Democrats voicing support for Israel as it kills hundreds of Iranian civilians while continuing its annihilation of Gaza, progressives on Thursday implored voters to pressure their representatives to oppose yet another U.S. war of choice.
While Trump has reportedly approved plans to join a war that fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says is meant to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons that every U.S. administration this century—including his own—says Tehran is not trying to build, Democratic pushback against possible war has largely been limited to three pieces of proposed legislation that would require lawmakers' approval for military action, as mandated by the War Powers Resolution of 1973, also known as the War Powers Act.
"If your argument is that Trump is an authoritarian danger to democracy but sure, let's follow him into another war, you are a complete fraud."
Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt) No War With Iran Act, which has just seven co-sponsors, would prohibit use of federal funds for an attack on Iran. A separate Senate bill introduced by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) would also block Trump from waging war on Iran absent congressional approval, while a similar measure put forth in the House by Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California has drawn the support of 15 Democratic colleagues.
Meanwhile, under relentless pressure from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—which spent over $100 million in the 2024 election cycle on largely successful efforts to oust progressive opponents of Israel's war on Gaza—dozens of congressional Democrats have voiced support for Israel's unprovoked and illegal attack on Iran, which has killed or wounded around 2,000 people and prompted Iranian retaliation that has left hundreds of Israelis dead or injured.
On Wednesday, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) introduced a resolution praising and expressing support for Israel's so-called "preemptive" war on Iran. Sherman's measure is backed by more than a dozen Republican lawmakers and a pair of Democrats, Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.). Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) have both also publicly backed Israel.
"This is now defining for the Democratic Party," Khanna asserted in the face of his party's ambivalence. "Are we going to criticize the offensive weapons for Netanyahu and the blank check? Are we going to stand up with clarity against the strikes on Iran? Are we going to actually be the party of peace, or are we going to be just another party of war?"
On @chrislhayes.bsky.social, I called on @schumer.senate.gov to support @kaine.senate.gov, @sanders.senate.gov, Rep. Massie & my resolution opposing a war in Iran. This is a defining moment for our party where too many blundered in supporting the Iraq war.Now we need to be clear — no war in Iran.
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— Ro Khanna (@rokhanna.bsky.social) June 18, 2025 at 8:13 PM
Other Democrats, including but by no means limited to Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio)—who have collectively raked in more than $2.2 million in campaign cash from the pro-Israel lobby, according to Track AIPAC—have voiced support for attacking Iran.
"The Democratic Party has an AIPAC problem," Our Revolution executive director Joseph Geevarghese told Common Dreams Thursday. "Too many of its leaders seem more afraid of crossing a powerful lobbying group than they are of dragging the U.S. into another costly regime change war."
"It's embarrassing that some problematic far-right figures are speaking out more forcefully against direct military action than the so-called leaders of the opposition," he added. "Much like [former President] Joe Biden's indefensible handling of the genocide in Gaza, this is yet another example of Democrats squandering their credibility with young, progressive, and independent-leaning voters."
RootsAction national director Norman Solomon—author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death—told Common Dreams Thursday that "current members of Congress, in effect, belong to a war party or a peace party—and it has nothing to do with whether they have a 'D' or an 'R' after their names."
"Many Democrats in Congress—who were silent while Trump killed the Obama-era nuclear deal during his first term and then President Biden refused to revive it—are now trying to score partisan points against Trump without clearly and emphatically opposing any U.S. direct attack on Iran, let alone opposing Israel's immense war crime of launching an aggressive war on Iran," he added.
Like Solomon, progressive economist and Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs noted that "there are warmongers in both parties, and peacemakers in both parties."
"An antiwar coalition is possible but needs to be bipartisan," he told Common Dreams.
Some of the most vocal opponents of a U.S. attack on Iran—a country that hasn't started a war since the mid-19th century when it was the Persian Empire, but has endured U.S. regime change and destabilization efforts for 70 years—have been Iranian Americans.
"There is deep frustration and disappointment across our community with the Democratic Party's overall reluctance to meet the moment with the urgency and moral clarity it demands," Isabella Javidan, communications manager at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), told Common Dreams Thursday.
"While some lawmakers are thankfully backing War Powers Resolutions to prevent unauthorized U.S. military involvement, too many Democrats are either silent or hedging, despite an illegal and catastrophic assault that has already killed hundreds of civilians in Iran and dragged the U.S. to the brink of war," Javidan continued.
"This isn't just about diplomacy or restraint, it's also about preventing history from repeating itself," Javidan added. "The U.S. has been here before, and we know what happens when political leaders fail to speak out against reckless, one-sided escalations. Many in our community are alarmed that, despite the human toll, there's an absence of strong Democratic leadership publicly opposing the warpath being laid out by Netanyahu and endorsed by some in Congress."
Referring to the recent U.S. intelligence assessment which, like several before it, concluded that Iran is not seeking nukes, Branko Marcetic lamented in a Jacobin article published Wednesday that "pro-war officials, both Democrat and Republican, have simply decided to pretend this never happened."
In a separate piece for Responsible Statecraft, Marcetic noted that even progressive Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon referenced "Iran's nuclear ambitions."
Ironically, much of Trump's 2016 foreign policy platform involved excoriating the Bush administration's lies about Iraq's nonexistent quest for weapons of mass destruction.
"Trump is now a fingernail's length away from doing exactly what he bashed Bush for doing in order to kickstart his political ascent," Marcetic wrote for Jacobin.
Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former senior foreign policy adviser to Sanders, said on social media that "any Democrat who can't stand up and speak out now against the Trump-Netanyahu regime change war should not even consider running in 2028. You're not who this country needs."
"Seriously," Duss continued, "if your argument is that Trump is an authoritarian danger to democracy but sure, let's follow him into another war, you are a complete fraud."
"Any Democrat who can't stand up and speak out now against the Trump-Netanyahu regime change war should not even consider running in 2028."
Duss quipped, "I'll be accepting apologies from everyone who insisted we needed to welcome Bill Kristol in our coalition," referring to the "never-Trump" neoconservative co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, who has been an Iran hawk for decades.
There's a politically expedient motivator for eschewing war on Iran—it's unpopular among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. An Economist/YouGov poll published earlier this week found that 60% of all respondents oppose U.S. involvement in the war, while just 16% supported military action and 24% were unsure. A slim majority of 2024 Trump voters don't want war with Iran and slightly more Republican respondents than Democrats support U.S. negotiations with Iran.
Astonishing that only 16% of Americans think the US should join Israel’s war on Iran but so few Democrats are speaking out against it. The gaping disconnect between Dem politicians and the Dem base we saw on Gaza continues to cripple effective opposition.
