Grossly illegal or vulgar - or both 18MAR26

 Here's an update from Sen Bernie Sanders on the fascist authoritarianism and war mongering imperialism of the neo-nazi drumpf / trump-vance administration and the gop / greed over people-republican party along with the 2026 Midterm Elections and some of the progressive candidates running for office. We have the chance to return congress to an active participant in governing our democratic Republic representing the American people by supporting these campaigns and by voting. Remember, DEMOCRACY IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT!!! And if possible please make a donation of whatever you can afford by clicking the donate link at the end of this post. I donated and hope you will to....

Sisters and Brothers -

We are living in unprecedented and dangerous times. It seems that every day there is an action or statement from the Trump Administration that is grossly illegal or vulgar - or both.

In the midst of all the chaos I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your ongoing support and let you know what I and my co-workers are doing to combat Trumpism. Frankly, we’re doing a lot. Here is just some of what we’re focusing on.

COMBATTING TRUMP’S AUTHORITARIANISM: Today we have a president who is not only a pathological liar, but a narcissist, a kleptocrat and an egomaniac. He wants more and more power in his own hands and couldn't care less about the Constitution, the rule of law, decency or democracy.

The fight against authoritarianism is a struggle we are fighting on a number of fronts. Last month, I offered an amendment in the Senate that received 49 votes (all Democrats and two Republicans) to rescind the $75 billion that ICE received as part of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the worst piece of legislation passed in the modern history of America. With your help, we were also able to raise $200,000 for some of the courageous groups in Minnesota who fought back against the ICE occupation of that city and showed us what grassroots activism can achieve. In preparation for the 2026 elections I am working with a number of my colleagues to make certain that, despite the outrageous efforts of Trump and many Republicans to suppress the vote, these elections are free and fair.

FIGHTING OLIGARCHY: Never before in American history have so few individuals had so much wealth and so much power. Today, with the top 1% owning more wealth than the bottom 93%, we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. While 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, the Oligarchs are not only getting richer but they are increasing their power by buying up media and making huge campaign contributions.

I am proud that our Fighting Oligarchy rallies have now taken place in 24 states, with some 325,000 people in attendance. And it’s not just Progressives who are coming out. It’s Independents and Republicans as well. We have also just introduced a bill that would impose a wealth tax on billionaires. This bill would raise $4.4 trillion in the next ten years, and plow that money back into improving life for the struggling working families of our country. Yes. We need a government that works for all, not just the 1%. I am also supporting the Billionaire Wealth Tax proposal in California and was part of a great union rally that was held in Los Angeles last month.

ADDRESSING THE THREAT OF AI AND ROBOTICS: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics are being pushed by the wealthiest people in the world - Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Thiel, etc. Left unchecked these technologies will bring about a massive transformation of American economic, political and social life. I will not surprise you by stating that the multi-billionaires developing these technologies do not stay up nights worrying about the well-being of ordinary Americans. Their goal is to simply increase the enormous amount of wealth and power that they have, and they want to do it without any rules or regulations to impede their greed.

Studies indicate that AI and Robotics could result in the loss of tens of millions of jobs. Further, these new technologies could impact the mental health of our young people, undermine democracy and significantly erode our privacy. And, if a super -AI becomes smarter than humans, as some leading experts believe may happen soon, it is possible that AI could function independently of human control and threaten the very existence of humanity.

Next week, I will be introducing legislation calling for a moratorium on the construction of new data centers. Congress and the American people must get a handle on these rapidly evolving technologies. The function of AI and robotics must be to improve life for all, not just make a handful of very rich people even richer.

THE WAR IN IRAN: At Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s request, Trump initiated a horrific war against Iran. Trump’s actions were unconstitutional, as he did not get approval from Congress. It is also in blatant violation of international law. By attacking a sovereign nation Trump is moving the world toward international anarchy where any nation, for any reason, can attack another. That makes all of us increasingly unsafe.

The death toll and destruction from the war continues to mount. As of yesterday, 1,444 people in Iran have been killed, 910 in Lebanon, 29 in Iraq, 15 in Israel and 8 in the UAE. Further, 13 members of the U.S. military have also been killed and several hundred have been wounded. In addition, there are many thousands of civilians who have been wounded and displaced, as well as massive destruction of housing and infrastructure.

This is a war that should never have been started and the Trump Administration must be held accountable. Further, I will continue to help lead the effort to end all military support for Israel. We cannot continue to arm an extremist government that has brought so much death and destruction to the region.

