17 Reasons to Tell Trump: “You’re Fired!”

It is long overdue for the Democrats in Congress to lay the groundwork for impeaching President Donald Trump and removing him from office.


A woman holds a sign with the words “You’re fired!” in a protest by demonstrators who have gathered in the center of Frankfurt under the slogan “No Kings,” directed against US President Donald Trump and the policies of the US government on June 14, 2025.
(Photo by Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Ralph Nader
Mar 15, 2026

Common Dreams

Tyrant Trump’s favorite snarl is “You’re Fired!” That was his bellow on “The Apprentice” television program. Subsequently, he told hundreds of thousands of federal civil servants and contractors, “You’re Fired!” Shame on the pitiful Democratic Party that allowed him to regain the presidency last year.

It is long overdue for the Democrats in Congress to lay the groundwork for impeaching President Donald Trump and removing him from office. Trump provides them with the impeachable evidence openly and brazenly every day. No president in history has ever declared that “then I have Article II, where I have the right to do anything I want as president.” No president has ever dared to say, as did Trump in an interview with Reuters on January 15, 2026, that “…when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election” and meant it.

Based on their detailed declaration against King George III in the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the congressional safeguards in the Constitution drafted in 1787, our Founders, were they members of Congress today, would unanimously vote articles of impeachment against Trump for rampant constitutional lawlessness.

Here are 17 articles of Impeachment against dictator Trump that many constitutional law scholars would endorse, drafted by constitutional law specialist and practitioner, Bruce Fein. (For the full text of the articles of Impeachment, here.)

Ask these lawmakers if they are waiting for Trump to use the Insurrection Act to order the military to seize the state voting machinery and repress the vote in the contested states or districts?

ARTICLE 1—WAR POWER-MURDER-PIRACY

ARTICLE 2—MILITARIZATION OF DOMESTIC LAW ENFORCEMENT

ARTICLE 3—SERIAL UNCONSTITUTIONAL DETENTIONS AND DEPORTATIONS

ARTICLE 4—BRIBERY

ARTICLE 5—RETALIATION AGAINST CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED SPEECH OR ASSOCIATION

ARTICLE 6—ABUSE OF THE PARDON POWER—SABOTAGING THE RULE OF LAW

ARTICLE 7—ILLEGALLY CRIPPLING OR DEFUNDING PROGRAMS TO PROTECT CONSUMERS, THE NEEDY, WORKERS, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

ARTICLE 8—USURPATION OF THE CONGRESSIONAL POWER OF THE PURSE

ARTICLE 9—CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS—SECRET GOVERNMENT

ARTICLE 10—PERVERTING LAW ENFORCEMENT TO PERSECUTE POLITICAL OPPONENTS AND BENEFIT FRIENDS

ARTICLE 11—SUSPENDING OR DISPENSING WITH LAWS

ARTICLE 12—FLOUTING SECTION 1 OF THE 14TH AMENDMENT

ARTICLE 13—SPECIOUS NATIONAL EMERGENCY—FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION DECLARATIONS

ARTICLE 14—DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN EMOLUMENTS CLAUSES

ARTICLE 15—CHRONIC DECEIT AIMING AT DICTATORSHIP

ARTICLE 16—TREASON

ARTICLE 17—MEGALOMANIA-HUBRIS

Already, a growing majority of the American people want Trump Impeached. They are feeling the impact where they live, work, and raise their families of Trump’s dictatorial, corporatist regime, which is endangering, weakening, and wrecking America! The criminal, illegal, unconstitutional war against Iran and the continuing full backing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide against the Palestinians and the Israeli bombing of Lebanon’s civilian population and occupying southern Lebanon will only increase the hardships on the American people. US soldiers are also being ordered to illegally obey illegal orders. Six Members of Congress who served in the military issued a video statement that said, “You must refuse illegal orders.” Representatives said in the video, “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

Send these articles of Impeachment with your own thoughts and demands to your two senators and your representative by letter, email, or voicemail. (The Congressional switchboard number is 202-224-3121). You can also call local congressional offices to voice your concerns to your member of Congress. Ask them when will they exercise their constitutional duties. What further criminal outrage, program, and police state power will move them to catch up with the demands of the people back home?