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— Abu Aardvark’s Ghost (@abuaardvark.bsky.social) June 18, 2025 at 9:11 AM
"What this all boils down to," said Solomon, "is the imperative for all of us to demand that the U.S. not engage in any military action against Iran and insist that Israel halt its war of aggression—and that the negotiations between the U.S. and Iran for a new nuclear deal be resumed and completed for an agreement."
"As constituents, we need to let all elected officials know that pursuit of peace is essential—and anything less is an insane push toward nuclear annihilation," he added.
Disclosure: The author of this article recently served as the co-chair of San Francisco Berniecrats, an Our Revolution affiliate.
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Progressive Petition Calls for DNC 'Emergency Meeting' to Shift Gears Against Trump
"Doing the same old thing (or nothing) nets the same dismal results," wrote one petition signer.
May 28, 2025
A petition sponsored by two national progressive organizations is urging the Democratic National Committee to convene an emergency meeting of all its members in order to chart "truly bold action" against U.S. President Donald Trump and his "cronies."
The petition, which was sent to Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Ken Martin this week and circulated by the groups RootsAction and Progressive Democrats of America, has 7,000 signers, according to a Wednesday statement. It also includes more than 1,500 individual comments from petition signers.
One petition signer, Andrea Helene Hansen of Hudson, New York, wrote: "As a lifelong Democrat (and I'm now 77 years old), I'm looking for an alternative since my party is failing me (and others of the boomer generation). WAKE UP!"
"Doing the same old thing (or nothing) nets the same dismal results. Time to represent your voters that want you to fight Trump and GOP and overwhelmingly support progressive programs," wrote Anne Eisinger of Auburndale, Florida.
Recent polling and the success of Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) "Fighting Oligarchy" tour—with appearances by other key progressives including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)—this spring suggest that a sizable portion of the Democratic base is keen to see Democrats pushing back forcefully against Trump.
The petition urges the DNC to convene the emergency meeting as soon as possible and make it fully open to the public.
"The predatory, extreme, and dictatorial actions of the Trump administration call for an all-out commensurate response, which so far has been terribly lacking from the Democratic Party," the petition states. "It is time for the Democratic National Committee, as the organization tasked with responding to the concerns of Democrats, to heed the insights of progressive policy analysts and grassroots activists—and that should begin at this emergency meeting."
The text of the petition does not specify which insights the groups and petition signers would like the DNC to heed.
According to the petition, waiting until the DNC's next regular meeting in late summer would be "irresponsible."
In a Common Dreams op-ed published Wednesday, RootsAction national director Norman Solomon highlighted anger directed at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) after he decided to support a Republican spending bill in March, and Democratic congressional leadership's poor performance in recent polling.
"Four months into his job as the DNC's chair, Ken Martin has yet to show that the DNC is truly operating in real time while the country faces an unprecedented threat to what's left of democracy. His power to call an emergency meeting of the full DNC remains unused," wrote Solomon.
Meanwhile, the DNC recently took steps to void the elections of multiple DNC vice chairs, including gun reform activist David Hogg, who rankled DNC members earlier this year when he announced his intention to support primary challenges to "asleep-at-the-wheel" Democrats in safe-blue seats.
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How to Fight Trump Without Caving to Corporatists
Can the progressive movement display leadership and vision in forming a united front at a time when those qualities seem to be lacking elsewhere?
May 19, 2025
RICHARD ESKOW: In a recent column you asked, “What’s preventing a united front against the Trump regime?” You say, “America desperately needs a united front to restrain the wrecking ball of the Trump regime.” I get the “wrecking ball,” but why do we need a united front? What’s wrong with a multi-pronged approach from various groups and actors?
NORMAN SOLOMON: There’s a serious lack of coordination at the political level. The Democratic Party is a constellation of 50-plus state and other local parties, and there are many organizations which are—or should be—independent of the party.
To the extent there is any governing body, it's the Democratic National Committee. The DNC should provide leadership at times like these. But there’s still no leadership, several months into a second Trump regime that’s much worse than the first. There's energy to oppose, but it’s uncoordinated.
Rethinking the Left and the Party
ESKOW: Here’s a challenge. For too long, the American left looked to the Democratic Party for leadership and guidance instead of considering it an instrument that’s available to movements. I think a lot of people assume that “a united front” against Trump means making the left fall in line yet again behind the institutional party’s corporate, so-called “centrist” politicians.
SOLOMON: It’s dubious, and not very auspicious, to follow “leadership” that isn’t leading. I think your word “instrument” is an excellent one. The left should consider the Democratic Party a tool that not only can be used but, under this electoral system, must be used to stop the right and advance progressive causes. No other party can win federal elections and stop what has become a neo-fascist Republican Party.
Most of the people who serve as administrative or elected Democrats consider social movements subordinate to their electoral work. They see progressives—the grassroots activists, the ones with deep concerns, who do research, who communicate, who organize in local communities, who provide hope—as fuel for them to win elections.
That's backward. Campaigns and candidates should be subordinated to progressive social movements, not the other way around. That's how we win. Change doesn't come from the top. The great advances—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, antiwar, gay rights, civil rights, women's rights, reproductive freedom—came from people who weren’t held into check by the party apparatus. They came from the grassroots, the social movements.
Big Money, Big Problems
ESKOW: Progressives inside the party have told me how complicated it is to work within the party. Each state party has its own rules and its own representatives to the DNC, and there are also other appointed members and other centers of power. They’re up against complex machinery whenever they try to change anything.
Worse, the party allows dark money in its primaries and is heavily reliant on it in general elections. Party operatives—thousands of them, in think tanks and consulting firms and so on—depend on that money for their livelihood.
Kamala Harris raised more money than perhaps any candidate in history. I think that money actually hurt her. It dissuaded her from saying the things she needed to say to win, whether she meant them or not.
How can a popular front incorporate and influence a party that’s dominated by big donors? Isn't that the elephant in the room?
SOLOMON: Well, certainly the money is huge, but we want to be realistic without being defeatists. With the state supreme court election in Wisconsin a few weeks ago, Elon Musk literally tried to buy the election and failed. That was a victory against the tide of big money. But yes, money typically correlates with victory.
I attended the DNC’s so-called Unity Reform Commission meetings in 2017, when the power of the Bernie Sanders forces was at high ebb. The party’s centrists, corporatists, and militarists felt it necessary to give the left some seats on that commission. But they kept a voting majority, which they used to kill some important reforms for transparency and financial accountability.
Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who was then the Clinton-aligned chair, helped defeat those proposals. And what happened to her? She became deputy chief of staff in the Biden White House, then effectively ran Biden’s reelection campaign. And, after Biden belatedly pulled out and left chaos behind, suddenly Jen O’Malley Dillon was running the Harris campaign.
