The Democratic Party's most powerful donors are running out of options in the presidential race. Their warhorse Joe Biden is stumbling, while the other corporate-minded candidates lag far behind. For party elites, with less than four months to go before voting starts in caucuses and primaries, 2020 looks like Biden or bust.

A key problem for the Democratic establishment is that the "electability" argument is vaporizing in the political heat. Biden's shaky performances on the campaign trail during the last few months have undermined the notion that he's the best bet to defeat Donald Trump. The latest polling matchups say that Biden and his two strong rivals for the nomination, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, would each hypothetically beat Trump by around 10 points.

As such realities sink in, the focus is turning to where the party's entrenched power brokers don't want it to go -- the actual merits of the candidates in terms of political history, independence from big-money special interests, and longtime commitment to positions now favored by most Democrats.

With the electability claim diminished, Biden faces a steep climb on the merits of his record and current policy stances. The looming crisis for the Biden forces is reflected in the fact that his top campaign operatives have already publicly conceded he could lose the first two nomination contests, the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

And in an era when small donations from the grassroots are adding up to big financial hauls, Biden is so uninspiring that he's losing the money race by a wide margin. Despite his relentless harvesting of big checks from hedge-fund managers, rich CEOs and the like, Biden's campaign raised a total of only about $15 million in the last quarter, compared to around $25 million that Sanders and Warren each received. The New York Times noted that the duo's fundraising totals are markers for "the collective enthusiasm in the party for progressive candidates pushing messages of sweeping change."

But Biden continues to greatly benefit from the orientations of corporate media outlets that loudly echo the concerns of corporate Democrats (often called "moderates" or "centrists") and their kindred spirits in realms like Wall Street. Rarely inclined to dispel the longstanding myth of "Lunch Bucket Joe," reporting has been sparse on his legislative legacy in service to such industries as credit-card companies, banks and the healthcare business.

Media affection for Biden is matched by the biases of corporate media that -- for many years -- have routinely spun coverage of Sanders in negative ways, amplifying the messages from people at the helm of huge corporations. Recent months have seen no letup of anti-Bernie salvos, with Sanders as a kind of "heat shield" for Warren, catching the vast majority of the left-baiting attacks that would otherwise be aimed at her. Yet, as Warren's campaign gains momentum, she is becoming more of a prime target for wealthy sectors and their media echo chambers.

A CNBC article summarized on-air comments from network star Jim Cramer: "The financial community is really worried about the possibility of Sen. Elizabeth Warren becoming president." A theme among corporate executives, he said, is that "she's got to be stopped."

Such rumblings have grown louder since that broadcast five weeks ago, as Warren has surged into virtual ties with Biden in national polls. In late September, CNBC reported: "Democratic donors on Wall Street and in big business are preparing to sit out the presidential campaign fundraising cycle -- or even back President Donald Trump -- if Sen. Elizabeth Warren wins the party's nomination."

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders (who I actively support) is even more antithetical to the economic powers that be. He directly advocates for an end to the biz-as-usual that has propelled the rapacious rise of corporate power and widening economic inequality.

Sanders underscored that advocacy in an ABC interview that aired on Sunday: "What we need is, in fact -- I don't want to get people too nervous -- we need a political revolution. I am, I believe, the only candidate who's going to say to the ruling class of this country, the corporate elite: 'Enough, enough with your greed and with your corruption. We need real change in this country.'"

And Sanders made explicit why -- at the same time that Warren is loathed on Wall Street -- he is even more feared and despised by champions of predatory capital. "Elizabeth considers herself -- if I got the quote correctly -- to be a capitalist to her bones," he said. "I don't. And the reason I am not is because I will not tolerate for one second the kind of greed and corruption and income and wealth inequality and so much suffering that is going on in this country today, which is unnecessary."

Days ago, the Bernie 2020 campaign began wide distribution of a sticker that boldly says, "Billionaires Should Not Exist." That kind of genuine progressive politics is an existential threat to the extremely wealthy, whose riches amid vast income inequality keep killing a lot of people.

