Is the Trump Administration secretly waging war on senior citizens? A suspicious new trend suggests they’re passive-aggressively piling on extra hurdles to snag Social Security benefits—bureaucratic hoops and red tape that’d make even the sprightliest grandma groan. Why the sudden change? Maybe it’s a cunning ploy by the president, a self-proclaimed beacon of physical fitness, now teamed up with health nut RFK Jr. Could this be their bizarre masterplan to Make Elderly Codgers Limber Again (MECLA)? Forget bingo and rocking chairs—Trump might want seniors doing jumping jacks to prove they’re worthy of their checks!

The post Trump’s Sneaky Social Security Plot Exposed appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Taxes are complicated. That’s why every spring I hand everything over to my accountant.

Federal tax policy is even more complex. Trying to figure out how the Republicans’ current plan to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act they passed in 2017—which blew a $1-trillion to $2-trillion hole in the federal deficit—would impact taxpayers is beyond even my trusty accountant.

There are federal agencies and nonprofit think tanks that have done a good job crunching tax cut extension numbers, but most people are not aware of their work. They have to rely on the news media for that information, and to be sure, news outlets have accurately reported that the GOP tax cut extension—which expires after this year unless Congress acts—favors the uber wealthy. Most reporters also have cited the Congressional Budget Office or another reputable source that have calculated that the tax cuts would cost the government $4.6 trillion in lost revenue over a decade, bolstering the GOP’s trumped-up rationale for dismantling “unaffordable” federal agencies and programs. For the most part, however, the news media have failed to spell out the damning details.

This column is going to provide those details—and they’re going to piss you off.

Big bucks for the top 1 percent

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, has been tracking the ebb and flow of the Republican tax cut extension plan. It posted its most recent updated analysis on April 11, which included a very informative bar graph. But the center buried some pertinent data in an end note at the bottom of that chart, so I asked an information designer to create a chart that clearly shows how households in different income brackets would be affected.

If the Republican-controlled Congress succeeds in extending the tax cuts, which everyone received to some extent due to the original 2017 law, income taxes would stay roughly the same, providing a windfall for the 1 percent of households that make more than $1 million a year. If the GOP fails to extend the cuts, taxes would go back to where they were before. That would especially hit the wealthiest Americans, whose taxes would help replenish government coffers and short-circuit the Republicans’ longtime goal of privatizing most government functions.

What the numbers plainly show is that the 1 percent of households that make more than $1.14 million annually would continue to receive an average tax break of more than $77,000, while households making between $66,800 and $119,200 would receive an average tax cut of only $1,120. Households making less than $66,800 would on average save only $500, while the poorest households—those earning less than $34,600 a year—would be rewarded with an average tax break of a measly $120. (At the same time, Trump’s tariffs could cost the average household $4,700 a year, according to new analysis by the Yale Budget Lab, wiping out the tax break for as many as 90 percent of households.)

Many Democrats, including Joe Biden when he was in the White House, wanted to extend the tax cuts, but only for households making less than $400,000 a year. At a House Rules Committee hearing on February 24, Jim McGovern (Mass.), ranking Democrat on the committee, offered amendments to cap the tax cut extensions at various income levels—first for households earning less than $400,000 per year, then less than $1 million, $100 million, and $1 billion per year.

All of McGovern’s amendments were voted down along straight party lines. Five of the nine Republicans on the committee who rejected the amendments are millionaires. The richest, Ralph Norman (S.C.), has a net worth of $66 million. The next wealthiest Republican on the committee, Virginia Foxx (N.C.), has $6.9 million. Two of the four Democrats on the committee who voted in favor are millionaires—McGovern himself, with a net worth of $3.4 million, and Mary Gay Scanlon (Pa.), with a net worth of $9.35 million.

Millionaires are shaping tax policy in their favor

Norman, Foxx, McGovern and Scanlon are hardly outliers. Roughly half of all members of Congress are millionaires, including about two-thirds of senators. By contrast, only 6.6 percent of Americans have that kind of money. Do wealthy legislators protect their class interest? A number of them do.

For example, the committees that drafted the tax bills the House and Senate recently passed (with no Democratic support) setting the stage for extending tax cuts are studded with Republican millionaires, according to a February report by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF). Besides the tax cut extension, the bills would lower corporate tax rates, exempt tips from taxes, and allow new car buyers to deduct their auto loan interest payments. All told, the Trump tax package could cost between $5 trillion and $11 trillion over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

ATF found that the average net worth of the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee is nearly $15 million. More than two-thirds of the 26 Republican members of the House committee and nearly two-thirds of the 13 Republicans on the Senate committee are millionaires, and nine of the 36 GOP members on the two tax-writing committees are worth more than $10 million. The wealthiest Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, Vern Buchanan (Fla.), is worth $249 million. The richest Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Johnson (Wis.), has a net worth of $54.6 million.

“The multimillionaire Republicans in charge of these key committees cannot properly represent average Americans’ tax and spending interests,” said ATF Executive Director David Kass in a statement. “Their prioritization of extending Trump’s tax scam demonstrates their disconnect from middle- and working-class constituents’ needs.

“While wealthy Democrats also serve on these committees,” he added, “they aren’t promoting continuing the entire Trump tax legislation which primarily benefits rich individuals like them and giant corporations—legislation that would add trillions to the deficit and threaten funding for Social Security, healthcare, education, housing and other vital public services.”

Ninety years of GOP attacks on progressive federal programs

The GOP’s current push to extend tax cuts is just the latest round of the party’s 90-year campaign to eliminate government programs based on a misguided belief that the private sector can take care of just about everything besides the military.

In the 1930s, the GOP tried to kill Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in its crib. Thirty years later, it opposed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, notably Medicare, Medicaid and federal education funding. Richard Nixon cut funds for anti-poverty programs. Ronald Reagan rolled back welfare, public housing and food assistance programs, declaring that government is the problem, not the solution. George W. Bush wanted to privatize Social Security. Does this all sound familiar?

Now that the Republicans have slim majorities in both houses of Congress, a vengeful Donald Trump in the White House, and Elon Musk’s swat team, they will do all they can to fulfill their dream of destroying the programs and agencies they never supported. Why? To pay for more tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, which includes them. Is that American exceptionalism or what?

This column was originally posted on Money Trail, a new Substack site co-founded by Elliott Negin.

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the 10 richest people in the world—including nine Americans—expanded their wealth by nearly $64 billion, the greatest single-day increase in recorded history. Since then, an unholy marriage of billionaire investors, tech bros, Christian nationalists, and, of course, Donald Trump has staged an oligarchic assault on our democracy. If the nation’s corporate elite once leveraged their relationships within government to enrich themselves, they’ve now cut out the middleman. We’re living in a new Gilded Age, with a proto-fascistic and religiously regressive administration of, by, and for the billionaires.

With the wind at their backs, leading elements in the Republican Party have rapidly eschewed euphemisms and political correctness altogether, airing their anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-poor prejudices in unapologetically broad and brazen terms. The effect of this, especially for the most vulnerable among us, is seismic. During the first two months of the second Trump administration, we’ve witnessed nothing less than an escalatory war on the poor.

The attacks are many-pronged. Rural development grants, food banks, and environmental protection measures have all been slashed in the name of “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” Planned Parenthood and other life-saving healthcare services for poor and marginalized communities have been defunded. Homelessness has been ever more intensely criminalized and Housing First policies vilified. The Department of Education, which has historically provided critical resources for low-income and disabled students, has been gutted, while the barbaric conditions in overcrowded immigrant detention centers have only worsened. Billions of dollars in funding for mental health and addiction services have been revoked. Worse yet, these and other mercenary actions may prove to be just the tip of the spear. Tariff wars and potential cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and SNAP could leave both the lives of the poor and the global economy in shambles.

As the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the question remains: How do we chart a more just and humane path forward?

This volatile moment may represent an unprecedented, even existential, threat to the health of our democracy, but it is building on decades of neoliberal plunder and economic austerity, authored by both conservative and liberal politicians. Before the 2024 elections, there were more than 140 million people living in poverty or one crisis away—one job loss, eviction, medical issue, or debt collection—from economic ruin. In this rich land, 45 million people regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, while more than 80 million people are uninsured or underinsured, 10 million people live without housing or experience chronic housing insecurity, and the American education system has regularly scored below average compared to those of other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Amid tremendous social and economic dislocation, traditional American institutions and political alignments have steadily lost their meaning for tens of millions of people. The majority of us know things aren’t well in this country. We can feel it, thanks not just to the violent and vitriolic political environment in which we live, but to our bank statements and debt sheets, our rising rent and utility bills. As the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the question remains: How do we chart a more just and humane path forward? There are no easy answers, but there are profound lessons to be learned from the past, especially from movements of poor and dispossessed people that have inspired many of this country’s most important moments of democratic awakening.

This is the focus of our new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty. Drawing on Liz’s 30 years of anti-poverty organizing, we poured over old pamphlets and documents, memories and mementos to gather evidence that social transformation at the hands of the poor remains an ever-present possibility and to summarize some of the most significant ideas that, even today, continue to animate their organized struggles.

Homeless, Not Helpless

In the late spring of 1990, hundreds of unhoused people across the country broke locks and chains off dozens of empty federally owned houses and moved in. Bedrooms and kitchens carpeted with layers of dust suddenly whirled with activity. Mattresses were carried in and bags of food unpacked. Within hours, the new occupants made calls to the city’s energy companies, requesting that the utilities be turned on. They were remarkably disciplined and efficient—single moms who had been living in their cars, veterans, students, and low-wage or recently laid-off workers, and people battling illness without healthcare. They were Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and white, and although they came from radically different slices of society, one simple fact bound them together: They were poor, in need of housing, and fed up.

That wave of takeovers was led by the National Union of the Homeless (NUH), one among many carried out by the group in those years. The NUH was not a charity, a service provider, or a professional advocacy group but a political organization led by and for unhoused people, with close to 30,000 members in 25 cities. Liz was introduced to it on her first day of college. Within a few months, she had joined the movement and never left.

NUH members included people who had recently lost their manufacturing jobs and could no longer find steady work, as well as low-wage workers who couldn’t keep up with the growing costs of housing and other daily necessities. In such dire times, the reality of the unhoused only foreshadowed the possible dislocation of millions more. The NUH emphasized this truth in one of its slogans: “You Are Only One Paycheck Away from Homelessness!” The name of the organization itself reflected a connection between homelessness and the new economy then being shaped. As industrial work floundered and labor unions suffered, there was a growing need for new unions of poor and dispossessed people.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NUH won a string of victories, including new policies guaranteeing 24-hour shelter intake, access to public showers, and the right of the unhoused to vote without a permanent address. They also won publicly funded housing programs run by the formerly unhoused in nearly a dozen cities. Such successes were a barometer of the incipient strength of the organized poor and a corrective to the belief that poor people could perhaps spark spontaneous outrage but never be a force capable of wielding effective political power.