As you said, a lot of money was sloshing around. It’s hard to spend a billion dollars-plus in a few months and not have a lot of pockets being lined. Lots of it goes to consultants who broker deals, hire other consultants, and arrange TV advertising. They love advertising because it's easy and you don't have to relate to people. (Note: Many consultants are also paid a percentage of each ad buy.)
Meanwhile, we heard afterwards that African-American organizers in places like Philadelphia had been asking Where's our help? Where are our resources?—while TV stations in their states were filled with Harris ads.
That’s not to villainize Jen O’Malley Dillon. She's just an example. Certain people will always win. They’ll always make tons of money, no matter what happens on Election Day.
Would the Party Rather Lose Than Change?
ESKOW: Let me underscore that point about insiders. I think they would all prefer winning to losing. I don't know anyone who’d rather lose. But their incentives are misaligned. There are times when, consciously or not, they feel there are worse things than losing. Take Bernie Sanders, whose policies and fundraising model threatened the Democratic ecosystem that feeds them. In a choice between winning with Bernie or losing—even to Trump—they’d rather lose. Their incentives make losing preferable to turning the party over to unruly Sanders types like—well, like you.
SOLOMON: I think that's a fair point. Remember, when Bernie was at high ebb in primaries, a lot of traditional Democrats on Wall Street and elsewhere were quoted as saying if Sanders is the nominee they might go with Trump.
Imagining a “Popular Front”
ESKOW: Let's try to envision a popular— well, I call it a “popular front.” I don't think others use that term, but I think of the wartime alliance under FDR that included everyone on the left—including Communists, socialists, mainstream labor, radical labor, moderate Democrats—everyone. From the radical left to the center, people made common cause against fascism. I think there is common cause again. You can see it in the threats to the judicial system, to media independence, educational independence, and other pillars of civil democracy. Those pillars were already tattered, and many are already broken, but what remains is endangered.
How can the left build that alliance without either surrendering leadership on its ideas or being subsumed by the “Vote Blue, no matter who” rhetoric that always gives us the same failed party leadership?
SOLOMON: It's a challenge. To use a word that might seem jargony, we should take a dialectical approach. We should look at these contrary, sometimes seemingly contradictory realities and see them all. Fred Hampton was a great young leader of the Black Panther Party, murdered with the collusion of the FBI and Chicago police. There’s video of him saying that nothing is as important as stopping fascism because fascism is gonna stop us all. Malcolm X said that if somebody is holding a gun on you, your first job is to knock the gun out of the hand.
The right is holding a gun on you. There are neoliberals and there are outright fascists. Neoliberalism is a poison. It’s a political economy that makes the rich ever richer and immiserates everybody else, while destroying the environment and creating more and more militarism. But the fascists are holding a gun to our head.
We have an opportunity to creatively acknowledge that two truths exist simultaneously in 2025. We have a responsibility and imperative to join with others to defeat this fascistic group, which means forming a de facto united front with militarists and corporatists. And, at the same time, we need to fight militarists and corporatists.
So, there we are.
A Time for Left-Populism
ESKOW: This may be blue-sky thinking, but it occurs to me that the progressive movement can display leadership and vision in forming that front, at a time when those qualities seem to be lacking elsewhere. It could build a broad alliance while simultaneously attracting people to the left’s ideas and leadership. We wouldn’t try to subordinate people to our will in this alliance, as has been done to us in the past. Instead, in this admittedly optimistic scenario, some people will be attracted by the left’s vision and leadership.
SOLOMON: Absolutely. One of the recent dramatic examples is AOC and Bernie going to state after state, often in deep red districts, and getting huge turnouts. In 2016’s primary, Bernie went to the red state of West Virginia and carried every county against Hillary Clinton.
These examples undermine the mainstream media cliches about left and right because they’re about populism. It's about whether people who are upset and angry—and a lot of people in this country are—are encouraged to kick down or kick up.
The right wing—the fascists, the militarists, the super pseudo masculinists—they love to kick down. That's virtually their whole program: attacking immigrants, people of color, women, people who have been historically shafted. Progressives should kick up against the gazillionaires and the wealthy power brokers who hate democracy.
ESKOW: That kind of populism resonates. Expanding Social Security resonates. Healthcare for everyone resonates. It resonates among self-described conservatives, Republicans, whatever, as well as liberals and progressives. We could be saying to people, “They’re distracting you. It's not trans kids who are ripping you off and making your life so miserable. It's those guys over there.”
It’s been striking to see how passive the party was in the face of this year’s onslaught, and how passive so much of it continues to be. The right got off to a running (or crawling) start on demolishing what remains of democracy. And yet, we were flooded with Democratic operatives like James Carville, who openly use the phrase “playing possum” when describing how the party should respond. Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Leader of the House, said we can't do anything because we don't have the votes. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer helped pass Trump’s budget.
It felt like the party leadership had wiped its hands and walked away from the catastrophe it helped create. People who want to fight Trump will also have to fight this inertia—even though many of the party’s presumptive presidential candidates are distinguishing saying, no, no, I'm going to come out swinging. I'm going to be the candidate who comes out swinging against the right.
I always tell people that if they’re going to work in Democratic Party politics, they should heed the biblical injunction about the world: be in it, but not of it. And I think that activists should go where their inclinations and their talents lead them. They should follow the path that calls out to them.
Working Inside the Party
ESKOW: But if people are called to do Democratic Party activism, what exactly does that look like, given what they’re up against? What’s the mechanism of activist involvement?
SOLOMON: I think the right wing has in the last decades been much more attentive and attuned to the reality that everybody in Congress is elected from somewhere else, not DC. You wouldn't know that when you talk with a lot of the Democrats and Democratic-aligned groups there. Some people in that bubble think that's where the action is, where power is wielded. But, as you say—to the extent we have democracy and there are still some democratic structures as of now—the action is in the grassroots, in communities.
There are well over 1,000 different congressional offices. Members of the House have district offices. They are, in a nonviolent way, sitting ducks to be confronted. Voters are facing questions of life and death, whether it's healthcare or the genocidal war on Gaza that the U.S. continues to arm, or so many other concerns. We could be confronting these people in Congress when they don't do what they should be doing.
Those folks are not gods. They should be confronted. And there's often a dynamic on the left where, if Congressperson X does some things that we appreciate and a couple of things that we think are terrible, there's a tendency to say, “Well, I appreciate the good things. I don't want to be mean just because I differ on one or two things.”
The right wing rarely takes that tack. They go to the mat. They fight for exactly what they believe. That’s been successful for them—very successful.
We have the chance to really make an impact right now. But we’re often told, “Cool your jets. You don't want to be divisive.” Bernie got a lot of that. AOC gets a lot of that. We’re told, “You don't want to be like the Tea Party from the last decade.” And the astute response is, “Oh, yeah, what a disaster. The Tea Party took over the Republican Party. That must have been just a terrible tactical measure.”
