Neera Tanden and Antony Blinken Personify the 'Moderate' Rot at the Top of the Democratic Party

What's so moderate about being on the take from rich beneficiaries of corporate America while opposing proposals that would curb their profits in order to reduce income inequality and advance social justice?

by Norman Solomon

Sometimes a couple of nominations convey an incoming president’s basic mindset and worldview. That’s how it seems with Joe Biden’s choices to run the Office of Management and Budget and the State Department.

For OMB director, Biden selected corporate centrist Neera Tanden, whose Center for American Progress thrives on the largesse of wealthy donors representing powerful corporate interests. Tanden has been a notably scornful foe of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing; former Sanders speechwriter David Sirota calls her “the single biggest, most aggressive Bernie Sanders critic in the United States.” Who better to oversee the budget of the U.S. government?

For Secretary of State, Biden chose his longtime top foreign-policy adviser, whose frequent support for U.S. warfare included pushing for the disastrous 2011 military intervention in Libya. Antony Blinken is a revolving-door pro who has combined his record of war boosterism with entrepreneurial zeal to personally profit from influence-peddling for weapons sales to the Pentagon. Who better to oversee diplomacy for the U.S. government?

"With few exceptions, Biden's current policy positions are destructively corporate, deferential to obscene concentrations of wealth, woefully inadequate for meeting human needs, and zealously militaristic." Standard news coverage tells us that Tanden and Blinken are “moderates.” But what’s so moderate about being on the take from rich beneficiaries of corporate America while opposing proposals that would curb their profits in order to reduce income inequality and advance social justice? What’s so moderate about serving the military-industrial complex while advocating for massive “defense” spending and what amounts to endless war?

Unless they fail to get Senate confirmation, Tanden and Blinken will shape future history in major ways.

As OMB director, Tanden would head what the Washington Post describes as “the nerve center of the federal government, executing the annual spending plan, setting fiscal and personnel policy for agencies, and overseeing the regulatory process across the executive branch.”

Blinken is ready to be the administration’s most influential figure on foreign policy, bolstered by his longstanding close ties with Biden. As staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden chaired the panel’s mid-2002 crucial sham hearings on scenarios for invading Iraq, Blinken helped grease the skids for the catastrophic invasion.

Overall, purported “moderates” Tanden and Blinken have benefited from favorable mass-media coverage since their nominations were announced several weeks ago. Most of the well-documented critical accounts have appeared in progressive outlets such as Common Dreams, Democracy Now, The Daily Poster, In These Times and The American Prospect. But some unappealing aspects of their records have been reported by the mainstream press.

“In her nine years helming Washington’s leading liberal think tank, Neera Tanden mingled with deep-pocketed donors who made their fortunes on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley and in other powerful sectors of corporate America,” the Washington Post reported in early December. “At formal pitches and swanky fundraisers, Tanden personally cultivated the bevy of benefactors fueling the $45 million to $50 million annual budget of the Center for American Progress.”

The Post added: “As OMB director, Tanden would have a hand in policies that touch every part of the economy after years spent courting corporate and foreign donors. These regulatory decisions will have profound implications for a range of U.S. companies, dictating how much they pay in taxes, the barriers they face and whether they benefit from new stimulus programs.”

Blinken’s eagerness to cash in on the warfare state -- when not a formal part of the government’s war-making apparatus -- is well-documented and chilling. In a healthier political culture, Blinken’s shameless insistence on profiteering from military weapons sales, as spelled out in a Nov. 28 New York Times news story, would have sunk his nomination for Secretary of State.

As for Tanden, in recent years her Center for American Progress received between $1.5 million and $3 million from the United Arab Emirates, which is allied with Saudi Arabia in waging a long and murderous war on Yemen. CAP refused to back a Senate resolution calling for the U.S. government to end its military support for that war. On a range of foreign-policy issues, Tanden has shown dedication to militarism again and again and again.

By many accounts, progressive organizing was a key factor in preventing the widely expected nomination of hawkish Michèle Flournoy to be Secretary of Defense. (RootsAction.org, where I’m national director, was part of that organizing effort.) Last week, the withdrawal of torture defender Mike Morell from consideration for CIA director was a victory for activism led by CodePink, Progressive Democrats of America, Witness Against Torture and other groups.