Biden, speaking at the Brookings Institution in May 2018, was transparent about why corporate Democrats remain so enamored with him. "I love Bernie, but I'm not Bernie Sanders," he said. "I don't think 500 billionaires are the reason why we're in trouble. . . The folks at the top aren't bad guys."

No wonder Dianne Feinstein -- snubbing fellow California senator Kamala Harris -- recently hosted a high-profile fundraiser for Biden and last week formally endorsed him as "a tireless fighter for hardworking American families." Feinstein's net worth is close to $100 million, and her investment-banker husband Richard Blum is a billionaire.

At this point, the shaky Biden for President campaign appears to be the only realistic hope for those who want a defender of corporate greed at the top of the Democratic ticket next year. While progressives who understand Biden's actual record are determined to prevent him from becoming the presidential nominee, "the folks at the top" are doubling down on their best chance to win the nomination for someone who says they "aren't bad guys."

(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."

It is time for the House of Representatives to announce comprehensive articles of impeachment against the chronic outlaw and violator of the public trust-President Donald J. Trump who won the Electoral College, but lost the popular vote.

Six House Committees have been investigating and assembling for months the necessary evidence. Mr. Trump himself has taunted the House to impeach him. He has openly and brazenly defied Congressional subpoenas for documents and blocked subpoenaed witnesses from testifying. This obstruction of Congress is an ongoing impeachable offense-a grave one in the opinions of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the other framers of our Constitution, who knew the importance of critical separation of powers.

These committees are documenting his massive obstruction of justice, otherwise known as blocking law enforcement and the rule of law through intimidation, firings, and other forms of political coercion. They are filling in the details of the ten categories of obstruction described in the Mueller Report. They are cataloguing all the ways Trump is using his office to enrich his businesses-openly promoting his hotels before foreign governments and their agents.

Committee investigators are peeling off layer after layer of Trump's demanding from Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine to investigate a possible opponent to his re-election-Joe Biden and his son, having suspended nearly $400 million in U.S. aid to Ukraine to pressure Mr. Zelensky.

The "abuse of the public trust," in Alexander Hamilton's phrase is overflowing. Over ten thousand Trump lies mean cover-ups, secrecy in government, deceiving innocent citizens about the air, food, water, and workplace danger, megalomania, about drug prices and health insurance for all. Lies matter; they tell us something about the president's mental instability, his detachment from reality, and the willingness of a large minority of the people to believe the fibs-even when they are about their own crucial livelihoods, health, and safety.

Being a serial sexual predator and earlier bragging about how he accosted women are a brutish model for youngsters. Legislators like Senator Al Franken lost his position for doing one percent of Donald's criminal and tortious acts. What would Hamilton also think of the commander in chief saying that if he is impeached, there might be a civil war? Incitation to mass violence for his political survival is not a minor matter.

Then there are the lawless uses of armed force abroad anywhere Trump wants, regardless of the absence of congressional appropriations or declarations of war. Dragnet enforcement without judicial warrants are a federal crime. The same for threatening registered federal whistleblowers.

The House of Representatives already has enough evidence of Trump spending money for purposes not authorized by Congress, such as shifting $3.5 billion from Pentagon schools and other services to building his porous wall. If he reads the Constitution, the "power of the purse" was exclusively given to Congress.

That previous presidents have done some of the latter offenses does not exonerate Trump's violations. The Congress has to draw the line and stop the ever-faster drift under both parties toward executive tyranny in the White House.

The polls are moving over 50 percent in favor of impeachment. Other people wish Congress would focus on kitchen-table issues. They need to know that Trump's impeachable offenses include wholesale taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beat. He is making your air, water, food, and workplaces more hazardous by removing or weakening health and safety standards that save lives and diminish sicknesses. He's allowing more greenhouse gases to be emitted, worsening the climate disruptions which he says is a "Chinese hoax."

Law enforcement to protect your family budget has reached a record low. The loan sharks, credit, insurance, and banking industries know that. Fines imposed on wrongdoers by Trump's agencies have dropped precipitously (see Public Citizen's report, "Corporate Impunity"). With Trump, you're paying higher taxes as the wealthy classes get off and savor their large Trumpian tax escapes.

