America-- And The Democratic Party-- Needed Bernie To Stay In The Race

This is a must-watch video, a discussion between Mehdi Hasan and Naomi Klein. They don't get to Bernie staying in the race 'til near the end but the whole half hour is a worthwhile way to spend some time. As for Bernie staying in the race, I very much agree with Naomi Klein and with Alan Minsky, the Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America who penned this guest post a day before Bernie decided to drop out. I hope you agree as well-- and agree enough to contribute to congressional candidates who are running on Bernie's issues, even if it's just five or two dollars. Thats why I've included a Bernie Congress Blue America thermometer below. Just click on it and vote with a few dollars to let Bernie you agree too.


Stay In The Race Bernie Sanders-- America Needs You Now More Than Ever.
-by Alan Minsky

Progressive Democrats of America calls upon Senator Bernie Sanders to continue his presidential campaign until the end of the 2020 primary season.

We understand that many Democrats are calling for Bernie to drop out. They say that Joe Biden is so far ahead that the time has come for party unity, for focusing on Donald Trump. While we agree about the necessity of defeating Donald Trump, we arrive at the opposite conclusion: The Democratic Party, and all Americans, will benefit from Bernie continuing his campaign in this historic moment.

The severity of the COVID-19 national emergency has changed everything in this election year. Coronavirus has revealed, with tragic consequences, the failings of our public health institutions and economic safety net-- in ways that Bernie Sanders has been warning against for decades. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Bernie's platform directly addresses these failings; in marked contrast to his rival's. As many observers have noted, with each passing day the COVID-19 pandemic is proving the wisdom of the Sanders agenda.

In particular, Medicare for All needs to be the official policy of the Democratic Party and it's presidential nominee in 2020. The pandemic has exposed America's current healthcare system for the disaster that it is. There can be no denying that having tens of millions of Americans unable to access affordable care greatly increases the public health risk for everyone. America needs universal single-payer health care; and the only way to get there is through the Democratic Party. Yet Joe Biden opposes Medicare for All, while Bernie Sanders is its leading proponent.

In the wake of COVID-19, Medicare for All isn't merely a winning political issue; it's a political landslide issue. Even if Bernie doesn't win the nomination, by continuing to campaign and win delegates to the convention, he could leverage Medicare for All into the party platform. For this, America, the Democratic Party, and even Joe Biden, should want Bernie Sanders to stay in the race. We also need Bernie to stay in the race to insure that his voice is heard as we enter the peak days of the crisis. Over the past few weeks, Bernie has fought tirelessly on behalf of average Americans in the battles over the stimulus bills. As one of only three viable candidates for President, Bernie has a powerful platform. That will change overnight when his campaign ends; and his influence will wane, leaving Americans even more at the mercy of a political class that, on balance, prioritizes big money interests over those of the vast majority.

Of course, Bernie's campaign going forward is not just about building support for policies, however essential, because of one fact: the race isn't over. Joe Biden may have a significant delegate lead, but it's nothing that a string of 70-30 results wouldn't reverse. That might be a longshot, but it's not impossible. Think about it this way: Bernie's policies match this moment just like FDR's did in the early 1930s; and FDR won his share of landslides. Calling for Sanders to step aside is anti-democratic. Let the candidates campaign and let the voters decide.

On this final point, consider the parallel with FDR in light of the recent unemployment statistics. Only one period in American history resembles the wholesale devastation that is currently shredding the American economy, the Great Depression. How did we get out of that? After three years of Hoover's impotent response, FDR re-energized America with a revolutionary program that transformed the country forever, the New Deal-- an updated version of which was a central plank of Sanders' platform, the Green New Deal.

The President who will be inaugurated in January will have a unique opportunity to define the direction of the country for the foreseeable future. Do we want to re-affirm a society that only works for the few while the rest of us work multiple jobs, live entwined in debt, with underfunded public schools, and a broken health care system with little hope of overcoming America's endemic crises? Or do we choose a new path that brings both our society and the planet back into balance and ensures that America will lead the world in addressing the biggest challenges of the next century?

Be honest folks, the Bernie Sanders agenda made a lot of sense before COVID-19, now it makes all the sense in the world. It's the vision that the Democratic Party needs to unify behind. The only way that happens is if the Sanders campaign continues.

The world has changed irreparably since early March when most primary votes were cast. The fallout from COVID-19 will define politics in the 2020s. We will all benefit by having the country's leading advocate for strengthening the public sector make his case in our new, transformed, reality.

Stay in the race Bernie Sanders. America needs you now more than ever.

Welcome To The COVID Economy

Sure, there's a Trump tweet for occasion; but there's also a George Carlin video for every occasion as well. You may prefer how Carlin explains what we're going through as a society now but economist James Galbraith is slightly less pessimistic. In fact, he wrote a piece for The Nation this week about how to confront the side-effects of the pandemic, namely the economic one. He looks at it square in the eyes and wants you to accept it: "a house of cards has fallen. An entire world of illusions, self-deceptions, and sophistries has died. We’ve come to the end of a very long string. The string has been unspooling since the triumphs of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, conventionally thought of as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but rooted equally in Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, in Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and in the Bushes and Obama and many lesser figures. A binational, bipartisan coalition of catastrophe in the Anglo-Saxon realm of ideas. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are consequences, not causes, of this mental failure. The delusion is economics as we’ve known it. Here, two concepts have ruled: self-organization and the veil of money. The first argued for markets, for all of society to be mediated by the forces of supply and demand. Its supposed virtues were competition, flexibility, incentives, efficiency; the reality is a fragile web, woven in strands of glass. The second submerged the financial system-- the banks, traders, speculators-- rendering those people and institutions as mere messengers, unimportant and invisible."

He wrote that "our leaders now plan to send out cash, as 'stimulus'-- as though a market response will organize itself. It is another delusion. In Europe "border controls are back" and America "is breaking apart." I agree with him that "federal officials, with few exceptions, are predatory, indifferent, or merely stupid [and that] congressional leaders appear stymied. The few steady hands are those of some governors-- in both parties-- many mayors, county judges, and other local officers." I don't know what he means by governors of both parties. The only governor who appears to be doing a genuinely good job at confronting the pandemic-- not a cosmetic job-- is DeWine, an Ohio Republican.

For the population, it is a test of character. Ordinary Americans are for the most part community-minded, prepared to follow instructions and do right, if others will do likewise. Around me in Austin, people are curtailing activities while going about their day jobs in the face of increasing risk. Pools and playgrounds and libraries are closed—we’re told, for several weeks. Everyone knows it could be months and months.

