Choosing Democracy: How Mandami and Democratic Socialists Win -

Choosing Democracy: How Mandami and Democratic Socialists Win -: Article, published today, explaining recent victories of democratic socialists and progressives (in NY, Seattle, Buffalo, and elsewhere) and...

Support Students: Eat Tamales

 

Choosing Democracy: Protect Public Education - Stop Trump et al

Choosing Democracy: Protect Public Education - Stop Trump et al: Congress created the Department of Education to ensure all students, no matter who they are or where they live, get equal access to an educa...

Building Resistance

Building networks to create and sustain resistance. 

Views from the South,

https://ourmoralmoment.substack.com/p/america-has-seen-authoritarianism?

Excellent advice.   A conference at Vanderbilt, , and the Poor Peoples Campaign.  

Duane Campbell

The End of the Shutdown was Not a Republican Victory

 Today’s Democratic Party is divided along two separate axes: an ideological one and, for lack of a better term, a strategic one. The former is what separates, say, democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from centrist Rep. Jared Golden; the latter, what separates, say, Rep. Ro Khanna from Sen. Chuck Schumer (whose ousting as party leader Khanna has called for).

It’s important not to conflate or confuse the two, or even to exaggerate each of them. On ideology, there’s clearly a divide between Zohran Mamdani and Abigail Spanberger, yet the two ran successful campaigns focused almost entirely on the same issue: affordability. Republican economic policy incapable of addressing (or actually exacerbating) acute hard times is a great unifier, as the hugely successful New Deal Democrats of the 1930s demonstrated, overcoming the immense cultural, religious, and ethnic divisions that had kept the party as far from power as a party can be during the 1920s.

More from Harold Meyerson

The strategic divide, of course, is all about how Democrats should grapple with Donald Trump. Nothing about it correlates with ideology, as centrist Democrats’ anger and exasperation (see, e.g., Jon Chait) at the Democrats who voted to end the shutdown makes very clear. It’s worth noting that the Democrat who has most effectively countered Trump—California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who successfully led the campaign to create five new Democratic House seats—has seized the pole position in the party’s 2028 presidential contest. For now, at least, his strategic success is such that it’s rendered him seemingly immune from any ideological profiling by his fellow Democrats. For what it’s worth, he’s clearly more on the Spanberger side than Mamdani’s, though his success at having California’s government fund the production and distribution (starting January 1) of affordable insulin is more socialistic than anything Mamdani ran on. On cultural issues, he’s literally and figuratively a San Francisco Democrat, which means he’d schlep some heavy political baggage into an election requiring 270 electoral votes.

Strategy and ideology don’t rhyme. On most issues, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine is a little to the left of his fellow Virginia senator, Mark Warner, certainly on labor issues, as Warner is the one Democratic senator who’s by no means a sure vote for labor law reform. But it was Kaine who voted to end the shutdown even as Warner voted no. (Virginia, of course, was home to more laid-off federal workers than any other state.)

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How AI Is Taking Over Politics

Trump Admin Hands out Massive Tax Breaks to the Very Wealthy

 

Trump Admin Hands Out Tax Breaks to the Wealthy.

NYT. 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.”

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/business/trump-administration-tax-breaks-wealthy.html?

 

 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/business/trump-administration-tax-breaks-wealthy.html?

While taking food stamps and health care away from children.