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.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Impeachment dramas on Capitol Hill have routinely skipped over a question that we should be willing to ask even if Congress won’t: “What about a president’s unimpeachable offenses?”

The question is the flip side of one that Republican Gerald Ford candidly addressed when he was the House minority leader 50 years ago: “What, then, is an impeachable offense? The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

By narrowly defining which offenses are impeachable, political elites are implicitly telling us which offenses aren’t.

So, when the House approved two articles of impeachment on Donald Trump in December 2019 and one impeachment article last month, the actions were much too late and much too little.

On Feb. 6, 2017, less than three weeks into Trump’s term, I wrote in The Hill newspaper: “From the outset of his presidency, Trump has been violating the U.S. Constitution in a way that we have not seen before and should not tolerate. It’s time for members of Congress to get the impeachment process underway.” I pointed out that “the president continues to violate two ‘emoluments’ clauses in the Constitution. One prohibits any gifts or benefits from foreign governments, and the other prohibits the same from the U.S. government or any U.S. state.”

But, at the outset, treating President Trump as unimpeachable — despite those flagrant violations of the Constitution — greased the wheels for the runaway madness of his presidency in the years that followed. As Trump’s destructive joyride went on, reasons to impeach him proliferated. Researchers easily drew up dozens of articles of impeachment. But in the eyes of political elites, as with previous presidents, Trump’s offenses were seen as unimpeachable.

Two decades earlier, President Bill Clinton became the second impeached president in U.S. history. The frenzy was akin to vilifying Al Capone for tax evasion. “We all seem to have lost our sense of proportion,” historian Howard Zinn wrote five weeks before Clinton’s impeachment. “Why are the political leaders of the United States and the major media talking of impeaching Bill Clinton for lies about sex, surely not the most important sins of his administration?”

Writing in November 1998, Zinn added: “If Clinton is to be impeached, why do it for frivolous reasons? I can think of at least 10 reasons to impeach him, for acts far more serious than his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky or his lies to Kenneth Starr. I am speaking of matters of life and death for large numbers of people.”

Zinn cited such matters as missile attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan; Clinton’s refusal to accept a Canadian proposal to ban land mines; continuation of “embargoes on Cuba and Iraq, causing widespread misery in Cuba for lack of food and medicine, and hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq according to U.N. statistics”; and squandering vast funds on the U.S. military while people were suffering and dying at home and abroad due to lack of health care, nutrition and housing.

There was no second impeachment of Clinton after he used a “diplomatic” scam called the Rambouillet accords to justify launching intensive U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, without congressional authorization. Clinton persisted with a continuous air war for more than two months — making history by blatantly violating the War Powers Resolution.

Trump — like Barack Obama and George W. Bush before him — was able to order missile strikes and deploy troops in numerous war-torn countries without congressional constraints. And there was no reason to be concerned that Congress might impeach him for war crimes. The reasons for such impunity are rooted in the history of “unimpeachable” offenses.

Consider the proceedings in Congress that forced President Richard Nixon to resign when impeachment was imminent in mid-1974. The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment — focusing on Nixon’s obstruction of justice after the Watergate break-in by operatives for his re-election campaign, misuse of federal agencies to violate citizens’ constitutional rights, and noncompliance with congressional subpoenas.

Unmentioned in the Nixon impeachment articles: the Vietnam War that he had prolonged with a vengeance while claiming to seek peace. With methodical deception, Nixon inflicted a massive horrendous war — but his crimes against humanity were judged to be completely unimpeachable.

Also entirely excluded from the Nixon impeachment articles was the merciless U.S. bombardment of northern Laos that slaughtered people who lived on the Plain of Jars, making Laos “the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.” The impeachment articles likewise made no mention of Nixon’s ordering of the secret and illegal carpet-bombing of Cambodia, which began two months into his presidency and persisted year after year.

On July 31, 1973 — nearly a full year before Nixon’s resignation — Democratic Rep. Robert Drinan introduced an impeachment resolution. He said it was triggered by the “recent revelation that President Nixon conducted a totally secret air war in Cambodia.”

As journalist Judith Coburn noted, “The secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power and political manipulation of government agencies as Watergate, but only a few congressional representatives like John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Edward Mezvinsky supported Drinan’s Cambodia article, which was soundly defeated by the House impeachment committee 26-12.”

Gerald Ford’s “only honest answer” — acknowledging that an impeachable offense is only “whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history” — foreshadowed the impeachment proceedings against Nixon, Clinton and Trump.

If what’s impeachable is only what members of Congress say it is, constituents should insist that egregiously narrow definitions must no longer prevail. Otherwise, the operative standard for presidents will continue to be what they can get away with — in tandem with a collectively feckless Congress.