As everyone also knows, there has been far too little testing. There is no reserve of hospital beds or equipment. Global supply chains are broken, and medicines of many types will run short. The only possible advantage to being in America right now is that it is a large country; many people live in more space and can self-isolate more easily, for a time. This is not a consolation for the poor, nor for New Yorkers, nor for those reliant on assistance that they may not be able to get.





It is hard to look past the imminent swamping of the health system, but there are deeper disasters afoot. In California, nearly 6 million elderly have been told to stay home. Many of them live alone or in pairs. Who will feed them? To this, the governor replied, “Good question.” The reality is, we’ve done a good job in this country of keeping many frail and elderly people alive, a very poor job of keeping them healthy, and we have no system for keeping them fed. We may not even know where they are.

We are told there is plenty of food in the country. Can it get to the stores? Yes, for now; but for how long? How long will people be there to stock and sell and run the checkout counters and maintain security? Distribution and security are the weak links in the food chain. The market has given us efficiency and a high living standard. It has by the very same token not given us resilience, spare capacity, coordination, or leadership. It has, instead, given us fragility. A web of glass. Panic is both the rational response and the enemy. If panic takes control, it will destroy whatever is left.

The American economy must convert, in full and at once, to fight the pandemic. A public corporation-- the Health Finance Corporation, based on the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the Depression and World War II, with power to borrow and allocate and meet problems as they arise-- is needed now. The National Guard and the Army and all their resources must be deployed. And every civilian resource, including all available human beings, must be enlisted.

The immediate medical need is supplies, beds, personnel. Hospitals can be built in days, we have learned. Space can be requisitioned; hotels and dormitories are empty. The military is said to know how to deal with mass casualty events. The Defense Production Act gives authority to command companies to make masks, oxygen tanks, respirators. Unlimited jobs are available for people to clean and perform other basic functions. It’s risky work, and it must be decently paid. Guarantee the jobs, and people will do them. China managed that much, and many people volunteered.

The next need is to stabilize priority civilian supply: food, drugs, cleaners, paper goods. The existing system may hold up for a while. The essential is to lock it in place, supporting the people doing their jobs so that they can continue: drivers, stockers, checkout clerks, cooks and kitchen help, and scrubbers. If the necessary goods keep coming in, people will stay calm and get along without the rest. As in Korea, ride-share and taxi drivers can be trained to disinfect and mobilized to drop off meals and medicines. Suddenly, all these workers are essential and must now be treated that way.

All the information services should now be drafted and basic customer bills should suspended for the duration: cable, cellular, landlines, Internet. Let the federal government compensate the companies for basic costs. Having secure communications and entertainment will help keep people at home. The boost in disposable incomes will help in exact inverse proportion to wealth; those losing work income will benefit most.

Among the most necessary big corporations right now are those who run mass distribution networks: Amazon, Walmart, FedEx, UPS, and the drugstores and major fast-food chains. They should be run as public utilities for the duration. That means giving delivery at cost on essential goods and stop-orders on frills. Top executives should contribute their time. The workers should get raises and medical care and protective equipment and unions. In return for staying on the job in the emergency, those workers too should emerge in an entirely different position after this ends.

Many large, medium, and small employers are down for the count and may be bankrupt soon: airlines, hotel chains, shopping malls, convention centers-- more than anyone can list. The equity will be gone; there must be financing to maintain essential operations and to hold the physical and engineering assets in place, and a debt moratorium to stave off the creditors and the vultures. Needless to say, evictions and foreclosures and utility stoppages must be stopped immediately; if necessary, it is better to ration the supplies. As businesses go down, so will the bankers. After the wave passes, we’ll see what can be rebuilt.

Through it all, the people must be reassured. Those at home must be cared for. And those who remain healthy must be given useful work. Solidarity, organization, determination: These are the words for us now.

Changing times... very changing times requires agile, competent leadership which is in short supply in our ruling class. Take the idea of bailouts. The airlines near our money to stay in business? OK, our tax dollars should go towards buying their stock. As Aaron Gordon wrote at Vice yesterday, "U.S. airlines have spent the last decade shoveling billions in profits to stockholders. Now they want your tax dollars with no strings attached. Fuck that."

The last decade has been very good to U.S. airlines. Industry consolidation, stuffing more people into smaller spaces on planes, and stacking fees upon fees have resulted in unprecedented prosperity for the country’s Big Four (American, Delta, United, and Southwest). From 2012 to 2016, these four airlines were the most profitable in the world, walking away with a combined $42.3 billion, according to an analysis by L.E.K. Consulting. In the two subsequent years, 2017 and 2018, the US airline industry raked in an additional $27.3 billion in profits. They then used nearly all of that money, a whopping 96 percent, to buy back shares from stockholders-- a move that enriches investors while doing nothing for the company itself-- and handsomely compensating executives.

Now, the airline industry, like nearly every other industry, is suffering due to the unprecedented coronavirus travel restrictions. The airlines are asking the federal government or a bailout of almost $60 billion, to be paid for with our tax dollars.

To which I say: Fuck that. The airlines shouldn’t get a dime from American taxpayers unless there are so many strings attached it can support a 787.

If a working class person had handled their finances in the same way the airlines have, it would be a caricature of a Republican talking point about individual responsibility. During the good times, airlines spent all of their money on financial chicanery and self-enrichment while saving virtually nothing for a rainy day. Now that the good times have stopped, they’re rapidly running out of cash, which is what tends to happen when you don’t have much sitting around. It’s like a meme about millennials and avocado toast except it’s about the boomers who run airlines.

You could be excused for doing this once, but not twice. The airlines should have learned their lesson after the September 11 bailouts that they are not normal companies. The industry, already in financial trouble, saw demand collapse all at once after which the feds gave them $18.6 billion in direct assistance and loan guarantees. The lesson here ought to have been that airlines are uniquely vulnerable to huge shocks and need to plan accordingly. These do not happen often-- oh, once every 20 years, thereabouts-- but often enough. That was not the lesson the airlines learned.

I suppose the airlines did have a plan. The plan was to get bailed out by us.

Fair play to the airlines, because they almost certainly will. Congress, which is comprised of some of the most frequent fliers and loyal airline customers in the country, will oblige them. Our political leaders will almost certainly meet the airlines on the industry’s terms because Congress overvalues the airlines themselves relative to the average American. A 2018 survey by an air travel industry group found 52 percent of Americans didn’t fly at all in 2017, and nearly three quarters of all trips were personal, not business. And airline flyers are disproportionately higher income, with the majority of airline trips coming from Americans with an annual household income of at least $75,000, well above the median household income (the most frequent fliers by income group, according to the airline industry survey, make more than $150,000 a year).