At the heart of the NUH were three principles: First, poor people can be agents of change, not simply victims of a cruel history; second, the power of the poor depends on their ability to unite across their differences; and third, it is indeed possible to abolish poverty. Those guiding principles were crystallized in two more slogans: “Homeless, Not Helpless” and “No Housing, No Peace.” The first captured a too-often obscured truth about the poor: that one’s living conditions don’t define who we are or limit our capacity to change our lives and the world around us. The second caught the political and moral agency of the impoverished—that there will be no peace and quiet until the demand for essential human needs is met.

Another NUH slogan has also echoed through the years: “You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take.” It’s a favorite of ours because it expresses a crucial argument of our book: that poverty and economic inequality won’t end because of the goodwill of those who hold political power and wealth (as is abundantly clear today) or even through the charitable actions of sympathetic people.

Change on such a scale requires a protagonist with a more pressing agenda. Poverty will end when poor people and their allies refuse to allow society to remain complacent about the suffering and death caused by economic deprivation. It will end when the poor become an organized force capable of rallying a critical mass of society to reorder the political and economic priorities of our country.

Projects of Survival

In the mid-1990s, Liz was active in North Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Organization (KWRU). Kensington’s workforce had by then been decimated by deindustrialization and disinvestment. People without steady or reliable housing were moving into vacant buildings or cobbling together outdoor shelters, while tenants refused to leave homes from which they were being evicted. In its actions, KWRU reached deep into this well of experience, taking the spontaneous survival strategies that poor people were already using and adapting them into “projects of survival.”

The phrase “project of survival” was borrowed from the Black Panther Party, which, in the 1960s and 1970s, created successful “survival programs” like the Free Medical Clinic Program and the Free Breakfast Program. In 1969, the head of the national School Breakfast Program admitted that the Black Panthers were feeding more poor children than the state of California. The Panthers, however, were concerned with more than just meeting immediate needs. They were focused on structural transformation and, through their survival programs, they highlighted the government’s refusal to deal seriously with American poverty, even while then spending billions of dollars fighting distant wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

Today, amid the rising tide of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s billionaire-fueled authoritarianism, there’s an urgent need for defiant and militant organizing among a broad cross-section of society.

KWRU learned from the Black Panthers. In the late fall of 1995, a cold front swept through a large KWRU encampment known as Tent City. In need of indoor shelter, the group set its sights on a vacant church a few blocks away. Earlier that year, the archdiocese of Philadelphia had shuttered St. Edward’s Catholic Church because its congregants were poor and the drafty building expensive to maintain. Still, some of those congregants continued to pray every Sunday in a small park outside the shuttered church. Eventually, dozens of residents from Tent City walked up the church steps, broke the locks on its front doors, and ignited a highly publicized occupation that lasted through that winter.

On the walls of the church, Liz and her compatriots hung posters and banners, including one that asked, “Why do we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?” As winter engulfed the city, residents of St. Ed’s fed and cared for one another in a fugitive congregation whose youngest resident was less than a year old and whose oldest was in his 90s. That occupation ultimately pressured the archdiocese to refocus its ministry on poor communities, while electrifying the local media to report on the rampant poverty that had normally been swept under the rug.

Such projects of survival enabled KWRU to build trust in Kensington, while serving as bases for bigger and bolder organizing. As a young woman, Liz gained new insight into how bottom-up change often begins. While media narratives regularly depict poor people as lazy, dangerous, or too overburdened with their own problems to think about others, there is an immense spirit of cooperation and generosity among the poorest people in our society. Indeed, that spirit of communal care is the generative ground from which powerful social movements emerge.

A Survival Revival for These Times

Today, amid the rising tide of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s billionaire-fueled authoritarianism, there’s an urgent need for defiant and militant organizing among a broad cross-section of society. As our democratic horizons continue to narrow, we find ourselves operating within a critical window of time. In our work, we call this a “kairos moment.” In the days of antiquity, the Greeks taught that there were two ways to understand time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is quantitative time, while kairos is the qualitative time during which old and often oppressive ways are dying while new understandings struggle to be born.

In kairos moments such as this sinister Trumpian one, it is often the people whose backs are up against the wall who are willing to take decisive action. In every popular, pro-democracy movement, there is a leading social force that, by virtue of its place in the economic pecking order, is compelled to act first, because for them it’s a matter of life-or-death. And by moving into action, that force can awaken the indignation and imagination of others.

Right now, there are tens of thousands of Americans already in motion trying to defend their communities from the growing ravages of economic, environmental, and political disaster. Their efforts include food banks and neighborhood associations; churches and other houses of worship providing sanctuary for the unhoused and immigrants; women, trans kids, and other LGBTQ+ people fighting to ensure that they and their loved ones get the healthcare they need; community schools stepping into the breach of our beleaguered public education system; mutual-aid groups responding to environmental disasters that are only increasing thanks to the climate crisis; and students protesting the genocide in Gaza and the militarization of our society. Such communities of care and resistance may still be small and scrappy, but within them lies a latent power that, if further politicized and organized, could ignite a new era of transformational movement-building at a time when our country is in increasing danger.

Indeed, just imagine what might be possible if so many communities were operating not in isolation but in coordination. Imagine the power of such a potentially vast network to shake things up and assert the moral, intellectual, and political agency of those under attack. Food pantries could become places not just to fill bellies but to launch protests, campaigns, and organizing drives. Ever more devastating superstorms, floods, and forest fires could become moments not just for acute disaster response but for sustained relationship-building and communal resilience, aimed at repairing the societal fissures that worsen extreme weather events.

Last month, the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, where we both work, published a new report on the theory and practice behind this approach to grassroots organizing, A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis. Authored by our colleagues Shailly Gupta Barnes and Jarvis Benson, it describes how—beginning during the Covid-19 pandemic and continuing today—dozens of grassroots organizations, congregations, mutual-aid collectives, artists, and others have been building projects of survival and engaging in communal acts of care.

Over the coming months, the Kairos Center plans to draw inspiration from such stories as we launch a new and ambitious national organizing drive among the poor. The “Survival Revival,” as we call it, will connect with and link the often-siloed survival struggles of the poor into a more unified force. Together, we will study, strategize, sing, pray, and take the kind of action that, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once put it, can be “a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.” Together, we will lift from the bottom, so that everyone can rise.

When U.S. Congress recently approved a budget proposing nearly $880 billion in spending cuts to execute President Donald Trump’s agenda, which will almost certainly mean funding tax cuts for the wealthy, it didn’t just target unnecessary spending—it targeted our healthcare.

Republicans claim this is about combating fraud, but we know the truth. Let’s be clear: Slashing Medicaid by billions of dollars is a direct attack on critically needed health services, as it covers essential healthcare like doctors visits, hospital care, cancer screenings, reproductive healthcare, and more. These cuts threaten not only our access to care, but our fundamental rights to live and thrive.

Attacks on Medicaid will impact millions of Americans, but will disproportionately harm marginalized groups, including people with disabilities; the elderly; low-income families; and most severely Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people. Given the wide-ranging impact these cuts will have on people’s ability to control their health, bodies, lives, and reproduction, this isn’t just a healthcare issue—it’s a matter of reproductive justice.

Expanding Medicaid in more states, increasing access to doula care, and committing to researching racial discrimination in the healthcare system are just a few of the steps we must take.

Medicaid is a lifeline in addressing the deep inequities in healthcare coverage, and any cuts to this vital program threaten to unravel the limited progress we’ve fought so hard to make. Currently, Medicaid funds almost two-thirds of Black births, provides coverage for almost a third of Black women, and insures over half of Black girls. The fact of the matter is that Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people have the most to lose, and it’s undeniable that Medicaid cuts will only exacerbate the Black maternal mortality crisis our communities are already struggling to survive.

It is true that providing lifesaving healthcare to millions of people comes at a cost. But when politicians start looking for ways to trim the federal budget, Medicaid is often first on the chopping block. And yet, slashing Medicaid has proven politically impossible—because the truth is, 8 in 10 Americans overwhelmingly support it. People like being able to see a doctor when they need to, and they recognize Medicaid is essential in making that possible.

Despite its popularity, cuts to Medicaid may soon become reality because of decades of relentless attacks on reproductive justice by our elected leaders. From forced sterilization, to shackling women during birth, from the Hyde Amendment and to overturning the federal right to an abortion, this country has an insidious history of reproductive abuse—particularly against Black women. Now, attacks on Medicaid are just the latest tactic used by anti-choice politicians to strip us of our bodily autonomy and further deny us access to lifesaving reproductive healthcare.

Access to healthcare should never be determined by income or zip code, but these cuts force states to make up this deficit by either raising taxes or slashing education budgets, further burdening our communities. Rural Americans, particularly, will suffer as rural hospitals often rely heavily on Medicaid funding to stay afloat. These cuts will worsen maternal healthcare deserts, which have 1 in 6 Black babies born in areas with limited or no access to essential maternal care.

What’s worse, adding “work requirements,” which were narrowly avoided under Trump’s first administration, will also be used as a tool to remove people from Medicaid. Not because they are not working, but because new bureaucratic reporting requirements will create confusion, and ultimately cause people, including people with disabilities and the elderly, to be disqualified from coverage.

In reality, 92% of Medicaid beneficiaries under 65 are employed, debunking the harmful stereotype that people on Medicaid are not working. There is a long history of scapegoating poor people for receiving social services and adding increased burdens to show they “deserve” help. This is the same racist welfare reform narrative we have heard for decades—the false “welfare queen” myth, used to police Black women, incarcerate Black mothers, and justify cuts to social services.

Make no mistake, Black women will bear the brunt of these Medicaid cuts. Yes, our healthcare system, including Medicaid, has flaws, but slashing coverage for the most vulnerable Americans is not the solution. During a time when access to reproductive healthcare is under attack like never before and Black maternal mortality rates are still continuing to rise, we need policy solutions rooted in reproductive justice.

This means centering Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people who are disproportionately impacted by Medicaid cuts and the policies driving these changes. Expanding Medicaid in more states, increasing access to doula care, and committing to researching racial discrimination in the healthcare system are just a few of the steps we must take. Our lives—and our future—depend on it.

Today is Tax Day, and the brazen attack of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency against the federal government looms large over the Internal Revenue Service. The recent announcement that reductions in force are commencing at the IRS spells danger for taxpayer services, essential government workers, and the heart of our voluntary tax system.

As the president of the union representing IRS employees and the executive director of the largest tax fairness coalition, we each bring a different perspective to this unfolding catastrophe. But we share the same strong objection to DOGE’s drastic, ill-conceived and likely illegal attack on the nation’s tax collection agency.

The immediate victims of the DOGE attacks on the agency are the laid-off employees and those threatened with firing. Though Musk and President Donald Trump present their haphazard crusade as one waged against elites in the nation’s capital, the reality is that about 85% of federal employees work outside the Washington, D.C., area. As a result, neighbors across the country will lose their jobs, and communities everywhere will feel the economic impact of lost IRS positions and facilities.

If Musk tries to cut $10 billion from IRS enforcement spending, he will be risking $50-90 billion in lost revenue each year. That’s a strange strategy for someone who claims he wants to make the government more cost-efficient.

IRS employees are disproportionately female and members of racial or ethnic minorities, groups that have historically faced discrimination in hiring and advancement. Nearly 10% of IRS workers are military veterans. The National Treasury Employees Union is currently in court fighting these improper layoffs.

Next, taxpayers filing their annual returns and expecting prompt refunds will feel the impact. The reduction in IRS employees means fewer answered calls, longer wait times for help, and delayed refunds. The administration’s plan to shut over 100 taxpayer assistance centers across the country will leave most Americans unable to get in-person help with their tax issues.

As damaging as the cuts are to every federal agency, cuts to the IRS are different in one important respect: They could cost us a fortune in lost revenue.

Roughly 70% of the personnel cuts thus far have been in enforcement, which will make it easier to avoid detection for the millionaire and billionaire tax cheats who evade an estimated $150 billion in taxes every year. It is estimated that every dollar cut from enforcement costs $5 to $9 in revenue. So if Musk tries to cut $10 billion from IRS enforcement spending, he will be risking $50-90 billion in lost revenue each year. That’s a strange strategy for someone who claims he wants to make the government more cost-efficient.

However, it’s really not surprising that Musk, the richest individual in the world, is focusing on diminishing the agency’s ability to enforce the law. That’s what his allies in Congress have been trying to do ever since the agency received restored funding in 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act. That increased enforcement has focused exclusively on wealthy households and big corporations. Musk has a vested interest in hobbling IRS efforts to ensure the rich and big corporations pay what they owe.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s restored funding for the IRS yielded successes. As of last summer, the agency had collected over $1 billion just from 1,600 millionaires who owed but had failed to pay at least $250,000 each. It also informed Microsoft that it owed $29 billion in back taxes and had plans to increase audits on big companies (those worth more than $250 million), large partnerships (those with over $10 million in assets), and individuals with income over $10 million.

The Musk axe might also fall on the IRS Direct File program, the new system allowing taxpayers in about half the country to file for free directly with the government, bypassing expensive tax preparation firms. (The program is still in the pilot stage and will eventually be available to all taxpayers.) Musk announced recently he “deleted” the technical support department that helped create Direct File, but as of now the service itself is still operational. We don’t know how long that will last with Musk’s operatives roaming the halls of the IRS.

The restored funding for the IRS also helped it improve customer service. The average wait time on calls to the agency had dropped from 30 minutes to 3; over 50 in-person taxpayer assistance centers had been opened before the mass closures, and backlogs of unprocessed returns dropped.

All of this is at risk, of course, as DOGE prepares a “hackathon” that would allow our national tax data to be easily accessible to third parties. Compromising the tax data of millions of Americans in conjunction with efforts to stall attempts to modernize our tax system portend nothing less than disaster for the services we depend on.

Because the IRS brings in the revenue that funds the rest of the government, Musk’s gang is striking at the heart of the federal government’s ability to fund healthcare for seniors, nutrition for children, and other needs of the American people. The DOGE attack on the IRS is also an attack on economic justice and equality. Taxes on ultra-high income and extreme wealth help to narrow the nation’s destabilizing economic gaps. It’s hard not to conclude that those very injuries—not “waste, fraud and abuse”—are the real aim of DOGE’s wayward campaign.

Yesterday was the day democracy in our nation officially died.

We no longer live in the America we grew up in: “The land of the free and the home of the brave.” The country the rest of the world looked up to and depended on. The country that claimed to follow the rule of law, and valued compassion and the protection of its most vulnerable people.

We are now in the midst of a outright coup against the Constitution, against the United States, and against our founding ideals: Donald Trump proclaimed it yesterday when he openly defied the Supreme Court and our founding documents with a sneer, and his neofascist sycophants chuckled and giggled in the Oval Office.

When Marco Rubio claimed that arresting and deporting a man legally living in the US was “foreign policy” that can’t be overseen by the Supreme Court and then congratulated himself on his cleverness.

Trump’s response to the ruling was a resounding, “Fuck you” to our courts, our Constitution, and our laws.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal U.S. resident who committed no crime, is now held in El Salvador’s most notorious concentration camp, where as many as 75 men are packed into cells designed for a fraction of that number.

Prisoners are not allowed outside — not for fresh air, not for exercise — and the fluorescent lights never go off. Food is minimal: plain rice or beans twice a day, with water. There is no possibility of appeal for him or the other 75,000 people El Salvadoran dictator Bukele has arrested and imprisoned without due process.

This father of three US citizens, this husband of a US citizen, who had been in the US with the permission of our government, is today packed in with savage gang members — literally murderers and rapists — in one of the most infamous and violent prisons in the world.

He has is no access to legal counsel, no information about charges or release, and medical care is often denied except in extreme emergencies. Days blur into nights as men lie on concrete floors or sit in silence, many carving repetitive paths along the walls to stay sane.

Kilmar may be doing the same, clinging to routine, to hope, to anything that reminds him he once belonged to a country that promised justice.

But then came the most lawless president in the history of America, who yesterday all but declared that we are no longer a constitutional democratic republic as long as he is president.

Article I, Section 9 of the United States’ Constitution is unambiguous about habeas corpus, Latin for “produce the body,” which means no person can be imprisoned without first knowing the charges against them, being able to challenge those charges, and having a court of law decide their fate.

This right embraced by our Founders and written into our Constitution literally dates back to the year 1215 when King John signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede, as Article I Section 9 clearly states:

“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

(Trump is falsely and cynically claiming in an illegal Executive Order that the government of Venezuela has sent gang members to “invade” the US. Bizarrely, even if a court were to uphold this “invasion” gimmick, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is neither a gang member nor even a Venezuelan; he’s a citizen of El Salvador who’s lived in the US since he was 16, is a union worker and beloved member of his community, and was here legally.)

Fifth Amendment to the Constitution:

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”

Sixth Amendment to the Constitution:

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

Seventh Amendment to the Constitution:

“[T]he right of trial by jury shall be preserved…”

Eighth Amendment to the Constitution:

“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Please point out to me where, in our Constitution, it says that the President of the United States or the Secretary of State can simply order a “person” (see 5th Amendment; nowhere does the word “citizen” appear) to be arrested and transported to a foreign hellhole concentration camp without a warrant, without an attorney, without a trial, and without even advance notice that might give him a chance to protest his innocence.

An unanimous Supreme Court ruled last week that our Constitution, as quoted above, says exactly what it means and Trump must “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is not a criminal and has been denied all of the due process provisions detailed above in our Constitution and its amendments.

Justice Sotomayor was explicit:

“The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene. …
“[T]he proper remedy is to provide Abrego Garcia with all the process to which he would have been entitled had he not been unlawfully removed to El Salvador. That means the Government must comply with its obligation to provide Abrego Garcia with ‘due process of law,’ including notice and an opportunity to be heard…
“It must also comply with its obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”

Trump’s response to the ruling was a resounding, “Fuck you” to our courts, our Constitution, and our laws. And to the millions of American citizens who are frightened by his systematic dismantling of our legal system.

It was an open assertion by Trump that he can do anything he wants, no matter how unlawful or unconstitutional, without fear of consequences. That he has successfully staged a coup against the government of the United States and her laws and has every intention of running this country like Russia or Hungary.

And not only that, he told El Salvador’s authoritarian president Bukele that the people he next wants to send to his slave labor camp are American citizens like you and me:

“Home grown criminals. Home growns are next. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”

Which brings us to a frightening echo of Jefferson’s objections to the “tyranny” of King George II, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence he authored and was signed on July 4, 1776:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. …

“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. …

“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone…

“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws…

“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

“For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: …

“For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: …

“In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” (emphasis added)

If Trump and his ass-kissing lackeys aren’t stopped by public outrage, our courts, and our Constitution and laws, then America has ceased to be a functioning republic and the future is unknowable but certainly grim.

If Trump and his ass-kissing lackeys aren’t stopped by public outrage, our courts, and our Constitution and laws, then America has ceased to be a functioning republic and the future is unknowable but certainly grim.

That would be, the Declaration says, the very definition of tyranny. As Senator Chris Murphy just posted to Bluesky:

“You may not think this case matters to you. But Abrego Garcia was legally in the U.S., just like all the rest of us. His status as an immigrant doesn't matter as a matter of law. If Trump can lock up or remove ANYONE — no matter what the courts say — we are all at grave risk.”

Trump should be impeached for his defiance of the Supreme Court and our Constitution. For spitting in the face of our Founders and every American veteran who has ever fought (or died) for this country and it’s ideals. For using foreign concentration camps.

Tragically, however, Republicans in Congress and across the country are now fully in on the coup. They have chosen an egomaniacal, self-centered narcissist and his billionaire friends over their integrity, country, and their oath of office.

Show up in the streets this coming Saturday and reach out to your elected representatives to demand a return to the rule of law.

The number for Congress is 202-224-3121, at least for the moment; like with Social Security, Trump may cut that phone number off any day now, too.

Streaming 10 AM Eastern this morning, but you can listen/watch any time afterwards:

On The TMI Show, Ted Rall and Manila Chan expose the shocking contradictions in Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, delivering a serious yet electrifying breakdown of a system gone rogue. Trump has demanded that immigrants who “broke American law by coming illegally” be reported, yet his administration is illegally deporting people who followed every rule, often through underhanded tactics. The hosts spotlight a Columbia University student, Mohsen Mahdawi, who was lured to a citizenship hearing expecting approval, only to be ambushed and detained by ICE agents in a stunning betrayal.

Drawing from a New York Times investigation, the episode reveals that 90% of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s mega-prison are not gang members and have no criminal records—ordinary people like students and workers caught in a merciless dragnet. The hosts also tackle the administration’s defiance of a Supreme Court order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador’s brutal prison despite legal protections. The White House acknowledges the error but refuses to act, leaving Garcia stranded in a humanitarian crisis.

With razor-sharp analysis, Rall and Chan unravel how these actions not only break the law but erode trust in justice itself, painting a chilling picture of an administration wielding deportation as a political weapon. The episode connects Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric to real human devastation, from shattered families to ignored court rulings, urging viewers to confront the stakes. Packed with hard-hitting facts and raw urgency, this TMI Show installment is a must-watch for anyone alarmed by the erosion of the rule of law. Tune in for an unflinching look at a crisis where innocence is no defense, and the law is twisted to punish the vulnerable.

The post TMI Show Ep 117: “Deported Accidentally On Purpose” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Each year for Tax Day, my colleagues and I at the Institute for Policy Studies release a tax receipt so you can learn where your taxes are actually going.

This year, you may be more worried about the price of eggs than your tax dollars. But with President Donald Trump now urging a $1 trillion military budget, it’s worth thinking about what we’re already spending.

Last year, the average taxpayer paid $3,707 for weapons and wars. That’s the equivalent of 628 dozen eggs. So if you thought buying a dozen or two a week for your family was taxing, well, that’s just the beginning.

Taxpayers are directly subsidizing the world’s wealthiest man even as he cuts programs for the poorest people on Earth.

Yet the president and his allies in Congress are planning on spending more for war and mass deportations—and less on just about everything else.

