SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
us senate
Susan Collins Advanced Trump Tax Bill After Receiving $2 Million from Private Equity Billionaire
The five-term Maine senator's populist opponent has seized on her ties to Wall Street, saying: "I don't think private equity deserves more time with a senator than someone who works two jobs to get by."
Sep 04, 2025
As she gears up for a tough midterm race against a progressive challenger in 2026, Sen. Susan Collins is struggling to shake her reputation as a sellout to corporate interests. A new report out Wednesday may make that even more difficult.
Collins (R-Maine) was one of just three Republican senators not to vote for President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" Act in July, which slashes over $1 trillion from Medicaid to help pay for tax cuts for the rich and is expected to result in over 10 million people losing health insurance coverage.
But Collins did cast a crucial vote to advance the legislation to the Senate floor. An exclusive report from Tessa Stuart in Rolling Stone gives us damning insight into a possible reason why:
[Collins] cast that vote just one day after private equity billionaire Steve Schwarzman, the chair of the Blackstone Group and a man who will personally reap huge rewards from the bill, kicked in $2 million toward her reelection effort.
On June 27, Schwarzman gave $2 million to Pine Tree Results PAC, a Super PAC backing Collins; on June 28, Collins cast a decisive vote allowing Trump's bill to advance to the floor. The vote was 51-49. Vice President JD Vance was present at the Capitol, on hand to break a tie, but was not needed after Collins voted in favor of the bill.
The bill went on to pass the Senate just a few days later, to Schwarzman's presumed delight, since the legislation both extended the pass-through business deduction—treasured by the owners of private equity firms—and made it permanent, allowing partnerships to deduct 20% of their pre-tax income.
Collins' office has strongly denied that Schwarzman's influence had anything to do with her vote to advance the bill. As press secretary Blake Kernen noted, a tie in the Senate would have been broken by Vance, so "the motion to proceed would have passed without her vote."
However, Stuart notes that this was not Collins' first conspicuous donation from Schwarzman or the private equity industry at large.
According to OpenSecrets, Collins' campaign committee and leadership PAC received over $715,000 from private equity and investment firms—more money than any other person elected to Congress during the 2020 election cycle. It included maximum individual contributions from both Schwarzman and his wife.
That number does not include an additional $2 million that Schwarzman donated to her reelection super PAC in 2020. As Stuart points out, this donation came after Collins dropped a proposed amendment to Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, opposed by private equity. That amendment would have "[made] childcare more affordable, by making changes to the private equity industry's beloved carried interest loophole," Stuart wrote.
While Collins denies that her votes are influenced by the piles of money gifted to her by private equity, one of her most formidable challengers in 2026, oyster farmer and Marine veteran Graham Platner, has often seized on her extensive industry ties to hold her up as the poster child for the "oligarchy" he is trying to unseat from power.
"I believe that input from working people is far more important than input from someone who simply has money," Platner thundered during a Labor Day speech in Portland alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). "I believe that we shouldn't be settling for crumbs while billionaires eat the cookie we baked. I don't think private equity deserves more time with a senator than someone who works two jobs to get by."
If Democrats are going to regain the Senate in 2026, Maine will be an essential state to win, something that looks increasingly possible as approval ratings for Collins have plummeted over the first half-year of Trump's second term.
Nearly 7,000 attended Platner's speech, during which he railed against the five-term senator Collins' long history of casting "symbolic" dissenting votes against her party, like opposing Trump's tax legislation, or voting to codify Roe v. Wade, to posture as a "moderate" without actually disrupting their agenda.
"Susan Collins' charade is wearing thin," Platner said Monday. "No one cares that you pretend to be remorseful as you sell out to lobbyists. No one cares while you sell out to corporations, and no one cares while you sell out to a president, who are all engineering the greatest redistribution of wealth from the working class to the ruling class in American history."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why Does the Pentagon Seem to Be Spending More for Less?
One has to wonder how on Earth the Pentagon needs more money to not fight wars than it did to fight two of them at the same time.
Sep 04, 2025
As US Congress returns from its summer recess, Washington’s attention is turning toward a possible government shutdown.
