Norman Solomon For Congress, on Nuclear Power Madness, and When 'Good' Dictators Go Bad

Hi.  I’ve never before known and truly admired two people running for congress

at the same time.  Marcy Winograd and Norman Solomon not only have profound

understanding, compassion and advocacy for genuine democracy, they have that rare

ability to communicate ideas in language, understandable and elevating to regular folks. 

 

My good friend, Jeff Cohen, introduced me to Norman 15 or so years ago, and I’ve

followed his amazing work, from a distance . Check out his campaign website for just

some of it.  We finally got together a month or so ago, when he was here for a fundraiser.

His speech covered Fukushima, Libya, Arab Spring, Wisconsin, and the domestic mess

we’re all in, including DC politics..  He did it all brilliantly, and in 15 minutes.  Our personal

talks moved me as much.    

 

 I realize Norman is running in Lynn Woolsey’s district in the Bay area, not here, but the

possibility of two powerful new, progressive voices in Congress has to be inspiring to many

on this list.  If you can spare a few bucks, send some to Norman Solomon.  In any event, enjoy

some of the material offered below.

 

Ed

From: Norman Solomon [mediabeat@igc.org]

Sent: Friday, May 06, 2011 3:18 PM
To: epearlag@earthlink.net

I'm now a strong grassroots candidate who can win this Congress seat as an article in Marin County's daily paper noted last Sunday:

We have an important fundraising goal that we need to reach before the end of this month, so an appeal for help soon would be a major boost...

Many thanks --

Norman

Do Progressives Have Enough Voters to Send Solomon to Congress?
http://www.marinij.com/dickspotswood/ci_17960874

The campaign website is at:
http://www.solomonforcongress.com

And info on making a contribution is at:
https://www.normansolomonnow.com/index.php/contribute

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Dick Spotswood: Do progressives have enough voters to send Solomon to Congress?

By Dick Spotswood
Special to the IJ: May 01, 2011

THE RACE to succeed Rep. Lynn Woolsey , D-Petaluma, is slowly getting started.

Woolsey has indicated that she will make her plans public by early summer. It's widely expected that she will retire when her term expires in 2012.

So far, two Marin Democrats are in the race, Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, and West Marin author and progressive activist Norman Solomon.

While Huffman was the first to declare his candidacy, Solomon should not be underestimated. His goal is to capture Woolsey 's base on the left and face off against a more centrist Democrat such as Huffman or potentially North Coast state Sen. Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa.

Solomon's campaign-funding strategy is to galvanize the political left across the county. He aims for a combination of Internet and traditional fund-raising to amass a $1.2 million war-chest.

His recent campaign kickoff featured Jim Hightower, the populist radio commentator and former Texas agriculture commissioner. The folksy Texan motivated a crowd of a hundred at the Corte Madera Recreation Center. He criticized Scott Walker, the Tea Party-allied governor of Wisconsin, while predicting a Democratic backlash.

Hightower observed, "You know what they say in Wisconsin: 'If you screw us, we multiply.'"

Woolsey indicates that if she doesn't run, she will remain neutral in the race to select her successor in the Marin-Sonoma Sixth.

District. Woolsey's neutrality is to Solomon's disadvantage since he correctly regards himself as her philosophical heir.

Not that Solomon is "Woolsey-lite."

The criticism Woolsey has always endured is that she's an intellectual lightweight. It's more accurate to describe the North Bay's member of Congress as "Solomon-lite."

While the two have the same ideological orientation, Solomon is well-informed and able to passionately promote his anti-military intervention foreign policy based on personal travels and global connections.

The quandary faced by the left is that it represents a small portion of America. The Bay Area is hardly representative of national opinion. It's estimated that 40 percent of Americans consider themselves conservative, 40 percent moderate independents and 20 percent liberal-progressives.

The left can only win when allied with the center.

As Solomon rhetorically asked at his kickoff, "Do we progressives go to a third party and get our two or three percent, or do we stay and fight within the Democratic Party?"

The trick for progressive Democrats such as Solomon and Hightower is to stand their ground without undermining Barack Obama's necessary fight to regain support from independents, America's true swing voters.

Columnist Dick Spotswood of Mill Valley shares his views on local politics every Sunday in the IJ. His email address is spotswood@comcast.net. Read his musings at http://blogs.marinij.com/spotswood/

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/14-5

Nuclear Power Madness

by Norman Solomon

CommonDreams.org:  March 14, 2011

Like every other president since the 1940s, Barack Obama has promoted nuclear power. Now, with reactors melting down in Japan, the official stance is more disconnected from reality than ever

Political elites are still clinging to the oxymoron of “safe nuclear power.” It’s up to us -- people around the world -- to peacefully and insistently shut those plants down.

There is no more techno-advanced country in the world than Japan. Nuclear power is not safe there, and it is not safe anywhere.

As the New York Times reported on Monday, “most of the nuclear plants in the United States share some or all of the risk factors that played a role at Fukushima Daiichi: locations on tsunami-prone coastlines or near earthquake faults, aging plants and backup electrical systems that rely on diesel generators and batteries that could fail in extreme circumstances.”

Nuclear power -- from uranium mining to fuel fabrication to reactor operations to nuclear waste that will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years -- is, in fact, a moral crime against future generations.

But syrupy rhetoric has always marinated the nuclear age. From the outset -- even as radioactive ashes were still hot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- top officials in Washington touted atomic energy as redemptive. The split atom, we were to believe, could be an elevating marvel.

President Dwight Eisenhower pledged “to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma” by showing that “the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”

Even after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 -- and now this catastrophe in Japan -- the corporate theologians of nuclear faith have continued to bless their own divine projects.

Thirty years ago, when I coordinated the National Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims on the edge of Capitol Hill, we heard grim testimony from nuclear scientists, workers, downwinders and many others whose lives had been forever ravaged by the split atom. Routine in the process was tag-team deception from government agencies and nuclear-invested companies.

By 1980, generations had already suffered a vast array of terrible consequences -- including cancer, leukemia and genetic injuries -- from a nuclear fuel cycle shared by the “peaceful” and military atom. Today, we know a lot more about the abrupt and slow-moving horrors of the nuclear industry.

And we keep learning, by the minute, as nuclear catastrophe goes exponential in Japan. But government leaders don’t seem to be learning much of anything.

On Sunday, even while nuclear-power reactors were melting down, the White House issued this statement: “The president believes that meeting our energy needs means relying on a diverse set of energy sources that includes renewables like wind and solar, natural gas, clean coal and nuclear power. Information is still coming in about the events unfolding in Japan, but the administration is committed to learning from them and ensuring that nuclear energy is produced safely and responsibly here in the U.S.”

Yet another reflexive nuclear salute.

When this year’s State of the Union address proclaimed a goal of “clean energy sources” for 80 percent of U.S. electricity by 2035, Obama added: “Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all -- and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen.”

Bipartisan for nuclear power? You betcha. On Sunday morning TV shows, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell voiced support for nuclear power, while Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer offered this convoluted ode to atomic flackery: “We are going to have to see what happens here -- obviously still things are happening -- but the bottom line is we do have to free ourselves of independence from foreign oil in the other half of the globe. Libya showed that. Prices are up, our economy is being hurt by it, or could be hurt by it. So I'm still willing to look at nuclear. As I’ve always said it has to be done safely and carefully.”

Such behavior might just seem absurd or pathetic -- if the consequences weren’t so grave.

Nuclear power madness is so entrenched that mainline pundits and top elected officials rarely murmur dissent. Acquiescence is equated with prudent sagacity.

In early 2010, President Obama announced federal loan guarantees -- totaling more than $8 billion -- to revive the construction of nuclear power plants in this country, where 110 nuclear-power reactors are already in operation.

“Investing in nuclear energy remains a necessary step,” he said. “What I hope is that, with this announcement, we’re underscoring both our seriousness in meeting the energy challenge and our willingness to look at this challenge, not as a partisan issue, but as a matter that’s far more important than politics because the choices we make will affect not just the next generation but many generations to come.”

