trump catch all - part 7

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Now isn’t this interesting.  

The Dallas News..

“How Putin's proxies helped funnel millions into GOP campaigns”

As Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team probes deeper into potential collusion between Trump officials and representatives of the Russian government, investigators are taking a closer look at political contributions made by U.S. citizens with close ties to Russia.

Buried in the campaign finance reports available to the public are some troubling connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to President Donald Trump and a number of top Republican leaders. And thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, the political contributions are legal. We have allowed our campaign finance laws to become a strategic threat to our country.

An example is Len Blavatnik, a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle. Blavatnik's family emigrated to the U.S. in the late '70s from the U.S.S.R. and he returned to Russia when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late '80s.
Data from the Federal Election Commission show that Blavatnik's campaign contributions dating back to 2009-10 were fairly balanced across party lines and relatively modest for a billionaire. During that season he contributed $53,400. His contributions increased to $135,552 in 2011-12 and to $273,600 in 2013-14, still bipartisan.

In 2015-16, everything changed. Blavatnik's political contributions soared and made a hard right turn as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.

In 2017, donations continued, with $41,000 going to both Republican and Democrat candidates, along with $1 million to McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund.

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Anyone want to disagree with this?

E J Dionne, Jr’s latest from the Washington Post....


“The Republicans are joining a festival of corruption.”

“The tax bill the GOP is trying to foist on the country is not only an unfair and deficit-bloating hodgepodge written on the fly. It is also deeply corrupt. Every Republican who votes for this bill will be joining a festival of venality.
 
Corruption is not a word to be used lightly, so let's be disciplined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary's definitions: "dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people" and "inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means."

We can stipulate that the tax bill is not illegal. But it is a dishonest power and money grab by — and on behalf of — the already powerful. As for "inducements," well, there are those long-term investments of tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions (enabled by the collapse of all the guardrails around political money) from wealthy individuals and regiments of interest groups. They will have a merry holiday season if the bill passes as expected.

This legislation proves that Washington is, indeed, the "swamp" that President Trump described during the campaign. But instead of draining it, he and his partisan allies have jumped right in. Actually, they have polluted it further.

A prime example of this subtle corruption is how the "compromise" bill deals with the radical scaling back of the deduction for state and local taxes. Gutting what is known as the SALT tax break sets back the common good because doing so penalizes states that (a) have progressive income taxes and (b) have somewhat larger governments and thus tend to invest more in education, infrastructure and programs for the needy. While California, New York and New Jersey would be hit hard, many other states would hurt, too.

But instead of restoring all or most of the lost deduction, Republicans offered a fig-leaf compromise. Originally, the Senate bill reduced the amount that could be deducted to $10,000 and restricted it to property taxes. The new version keeps the cap while allowing the deduction to be used for sales and income taxes as well.

For most taxpayers who use the existing deduction, this won't solve their problem. One estimate from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that 1.89 million Californians would still see their taxes rise under the new provision, only a modest drop from the 2.36 million who would have had a tax increase under the version confined to property taxes. Any California representative who votes for this is voting against the interests of the state.

Ah, but the Republicans did want to respond to rich New Yorkers and Californians who were howling to their usual GOP benefactors, including Trump, about their lost SALT deductions.

So rather than offer general relief, the Republicans sliced the top income tax rate — for couples earning $600,000 or more — from the current 39.6 percent to 37 percent. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, could not really explain why only the best-off got real help, arguing lamely that middle-income people got other benefits from the bill.

The shamelessness of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin's description of the bill on CNN Sunday as "a very large tax cut for working families" is quite staggering. Consider that this confection of loopholes gives lawyers at big firms many paths to lower taxes but not much to the people who clean their offices. Soon, all Americans will demand the right to transform themselves into "pass-through" legal entities.

The bill's champions claim that the big corporate tax cut will lead to massive new investment. But, as former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg (no enemy of business) pointed out, corporations are already "sitting on a record amount of cash reserves: nearly $2.3 trillion." Bloomberg added: "It's pure fantasy to think that the tax bill will lead to significantly higher wages and growth."

And imagine: The "Make America Great Again" crowd appears to have designed a corporate tax system that creates new incentives to "shift profits and operations overseas," as former Obama administration economic adviser Gene B. Sperling argued in a careful analysis. Trump probably doesn't even know this.

The key to corruption is operating in the dark. This bill is a mess of opaque provisions that almost no one outside the ranks of tax lobbyists understands — because many of these giveaways were written or inspired by lobbyists themselves.

Needlessly rushing a massive special-interest tax bill through Congress is the antithesis of good government. This doesn't seem to matter anymore, even to Republicans who built reputations as champions of moderation, openness and rectitude.”

The rust belt area is a group of states in the Midwest where some of the residents have been saying that nobody listens to what they have to say.  That they are the forgotten Americans.  Near as I can determine these folks are the ones who worked in jobs that have disappeared through outsourcing outside the country.  What they want is for those jobs to come back.  trump told him he could get them back so they voted for him. This is a simple version and it’s more complex then that but from what I have been able to determine it’s the basis of what ails these folks.

I think the job market is a little more complex then they run out of money by the end of the year.  It has been reported that inspite of trump, jobs are still being shipped overseas.   In fact Carrier ,who trump claims he personally stopped them from closing a plant, is letting people go in that particular area.   

What it means is that the jobs trump promised to the rust belt states aren’t going to happen anytime soon if at all.

Told you so....

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From Newsweek.

“TRUMP EMPLOYMENT GAINS ARE NOT HELPING HIS RUST BELT BASE”


“Factories nationwide have added 171,000 jobs so far in 2017, but most of the benefits are in the South, where labor unions are weakest. The largest gains in manufacturing jobs between 2010 and 2016 were in South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia.”

“I say, ‘Can you tell me one promise that [Trump has] kept you, one thing he’s promised during his campaign that he’s kept and that’s the reason you’re voting for him?’” he said. “And they’ll tell me, ‘Honestly, I can’t.’ It’s a buyer’s remorse. People are waking up.”

For the record I do feel sorry for these folks but the reality was the signs were there that it would be near impossible for those lost jobs making there way back to these folks and they chose to ignore those signs.

So Laurence O’Donnell is commenting on trump’s speech I guess about national security.

“Trump speech: "We will stand up for our country like we have never stood up before."

Revolutionary War?
Civil War?
WW 1?
WW 2?”

“Trump rehearsed! He just read the word "electromagnetic" correctly in his teleprompter. How many rehearsals did that take?”

The first tweet.  Why does trump continually discount the past by implying he is the only one to ever do something or doing it right.  Is he that insecure?