25 February 20
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25 February 20
RSN: Norman Solomon | As a Corporate Tool, Buttigieg Is Now a Hammer to Bash Sanders
Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
Solomon writes: "Buttigieg has gone from pseudo-progressive to anti-progressive in the last year, and much of his current mission involves denouncing Bernie Sanders with attack lines that are corporate-media favorites."
oon after his distant third-place finish in the Nevada caucuses, Pete Buttigieg sent out a mass email saying that “Senator Sanders believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans.” The blast depicted “the choice before us” in stark terms: “We can prioritize either ideological purity or inclusive victory. We can either call people names online or we can call them into our movement. We can either tighten a narrow and hardcore base or open the tent to a new, broad, big-hearted American coalition.”
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Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
Solomon writes: "Buttigieg has gone from pseudo-progressive to anti-progressive in the last year, and much of his current mission involves denouncing Bernie Sanders with attack lines that are corporate-media favorites."
oon after his distant third-place finish in the Nevada caucuses, Pete Buttigieg sent out a mass email saying that “Senator Sanders believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans.” The blast depicted “the choice before us” in stark terms: “We can prioritize either ideological purity or inclusive victory. We can either call people names online or we can call them into our movement. We can either tighten a narrow and hardcore base or open the tent to a new, broad, big-hearted American coalition.”
The bizarre accusations of being “narrow” and not “inclusive” were aimed at a candidate who’d just won a historic victory with one of the broadest coalitions in recent Democratic Party history.
Buttigieg has gone from pseudo-progressive to anti-progressive in the last year, and much of his current mission involves denouncing Bernie Sanders with attack lines that are corporate-media favorites (“ideological purity … call people names online … a narrow and hardcore base”). Buttigieg’s chances of winning the 2020 presidential nomination are now tiny, but he might have a bright future as a rising leader of corporate Democrats.
Weirdly, Buttigieg’s claim that Sanders has “a narrow and hardcore base” came from someone who appears to be almost incapable of getting votes from black people. In Nevada, columnist E.J. Dionne noted, Buttigieg “received virtually no African American votes.” And Buttigieg made his claim in the midst of a Nevada vote count showing that Sanders received more than three times as many votes as he did. The Washington Post reported that Sanders “even narrowly prevailed among those who identified as moderate or conservative.”
As chances that Buttigieg could win the nomination slip away — the latest polling in South Carolina indicates his vote total there on Saturday is unlikely to be any higher than it was in Nevada — his mission is being steadily repurposed. After increasingly aligning himself with the dominant corporate sectors of the party — vacuuming up millions of dollars in bundled checks along the way — Buttigieg is hurling an array of bogus accusations at Sanders.
Four months ago, while Buttigieg’s poll numbers were spiking in Iowa and big donations from wealthy donors poured in, I wrote an article with a headline dubbing him a “Sharp Corporate Tool.” The piece cited an influx of contributions to Buttigieg from the health insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital industries — while he executed a U-turn from proclaiming support for Medicare for All to touting a deceptive rhetorical concoction called “Medicare for all who want it.” I concluded that Buttigieg is “a glib ally of corporate America posing as an advocate for working people and their families.”
Since then, continuing his rightward swerve, Buttigieg has become even more glib, refining his campaign’s creation myth and fine-tuning his capacity to combine corporate policy positions with wispy intimations of technocratic populism. Buttigieg is highly articulate, very shrewd — and now, in attack mode, more valuable than ever to corporate patrons who are feverishly trying to figure out how to prevent Sanders from winning the nomination. During last week’s Nevada debate, Buttigieg warned that Sanders “wants to burn this party down.”
Over the weekend, the Buttigieg campaign sent out email that tried to obscure its major support from extremely wealthy backers. “At the last debate,” Buttigieg’s deputy campaign manager Hari Sevugan wrote indignantly, “Senator Bernie Sanders condemned us for taking contributions from billionaires. That’s interesting. Because what that tells us is in the eyes of Bernie Sanders, the donations of 45 folks (that’s .0054% of our total donor base) are more important than the donations of nearly 1,000,000 grassroots supporters.”
But Sevugan left out the pivotal roles that very rich contributors have played in launching and sustaining the Buttigieg campaign, with lobbyists and corporate executives serving as high-dollar collectors of bundled donations that add up to untold millions. Buttigieg’s corresponding shifts in policy prescriptions make some sense if we follow the money.
In a detailed article that appeared last week, “Buttigieg Is a Wall Street Democrat Beholden to Corporate Interests,” former Communications Workers of America chief economist Kenneth Peres summed up: “Buttigieg and his supporters like to portray him as a ‘change agent.’ However, he has proven to be a change agent that will not in any significant way challenge the current distribution of power, wealth and income in this country. Given his history, it is no surprise that Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Health Insurers, Real Estate Developers and Private Equity have decided to invest millions of dollars into Buttigieg's campaign.”
In the aftermath of the Nevada caucuses, Buttigieg is escalating his attacks on Sanders (who I actively support), in sync with “news” coverage that is especially virulent from some major corporate outlets. Consider, for example, the de facto smear article that The New York Times printed on Sunday. Or the venomous hostility toward Sanders that’s routine on Comcast-owned MSNBC, which has stepped up its routine trashing of Sanders by journalists and invited guests.