Airlines and other pro-business groups will argue a bailout is necessary in order to prevent massive job losses, an argument that made sense in 2001 when airlines were bearing the brunt of the recession following September 11 and mandatory flight groundings. But that argument doesn’t make sense today, because everyone is hurting just as much. The airlines, while experiencing massive revenue losses, can get in line with every other industry experiencing massive revenue losses, including but not limited to the entire hospitality and travel industry.

Even within the transportation industry, airlines don’t have a special case for bailouts. Public transportation is experiencing a similar shock, with ridership and revenue drops in line with what airlines are experiencing. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, they employ the same number of people. Public transit agencies-- which, it’s worth bearing in mind, are publicly owned and operated, not private corporations-- are also asking for federal funds so they can keep running service for critical workers like hospital and grocery store staff, but they’re asking for about $13 billion, or about one-fifth of what the airline industry wants.

Fake Magic by Nancy Ohanian

Some, like Florida Senator Rick Scott, have argued against bailouts of any kind for anyone, including the airline industry. At the very least, industries like airlines that quite clearly have embedded federal bailouts as part of their long-term plans need to have their courses corrected.

The exact details are up for debate, but fundamentally, the government must set a precedent for corporations that spend the boom years enriching themselves and their shareholders only to crawl to Capitol Hill hat in hand. Rather than filling up the hat, they ought to get a kick in the butt.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren laid out a plan (of course she did) of what this might look like for companies that get federal funds including: a mandatory $15 an hour minimum wage for all employees, a permanent ban on stock buybacks, no dividends or executive bonuses for three years, and criminal penalties for CEOs who violate any of these rules. It’s a start.

We must also stop the cycle of corporations privatizing profits while socializing costs. Why should we, the taxpayers of the United States, spend $50 billion or $60 billion or whatever it may be when we see nothing in return? As of this writing, the total market cap of the Big Four US airlines is $54 billion, almost exactly the value of the bailout being proposed. What if, instead of bailing out the airlines, the US government became the majority shareholder of each so it could profit from its investment?

This is not some pie-in-the-sky proposal. It’s exactly what happened with Conrail, a government-created railroad entity formed in the 1970s out of the bankruptcy of a bunch of private railroads including Penn Central. The government bought the bankrupt railroads for dirt cheap then privatized Conrail in the late 1980s once it started turning a profit, netting some $3.7 billion in 2020 dollars for taxpayers.

Whether or not that specific model is right for the airline bailout is up for debate. But the general idea, that the public needs to stop subsidizing the irresponsible financial behavior of large corporations while the average taxpayer suffers, needs to be the focus of Congress going forward. Maybe, just maybe, we can come out of this mess with a fairer and more equitable relationship between corporations and the American public. And, while I’m dreaming, with some minimum leg room requirements, too.

Trump Doesn't Deserve All Of The Blame For The Poor U.S. Response To COVID-19-- Just Most Of It

Yesterday a senior member of Congress told me that he's taking the pandemic a lot more seriously than his wife, his friends and, most disturbingly, his colleagues, and speculated that it's because he's "been hearing about this for a lot longer than most people and I think it is going to get real bad in about 10 days. I hope I'm wrong, but fear I'm not. People in DC are not taking it seriously enough. I'm hearing bars and restaurants are still full." Bad enough, but the leadership is doing far too little and far too late. Obviously McTurtle is worse but Pelosi's pathetic, compromised agenda is just better in comparison with his and Trump's and isn't going to save us from the impact of what could well turn out to be the worst pandemic in American history. And on Meet the Press, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made it clear that the only way to flatten the curve in America is for everyone to "hunker down" for the immediate future-- starting right this second. He warned that deaths in the country "could soar into the millions." Later, on State of the Union he said that "if we go about our daily lives and not worry about everything-- that it’s not going to happen-- it could happen. And it could be worse." He especially warned young people that the bullshit about people their age being immune or not getting a serious case is patently false.

Some people have told me I've been too harsh claiming Trump for the spread of coronavirus. But I haven't been-- not at all. I want to direct your attention to the two short clips, first the one above and then the quickie analysis below. When trying to defend his decision to close down the response apparatus to global pandemics-- like the nightmare we're living through now-- he said, "Some of the people we cut, they haven't been used for many, many years. And if we ever need them we can get them very quickly. And rather than spending the money... and I'm a business person. I don't like having thousands of people around when you don't need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly." He called the inquiry into the time lost in responding to the rapid rate of infection because he disbanded the White House pandemic office "just a nasty question."

Below, Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, is moved to refer to him as a "bozo" on Democracy Now a few days later for that response. "Everybody is recognizing, oops, it was a big mistake by the Trump Administration to obliterate the entire infrastructure if the pandemic response that the Obama administration had created... because it was Obama's program."





Now, as the U.S. hurtles towards recession-- with the country "suffering the most abrupt and widespread cessation of economic activity in its history... that could mean lost jobs, income and wealth for millions of Americans, Trump is bumbling and fumbling and continuing to make every mistake possible at every junction he comes to. I hate to say it, but this is the "president" of the United States, deal with the response to the pandemic:

"Across the country," continued the Washington Post, consumer spending-- which supports 70 percent of the economy-- is grinding to a halt as fears of the escalating coronavirus pandemic keep people from stores, restaurants, movie theaters and workplaces." Writing for Bloomberg News, Mohamed El-Erian asked his readers to "Think of what is happening as a huge paradigm shift for economies, institutions and social norms and practices that, critically, are not wired for such a phenomenon. It requires us to understand the dynamics, not only to navigate them well but also to avoid behaviors that make the situation a lot worse. The bottom line is that the economic disruptions immediately ahead will be more severe and widespread than the ones experienced by the bulk of the population in advanced countries... We live in a global economy wired for ever deepening interconnectivity; and we are living through a period in which the current phase of health policy-- emphasizing social distancing, separation and isolation-- runs counter to what drives economic growth, prosperity and financial stability. The effects of these two basic factors will be amplified by the economics of fear and uncertainty that tempt everyone not just to clear out supermarket shelves but sadly also reignite terrible conscious and unconscious biases."

