With a launch of the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign on the near horizon, efforts to block his trajectory to the Democratic presidential nomination are intensifying. The lines of attack are already aggressive-and often contradictory.

One media meme says that Bernie has made so much headway in moving the Democratic Party leftward that he's no longer anything special. We're supposed to believe that candidates who've adjusted their sails to the latest political wind are just as good as the candidate who generated the wind in the first place.

Bloomberg News supplied the typical spin in a Feb. 8 article headlined "Sanders Risks Getting Crowded Out in 2020 Field of Progressives." The piece laid out the narrative: "Sanders may find himself a victim of his own success in driving the party to the left with his 2016 run. The field of Democratic presidential hopefuls includes at least a half-dozen candidates who've adopted in whole or in part the platform that helped Sanders build a loyal following . . ."

: Yet Bernie is also being targeted as too marginal. The same Bloomberg article quoted Howard Dean, a long-ago liberal favorite who has become a hawkish lobbyist and corporate mouthpiece: "There will be hardcore, hard left progressives who will have nobody but Bernie, but there won't be many."

" So, is Bernie now too much like other Democratic presidential candidates, or is he too much of an outlier? In the mass media, both seem to be true. In the real world, neither are true.

Last week, Business Insider reported on new polling about Bernie's proposal "to increase the estate tax, the tax paid by heirs on assets passed down by the deceased. Sanders' idea would lower the threshold to qualify for the tax to $3.5 million in assets, down from the current $11 million. The plan would also introduce a graduating scale of tax rates for the estates of wealthier Americans, eventually reaching a 77 percent marginal rate for assets over $1 billion."

Here are the poll results: "When presented with the details of the proposal, 37 percent of respondents supported Sanders' policy while 26 percent opposed, according to Insider's survey."(The rest had no opinion.)

That kind of response from the public is a far cry from claims that Sanders is somehow fringe. In fact, the ferocity of media attacks on him often indicates that corporate power brokers are afraid his strong progressive populism is giving effective voice to majority views of the public.

A vast range of grassroots organizing-outside and inside of electoral arenas-has created the current leftward momentum. "As a progressive, it is heartening to see so many other candidates voice support for Senator Sanders' policies," said Alan Minsky, executive director at Progressive Democrats of America. "However, I've been around the block enough times to know that politicians who adopt positions in tune with the fashion of the moment are not as trustworthy as those rare few, like Bernie Sanders, who have held firm to a powerful social justice vision through his entire long career."

I also asked for a comment from Pia Gallegos, former chair of the Adelante Progressive Caucus of the New Mexico Democratic Party. "Bernie's competitors lack his track record on economic security for all American workers, Medicare for All, free public college education, taxing the rich and opposing bloated military budgets," she said. "Those are long-standing positions that-more than ever-resonate with grassroots activists and voters. Other Democratic presidential candidates will try to imitate this populist agenda, but only Bernie can speak with the vision, clarity and moral authority that the Democratic Party's presidential candidate needs to defeat the incumbent."

The overarching fear that defenders of oligarchy have about Bernie Sanders is not that he's out of step with most Americans-it's that he's in step with them. For corporate elites determined to retain undemocratic power, a successful Bernie 2020 campaign would be the worst possible outcome of the election.

(c) 2019 Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" and "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State."

Note: Palast covered Venezuela during the Chavez presidency for BBC Television Newsnight and the Guardian. You may download, for free, the film of Palast's BBC reports, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez. This article incorporates additional reporting by William Camacaro in Caracas.

On January 23, right after a phone call from Donald Trump, Juan Guaido, former speaker of Venezuela's National Assembly, declared himself president. No voting. When you have official recognition from The Donald, who needs elections?

Say what?

I can explain what's going on in Venezuela in photos.

First, we have Juan Guaido, self-proclaimed (and Trump-proclaimed) president of the nation, with his wife and child, a photo prominently placed in The New York Times. And here, the class photo of Guaido's party members in the National Assembly. They appear, overwhelmingly light-skinned - especially when compared to their political opposites in the third photo, the congress members who support the elected President Nicolas Maduro.