While much of the focus will be on a showdown between Senate Democrats and President Donald Trump, a subplot is brewing as the House and Senate, led by Republicans but supported by far too many Democrats, fight over how big the Pentagon’s budget should be. The House voted to give Trump his requested trillion dollar budget, while the Senate is demanding $22 billion more.
To justify this historic largesse, both Trump and Congress give the same reason: peace through strength. Harkening back to Ronald Reagan’s Cold War military spending spree, today its invocation often boils down to one simple idea: Give the Pentagon more money. But, since Reagan’s famed buildup actually cost much less, it's worth asking if the problem really is a lack of funds
Four decades ago, the newest aircraft carrier in the fleet was the USS Theodore Roosevelt. It was a remarkable acquisition project coming in a full 16 months early and more than $80 million under budget. Today, the latest carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. And even after adjusting for inflation, the Ford class carriers are also much more expensive than the Nimitz class they are replacing, and costs may keep going up. And those costs come before even asking if the ships are actually matched to the military’s current needs, let alone for the decades ahead they’ll be in use.
Sadly, this cost explosion and questionable alignment with modern warfare are far from unique to carriers. A quick Google search for the F-35, Littoral Combat Ship, Sentinel ICBM, or any number of other recent boondoggles tells the same story. Today, nearly every Pentagon acquisition program is a mess, coming in late, over budget, and significantly more expensive than the weapons and platforms being replaced.
This collapse into dysfunction of the Pentagon’s procurement system cannot be ascribed to a lack of funding. Despite a genuine drop in spending following the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon is now nearly two and a half decades into an unprecedented era of massive budgets. More money hasn’t solved this problem, and there’s zero reason to think even more will do anything but make it worse.
Before going further, it’s worth examining two of the most common justifications for why costs have skyrocketed: technology and personnel.
There’s a decent chance you’re reading this on a smartphone like the iPhone, a remarkable encapsulation of just how dramatically technology has increased in power and decreased in costs over the past 40 years. In 1985, the CRAY-2 was the world’s most powerful super computer. It cost between $35-50 million (adjusted for inflation) and weighed nearly 3 tons. Instead, that iPhone in your hand weighs a few ounces, costs around $1,000, and is thousands of times more powerful. Oh, and it also makes phone calls, plays music, takes photos and videos, lets you surf the internet, and much more.
When you put it all together, Washington has some tough questions to ask about the Pentagon’s budget, and one of those questions should not be, “Can we add $22 billion more?”
Put another way, you have far more computing power in your pocket than the entire US military did four decades ago, and you didn’t even need a multi-billion-dollar spending spree to get it. Yet somehow, every time someone tries to explain why the Pentagon needs a trillion dollars today, the inevitable answer is the role of advanced technology in today’s military. Is technology more ubiquitous and more complex? Unquestionably. It is also outrageously more powerful and cheaper today than it was 40 years ago. Reagan’s military wasn’t sailing tall ships and using an abacus. They bought most of those supercomputers and utilized some of the most sophisticated technology of the time.
Yet somehow, while the rest of us have cheap supercomputers in our pocket, the Pentagon’s spending more than ever.
Of course, the Pentagon doesn’t just buy things; it is the largest employer in the United States, and, so the justification for more money goes, those people cost more today than they used to. Let’s start with acknowledging two facts: Military personnel have seen real and meaningful increases in their pay and benefits over the past 40 years; and also their compensation, particularly among the lower ranks, remains woefully low and should be raised further.
But what’s also true is that the size of the armed forces under Trump is significantly smaller than those under Reagan. In 1985, there were 2.15 million active-duty personnel with another 1.1 million civilians supporting them. Today, those numbers are more than one-third smaller. So, while one can justify some budget pressure by the increasing costs per person due to better pay and benefits, any honest math would have to also account for significant cost savings of a smaller workforce both in and out of uniform. Today, we’re simply paying more for a far smaller military and civilian workforce than 40 years ago. Since in Washington, “more” is never enough, we’re left to wonder what happened to the savings of a smaller workforce utilizing ever cheaper technology?