And it is a war budget, make no mistake. President Trump has escalated bombing in Yemen and doubled down on providing weapons to Israel, raising the chances of a new, full-blown Middle East war.

The president is also flirting with war with China, both through his trade war but also more directly. Much of the Pentagon’s future spending is in preparation for a war with China.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk and DOGE are supposed to save money. But look at what they’re cutting: The average taxpayer paid just $39 for USAID last year, the international aid program that DOGE eliminated. For the cost of just six dozen eggs per taxpayer, that saved millions of lives—including millions of children who are now at risk.

DOGE and the president have fired staff and cut programs at the National Institutes of Health that conduct lifesaving cancer research. To discover those cures, the average taxpayer paid $149 in 2024—about 25 dozen eggs. Not a bad investment to help treat cancer.

The president also eliminated a program for museum and library funding for which the average taxpayer paid just $1.43 in 2024—about three eggs. And the president is dismantling an agency called the Interagency Council on Homelessness that coordinates services to help end homelessness, for which the average taxpayer paid just one penny in 2024.

These are just average figures, so those with lower incomes are paying far less for these things. Either way, these aren’t the kinds of cuts you’d make if you were really looking to get the best bang for your buck.

Instead, you might start with weapons contractors. In 2024, the average taxpayer paid $1,430 for Pentagon contractors—the equivalent of 242 dozen eggs.

One of those contractors is SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company. Indeed, SpaceX is benefiting from new Pentagon contracts while Musk takes his chainsaw to cancer research and homeless services. Taxpayers are directly subsidizing the world’s wealthiest man even as he cuts programs for the poorest people on Earth.

Naturally, a $1 trillion Pentagon budget will open the floodgates for more money for contractors, who already get over half the Pentagon budget each year. Cutting that planned $1 trillion by 10% could pay to avert GOP plans to cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and food stamps over the next 10 years.

Or you could skip the president’s plans for mass deportations and detentions of immigrants. At $98 for the average taxpayer in 2024, this amount is set to balloon as Congress prepares billions in new funding for the president’s deportations of students, fathers, mothers, and even a U.S. citizen child seeking emergency cancer treatment.

The U.S. needs humane and commonsense immigration law, not an indiscriminate dragnet that scapegoats even legal residents for problems they had no role in creating. We could put that money back into threatened services like the NIH, local libraries, and ending homelessness—or all of the above, given how comparatively cheap those things are.

With many Americans struggling to afford the price of eggs, healthcare, and housing, the government can and should help with those real problems instead of creating new ones with new wars and new mass deportation plans.

Today our 2024 taxes are due. You likely had most of your federal taxes deducted from your paychecks throughout the year. This is not true, however, for mega-millionaires and billionaires, some of whom are practically running our government right now. They receive much of their income in the form of appreciation on the stocks of the corporations they run. And the companies themselves use loopholes and deductions to reduce their tax bill, sometimes down to zero.

Take Tesla (please!).

The company, valued at over $1 trillion, paid no federal income tax on its 2024 income of $2.3 billion. And its CEO, Elon Musk, who had hoarded some $342 billion in wealth by earlier this year, avoids paying taxes on most of his income until he chooses to “realize” capital gains by selling his enormously appreciated stock.

Because of our overall low taxes, the U.S. does not collect as much revenue as other comparable nations. This means you get a lot less by being an American citizen than you get by being a French, German or Swedish citizen. Less health care, less child care, less access to affordable college.

These low taxes are part of the reason that America experiences supercharged inequality. While other countries do more to boost people at the bottom and enable upward mobility for the middle class, in the U.S. low taxes combined with an anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environment regulatory regime means that here the rich get richer and the rest of us stagnate.

A regime of relatively robust taxation and reasonable regulation delivered a more educated, healthier, more prosperous America.

Further, the extreme wealth of the billionaire class often lets them buy the elected officials and the policies they want—usually policies that add further to their riches in a vicious cycle that leaves most of us worse off. President Trump has given Musk the power to fire tens of thousands of workers, eliminate funding for hospitals and universities around the country, and destroy Congressionally-created agencies that carry out vital public functions.

Shutting down special tax breaks for very wealthy individuals and profitable corporations could go a long way to addressing these problems. But Trump and his allies in Congress are moving dramatically in the opposite direction. While they plan to double down on tax cuts that mainly benefit the wealthy, they are also allowing the most destructive billionaire-driven attack we’ve ever seen on the policies that keep us healthy and safe.

Musk is wielding a chainsaw against public services using his so-called DOGE (“Department of Government Efficiency” though it’s not a government agency and will likely undermine efficiency). DOGE’s cuts to services could decimate education, health, and income support. And its cuts to public oversight will enable corporations to more easily exploit us as workers, consumers, and community members.

For example, Trump and Musk are trying to eliminate the Department of Education and slash school budgets in ways that will particularly harm children with disabilities, students in disadvantaged rural and urban schools, and college access for working class kids.

They’ve fired 10,000 staff members at the Department of Health and Human Services, including those who ensure vaccine distribution, drug safety, and health care access. They’ve haphazardly slashed funding nationwide for labs conducting medical research on cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, maternal health, and more.

They tried to get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency which has recovered more than $21 billion for consumers from companies that engage in unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices. And they even slashed the Federal Emergency Management Association which helps communities facing floods, hurricanes, and wildfires, leaving communities unprotected.

Their reasons are three-fold, all bad for regular people:

• Cutting public services can free policymakers to pass expensive tax cuts for the wealthiest people and corporations.
• It can also allow privatization of services so Musk and others can demand payment to provide them.
• Finally by hobbling regulations and firing public employees that safeguard factories, inspect meat, and test drugs, Musk hopes to juice corporate profits as CEOs are permitted to shed factory safety equipment, ignore anti-pollution rules, and violate labor laws.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the crazy on-again, off-again tariffs that are roiling our financial markets and industrial supply chains.

Policymakers of the 20th century created regulations, safety nets, and labor standards that made Americans more educated, more prosperous, and healthier. They didn’t work perfectly of course. But education, income, and health improved dramatically over this span.

Educational investments boosted high school attainment rates for adults from a mere 10 percent in 1910 to 90 percent by 2017. With more education and unionization, inflation-adjusted per capita income went from $18,460 in 1967 to $46,193 by 2023. Research and vaccination nearly eradicated polio, smallpox, and measles. And safety standards meant the number of workers killed on the job plummeted from 15.8 to 1.9 per 100,000 between 1928 (when tracking began) and 1998. The big picture: life expectancy at birth nearly doubled (from 46.6 years to 74.7 years) for white men and more than doubled (from 32.5 years to 68.2 years) for Black men between 1900 and the year 2000.

In other words, a regime of relatively robust taxation and reasonable regulation delivered a more educated, healthier, more prosperous America. In 2025, it seems, Trump and those he enables are trying to make American impoverished again by rolling back the 20th century and its accomplishments.

Friends,

As tens of millions of Americans hussle to pay their taxes, President Donald Trump has put the entire global economy into chaos. 401(k)s are tanking, savings are shrinking, treasury bonds are losing value, supply chains are convulsing.

Even America’s oligarchs are petrified. They contributed millions to Trump’s inauguration. Many invested heavily in his campaign. They lavished praise on the new president and have supported his every move—in order to benefit from his promised big tax cut.

But the chaos he’s unleashed on the world economy is causing many of them to go public with their worries.

“Obviously,” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, said in a conference call with reporters, “the China stuff is significant. We don’t know the full effect.”

But we do know that global investors are fleeing Treasury bonds, which had been the safest place to put money in the world. That may not be the full effect, but it’s a huge and frightening one.

By Friday morning, Dimon was warning that the economy faced “considerable turbulence” from the tariffs, while echoing Trump’s assertion that the immediate turmoil was nothing to worry about. “I really almost don’t care fundamentally about what the economy does in the next two quarters,” Dimon said. “That isn’t that important. We’ll get through that. We’ve had recessions before and all of that.”

Oops. The word “recession” coming out of the mouth of the CEO of the largest bank in the United States? That itself is extraordinarily worrying.

Notably, JPMorgan has added nearly half a billion dollars to its financial cushion, preparing for losses from customers who won’t be able to pay credit card debts and loans.

Other oligarchs are repeating the R word.

In a Friday interview on CNBC, BlackRock’s chief executive, Laurence D. Fink, warned that the American economy was “very close—if not in—a recession now.” Fink admitted that in its push for tariffs, the United States had become “the global destabilizer” and that the trade war “went beyond anything I could have imagined in my 49 years in finance.”

Yesterday, Dan Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, told investors that “the mass confusion created by this constant news flow out of the White House is dizzying for the industry and investors and creating massive uncertainty and chaos for companies trying to plan their supply chain, inventory, and demand.”

Many oligarchs continue to kiss Trump’s derriere while at the same time trying to signal to major investors that they’re sane. It’s tricky. “A willingness to adjust a strategy based on new facts and data is a sign of the strength of a leader,” Bill Ackman, the chief executive of the hedge fund Pershing Square, pirouetted on social media yesterday. “It is not an indication of weakness.”

No. It’s an indication of insanity.

“Sentiment has obviously deteriorated,” Robin Vince, chief executive of BNY, one of the world’s largest banks, said in an interview. “Time is not our friend.”

When they speak in the passive tense like this, you know they’re pulling their punches.

None dare come right out and say it: Trump is f*cking out of his mind and crashing the entire world economy. “It’s not smart to criticize the president,” said Robert K. Steel, a veteran Wall Street executive and top Treasury Department official under President George W. Bush.

Not smart because Trump has too many ways to punish them.

Last month, the Trump Organization sued the giant financial services company Capital One for shutting the organization’s accounts after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The oligarchs know Trump has many ways to reward them, too.

On Friday, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, got a reprieve from Trump’s tariffs on China, which would have just about killed Apple’s iPhone profits. (The exclusions apply to smartphones and other electronics.)

Cleverly, Cook, and Apple had announced last Monday that, as a result of a conversation between Cook and Trump, Apple would be investing more than $500 billion in the United States over the next four years and creating thousands of jobs, in what looked like “a bet on America.”

It was BS. The $500 billion figure was simply what Apple had already planned, including everything from Apple’s day-to-day activities with thousands of suppliers in all 50 states to the operation of its domestic data centers, as well as its investments in Apple TV+ and other projects already manufactured in the country.

The announcement mentioned a new advanced manufacturing plant in Houston to produce servers that support Apple’s AI, but the plant is owned by Foxconn, which is doing the investing. (Apple has perfected the art of outsourcing capital expenditures to its partners without risking its own money.)

But yesterday, Trump backtracked even on the electronics reprieve, calling it “temporary.” China, meanwhile, put a stop to shipments of rare earth materials critical to semiconductors and much of our military technology.

Where and how will this chaos end? The oligarch’s main line in to Trump is through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who apparently talked Trump down from the worst of his tariff craziness last week.

But Bessent himself is part of the chaos. He and others inside the White House are all saying radically different things. No one is in charge. Some, like Elon Musk and trade adviser Peter Navarro, are openly taking potshots at each other.

Bessent, a member of the billionaires club, doesn’t even get what this economic chaos is doing to average Americans. Last weekend, he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that people who want to retire now aren’t paying attention to the stock market: “They don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening.”

Hello?

The oligarchs won’t tell Trump how much chaos he’s unleashed, and they don’t even know how the chaos is affecting average people. The oligarchy is almost as incompetent and out of touch as is Trump.

But average people comprise the real economy. They’re also taxpayers. And their worried discussions over their kitchen tables spell even worse trouble ahead for the economy—and far worse ahead for Trump and his Republican Party.

Friends,

As tens of millions of Americans hussle to pay their taxes, President Donald Trump has put the entire global economy into chaos. 401(k)s are tanking, savings are shrinking, treasury bonds are losing value, supply chains are convulsing.

Even America’s oligarchs are petrified. They contributed millions to Trump’s inauguration. Many invested heavily in his campaign. They lavished praise on the new president and have supported his every move—in order to benefit from his promised big tax cut.

But the chaos he’s unleashed on the world economy is causing many of them to go public with their worries.

“Obviously,” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, said in a conference call with reporters, “the China stuff is significant. We don’t know the full effect.”

But we do know that global investors are fleeing Treasury bonds, which had been the safest place to put money in the world. That may not be the full effect, but it’s a huge and frightening one.

By Friday morning, Dimon was warning that the economy faced “considerable turbulence” from the tariffs, while echoing Trump’s assertion that the immediate turmoil was nothing to worry about. “I really almost don’t care fundamentally about what the economy does in the next two quarters,” Dimon said. “That isn’t that important. We’ll get through that. We’ve had recessions before and all of that.”

Oops. The word “recession” coming out of the mouth of the CEO of the largest bank in the United States? That itself is extraordinarily worrying.

Notably, JPMorgan has added nearly half a billion dollars to its financial cushion, preparing for losses from customers who won’t be able to pay credit card debts and loans.

Other oligarchs are repeating the R word.

In a Friday interview on CNBC, BlackRock’s chief executive, Laurence D. Fink, warned that the American economy was “very close—if not in—a recession now.” Fink admitted that in its push for tariffs, the United States had become “the global destabilizer” and that the trade war “went beyond anything I could have imagined in my 49 years in finance.”

Yesterday, Dan Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, told investors that “the mass confusion created by this constant news flow out of the White House is dizzying for the industry and investors and creating massive uncertainty and chaos for companies trying to plan their supply chain, inventory, and demand.”

Many oligarchs continue to kiss Trump’s derriere while at the same time trying to signal to major investors that they’re sane. It’s tricky. “A willingness to adjust a strategy based on new facts and data is a sign of the strength of a leader,” Bill Ackman, the chief executive of the hedge fund Pershing Square, pirouetted on social media yesterday. “It is not an indication of weakness.”

No. It’s an indication of insanity.

“Sentiment has obviously deteriorated,” Robin Vince, chief executive of BNY, one of the world’s largest banks, said in an interview. “Time is not our friend.”

When they speak in the passive tense like this, you know they’re pulling their punches.

None dare come right out and say it: Trump is f*cking out of his mind and crashing the entire world economy. “It’s not smart to criticize the president,” said Robert K. Steel, a veteran Wall Street executive and top Treasury Department official under President George W. Bush.

Not smart because Trump has too many ways to punish them.

Last month, the Trump Organization sued the giant financial services company Capital One for shutting the organization’s accounts after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The oligarchs know Trump has many ways to reward them, too.

On Friday, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, got a reprieve from Trump’s tariffs on China, which would have just about killed Apple’s iPhone profits. (The exclusions apply to smartphones and other electronics.)

Cleverly, Cook, and Apple had announced last Monday that, as a result of a conversation between Cook and Trump, Apple would be investing more than $500 billion in the United States over the next four years and creating thousands of jobs, in what looked like “a bet on America.”

It was BS. The $500 billion figure was simply what Apple had already planned, including everything from Apple’s day-to-day activities with thousands of suppliers in all 50 states to the operation of its domestic data centers, as well as its investments in Apple TV+ and other projects already manufactured in the country.

The announcement mentioned a new advanced manufacturing plant in Houston to produce servers that support Apple’s AI, but the plant is owned by Foxconn, which is doing the investing. (Apple has perfected the art of outsourcing capital expenditures to its partners without risking its own money.)

But yesterday, Trump backtracked even on the electronics reprieve, calling it “temporary.” China, meanwhile, put a stop to shipments of rare earth materials critical to semiconductors and much of our military technology.

Where and how will this chaos end? The oligarch’s main line in to Trump is through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who apparently talked Trump down from the worst of his tariff craziness last week.

But Bessent himself is part of the chaos. He and others inside the White House are all saying radically different things. No one is in charge. Some, like Elon Musk and trade adviser Peter Navarro, are openly taking potshots at each other.

Bessent, a member of the billionaires club, doesn’t even get what this economic chaos is doing to average Americans. Last weekend, he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that people who want to retire now aren’t paying attention to the stock market: “They don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening.”

Hello?

The oligarchs won’t tell Trump how much chaos he’s unleashed, and they don’t even know how the chaos is affecting average people. The oligarchy is almost as incompetent and out of touch as is Trump.

But average people comprise the real economy. They’re also taxpayers. And their worried discussions over their kitchen tables spell even worse trouble ahead for the economy—and far worse ahead for Trump and his Republican Party.

"I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody." —James Carville, 1993

Are you up in arms about the existential threat Trump poses to democracy—about how he stomps on the courts, usurps the congressional power of the purse, recklessly fires government workers, kisses up to autocrats, attacks free speech, and deports immigrants on trumped-up charges? Isn't Trump the new face of fascism?

Maybe, but the bond market vigilantes showed us what undemocratic power really looks like.

The bond market is gigantic, $140 trillion worth of interest-bearing IOUs. Every nation and every large institution holds government bonds. And the most sought-after bonds come from the U.S. Treasury, especially the 10-year Treasury note, which has for a long time been considered as risk-free as any investment can be.

While tens of millions of people and institutions own government bonds, the vigilantes, a subset of bond traders spread across the world, place bets on whether they expect bond prices will be going up or down. Their buying and selling guides market prices higher or lower. No one knows how many vigilantes it actually takes to move the market, but it’s not just a few people in a back room somewhere.

Wherever they are located, the vigilantes share an understanding—a profound group-think—of what makes for strong government bonds. If the large holders of capital in a particular country are threatened, the vigilantes demand a higher interest rate on existing bonds, thereby putting downward pressure on the value of those bonds. They are demanding a higher interest rate because they believe the bonds, due to what they believe are bad government policies, just got riskier. (By definition, if the interest rates go up, the price of existing bonds goes down.)

The decline in the value of these bonds immediately inflicts financial pain on millions upon millions of bondholders all over the world. The message is impossible to ignore.

These vigilantes are not anti-government populists. What they think harms the economy is usually the opposite of what the rest of us believe is good. They are anti-populists who care only about protecting the interests of capital and maximizing their own profits. They punish the bonds of countries that want to increase social spending, improve worker wages, and curtail corporate power, even if that means undermining the policies established by duly elected officials. Democracy is irrelevant, if not a hindrance, to bond vigilantes. They are the global enforcers of runaway inequality.

We saw their power at work in 2024, when the vigilantes turned Liz Truss into the shortest-serving prime minister ever of the United Kingdom. By planning tax cuts that would be paid for with government debt, hoping for a post-Brexit economic stimulus, the vigilantes believed she would hurt the value of British bonds and the British pound, so they started a run on both. Truss reversed course and then resigned after only 45 days in office.

Similarly, the vigilantes, in effect, told Trump this week he could not continue with his poorly thought-out Liberation Day tariffs. They demonstrated disapproval by crashing the value of U.S. government bonds, and evaporating, at least temporarily, trillions of dollars of wealth. Even Trump, who believes he can browbeat Congress and intimidate the courts, was forced to retreat.

The vigilantes said kneel, and he did.

"Their goal is to make as much money as possible and damned be any government policy that gets in the way. That may not be fascism, but it sure isn't democracy."

Let's consider what this means. An unelected group of people, who control the investments of millions of wealthy people and institutions, has apparent veto power over elected officials the world over. The vigilantes have become an unelected branch of every government on the planet, with the supreme power to control economic policy.

How did high finance amass so much power? Was this part of a plan? Or of a coup?

After the 1929 stock market crash, Franklin Roosevelt saw how the financial barons at the time manipulated markets and were unable to police themselves. Left to their own devices, Roosevelt was sure they would crash the economy again and extend the Depression indefinitely. Therefore, he determined, the power of finance had to be constrained.

The New Deal crafted a set of stiff regulations that prevented the large financial institutions of the time from running wild, including the Glass-Steagall Banking Act (1933), the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act (1934), the Chandler Bankruptcy Act of 1938, the Securities and Exchange Commission founding in 1934, the Investment Company Act (1940), along with a myriad of specific rules that greatly curtailed the power of Wall Street, like severe limitations on a company's ability to buy back its own shares of stock to manipulate its price.

The Bretton Woods Agreement (1944) further limited the amount of currency that could be transferred in and out of a given country. These regulations were so effective that for the next 25 years there were no financial crashes and, not coincidentally, Wall Street compensation was no higher than the wages of comparable personnel in the non-financial sector.

But when the Bretton Woods Agreement was dissolved in 1971, money flowed rapidly around the world. By the 1980s all caution was thrown to the wind, Wall Street's shackles were removed, and banks and traders once again ran wild with dangerous new financial maneuvers that finally crashed the economy in 2008. (Please see Wall Street's War on Workers.)

At that point, however, the toothpaste was out of the tube. Global bond markets, based mostly on growing U.S. government debt, had grown to mammoth proportions. The vigilantes had escaped the clutches of regulators and now ruled supreme over government bonds, and hence government policies.

As early as 1972, James Tobin, the Nobel laureate, understood that the deregulation of currency trades would lead financial market players to rapidly move money in and out of economies. These rapid and unconstrained capital flows would essentially exercise a veto over sovereign government policies intended to improve the well-being of its citizens at the expense of capital. Tobin recommended that governments "throw some sand in the wheels of our excessively efficient international money markets."

That sand became known as the Tobin tax, a small levy on every foreign exchange transaction. The only problem? It hasn't happened yet, and you can be sure that if it ever were enacted the bond vigilantes would stomp all over it.

Those vigilantes may have saved us this week from ill-conceived tariffs, but they are not on our side, nor do they care about democracy. Their goal is to make as much money as possible and damned be any government policy that gets in the way.

That may not be fascism, but it sure isn't democracy.

The crisis of the American left obviously long predated Trump’s latest victory. Like many others on the left, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what we need to do first. We don’t have an organization. We don’t have a party. Where to start? I realized: we need a platform of ideas to push for. You can form an organization and maybe a party around those. But you have to start with ideas.

That’s what my next book is: a set of ideas. I hope the left can coalesce around my ideas but that’s not important. I want the left to coalesce around A set of ideas.

This is a thought experiment that started with a simple question: what if, instead of wasting our money on wars, we spent money on Americans? Then I started thinking: what if we completely changed national spending priorities to create a society that was better for most people? That’s what this set of ideas is, a specific set of suggestions of policies that could be theoretically enacted next week if the powers that be were interested in making life better for us. 

The post May 1 appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Most of us can remember at least a few troubling scenes from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: the mandatory love demanded for the spectral dictator Big Brother; the malleability of facts at the Ministry of Truth; or the ruling party’s memorably grim slogans, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery.” But for me, the most disturbing image of all—and I first read the book in high school—was the “Two Minutes Hate,” aroused among the public by threatening images on giant video screens.

Within just 30 seconds, Orwell wrote, “A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.” As those moments of hate continued, what appeared was “the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched out of their seats.”

Finally, as “row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces… swam up to the screen” and brought those two minutes of Hate to their terrifying climax, the face of Big Brother appeared “full of power and mysterious calm,” prompting spectators to shout, “My Saviour!,” and to break into “a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B!… B-B!’—over and over.”

In its totality, Trump’s vision is of a continental Fortress America, formed by annexing the northern lands of Canada and Greenland, while sealing off Mexico for ethnic reasons as a separate but subordinate state.

For, as Orwell explained, those people of Oceania were “at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia.” Officially, “Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia,” which “represented absolute evil.” Yet through some quirk of memory, the novel’s hero Winston “well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia.”

That was, in some fashion, Orwell’s ultimate horror: a world divided into three great continental blocs, with humanity held in thrall to omnipotent leaders like Big Brother through endless wars against an ever-changing enemy. Even though he published1984 nearly 80 years ago in 1948, just two years before he died, more than three quarters of a century later, in the age of U.S. President Donald Trump, his fictional fantasy is fast becoming an unsettling simulacrum of our current geopolitical reality and that couldn’t be eerier (at least to me).

A Tricontinental Strategy

Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements pouring forth almost daily from the Trump White House, the overall design of his de facto geopolitical strategy has taken shape with surprising speed. Instead of maintaining mutual-security alliances like NATO, President Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered leader like himself—with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling, in a version of fortress America, all of North America (including, of course, the Panama Canal). Reflecting what his defense secretary called a “loathing of European freeloading” and his administration’s visceral disdain for the European Union, Trump is pursuing that tricontinental strategy at the expense of the traditional trans-Atlantic alliance, embodied by NATO, that has been the foundation for American foreign policy since the start of the Cold War.

Trump’s desire for ultimate continental hegemony lends a certain geopolitical logic to his otherwise seemingly off-the-wall, quixotic overtures to claim Greenland as part of the United States, reclaim the Panama Canal, and make Canada “the 51st state.” On his sixth day in office, President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, “I think Greenland will be worked out with us. I think we’re going to have it.” He then added, “I don’t know really what claim Denmark has to it. But it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for protection of the free world.” After Vice President JD Vance made a flying visit to a remote U.S. military base in Greenland and claimed its people “ultimately will partner with the United States,” Trump insisted that he would never take military force “off the table” when it came to claiming the largest island on this planet.

Turning to his northern neighbor, Trump has repeatedly insisted that U.S. statehood would mean “the people of Canada would pay a much lower tax…They would have no military problems.” During his first weeks in office, he imposed a 25% duty on all imports from Canada and Mexico, which was quickly followed by a blizzard of similar tariffs that instantly sparked multiple trade wars with once-close allies. In response, Justin Trudeau, then Canada’s prime minister, whom Trump was already referring to as “governor” (as in the head of that 51st state), charged in an emotional speech that the American president wants “to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”

In his inaugural address last January, President Trump also complained that “the Panama Canal… has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States… spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.” He added that “we have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made, and Panama’s promise to us has been broken… And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China.” To a burst of applause, he insisted, “We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.” No surprise then that, on his very first trip as secretary of state, Marco Rubio stormed into Panama City where he pressured its president, José Raúl Mulino, to placate Trump by withdrawing from Beijing’s global Belt and Road Initiative.

In its totality, Trump’s vision is of a continental Fortress America, formed by annexing the northern lands of Canada and Greenland, while sealing off Mexico for ethnic reasons as a separate but subordinate state. Then, sweeping aside what had long been a U.S. reliance on global multilateral defense pacts and, with the country’s Arctic approaches under its control, the administration would draw a defensive frontier around Greenland and through the North Atlantic Ocean, secure the Panama Canal as a southern bastion, and maintain military control over the entire Pacific Ocean. Every major component of such a strategy would, of course, be laden with the potential for conflict, particularly the administration’s plans for the Pacific, where the U.S. faces a continuing challenge from China.

Demolishing a World Order

Following his second inauguration in January 2025, President Trump has pursued this distinctive tricontinental strategy by working with remarkable speed to demolish the institutional pillars of the “rules-based international order” the U.S. had supported and tried to advance since the end of World War II. Standing in the Rose Garden on his April 2 “liberation day,” Trump proclaimed a roster of tariffs reaching as high as 49% that, said Foreign Policy magazine, “will shatter the world economy” the U.S. has built since 1945, while the respected Economist observed that it “heralds America’s total abandonment of the world trading order.” After calling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) “corrupt” and falsely claiming that he had “stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas,” Trump abolished just about all the global humanitarian initiatives of that agency. He cut 5,800 programs that provided food rations for a million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, malaria prevention for 53 million people globally, and polio immunization for millions of children worldwide, among all too many other things. In a further flurry of executive orders, he also shut down the global broadcaster Voice of America, spuriously claiming that it was “radical” (though a judge has, for now, stopped that shutdown process), withdrew from the World Health Organization (WHO), and quit the Paris climate accords for a second time. Apart from the harm inflicted on poor communities across three continents, the closure of most USAID programs has crippled the key instrument of America’s “soft power,” ceding China the role as prime development partner in at least 40 countries worldwide.

In junking that Paris climate agreement, Trump has ensured that the U.S. would abdicate any leadership role when it comes to the most consequential issue facing the international community, climate change and the potential devastation of the planet. In the process, he has left a void that China may readily fill by offering stable world climate leadership in contrast to the “aggressive unilateralism” of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” second term.

With its military alliances compromised and its trade relations roiled by tariff wars, Washington’s international influence will, in all probability, be significantly reduced (or worse) by the end of Trump’s second term in 2029.

Reflecting his aversion to multilateral alliances, Trump’s first major foreign policy initiative was a unilateral attempt to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war. On February 12, he launched peace talks through what he called a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, agreeing that “our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” By month’s end, tensions from that tilt toward Moscow had culminated in a televised Oval Office meeting in which Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, saying, “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.”

That unilateral approach not only weakened Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, but also disregarded and even degraded NATO, which had, for the past three years, expanded its membership and military capacity by supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion. Recoiling from the “initial shock” of that utterly unprecedented breach, Europeans quickly appropriated $160 billion to begin reinforcing their own arms industry in collaboration with both Canada (not eager to become the 51st state) and Ukraine, thereby aiming in the future to reduce their dependence on American weaponry. If his administration does not formally withdraw from NATO, Trump’s ongoing hostility, particularly toward its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to weaken if not eviscerate the alliance—even as, recently, Trump has also gotten “very angry” and “pissed off” at Russian President Vladimir Putin for not responding effusively enough to his gestures. Consider that an indication that American relations across much of Eurasia could soon prove all too unpredictably chaotic.

Fighting for the Pacific Penumbra

In the Asia-Pacific region, Trump’s new global strategy is already straining longstanding U.S. alliances. At the start of his second term, the American presence there rested on three sets of mutual-defense pacts: the AUKUS entente with Australia and Britain, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (with Australia, India, and Japan), and a chain of bilateral defense agreements stretching along the Pacific littoral from Japan to the Philippines. However, Trump’s disdain for military alliances, his penchant for abusing allies, and his imposition of ever more punitive tariffs on the exports of all too many of those allies will undoubtedly only weaken such ties and so American power in the region.

Although his first administration famously waged a trade war with Beijing, Trump’s attitude toward the island of Taiwan has been ambiguous. “I think Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he said last June during the presidential campaign, adding, “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.” Once in office, however, his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, issued an interim strategic guidance stating that “denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan… is the department’s sole pacing scenario,” requiring that the U.S. shift some of its forces from Europe to Asia. In similar signs of a commitment to that island, the administration has noisily raised tariffs and technology controls on China, while quietly releasing $870 million in military aid for Taiwan. Should Beijing indeed attack Taiwan outright or, as appears more probable in the future, impose a crippling economic blockade on the island, Trump could find himself faced with a difficult choice between a strategic retreat or a devastating war with China.

However it might happen, the loss of that island would break the U.S. position along the Pacific littoral, possibly pushing its naval forces back to a “second island chain” running from Japan to Guam, a major blow to America’s geopolitical position in the region. In short, even within Trump’s tricontinental strategy, the Western Pacific will remain at best a contested terrain between Beijing and Washington, fraught with the possibility of armed conflict in that continuing great-power rivalry, and war will remain a grim possibility.

A Residue of Ruin

With little chance of success, Trump’s attempt at a grand Fortress America strategy will likely leave a residue of ruin—corroding American global power, compromising the current world order, and harming countless millions worldwide who once benefitted from this country’s humanitarian aid. His attempt at consolidating control over North America has already encountered determined resistance in Ottawa, which responded to him with a strong bid to join Europe’s accelerated development of its own defense industries.

While the Trump administration’s aversion to formal alliances and its imposition of protective tariffs will likely weaken diplomatic ties to traditional allies in Asia and Europe, both China and Russia are likely to gain greater influence in their respective regions. From a strategic perspective, this start of a staged U.S. retreat from its military bastions at the antipodes of Eurasia in Western Europe and eastern Asia will weaken its longstanding influence over that vast landmass, which remains the epicenter of geopolitical power globally. With its military alliances compromised and its trade relations roiled by tariff wars, Washington’s international influence will, in all probability, be significantly reduced (or worse) by the end of Trump’s second term in 2029.

In the meantime, as he takes Americans on his own version of a succession of Two Minute Hates—of freeloading Europeans, prevaricating Panamanians, vile Venezuelans, Black South Africans, corrupt humanitarians, illegal immigrants, and lazy Federal workers—count on one thing: he’s leading us on a path eerily reminiscent of 1984. Unless, of course, like Orwell’s hero Winston, all too many of us somehow come to love Big Brother and so set aside our musty old Constitution and take Donald Trump’s often-repeated hints to elect him to a third term on a planet plunging headlong into a tempest of armed conflict, commercial chaos, and climate change.

Republican leaders in Congress have been working feverishly over recent days to renew the rich people-friendly 2017 Trump tax cuts set to expire at this year’s end. Both the House and Senate have now passed bills that do that renewing—and also add in some assorted new goodies.

All that remains before this latest giveaway to grand fortune becomes law: a bit of dickering between House and Senate GOP leaders over the tax cut’s particulars and then President Donald Trump’s John Henry on whatever legislation that dickering ends up producing.