The foregoing is to urge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to deliver a full hand of serious impeachable offenses to the Congress and the American people. The Ukraine shakedown is important, but not sufficient to let people realize all the other things Trump is doing to them, their families, their Constitution, and their democracy.

The full, despicable portrait of Donald J. Trump must be revealed to provide the maximum possible public understanding. For over two and a half years, too many of his absurd tweets and assertions have gone without official rebuttals. His tactic is to dominate the news cycle every day as if his presidency is a reality show and he is the star.

The mass media is starting to wise up about being used and abused by Trump's fulminations and incitements. It is time for the mass media, and its broadening coverage of the forthcoming, nationally televised House impeachment proceedings, to prove it too can expose Trump's assault on both our Constitution's law of the land and the citizenry.

"I have done nothing to harm these people but they are angered with me, so what do they do, doctor up some income tax, for which they have no case... to harass a peaceful man."

You could be excused for thinking that Donald Trump spoke these words of self-pity. In fact, they're from Robert de Niro, playing that other gangster, Al Capone, in the 1987 movie The Untouchables, written by David Mamet.

Like Trump, a would-be dictator madly claiming the overwhelming support of the populace, the real-life Capone insisted that his criminal acts satisfied "a public demand." He declared, "I am just a businessman, giving the people what they want." And a certain percentage of the civilian population-Capone's "base," if you will-thought he was just swell.

Scarface even rigged elections. In 1924, in Cicero, Illinois, Capone was fearful that the Republican mayor who fit snugly in his pocket might be defeated for another term. So those who opposed the incumbent were kidnapped, beaten and murdered. Ballot boxes were stuffed and voters threatened. Problem solved.

Trump hasn't reached the point of kidnapping and killing voters-yet-but it's clear that he views elections with equal distemper and has no scruples about cheating to win or even eliminating elections altogether. He welcomed what has been thoroughly documented Russian interference in the 2016 election, yet continues to deny it ever happened, and now is doing his best to obstruct efforts for fair elections in 2020. The nationwide GOP effort to suppress voter turnout continues.

Not only is Trump trying to shake down other countries for real or imagined dirt on political opponents-and using Rudy Giuliani and other lowlifes to assist in the thuggery-he continues to market his office, seemingly eager to line his pockets and those of his family and friends with the lucre of bribery and extortion, much of it to be provided, evidence suggests, by the very countries in which, surprise, he has business interests.

It is, in the words of US Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), an extralegal "shadow foreign policy operation." Yet to some minds, such as they are, and Republican leadership in particular, this all seems somehow okay because he's doing it so blatantly. But on top of the graft and venality, Trump doesn't think through the implications of his impulsive and inconsistent policy choices, both here and overseas, whether it's Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, North Korea, China and the list goes on.

There's no longer anyone at the White House to stop him from crashing down the slope from one boulder to the next, caroming like a tangerine billiard ball, inflicting further death and despair on families at home and abroad and increasing the odds of complete disaster, including a resurgence of terrorist violence. See Syria, the Kurds, Turkey and a mindboggling series of boneheaded, deadly decisions.

Meanwhile, his appeals to racial prejudice, lies and seedy conspiracy theories are backed by cynical opportunists who know they're all false yet don't care as long as their own goals are achieved. They're joined by people so angry, clueless and out of touch with the way government actually works-or doesn't-that they think our bureaucracy is capable of pulling off plots like some wannabe James Bond villain.

But I digress: I've been out of the country the last couple of weeks and so much has been happening. What has become increasingly distressing over the last few days is that many of the aforementioned cynical opportunists have a theocratic agenda which, if they could make it happen, would see a Margaret Atwood-style, "Handmaid's Tale" Gilead descend like a shroud over the nation.

These aren't your garden-variety, come-to-Jesus evangelists, members of the religious right bemoaning gays and abortion, praying for your soul and eagerly awaiting the Second Coming. Rather, in contrast to the founders who favored the separation of church and state and rejected the encroachment into government of organized religion, these self-sanctified pomposities, pit bulls of dogma, would impose on the rest of us an illiberal hierocracy of Christian rules and regs that they alone would determine. All in the name of God, of course, with whom they apparently text on a regular basis.