More than ever, corporate Democrats and their media allies are freaking out about the grassroots momentum of the Bernie 2020 campaign. No one has figured out how to stop him. But Buttigieg is determined to do as much damage as he can.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Richard Grenell, whom President Donald Trump appointed as acting director of national intelligence. (photo: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images)
Trump's New Spy Chief Used to Work for a Foreign Politician the US Accused of Corruption
Issac Arnsdorf, ProPublica
Excerpt: "Richard Grenell did not disclose payments for advocacy work on behalf of a Moldovan politician whom the U.S. later accused of corruption."
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Issac Arnsdorf, ProPublica
Excerpt: "Richard Grenell did not disclose payments for advocacy work on behalf of a Moldovan politician whom the U.S. later accused of corruption."
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John Oliver. (photo: HBO)
John Oliver Urges the Country to Not Vote for Mike Bloomberg: 'Don't Even F*cking Think About It'
Marlow Stern, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "The 'Last Week Tonight' host can't believe that the multi-billionaire who championed stop-and-frisk is trying to purchase a presidential nomination."
ne week after going in on Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) over her delusional defense of her Trump impeachment vote, John Oliver kicked off Last Week Tonight with a blistering tirade against Democratic candidate Mike Bloomberg—a man with an estimated net worth of $63.7 billion who’s purchased his way up the polls.
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Marlow Stern, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "The 'Last Week Tonight' host can't believe that the multi-billionaire who championed stop-and-frisk is trying to purchase a presidential nomination."
The “Last Week Tonight” host can’t believe that the multi-billionaire who championed stop-and-frisk is trying to purchase a presidential nomination.
ne week after going in on Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) over her delusional defense of her Trump impeachment vote, John Oliver kicked off Last Week Tonight with a blistering tirade against Democratic candidate Mike Bloomberg—a man with an estimated net worth of $63.7 billion who’s purchased his way up the polls.
After referring to the Democratic primary—which Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) is running away with—as “a fun contest where the winner gets a new nickname from the president before ultimately losing the Electoral College,” the HBO host came for Bloomberg, a man with 40 sexual harassment or discrimination cases against him from 64 employees, most of whom have been muzzled by non-disclosure agreements.
“I know he technically does have two daughters but that doesn’t change the fact that Michael Bloomberg has big virgin energy,” joked Oliver.
“Even if he drops in the polls, don’t expect him to go away anytime soon,” he continued. “He doesn’t have to. He’s personally spent more than $400 million, mostly on ads, over the last few months. Meanwhile, Google and Facebook have served up 2 billion Bloomberg ads, which has worked out to roughly 30,000 a minute.”
If that weren’t enough, the “charisma-impaired” candidate’s campaign is paying loads for some truly embarrassing sponsored content over many popular Instagram meme accounts.
But the biggest problem, as Oliver sees it, is the racist stop-and-frisk policy that Bloomberg enforced as mayor of New York City. Over 5 million people were affected by stop-and-frisk, while cops made 700,000 stops in 2011 alone (in a city of just over 8 million people).
“This policy was appalling, and fell disproportionately on black and Latino New Yorkers who were the target of over 80 percent of the stops at its peak—something for which Bloomberg was completely unrepentant,” Oliver explained, before throwing to a 2013 clip of Bloomberg telling a talk-radio host, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”
And, “while Bloomberg eventually apologized for it, he only did it last November—just days before launching his campaign,” said Oliver. “It’s kind of amazing that Bloomberg thinks his money can make people forget all of this.”
With that, Oliver threw to a meme and implored his viewers that when it comes to voting for Bloomberg, “Don’t even fucking think about it.”
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Pro-immigration reform demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The Supreme Court Could Criminalize Immigration Advice and Advocacy
Sarah Sherman-Stokes, The Hill
Sherman-Stokes writes: "Today the Supreme Court will hear oral argument on whether a federal statute that criminalizes any person who encourages a non-citizen to come to, or reside in, the United States, should be struck down."
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Sarah Sherman-Stokes, The Hill
Sherman-Stokes writes: "Today the Supreme Court will hear oral argument on whether a federal statute that criminalizes any person who encourages a non-citizen to come to, or reside in, the United States, should be struck down."
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'Fighting for the right to unionize is an important first step for any group of workers. But the work doesn't end there - a union's real strength comes not from the contracts it signs, but from the ferocity and courage of its members.' (photo: Stephan Bitterwolf)
Why Should You Care About the UCSC Strike?
Nick Slater, Current Affairs
Slater writes: "Last December, hundreds of graduate students at the University of California-Santa Cruz (UCSC) voted to go on strike. Their sole demand was a cost of living adjustment."
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Nick Slater, Current Affairs
Slater writes: "Last December, hundreds of graduate students at the University of California-Santa Cruz (UCSC) voted to go on strike. Their sole demand was a cost of living adjustment."
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Authorities last week announced the re-opening of the schools amid a continuing security lockdown. (photo: Shuaib Bashir/Al Jazeera)
Kashmir Students Attend School for the First Time in 7 Months
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Nearly a million students in Indian-administered Kashmir have attended classes for the first time in almost seven months."
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Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Nearly a million students in Indian-administered Kashmir have attended classes for the first time in almost seven months."
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'Nature softened the voices in my head and stabilised my mood': Lucy Jones at the cemetery near her home. (photo: Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi/Guardian UK)
Ecological Grief: I Mourn the Loss of Nature - It Saved Me From Addiction
Lucy Jones, Guardian UK
Jones writes: "The more I learned about the benefits a connection to nature can have on our minds, the more it seemed appalling that access to nature is so threatened in some places."
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Lucy Jones, Guardian UK
Jones writes: "The more I learned about the benefits a connection to nature can have on our minds, the more it seemed appalling that access to nature is so threatened in some places."
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