This is the story of Venezuela in black and white, the story not told in The New York Times or the rest of our establishment media. This year's so-called popular uprising is, at its heart, a furious backlash of the whiter (and wealthier) Venezuelans against their replacement by the larger Mestizo (mixed-race) poor. (Forty-four percent of the population that answered the 2014 census listed themselves as "white.") Four centuries of white supremacy in Venezuela by those who identify their ancestors as European came to an end with the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, who won with the overwhelming support of the Mestizo majority. This turn away from white supremacy continues under Maduro, Chavez's chosen successor.

In my interviews with Chavez for BBC beginning in 2002, he talked with humor about the fury of a white ruling class finding itself displaced by a man who embraced his own Indigenous and African heritage.

In Venezuela, as in the USA, poverty and race are locked together. Why did so many Mestizo, poor Venezuelans love Chavez? As even the CIA's surprisingly honest Fact Book states:

"Social investment in Venezuela during the Chavez administration reduced poverty from nearly 50% in 1999 to about 27% in 2011, increased school enrollment, substantially decreased infant and child mortality, and improved access to potable water and sanitation through social investment."

Everyone has been hurt economically, but the privileged class's bank accounts have become nearly worthless. So, knowing that the Mestizo majority would not elect their Great White Hope Guaido, they simply took to the streets - often armed. (And yes, both sides are armed.)

I've seen this movie before. When I look at today's news reports of massive demonstrations against the so-called "dictatorship" of Venezuela's left government, it looks awfully like 2002, when I was first in Caracas reporting for BBC Television. Then, The New York Times, NPR and other mainstream outlets in the US reported on marches against the Chavez government, describing the tens of thousands of Venezuelans calling for Chavez's removal. The light-skinned protesters were overwhelmingly wealthy - and they wanted you to know it. Many of the women marched in high heels, the men peacocking in business suits, proudly displayed in the uniforms of their privileged class. The Chavistas wore patriotic yellow, blue and red T-shirts, sneakers, jeans.

To anti-Chavista protesters, race was an issue as much as class economics. I heard these opposition demonstrators shout "Chavez, Monkey!" and worse.

Many in the US have never heard this story of race war in Venezuela (and war is what it is), as the US press does not recognize its own racial bias. In 2002, as today, the massive demonstrations of the whiter Venezuelans were reported as evidence that Chavez was wildly unpopular. Yet, the day after each anti-Chavez march, I would witness and film the pro-Chavez demonstrations that flooded Caracas with an ocean of nearly half a million marchers, largely the Mestizo poor, that received little or no coverage in the US press.

The bias continues. The New York Times did not run a photo of this past week's pro-Maduro demonstrations. But in hard-to-find photos and reports from my colleagues on the ground, the Chavista demonstrations are bigger, involving mass turnouts in several cities, not just wealthy neighborhoods in Caracas.

Why do the poor march for Maduro? Even though the Mestizo majority suffers today, they will not turn back to the pre-Chavez days of de facto apartheid.

And we must remember this is not the first time the US government has tried to overthrow the elected government in Venezuela.

In 2002, George W. Bush's State Department cheer-led the coup. The plotters kidnapped Chavez and held him hostage. The coup was led by an oil industry leader and head of the Chamber of Commerce, Pedro Carmona, who had seized the nation's White House, and, like Guaido today, declared himself president. Carmona told me proudly about the fancy inaugural ball held by the nation's elite and attended by Bush's ambassador.

But the Bush/Carmona coup collapsed when a million mostly Mestizo, Indigenous and Black Venezuelans flooded the capital and forced the plotters to return their hero, the supposedly unpopular Chavez, to Miraflores, the presidential palace. "Presidente" Carmona fled.

Today, Guaido's supporters, like Carmona's, know they can't win an election given the overwhelming fact of the newly empowered Mestizo majority. So Guaido has skipped the idea of an election altogether, simply replacing running for office with the "recognition" from Trump and allies which Guaido can't get from Venezuelans.