It’s worth adding into the equation what the military is actually doing. There is no doubt that a wartime military costs more than one at peace. At the center of today’s calls for a larger budget is thus, the so-called “return of great power competition,” with the US-China rivalry at its core. Add in a resurgent and aggressive Russia, ongoing crises in the Middle East, and other challenges like North Korea, and the Pentagon’s boosters say the threat environment is simply far more complex and involved than 40 years ago.
Accepting that logic, however, requires one to dramatically downplay the complexity of the Cold War, which of course was only “cold” if you leave out conflicts like Afghanistan, Central America, and the Iraq-Iran War. There was also US support for brutal dictators like Mobutu, Pinochet, and Suharto and their armed forces. Today’s threat environment is no doubt complex, but Reagan hardly oversaw a time of cheap, global peace.
Trump’s trillion-dollar budget is also coming in far larger than those of the recent past when the US was actively fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with as many as 200,000 uniformed personnel deployed in theater simultaneously. While the US undoubtedly maintains a not-insignificant operational tempo across the Middle East and North Africa today, it is a far cry from those peak war years.
One has to wonder how on Earth the Pentagon needs more money to not fight wars than it did to fight two of them at the same time.
When you put it all together, Washington has some tough questions to ask about the Pentagon’s budget, and one of those questions should not be, “Can we add $22 billion more?” How will more money fix a completely broken acquisition process? What happened to savings from cheaper technology and a smaller military? And why exactly are the military’s missions of the future so much more expensive than the past? Ultimately, if we want our nation to experience either peace or strength, it's going to take answering those, and other, questions, not just an ever larger fortune for the Pentagon.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Biggest Applause Line From Graham Platner's Labor Day Speech Was About Ending US Bombs in Gaza
And the second biggest was about naming the enemy which his Senate campaign will seek to target: "the oligarchy."
Sep 02, 2025
Graham Platner, the Democratic hopeful in Maine looking to unseat US Sen. Susan Collins next year, received the largest applause of his Labor Day speech in Portland on Monday when he railed against the ill-spent taxpayer money used to support the Israeli genocide in Gaza—a sharp contrast with many in the party who have shied away from such direct criticism of Israeli's assault and the backing it receives from the US government.
Even as support for Israel's assault on Gaza has plummeted among US voters and Americans across the political spectrum have increasingly demanded an arms embargo on the country, a number of Democratic politicians have struggled to keep up with the electorate in recent weeks.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called the conflict in Gaza that's killed more than 63,000 Palestinians and starved hundreds of people "complicated," while Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) last week accused a Jewish comedian of "justifying antisemitism" for noting that more than 80% of people killed by the Israel Defense Forces were civilians. Both responses garnered condemnation from Palestinian rights advocates and progressive commentators.
But on Monday—before a packed house of more than 6,500 in Portland—Platner took a much different approach.
"Our taxpayer dollars can build schools and hospitals in America, not bombs to destroy them in Gaza," said Platner, leading the audience to stand up and applaud for a full 30 seconds.
Platner, a military veteran and oyster farmer who is challenging Collins—a vehement supporter of Israel—has previously spoken about Gaza in an interview for Zeteo, calling Israel's US-backed attack on the territory "the moral test of our time."
He repeated his message on social media Tuesday, saying: "It's not complicated: Not one more taxpayer dollar for genocide."
Platner was speaking at a rally hosted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), as part of the senator's ongoing Fighting Oligarchy tour—a project that some establishment Democrats have claimed is out of touch with the views of Democratic voters even as Sanders has filled arenas in both red and blue districts across the country.
Rep. Eliss Slotkin (D-Mich.) has claimed the term "oligarchy" is unfamiliar to Americans, but the audience of a reported 6,500 people in Portland evidently didn't have trouble understanding Platner when he named oligarchy as "the enemy" of working Americans.
The line also garnered a standing ovation.
"I've been waiting my entire life," said journalist David Sirota, "for a politician other than Bernie Sanders to just say this."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular