Such an excellent piece! Thank you Norman Solomon! So disturbing and absolutely spot on! And these are the facts that we need to know!
Buttigieg is an incredibly dangerous, dishonest, slimy corporate tool who’s obviously hell bent on doing the bidding of his wealthy corporate donor friends. These are the predatory capitalist special interests who are determined to take down Sanders and our multigenerational multiracial grassroots movements of millions of We the People whose “crime” is uniting in huge numbers to dismantle the systems of death, inequality, injustice, and violence and instead create a just and caring society.
Let’s be clear — this is what Buttigieg and his predatory capitalist cronies are fiercely fighting to stop and crush.
Their sick greed-infested neoliberal agenda of smashing the ever growing grassroots movements of We the People is obviously their priority over all else — even if it means 4 more years of Trump.
I’m so disgusted with Buttigieg and all who’ve sold their souls to the highest bidders. And I recognize the great need to channel my outrage into that which is most needed in our world. And that certainly means not getting stuck in anger, denial, or despair.
This heartlessness and lack of integrity, truth, and consciousness that we are witness to in Trump, in corporate republicans and corporate democrats, in the corporate mainstream media, and others is also shaking millions of us out of our slumber. And this is the good news.
So, gratefully!, more and more of us are seeing through the charade and the relentless poisonous propaganda and refusing to buy what they’re selling. We’re done with the predatory capitalists ideologues, done with the lies and false promises, done with the divide and conquer politics of polarization, done with the suicidal path we’re on and all who are shoving us right towards the cliff of civilization collapse and extinction. WE ARE WAKING UP AND WE ARE DONE!
Instead we’re choosing to unite behind Bernie and our movements grounded in the many faces of Revolutionary Love — interconnection and caring, compassion and generosity, and economic, racial, social, and environmental justice.
May Love and Truth and Justice prevail! — Molly
The corporate establishment has not yet figured out how to defeat Bernie Sanders in the primary, but the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana appears dead set on damaging the progressive frontrunner as much as possible.
By
Soon 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.”
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