Trump can barely wait for the signing ceremony. But he’s also pushing for much more than an extension—and expansion—of those 2017 tax cuts. His ultimate goal: erasing taxes on income from the entire federal tax code.

Some 48% of Americans say they worry “a great deal” about how “income and wealth are distributed,” a remarkably high share of the public given how seldom our media and politics directly address that distribution.

“You know,” Trump told a press conference this past Tuesday, “our country was the strongest, believe it or not, from 1870 to 1913. You know why? It was all tariff based. We had no income tax.”

Over those years, federal revenue most certainly did come mostly from tariffs. And those tariffs did work wonders—for the nation’s rich. Our original Gilded Age wealthy frolicked in an America where the rich and their corporations could essentially operate however they pleased. They could pay their workers precious little and cavalierly short-change consumers at every opportunity.

In that same America, the federal government did precious little to protect average Americans from greed and grasping—and even less to make their lives more economically secure.

Changing that profoundly unequal state of affairs took decades of organizing on the part of workers, farmers, and middle-class reformers. By 1913, that organizing had paid off. The ratification of the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that year gave Congress the authority to levy income taxes. By the end of World War I, America’s wealthy faced a 79% levy on their top tax-bracket income.

But the nation’s rich would come roaring back in the Roaring Twenties. America’s wealthiest flexed their political muscles enough to get that top tax rate down to 25%. They would go on to party hardy throughout that decade, right up until the 1929 stock market crash. The 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that Trump so likes to trumpet helped turn that crash into the Great Depression.

Amid that unprecedented downturn, America’s grassroots would rise up and break the plutocratic lockgrip on public policy. Working people would gain collective bargaining rights. Seniors would gain Social Security. The super rich would gasp as federal tax rates on their top-bracket income jumped to over 90%.

The end result? By the mid-1950s, over half America’s households had money left over after meeting their most basic living expenses. No modern nation had ever before reached that status.

That share-the-wealth momentum, unfortunately, would soon begin ebbing. Since the late 1970s, as the Economic Policy Institute has detailed, only Americans of substantial means have been sharing in Corporate America’s economic bounty.

How can we change this top-heavy state of affairs? Last week, at an unusual conference in Washington, D.C., activists highlighted a detailed agenda for making America start working for all Americans, not just the wealthiest among us. What made this confab so unusual? The people who put it together all just happen to rate as wealthy themselves.

The sponsor of this How To Beat the Broligarchs gathering: Patriotic Millionaires, the national group that’s been organizing Americans of means to “tax the rich, pay the people, and spread the power” since 2010. This past week’s broligarch-bashing conference gave these millionaires—and activists and scholars equally interested in creating a more equal United States—a vibrant forum for sharing information, insights, and, most importantly, an ambitious gameplan for ending rule by the rich.

“Our economy should be judged on how well it takes care of working people,” as Patriotic Millionaires founder Erica Payne notes, “not on how many billionaires it mints in a calendar day.”

To take better care of working people, the new Patriotic Millionaires economic plan, entitled America 250: The Money Agenda, proposes a “Cost of Living Tax Cut Act” that would exempt all annual income up to $41,600—the current cost of living for the typical American adult—from federal income tax.

Another Patriotic Millionaires-proposed piece of legislation, the “Cost of Living Wage Act,” would nearly triple the federal minimum wage, from $7.25 an hour to $20, a rate that would adjust every year to rising prices.

To help trim our richest down to something resembling democratic size—and offset the cost of exempting low incomes from income tax—the Patriotic Millionaires plan would also start subjecting millionaires to a surtax on their taxes due.

Another part of the plan would tax the capital gains millionaires pocket—their profits from buying and selling stocks and other assets—at the same rate as ordinary earned income. Still another plan section would essentially prevent the mostly tax-free intergenerational transfer of assets from the super rich to their super fortunate offspring.

What makes that prevention so important? Under current law, point out Patriotic Millionaires analyst Bob Lord and law professors Brian Galle and David Gamage in a new research paper, between 80 and 90% of the wealth “that rich families have set aside for their heirs will likely never be subject” to the over-a-century-old federal estate tax.

The first phase of the “Anti-Oligarchy Act” the Patriotic Millionaires plan is proposing would have all inheritances over $1 million taxed as ordinary income. This phase would also “impose a progressive tax on large sums of trust-held wealth to limit the accumulation of dynastic wealth.”

The second phase would seek to impose “a tax on the wealth of the richest Americans sufficient to reduce their wealth to a level in harmony with the ideals of democracy, amending the United States Constitution if necessary.”

The pollsters at Gallup have just asked Americans if they worry “a great deal”—or much less—about 16 different current-day concerns. Some 48% of Americans say they worry “a great deal” about how “income and wealth are distributed,” a remarkably high share of the public given how seldom our media and politics directly address that distribution.

The new Patriotic Millionaires tax plan obviously isn’t going to become the law of the land anytime soon. But the plan could help refocus America’s political debate onto the dynamics that are threatening to destroy our democracy. Let’s get that debate going. Soon.

On March 15, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz informed fellow Trump Administration officials through their now-infamous Signal chat that a U.S. missile attack had resulted in the collapse of an apartment building filled with Yemeni civilians. Vice President JD Vance replied, “Excellent.”

Democrats on Capitol Hill have since expressed outrage—not at the deaths of innocent civilians, or at the United States’ unprovoked attack on a sovereign country, but at the fact that the conversation was not more carefully shielded from the public.

The Trump administration claims to have resumed bombing in Yemen to stop the Houthi rebels’ attacks on shipping vessels in the Red Sea, despite the fact that the Houthis, who serve as the de facto government of much of the country, had ceased those attacks months ago. Scores of Yemeni civilians have died since the United States resumed the bombing last month. Air strikes have denied tens of thousands of people in this impoverished country access to electricity and drinking water. The Democratic leadership in Congress has refused to condemn this destruction or attempt to invoke the War Powers Resolution, which was enacted in 1973 to limit a president’s ability to engage in armed conflict without the consent of Congress.

Today, it is the majority of congressional Democrats who are allying with a Republican President to support war crimes and undermine international humanitarian law.

Those same Democratic leaders have expressed little opposition to President Donald Trump’s support of Israel’s ongoing occupation forces in Lebanon, which violate the terms of the cease-fire agreement made between Israel and Lebanon last fall. Nor have the Democrats objected to Trump’s support for Israel’s violation of its 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria, or his defense of the ongoing large-scale seizure of Palestinian lands and destruction of villages in the occupied West Bank.

And it’s not just Israel. The Democratic leadership has also backed Trump’s arms shipments and other support for oppressive Arab dictatorships, including Morocco, whose illegal annexation of Western Sahara he recognized in 2020, violating a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions and a landmark ruling of the International Court of Justice.

Soon after Trump launched his war on Yemen, Israel’s far-right government tore up its cease-fire agreement with Hamas, which was the product of months of negotiations led by the United States, Egypt, and Qatar. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the indicted war criminal feted this week in Washington, D.C., relaunched devastating air strikes as Israeli troops re-occupied large swathes of the territory, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people.

More than 1,000 Palestinians, primarily civilians, have been killed in these post-cease-fire attacks, including more than 300 children. The recent execution-style slaying of 15 paramedics and rescue workers in clearly marked ambulances by Israeli forces, who attempted a coverup by burying the victims and their vehicles in a mass grave, has sparked international outrage.

Meanwhile, both Netanyahu and Trump are pushing forward with their plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of surviving Palestinians in order to develop resorts there, per Trump’s aspiration. Rather than try to force 2.3 million people out by bayonet point, the U.S. and Israel appear determined to drive out the population by bombing civilians and blocking food and medicines from entering the besieged enclave, forcing the remaining population to flee in order to survive.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has sponsored Joint Resolutions of Disapproval over some of Trump’s continued backing of Netanyahu.

“As a result of Israel’s blocking of humanitarian aid into Gaza, many thousands of children there face malnutrition and even starvation,” Sanders said. “Sadly, and illegally, much of the carnage in Gaza has been carried out with U.S.-provided military equipment. Providing more offensive weapons to continue this disastrous war would violate U.S. and international law.”

Among the weapons included in the resolution are 35,000 two-thousand-pound bombs, which have caused thousands of civilian casualties over the past 18 months. The international outcry over these war crimes was so great that even President Joe Biden suspended their shipment last spring. Trump insisted that such arms shipments should be resumed, however, and the majority of Senate Democrats are supporting him.

Indeed, only 14 Democratic Senators voted for Sanders’ resolutions to block the transfer of these and other deadly weapons.

This was not a result of political pressure. Only 15% of Americans and just 5% of Democrats support additional military aid to Israel. Senate offices were flooded with calls to support the resolutions in a campaign organized by a wide array of peace, human rights, and religious organizations. Despite this, more than 70% of Senate Democrats sided with Trump and the arms industry over the wishes of their constituents.

The truth is that a number of Democratic members of Congress, whom millions of people see as leading the resistance, actually ally with Trump on foreign policy.

While Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.)—a prominent supporter of Trump’s massive arms transfers—was widely praised for his marathon speech warning of the dangers of Trump’s policies, few pointed out that Booker expressed support for Trump’s backing of Israel’s far-right government and autocratic Arab allies during his address and joined the majority of Democrats if voting against limiting arms shipments.

Instead of challenging Trump’s Middle East policies, today’s opposition party resembles the so-called “Death Squad Democrats” who backed former President Ronald Reagan’s policy in Central America. The difference is that such Democratic militarists were then in the minority. Today, it is the majority of congressional Democrats who are allying with a Republican President to support war crimes and undermine international humanitarian law.

Had today’s Democrats been in office 40 years ago, they would have likely backed arming the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, the death squads in El Salvador, and the Guatemalan genocide against the indigenous Mayans. A few years earlier, they would have probably supported former President Richard Nixon’s carpet bombing of Vietnam.

Perhaps today’s Democratic Party leadership assumes that the threat to basic government institutions and our very democracy posed by the Republicans is so great that progressive voters will support their candidates even if they side with Trump on such issues as offensive military operations, arms control, human rights, and international law.

This is not necessarily the case, however. Polls have shown that Democratic support for Israel’s war on Gaza was the number one issue among the 6 million voters who backed Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024.

Indeed, a case could be made that, given the closeness of the presidential election and some key congressional races, Democratic support for Israel’s wars on its neighbors cost them the White House and both houses of Congress.

A growing number of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters do see opposing ethnic cleansing, undeclared wars, massacres of civilians, and other crimes as a fundamental principle that’s worth defending. Even if that means standing up to the party’s leadership.

Correction: An earlier version of this article said that Kamala Harris lost 19 million voters who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. The actual figure is around 6 million. The piece has been updated to reflect this.

As inflation soars, dream getaways to top tourist spots like Paris or Hawaii can set you back thousands—flights, hotels, and food adding up fast. But here’s the unexpected twist: deportations might just be your ticket to an exotic escape! Imagine skipping the hefty price tag and jetting off to El Salvador—for free! Sure, it’s a one-way trip, and you might not be sipping cocktails by choice, but with pristine beaches, vibrant culture, and no round-trip costs, could this be the ultimate budget travel loophole?

