This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Revenge cycles have no end, and they’ve continued to power endless U.S. warfare—as a kind of perpetual emotion machine—in the name of opposing terrorism.
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When President Biden announced late Friday afternoon that he will nominate Rahm Emanuel to be the U.S. ambassador to Japan, the timing just before the weekend was clearly intended to minimize attention to the swift rebukes that were sure to come. The White House described Emanuel as having “a distinguished career in public service,” but several progressive More
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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
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“If you believe Black lives indeed matter, then the Senate must reject his appointment immediately,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib in response to the announcement.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Four weeks from now, a right-wing Republican could win the governor’s office in California. Some polling indicates that Democrat Gavin Newsom is likely to lose his job via the recall election set for Sept. 14. When CBS News released a poll on Sunday, Gov. Newsom’s razor-thin edge among likely voters was within the margin of error. How this could More
The post How California’s Top Democrats Paved the Way for a Republican Governor This Fall appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
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Whether Newsom will remain governor past mid-autumn now looks like a coin flip. And what’s at stake in the recall goes far beyond California—in fact, all the way to the nation’s capital.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Jane Mayer’s article in The New Yorker last week, “The Big Money Behind the Big Lie,” starkly illuminates how forces aligned with Donald Trump have been upping the ante all year with hyperactive strategies that could enable Republican leaders to choke off democracy, ensuring that Trump or another GOP candidate captures the presidency in 2024. More
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An affirmative program for progressive change—to substantially improve the economic and social conditions of people’s daily lives—will be essential for mobilizing voter turnout and preventing the Republican Party from seizing control of the federal government.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Turner’s defeat is a victory for an array of wealthy individuals and corporations alarmed at her willingness to challenge such corporate powerhouses as Big Pharma, insurance firms and the fossil-fuel industry.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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The race for a vacant congressional seat in northeast Ohio was a fierce battle between status quo politics and calls for social transformation. In the end, when votes were counted Tuesday night, transactional business-as-usual had won by almost 6 percent. But the victory of a corporate Democrat over a progressive firebrand did nothing to resolve More
The post Nina Turner’s Loss is Oligarchy’s Gain appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The race for a vacant congressional seat in northeast Ohio was a fierce battle between status quo politics and calls for social transformation. In the end, when votes were counted Tuesday night, transactional business-as-usual had won by almost 6 percent. But the victory of a corporate Democrat over a progressive firebrand did nothing to resolve More
The post Nina Turner’s Loss is Oligarchy’s Gain appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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For a while, President Biden seemed to be recovering from chronic fantasies about Republicans in Congress. But last week he had a relapse — harming prospects for key progressive legislation and reducing the already slim hopes that the GOP can be prevented from winning control of the House and Senate in midterm elections 15 months from now. More
The post Biden’s Relapse into Hallucinations About GOP Leaders appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The obstacles to enacting long-term structural changes will be heightened to the extent that Biden relapses into a futile quest for “bipartisanship.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Nina Turner is very scary — to power brokers who’ve been spending big money and political capital to keep her out of Congress. With early voting underway, tensions are spiking as the decisive Democratic primary race in northeast Ohio nears its Aug. 3 finish. The winner will be virtually assured of filling the seat in More
The post Who’s Afraid of Nina Turner? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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What’s at stake in the special election is whether progressives will gain a dynamic champion in the House of Representatives.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Progressives cannot and should not be satisfied with the policies of the Biden presidency. Yet breakthrough achievements should not be denied.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Since the Civil War, midterm elections have enabled the president’s party to gain ground in the House of Representatives only three times, and those were in single digits. The last few midterms have been typical: In 2006, with Republican George W. Bush in the White House, his party lost 31 House seats. Under Democrat Barack More
The post In 18 Months, Republicans Are Very Likely to Control Congress. Being in Denial Makes It Worse appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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The GOP have been methodically doing all they can to asphyxiate democracy. And they can do a lot more before the 2022 midterms.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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The two biggest cities on the shores of Lake Erie are now centers of political upheaval. For decades, Buffalo and Cleveland have suffered from widespread poverty and despair in the midst of urban decay. Today, the second-largest cities in New York and Ohio are battlegrounds between activists fighting for progressive change and establishment forces determined to prevent it.