And the third rate Trump Regime's response to this multi-faceted calamity? The New York Times' Ellen Barry, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner, termed it a patchwork-- which is what Obama had worked to make sure it wouldn't be: It's Totally Ad Hoc. Without leadership and clear guidance from the federal government, local governments are left on their own-- and each one is doing something different without even definitive guidelines to consult. "The United States, a nation founded on the notion of individual rights and limited federal power," wrote Barry, "vests key decisions on public health in state and local government. The last week laid bare a dizzying patchwork of local decision-making, as the largest quarantine in recent American history occurred in a juddering, piecemeal fashion. Limits on public gatherings are being decided by individual counties, school closures by individual school districts. Testing practices vary widely, with some states introducing curbside testing and private testing firms. Although this country has a central public authority for handling infectious disease-- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-- the federal agency cannot get involved on the ground unless invited by states or municipalities."

“We have a completely decentralized public health system,” said Michele Barry, senior associate dean for global health at Stanford University. “It is difficult to mobilize a large containment strategy. That’s what Singapore did, or what China did. We don’t even work from the states up. We work from the counties up.”

She said she worried that this has kept the nation from acting swiftly, to enact aggressive controls on social distancing.

“I’m just worried we’re going to follow the Italy course, rather than the Singapore course or Hong Kong course, because we’re decentralized,” she said.

The Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, a careerist lunkhead who is far out of his depth and should never have been elected to public office, is as much as personification of this dysfunction and catastrophe as Trump. Under Newsom, California has opted for a sub-Italy response. Some schools are closed, some aren't... no endorsement of anything halt the disease. Newsom, like Trump, is a public menace who had always counted on making do as long as nothing to terrible happened while he was in office and who is making the disaster worse. He told The Times that he preferred not to use his authority to enforce guidelines limiting the size of large gatherings, instead leaving the decision to each of California’s 58 counties, the stupidest possible response by one of the stupidest governors in America. "I have the ability as governor to enforce, but I don’t expect we’ll need to do that," the feeble-minded murderer boasted. He prefers local autonomy, "We are many parts but one body. We are informed by locals and then we supplement our support with the state and federal government. And we work hand in glove, collaboratively." California will have an incredibly high death rate thanks to an incompetent president on top of an incompetent governor-- who haven recent days, taken to complimenting each others incompetence.

Bipartisanship: lame and incompetent politicians boosting each other

About a month ago, a friend of mine living in China joked that "COVID-19 was exposing each East Asian country's weakness. China had intransparent and authoritarian government. Japan had inflexible and sclerotic bureaucracy. South Korea had irresponsible cult fanatics. Turns out," he concluded," that the U.S. has all three together."

In battling a pandemic speed trumps perfection:





Over the weekend, CNN reported that infected people without symptoms might be driving the spread of coronavirus. The Trumpist regime insists that COVID-19 "is spread mainly by people who are already showing symptoms, such as fever, cough or difficulty breathing. If that's true, it's good news, since people who are obviously ill can be identified and isolated, making it easier to control an outbreak." But it might not be true, as studies from all over the world have indicated. Instead, people without symptoms-- like Trump and Pence themselves, "are causing substantial amounts of infection... Several experts interviewed by CNN said while it's unclear exactly what percentage of the transmission in the outbreak is fueled by people who are obviously sick versus those who have no symptoms or very mild symptoms, it's become clear that transmission by people who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic is responsible for more transmission than previously thought."

For weeks, federal officials have emphasized that asymptomatic transmission can happen, but have said that it's not a significant factor in the spread of the virus.

On March 1 on ABC's This Week, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar told host George Stephanopoulos that asymptomatic spread is "not the major driver" of the spread of the new coronavirus.

"You really need to just focus on the individuals that are symptomatic," he said. "It [the containment strategy] really does depend on symptomatic presentation."

The website for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention echoes that assessment.

...But during a press briefing at the White House on Saturday, the administration's coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, seemed to strike a somewhat different note on asymptomatic transmission.

She said they're trying to understand people under the age of 20 who don't have "significant symptoms"-- "Are they a group that are potentially asymptomatic and spreading the virus?" she asked.

"Until you really understand how many people are asymptomatic and asymptomatically passing the virus on, we think it's better for the entire American public to know that the risk of serious illness may be low, but they could be potentially spreading the virus to others."

Centrism Has Proven Itself Disastrous For Most Americans-- Which Is Why Bernie Is Going To Be President

The more we see the anti-working class MSNBC personalities and other contemptible pundits attack Bernie, the more he rises in the polls. Literally. Eli Yokley explained it a little differently for Morning Consult readers: Sanders Rises as Primary Voters Grow More Confident About His Chances Against Trump. Morning Consult polled after the Nevada blowout and Bernie already considerable lead grew by 2 points while Biden dropped into third place, confirming his slow Jeb Bush-like decline back into the political oblivion Obama warned him was waiting for him.

Despite the hysterical and desperate efforts of the hated punditocracy and media elites, Democratic primary voters grow more bullish on Bernie’s chances of beating Señor Trumpanzee in November. Morning Consult's poll on Sunday "found 32 percent back Sanders as their first choice for president, widening the gap over former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to 13 percentage points-- his biggest national lead of the campaign. Sanders’ support is up 2 points from a Feb. 20 survey conducted the day after the party’s debate in Las Vegas and up 4 points from a Feb. 12-17 survey conducted after the New Hampshire primary.

At the same time, a separate Morning Consult survey of 954 Democratic primary voters also conducted Sunday found 34 percent said Sanders has the best chance of beating Trump, up 5 points from the post-New Hampshire poll and 11 points higher than the share who identified Bloomberg as the most electable Democratic candidate.

The latest Morning Consult tracking poll also finds Sanders leading the field among black voters for the first time as the race moves to South Carolina, the second successive state with a significant black population that former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign views as a firewall. Thirty-three percent of black Democratic primary voters said they’re backing Sanders, compared with 29 percent who said Biden, within the subsample’s 4-point margin of error.

With Biden at his lowest point since Morning Consult began tracking the race, and no moderate contender solidifying support, Democratic primary voters are increasingly coming to terms with the possibility that Sanders could lead the ticket in November. Among the 69 percent who correctly identified Sanders as the winner in Nevada, a 43 percent plurality said they expect him to be the party’s nominee, up 11 points from the post-New Hampshire poll.

While Sanders’ early victories in the nominating contests have raised alarm bells for some Democrats who fear he could jeopardize gains in the House, chances of taking back the Senate and even of beating Trump, the party’s voters are expressing more confidence in the democratic socialist’s ability to win.

Fifty-two percent of Democratic primary voters who knew Nevada’s victor said they believe Sanders can beat Trump in November-- up 5 points from the share measured immediately following New Hampshire.

Paul Krugman should give his Nobel Prize, or at least his column, to Richard Wolff. This is a very valuable video-- a friendly debate between Krugman and Wolff-- inspiring, compelling and really worth watching.