For now, the presidential offenses that are routinely considered unimpeachable — and therefore ultimately acceptable — tell us a lot about Congress. And about U.S. mass media. And maybe about ourselves.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The Republican plunge into Trumpism has made the party especially unhinged and dangerous, but its basic ideology has long been a shameless assault on minimal standards of human decency. Now — while Democratic leaders and most corporate media outlets are suitably condemning the fascist tendencies of Trump and his followers — deeper analysis and stepped-up progressive organizing are urgently needed.

Economic injustice — disproportionately harming people of color — constantly propels U.S. society in a downward spiral. Poverty, economic insecurity and political disempowerment go together. Systemic racism continues to thrive, enmeshed with the predatory routines of corporate power.

After becoming a member of Congress last week, Cori Bush wrote in the Washington Post: “Many have said that what transpired on Wednesday was not America. They are wrong. This is the America that Black people know. To declare that this is not America is to deny the reality that Republican members of the U.S. House and Senate incited this coup by treasonously working to overturn the results of the presidential election.”

And, Bush added, “what my Republican colleagues call ‘fraud’ actually refers to the valid votes of Black, brown and Indigenous voters across this country who, in the midst of a pandemic that disproportionately kills us, overcame voter suppression in all of its forms to deliver an election victory for Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris.”

Yet that election victory — which was a huge blow to right-wing forces and a triumph for the progressive forces that made it possible — assures us of little. The same establishment-oriented corporate and militaristic mindsets that reigned supreme in the executive branch during the Obama administration are being reconfigured for the Biden administration. Similar mentalities at the top of the Democratic Party a decade ago are replicated today.

But, at the grassroots, progressive outlooks are much more prevalent than a decade ago — and left-leaning forces are much better positioned. There’s far less naiveté about Joe Biden on the verge of his presidency than there was a dozen years ago on the verge of Barack Obama’s. And much stronger communication and organizing capacities are in place for progressive individuals and groups in 2021 than was true in 2009.

In short, as Biden prepares to move into the White House, progressives are in much better shape to put up a fight — not only against the right wing but also against corporate Democratic elites, who are uninterested in delivering the kind of broad-based economic uplift that could undermine the pseudo-populist propaganda coming from the Republican Party.

A day after the orchestrated mob assault at the Capitol, Bernie Sanders appeared on CNN and provided a cogent summary of what must be done to effectively push back against the Republicans. In contrast to standard-issue Democratic Party talking points, what he had to say went to the core of key economic and political realities.

While countless Democratic politicians and pundits were taking the easy route of only condemning Trump and his acolytes, Sanders went far deeper.

“We must not lose sight of the unprecedented pain and desperation felt by working people across the country as the pandemic surges and the economy declines,” Sanders wrote to supporters on Sunday. “We must, immediately, address those needs.”

Sanders pointed out that “right now, hunger is at the highest levels in decades in this country and the family that couldn’t afford to put food on the table last week still cannot afford to put food on the table this week, and they need our help.” Among the ongoing realities he cited were these:

+  “The 500,000 Americans who were homeless and the 30 million more facing eviction last week are still worried about keeping a roof over their heads this week, and they need our help.”

+  “During the midst of a murderous pandemic which is getting worse and worse every day, the 90 million Americans who were uninsured or underinsured last week still are worried about being able to afford to go to a doctor this week, and they need our help.”

+  “The millions of Americans working two or three jobs to pay the bills because we have a national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour this week will still be getting paid a starvation wage next week, and they need our help.”

Such help will not come from merely denouncing the villainy of Trump and other Republicans. And it won’t come from reflexively deferring to the Biden administration. On the contrary, it can come from insisting that there must be no honeymoon for the incoming administration if we want to meet the crying needs of working-class people.

Some progressives believe that we should give Biden a break as his presidency gets underway. But in early 1993, we were told to give President Clinton a break. Wall Streeters went into the Cabinet, NAFTA soon followed — and, in 1994, Republicans roared back and took Congress. Later came cruel “welfare reform,” deregulation of the banking industry, and much more.

In early 2009, we were told to give a break to President Obama. Wall Streeters went into the Cabinet, big banks were bailed out while people with their houses under water lost their homes — and, in 2010, Republicans roared back and took Congress. Later came economic policies that undermined support and turnout from the Democratic Party base, helping Trump win four years ago.

As Bernie Sanders says, “The old way of thinking is what brought us Donald Trump.”

The Sanders prescriptions for antidotes to right-wing poisons are absolutely correct. Along with ending Trump’s toxic political career, Sanders wrote four days after the Capitol events, “we must also start passing an aggressive agenda that speaks to the needs of the working class in this country: income and wealth inequality, health care, climate change, education, racial justice, immigration and so many other vitally important issues. We must lift people out of poverty, revitalize American democracy, end the collapse of the middle class, and make certain our children and grandchildren are able to enjoy a quality of life that brings them health, prosperity, security and joy.”

