From Reader Supported News, by Bernie Sanders

et me take this opportunity to wish you a very happy holiday season and a wonderful new year.

Whenever I am asked about running for president in 2020, I answer that if I am the best candidate to beat Donald Trump, then I will probably run. That is the truth.

If that happens, the political, financial and media elite of this country will stop at nothing to defeat us. You know that. We’ve lived through it together once before. Our ideas terrify them. So what they will do is try to divide us up with attacks — some old, some new — and our political opponents will spend obscene sums of money on ads to defeat us.

I just did not expect the attack ads to begin before I even made a decision. But they have…

Right now, a group of Wall Street Democrats known as the Third Way is running ads in early primary states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — calling me out by name and saying our ideas, like Medicare for all, are a path to defeat in 2020.

They not only want to discourage or defeat a Sanders candidacy, they want to make sure that the progressive agenda is not advanced by anyone. They want us to go back to their failed corporate approach which has led to a massive level of income and wealth inequality, a bloated military budget and a failure to address the crises of climate change, a broken criminal justice system and inhumane immigration policies.

Last time we ran, we made the financial elite pay a price for their attacks on our progressive agenda. It is just as important we do it again today.

Our agenda terrifies the political and financial establishment of this country.

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The dog whistle couldn’t have been any clearer. When Donald Trump said two weeks ago that “the people would revolt” if he were impeached, his extremist base of neo-Nazis, Klan members, right-wing militias and sympathetic service members likely heard the following: “Feel free to attack Democrats, liberals, leftists and progressives if the coming Democratic Party-run House of Representatives acts on its constitutional right to impeach me.”

Impeachment alone probably wouldn’t trigger a right-wing uprising. But impeachment followed by the unlikely prospect of removal, which requires 67 votes in the Republican-majority U.S. Senate, might well make it happen. So too could invoking the 25^th Amendment on the grounds that Trump is incapable of performing his presidential duties.

Officially, the Democratic Party—led by corporate allies like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi—isn’t interested in moving ahead with either of these constitutionally available processes. That could change, however, if and when the report from special counsel Robert Mueller directly implicates Trump. But even if the party’s efforts proved successful, America would be left with President Mike Pence—an honest-to-goodness Christian fascist.

 

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President Donald Trump’s celebrity was cemented in the American mind with the show “The Apprentice,” which sold him as a real estate mogul and business genius imparting his wisdom to a new generation of entrepreneurial hopefuls. But the show’s fundamental premise is a lie.

Far from a business genius, Trump was largely a flop in business. As a recent investigative piece in Foreign Policy explained, Trump’s repeated failures in the ’90s made him virtually radioactive to any American banks looking to fund new ventures. Lenders were wary of trusting the most prominent son of actual real estate titan Fred Trump, because Donald Trump’s businesses were consistently going belly up — most famously, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City.

 

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Building Trump’s much-ballyhooed border wall will requiring using eminent domain to forcibly take the land of numerous property owners. If that happens, many of the property owners probably will not get anything like adequate compensation. A just-published study conducted by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune analyzed over 400 condemnations undertaken as a result of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorized the construction of a much smaller barrier than Trump’s proposed wall. Here is their summary of their findings:

An investigation by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune shows that [the Department of] Homeland Security cut unfair real estate deals, secretly waived legal safeguards for property owners, and ultimately abused the government’s extraordinary power to take land from private citizens.

The major findings:

• Homeland Security circumvented laws designed to help landowners receive fair compensation. The agency did not conduct formal appraisals of targeted parcels. Instead, it issued low-ball offers based on substandard estimates of property values.

 

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