For Buffalo’s entrenched leaders, a shocking crisis arrived out of the blue on June 22 when socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary for mayor, handily defeating a 15-year incumbent Byron Brown, who has a deplorable track record. “I am a coalition builder,” Walton said in her victory speech that night. But for the city’s power brokers, she was a sudden disaster.
“This is organizing,” Walton said as rejoicing supporters cheered. “When we organize, we win. Today is only the beginning. From the very start, I said this is not about making India Walton mayor of Buffalo — this is about building the infrastructure to challenge every damn seat. I’m talking about committee seats, school board, county council. All that we are doing in this moment is claiming what is rightfully ours. We are the workers. We do the work. And we deserve a government that works with and for us.”
To the people running City Hall, the 38-year-old victor seemed to come out of nowhere. Actually, she came out of grassroots activism and a campaign that focused on key issues like food access, pandemic recovery, education, climate, housing and public safety. And for corporate elites accustomed to having their hands on Buffalo’s levers of power, there would not be a GOP fallback. Brown had looked like such a shoo-in for a fifth term that no Republican even bothered to run, so Walton’s name will be the only one on the November ballot.
Alarm sirens went off immediately after election night. The loudest and most prominent came from real estate developer Carl Paladino — whose estimated net worth is around $150 million —a strident Trump supporter and former Republican nominee for governor, who became notorious in 2016 for racist public comments about Michelle and Barack Obama. Walton’s victory incensed Paladino, who has made it clear that he vastly preferred the Black incumbent to the Black challenger. “I will do everything I can to destroy [Walton’s] candidacy,” Paladino said, and he urged fellow business leaders in Buffalo to unite behind Brown as a write-in candidate.
In tacit alliance with Paladino — while keeping the affluent Republican businessman at arm’s-length — Brown announced on Monday evening that he plans to mount a write-in campaign to stay in the mayor’s office. Brown cited among his mayoral achievements “the fact that the tax rate in Buffalo is the lowest it’s been in over 25 years.” Then he began scare-mongering.
“I have also heard from voters that there is tremendous fear that has spread across this community,” Brown said. “People are fearful about the future of our city. They are fearful about the future of their families. They are fearful about the future of their children. And they have said to me that they do not want a radical socialist occupying the mayor’s office in Buffalo City Hall. You know, we know the difference between socialism and democracy. We are going to fight for democracy in the city of Buffalo. The voters have said that they don’t want an unqualified, inexperienced radical socialist trying to learn on the job on the backs of the residents of this community. We will not let it happen. It will not stand.”
Such attacks, with their echoes of Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump, are likely to be at the core of Brown’s strategy for winning the general election. But he’ll have to do it in conflict with the formal apparatus of his party in Buffalo. After the write-in campaign announcement, the Erie County Democratic Party issued an unequivocal statement about India Walton, “to strongly affirm once again that we are with her, now and through the general election in the fall.” It added: “Last Tuesday, India proved she has the message and the means to move and inspire the people of Buffalo. It was a historic moment in Western New York politics. The voters heard her message and embraced her vision for the city’s future, and we look forward to working with her and her team to cross that final finish line on Nov. 2.”
Two hundred miles away, in northeast Ohio, the clash between progressives and corporatists has been escalating for several months, ever since Rep. Marcia Fudge left a congressional seat vacant when she became President Biden’s HUD secretary. Early voting begins next week, and the district is so heavily Democratic that the winner of the Aug. 3 primary is virtually certain to fill the vacancy this fall.
On Tuesday, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, went out of his way to make clear that he doesn’t want the frontrunner in the race, progressive stalwart Nina Turner, to become a colleague in Congress. Though nominally endorsing Turner’s main opponent, Shontel Brown, the clear underlying message was: Stop Turner.
Clyburn went beyond just making an endorsement. He provided some barbed innuendos in an interview with the New York Times, which reported comments that say something about Clyburn’s self-conception but nothing much about Turner. “What I try to do is demonstrate by precept and example how we are to proceed as a party,” he said. “When I spoke out against sloganeering, like ‘Burn, baby, burn’ in the 1960s and ‘defund the police,’ which I think is cutting the throats of the party, I know exactly where my constituents are. They are against that, and I’m against that.”