Kamala Harris Failed-- One Very Big Reason Why She Deserved To: Her Record As Attorney General

Aaron Glantz's new book, Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall St. Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions of Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream is generally horrible for Trump's inner circle. Amy Goodman: "Aaron Glantz reveals how the 2008 housing crisis decimated millions of Americans' family wealth but enriched President Donald Trump's inner circle, including Trump cabinet Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, Trump's longtime friend and confidant Tom Barrack and billionaire Republican donor Steve Schwarzman." In short, crooks from the Trumpland Swamp-- the aforemented Mnuchin, Ross, Schwarzman and Barrack-- took advantage of a rigged system to transfer billions of dollars from individual homeowners into their own pockets during the Great Recession. None are in prison and none have been charged for their grand scale crimes. But one of them was almost charged and could have easily been serving prison time now... instead as Trump's crooked Treasury Secretary helping Trump violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution every day of the week.

But, as Politico reported yesterday, Glantz also reveals Kamala Harris' sordid and disgraceful role in this mess. He wrote that "Harris not only allowed Steve Mnuchin’s OneWest bank to get away with foreclosing on tens of thousands of state homeowners, but then tried to bury the evidence."

"Consumers wonder how is it that we all got so far behind" and so many Americans lost their homes in the Great Recession, Glantz-- a two-time Peabody Award winning journalist with California-based Reveal and the Center for Investigative Reporting-- said Monday in an interview.

“The answer is all of these officials screwed up and dropped the ball-- and hid it. The time period when all this homewrecking occurred was during the Obama presidency, and when AG’s like Kamala Harris were on the job," he said. "It happened on her watch. And she’s never been really forced to tell the other story-- and wrestle with the truth of what happened."

In California, Mnuchin-- now the Treasury secretary-- acquired regional banks like OneWest with the federal government’s help; the banks got billions in subsidies as they foreclosed on 35,000 homeowners in the Golden State alone, Glantz reports. Harris did little to stop that bleeding-- and later tried to suppress evidence of her inaction, he argues.

"Harris’ deputies recommended that their boss sue the bank," Glantz said, citing the bank’s loss-share agreement with the FDIC, which stated that Mnuchin’s bank could only receive payments from the government if it followed proper foreclosure procedures. "If the state of California found OneWest violated those rules, the payments could stop-- saving not only homeowners... but government coffers as well."

"[But] despite a strong recommendation from her staff," Harris never legally pursued Mnuchin’s OneWest bank, he says. "As a result, no one at OneWest faced prosecution-- and no one got their homes back."

...Earlier this year, Harris told the San Francisco Chronicle that she "didn’t have the legal ability," because "the rules were written in favor of the banks"-- an argument Glantz reports was disputed in a 25-page memo produced by Harris’ own staff. "Case NOT filed despite strong recommendations," reads a cover sheet atop the memo, Glantz writes.

He said the Mortgage Fraud Strike Force Harris launched does get credit for taking action, but mostly went after "small potatoes" offenders. On bigger fish, however, her staff "did investigate OneWest, and did recommend prosecution-- but she did bury their report and declined to launch a prosecution," he said. "That happened."

Glantz writes in Homewreckers that "the only reason we know about California’s investigations into OneWest today is because David Dayen of the news website The Intercept obtained a leaked copy," and published it in January 2017. "By then," Glantz reports, "Harris was no longer California attorney general-- she was a U.S. senator."

It's worth noting that Mnuchin was a mega-donor to politicians-- all Republican politicians... except one: Kamala Harris. These were the Mnuchin contributions I was able to dig up for 2016

• Republican National Committee- $309,600
• New Jersey Republican State Committee- $10,000
• Connecticut Republican Campaign Committee- $10,000
• Republican Party of Tennessee- $10,000
• Republican Party of Wyoming- $10,000
• Republican Party of Louisiana- $10,000
• Republican Party of West Virginia- $10,000
• Republican Party of Virginia- $10,000
• Republican Party of Mississippi- $10,000
• Republican Party of Arkansas- $10,000
• Republican Party of South Carolina- $10,000
• New York Republican Federal Campaign Committee- $10,000
• Paul Ryan (R-WI)- $5,400
• Scott Walker (R-WI)- $2,700
• Donald J. Trump (R-NY)- $5,400
• Kamala Harris (D-CA)- $2,000

Just a coincidence?

By the way, Harris' RealClearPolitics polling average is 5.4% and in her home state, which she once hoped would propel her into the presidency, she's not in the top tier:

• Elizabeth Warren- 23%
• Status Quo Joe- 22%
• Bernie- 21%
• Kamala- 8%
• Mayo Pete- 6%

I Bet No One Asks Biden Tonight About His Role In Creating The Northern Triangle Immigration Disaster

Status Quo Joe With Colombian President Uribe In 2017

Biden doesn't want to play the role of political piñata tonight. His record, though, lends itself to exactly that. Trump will certainly use it against him if he's the nominee and the Democrats on the stage with him tonight should go all in in testing every weak point in the most repulsive record any Democratic candidate has brought to the primary stage since his old ally Joe Lieberman. A couple of days ago, investigative reporter Max Blumenthal tackled a piece of Biden's vile record that he'd prefer to hide and that hasn't been touched by the other candidates yet: How Joe Biden's Privatization Plans Helped Doom Latin America And Fuel The Migration Crisis. I'd love to watch Status Quo Joe squirm while trying to respond to this one!

Blumenthal began by pointing out that Biden has touted the crucial role he played in "designing US mega-development and drug war campaigns that transformed the socio-political landscape of large swaths of Latin America" while he's been campaigning (umm... talking with wealthy donors; there's virtually no campaoigning at all) for the last two month. "'I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia,' Biden boasted in a July 5 interview with CNN, referring to the multi-billion dollar U.S. effort to end Colombia’s civil war with a massive surge of support for the country’s military. According to Biden, the plan was a panacea for Colombia’s problems, from 'crooked cops' to civil strife." But as with almost everything Biden asserts, this was pure bullshit.

Biden’s plan for Colombia has contributed directly to the country’s transformation into a hyper-militarized bastion of right-wing rule, enhancing the power and presence of the notoriously brutal armed forces while failing miserably in its anti-narcotic and reformist objectives.

This year alone, more than 50 human rights defenders were killed in Colombia in the first four months of 2019, while coca production is close to record levels. And as Colombian peace activists lamented in interviews with The Grayzone, the US is still in complete control of Bogotá’s failed anti-drug policy, thanks largely to Plan Colombia.

Biden has also pumped up his role in an initiative called the Alliance for Prosperity, which was applied to the Northern Triangle of Central America. The former vice president was so central to the program’s genesis that it was informally known as “Plan Biden.”