The post Trump’s Deportation Plan: Fascist or Vacation Hack? appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

If there was ever a strong contemporary case for declaring that silence is complicity, consider the hush of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and even George W. Bush as they grind their teeth over the Donald Trump-Elon Musk wrecking of America. Trump is destroying freedom of speech and due process, abolishing democratic restraints, and establishing a criminal fascistic dictatorship.

Trump pounds Biden for the Trump administration’s blunders and failures an average of six times a day. These assaults go unrebutted by the Delaware recluse, nursing his political wounds.

The Clintons? Bill sticks to his private telephone wailings. While Hillary, who gave us Trump in 2016 with her smug, stupid campaign, penned a self-anthem op-ed in The New York Times on March 28, 2025. She writes: “Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries.” Trump is not belligerent enough for the war hawk Hillary Clinton who has been the pro-Iraq sociocider butcher of Libya and the ardent supporter behind provocative “force projection” of the Empire around the world.

What would all the GIs, who they caused to lose their lives in their presidential wars, think of their timidity?

Before turning to the excuses for essentially shutting themselves up during our country’s greatest political upheaval—unconstitutional and criminal to the core—here is what prominent former Democratic presidents and presidential candidates COULD do:

1. Tens of millions of Americans voted for our past presidents. They are waiting for their leaders to speak up, stand up, and mightily help lead the fight to stop Trump’s mayhem against the American people in red and blue states. The people want former Democratic leaders to galvanize the Democratic Party, still largely in disarray about confronting Trump.

Don’t they know they have a trusteeship obligation to citizens, many of whom are voicing their demands for a comprehensive plan of offense against the GOP in town meetings and other forums?

The media, threatened daily by Trump, is eager to give former Democratic Party leaders coverage.

2. They are all mega-millionaires, very capable of raising many more millions of dollars quickly with their fame and lists of followers. They know very rich people as friends. They could set up strike forces in Washington and around the country to provide needed, fighting attorneys, organizers, and other specialists to ride head-on against the proven damage to health, safety, and economic well-being of people here and abroad and counter Trump’s daily cruel and vicious assaults. They could end Trump’s unrebutted soliloquy of lies and false scenarios over mainstream and social media.
3. They could push the Democrats in Congress to hold constant “unofficial” public hearings and file resolutions and legislation that provide the daily evidence of this dictator and his recidivistic criminality and push for impeachment and Trump’s removal from office. Impossible, you might say with the GOP in narrow control on Capitol Hill. Look back at Richard Nixon who for far fewer violations was told by Republican senators that his time was up. Politicians save their political skin in approaching elections before rescuing an unstable, egomaniacal, vengeful politician like the one now camped at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Trump will be soon plunging in polls and stock market drops, inflation, recession, and more Gestapo-like kidnappings and disappearances to foreign prisons of targeted individuals. These conditions are not popular with the American people.
4. The former Democratic leaders could do what Bernie Sanders is doing and traverse the country supporting the fighting civic spirit of the American people who oppose the painful afflictions wrought by Tyrant Trump.
5. Gore is well-credentialed to show how the actions of Hurricane Donald, Tornado Trump, Drought Donald, and Wildfire Musk’s fossil-fuel-driven greenhouse gases are leading to a climate catastrophe. The facts and trends Trump omnicidally ignores need to be front and center.

Even George W. Bush, known for causing the deaths of over 1 million Iraqis and the destruction of their country by his criminal war of aggression has a beef. His sole claim to being a “compassionate conservative”—the funding of life-saving AIDS medicines overseas—has gone down in flames with Trump’s illegal demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Bush may be mumbling about this, but he’s staying in his corner painting landscapes.

All this abhorrent quietude in the face of what they all believe is a mortal attack on the Republic has the following excuses:

First, they don’t want to get into a pissing match with a slanderous ugly viper, who unleashes his hordes of haters on the internet. That’s quite a surrender of patriotic duty at a time of unprecedented peril. What would all the GIs, who they caused to lose their lives in their presidential wars, think of their timidity?

Second, it wouldn’t have much impact. America doesn’t listen to “has-beens.” Then why is Obama still the most popular retired politician in America with over 130 million followers on Twitter? That attitude is just convenient escapism.

Third, plunging into the raucous political arena with the Trumpsters and Musketeers is just too disruptive of a comfortable daily routine life by politicians who believe they have been there, done that, and deserve a respite. Self-diminishment gets you nowhere with tens of millions of people in distress who seek powerful amplifiers from well-known leaders behind the demand that Trump understands: YOU’RE FIRED, ringing throughout the nation from liberals and betrayed Trump voters hurting in the same ways. That mass demand is what pushes impeachment of the most visibly impeachable president in American history.

In the final analysis, it comes down to their absence of civic self-respect and cowardliness in confronting Der Fuhrer. Aristotle was right: “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”

Attempts by the Department of Homeland Security to secure private information from the Internal Revenue Service on people who file taxes with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number is a violation of federal privacy laws that protect taxpayers. It is also a change that could seriously damage public trust in the IRS, which could jeopardize billions of dollars in tax payments by hardworking immigrant families.

The recent memorandum of understanding between the IRS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—which led to the resignation of the Acting IRS Commissioner—establishes procedures for requesting taxpayer information under IRC section 6103(i)(2) for criminal investigations. But that section is clear: Taxpayer information is confidential unless Congress specifically authorizes disclosure. No such authorization exists for routine immigration enforcement.

Using the IRS and its resources for immigration enforcement is a departure from the agency’s core mission, which is to administer tax laws. What’s more, federal privacy law unambiguously protects all taxpayer information, meaning tax returns and taxpayer information must remain confidential except under very specific circumstances that do not include immigration enforcement. This weaponization should worry all filers, because if this can be done without congressional authorization then it can be done to other groups as well.

Every 10-percentage point drop in the income tax compliance rate of undocumented immigrants would lower federal tax revenue by $8.6 billion per year, and state and local tax collections by $900 million per year.

Besides the privacy implications, there are other important considerations when we look at how this will affect immigrant families.

We know that undocumented immigrants pay taxes. Recent Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy research finds that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022, with more than a third of that amount ($37.3 billion) going to states and localities.

Deporting immigrants on a large scale would cause most of those revenues to vanish from public coffers. Both income and sales tax revenues would be reduced as these individuals would no longer be in the U.S. earning taxable incomes and making taxable purchases.

We predict a $7.9 billion reduction in annual revenue for every 1 million undocumented people who exit the country, with $2.5 billion of that coming out of state and local budgets.

But these figures almost certainly understate the true revenue cost of deportations. They don’t account for losses to business outputs and workforce declines in sectors like construction and agriculture. They don’t consider the effects these efforts will have on documented immigrants who may be erroneously swept up in this. And they don’t try to measure how deportations may lead immigrant families to retreat from public view, constrained to less formal, off-the-books employment at jobs less likely to withhold income tax from paychecks.

Our analysis suggests that every 10-percentage point drop in the income tax compliance rate of undocumented immigrants would lower federal tax revenue by $8.6 billion per year, and state and local tax collections by $900 million per year.

On Saturday, April 5 hundreds of thousands gathered across the United States rallying under the banner of “hands off.” The protest was against the devastation wielded by the Trump government on public services, consumer protections, public healthcare, and trade freedom. The protesters’ ire turned especially to Elon Musk’s work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) radically downsizing U.S. government spending. “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Elon Musk has to go!” They chanted

The scenes of public dissent were in sharp contrast to the image of Musk, just a few months ago, taking the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington raising a chainsaw high in the air with boyish glee. “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” he extolled, referring to his aggressively ruthless ambition to ax $2 trillion from the U.S. federal budget.

The April protests are a sign that Musk’s fresh-faced jubilance and billionaire-funded political luck might be running out at the hands of his own destructive impulses. As Musk wantonly fights against what he calls “civilizational suicidal empathy,” is it possible that by promising to end “death by bureaucracy,” he has willfully sowed the seeds of his own political demise?

He represents a very particular marriage of politics and capitalism that has no respect for the law, believing that the masters of industry should also be the masters of the world, unencumbered by stuffy bureaucrats trying to stymie their pursuit of greatness.

Musk portrays himself as the billionaire version of the classic vigilante: the man (almost always) who takes the law into his own hands in search of a self-styled brand of justice and effectiveness. A significant part of Musk’s cultural cache is that he exploits the vigilante myth, portraying himself as the savior of an America dream destroyed by corrupt and inefficient democratic institutions.

President Donald Trump described Musk’s vigilante appeal well: “Elon is doing a great job, but I would like to see him get more aggressive. Remember, we have a country to save.” Destruction, redemption, and emancipation driven by masculine emotion is at the heart of Musk’s DOGE endeavor.

Vigilantes achieve their ambitions through self-justified law breaking, reflected in Musk’s DOGE being condemned as illegal. With unwavering confidence in their own convictions, vigilantes feel justified in using whatever powers they have to ensure what they think is right is enforced—and in Musk’s case that is a lot of power.

Unlike the vigilantes we see on television or in the movies, Musk is not a violent avenger seeking justice through the barrel of a gun (or even at the end of chain saw). His weapons are not firearms but money and power. He is portrayed as “the DOGEfather” in vigilante reference to Don Corleone, the eponymous anti-hero of 1972 gangster film The Godfather.

Musk acts out billionaire vigilantism par excellence. He represents a very particular marriage of politics and capitalism that has no respect for the law, believing that the masters of industry should also be the masters of the world, unencumbered by stuffy bureaucrats trying to stymie their pursuit of greatness.

The aggression of Musk’s ambition to slash government and upturn the institutions of democracy appears to be turning against up him. His popularity is nosediving as his unpredictable and conflict-ridden behavior escalates. Musk may have taken the stereotype of the vigilante to such extremes that he is exercising a death wish not just on his own political career but on very idea of the heroic billionaire savior.

The tides are certainly changing. Musk may have used his wealth to influence the presidential election last year, but this month his $25 million spend could not secure Trump’s preferred candidate Brad Schimel in the campaign for as seat in Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Tesla’s sales around the world have plummeted, with people seemingly embarrassed at the prospect of being seen to be associated with Musk. Many are putting bumper stickers on their cars with slogans such as “I Bought This Before We Knew Elon Was Crazy.” In Britain social media campaigners Everyone Hates Elon orchestrated a public art project where people took sledgehammers to a donated Tesla Model S. Their purpose was “to create a debate about wealth inequality.”

Employees are not far behind. Musk practically begged them not to sell Tesla stock holdings. Meanwhile investors are calling for Musk to resign as CEO of Tesla as he gets more and more embroiled in political controversy and Tesla’s market value stumbles. In the the not too recent past conservatives rallied behind the slogan “go woke, go broke.” This is rapidly turning around to “go MAGA, go broke.”

Musk’s outlandish death drive might end up killing the vigilante myth he trades on rather than killing American democracy. Time will tell, but for now there are plenty of reasons to hope that it will.