During the first weeks of 2021, such organizing could be effective in helping to derail other nominations. High on the deserving list are Agriculture Secretary nominee Tom “Mr. Monsanto” Vilsack, a loyal ally of corporate Big Ag, and Director of National Intelligence nominee Avril Haines -- whose record as former deputy director of the CIA included working to prevent accountability for agency personnel who engaged in torture, as well as crafting legal rationales for drone strikes that often killed civilians.

Such deplorable nominees don’t tell the whole story of Biden’s incoming team, which includes some decent economic and environmental appointees. “There’s no question that progressive focus on personnel has led to far better outcomes than when Obama put a corporate- and bank-friendly Cabinet together with little resistance,” The American Prospect’s executive editor, David Dayen, correctly pointed out last week. At the same time, none of Biden’s high-level nominees were supporters of the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign or are fully in sync with the progressive wing of the party.

The brighter spots among Joe Biden’s nominations reflect the political wattage that progressives have generated in recent years on a wide array of intertwined matters, from climate to healthcare to economic justice to structural racism. Yet, with few exceptions, Biden’s current policy positions are destructively corporate, deferential to obscene concentrations of wealth, woefully inadequate for meeting human needs, and zealously militaristic. It’s hardly incidental that the list of key White House staff is overwhelmingly dominated by corporate-aligned operatives and PR specialists.

Wishful thinking aside, on vital issue after vital issue, it’s foreseeable that Biden -- and the people in line for the most powerful roles in his administration -- will not do the right thing unless movements can organize effectively enough to make them do it.

Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" (2006) and "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State" (2007). The article was first published

When you hear the word bipartisan, reach for your gun.

There is a conservative majority in Congress that persists no matter which party controls the big corner offices. When you hear the word bipartisan, remember that it is most often used to describe something like Bob Corker and Mark Warner, just say, getting together to craft a deal to advance corporate interests at your expense.

Third party? Now? How about now? No? Maybe now?

The arguments for a People's Party become ever more compelling. Clinging to the faith that the Democrats any more than the Republicans will dismantle the corporate-security state is like believing in angels.

In a new book, Ralph Nader reminds us that the militarization of American diplomacy began with Bill Clinton and that Obama has doubled down on the excesses of George Bush and Dick Cheney. In Unstoppable, Nader demands an end to “unconstitutional wars and unchecked militarism.” Barack Obama, he writes, “has extended the Bush doctrine by declaring his unilateral right, as secret prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, to destroy anybody, anywhere in the world, including American citizens, suspected to be engaged in alleged terrorist activities, all this vaguely and loosely defined as anti-U.S. security," extending the illegal reach of wars of choice, invasions, incursions, and drone attacks, without regard for international law or national boundaries.

For the average citizen, the growth of corporate power bolstered by the security apparatus has been matched by a corresponding decline in quality of life. Enough is enough. Building new organizations, like a third party, and restoring old ones, like the Labor Movement, to challenge the status quo will not be easy. But without that effort, our national decline, now in its fifth decade. will continue until it is irreversible.

Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State by Ralph Nader (Amazon Kindle).

A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.

You can read Bernie Sanders' progressive deficit reduction plan here.

Labor: The attack on unions is an attack on the middle class

Unionized workers earn more and get more generous benefits. In 2010, wages of workers in unionized manufacturing companies in Indiana were 16 percent higher than in nonunion plants. One study concluded that the decline in unionization since the 1970s is responsible for one-fifth to one-third of the growth in inequality in this country. Voters, unionized or not, should recognize the new "right to work" push for what it is: bad economics and cynical politics. -- New York Times editorial (2012-01-07).

See, also: Working hard to make Indiana look bad: The tortured, uphill case for ‘right-to-work’ by Gordon Lafer (Economic Policy Institute 2012-01-03).
Unions, Norms, and the Rise in American Wage Inequality by Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld (Department of Sociology, Harvard University 2011-03).

Update:

Collective bargaining…has played a major role in America’s economic miracle. Unions represent some of the freest institutions in this land. There are few finer examples of participatory democracy to be found anywhere. Too often, discussion about the labor movement concentrates on disputes, corruption and strikes. But while these things are headlines, there are thousands of good agreements reached and put into practice every year without a hitch. -- Ronald Reagan (New York Times 1981-09-04)

quoted in It's Scott Walker's Party: How anti-union zealotry defines GOP race by John Nichols (Nation of Change 2012-01-09).

See, also: Republicans Douse ‘Light of Democracy’ and Ram Through RTW Bill by Mike Hall (AFL-CIO Now Blog News 2012-01-10).