BUILDING A STRONG GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT: Our current political system is corrupt. The bad news is that, as a result of the terrible Citizens United Supreme Court decision, billionaires in both political parties are spending huge amounts of money to elect candidates who represent their interests. The good news is that, in every region of our country, there is growing disgust at a political elite who ignore the needs of the average American.

During the last number of years, the progressive movement has had enormous success in electing outstanding progressives at the local, state and federal level. Right now, for example, there are over 100 members of the House Progressive Caucus, which is one of the largest caucuses in Congress. Last November, Zohran Mamdani was elected Mayor of New York City. Last month, Analilia Mejia won an upset Democratic primary victory in New Jersey for a congressional seat.

Even more importantly, poll after poll shows that the American people are tired of status quo politics and are demanding real change. They want a progressive agenda that makes certain that, in the richest country in the history of the world, all of our people live with dignity and security.

They understand that our health care system is broken, that health care is a human right and want Medicare for All.

They understand that the cost of housing is unaffordable and want us to build the millions of units of low-income and affordable housing that we desperately need.

They understand that wages are far too low and want us to raise the federal minimum wage from a starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to a living wage of $20 an hour.

They understand that our approach to funding education is absurd and that young people who want a higher education should not leave school with $50,000 or $100,000 in debt.

They understand that climate change is real and that we can cut carbon pollution and create millions of good-paying jobs by encouraging the development of sustainable energy and energy efficiency.

Building a progressive political movement is not easy. But we’re doing it. We’re taking on the Oligarchs and all their money. We’re taking on the corporate media. We’re taking on the political establishment in both political parties.

And, because of your support, we’re succeeding.

Let’s keep going forward together.

In Solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

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How the Trump Administration Is Giving Even More Tax Breaks to the Wealthy 8NOV25

Congressional Republicans celebrated the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July. The legislation provided roughly $4 trillion in tax cuts.Credit...THESE ARE JUST SOME OF THE MEMBERS OF THE TRUMP ARSCHLECKEN CLUB 

 THE drumpf / trump-vance administration with the gop / greed over people-republican party wants $50 BILLION more for their illegal and immoral war in Iran after giving the wealthy more tax breaks knowing many of these same people are war profiteers and will benefit from all the wars he starts. Posting this from the New York Times though it was first published on 8 NOV 25 just to remind America who these neo-nazi fascist war pigs actually care about.....

How the Trump Administration Is Giving Even More Tax Breaks to the Wealthy

The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service are issuing rules that provide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax relief to big companies and the ultrarich.

By Jesse Drucker

Jesse Drucker has been investigating the tax strategies of large companies and the ultrawealthy for nearly 20 years. He reported from New York City.

Nov. 8, 2025

With little public scrutiny, the Trump administration is handing out hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to some of the country’s most profitable companies and wealthiest investors.

The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, through a series of new notices and proposed regulations, are giving breaks to giant private equity firms, crypto companies, foreign real estate investors, insurance providers and a variety of multinational corporations.

The primary target: The administration is rapidly gutting a 2022 law intended to ensure that a sliver of the country’s most profitable corporations pay at least some federal income tax. The provision, the corporate alternative minimum tax, was passed by Democrats and signed into law by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. It sought to stop corporations like Microsoft, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson from being able to report big profits to shareholders yet low tax liabilities to the federal government. It was projected to raise $222 billion over a decade.

But the succession of notices the Treasury and I.R.S. have issued beginning this summer means the tax could bring in a fraction of that.

These breaks come in addition to the roughly $4 trillion package of tax cuts that President Trump signed into law in July. The legislation, passed entirely by Republicans, heavily benefits businesses and the ultrawealthy. It is projected to add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit and came with steep cuts to health care for the elderly and food stamps for the poorest Americans.

With its various tax relief provisions, the administration is now effectively adding hundreds of billions of dollars in new breaks for big businesses and investors. The Treasury is empowered to write rules to help the I.R.S. carry out tax laws passed by Congress. But the aggressive actions of the Trump administration raise questions about whether it is exceeding its legal authority.

Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have attacked federal workers as instruments of the “deep state,” exercising power beyond anything authorized by the law. Now the administration is doing the same thing, several tax experts said, undermining laws that hit the ultrawealthy and big companies.

“Treasury has clearly been enacting unlegislated tax cuts,” said Kyle Pomerleau, a tax economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “Congress determines tax law. Treasury undermines this constitutional principle when it asserts more authority over the structure of the tax code than Congress provides it.”