In fact, Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of programs being championed by Turner, none more notably than Medicare for All, a proposal that Clyburn and many of his big funders have worked hard to block. “Clyburn has vacuumed in more than $1 million from donors in the pharmaceutical industry — and he previously made headlines vilifying Medicare for All during the 2020 presidential primary,” the Daily Poster pointed out on Wednesday.
The corporate money behind Clyburn is of a piece with the forces arrayed against Turner. What she calls “the commodification of health care” is a major reason.
In mid-June, Turner “launched her television spot entitled ‘Worry,’ in which she talks about how her family’s struggle to pay health care bills led her to support Medicare for All,” the Daily Poster reported. “The very next day, corporate lobbyists held a Washington fundraiser for Turner’s primary opponent, Shontel Brown. Among those headlining the fundraiser was Jerome Murray — a registered lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers Association, which has been backing a nationwide campaign to reduce support for Medicare for All.”
Whether Clyburn’s endorsement will have a significant impact on Cleveland voters is hard to say, but it signaled that high-ranking Democrats are more determined than ever to keep Turner out of Congress if they possibly can. His move came two weeks after Hillary Clinton endorsed Brown, who has also received endorsements from the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Joyce Beatty, and House Democrats’ chief deputy whip, Rep. Pete Aguilar. On the other hand, a dozen progressive members of the House have endorsed Turner, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Carmen Yulín Cruz, the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico — who, like Turner, was a national co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign — is a strong supporter of Turner for Congress. This week, summing up the fierce opposition from power brokers who want to prevent a Turner victory, Cruz used words that equally apply to the powerful interests trying to prevent India Walton from becoming the next mayor of Buffalo: “They’re afraid of a politician that can’t be bought.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The second-largest cities in New York and Ohio are battlegrounds between activists fighting for progressive change and establishment forces determined to prevent it.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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When Hillary Clinton endorsed Nina Turner’s main opponent recently, it was much more than just an attempt to boost a corporate Democrat. Clinton’s praise for candidate Shontel Brown was almost beside the point. Like other power brokers and the big-money PACs now trying to sway the special election for a vacant congressional seat in northeast Ohio, Clinton is doing what she can to keep the deeply progressive Turner out of Congress. (Rep. Marcia Fudge, who previously held the seat, resigned to become President Biden’s HUD secretary.)
Time is short. Polling shows Turner with a big lead, early voting begins in less than two weeks and Election Day is Aug. 3. What scares the political establishment is what energizes her supporters: Turner won’t back down when social justice is at stake.
That reality was clearly audible last Tuesday night during the first debate of the campaign, sponsored by the City Club of Cleveland. “I am running to be a voice for change, to uplift the downtrodden, including the poor, the working poor and the barely middle class,” Turner began. “You send me to Congress, I’m going to make sure that we tax the wealthy, make them pay their fair share, and to center the people who need it the most in this district.”
The contrast was sharp with Brown, who chairs the Democratic Party in Cuyahoga County, a major population center that includes the city of Cleveland. The discussion of health care was typical: Brown voiced a preference for a “public option,” while Turner strongly advocated Medicare for All while calling the current health care situation “absurd” and “asinine.” Brown sounded content to tinker with the status quo. Turner flatly declared: “The employer-based system, the commodification of health care, does not work in the United States of America. Almost 100 million people are either underinsured or uninsured right now.”
After Brown emphasized that “we have to be able to compromise so we can get some things done,” Turner closed with a jab at those eager to block the momentum of her campaign for Congress: “You need to have somebody that will lead this community, who does have a vision and understands being a partner does not mean being a puppet, that working with does not mean acquiescing to. … You will always know whose side I am on.”
That’s exactly the problem for the party establishment. Its backers know full well whose side Turner is on.
So the attacks are escalating from Brown’s campaign. It sent out a mailer — complete with an out-of-focus photo of Turner, made to look lurid — under the headline “Nina Turner Opposed President Biden and Worked Against Democrats.” A more accurate headline would have been: “Nina Turner Supported Sen. Sanders and Worked Against Neoliberal Democrats.” The Brown campaign’s first TV ad, which began airing last month, features her saying that she will “work with Joe Biden … that’s different than Nina Turner.”