Marketed as an answer to the crisis of child migration, Biden’s brainchild channeled $750 million through a right-wing government installed by a US-orchestrated military coup to spur mega-development projects and privatize social services.

The Grayzone visited Honduras in July and documented, through interviews with human rights defenders, students, indigenous activists, and citizens from all walks of life, how the Alliance for Prosperity helped set the stage for a national rebellion.

In recent months, teachers, doctors, students, and rural campesinos have been in the streets protesting the privatization plans imposed on their country under the watch of Biden and his successors.

The gutting of public health services, teacher layoffs, staggering hikes in electricity prices, and environmentally destructive mega-development projects are critical factors in mass migration from Honduras. And indeed, they are immediate byproducts of the so-called “Biden plan.”

“Biden is taking credit for doing something constructive to stop the migration crisis and blaming the concentration camps [on the U.S.-Mexico border] on Trump. But it’s Biden’s policies that are driving more people out of Central America and making human rights defenders lives more precarious by defending entities that have no interest in human rights,” explained Adrienne Pine, a professor of anthropology at American University and leading researcher of the social crisis in Honduras, in an interview with The Grayzone.

“So $750 million US taxpayer dollars that were allocated to supposedly address child migration are actually making things worse,” Pine added. “It started with unaccompanied minors and now you have children in cages. Largely thanks to Biden.”

In an interview with CNN on July 5, Biden was asked if he favored decriminalizing the entry of Latin American migrants to the United States. Responding with a definitive “no,” Joe Biden stated that he would be “surging folks to the border to make those concrete decisions” about who receives asylum.

Biden's fault?

Biden argued that he had the best record of addressing the root causes of the migration crisis, recalling how he imposed a solution on Central America’s migration crisis. “You do the following things to make your country better so people don’t leave, and we will help you do that, just like we did in Colombia,” he said.

“What did we do in Colombia? We went down and said, okay, and I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia,” Biden continued. “I said, here’s the deal. If you have all these crooked cops, all these federal police, we’re sending our FBI down, you let us put them through a lie detector test, let us tell you who you should fire and tell you the kind of people you should hire. They did and began to change. We can do so much if we’re committed.”

With the arrogance of a pith-helmeted high colonial official meting out instructions on who to hire and fire to his docile subjects, Biden presided over a plan that failed miserably in its stated goals, while transforming Colombia into a hyper-militarized bastion of US regional influence.

Plan Colombia was originally conceived by Colombian President Andrés Pastrana in 1999, as an alternative development and conflict resolution plan for his war-torn country. He considered calling it the “Plan for Colombia’s Peace.”

The proposal was quickly hijacked by the Bill Clinton administration, with Joe Biden lobbying in the Senate for an iron-fisted militarization plan. “We have an obligation, in the interests of our children and the interests of the hemisphere, to keep the oldest democracy in place, to give them a fighting chance to keep from becoming a narcostate,” Biden said in a June 2000 floor speech.

When Plan Colombia’s first formal draft was published, it was done so in English, not Spanish. The original spirit of peace-building was completely sapped from the document by Biden, whose vigorous wheeling-and-dealing ensured that almost 80 percent of the $7.5 billion plan went to the Colombian military. 500 US military personnel were promptly dispatched to Bogota to train the country’s military.

“If you read the original Plan Colombia, not the one that was written in Washington but the original Plan Colombia, there’s no mention of military drives against the FARC rebels,” Robert White, the former number two at the U.S. embassy in Bogota, complained in 2000. “Quite the contrary. [Pastrana] says the FARC is part of the history of Colombia and a historical phenomenon, he says, and they must be treated as Colombians.”

White lamented how Washington had abused the trust of the Colombians: “They come and ask for bread, and you give them stones.”

Plan Colombia was largely implemented under the watch of the hardline right-wing President Álvaro Uribe. In 1991, Uribe was placed on a US Drug Enforcement Agency list of “important Colombian narco-traffickers,” in part due to his role in helping drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s obtain licenses for landing strips while Uribe was the head of Colombia’s Civil Aeronautics Department.

Under Uribe’s watch, toxic chemicals were sprayed by military forces across the Colombian countryside, poisoning the crops of impoverished farmers and displacing millions.

Six years after Bill Clinton initiated Plan Colombia, however, even U.S. drug czar John Walters was forced to quietly admit in a letter to the Senate that the price of cocaine in the US had declined, the flow of the drug into the U.S. had risen, and its purity had increased.

Meanwhile, a UN Office of Drugs and Crime report found that coca cultivation reached record levels in Colombia in 2018. In other words, billions of dollars have been squandered, and a society already in turmoil has been laid to waste.

For the military and right-wing paramilitary forces that have shored up the rule of leaders like Uribe and the current ultra-conservative Colombian president, Ivan Duque, Plan Colombia offered a sense of near-total impunity.

The depravity of the country’s military was put on bold display when the so-called “false positives” scandal was exposed in 2008. The incident began when army officers lured 22 rural laborers to a far-away location, massacred them, and then dressed them in uniforms of the leftist FARC guerrillas.

It was an overt attempt to raise the FARC body count and justify the counter-insurgency aid flowing from the U.S. under Plan Colombia. The officers who oversaw the slaughter were paid bounties and given promotions.

Colombian academics Omar Eduardo Rojas Bolaños and Fabián Leonardo Benavides demonstrated in a meticulous study that the “false positives” killings reflected “a systematic practice that implicates the commanders of brigades, battalions and tactical units” in the deaths of more than 10,000 civilians. Indeed, under Plan Colombia, the incident was far from an isolated atrocity.

In an interview in Bogotá this May, The Grayzone’s Ben Norton asked Colombian social leader Santiago Salinas if there was any hope for progressive political transformation since the ratification of Plan Colombia.

An organizer of the peace group Congreso de los Pueblos, Salinas shrugged and exclaimed, “I wish.” He lamented that many of Colombia’s most pivotal decisions were made in Washington.

Salinas pointed to drug policy as an example. “It seems like the drug decisions about what to do with the drugs, it has nothing to do with Colombia.

“There was no sovereign decision on this issue. Colombia does not have a decision,” he continued. It was the Washington that wrote the script for Bogota. And the drug trade is in fact a key part of the global financial system, Salinas pointed out.

But Biden was not finished. After 15 years of human misery and billions of wasted dollars in Colombia, he set out on a personal mission to export his pet program to Central America’s crime and corruption-ravaged Northern Triangle.

