Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

The GOP Health Care Plan Is About To Fail. Republicans Don't Know What To Do Next.
HP | Matt Fuller , Jennifer Bendery | 07/18/17

After seven years of promises, Republicans just can't find the votes to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) appears to have exhausted his options for alternative GOP bills. Early next week, senators are expected to vote down an effort to begin debate on a bill to gut Obamacare without a replacement. The proposal is similar to one Republicans in the House and Senate sent to President Barack Obama's desk in early 2016.

The problems Republicans have decried about the Affordable Care Act, however, while often overstated, will persist. A handful of rural counties still don't have an insurer lined up to offer plans in 2018, and quite a few more counties ? about one-fifth of total exchange enrollment ? have only one option and have seen a spike in premiums in the last year or two. ... Read more

How the Trump administration's secret efforts to ease Russia sanctions fell short
Yahoo News | Michael Isikoff | older 06/02/17

In the early weeks of the Trump administration, former Obama administration officials and State Department staffers fought an intense, behind-the-scenes battle to head off efforts by incoming officials to normalize relations with Russia, according to multiple sources familiar with the events.

Unknown to the public at the time, top Trump administration officials, almost as soon as they took office, tasked State Department staffers with developing proposals for the lifting of economic sanctions, the return of diplomatic compounds and other steps to relieve tensions with Moscow. ... Read more
Trump's Been Trying To Lift Russia Sanctions Since Day One | TYT | 07/18/17 | 7:43

**Inside The 'Shakespearean Irony' Of Trump And Bannon's Relationship
FreshAir.org & NPR.org | author | 07/18/17

In August 2016, three months before the presidential election, Republican nominee Donald Trump was behind in the polls. Instead of staying on message, the candidate was engaged in a politically damaging fight with the parents of an Army captain killed in Iraq.

On Aug. 17, in an effort to change course, the Trump team appointed Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of the conservative Breitbart News, to lead the campaign. Journalist Joshua Green of Bloomberg Businessweek says the switch would prove to be a turning point.

Green argues that Bannon's experiences with Breitbart gave him a framework for mobilizing disaffected young white male voters who were attracted to Trump. Without such guidance, Green says, "I don't think that Donald Trump would have been elected president." ... Read more
**Inside The 'Shakespearean Irony' Of Trump And Bannon's Relationship | NPR FreshAir.org | | 07/18/17

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

From the reporter who was there at the very beginning comes the revealing inside story of the partnership between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump--the key to understanding the rise of the alt-right, the fall of Hillary Clinton, and the hidden forces that drove the greatest upset in American political history.

Based on dozens of interviews conducted over six years, Green spins the master narrative of the 2016 campaign from its origins in the far fringes of right-wing politics and reality television to its culmination inside Trump's penthouse on election night.

The shocking elevation of Bannon to head Trump's flagging presidential campaign on August 17, 2016, hit political Washington like a thunderclap and seemed to signal the meltdown of the Republican Party. Bannon was a bomb-throwing pugilist who'd never run a campaign and was despised by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Yet Bannon's hard-edged ethno-nationalism and his elaborate, years-long plot to destroy Hillary Clinton paved the way for Trump's unlikely victory. Trump became the avatar of a dark but powerful worldview that dominated the airwaves and spoke to voters whom others couldn't see. Trump's campaign was the final phase of a populist insurgency that had been building up in America for years, and Bannon, its inscrutable mastermind, believed it was the culmination of a hard-right global uprising that would change the world.

Any study of Trump's rise to the presidency is unavoidably a study of Bannon. Devil's Bargain is a tour-de-force telling of the remarkable confluence of circumstances that decided the election, many of them orchestrated by Bannon and his allies, who really did plot a vast, right-wing conspiracy to stop Clinton. To understand Trump's extraordinary rise and Clinton's fall, you have to weave Trump's story together with Bannon's, or else it doesn't make sense.

Trump aides move on after health care loss
Politico | Annie Karni and Eliana Johnson | 07/18/17

As the president's biggest agenda item tanked on the Hill, his senior advisers busied themselves with their pet projects -- and looked ahead to tax reform.

The president's most senior aides appeared eager to move on from the health care loss, busying themselves with their own pet projects. Counselor Kellyanne Conway spent the morning in the Cannon House Office Building, participating in a two-hour-long bipartisan round table on veterans and the opioid crisis.

Ivanka Trump made an appearance at a global robotics competition celebrating girls from Afghanistan pursuing careers in STEM. Meanwhile, her husband, White House adviser Jared Kushner -- who has taken little interest in the health care bill since its early, troubled days in the House, when he went skiing in Aspen with his family -- was busy leading a meeting with his Office of American Innovation.

In the West Wing, chief strategist Steve Bannon took a meeting with Wayne Berman, a Republican operative and board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition whose name has surfaced as a potential future chief of staff. He also met with Kris Kobach, head of Trump's voter fraud commission, and former campaign operatives David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski, among others. But Bannon was conspicuously absent from senior staff meetings on trade and tax reform that brought Cabinet officials into the White House. ... Read more