When I see the images and hear the chants of the anti-Chavista demonstrators now, I'm also reminded of what I saw at a Trump rally in Macon, Georgia, this past November. The president slid out of Air Force One to tell the crowd - heavily weighted with white supremacists - that they needed to take back their country from those "invading" the border. Trump told them to fear gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who is Black, saying she would "turn Georgia into Venezuela."

I don't think Trump was talking about Abrams's program to bring universal health care to Georgia, as Chavez did for Venezuela.

Some of the US press is quick to condemn the racial hatred on display at Trump rallies. But I have yet to hear or read in the US press what our eyes can see in the three photos from Venezuela: an uprising of white or light-skinned people wanting to "take back their country."

The putsch in Venezuela is run by the wealthy, internationally connected minority operating by a regime-change plan designed by neocon retread John Bolton, Trump's national security adviser - a plan to control Venezuela and its oil, as Bolton openly proclaims.

Ah, yes, the oil. It's always the oil. And Venezuela has plenty to seize: the world's largest reserves.

We'll get to that in Part II.

Bernie Sanders' anticipated second run for the presidency is the 6-ton elephant in the Democratic boardroom. But the rich owners of the Party would rather lose to Trump again than win with Sanders For the entirety of the 21st century the Lords of Capital have offered nothing but deepening austerity and endless war to the "home" populace of the imperial countries. The Great Meltdown of 2008 brought the global capitalist system to the very brink of collapse, impoverishing tens of millions and imprinting a profound sense of dread and insecurity on a new generation. Were it not for the strength of China's command economy and the $19 trillion Federal Reserve bailout of U.S. and European banks, the global capitalist system might have come totally undone. Instead, the system's concentration of wealth mechanisms were put on overdrive. No wonder, then, that polls show 18 to 29 year-old Americans favor socialism (51%) over capitalism (45%), and that Black Americans are even more socialist-minded than that. And no wonder a U.S. president felt compelled to exorcise the demons of socialism in his State of the Union Address:

"Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country," Donald Trump told the imperial Congress. "America was founded on liberty and independence --- not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country."

In truth, there are no organizations of socialists even remotely positioned to threaten the rule of the Lords of Capital in the U.S. However, super-majorities of the U.S. public favor single payer health care, free college tuition, a living minimum wage, and other New Deal-type programs pushed by self-styled "democratic" socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And the leftish Democrats' "Green New Deal" proposals for a massive renewable energy makeover of infrastructure combined with jobs guarantees are "strongly" or "somewhat" supported by a whopping 81 percent of all registered voters (including 40 percent of Republicans) and 92 percent of Democrats.

This is what passes for "socialism" in the U.S., and although such programs are not designed to overthrow the rule of capital, they are forbidden political territory for the leadership of both corporate parties in the age of endless austerity and war. Of the 535 House and Senate members gathered in the Capitol building for the annual presidential address, only 78 belong to the Medicare for All Caucus, all of them House Democrats. That means only one-third of the 235 Democratic House members have endorsed a measure that enjoys 85 percent support among Democratic voters and 70 percent among Americans as a whole, including 52 percent of Republicans.

The Lords of Capital, not the voters, control both political parties, and the Lords decree austerity. Donald Trump, the billionaire arch racist, nevertheless styles himself as a "populist," and littered his remarks with vague references to repairing "crumbling infrastructure," lowering the cost of prescription drugs, and a promise to sign a bill for nationwide paid parental leave after childbirth. But that's just hot air for the occasion. Trump's proposed budget for 2019, like the previous year, slashes deeply at the threadbare safety net, gutting Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps - a vicious austerity.

Trump bragged about his gargantuan military budgets -- $700 billion for 2018, $716 for this year - that blew deficits through the roof, providing a rationale for more cuts to social programs the next go-round. "War as an enemy of the poor," as Dr. Martin Luther King described it. Under late stage capitalism, war and austerity are twin policies, and the only items on the menu of either corporate party.