In his July sit-down with CNN, Joe Biden trumpeted his Plan Colombia as the inspiration for the Alliance for Prosperity he imposed on Central America. Channeling the spirit of colonial times once again, he bragged of imposing Washington’s policies on the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

“We’ll make a deal with you,” Biden recalled telling the leaders of these countries. “You do the following things to make your country better so people don’t leave, and we will help you do that.”

Biden announced his bold plan on the editorial pages of the New York Times in January 2015. He called it “a joint plan for economic and political reforms, an alliance for prosperity.” Sold by the vice president as a panacea to a worsening migration crisis, the Alliance for Prosperity was a boon for international financial institutions which promised to deepen the economic grief of the region’s poor.



The Alliance for Prosperity “treated the Honduran government as if it were a crystal-clear, pure vessel into which gold could be poured and prosperity would flow outward,” explained Dana Frank, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of the book, The Long Honduran Night.

“In reality, the Plan would further enrich and strengthen the political power of the very same elites whose green, deliberate subversion of the rule of law, and destruction of natural resources and of Indigenous and campesino land rights, were responsible for the dire conditions the proposal ostensibly addressed,” Frank added.

In Honduras, the government had no capacity or will to resist Biden’s plan. That is because the country’s elected president, Juan Manuel Zelaya, had been removed in 2009 in a coup orchestrated by the United States.

As Zelaya told The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil, the Obama administration was infuriated by his participation in ALBA, a regional economic development program put forward by Venezuela’s then-President Hugo Chavez that provided an alternative to neoliberal formulas like the so-called “Biden Plan.”

Following the military coup, a corporate-friendly administration was installed to advance the interests of international financial institutions, and US trainers arrived in town to hone the new regime’s mechanisms of repression.

Under the auspices of the Central American Regional Security Initiative, the FBI was dispatched to oversee the training of FUSINA, the main operational arm of the Honduran army and the base of the Military Police for Public Order (PMOP) that patrols cities like an occupation force.

In an October 2014 cable, the US embassy in Tegucigalpa acknowledged that the PMOP was riven with corruption and prone to abuse, and attempted to distance itself from the outfit, even though it operated under the umbrella of FUSINA.

This June, the PMOP invaded the Autonomous University of Honduras, attacking students protesting the privatization of their school and wounding six.

The creation by the US embassy in Honduras of a special forces unit known as the Tigres has added an additional layer of repressive muscle. Besides arresting activists, the Tigres reportedly helped a drug kingpin escape after he was detained during a US investigation.

While violent crime surged across Honduras, unemployment more than doubled. Extreme poverty surged, and so too did the government’s security spending.

To beef up his military, President Juan Orlando Hernández dipped into the social programs that kept a mostly poor population from tumbling into destitution.

As Alex Rubinstein reported for The Grayzone, the instability of post-coup Honduras has been particularly harsh on LGTTBI (Lesbian, Gay, Trans, Travesti, Bisexual, and Intersex) Hondurans. More than 300 of them have been killed since 2009, a dramatic spike in hate crimes reinforced by the homophobic rhetoric of the right-wing Evangelical Confraternity that represents the civil-society wing of the ultra-conservative Hernandez government.

As the social chaos enveloped Honduran society, migration to the US-Mexico border began to surge to catastrophic levels. Unable to make ends meet, some Hondurans sent their children alone to the border, hoping that they would temporary protective or refugee status.

By 2014, the blowback of the Obama administration’s coup had caused a national emergency. Thousands of Hondurans were winding up in cages in detention camps run by the US Department of Homeland Security, and many of them were not even 16 years old.

That summer, Obama went to Congress for $3.7 billion in emergency funds to ramp up border militarization and deport as many unaccompanied Central American minors as possible.

Biden used the opportunity to rustle up an additional billion dollars, exploiting the crisis to fund a massive neoliberal project that saw Honduras as a base for international financial opportunity. His plan was quickly ratified, and the first phase of the Alliance for Prosperity began.

The implementation of the Alliance for Prosperity was overseen by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), a US-dominated international financial institution based in Washington, DC that supports corporate investment in Latin America and the Caribbean.

A graphic [above] on the IADB’s website outlined the plan’s objectives in anodyne language that concealed its aggressively neoliberal agenda.

For instance, the IADB promised the “fostering [of] regional energy integration.” This was a clear reference to Plan Pueblo Panama, a region-wide neoliberal development blueprint that was conceived as a boon to the energy industry. Under the plan, the IADB would raise money from Latin American taxpayers to pay for the expansion of power lines that would carry electricity from Mexico all the way to Panama.

Honduras, with its rivers and natural resources, provided the project with a major hub of energy production. In order for the country’s energy to be traded and transmitted to other countries, however, the International Monetary Fund mandated that its national electricity company be privatized.

Since the implementation of that component of “Plan Biden,” energy costs have begun to surge for residential Honduran consumers. In a country with a 66 percent poverty rate, electricity privatization has turned life from precarious to practically impossible.

Rather than languish in darkness for long hours with unpaid bills piling up, many desperate citizens have journeyed north towards the U.S. border.

As intended, the Alliance for Prosperity’s regional energy integration plan has spurred an influx of multi-national energy companies to Honduras. Hydro-electric dams and power plants began rising up in the midst of the lush pine forests and winding rivers that define the Honduran biosphere, pushing many rural indigenous communities into a life-and-death struggle.

This July, The Grayzone traveled to Reitoca, a remote farming community located in the heart of the Honduran “dry sector.” The indigenous Lenca residents of this town depend on their local river for fish, recreation, and most importantly, water to irrigate the crops that provide them with a livelihood. But the rush on energy investment brought an Italian-Chilean firm called Progelsa to the area to build a massive hydro-electric dam just upstream.

Wilmer Alonso, a member of the Lenca Indigenous Council of Reitoca, spoke with The Grayzone, shaking with emotion as he described the consequences of the dam for his community.

“The entire village is involved in this struggle,” Alonso said. “Everyone knows the catastrophe that the construction of this hydro-electric plant would create.”

He explained that, like so many foreign multi-nationals in Honduras, Progelsa employs an army of private thugs to intimidate protesters: “The private company uses the army and the police to repress us. They accuse us of being trespassers, but they are the ones trespassing on our land.”

The Alliance for Progress also provided the backdrop for the assassination of the renowned Honduran environmentalist and feminist organizer Berta Cáceres.

On March 3, 2016, Cáceres was gunned down in her home in rural Honduras. A towering figure in her community with a presence on the international stage, Cáceres had been leading the fight against a local dam project overseen by DESA, a powerful Honduran energy company backed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and run by powerful former military officers.