It's a way of being told to sit down and do what you're told. The right doesn't do that—maybe because, ironically, they have less respect for authority figures. We don't need deference to leaders who don't provide leadership.
Can We All Just Get Along?
ESKOW: On the right, the nastiness is directed against what was the institutional party establishment. But a lot of centrist Democrats, leaders and supporters alike, seem to get angriest at the left for bringing up certain ideas. It’s like we’re just like spitting in the punch bowl, that it's wrong and rude and who the hell do you think you are? The left has the ideas, but I also think we have to deal with a kind of professional/managerial class culture that can be quite hostile.
It feels like we have to say, “No, we're actually your friends, because a) we can help you and b) in your hearts, you want these things too. Don't be annoyed. We’re not ‘indulging ourselves’ by speaking up. We're helping.”
I struggle with that all the time. And I wonder what your thoughts are.
SOLOMON: That’s the corrosive culture of thinking the people in charge know best. That culture includes a substantial proportion of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. And it also happens because the financial and party pressures on elected officials are intense.
A few minutes ago I mentioned my admiration for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their anti-oligarchy tour. They've been great. But we should not erase the historical memory that, even after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate last summer and up until the day he withdrew from the race, Bernie Sanders was publicly adamant that Biden should stay in the race. AOC was adamant that Joe Biden should stay in the race.
That made no sense whatsoever. And as someone on the RootsAction team, that isn’t just hindsight. RootsAction launched the Don't Run Joe campaign at the end of 2022. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist or a political scientist to know that Joe Biden was incapable of running an effective campaign for reelection.
ESKOW: We also saw the Congressional Progressive Caucus leadership endorse Biden a year before the election, if I recall correctly.
SOLOMON: Oh, absolutely. The chair at the time, Pramila Jayapal, endorsed him two years ahead of the 2024 election day.
ESKOW: It’s also striking what wasn't said during those two years. We heard virtually nothing about Medicare for All, which went off the political radar. We didn't hear much about expanding Social Security. Joe Biden promised to expand it in the campaign and never said another word about it.
“Inside/Outside”
ESKOW: We could go on. But to me, and speaking of embracing contradictions, this speaks to the ongoing need for activists. Because here’s the ultimate irony for me about the phenomenon we've just described. Capitol Hill progressives, many of whom I respect, essentially replicated what party insiders did to them in 2015 and 2016 when they were told not to challenge Hillary Clinton.
SOLOMON: Good point.
ESKOW: It says to me we’ll always need outside activists pounding on the door, however annoying they may find us to be from time to time. It’s an “inside/outside” game.
SOLOMON: Jim Hightower said it's the agitator that gets the dirt out in the washing machine.
ESKOW: He also said there's nothing in the middle of the road except yellow lines and dead armadillos.
Call for an Emergency DNC Meeting
ESKOW: Let’s close with this. RootsAction has been calling for an emergency meeting of the DNC to address the crisis of fascism, or what I would join you in calling neo-fascism. What's the thinking there and what's the status of that?
SOLOMON: I think of a quote from James Baldwin. He said that not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it's faced. We're in an emergency, and we're getting very little from what amounts to the party’s governing body, the Democratic National Committee—even acknowledging that it is an emergency. There's pretty much a business-as-usual ambience, although the rhetoric is ramped up.
The DNC, which has 448 members, normally meets twice a year. If, in the midst of emergency year 2025, you remain committed to meeting only twice a year, you're conveying something very profound. You’re communicating that you're not operating in the real world of an emergency.
That's where we are right now. So, in partnership with Progressive Democrats of America, RootsAction has launched a petition (which people can find at RootsAction.org) urging the DNC to hold an emergency meeting. People can still sign it. And we know that the chair of the DNC, who has the power to call such a meeting, knows full well about this petition.
But right now it’s still business as usual. So, I think we need to ramp up these demands.
ESKOW: And meanwhile the party is at historic levels of unpopularity. You'd think that’s one emergency they would recognize.
SOLOMON: One would think so. The latest polling showed only 27 percent of voters had a favorable view of the Democratic Party. You would think that one or two alarm bells would go off. Maybe the “same old, same old” isn't going to do it anymore.
The above dialogue was adapted from a discussion on The Zero Hour podcast.
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Holding the Press and Biden Accountable on the Gaza War
Building on themes in his War Made Invisible, anti-war organizer and author Norman Solomon's new afterword to the paperback edition reveals the human toll of an imperial U.S. foreign policy.
Sep 05, 2024
In Norman Solomon’s new Afterword in the paperback edition of his book
War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,, the author excoriates the White House for arming a genocide with assistance from a negligent press. Solomon tracks events following Hamas’ killings and kidnappings of Israelis on October 7, 2023, a few months after publication of the book in hardcover. The 31-page Afterword indicts the Biden administration for complicity in Israel’s genocide, a horror facilitated by Pentagon media stenographers who covered up, ignored, or under-reported U.S-Israel war crimes.
As executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Solomon values truth in reporting, a rarity in a country where the press fails to report near trillion-dollar military budgets that defund urgent needs at home despite Americans living one paycheck away from desperation, even homelessness.
Solomon’s lucid “Afterword: The Gaza War” exposes the lies, half-truths, omissions, and pivots of U.S. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State “rules-based order” Antony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan as they bemoan the “unintentional” killing and wounding of tens of thousands of Gazans, most of them women and children who had nothing to do with October 7.
Either the corporate media knew of the Biden administration’s culpability or chose not to know—both worthy of derision.
“After 10 weeks of the carnage, it was big news on December 12 when Biden got around to voicing some unhappiness with Israel’s ‘indiscriminate bombing,’” writes Solomon, explaining that during this time a duplicitous Biden was green-lighting and fast-tracking “enormous U.S. shipments of weapons and ammunition to Israel—including one-ton bombs—so that indiscriminate bombing could continue.”
Solomon’s addition to his
War Made Invisible tells the truth in harrowing detail, reflecting the author’s commitment to accuracy in journalism and political discourse. A collection of Solomon’s “Media Beat” columns, published from 1992-2009, won the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. Solomon’s incisive analysis and scathing foreign policy critiques are also hallmarks of his other books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (co-authored with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich) published in January 2003, two months before then-President George W. Bush ordered the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
In “Afterword: The Gaza War,” Solomon demonstrates a knack for narration, offering a cringe-worthy snapshot of Biden’s callous detachment from the suffering in Gaza. Solomon describes the president in late February hosting a photo op at an ice cream parlor near Rockefeller Center, where Biden ruminated on the prospects for a cease-fire. “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done yet,” Biden tells the press before strolling off holding his ice cream cone.
Meanwhile, the author points out, it was five months into Israel’s killing spree before a compliant
Washington Post finally reported the U.S. was able to secretly deliver to Israel more than 100 separate weapons transfers without public debate since the transfers fell below the dollar threshold that required congressional notice and approval.
Apparently the Biden administration could read the tea leaves—the majority of Americans wanted an end to the killing—and so the weapons were transferred quietly lest the public throw stones at the White House or a shoe at President Biden. After all, according to Solomon, the U.S. was supplying Israel with 80% of its imported weapons to bomb Gaza’s hospitals, schools, United Nations refugee centers, and so-called “safe” zones to which the Israeli military directed tens of thousands of Palestinians to seek refuge.
Readers remembering New York Times stories about individual Palestinian suffering may judge Solomon as too harsh on corporate media and its guest pundits, but these stories, Solomon notes, rarely blamed the White House because “...the narratives of catastrophe were short on zeal for exploring causality—especially when the trail would lead to the U.S. ‘national security’ establishment.”
Either the corporate media knew of the Biden administration’s culpability or chose not to know—both worthy of derision.
In examining mass media complicity, Solomon reminds us of The Intercept’s findings: The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times coverage of the war’s first six weeks minimized Palestinian suffering, with editors and reporters employing 60-1 the term “slaughter” to characterize the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians and using “massacre” 125-2 to describe the murder of Israelis versus Palestinians.
Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org, a grassroots anti-war organization, chastises the press for ignoring Israel firing artillery shells loaded with white phosphorus at civilians in Gaza. White phosphorus can burn its victims down to the bone, cause them to blink spasmodically until blind, or struggle to breathe before dying from asphyxiation.
To the skeptic, Solomon offers abundant examples of media bias, including press failure to cover the declaration of U.N. experts who in March, 2024, issued a statement: “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.”
The most inspiring passages—the pages that restore our faith in reporters on big media’s payroll—describe how courageous journalists, including those at
CNN, risked their lives and careers to cover Israel’s bombardment and starvation of over 2 million people in Gaza, 9 out of 10 internally displaced where “trauma in Palestine is collective and continuous,” according to the chair of the mental health unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Solomon tells us that reporters at some of the largest news outlets—The Associated Press, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, McClatchy, the Chicago Tribune—signed a letter in November, 2023, denouncing their employers for “dehumanizing rhetoric that served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” A month later the Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern over the Israeli military’s pattern of targeting journalists and their families, citing a journalist killed wearing press insignia and other journalists whose families were threatened by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Referencing a report in
The Guardian, Solomon writes of internal dissension at CNN, where reporters, including star veteran correspondent Christiane Amanpour, decried editorial policies demanding disgraceful regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and censorship of Palestinian voices in what amounted to “journalistic malpractice.”
Broken up into sections, peppered with news quotes and congressional grilling of the secretary of defense, Solomon’s Afterword presents a rare and valuable synthesis of post October 7 events and bedfellows.
Presidents can get away with genocide as long as the press gives them a free pass.
Building on themes in his
War Made Invisible, Solomon reveals the human toll of an imperial U.S. foreign policy. The new edition with “Afterword: The Gaza War” is a must-read for policymakers, academics, activists, and anyone wondering how war criminals in the White House can cry crocodile tears that pass for real anguish.
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Norman Solomon's 'War Made Invisible' Repudiates Collusion With War Makers
Solomon's 13th book shows how the U.S. hides the human toll of its military machine.
Jun 18, 2023
Following a string of U.S. “forever wars,” a profusion of well-written, often riveting novels, memoirs, and analyses have been published. Talented authors have aimed to promote understanding about the human cost of war.
In the same period, mainstream media sources have continually developed ways to make war appear normal—something necessary, justifiable, or in some cases, “humane.”
Norm Solomon’s War Made Invisible erects an edifice of evidence showing deliberate, consistent, coordinated and well-funded efforts to squelch movements opposing the vicious consequences of war.
Solomon asks why people identify more with the bombers rather than the bombed. Then he traces the history of embedded reporters. He shows how the presence of “embeds” (journalists who live among and travel with units of the military) has changed the way wars are covered. The embeds are beholden not only to the military that protect them but also to corporate heads who collude with war profiteers and war planners.
Solomon asks why people identify more with the bombers rather than the bombed.
Militarists’ justifications for wars often emphasize the terror wielded by insurgents using bloody tactics. Solomon points out the similarities between suicide bombers causing slaughter on the ground and sophisticated warplanes maiming and killing civilians from the air.
The legendary peace activist Phil Berrigan once likened racism and threats of nuclear war to the many faces of the hydra written of in Greek mythology. Cut off one head and another appears. The many-faced hydra of racism and war now turns to all corners of the globe. Any country refusing to subordinate itself to serving U.S. national interests risks being devastated by U.S. military and economic wars. Increasingly, war planners invoke the nuclear threat.
Authors and orators who challenge the status quo of glorifying and justifying wars face well organized opponents with deep pockets and a vice like grip on mainstream media. Astonishing past efforts, in U.S. history, to outlaw war and denounce the “merchants of death” reached millions of people after the industrial slaughter of World War I.
Eugene Debs, the indefatigable campaigner imprisoned for opposing U.S. foreign policy, ran for president from his jail cell and won nearly a million votes in 1920. The Kellogg Briand pact outlawing war was written into U.S. law in August of 1928. In April of 1935, the New York Times reported that over 60,000 students went on strike, declaring they would never enlist to fight in a foreign war. Former U.S. Representative Jeanette Rankin voted against entering both World War I and World War II. Norm Solomon shares the moral compass and honorable intent of these heroic resisters. His highly worthwhile book invites readers to embrace his clarity, expose the military machine’s human toll, and campaign to end all wars.
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20 Years After the Invasion of Iraq, Will the Media's Complicity Be Flushed Down the Memory Hole?
As we mark the anniversary of the murderous U.S. invasion of Iraq, it's imperative to reclaim the memory of this war not only from the Bush administration officials who waged it, but also from the corporate media system that helped sell it.
Mar 17, 2023
"All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." -- Viet Thanh Nguyen
As mainstream U.S. media outlets pause to remember the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it's clear that there's a lot they hope we'll forget—first and foremost, the media's own active complicity in whipping up public support for the war.
But the more you dig into mainstream news coverage from that period, as our documentary team did last week when we put together this five-minute montage from our 2007 film War Made Easy, the harder it is to forget how flagrantly news networks across the broadcast and cable landscape uncritically spread the Bush administration's propaganda and actively excluded dissenting voices.
After 20 Years, Will US News Media Finally Admit its Craven Complicity in Iraq War? | WAR MADE EASYwww.youtube.com
The numbers don't lie. A 2003 report by the media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) found that in the two weeks leading up to the invasion, ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, and the PBS Newshour featured a total of 267 American experts, analysts, and commentators on camera to supposedly help make sense of the march to war. Of these 267 guests, an astounding 75% were current or former government or military officials, and a grand total of one expressed any skepticism.
Meanwhile, in the fast-growing world of cable news, Fox News's tough-talking, pro-war jingoism was setting the standard for ratings-wary executives at most of the more "liberal" cable networks. MSNBC and CNN, feeling the heat of what industry insiders were calling "the Fox effect," were desperately trying to outflank their right-wing rival—and one another—by actively eliminating critical voices and seeing who could bang the war drums loudest.
At MSNBC, as the Iraq invasion approached in early 2003, network executives decided to fire Phil Donahue even though his show had the highest ratings on the channel. A leaked internal memo explained that top management saw Donahue as "a tired, left-wing liberal" who would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." Noting that Donahue "seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives," the memo warned ominously that his show could end up being "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."
Two decades later, as we hurtle ever closer to potentially catastrophic new wars, there's been virtually no accountability or sustained reporting in mainstream news media to remind us of their own decisive role in selling the Iraq war.
Not to be outdone, CNN news chief Eason Jordan would boast on air that he had met with Pentagon officials during the run-up to the invasion to get their approval for the on-camera war "experts" the network would rely on. "I think it's important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy behind the conflict," Jordan explained. "I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said . . . here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war, and we got a big thumbs up on all of them. That was important."
As Norman Solomon observes in our film War Made Easy, which we based on his book of the same name, the bedrock democratic principle of an independent, adversarial press was simply tossed out the window. "Often journalists blame the government for the failure of the journalists themselves to do independent reporting," Solomon says. "But nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so much commentary from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of it . . . It wasn't even something to hide, ultimately. It was something to say to the American people, 'See, we're team players. We may be the news media, but we're on the same side and the same page as the Pentagon.' . . . And that really runs directly counter to the idea of an independent press."
It's an act of forgetting we can ill afford, especially as many of the same media patterns from 20 years ago now repeat themselves on overdrive...
The result was a barely debated, deceit-driven, headlong rush into a war of choice that would go on to destabilize the region, accelerate global terrorism, bleed trillions of dollars from the U.S. treasury, and kill thousands of U.S. servicemembers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, most of them innocent civilians. Yet two decades later, as we hurtle ever closer to potentially catastrophic new wars, there's been virtually no accountability or sustained reporting in mainstream news media to remind us of their own decisive role in selling the Iraq war.
It's an act of forgetting we can ill afford, especially as many of the same media patterns from 20 years ago now repeat themselves on overdrive–from the full-scale reboot and rehabilitation of leading Iraq war architects and cheerleaders to the news media's continuing over-reliance on "experts" drawn from the revolving-door world of the Pentagon and the arms industry (often without disclosure).
"Memory is a strategic resource in any country, especially the memory of wars," the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen has written. "By controlling the narrative of the wars we fought, we justify the wars we are going to fight in the present."
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the murderous U.S. invasion of Iraq, it's imperative to reclaim the memory of this war not only from the Bush administration officials who waged it, but also from the corporate media system that helped sell it and has tried to control the narrative ever since.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the RootsAction Education Fund will be hosting a virtual screening of "War Made Easy" on March 20th at 6:45 PM Eastern, followed by a panel discussion featuring Solomon, Dennis Kucinich, Kathy Kelly, Marcy Winograd, India Walton, and David Swanson. Click here to sign up for the event, and click here to stream "War Made Easy" in advance for free.
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'You'll Be Hearing From Me as Long as I'm Here,' Daniel Ellsberg Vows After Terminal Cancer Diagnosis
"I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline," the Pentagon Papers whistleblower quipped.
Mar 02, 2023
Daniel Ellsberg, whose leaking of the Pentagon Papers and decades of anti-war activity have inspired generations of whistleblowers and activists, said Wednesday that he has terminal cancer, but that there's "tons more" movement work for him to do before he's gone.
The former nuclear war planner-turned-disarmament campaigner, who is 91 years old, notified friends and supporters in an email Wednesday morning that he had "difficult news to impart":
On February 17, without much warning, I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer on the basis of a CT scan and an MRI... I'm sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live. Of course, they emphasize that everyone's case is individual; it might be more, or less.
Ellsberg, who will not undergo chemotherapy—he says it "offers no promise"—wrote that he is "not in any physical pain."
"In fact, after my hip replacement surgery in late 2021, I feel better physically than I have in years," he said.
"As I just told my son Robert: He's long known (as my editor) that I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline," he quipped.
Whistleblowers and activists hailed a man one anti-nuclear campaigner called "a change-maker, a disrupter, and an icon."
RootsAction co-founder and director Norman Solomon, a longtime friend and collaborator, told Common Dreams that "words can't really convey what Dan Ellsberg has meant to the world, and along the way what he has been wonderfully giving to countless people he has reached out to and who've reached out to him."
"In public, he has been a beacon of integrity and truth, willing to say and do what the warmakers and nuclear-holocaust planners find completely unacceptable," he added. "In private, his thoughtful kindness and daily commitment to humanity are central to his being. And I want to emphasize right now that nothing in the world is more important to read and heed than Dan's monumental book The Doomsday Machine."
"I want to emphasize right now that nothing in the world is more important to read and heed than Dan's monumental book The Doomsday Machine."
John Kiriakou, the former CIA case officer and analyst who was jailed after he revealed U.S. torture in the so-called War on Terror, wrote on his Substack that "after my arrest in 2012 after blowing the whistle on the CIA's torture program, it was Dan who talked sense to me and convinced me that I was stronger than I realized."
"It was thanks to him that I didn't do something drastic," he added. "And then when I was serving 23 months in prison, Dan wrote to me religiously, sent books, and offered his friendship and encouragement. I love the guy. This is a blow for all Americans."
In Wednesday's email, Ellsberg reflected upon his life and work:
When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was). Yet in the end, that action—in ways I could not have foreseen, due to [then-President Richard] Nixon's illegal responses—did have an impact on shortening the war. In addition, thanks to Nixon's crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was able to spend the last 50 years with Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends.
"What's more," he continued, "I was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing, and joining with others in acts of protest and nonviolent resistance."
"I wish I could report greater success for our efforts," Ellsberg lamented. "As I write, 'modernization' of nuclear weapons is ongoing in all nine states that possess them (the U.S. most of all). Russia is making monstrous threats to initiate nuclear war to maintain its control over Crimea and the Donbas—like the dozens of equally illegitimate first-use threats that the U.S. government has made in the past to maintain its military presence in South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and (with the complicity of every member state then in NATO ) West Berlin."