A former editorial page editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Brent Larkin, wrote: “Brown will be a well-financed candidate with deep-pocketed supporters who aren’t afraid to play rough. That’s because Turner can’t be beaten unless opponents plant seeds of doubt about her fitness, convincing voters her harsh criticisms of President Joe Biden would make it impossible for her to get things done for her community. The notion that Biden might punish a constituency important to him because Turner represents that constituency in Congress is far-fetched. During the 2020 campaign, Sen. Kamala Harris was bitterly critical of Biden’s civil rights record. Nevertheless, Biden chose her as his running mate, effectively rewarding her with the vice presidency.”
Brown’s backers are eager to “play rough” because corporate power is at issue. It’s not only that Turner crisscrossed the nation, speaking eloquently in support of both of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, serving as a national co-chair during the last one. Powerful backers of the Democratic Party’s top leadership — cozy and enmeshed with corporate America and the military-industrial complex — realize that “Rep. Nina Turner, D-Ohio” would significantly increase the leverage of genuinely progressive members of the House. For the Clinton wing of the party, that would be a frigging nightmare.
As the marquee anti-Turner candidate, Brown is leaving the more blatant smears to outfits like the “Protecting Our Vote PAC” (which spent $41,998 in the last cycle in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat now-Rep. Cori Bush in Missouri). That PAC has released a scurrilous attack ad through Facebook, not merely telling viewers to vote for Brown but claiming, among other things, that “Nina Turner is not a real Democrat, you can’t trust her,” and she “has no respect for anyone, not even our president,” and “Nina Turner is all about Nina, she doesn’t care about Ohio, she doesn’t care about getting things done, all she cares about is making noise.”
Though some may see Turner only as a firebrand speaker at political rallies, I was in dozens of meetings with her last year when her patient hard work was equally inspiring as she put in long hours with humility, compassion and dedication. I saw her as the real deal when we were colleagues for several months while she worked with RootsAction.org as a strategic delegate adviser for the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
Recalling how she works behind the scenes, I can understand even more why the party establishment is so anxious to block her entry to Congress. While Turner is a seasoned legislator — she served on the Cleveland City Council and in the Ohio State Senate for a total of nine years — she’s committed to the meticulous and sometimes tedious work of organizing and coalition-building that, in the long run, can make all the difference for progressive change.
The day that Clinton made her endorsement of Brown, a tweet from Turner offered an apt retort. Saying that she was “proud to be running a campaign focused on the issues that matter most to working people,” Turner added: “My district knows all too well that the politics of yesterday are incapable of delivering the change we desperately need.”
The next day, underscoring wide awareness that the corporate “politics of yesterday” must not be the politics of tomorrow, the Turner campaign announced that it raised six figures in donations in less than 24 hours; Clinton’s intervention had been a blessing. Overall, at last report, the Turner campaign has received donations from 54,000 different individuals, with contributions averaging $27.
Dollars pouring into Shontel Brown’s campaign are coming from a very different political and social universe. As the Daily Poster has reported, “business-friendly Democrats” and Washington lobbyists for huge corporations — including “Big Oil, Big Pharma, Fox News and Wall Street” — are providing big bucks to stop Nina Turner from becoming Congresswoman Turner.