The alternative minimum tax isn’t the administration’s only effort to roll back taxes on large businesses and wealthy individuals. Last month, the Treasury and I.R.S. granted new tax relief to foreign investors in U.S. real estate. In August, they withdrew regulations to prevent multinationals from avoiding taxes by claiming duplicate losses in multiple countries at once. And, as The New York Times previously reported, the Treasury and I.R.S. have rolled back a crackdown on an aggressive tax shelter used by big companies, including Occidental Petroleum and AT&T. That amounts to another $100 billion in cuts — and likely far more, according to tax advisers.

Changes like these are not widely publicized by the Treasury, but are closely followed by tax planners for the country’s biggest corporations — who are applauding the new guidelines. In notes to clients, advisers at KPMG celebrated the new “array of choices” available for investors seeking to avoid the corporate alternative minimum tax. They noted that the Treasury’s moves provided “significant flexibility” for clients to trim their bills, allowing them to “cherry-pick” the rules that best suit their needs.

A Treasury spokesman said the new moves were “a practical approach that supports American investment and competitiveness” and were meant to replace the Biden administration’s “compliance maze that would have buried taxpayers in red tape.” The spokesman did not address the issue of whether the Treasury was exceeding its legal authority.

Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have attacked federal workers as instruments of the “deep state,” exercising power beyond anything authorized by the law. Now the administration is doing the same thing, several tax experts said, undermining laws that hit the ultrawealthy and big companies.

“Treasury has clearly been enacting unlegislated tax cuts,” said Kyle Pomerleau, a tax economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “Congress determines tax law. Treasury undermines this constitutional principle when it asserts more authority over the structure of the tax code than Congress provides it.”

The alternative minimum tax isn’t the administration’s only effort to roll back taxes on large businesses and wealthy individuals. Last month, the Treasury and I.R.S. granted new tax relief to foreign investors in U.S. real estate. In August, they withdrew regulations to prevent multinationals from avoiding taxes by claiming duplicate losses in multiple countries at once. And, as The New York Times previously reported, the Treasury and I.R.S. have rolled back a crackdown on an aggressive tax shelter used by big companies, including Occidental Petroleum and AT&T. That amounts to another $100 billion in cuts — and likely far more, according to tax advisers.

Changes like these are not widely publicized by the Treasury, but are closely followed by tax planners for the country’s biggest corporations — who are applauding the new guidelines. In notes to clients, advisers at KPMG celebrated the new “array of choices” available for investors seeking to avoid the corporate alternative minimum tax. They noted that the Treasury’s moves provided “significant flexibility” for clients to trim their bills, allowing them to “cherry-pick” the rules that best suit their needs.

A Treasury spokesman said the new moves were “a practical approach that supports American investment and competitiveness” and were meant to replace the Biden administration’s “compliance maze that would have buried taxpayers in red tape.” The spokesman did not address the issue of whether the Treasury was exceeding its legal authority.

The Treasury’s actions are probably contributing hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal deficit, tax experts said. That is on top of the trillions that the legislation signed by Mr. Trump in July is already adding to the deficit. Yet unlike laws passed by Congress, Treasury is under no obligation to publicly account for revenue lost by its actions — such as cutting spending to offset the money no longer being collected.

Doing it through the Treasury means “you can just give away the goodies to one group, without having to take back anything from another,” said Daniel Hemel, a law professor at New York University. This loophole, he said, is one “that previous administrations have exploited and which the Trump administration is exploiting more aggressively.”

The actions by Treasury over the past few months are an accelerated version of what the agency did during the first Trump administration: Regulators killed off efforts to crack down on a lucrative estate tax avoidance strategy, and watered down new taxes on multinational companies in the 2017 Republican tax package.

Big companies effectively keep two sets of books — one for investors and another for the I.R.S. The profits they report to the I.R.S. permit various deductions that can bring a firm’s tax rate far below the 21 percent corporate tax rate.

A holy grail of tax planning is figuring out a deduction that businesses can claim on their tax return — but one that they don’t report to investors, which would dent their profits, potentially hurt their stock price and thus depress compensation paid to executives. In 2021, the Biden administration was unable to get Congress to sign on to an international plan to tax multinational corporations. So the Democratic-led Congress revived an old idea to potentially achieve similar results by imposing a tax on the same profits that corporations report to their investors.

That alternative minimum tax was part of a 2022 domestic policy law called the Inflation Reduction Act. The new tax would apply to big corporations with an effective tax rate below 15 percent.

Not everyone viewed the new tax positively. “But it’s a thing that they were able to do at that moment in time,” said Kimberly Clausing, a top Biden administration Treasury tax official, and now a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The original proposal was relatively simple. Limited to a tiny group of corporations averaging profits of more than $1 billion a year, it would require I.R.S. auditors to look at the income reported to shareholders. If the companies paid taxes at a rate of less than 15 percent on those earnings, the new tax would kick in. It would hit as few as 80 corporations, according to one study.