Ask these lawmakers if they are waiting for Trump to use the Insurrection Act to order the military to seize the state voting machinery and repress the vote in the contested states or districts? He has already noted this limitless power in his first term and more recently.

There are only 535 members of Congress. Flood them with your demands to literally save our Republic and the Constitution for which it stands. Otherwise, WITH TRUMP AND HIS DANGEROUSLY UNSTABLE PERSONALITY, IT IS ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE, MUCH WORSE, HERE AND ABROAD.

Take charge, people, one by one, citizen group by citizen group! Use your sovereign power under the Constitution.

 

Not a Third Party, a Third Force

Or, 21st Century Common Sense Part 5

by Ted Glick / March 12th, 2026

In Part One of this planned series of articles, I wrote about the historical timeliness of a ‘third force’ strategy. I said, “This isn’t something pulled out of the air, or someone’s lofty dreams. It is grounded in historical experience in the United States over the last 60 or so years.”

A progressive “third force,” one that is both activist and electoral, that does day-do-day community, workplace and school organizing, that brings together those who see themselves as independents, who are critical of both the dominant sector of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, those who have a critique of “the system,” combined with those who may have a similar critique but who have decided for practical reasons to carry on that fight in part within the Democratic Party—this is what is needed right now to defeat fascism and lay the basis for more positive change going forward over coming years and decades.

What “historical experience in the United States over the last 60 years” am I referring to?

In the early 1970’s, as the Vietnam War was coming to an end, a civil rights lawyer, Arthur Kinoy, wrote a 60-or-so page document, “Toward a Mass Party of the People,” which articulated his reasoning about why this was not just a good idea but a timely idea.

This was NOT the kind of direction seen as the right one by many of the Black Freedom, anti-war, women’s and other activists who had taken part in the movements of the 50s and 60s. Older Left groups criticized this idea and continued to work primarily within the Democratic Party. Younger people rejected the idea and, for a decent percentage of them, instead wrongly acted as if the USA was like Russia or China prior to their revolutions. These US revolutionaries created organizations which attempted to use similar approaches toward systemic change, ideologically and organizationally, as did revolutionaries from those two very different kinds of countries. By the early 80’s those approaches were revealing themselves to be political dead ends in the USA.

What WAS having an impact, however, were the Mayoral candidacies in 1983 of Mel King in Boston and Harold Washington in Chicago. Both were progressive, movement-oriented Black men with long histories in community organizing. King came in first in a multi-candidate primary but because he did not get a majority of the overall vote, lost in a runoff against the second place finisher, but Washington won in Chicago and became Mayor.

King called his campaign the Boston Rainbow Coalition, emphasizing its multi-racial character. In 1983 Jesse Jackson began to openly explore running for President to build a national “rainbow coalition.” His campaign consciously and openly brought together both progressive Democrats and those in the Mass Party group, Independent Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Progressive Coalition, and others who were NOT Democrats.

History has shown the relative success of this approach to politics. Jackson polled about 3.3 million votes in total in 1984 and about seven million votes in 1988. Unfortunately, he did not support the continued building of a nationwide Rainbow Coalition in 1989 despite it starting to take root and developing in many parts of the country.

Next up were groups like Campaign for a New Tomorrow, the Labor Party, the New Party (which became the Working Families Party), and the Green Party. CNT and the Labor Party died out but Working Families and Greens continued and still exist, with the Greens following a strategy of running for President every four years. Their high point with that strategy came in 2000 when Ralph Nader ran for President as a Green, but he polled only 2.7% of the vote. The Green Party nationally has been floundering ever since, with no Presidential candidate getting more than 1.1% of the vote.

So has anything worked over these many years of various efforts? Yes!

The two Bernie Sanders campaigns for President in 2016 and 2020 and the successful campaigns in Democratic primaries of many other more local candidates, people like AOC and Ilhan Omar as two major examples, have worked. They have without question strengthened the overall progressive movement, not just when it comes to elections but as far as other forms of organizing and activism that are non-electoral.

When Bernie was considering his first run for the Presidency in 2015, he openly asked for input into whether he should run as an Independent—the only way that he had run for office up to that point in time—or within the Democratic Party. I, along with Bill Fletcher, wrote an article with our ideas on this. We said, in part:

The political reality of the United States of America today is that the vast majority of strong progressives who run for political office, people with similar politics as Bernie’s, do so within Democratic primaries. We may wish it was different, but it is not. This has to be taken into account in determining the tactics of a strong progressive Presidential campaign…

The last ‘third party’ candidate to actually be elected was Abraham Lincoln, winning with 36% of the vote because there were four major Presidential candidates in 1860…

The bottom line for us, and we believe for Bernie, should be that he runs for President in a way which brings together, holds together and builds that broad progressive coalition. He should be very clear and forthright that this is the path to ultimate victory and social and economic transformation in this country and make his decisions accordingly.

Bernie’s national “third force,” not “third party,” strategic/tactical approach was right then, and it still is today. At some point in the future, particularly if there is significant growth in the number of progressive candidates running on non-two-party lines for local offices and winning, that could change, but until that happens history and experience are telling us: it’s time for a conscious Third Force!

FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Ted Glick has been a progressive activist and organizer since 1968. He is the author of the recently published books, Burglar for Peace and 21st Century Revolution, both available at https://pmpress.org. Read other articles by Ted, or visit Ted's website.

Community Political Power v. the Corporate State

Seth Sandronsky

February 13, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

The multi-racial resistance to violent federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis and across the U.S. is an exercise in community political power. That’s a clear and present danger to the wealth behind the two political parties, or duopoly.

It’s not a mystery. The Democratic Party and GOP advance the class interests of corporations and billionaires, and don’t want challenges.

This political duopoly wants the corporate and billionaire dollars to keep flowing.

Community political power has other interests—meeting people’s needs. They are primary: food, health care, education and shelter, necessities for a reasonable quality of life.

Building community political power are working class Americans such as Viviana Salazar bringing food to immigrants too terrified to leave their homes to shop for groceries in Minneapolis. There are no illegal aliens on stolen land.

Popular culture is instructive. English is my second language, according to Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known as Bad Bunny, the global megastar rapper and singer who hails from Puerto Rico. English is also the second language of America, he added, which should be common knowledge but isn’t for reasons of ideology.

Ruling ideology dismisses and distorts European colonialism (sin papeles, or without papers). This bloody conquest systematically underdeveloped the Global South for over five centuries. Economic imperialism is the name of this game.

Immigrant labor powers the U.S. economy. Removing that demographic from the nation harms native-born workers under a capitalist economy that requires an expansion of sellers and buyers of wage labor.

Labor of all national origins makes our world. Americans building community political power understand and act on that.

The Poor People’s Campaign builds community political power by organizing and mobilizing poor and low-wealth Americans. Their numbers have swelled with the corporate state’s war on labor unions.

Philosophers have interpreted the world according to the 19th-century writings of Karl Marx. The point is, however, to change it, he wrote.

Much maligned as a godless communist during the Cold War, Marx’s critique of global capitalism as it grew from European feudalism via colonialism and industrialism remains strong. Later, Soviet communism defeated German fascism during World War II.

Then, communism was popular around the planet. Then, capitalism was unpopular, having birthed fascism and the Jewish Holocaust.

A sustained campaign of anti-communism to legitimize capitalism since the end of the Second World War rose as the dominant ideology in the Global North of the former colonial empires and the U.S., once a British colony. However, the ideology of anti communism has limits, as all who choose to see can comprehend.

Consider this. Capitalist investors, not atheist communists, bought millions of people’s foreclosed homes at fire sale prices after the housing bubble burst and caused the Great Recession. The financial interests behind the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s got a federal government bailout, while homeowners got sold out.

