Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump's former top strategist, alleged in journalist Michael Wolff's tell-all book about the Trump White House that the president's longtime attorney, Marc Kasowitz, "took care" of 100 women during the presidential campaign.
"Look, Kasowitz has known [Trump] for twenty-five years. Kasowitz has gotten him out of all kinds of jams," Bannon reportedly said. "Kasowitz on the campaign — what did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of all of them."
This apparently off-hand remark may take on new significance after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that another lawyer for the president, Michael Cohen, sent $130,000 to a porn star just weeks before the 2016 presidential election to keep her silent about an alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump.
The Journal reported that Cohen, who was the Trump Organization's top attorney for about a decade, arranged for the payment to Stephanie Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, in October 2016 after a negotiation between her lawyer and Cohen on a nondisclosure agreement.
Clifford has said privately that the encounter happened at a July 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, the newspaper reported.
Trump married his third wife, Melania Trump, in 2005.
http://www.businessinsider.com/bannon-trump-lawyer-took-care-of-a-hundred-women-2018-1
It is said that the rich and poor will always be among us — but nowhere is it written that the middle class is a sure thing.
Even in this country of grand egalitarian aspirations — where the common yeoman (neither rich nor poor) has been hailed from 1776 forward as America's greatest strength — the U.S. actually had no broad middle class until one was created in the 1930s and '40s. Before then, most Americans either lived in poverty or right next door.
And, yes, "created" is the correct term for how our middle class came to be.
The widespread economic devastation of the Great Depression created a grassroots rebellion of labor, farmers, poor people, the elderly and others against the careless moneyed class that caused the crash. These forces produced FDR and his New Deal of Social Security, worker rights and protections, consumer laws, anti-monopoly restraints and other policies that put government on the side of the people, empowering them to counter much of the corporate greed preventing their upward mobility.
In short, by the late 1970s, we had created a middle class that included nearly 60 percent of Americans.
Then — pffft — the momentum was gone. Beginning in the 1980s, right-wing Republicans and Democratic comparatists switched sides, and ever since they've increasingly allowed corporate lobbyists and campaign donors to disempower America's workaday majority, further enrich themselves and impose an abominable, un-American culture of inequality across our land.
The social cancer of inequality is spreading rampantly in America, devouring the very middle class that Trump & Company are using — ironically and cynically — as an Orwellian rationale for passing their plutocratic agenda. What we have here is plutocracy in action.
Just as progressives deliberately pushed public policies to create the middle class, so are today's economic royalists deliberately pushing plutocratic policies to destroy it. That is the momentous struggle that calls us to action this political year.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/01/10/whats-killing-americas-middle-class
In a televised bipartisan meeting with lawmakers on Tuesday, President Donald Trump suggested that Congress should return to a system of earmarking legislation, a much-maligned practice common in the 1990s and 2000s that became synonymous with government waste and corruption.
"I hear so much about earmarks and how there was a great friendliness when you had earmarks," Trump told the gathered lawmakers. "Of course they had other problems, but maybe all of you should start thinking about going back to a form of earmarks."
Also known as "pork barrel spending," earmarks are language added to legislation by lawmakers to obtain funds for their home states and districts for special projects, often to appease donors or corporate interests.
Many journalists are pointing out that Trump's advocacy for earmarks is another betrayal of his campaign promise to "drain the swamp" and rid Washington of corruption.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/01/09/latest-betrayal-drain-swamp-mantra-trump-calls-return-pork-barrel-politics
Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump's former top strategist, alleged in journalist Michael Wolff's tell-all book about the Trump White House that the president's longtime attorney, Marc Kasowitz, "took care" of 100 women during the presidential campaign.
"Look, Kasowitz has known [Trump] for twenty-five years. Kasowitz has gotten him out of all kinds of jams," Bannon reportedly said. "Kasowitz on the campaign — what did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of all of them."
This apparently off-hand remark may take on new significance after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that another lawyer for the president, Michael Cohen, sent $130,000 to a porn star just weeks before the 2016 presidential election to keep her silent about an alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump.
The Journal reported that Cohen, who was the Trump Organization's top attorney for about a decade, arranged for the payment to Stephanie Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, in October 2016 after a negotiation between her lawyer and Cohen on a nondisclosure agreement.
Clifford has said privately that the encounter happened at a July 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, the newspaper reported.
Trump married his third wife, Melania Trump, in 2005.
http://www.businessinsider.com/bannon-trump-lawyer-took-care-of-a-hundred-women-2018-1
It is said that the rich and poor will always be among us — but nowhere is it written that the middle class is a sure thing.
Even in this country of grand egalitarian aspirations — where the common yeoman (neither rich nor poor) has been hailed from 1776 forward as America's greatest strength — the U.S. actually had no broad middle class until one was created in the 1930s and '40s. Before then, most Americans either lived in poverty or right next door.
And, yes, "created" is the correct term for how our middle class came to be.
The widespread economic devastation of the Great Depression created a grassroots rebellion of labor, farmers, poor people, the elderly and others against the careless moneyed class that caused the crash. These forces produced FDR and his New Deal of Social Security, worker rights and protections, consumer laws, anti-monopoly restraints and other policies that put government on the side of the people, empowering them to counter much of the corporate greed preventing their upward mobility.
In short, by the late 1970s, we had created a middle class that included nearly 60 percent of Americans.
Then — pffft — the momentum was gone. Beginning in the 1980s, right-wing Republicans and Democratic comparatists switched sides, and ever since they've increasingly allowed corporate lobbyists and campaign donors to disempower America's workaday majority, further enrich themselves and impose an abominable, un-American culture of inequality across our land.
The social cancer of inequality is spreading rampantly in America, devouring the very middle class that Trump & Company are using — ironically and cynically — as an Orwellian rationale for passing their plutocratic agenda. What we have here is plutocracy in action.
Just as progressives deliberately pushed public policies to create the middle class, so are today's economic royalists deliberately pushing plutocratic policies to destroy it. That is the momentous struggle that calls us to action this political year.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/01/10/whats-killing-americas-middle-class
In a televised bipartisan meeting with lawmakers on Tuesday, President Donald Trump suggested that Congress should return to a system of earmarking legislation, a much-maligned practice common in the 1990s and 2000s that became synonymous with government waste and corruption.
"I hear so much about earmarks and how there was a great friendliness when you had earmarks," Trump told the gathered lawmakers. "Of course they had other problems, but maybe all of you should start thinking about going back to a form of earmarks."
Also known as "pork barrel spending," earmarks are language added to legislation by lawmakers to obtain funds for their home states and districts for special projects, often to appease donors or corporate interests.
Many journalists are pointing out that Trump's advocacy for earmarks is another betrayal of his campaign promise to "drain the swamp" and rid Washington of corruption.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/01/09/latest-betrayal-drain-swamp-mantra-trump-calls-return-pork-barrel-politics
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