The representative that DESA sent to sign its deal with USAID, Sergio Rodríguez, was later accused of masterminding Cáceres’ murder, alongside military officials and former company employees.

In March 2018, the Honduran police arrested DESA’s executive president, Roberto David Castillo Mejía, accusing him of “providing logistics and other resources to one of the material authors” of the assassination. Castillo was a West Point graduate who worked in the energy industry while serving as a Honduran intelligence officer.

This July, The Grayzone visited the family of Berta Cáceres in La Esperanza, a town nestled in the verdant mountains of Intibucá. Cáceres’ mother, Doña Berta, lives there under 24-hour police guard paid for by human rights groups.

The Cáceres household is bristling with security cameras, and family members get around in armored cars. In her living room, we met Laura Zúñiga Cáceres of the Civic Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), the human rights group that her mother Berta founded.

“The violence in Honduras generates migrant caravans, which tears apart society, and it all has to do with all of this extractivism, this violence,” Zúñiga Caceres told The Grayzone. “And the response from the US government is to send more soldiers to our land; it is to reinforce one of the factors that generates violence the most in our society.”

“We are receiving reports from our comrades that there is a US military presence in indigenous Lenca territory,” she added. “For what? Humanitarian aid? With weapons. It’s violence. It’s persecution.”

The Alliance for Prosperity also commissioned the privatization of health services through a deceptively named program called the Social Protection Framework Law, or la Ley Marco de Protección Social.

Promoted by Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández as a needed reform, the scheme was advanced through a classic shock doctrine-style episode: In 2015, close associates of Hernández siphoned some $300 million from the Honduran Institute for Social Services (IHSS) into private businesses, starving hospitals of supplies and causing several thousand excess deaths, mostly among the poor.

With the medical sector in shambles, Hondurans were then forced to seek healthcare from the private companies that were to provide services under Hernandez’s “Social Protection” plan.

“The money that was robbed [in the IHSS scandal] was used to justify the Ley Marco Proteccion Social,” Karen Spring, a researcher and coordinator for the Honduras Solidarity Network, told The Grayzone. “The hospitals were left in horrible conditions with no human capital and they were left to farm out to private hospitals.” “When Hondurans go to hospitals, they will be told they need to go to a private company, and through the deductions in their jobs they will have to pay a lot out of pocket,” Spring said. “Through the old universal system you would be covered no matter what you had, from a broken arm to cancer. No more.”

In response, Hondurans poured out into the streets, launching the March of Torches-- the first major wave of continuous protests against Hernandez and his corrupt administration.

In March 2015, in the middle of the crisis, Joe Biden rushed down to Guatemala City to embrace Hernández and restore confidence in the Alliance for Prosperity.

“I come from a state that, in fact, is the corporate capital of America. More corporations are headquartered there than anyplace else,” Biden boasted, with Hernández and the presidents of Guatemala and El Salvador standing by his side. “They want to come here. Corporate America wants to come.”

Emphasizing the need for more anti-corruption and security measures to attract international financial investment, Biden pointed to Plan Colombia as a shining model-- and to himself as its architect. “Today Colombia is a nation transformed, just as you hope to be 10 to 15 years from now,” the vice president proclaimed.

Following Biden’s visit, the privatization of the Honduran economy continued apace-- and so did the corruption, the repression, and the unflinching support from Washington.

By 2017, the movement in Honduras that had galvanized against the U.S.-orchestrated 2009 coup saw its most immediate opportunity for political transformation at the ballot box. President Hernández was running for re-election, violating a constitutional provision on term limits. His opponent, Salvador Nasrallah, was a popular broadcast personality who provided a centrist consensus choice for the varied elements that opposed the country’s coup regime.

When voting ended on November 26, Nasrallah’s victory appeared certain, with exit polls showing him comfortably ahead by several points. But suddenly, the government announced that a power outage required the suspension of vote counting. Days later, Hernández was declared the victor by about 1 percent.

The fraud was so transparent that the Organization of American States (OAS), normally an arm of US interests in Latin America, declared in a preliminary report that “errors, irregularities and systemic problems,” as well as “extreme statistical improbability,” rendered the election invalid.

But the United States recognized the results anyway, leaving disenfranchised Hondurans with protest as their only recourse.

“Hondurans tried to change what happened in their country through the 2017 elections, not just Hernández but all the implementation of all these policies that the Biden plan had funded and implemented all these years since the coup,” explained Karen Spring, of the Honduras Solidarity Network.

“They tried to change that reality through votes and when the elections turned out to be a fraud, tons of people had no choice but to take to the streets.”

At the front lines of the protests in 2017 was Spring’s longtime partner, the Honduran activist Edwin Espinal. Following a protest in November of that year where property damage took place, Espinal was arrested at gunpoint at his home and accused of setting fire to the front door of a hotel. He fervently denied all charges, accusing the government of persecuting him for his political activism.

In fact, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had placed a protective measure on Espinal in 2010 in response to previous attempts to legally railroad him.

The government placed Espinal in pre-trial detention in La Tolva, a US-style maximum security prison normally reserved for violent criminals and narco-traffickers. Last October, Espinal and Spring were married in the jail while surrounded by masked guards.

“Since the Biden plan, contractors have been coming down to build these US-style maximum security prisons,” Spring said. “That’s where my husband Edwin Espinal is being held.”

“They say the company is Honduran but there’s no way Hondurans could have built that without US architects or US construction firms giving them the plans,” she added. “I’ve been in the prison and it’s like they dumped a US prison in the middle of Honduras.”

Reflecting on her husband’s persecution, Spring explained, “Edwin wanted to stay in his country to change the reality that caused mass migration. He’s one of the people who’s faced consequences because he went to the streets. And he’s faced persecution for years because he’s one of the Hondurans who wanted to change the country by staying and fighting. Berta Caceres was another.”

“Hondurans wanted to use their votes to change the country and now they’re voting with their feet,” she continued. “So if Biden’s plan really addressed the root causes of the migrant crisis, why aren’t people asking why migration is getting worse? Hondurans are voting on the Biden plan by fleeing and saying your plan didn’t work and it made our situation worse by fleeing to the border.”

Now, if Democratic Party primary voters only cared about issues! And their candidates' characters! Trump told reporters yesterday that his dream is going to come true-- the only way he could win reelection is what will happen. "I think right now, it will be Sleepy Joe. I feel he’ll limp across the line. So, what I think doesn’t mean anything, but I know the other people, I know him. I think he’s off his game by a lot, but personally, I think it’s going to be Sleepy Joe."

Who Will Be The Democratic Nominee? by Nancy Ohanian