In the last week, speeches from the second and third most powerful men in the Trump administration powerfully illustrate that the old-time religion they have in mind is more along the lines of the Inquisition than the Enlightenment.

On Friday, Attorney General William Barr, took it upon himself to speak to an audience at Notre Dame Law School not about jurisprudence but a "campaign to destroy the traditional moral order."

In that social order, Barr insisted, "moral values must rest on authority independent of men's will – they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being."

He decried what he saw as the "force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion we are experiencing today. This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the 'progressives,' have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values."

The same day as Barr's closed-door address, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo-Savonarola to Barr's would-be American Torquemada-went before the American Association of Christian Counselors in Nashville. "I know some people in the media will break out the pitchforks when they hear that I ask God for direction in my work," he said. He asked that those in attendance "pray for my work in defending religious freedom," and added, "You will all be in my prayers as you do God's work, and I covet yours as I lead American diplomacy."

Trump hit the religion hot buttons, too, when he spoke on Saturday at the Value Voters Summit in DC, sponsored by the Family Research Council. But it's hard to take seriously anything he says about faith. Barr and Pompeo, on the other hand, really mean it.

Pompeo, who has said, "I keep a Bible open on my desk to remind me of God and his word, and the truth," has expressed his firm belief in the Rapture. Barr, as my friend Joan Walsh writes in The Nation, "is actually neck-deep in a web of extremist conservative Catholic institutions, and he has been for the last three decades." These include the Catholic Information Center, run by the far-right Opus Dei, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and Bill Donohue's Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

This is all of a piece with the increasing right-wing embrace of a philosophy known as integralism, which, as colleague Mike Lofgren recently explained, "stresses a comprehensively integrated social and political order complete with religious and cultural conformity. Of course, somebody would have to do all that integrating, and that means a powerful state apparatus keeping everyone in line and inevitably deciding which religious views should be fostered and which are heretical."

Integralism's adherents-whether they know the word for it or not-are part of anti-democratic movements all over the world. We're right, you're wrong, they say, and like Al Capone, to hell with any egalitarian process or legality that gets in our way. In June, Adam Serwer at The Atlantic wrote, "The leaders of both the populist and establishment wings of the Republican Party have concluded that they cannot be allowed to lose power simply because a majority of American voters do not wish them to wield it."

The ends-their desire for a Christian dominated, dictatorial theocracy-justify the means. In their use of religious belief to bolster this current autocratic government, Pompeo and Barr are hitting all the buzzwords and sounding the dog whistles. In many ways they are worse then Trump because they possess a clear and doctrinaire vision, know exactly what they want and how to make it happen. In the words of author and journalist Michael Tomasky, "Doubt nothing about what these people are capable of."

This is scary stuff, everyone. Be very afraid. Pay attention. Resist.

When did We The People vote to outlaw peaceful public protest against corporate profiteers who're running roughshod over our values, livelihoods, environment, and... well, our lives?

Answer: Never. Yet, behind our backs, for-sale state lawmakers are passing corporate-written laws that criminalize our protests against their greed, assessing inordinate jail time and exorbitant fines for the vague offense of "interrupting" or "interfering with" corporate operations and infrastructure.

Last year, the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-financed front group, wrote a model bill called the "Critical Infrastructure Protection Act" to sledgehammer peaceful protesters of corporate wrongdoing. Virtually-identical versions of ALEC's bill were then introduced in 22 state legislatures - and nine have already been enacted in: Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas.

The Texas version, which took effect September 1, was used just 11 days later to slap harsh felony charges on Greenpeace protesters and 20 others who were also arrested during the non-violent, symbolic shutdown of the Houston Ship Channel. It was lobbied through the legislature by Chevron, Dow, Exxon, Koch Industries, Shell, and other giants. Then it was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, whose top industrial donor group is - surprise! - oil & gas, which pumped more than $10 million into his 2018 election campaign.

These autocrats say they just want to stop violence and vandalism, but Greenpeace protesters committed neither. The real intent of these laws is to penalize legitimate protest, hoping to scare the American people from even trying to exercise our basic democratic rights. To help fight this blatant suppression, go to "PolluterWatch" at PolluterWatch.org.