Bernie Sanders described the situation clearly in a recent mass email: “The political establishment and their super PACs are lining up behind Nina’s opponent during the critical final weeks of this primary. And you can bet they will do and spend whatever it takes to try and defeat her.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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When Hillary Clinton endorsed Nina Turner’s main opponent last week, it was much more than just an attempt to boost a corporate Democrat. Clinton’s praise for candidate Shontel Brown was almost beside the point. Like other power brokers and the big-money PACs now trying to sway the special election for a vacant congressional seat in northeast Ohio, More
The post Why Corporate Democrats are Trying to Keep Nina Turner Out of Congress appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
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Powerful backers of the Democratic Party’s top leadership—cozy and enmeshed with corporate America and the military-industrial complex—realize that “Congresswoman Nina Turner (D-OH)” would significantly increase the leverage of genuinely progressive members of the House.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Cleveland has been spiraling downward. It’s one of the poorest cities in the country, beset by worsening violent crime, poverty and decaying infrastructure. Now, 42 years after the end of his first term as mayor, Dennis Kucinich is ready for his second. Kucinich won a race for mayor of Cleveland at age 31 and promptly More
The post If Dennis Kucinich Becomes the Mayor of Cleveland, It’ll Be a Shock to the System. Again. appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
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You can bet his campaign has already set off alarm bells among economic elites in Cleveland and far beyond.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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No matter what happens at Wednesday’s summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin in Geneva, a grim reality is that Democratic Party leaders have already hobbled its potential to move the world away from the worsening dangers of nuclear war. After nearly five years of straining to depict Donald Trump as some kind of Russian agent More
The post How Democrats and Progressives Undermined the Potential of the Biden-Putin Summit appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
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Most Democrats in Congress are now locked into a modern Cold War mentality that endangers human survival.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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Israel’s missile attack on media offices in Gaza City last weekend was successful. A gratifying response came quickly from the head of The Associated Press, which had a bureau in the building for 15 years: “The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today.” For people who care about truth, More
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This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
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When Reese Erlich died in early April, we lost a global reporter who led by example. During five decades as a progressive journalist, Reese created and traveled an independent path while avoiding the comfortable ruts dug by corporate media. When people in the United States read or heard his reporting from more than 50 countries, he offered windows on the world that were not tinted red-white-and-blue. Often, he illuminated grim consequences of U.S. foreign policy.
The first memorable conversation I had with Reese was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on the way to Iraq in September 2002 — as it turned out, six months before the U.S. invasion. He was one of the few journalists covering a small delegation, including Congressman Nick Rahall and former Senator James Abourezk, which the Institute for Public Accuracy sponsored in an attempt to establish U.S.-Iraqi dialogue and avert the looming invasion.
As the organizer of the trip, I was on edge, and I asked Reese for his assessment. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the Middle East, he provided cogent insights and talked about what was at stake.
After filing stories from various parts of Iraq, Reese returned home to California and we worked together to write alternating chapters of a book that came out two months before the invasion — “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.” (The book is posted online.) Reese’s eyewitness reporting and analysis were crucial to the book.
Reese critiqued the basic flaws in U.S. media coverage then beating the war drums, and he also wrote about the “professional” atmosphere that led U.S. journalists to conform.
As President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair methodically lied the U.S. and Britain into a war on Iraq, Reese pointed out: “The Bush and Blair administrations are fighting a two-front war: one against Iraq, another for public opinion at home. The major media are as much a battleground as the fortifications in Baghdad. And, for the most part, Bush and Blair have stalwart media soldiers manning the barricades at home.”
In a chapter titled “Media Coverage: A View from the Ground,” Reese wrote: “The U.S. is supposed to have the best and freest media in the world, but in my experience, having reported from dozens of countries, the higher up you go in the journalistic feeding chain, the less free the reporting. . . . The journalist’s best education is on the job. In addition to journalistic skills, young reporters also learn about acceptable parameters of reporting. There’s little formal censorship in the U.S. media. But you learn who are acceptable or unacceptable sources. Most corporate officials and politicians are acceptable, the higher up the better.”
Reese summed up: “Money, prestige, career options, ideological predilections — combined with the down sides of filing stories unpopular with the government — all cast their influence on foreign correspondents. You don’t win a Pulitzer for challenging the basic assumptions of empire.”
While Reese won prizes, including a Peabody Award, he did something far more important — skillfully and consistently challenging “the basic assumptions of empire.”
Reese did so with balance and accuracy as a freelancer reporting for such outlets as the Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times Syndicate, Dallas Morning News and Chicago Tribune.
I saw Reese at work in Iran in 2005 and Afghanistan in 2009. He was meticulous and good-natured even when the journey became exhausting and stressful. Unusual stories were usual for him. It was all in a day’s work when Reese lined up an interview with a grandson of the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Khomeini or got us to a women’s rights protest at Tehran University, or when he located an out-of-the-way refugee camp in Kabul where we could interview victims of the war.
Along with his radio reports and articles, Reese went in-depth as the author of “Inside Syria,” “The Iran Agenda Today,” “Dateline Havana” and “Conversations with Terrorists.” Reese’s firsthand reporting, multilayered knowledge and wry humor enrich those books. Meanwhile, he reached many people via interviews and public appearances, even when he was fighting cancer in his last months (as when he spoke about U.S.-Iranian relations and the Iran nuclear deal in February).