"The current risk of nuclear war, over Ukraine, is as great as the world has ever seen," he emphasized just over a year into Russia's invasion.
"It is long past time—but not too late!—for the world's publics at last to challenge and resist the willed moral blindness of their past and current leaders," Ellsberg argued. "I will continue, as long as I'm able, to help these efforts.
Indeed, Ellsberg is scheduled to speak Thursday with Noam Chomsky at a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation webinar about the dangers of nuclear war during Russia's invasion of Ukraine
"There's tons more to say about Ukraine and nuclear policy, of course," Ellsberg added, "and you'll be hearing from me as long as I'm here."
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Beware Corporate Democrats 'Passing the Torch'
Congressman Hakeem Jeffries is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but that affiliation for the heir apparent to the current House Speaker should not be taken at face value.
Nov 29, 2022
Images of passing the torch can be stirring.
President John Kennedy reached heights of inaugural oratory when he declared that "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans." Three decades later, when Bill Clinton won the presidency, a Newsweek headline proclaimed "THE TORCH PASSES." The article underneath glorified "a film clip that made its way into a widely seen campaign ad: a beaming, 16-year-old Bill Clinton on a sun-drenched White House lawn, shaking the hand of his and his generation's idol, John F. Kennedy."
Weeks later, when Time magazine named Clinton "Man of the Year," its cover story carried the headline "THE TORCH IS PASSED."
The Clinton presidency went on to carry the torch for corporate-friendly measures. The NAFTA trade pact destroyed many well-paying union jobs; "welfare reform" harmed poor women and their families; a landmark crime law fueled mass incarceration; Wall Street deregulation led to the financial meltdown of 2007-2008.
Now, the top of the Democratic Party is passing torches on Capitol Hill. When Nancy Pelosi announced two weeks ago that she will no longer lead House Democrats, she said: "The hour has come for a new generation to lead." But in what direction?
Pelosi quickly endorsed Rep. Hakeem Jeffries to replace her as leader. NBC News offered the common media frame: "Pelosi made history as the first female speaker of the House, while Jeffries, the current Democratic Caucus chairman, would become the first Black leader of a congressional caucus and highest-ranking Black lawmaker on Capitol Hill."
You can count on much of the mass media to shower the 52-year-old Jeffries with accolades, largely supplied by fellow Democrats. But, overall, a closer look reveals a problematic record.
Early on, before becoming a New York state legislator, Jeffries worked for years as a corporate lawyer. In Congress--while he has taken a few progressive positions like cosponsoring Medicare for All and voting to cut 10 percent of the military budget--his emphasis has been in sync with the party establishment.
"I'm a Black progressive Democrat concerned with addressing racial and social and economic injustice with the fierce urgency of now," Jeffries told The Atlantic in August 2021. But during the same interview, Jeffries added: "There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism." (Ironically, Jeffries was echoing the "fierce urgency of now" phrase from Martin Luther King Jr., who was a democratic socialist.)
Jeffries likes to jab leftward. In 2016, he called Bernie Sanders a "gun-loving socialist with zero foreign-policy experience." A 2018 profile in The Economist--titled "High Hopes for Hakeem Jeffries" - concluded that he "is nearly as moderate as a safe-seat Democrat gets." The article pointed out: "Though he supports the principle of universal healthcare coverage, he speaks of 'the importance of market forces and getting things done in a responsible fashion.' Quoting Ronald Reagan approvingly, he suggests this means promoting a flourishing private sector outside the 'legitimate functions' of government."
Congressman Jeffries takes umbrage at negative press portrayals to such an extent that his office tries to quash critical assessments. When I wrote in a HuffPost piece in January 2019 that "Jeffries has been more attentive to serving corporate power than the interests of voters in his Brooklyn district," the response was swift and angry. Jeffries's communications director and senior advisor at the time, Michael Hardaway, fired off emails to HuffPost, claiming that my characterization was "factually inaccurate and easily disproven." Despite the escalating fulminations, the HuffPost editor explained that he saw "no reason to correct or update the piece."
Jeffries has not been a sponsor of the Green New Deal (which Pelosi famously denigrated in 2019: "The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they're for it, right?"). He also has not cosponsored the Green New Deal for Cities Act.
During the latest election cycle, Jeffries joined forces with one of the most corporate and vitriolic anti-progressive Democrats in the House, Josh Gottheimer, to form Team Blue PAC. Its priority - to protect the party's incumbents against Squad-like primary challengers - was summed up last winter in a Rolling Stone headline over an article about Jeffries's initiative: "Top House Democrat Unveils Plan to Beat Back Progressive Rebellion."
Last year, The American Prospect reported, Jeffries was conspicuously absent from efforts to support public housing in his home city. "When all [other] New York City House Democrats sent a letter to Pelosi urging her to protect all $80 billion for public housing in the BBB [Build Back Better bill], Jeffries was the only member not to sign that missive, especially surprising given that New York Dems are known to act as a bloc."
Jeffries is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the magazine noted, but that affiliation should not be taken at face value: "Jeffries is a mute member of the CPC, the largest caucus in the party, but has recently chosen to ally himself with its more conservative factions. And while the party's moderate wing has moved left on everything from foreign policy to social welfare, Jeffries has not moved with it."
In fact, Hakeem Jeffries is thoroughly corporate, As The Intercept reported four years ago, after he won a close race against Rep. Barbara Lee to become chair of the House Democratic Caucus, "Jeffries is heavily backed by big money and corporate PACs. Less than 2 percent of his fundraising comes from small donors, who contribute less than $200, according to Federal Election Commission records."
While in his fourth term, "Jeffries was the leading congressional recipient of hedge fund money in 2020," The American Prospect reported last year. "He banked $1.1 million from the financial sector, real estate interests, and insurance industry in the 2019-2020 cycle. Everyone from JPMorgan Chase to Goldman Sachs to Blackstone contributed. Zimmer Partners, a hedge fund, is one of Jeffries's top donors in 2021. From the outset, he has governed with those interests at heart. While Democrats were reconsidering their coziness with Wall Street, he broke ranks to vote with the financial services world, including on a high-profile measure literally written by Citigroup lobbyists in 2013 that killed the Dodd-Frank 'swaps push-out' rule, allowing banks to engage in risky trades backed by a potential taxpayer-funded bailout."
Thirty years younger than the outgoing speaker, Jeffries is a fitting symbol of media eagerness to herald generational change for Democrats in Congress. But investigative journalist Alexander Sammon has provided an apt sum-up: "Barely in his fifties, Jeffries is young numerically, but aligned with an older mode of Democratic politics, and has repeatedly distanced himself from the younger crop of Democrats that is almost categorically more progressive (and more popular). He's made a reputation for himself as the party's future by becoming a foremost representative of its past."