Sound impossible? It isn’t. But to make such a future possible will require not only crushing the Republican Party but also dislodging the current Democratic Party leadership to make way for truly progressive elected Democrats — like Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ro Khanna and others — who understand that they must be part of transformative social movements that are our only hope.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The third time would not be a charm.

People on the left did very little to challenge Bill Clinton after he won the presidency in 1992. Two years later, a big Republican wave took control of Congress.

People on the left did very little to challenge Barack Obama after he won the presidency in 2008. Two years later, a big Republican wave took control of Congress.

Now, we’re being told that people on the left should pipe down and do little to challenge Joe Biden. But silence or merely faint dissent would enable the third Democratic president in four decades to again sacrifice progressive possibilities on the altar of corporate power.

Clinton and Obama — no less than Biden in recent months — could sound like a semi-populist at times on the campaign trail. But during 16 years combined in the White House, they shared a governing allegiance to neoliberalism: aiding and abetting privatization, austerity budgets for the public sector, bloated budgets for the Pentagon, deregulation of corporate behavior, and so-called “free trade” agreements boosting big-business profit margins at the expense of workers, consumers and the environment.

The idea that corporate centrism is the best way for Democrats to defeat Republicans is belied by actual history. Yes, Clinton and Obama won re-election — but their political narcissism and fidelity to big corporations proved devastating to the Democratic Party and very helpful to the GOP.

During Obama’s eight years as president, Democrats lost not only both houses of Congress but also more than 1,000 seats in state legislatures. As the New York Times noted, “In 2009, Democrats controlled both the state senate and house in 27 states, the Republicans 14. After the 2016 elections, Republicans controlled both branches of the legislatures in 32 states to 14 for the Democrats.” Republicans also gained more governors.

It’s worth pondering Obama’s blunt assessment of his administration’s first term: “My policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.”

Yet the Obama era is now being fondly and routinely hailed as a kind of aspirational benchmark. We’re now being told to yearn to go back to the future under the leadership of the soon-to-be president who boasted last year: “I’m an Obama-Biden Democrat, man, and I’m proud of it.”

On the verge of 2021, populist anger and despair are unabated. And, as economic disasters worsen at macro and individual levels, more widespread populist rage is predictable. Only progressive populism offers an appealing alternative to the toxic pseudo-populism of the Trumpist Republican Party.

Pushing the Biden presidency in the direction of progressive populism is not only the morally correct thing to do, given the scale of human suffering and the existential threats posed by economic unraveling, the climate emergency and militarism. Progressive populism can also be the political antidote to the poisonous right-wing manipulation of genuine economic and social distress. In sharp contrast, “moderate” programs have little to offer.

My colleague Jeff Cohen describes the “No Honeymoon” campaign we’re immersed in at RootsAction.org as “an effort to help save Biden from himself and from following in the footsteps — missteps, really — of his predecessors Obama and Clinton. Too much hesitation, vacillation, corporatism in the first two years will likely bring on a Republican landslide for Congress in 2022, as Clinton’s vacillation and corporatism, like NAFTA, did in 1994, and Obama’s in 2010, for example his bailing out Wall Street but not homeowners through a foreclosure freeze.”

To avert a big Republican win in two years, Cohen says, “Biden has to deliver for poor, working-class and middle-class people. Policies that make a big difference in people’s lives — including cancellation of federal student debt and pushing for a $15 federal minimum wage. That will mean listening more to progressive allies, progressive economists and legal experts — and less to the Democratic corporate donor class. If he doesn’t deliver, Biden plays into the hands of the GOP faux-populists, setting us all up for defeat in 2022.”

In the #NoHoneymoon launch video, released last week, former Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign national co-chair Nina Turner — now running for Congress in a special election — explained the concept of No Honeymoon. “We mean that we the people hold the power,” she said. “That we must continue to fight for what is just, right and good, and fight against what is not just, right and good. We mean that we must have solidarity and commitment, one to another.”

She added: “As long as there are injustices, we will continue to fight. What do we mean by that? We know that when everyday people put a little extra on the ordinary, extraordinary things happen. . . . We mean that we will not be seduced by smiles — we need action, and we need it right now. We will not relent. And that’s what we mean when we say ‘No Honeymoon.’”

