Sunday, November 9, 2025
1862 General Ulysses S. Grant issued orders to bar Jews from serving under him
1989 East Berlin opened its borders at Checkpoint Charlie when thousands arrived after a bureaucratic error announced that restrictions on travel to the West had been lifted
2018 Amid California forest fires, President Donald Trump accused state forest management of "gross mismanagement, ' and threatened to withhold funding
In bed at 10:52 minutes into "The Corporate Coup Etat," up at 6:20 to see the first snow on the ground. 😳 My left ankle area had some sensation or discomfort when I lowered it from the bed, but no pain. Hallelujah! 32°, wind chill 14°, high 36°, low 28°. Winter is here. 😟
Meds, etc. My last Lasix at 6:50 a.m. Morning meds at 4 p.m. 😟
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.
For some reason, I am reminded of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the idea that our military men and women fight wars to preserve a nation "of the people, by the people, and for the people." I don't know whether that idea was ever true. The Founding Fathers, for example, were the wealthy elite of the colonies. Forty to fifty percent of them were slaveowners. Today, the government is owned by the rich, individual billionaires and multinational corporations. They are represented by well-connected lobbyists and cadres of lawyers. They are empowered by their wealth, which buys influence, i.e., obedience and subservience, through campaign contributions. The best government money can buy.
FB exchange with JJA regarding this news story she posted:
In Desperation, a Dumpster
Arianna Payton, 25, Granada, Colo. On Tuesday night, Arianna Payton sneaked into a Walmart parking lot and climbed into a dumpster. "I grabbed as much as I could," she said. "I wasn't even looking tomake sure that it was safe." When she got home, she inspected everything. She retrieved a few bags of frozen vegetables, meal replacement shakes, cheese and fruit. She also found some loaves of moldy bread that she thought she could salvage. Last week, Ms. Payton, who has had health issues for years and lives on disability insurance, tried the only nearby food bank. "Everything was gone," she said.
Charles D. Clausen
Thank you for your heartfelt and impassioned plea. When I retired from teaching 24 years ago, I ran an inner city community center in Milwaukee for 2 and 1/2 years. We had a food pantry that served neighbors who needed food help. We had a nursing clinic headed by a nurse practitioner and nurses from UW-Milwaukee's School of Nursing. They provided help to neighbors who had no doctors. We had a free clothing program made possible by good used clothing donated by generous donors. It helped neighbors who didn't have the money to buy their clothes at Walmart or Target, and often didn't have the means to get to those big box stores. We had a legal clinic staffed by volunteer lawyers and Marquette law students who provided advice and direction to neighbors with problems that needed some legal help but who couldn't afford to pay lawyers' fees. Sometimes we provided cash assistance to neighbors in dire straits of all kinds. avoiding foreclosure of having the electricity turned off. I especially remember one young man who visited us and asked for help, $25 to pay the fee for his methadone treatment. He had been living under a viaduct. He stopped at our center on his way to visit his mother, who was living in the Salvation Army homeless shelter down the street from us. We rarely gave out cash directly to those requesting help; rather, we paid their overdue bills or otherwise took care of the problem. With this young man, I met him the following morning at the methadone treatment facility and paid the $25 fee for his treatment. I hesitate as I write this and as I think back on those days and on all the people needing help of some kind to survive in this world. There are millions of Americans in some kind of need today. They live in a different world than many or perhaps most of us live in, a world of want, of unmet needs, and of fear and anxiety. Those with televisions and who can stomach the news see the construction of the $300,000,000 ballroom. They can hear of the Great Gatsby ball and life at Mar-a-Lago. They know instinctively the falsity of the myth that ours is a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." The rest of us should wake up to the truth of who owns our government, that it's not us. It's our own oligarchs. Much as we like to lambaste him, Trump is not the cause of America's plutocratic oligarchy; he's a result, a symptom. We've been heading toward a Trump for decades and now we're living with it.
Janice Jenkins Anderson
Charles D. Clausen what an amazing community service your center provided! Elon will now become the first Trillionaire. A million million. And we are still paying a measly $7.25 for minimum wage - shamefully low and certainly not a living wage. Fun fact, the Georgia minimum wage is a pitiful $5.15 and so employers use the federal amount.
Trump is actively fighting the order to fund SNAP. Georgia actually has a 15 billion dollar surplus that our governor Brian Kemp refuses to use to feed people. The suffering is real and is going to be so much worse. We get calls about families living in a car. Recently, in a metro school district, a mom (federal employee) asked about giving up her 2 kids to DFACS because she could not feed them.
It’s just beginning. 😢
Charles D. Clausen
Forgive me for ranting. I can't help myself. I'm nearing the end of my life and am close to overwhelmed at the country I leave my children and grandchildren.
Janice Jenkins Anderson
The rich relax at Mar-a-Lago and watch synchronized swimming to “God Bless the USA” 😡
https://x.com/patriottakes/status/1987360178610548856.
Bruce Springsteen's Father. "Bruce Springsteen’s Father Complicates a Powerful American Narrative" is a guest op-ed in this morning's NY Times, by Mitchell Dineier. It made me want to read Springsteen's autobiography and see the recently released documentary: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. He and his father were estranged for years, reminding me of someone else. Springsteen is 8 years younger than me and by the time he was a big star, I wasn't much of a rock n' roll fan. I need to spend some time with his music. The little I know of him is remembering that Trump's people used to stupidly play his "Born in the USA" at Trump rallies, even though the lyrics paint such a bleak picture of the USA.
We watched a documentary about Nashville songwriters tonight. It All Begins With a Song. Fascinating. Katherine alerted us to it. It reminded me of the importance of art in every person's life, and a lot of related thoughts. We also watched about 2/3rds of another documentary, Stevie Nicks - Through the Looking Glass, but also about Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac. As the clock neared 10 p.m., we both needed to get to bed and stopped the film and hour and 10 minutes into it, with 58 minutes to go. Tomorrow's another day,
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