Democratic leadership is just as wedded to war and austerity as Trump and his Republicans. The Democrats recruited Georgia's Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who was defeated by blatant racial vote-stealing in her bid for governor, to show how important the Black vote is to the party. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn't authorize Abrams to offer any programs of substance that would upset the austerity regime. Instead, Abrams spoke of her own history and the trials and tribulations of the civil rights and women's movements, demanded that everyone be held "accountable for racist words and deeds," called for defense of an LGBTQ community that "remains under attack," and insisted that Donald Trump "tell the truth, and to respect his duties and the extraordinary diversity that defines America."

The truth is, the Democrats are running on a "we are not Trump" platform, the same as Hillary Clinton did the last time around. Clinton and her corporate handlers believed that Trump set the bar so low and was so personally repulsive, that he would be easily beaten without the Democrats having to make any promises to relieve the suffering of their working class base. The austerity regime would be safe in such a contest. Black and brown voters would rally around the Democrats in panic at the prospect of a Trump presidency, as would "non-deplorable" whites. But it turned out that most whites are deplorables and stuck with the Republican Party, as they have ever since it became the party of white supremacy in 1968 -- many with renewed passion, in the belief that they finally had one of their own at the helm.

Polls showed that Bernie Sanders, the "democratic socialist" insurgent, would likely have beaten Trump in 2016 - an outcome the Lords of Capital feared far more than Trump's ascent to the Oval Office, since his outstanding primary showing represented the strongest electoral challenge to austerity of the century. The "leftish" sentiments of voters and Democratic activists have hardened and intensified in the Trump years. Sanders' anticipated second run is the 6-ton elephant in the Democratic boardroom. The corporate overseers of the Party would rather lose to Trump again than win with Sanders, whose victory might spell the end of the austerity half of the late stage capitalist regime (although U.S. endless war policy would likely remain in effect.)

Sanders has for the past two years gone on Facebook Live and other social media to respond to Trump's State of the Union addresses. However, the corporate Democrats have rolled out their candidates early, with Black Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker out front in the race to protect the interests of the Lords of Capital. As BAR columnist Danny Haiphong has said, Democratic leadership wants to bury the dreaded Sanders candidacy in a sea of safe, pseudo-progressive faces, many of them Black and brown. Democratic operatives attacked Sanders for trying to "step on" the performance of official Democratic designated responder, Stacey Abrams.

Shamefully, Temple University professor Mark Lamont Hill, who was fired by CNN for defending Palestinian human rights, showed his true colors as kiss-ass to Democratic corporate leadership. A Sanders response to Trump's State of the Union" is a bad move," said Hill, "especially assuming he's going to run. It only reinforces the idea that Bernie is not serious about representing the interests of the Democratic Party. It also reads as racially tone deaf, as Stacey Abrams becomes the first Black woman to deliver the response."

Sanders dutifully waited for Abrams' soulful yet substance-starved presentation to end, then slammed into Trump's fantasy world like a growling gray bulldozer. The economy is "not booming" for the roughly 80% of Americans living "paycheck to paycheck," said Sanders. Americans need Medicare for All because they "can't afford to go to the doctor when they're sick" and "cannot afford to buy the prescription drugs." The U.S. has the "highest rate of childhood poverty in the developed world"; Americans are "working longer and longer hours for lower wages;" and "cannot afford a decent place in which to live" or "feed their families" - conditions that can be alleviated by living wage laws and a restructured economy. Sanders quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, the self-described "democratic socialist.": "This country has socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor."

After the Address, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told MSNBC that Trump is "losing on the issues" and that is why he made an "ad hominem" attack on socialism. She pointed out that her proposal to tax the super-rich at 70 percent is supported by 60 percent of the public. Howevever, Ocasio-Cortez, a "socialist" of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) variety, cannot escape the stupiifying grip of imperial ideology. Her "socialism" goes no farther than New Deal programs to save capitalism, and is absent any solidarity with those resisting imperialism's efforts to destroy the very idea of "socialism" and national sovereignty everywhere in the formerly Third World. Solidarity is not part of Sanders and "AOC's" political makeup, except with those purported "socialists" that have made peace with capitalism in western Europe and now struggle to preserve their welfare state structures under the NATO imperial umbrella - a battle they are so far losing -- while their governments act as junior partners in Washington's endless wars.

Ocasio-Cortez was questioned on MSNBC about Trump's attack on socialism in general, and on the socialist government in Venezuela that the U.S. has been attempting to overthrow for the past 20 years. "We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom," said the Orange Aggressor, who last week recognized a U.S.-groomed pretender to the Venezuelan presidency and gave him the keys to billions in assets stolen by Washington. "And we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair."

AOC said Trump was trying to "confuse the public. I think he sees himself losing on the issues, he sees himself losing on the wall in the southern border, and he needs to grasp at an ad hominem attack and this is his way of doing it." But she did not object to Trump and two previous U.S. presidents' attempted coups, devastating sanctions and constant subversion of a government whose electoral process were described by former president Jimmy Carter as the "best in the world." Instead, she spoke as a loyal American imperialist, for whom the sovereignty of other nations and peoples is dependent on the whims of the global hegemon, the government of which she is now a part. According to Ocasio-Cortez, the issue in Venezuela is not socialism, even if the president that ordered it says so, and neither is there a problem of violations of international law by the U.S. Rather, "What we need to realize is happening is this is an issue of authoritarian regime versus democracy. In order for [Trump] to try to dissuade or throw people off the scent of the trail, he has to really confuse the public. And I think that that's exactly what he's trying to do."

If AOC meant that the U.S. is an authoritarian regime that systematically violates international law, she would be correct. But instead, she was speaking of the government in Venezuela, and blaming the victim of the aggression. Ocasio-Cortez is thus complicit in the crime. As is Sanders, whose statement on the unfolding U.S coup in Venezuela provided a political rationale for overthrowing Nicolas Maduro's government, followed by a weak objection to Trump's actually doing it. The terms "wishy-washy" and worthless were coined for just such imperial leftists (properly called "social imperialists," not socialists.)

Only three Democratic members of the House, California Rep. Ro Khanna, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, have condemned the U.S. actions against Venezuela, and much of the phony left has found common cause with Trump in the crime.

It is possible that AOC will grow an internationalist consciousness, without which one is no socialist. But it's way too late for 77 year-old Bernie Sanders. His historical mission is to run for president once again, on a platform opposed to endless austerity, and hopefully generate such momentum that Democratic leaders will be forced by their corporate masters to sabotage Sander's campaign in the full light of day, provoking a significant exodus of lefties from the Party.

The corporate duopoly cannot buck the Lords of Capital, whose only vision for the planet is endless austerity and war, with themselves forever on top. The real resistance can only be nurtured outside the Party. Bernie Sanders' job, although certainly not his intention, is to explode the Democrats by running on a platform that supermajorities of people support - and to be publicly crucified for it.

A newspaper photograph last June portrayed three guys in suits and ties shoveling dirt. They were Donald Trump, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and the chairman of Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics conglomerate.

They were doing a PR groundbreaking for Foxconn's new plant that supposedly would hire thousands of blue-collar workers in Wisconsin to make flat-screen televisions. All three hailed the event as the start of a Made-in-the-USA manufacturing renaissance, but it was actually a corporate scam. Walker, who was up for re-election, was giving away a whopping $4 billion from his state's taxpayers to lure Foxconn. Still, Trump hailed the deal as "the eighth wonder of the world."

Less than a year later, though - oops - it turns out the three had been shoveling BS. In January, Foxconn quietly backed away from its promise of all those factory jobs, declaring that "the global market environment... has changed.... In terms of TV, we have no place in the US." Having already pocketed much of Walker's bribe money, Foxconn was downsizing its project from a mass-production blue-collar factory to some sort of high-tech R&D operation.

It turns out that the Taiwanese giant has a history of reneging on its grandiose schemes, including failing to deliver on a Pennsylvania factory it promised in 2013. Still, Foxconn is right that the environment had changed - Walker was defeated in November, Wisconsinites are in an uproar over both his extravagant giveaway and the corporation's backaway, the new Democratic governor is asking pointed questions, and Trump's slaphappy zigzags on tariffs has roiled the whole high-tech market.

So, beware: When you see a picture of politicians shoveling the people's tax dollars into corporate coffers, the only sure thing is that the people are being played for suckers.