Promising to push for bigger loan guarantees to build more nuclear power plants, the president said: “This is only the beginning.”

Norman Solomon was the director of the National Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims in 1980 and co-authored “Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation,” which exposed the health and environmental effects of the nuclear industry. For two years ending in late 2010, he served as co-chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay. For more information, go to: www.SolomonForCongress.com.

more Norman Solomon

 

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http://www.normansolomonnow.com/index.php/page/when_good_dictators_go_bad

When “Good” Dictators Go Bad

Originally Published at CommonDreams.org

A standard zigzag of political rhetoric went for a jaunt along Pennsylvania Avenue on Tuesday (Feb. 15) with a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at George Washington University. “Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people,” she declared. During the last few weeks, much has changed in the politics of the Middle East -- but not much has changed in the politics of Washington, where policymakers turn phrases on a dime.

The currency is doublespeak, antithetical to a single standard of human rights.

And so, the secretary of state condemns awful Iran, invoking “our sense of human dignity, the rights that flow from it and the principles that ground it.” But don’t hold your breath for any such condemnation of, say, Saudi Arabia -- surely an “awful” government that “routinely violates the rights of its people.”

It wasn’t long ago that Hosni Mubarak’s regime -- with all its repression and torture -- enjoyed high esteem and lavish praise in Washington. For Egyptians, the repression and torture went on; for the bipartisan savants running U.S. foreign policy, the suppression was good geopolitics.

As recently as Jan. 27, when Joe Biden appeared on the “PBS NewsHour,” the official U.S. line about the despot of Egypt was enough to make Orwell’s coffin spin. Was it time for Mubarak to go? “No,” Biden replied. “I think the time has come for President Mubarak to begin to move in the direction that -- to be more responsive to some . . . of the needs of the people out there.”

The interviewer, Jim Lehrer, is hardly a tough questioner of red-white-and-blue officialdom, but he did press the vice president on whether Mubarak was a dictator. Biden replied: “Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with -- with Israel. . . . I would not refer to him as a dictator.”

Secretary of State Clinton is correct when she says that Iran’s regime is “awful.” I caught a glimpse six years ago, at Tehran University, when police and Basij thugs broke up a peaceful demonstration for women’s rights. Over lunch one day, an Iranian talked about the torture of friends in prison and described the people in charge as “monsters.” These days, the repression in Iran is far worse.

Meanwhile, the torture of political prisoners in Saudi Arabia is no less horrific -- while the U.S. government’s winks and nods toward the Saudi regime are no less pernicious today than they were for decades while Mubarak’s henchmen did their foul deeds in Egypt. In both cases, the cruelty has been OK with Washington since it has been perpetrated by (cue Biden) “an ally of ours in a number of things” that has been “very responsible . . . relative to geopolitical interest in the region.”

On the same day as Clinton’s selectively righteous speech blasting an awful regime in the Middle East, my colleagues at RootsAction launched “An Open Letter to the People of Egypt.” [ http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/6503/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=3369

“From the United States, we watched as you stood up for democracy, faced huge obstacles and used nonviolent action to depose a dictator,” the letter says. “We send you our congratulations and appreciation for showing us -- and people all over the planet -- the power of mobilized humanity in the quest for justice and freedom.”

The letter adds: “As Americans, we have a responsibility to reset U.S. government policies in Egypt and the entire region. Last week, thousands of us signed a letter [ http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/6503/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=3264 ] demanding that Obama apologize for our country’s three decades of support for the Mubarak regime. Now, in the absence of a presidential apology, we take it upon ourselves to apologize. We resolve to work for human rights in solidarity with you, calling for a swift transition for democracy in Egypt. We intend to work so that U.S. foreign policy truly becomes aligned with the values of democracy and human rights.”

Signing the open letter [ http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/6503/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=3369 ] is a statement of solidarity with pro-democracy movements -- and a rejection of Washington’s ongoing double standard on human rights. But our words won’t accomplish much unless we match them with effective political organizing in the days and years ahead.