Capitalism is causing the climate catastrophe. Extreme weather and species extinction are two examples. Can’t blame such planetary destruction on communism.

Recessions are to capitalism what water is to fish. Recessions recur regularly, baked into the system that prioritizes profits over people and the planet. Instability is systemic.

Uncle Sam bailed out capitalist investors after the popping of the housing bubble. Capital, a social relationship between the sellers and buyers of labor services, demands and receives Democratic and Republican help. That equation holds no matter who is in Congress and the White House.

Community political power confronts the duopoly that handles the capitalist economy this way. The protracted conflict in Minneapolis is a case in point of ordinary people resisting the system’s drive to crush humanity in favor of profitability that bankrolls Blue and Red politics. Its primary purpose is to create the political conditions for the continuation of capital accumulation.

There is a history of the political duopoly shifting income and wealth from the bottom and middle to the top, relentlessly, during the past forty-plus years. This political process has spawned the monopoly corporations that dominate industries (Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech etc.). The faces of this new Gilded Age are the smarmy billionaires like Bezos, Ellison, Musk and Zuckerberg, the public faces of a minority ownership of the two political parties lock, stock and barrel.

Therefore, Democrats and Republicans prefer to focus on the personal identities of their voting bases. There is no lack of greenbacks to pursue a politics of ugly. Patriarchy and white supremacy loom large.

The color line remains a flashpoint of division and its opposite, unification. Hence the threat to the social order that the Minneapolis resistance poses. The multiracial uprising after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 was a kind of dress rehearsal for President Trump’s unleashing of violent federal immigration enforcement in 2025-2026.

Democrats appeal to labor unions and minorities. Democrats nod and wink at the military-industrial complex that enforces the American empire directly and by proxy. Recall former President Biden’s reassurances to his donors that “nothing fundamental will change.” It didn’t.

Republicans are the party of white Christian nationalism. Patriarchy or male supremacy, thrives because and despite the fact that the U.S. economy of a male worker in a labor union earning a family wage to support a wife and children that prevailed in the postwar era has been over for decades. The American working class has suffered horribly.

MAGA is an ideology, a band aid covering up wounds of late capitalism. The rise of finance and decline of industry in the U.S. has devastated the working class under successive Democratic and GOP administrations. The safe haven of MAGA ideology is a cruel hoax.

The ideological war of ideas is powerful. Debating the amount of surplus value that can balance on the head of a pin does nothing to weaken the ruling ideology of capitalism and imperialism. Ideology flows directly from a global economy that disappears the human labor making our world of commodities for reasons of profitability.

Building community political power like working-class folks in Minneapolis are doing is a post-capitalist move. Delivering groceries to immigrants terrified to leave their homes to avoid arrest via violent federal immigration enforcement officers is an example of working-class solidarity. Call it a vote for humanity.

Is this socialism in practice? That’s fine in practice, according to the egghead professor. But how does it work in theory?

Being on the side of humanity is a theory of building community political power. Its practice is feeding the hungry, working-class people, born abroad or stateside. A look back is instructive.

The Black Panther Party fed poor people in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s. As a result, over 20,000 poor black school kids ate breakfast before school. That was a material example of building community political power.

Food Not Bombs feeds hungry people in America today. No doubt some of the recipients are the so-called working poor. No doubt some of them are laboring union-free at Amazon and Walmart, the two biggest private-sector employers now.

President Trump seeks to increase the annual war budget to $1.5 trillion versus the current level of $1 trillion. Damage abroad from U.S. bombs harms poor people in America, according to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., shifting resources to the military and away from humanity. The Democratic Party is central to this military-industrial complex that former President Eisenhower warned against.

Meanwhile, the U.S. president has demonized and scapegoated immigrants in a campaign of sustained skin-color identity politics, successfully. The tip of this spear is the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, masked like a modern Klan, which received increased funding under the Biden administration. That created the conditions to hike ICE spending to $75 billion over the next four years under Trump 2.0.

Identity politics divides the laboring class from their material interests. Democrats and Republicans for reasons of public distraction and manipulation can and do perpetuate myths about the other.  Against this backdrop, public division and unification flow from the material conditions of living and working.