Over the weekend, under the headline “Biden Cabinet Leans Centrist, Leaving Some Liberals Frustrated,” the New York Times declared with typical media framing that “the president-elect’s personnel choices are more pragmatic and familiar than ideological” — as though centrism itself is not “ideological.” The newspaper reported that “there is no one yet in Mr. Biden’s cabinet carrying the torch for the policies that he campaigned against during the primaries: free college for everyone, a costly Green New Deal, an anti-Wall Street agenda, universal health care and steep increases in the minimum wage.”

Silence or grumbling acquiescence as the Biden presidency takes shape would amount to a political repetition disorder of the sort that ushered in disastrous political results under the Clinton and Obama administrations. Progressives must now take responsibility and take action. As Nina Turner says, “everything we love is on the line.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Bernie Sanders is not in a good political position right now. Yes, he continues to speak vital truths to — and about — power. His ability to reach a national audience with progressive wisdom and specific proposals is unmatched. And, during the last several decades, no one has done more to move the nation’s discourse leftward. But now, Sanders is in a political box.

After a summer and fall dominated by the imperative of defeating Donald Trump, progressive forces are entering a winter of discontent. Joe Biden has offered them little on the list of top personnel being named to his administration. While Sanders wants to maintain a cordial relationship with the incoming president, he doesn’t like what he’s seeing.

“The progressive movement deserves a number of seats — important seats — in the Biden administration,” Sanders said last week. “Have I seen that at this point? I have not.”

Sanders foreshadowed the current situation back in mid-November, when he told The Associated Press: “It seems to me pretty clear that progressive views need to be expressed within a Biden administration. It would be, for example, enormously insulting if Biden put together a ‘team of rivals’ — and there’s some discussion that that’s what he intends to do — which might include Republicans and conservative Democrats — but which ignored the progressive community. I think that would be very, very unfortunate.”

At this point, Sanders and avid supporters of the Bernie 2020 campaign have ample reasons to feel frustrated, even “enormously” insulted. It’s small comfort that Biden’s picks so far are purportedly “not as bad as Obama’s” were 12 years ago. That’s a low bar, especially to those who understand that Barack Obama heavily corporatized his presidency from the outset. And given the past decade’s leftward political migration among Democrats and independents at the grassroots, Biden’s selections have been even more out of step with the party’s base.

Reporting on Biden’s overall selections as this week began, the Washington Post found that “about 80 percent of the White House and agency officials he’s announced have the word ‘Obama’ on their résumé from previous White House or Obama campaign jobs.”

Biden conveyed notable disregard for Sanders by nominating an OMB director with a long record of publicly expressing antagonism toward him. The Post just reported that “the transition team never reached out to” Sanders about “Biden’s decision to tap Neera Tanden as director of the Office of Management and Budget, according to a person familiar with the lack of communication, despite Sanders’s role as the top Democrat on one of the committees that will hold Tanden’s confirmation hearings.”

Away from Capitol Hill, many progressive organizations are regrouping while “the Bernie movement” evaporates. Coalescing in its place are a range of resilient, overlapping movements that owe much of their emergent long-term power to his visionary leadership.

Nationally, Sanders became a shaper of history in unprecedented ways. Unlike almost every other major candidate for president in our lifetimes, he has always been part of social movements. For 30 years, Sanders not only continued to have one foot in the streets and one foot in the halls of Congress; somehow, he often seemed to be relentlessly in both places with both feet.

Bernie Sanders has fulfilled what the legendary progressive activist and theoretician Saul Alinsky described as a key goal of political organizers — to work themselves out of a job — so that other activists will become ready, willing and able to carry on.

At this juncture, while Sanders is ill-positioned and uninclined to push back very hard against the evident trajectory of Biden’s decisions, many progressives are starting to throw down gauntlets against the corporate and militaristic aspects of the incoming presidency. While the lunacy of the Trumpian GOP is nonstop and corporate Democrats have control of party top-down power levers, the broad democratic left is now stronger, better-funded and better-networked than it has been in many decades, with greatly enhanced electoral capacities as well as vitality of its social movements.

Those electoral capacities and social movements have long been intertwined with the tireless work of Bernie Sanders. But a crucial dynamic going forward into 2021 and beyond will be the resolve of progressives to methodically challenge the Biden administration. Senator Sanders is unlikely to have the leverage or inclination to lead the fight.

Sanders has tried to call in some political chits, but Biden — probably figuring that Sanders won’t really go to the mat — does not seem to care much. Days ago, Sanders said in an interview with Axios: “I’ve told the Biden people: The progressive movement is 35-40 percent of the Democratic coalition. Without a lot of other enormously hard work on the part of grassroots activists and progressives, Joe would not have won the election.”

Bernie Sanders was the catalyst for galvanizing the grassroots progressive power that propelled his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. His deep analysis, tenacity, eloquence and bold actions created new pathways. As this century enters its third decade, the torch needs to be grasped by others to lead the way.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.