When a torch passes, we might be glad to "meet the new boss." But we should discard illusions. That way, hopefully, we don't get fooled again.
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Critics Call Pelosi's Confirmed Trip to Taiwan a 'Dangerous War Provocation'
"Taiwan is China. The U.N. says so. The U.S. and China have said so," noted one anti-imperialist author, adding that "Nancy Pelosi has gone full neocon" to violate the "One China" policy.
Aug 01, 2022
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will visit Taiwan this week, U.S. and Taiwanese officials said Monday, despite warnings from China, the Biden administration, and anti-war campaigners.
"The chances of a military confrontation between China and the United States have spiked upward."
Although a stop on the island--which nearly the entire international community, including the United Nations and the U.S., consider part of China--is not on Pelosi's public itinerary, a senior Taiwanese official told CNN that the California Democrat is expected to stay overnight in Taiwan, where she will reportedly meet with officials including President Tsai Ing-wen.
At a Monday press conference in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said his government "has repeatedly made clear to the U.S. side our serious concern over Speaker Pelosi's potential visit to Taiwan and our firm opposition to the visit."
"Pelosi is the third highest-ranking official in the U.S. government, which means it would be highly sensitive for her to visit Taiwan no matter what," he continued, adding that such a trip constitutes "gross interference in China's internal affairs."
Zhao said the visit will also "seriously undermine China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, wantonly trample on the 'One China' principle, greatly threaten peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, severely undermine China-U.S. relations, and lead to a very serious situation and grave consequences."
"The People's Liberation Army of China will never sit idly by," he added ominously, "and we will make [a] resolute response and take strong countermeasures to uphold China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. As for what measures, if she dares to go, then let's wait and see."
In a Monday video commemorating the 95th birthday of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), China's Eastern Theater Command vowed it is "always ready to fight" and would "bury any invading enemies."
During a Monday press conference, U.S. National Security Council strategic communications coordinator John Kirby said that Pelosi would be arriving in Taiwan on a military plane, while the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and other American warships operate nearby.
Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense said Monday that four Chinese warplanes flew through the island's Air Defense Identification Zone.
Last week, Hu Xijin, a columnist for Chinese government-owned Global Times, suggested shooting down the plane transporting the House speaker as a last resort to prevent it from landing in Taiwan.
While U.S. President Joe Biden has said that Pentagon officials believe Pelosi's visit "is not a good idea right now," he has been criticized for not objecting more vocally to the trip.
Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly told Biden during a lengthy phone conversation last Thursday that "those who play with fire will eventually get burned," while the American leader asserted that Congress is an independent branch of the U.S. government whose members make their own decisions.
Anti-war voices continued to sound the alarm over a visit that numerous observers say increases the risk of a U.S.-China war.
"The PLA has repeatedly warned that their fighter jets are ready to follow, intercept, electronically interfere, force a landing, or drive Pelosi's plane back," noted author and Black Agenda Report journalist Danny Haiphong. "This is not a drill. Pelosi's trip to Taiwan is a dangerous war provocation."
Ariel Gold, executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and former co-director of the peace group CodePink, lamented that "one would think that while already in the midst of a Cold War that could easily turn hot with nuclear Russia," it "would be prudent not to escalate within nuclear China, but unfortunately Pelosi doesn't feel this way."
RootsAction co-founder Norman Solomon wrote for Common Dreams Monday: "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."
"This is the kind of leadership," added Solomon, "that can get us all killed."
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On 9/11 Anniversary, Anti-War Group Says 'Cut the Pentagon for People, Planet, and Peace'
"We must learn from the horrifying consequences of U.S. war and begin down a path towards peace."
Sep 10, 2021
As the United States prepares to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on Saturday, the women-led peace group CodePink is set to launch a new campaign this weekend featuring a webinar and White House rally "to reflect on the lessons of 9/11" and the so-called War on Terror that followed--and continues to this day.
On Saturday at 3:00 pm ET, CodePink and Massachusetts Peace Action will host "Never Forget: 9/11 and the 20-Year War on Terror," a webinar examining how "9/11 fundamentally altered the culture of the United States and its relationship with the rest of the world."
Scheduled webinar speakers include CodePink co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, War on Terror whistleblowers John Kiriakou and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, anti-war veterans Matthew Hoh and Danny Sjursen, RootsAction national director Norman Solomon, authors Vijay Prashad and Moustafa Bayoumi, and others.
CodePink writes:
In the name of freedom, and of vengeance, the United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan. We stayed for 20 years. With lies of 'weapons of mass destruction' a majority of the country was convinced to invade and occupy Iraq, the worst foreign policy decision of the modern era. The executive branch was given sweeping authority to make war across borders and without limits.
The conflict in the Middle East expanded under both Republican and Democratic presidents, leading to U.S. wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and more. Trillions of dollars were spent. Millions of lives were lost. We created the greatest migration and refugee crisis since World War II.
9/11 was also used as an excuse to change the relationship of the U.S. government to its citizens. In the name of safety the national security state was given expansive surveillance powers, threatening privacy and civil liberties. The Department of Homeland Security was created and with it ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Words like 'enhanced interrogation,' a euphemism for torture, entered the American lexicon and the Bill of Rights was tossed aside.
On Sunday, CodePink, Food Not Bombs, and other partners will rally outside the White House at 3:00 pm ET to launch a new 100-day national campaign to Cut the Pentagon for the People, Planet, Peace, and a Future, featuring a teach-in and the cutting and sharing of a Pentagon-shaped cake and Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Participants will then march to McPherson Square to feed unhoused residents "from the cuttings off the Pentagon."
"Just like CodePink's first vigil in front of the White House in 2002, we'll use this event to begin to organize the movement we need to take on the war profiteers who oppose us at every turn," Evans said in a statement. "When we cut the Pentagon cake and feed our community in front of the White House, we'll be enacting the peace economy we want to create. By nourishing ourselves and everyone around us we'll be modeling the exact opposite of a destructive and extractive war economy."
"While war profiteers might have the money, we have the people power."
--Carley Towne, CodePink
CodePink national director Carley Towne said that "while war profiteers might have the money, we have the people power. Starting on September 12, we will be in the streets building an intersectional movement to cut the Pentagon budget and begin holding our congressional representatives accountable for pouring trillions of dollars into war while neglecting the needs of the people."
Benjamin noted that "after spending two decades and $21 trillion on the United States' so-called 'War on Terror,' people are waking up to what we've been saying all along: We can't continue down the path of deadly, destructive, and costly U.S. militarism."
"Peace activists," she added, "need to use this moment to rally around a simple yet powerful demand that cuts across all movements for social justice: Cut the Pentagon for people, planet, and peace."
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