Here’s the thing. The parties’ similarities far outweigh the differences. Ideology distorts that similarity of ruling class interests that in times of crisis can create a clarity out of uncertainty.

The corporate state is the delivery system for a status quo. The political duopoly and the wealth that controls it play a version of three-card Monte, a rigged game that defeats the working class. Bear with me.

For example, the GOP slams Democrats as the extreme left of cultural Marxists. Democrats critique the GOP as extremist warmongers. The former is farcical, while the latter is partial.

Together, the political duopoly perpetuates capitalism and imperialism. The political defeat of health care for all financed via the tax system that could prevent a cancer diagnosis from meaning one must declare personal bankruptcy to fight the disease, is proof of that. There are other examples of the U.S. political economy of health care that benefits the few and harms the many.

Here’s more on the tentacles of a medical-industrial complex. It’s the goose that lays the golden eggs via campaign contributions to the political duopoly. These are legal bribes producing reforms that grind down the working class.

Meanwhile taxpayer dollars currently buy the bombs and bullets that Israel deploys against Palestinians in Gaza. It’s a siege of extermination. The building of community political power stateside challenges that grotesque priority of death over life.

One main challenge to building community political power is collectively forming an approach to self-governance to replace the existing system of political disempowerment. Its feature is what author, consumer advocate and presidential candidate Ralph Nader terms “lesser evilism” (vote Blue no matter who).

The Democratic Party masquerades as a liberal alternative to racist and militarist Republicans. The GOP wraps itself in the flag of patriotic national interest.

Biden’s staunch support for Israel and the U.S. arms industry to maim and murder Palestinians after Hamas killed Israeli settlers on Oct. 7, 2023, that Vice President Harris refused to change, led to Trump’s victory in 2024. Polling in swing states bears that out.

Liberalism U.S.-style paves the path for fascism. The authoritarian police state, e.g., mass black incarceration and working class immiseration, that community political power is wrestling against in Minneapolis and across the U.S. today, emerged well before President Trump arrived.

“Spending on policing has risen by 40% since 2017,” according to the Prison Policy Institute, “and one-third of that change is due to increases in federal spending on policing (not including ICE or Customs and Border Patrol). Taken together, federal spending on policing and the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda now makes up 25 percent of all government spending on the criminal legal system.”

It’s of course a mismatch, economically and politically, between community political power and that of the corporate state. But that’s where things are at currently. Imbalances in power of the status quo generate resistance.

Recently, Bishop William J. Barber II—president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, and founding director of the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy—began a 50-mile march from Wilson to Raleigh as part of the “Love Forward Together” movement. He emphasizes a moral revolution of values. Christian nationalism is not the only rodeo in town.

“Clergy and impacted people are protesting the relentless policy violence against poor and low-income people and gerrymandering efforts to suppress these voters in the midterm elections,” according to a Repairers of the Breach statement. There were 300 marchers at the beginning of this nonviolent protest. Its multiracial character is a strength.

Participating groups range from the North Carolina Poor People’s Campaign to the Institute for Policy Studies, St. James Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), North Carolina Council of Churches, Union of Southern Service Workers, Indivisible, Second Chance Alliance, Human Rights Campaign, Service Employees International Union, Public Schools First NC to the Save America Movement.

Masses of people in motion can build community political power from a democracy in form but not content under Trump, spawning one crisis after the next, drenched in bigotry and misogyny. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian author, communist and labor organizer, who the fascist dictator Mussolini imprisoned between World Wars I and II, wrote the following. “The Old World is dying and the New World struggles to be born: now is the time for monsters.”

The future is unwritten.

Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com

Ag

Silver’s historic surge fuels rush to sell heirlooms and coins

Bloomberg News | February 11, 2026 | 

Stock image.

Sol Glatstein, a 79-year-old resident of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, took a bus downtown one day last month to sell a mint-condition American Silver Eagle dollar coin inherited from his parents for $100.