During recent years, Reese’s “Foreign Correspondent” column for The Progressive magazine appeared in kindred online outlets like Common Dreams and the San Francisco-based 48 Hills. His last article — “My Final Column?” — embodies the honesty and deep humanity that made Reese such a wonderful journalist.
The post Reporting from Around the World, Reese Erlich Was a Beacon of Independent Journalism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
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When Reese Erlich died in early April, we lost a global reporter who led by example. During five decades as a progressive journalist, Reese created and traveled an independent path while avoiding the comfortable ruts dug by corporate media. When people in the United States read or heard his reporting from more than 50 countries, he offered windows on the world that were not tinted red-white-and-blue. Often, he illuminated grim consequences of U.S. foreign policy.
The first memorable conversation I had with Reese was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on the way to Iraq in September 2002 — as it turned out, six months before the U.S. invasion. He was one of the few journalists covering a small delegation, including Congressman Nick Rahall and former Senator James Abourezk, which the Institute for Public Accuracy sponsored in an attempt to establish U.S.-Iraqi dialogue and avert the looming invasion.
As the organizer of the trip, I was on edge, and I asked Reese for his assessment. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of the Middle East, he provided cogent insights and talked about what was at stake.
After filing stories from various parts of Iraq, Reese returned home to California and we worked together to write alternating chapters of a book that came out two months before the invasion — “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.” (The book is posted online.) Reese’s eyewitness reporting and analysis were crucial to the book.
Reese critiqued the basic flaws in U.S. media coverage then beating the war drums, and he also wrote about the “professional” atmosphere that led U.S. journalists to conform.
As President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair methodically lied the U.S. and Britain into a war on Iraq, Reese pointed out: “The Bush and Blair administrations are fighting a two-front war: one against Iraq, another for public opinion at home. The major media are as much a battleground as the fortifications in Baghdad. And, for the most part, Bush and Blair have stalwart media soldiers manning the barricades at home.”
In a chapter titled “Media Coverage: A View from the Ground,” Reese wrote: “The U.S. is supposed to have the best and freest media in the world, but in my experience, having reported from dozens of countries, the higher up you go in the journalistic feeding chain, the less free the reporting. . . . The journalist’s best education is on the job. In addition to journalistic skills, young reporters also learn about acceptable parameters of reporting. There’s little formal censorship in the U.S. media. But you learn who are acceptable or unacceptable sources. Most corporate officials and politicians are acceptable, the higher up the better.”
Reese summed up: “Money, prestige, career options, ideological predilections — combined with the down sides of filing stories unpopular with the government — all cast their influence on foreign correspondents. You don’t win a Pulitzer for challenging the basic assumptions of empire.”
While Reese won prizes, including a Peabody Award, he did something far more important — skillfully and consistently challenging “the basic assumptions of empire.”
Reese did so with balance and accuracy as a freelancer reporting for such outlets as the Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times Syndicate, Dallas Morning News and Chicago Tribune.
I saw Reese at work in Iran in 2005 and Afghanistan in 2009. He was meticulous and good-natured even when the journey became exhausting and stressful. Unusual stories were usual for him. It was all in a day’s work when Reese lined up an interview with a grandson of the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Khomeini or got us to a women’s rights protest at Tehran University, or when he located an out-of-the-way refugee camp in Kabul where we could interview victims of the war.
Along with his radio reports and articles, Reese went in-depth as the author of “Inside Syria,” “The Iran Agenda Today,” “Dateline Havana” and “Conversations with Terrorists.” Reese’s firsthand reporting, multilayered knowledge and wry humor enrich those books. Meanwhile, he reached many people via interviews and public appearances, even when he was fighting cancer in his last months (as when he spoke about U.S.-Iranian relations and the Iran nuclear deal in February).
During recent years, Reese’s “Foreign Correspondent” column for The Progressive magazine appeared in kindred online outlets like Common Dreams and the San Francisco-based 48 Hills. His last article — “My Final Column?” — embodies the honesty and deep humanity that made Reese such a wonderful journalist.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Photograph Source: Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York – SAS_1613 – CC BY 2.0
The governors of New York and California — the most populous states led by Democrats — now symbolize how slick liberal images are no substitute for genuinely progressive priorities.