Industry lobbyists swung into action, and Democrats in Congress began carving out enormous exceptions, permitting deductions for, say, businesses investing in heavy machinery and wireless spectrum used by the likes of T-Mobile and Verizon.

As a result of changes like these, the new tax’s projected revenue dropped to $222 billion from $319 billion, according to congressional estimates.

The amount of revenue is expected to shrink even more, in part because of the Treasury’s actions.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that Mr. Trump signed into law in July provided well over $1 trillion in relief for big companies when they calculate their income tax bills. But those breaks didn’t extend to the separate calculation that corporations must make for their alternative minimum tax bill. As a result, the regular tax bills of many businesses promise to drop so sharply — below 15 percent — that they could be newly subject to the alternative minimum tax.

The new law could have swept in two of the biggest crypto firms, Coinbase and Strategy. In response, they sought rule changes for calculating the minimum tax. Three high-powered legal advisers — Michael Desmond, who served as the I.R.S. chief counsel in the first Trump administration; Andrew Strelka, formerly senior tax counsel in the Biden administration; and Eugene Scalia, the labor secretary in the first Trump administration — pushed to exempt “mark to market” gains reported to investors. Those gains reflect the increase in value of the investments held by companies that haven’t been sold yet.

On Sept. 30, the I.R.S. granted their request, explicitly citing “digital assets.” Big crypto companies “have been granted a reprieve,” lawyers at Vedder Price wrote.

Strategy declared within hours that it “no longer expects to become subject to” the minimum tax, after previously disclosing a potential multibillion-dollar bill under the new tax.

Coinbase said in a statement that it supported the Trump administration’s approach to the regulations for administering the minimum tax. Strategy did not respond to a request for comment.

The crypto companies “owe tax and they’re not happy about it, so they’re going to the Trump administration for a special carve-out,” complained Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee.

Some energy firms are already benefiting, too. Cheniere Energy, the giant natural gas exporter, disclosed in a securities filing last month that, thanks to the most recent Treasury notice, it was entitled to a refund of $380 million of previously paid alternative minimum tax.

Private equity firms are yet another beneficiary. Beginning in early 2023, the industry giant Blackstone pressed for a number of provisions to be included in the regulations to administer the minimum tax.

This summer, Blackstone succeeded. Much of the recent guidance grants Blackstone’s requests, giving private equity firms enormous flexibility to calculate their bills.

A Blackstone spokeswoman declined to comment.

The regulations also provide new flexibility for insurance companies in using so-called tax losses. For one, the new rules permit some insurers to use those losses to reduce their bills under the minimum tax — even for prior years.

“They’re effectively repealing the statute,” said Monte Jackel, a tax lawyer and former I.R.S. official, referring to the minimum tax law.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Jesse Drucker is an investigative reporter for the Business section and has written extensively on the world of high end tax avoidance.

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 10, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: More Tax Breaks For the Wealthy. 

The Latest on the Trump Administration

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• Oil Drilling Project: The $5 billion project in the Gulf of Mexico, approved by the Trump administration, is expected to produce up to 10 billion barrels of oil by the end of this decade. Critics say it could endanger people and marine life.

• Housing Executive Orders: President Trump released two executive orders aimed at tackling the nation’s housing crisis. One order aims to increase housing supply, while the other loosens lending rules for community banks, making it easier for home buyers and builders to borrow.

• Boat Strikes and Seized Oil Tankers: Experts in international and U.S. domestic law told an inter-American human rights organization that the Pentagon’s campaign of blowing up boats it suspected of smuggling drugs in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean was illegal. And maintaining the oil tankers the Trump administration has seized has already cost the United States tens of millions of dollars.

• TikTok Fee: Investors in a deal to create a U.S.-controlled TikTok are set to pay $10 billion to the U.S. Treasury, the latest example of the Trump administration’s inserting the federal government into corporate deal making in unusual ways.

• Jared Kushner: Trump’s son-in-law, who is one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators in the Middle East, is trying to raise more money for his private equity firm from governments in the region, according to five people with knowledge of the talks who were not permitted to speak publicly about the discussions.

• Talks With Cuba: President Miguel Díaz-Canel announced that his government had been holding talks with the Trump administration while managing an increasingly severe lack of fuel. The Cuban government also said that it was planning to release 51 prisoners, a move that appears to be an effort to appease the U.S. government.