Until this year, Glatstein had planned to pass the coin on to his one-year-old grandson. But the recent record-breaking rally in silver prices prompted him to cash in.

Across North America, many others are doing the same. Coin and jewelry shops are seeing a rush of customers seeking to sell their collectibles, silverware and family treasures after a historic surge in silver prices.

Despite its status as a precious metal, silver has lacked the allure of gold — a more popular investment for those seeking a store of wealth. But the extreme rally in silver prices over the past few months has spurred a reappraisal of the silver items sitting in drawers and cupboards at home.

Some customers are coming in with “stuff that they’d completely forgotten that they had, and it was just sitting in a safety deposit box or in a closet somewhere,” said Greg Cohen, a senior numismatist at Stack’s Bowers Galleries, a rare coin shop on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. “They never thought about it until now. And then they realize, wow, this actually added up to quite a bit.”

Glatstein had worried his silver coin might eventually be lost. After selling it at Stack’s Bowers, he said cash in hand gives him more options to treat his grandson. “I have $100. I can go to Ralph Lauren and buy him an outfit.”

It’s been a busy year at Stack’s Bowers, which has locations worldwide and is owned by Gold.com Inc. At its Manhattan store, the average number of daily visitors has grown to 50 from 30 over the last year, Cohen said. Most are there to sell, he said.

Silver prices have swung sharply in recent weeks, but remain more than double their level a year ago. That’s lifting the melt value of silverware, jewelry and coins above what many collectors once prized them for.

“Everyone’s grandma is selling their chandelier, forks and knives — anything that’s made of sterling silver to utilize the silver prices,” said Gene Furman, owner of King Gold & Pawn and Empire Gold Buyers, which has locations around the New York City area.

The decision to sell silver heirlooms over gold reflects retail investors’ price expectations, said Philip Newman, managing director at research consultancy Metals Focus. As gold hit successive record highs, many holders chose to sit tight, expecting further gains and seeing little reason to sell amid broadly healthy financial markets, he said. People are less certain about whether silver will keep climbing so they’re opting to cash in while gains are still impressive.

Recycled or scrap silver accounted for about 19% of total supply in 2025, and volumes from jewelry, silverware and coins have been significantly higher than analysts expected during the past year, Newman said. “We were surprised by it.”

Dealers are reporting that January was their strongest-ever month, driven by a surge in trading volumes for silver and bullion products. Silver transactions have climbed as the pre-1965 US silver dollar coins almost tripled in value since the beginning of last year.

“It’s coming in droves and droves,” Gary Tancer, owner of Coin & Jewelry Gallery of Boca Raton, said in an interview. Tancer said he bought 10 times more than he usually does in a year in January. “The average check I’m writing is probably in the eight to $10,000 range.”

Canada Gold, one of North America’s top precious-metals dealers, refined a record 2 metric tons of scrap silver in December alone, according to Chris Pollock, founder and managing partner.

“A lot of these are coins that previously people would’ve proudly kept in their coin collections,” he said. “Now we’re seeing these get melted down.”

The huge influx of silver flowing into the market is straining refiners, which take scrap and other metal-bearing materials and process them into high-purity products such as bullion bars. Heraeus Precious Metals, one of the world’s largest precious-metals refiners, is facing a backlog, said Dominik Sperzel, head of trading for the German firm.

“When you place the silver order today, it cannot just take a few weeks,” he said. “We’re already talking about months.”

Some shops have stopped buying as refiners struggle to keep up, which retired English teacher Jim Castaldo learned when he inquired about selling some mismatched silver forks to a dealer in Manhattan’s Diamond District.

“I heard that silver is going up, and I’ve had these for years,” the 82-year-old Connecticut resident said. “I had to go to a doctor’s appointment, so I figured, let me stop by and find out what’s happening.”

Meanwhile, Glatstein — whose collectible coin sale made him $100 richer — plans to keep an eye on the market because he’s still sitting on a collection of old, low-purity silver quarters and dollar coins.

“I plan to sell it all,” he said.

(By Yvonne Yue Li and Ella Feldman)