After 10 years as New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo is facing an uproar over revelations that his administration intentionally and drastically undercounted the deaths from COVID in nursing homes. Meanwhile, in California, the once-bright political glow of Gavin Newsom has dimmed, in large part because of personally hypocritical elitism and a zig-zag “middle ground” approach to public-health safeguards during the pandemic, unduly deferring to business interests.
The political circumstances differ: Cuomo has been in conflict with New York progressives for many years over key policy matters, whereas Newsom was somewhat of a golden boy for Golden State progressives — if they didn’t look too closely at his corporate-friendly policies. But some underlying patterns are similar.
Both Cuomo and Newsom know how to talk progressive, but they’re corporate Democrats to the core. On many issues in the state legislature, Cuomo has ended up aligning himself with Republican lawmakers to thwart progressive initiatives. In California, where a right-wing petition drive is likely to force Newsom into a recall election, the governor’s moderate record is hardly cause for the state’s huge number of left-leaning voters to be enthusiastic about him.
Anyone who thinks that the current Cuomo scandal about nursing-home deaths is a recent one-off problem, rather than reflecting a deep-seated corporate orientation, should take a look at investigative reporting by David Sirota that appeared nine months ago under the headline “Cuomo Gave Immunity to Nursing Home Execs After Big Donations — Now People Are Dying.” Sirota wrote:
“As Gov. Andrew Cuomo faced a spirited challenge in his bid to win New York’s 2018 Democratic primary, his political apparatus got a last-minute boost: a powerful health care industry group suddenly poured more than $1 million into a Democratic committee backing his campaign. Less than two years after that flood of cash from the Greater New York Hospital Association, Cuomo signed legislation last month quietly shielding hospital and nursing-home executives from the threat of lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. The provision, inserted into an annual budget bill by Cuomo’s aides, created one of the nation’s most explicit immunity protections for health care industry officials, according to legal experts.”
On the other side of the continent, Newsom is second to none in sounding the alarm about climate change and the need to move away from fossil fuels. But Newsweek reports that during his first two years as governor, Newsom’s administration “approved more than 8,000 oil and gas permits on state lands.” He continues to issue many fracking permits. (As the Wall Street Journal noted days ago, fracking is now “the source of most oil and gas produced in the U.S.”)
Gov. Newsom’s immediate predecessor, Jerry Brown, became fond of crowing that he governed the way a person would steer a canoe, paddling sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right. The metaphor did not answer the question of where the boat was headed.
It may be relevant that Cuomo and Newsom grew up in the nurturing shadow of extraordinary privilege, making them ill-positioned to see much beyond the comfortable bubbles surrounding them.
Andrew Cuomo’s father Mario was New York’s governor for three terms. At age 35, the younger Cuomo was appointed to be assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development by President Clinton, who promoted him to HUD secretary four years later. Such powerful backers propelled him toward the governor’s mansion in Albany.
From the outset, Newsom has been enmeshed with power. As longtime California journalist Dan Walters recently pointed out, “Gov. Gavin Newsom wasn’t born to wealth and privilege but as a youngster he was enveloped in it as the surrogate son of billionaire Gordon Getty. Later, Getty’s personal trust fund — managed by Newsom’s father — provided initial financing for business ventures that made Newsom wealthy enough to segue into a political career as a protégé of San Francisco’s fabled political mastermind, Willie Brown.”
It’s possible to transcend such pampered upbringings — Franklin Delano Roosevelt certainly did — but failures to show credible concern for the working class and serve their interests have put both Cuomo and Newsom in today’s political pickles.
Like all politicians, Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom are expendable as far as the corporate system is concerned. If their individual brands lose appeal, plenty of other corporate-power servants are eagerly available.
When elected officials like Cuomo and Newsom fade, the solution is not to find like-minded replacements with unsullied images. The problem isn’t the brand, it’s the quality of the political product.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. And some trends are encouraging.
Genuine progressive populism — insisting that government should strive to meet widespread social needs rather than serve the special interests of the wealthy and corporate elites — is threatening to disrupt the complacency of mainline Democratic leaders who have long coasted on merely being better than Republicans.
More than ever, many entrenched Democrats are worried about primary challenges from the left. Such fears are all to the good. Progressive activism and shifts in public opinion have strengthened movements that are recruiting, supporting and sometimes electing candidates who offer far better alternatives.
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