Economy: In the middle of the worst economic decline in over 80 years, we need fiscal stimuli, not fiscal austerity

In the political current climate, mainstream Keynesianism, as espoused by economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, has come to seem almost left-wing. Is the Keynesian critique of austerity correct, and is a return to Keynesianism what we need?

Keynesianism only seems left-wing because the center has caved rightward. First, even a Nobel Prize does not protect one from ostracism by the mainstream of the economics profession today if you persist in dispensing Keynesian wisdom and challenge the assumption that unfettered markets always know best. As hard as this may be for non-economists to believe, Stiglitiz and Krugman are now persona non grata within the economics profession. Second, in the 1950s and 60s even Tories and Republicans had to begrudgingly accede to the wisdom of financial regulation and Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies. But that day is long past. Now even Labour and Democrats buy into the myth that markets, including financial markets, can be relied on to self-regulate, and governments must engage in fiscal austerity when recessions create temporary budget deficits. When the center caves right, center left appears to be left.

There are two important lessons to be drawn. (1) While socialists should not have to lead the charge for Keynesian policies to ameliorate capitalist crises, unfortunately that is the position we find ourselves in. Right now we must not only do our own work – explaining why all versions of capitalism are far less desirable than participatory, democratic socialism – but do the work of Keynesian reformers as well who have lost influence in all major political parties. (2) There is no point in trying to explain to Tories and Republicans why their policies are flawed. They have chosen to embrace ill-advised, discredited, nineteenth century economic policies because these policies serve their most important purpose – further pressing the class war they have been winning for more than three decades. Their first instinct when a crisis hits is not to search for policies that would actually solve the crisis. Instead they search their “wish list” for ways to take advantage of the crisis to press for changes that serve their class interests – further cuts in social spending, further concessions regarding wages, benefits, and working conditions, more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and of course more corporate welfare like the bailouts doled out to the financial industry. The fact that every one of these policies will only deepen the current crisis is of no concern to them.

When capitalism proves completely incapable of putting our productive potential to good use what is called for is replacing capitalism with socialism. A return to Keynesianism would be to settle for only part of a loaf, and leave us vulnerable to another counter revolutionary roll back of hard won gains, like the one we have been living through. However, unless I am pleasantly surprised, and leftists can win the loyalty and support of a majority of the population for replacing capitalism with socialism much sooner than I foresee, there is no road to participatory, democratic socialism that does not run through many successful reform campaigns to bring Keynesian policies back in vogue.

The rest of the story: Digging In A Hole -- Robin Hahnel, economics professor at American University and author of Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation and, with Michael Albert, of The Political Economy of Participatory Economics, discusses the continuing mismanagement of the economic crisis in the UK, Ireland and the US with Alex Doherty of New Left Project.

Must read: Freezing Out Hope by Paul Krugman -- After the pummeling in the midterm elections, has President Obama suffered a moral collapse?

The Long War: Without lies, could ruling elites justify their wars?

The Real News interviews David Swanson on his new book War Is A Lie, a much-needed counterweight to the mass of disinformation that distorts our understanding of American politics and history. For the United States, war is an economic enterprise, enormously profitable for those engaged in it, crushingly expensive for the rest of us. We didn't listen when Eisenhower warned us about the danger we faced from military-industrial power. It will be interesting to see if, after 40 years of increasing control over American life, corporate power can be arrested now.
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A coalition of antiwar groups has proposed a major action for April 9, 2011.

Politics: The End of Democracy?

Since the sixties, one party -- systematically and untiringly -- has sought to delegitimize democracy. Have we reached the tipping point?:

As a result of a twenty-eight-year-long deregulatory spree, we've reached the point where it's painfully difficult for government to undo the damage done to our economic infrastructure by a few thousand millionaires and billionaires playing Monopoly.

And the destructive shift of power in this shift in cultural assumptions isn't just limited to the economy. We have reached the point in the United States where corporatism has nearly triumphed over democracy. If events continue on their current trajectory, the ability of our government to respond to the needs and desires of humans -- things like fresh water, clean air, uncontaminated food, independent local media, secure retirement, and accessible medical care -- may vanish forever, effectively ending the world's second experiment with democracy. We will have gone too far down Mussolini's road, and most likely will encounter similar consequences, elements of which we have already experienced: a militarized police state, a government unresponsive to its citizens and obsessed with secrecy, a ruling elite drawn from the senior ranks of the nations largest corporations, and war.

From Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture (2009) by Thom Hartman.