Page 6 - Florida Sentinel 4-17-18

White House And Political News
Trump Signs Executive Order That Will Attack What Little Poor People Already Receive
Former FBI Director James Comey Says President Trump Is ‘Unfit To Hold Office’
President Donald Trump is such an indiscrimi- nate liar that he sometimes doesn't even know he's lying, former FBI Director James Comey said in an interview with ABC News that aired Sun- day night. He also said Trump was "morally unfit" to
hold his office.
In hours-long interview
with ABC's George Stepha- nopoulos, parts of which aired on "20/20," Comey re- counted many of the details he revealed in his memoir, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership." The inter- view was conducted before NBC News and other news or- ganizations obtained copies of the book and reported many of its details last week, so the dis- cussion included no responses to Trump's tweeted out- rage where he said:
“Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack (he is not smart!), will go down as the WORST FBI Director in history, by far!”
I never asked Comey for Personal Loyalty. I hardly even knew this guy. Just another of his many lies. His “memos” are self serving and FAKE!
Our president must embody respect and adhere to the val- ues that are at the core of this country, the most important being truth," Comey said last
Fired FBI Director James Comey has written a tell-all book and did a scathing inter- view aired on ABC on Sunday night.
week, according to a transcript of the entire interview that ABC News published Sunday night.
Trump lies are so promis- cuous that "sometimes he's lying in ways that are obvious, sometimes he's saying things that we may not know are true or false, and then there's a spectrum in between," Comey said, according to ABC News.
The challenge of this presi- dent is that he will stain every- one around him," he said.
And he indicated that the president's behavior in a one- on-one meeting could have been criminal.
Recounting a key section of his book, Comey said that in a meeting in February 2017, Trump asked Comey to drop the FBI's investigation of Michael Flynn, who had re- cently resigned as his national security adviser.
Consultants Hired By Trump’s Lawyer Paid 2 Women Off
On last Tuesday night, Presi- dent Donald Trump signed an executive order that sums up how little he understands about poverty in America.
The order, titled “Reducing Poverty in America by Promot- ing Opportunity and Economic Mobility,” carries little weight by itself. It directs a broad range of federal agencies to review pro- grams serving low-income peo- ple and make recommendations on how they can make the pro- grams harder to access, all under the guise of “welfare re- form.”
The order’s main purpose ap- pears to be smearing popular programs in an effort to make them easier to slash—in part by redefining “welfare” to encom- pass nearly every program that helps families get by. To that end, the order reads as follows:
The terms “welfare” and “pub- lic assistance” include any pro- gram that provides means-tested assistance, or other assistance that provides benefits to people, households, or families that have low in- comes (i.e., those making less than twice the Federal poverty level), the unemployed, or those out of the labor force.
Redefining everything from the Supplemental Nutrition As- sistance Program (SNAP, for- merly known as food stamps) to Medicaid to Unemployment In- surance to child care assistance as “welfare” has long been part of conservatives’ playbook.
Trump is erecting a smoke- screen in the shape of Presi- dent Reagan’s myth of the “welfare queen”—so we don’t notice that he’s coming after the entire working and middle class.
The fact is, we don’t have wel- fare in America anymore. What’s left of America’s tattered safety net is meager at best, and—con- trary to the claim in Trump’s executive order that it leads to “government dependence”—it’s light-years away from enough to live on.
The SNAP program provides an average of just $1.40 per per- son per meal. Most families run out of SNAP by the third week of the month, because it’s so far from enough to feed a family on. Then there’s housing assistance, which reaches just 1 in 5 eligible low-income families. Those left without help can spend up to 80 percent of their income on rent and utilities each month, while they remain on decades- long waitlists for assistance.
And then there’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the program that re- placed Aid to Families with De-
pendent Children in 1996 when Congress famously “[ended] welfare as we know it.” Fewer than 1 in 4 poor families with kids get help from TANF today— down from 80 percent in 1996. In fact, in several states, kids are more likely to be placed in foster care than receive help from TANF.
Families who do receive TANF are lucky if the benefits even bring them halfway to the aus- tere federal poverty line. For ex- ample, a Tennessee family of 3 can only receive a maximum of $185 per month, or a little over $6 a day.
Yet TANF is the program Trump is holding up as a model—hailing 1996 “welfare re- form” as a wild success—despite the fact that TANF has proven an abject failure both in terms of protecting struggling families from hardship and in helping them get ahead.
In particular, this executive order directs agencies to ramp up so-called “work require- ments”—harsh time limits on as- sistance for certain unemployed and underemployed workers— which were at the heart of the law that created TANF. But decades of research since TANF was enacted show that work re- quirementsdo not help anyone work.
Make no mistake: Pushing for “work requirements” is at the core of the conservative strategy to reinforce myths about poverty in America. That “the poor” are some stagnant group of people who “just don’t want to work.” That anyone who wants a well- paying job can snap her fingers to make one appear. And that having a job is all it takes to not be poor.
But in reality, millions of Americans are working two, even three jobs to make ends meet and provide for their fami- lies.
Half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have even $400 in the bank. And nearly all of us—70 percent—will turn to some form of means- tested assistance, like Medicaid or SNAP, at some point in our lives.
Trump claims his executive order is intended to eliminate “poverty traps.” But if he knew anything about poverty—aside
from what he’s learned on Fox News—he’d know the real poverty trap is the minimum wage, which has stayed stuck at $7.25 an hour for nearly a decade. That’s well below the poverty line for a family of two— and not nearly enough to live on. There isn’t a single state in the country in which a minimum- wage worker can afford a one- bedroom apartment at market rate.
Many low-wage workers are forced to turn to programs like Medicaid and SNAP to make ends meet, because wages aren’t enough.
If Trump were really trying to promote “self-sufficiency”—a concept he clearly doesn’t think applies to the millionaires and billionaires to whom he just gave massive tax cuts—he’d be all over raising the minimum wage.
In fact, raising the minimum wage just to $12 would save $53 billion in SNAP alone over a decade, as more low-wage work- ers would suddenly earn enough to feed their families without nu- trition assistance.
Yet there’s no mention of the minimum wage anywhere in Trump’s order to “promote op- portunity and economic mobil- ity.”
Which brings us back to the real purpose of this executive order: divide and conquer.
Trump and his colleagues in Congress learned the hard way last year how popular Medicaid is when they tried to cut it as part of their quest to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
And it’s not just Medicaid that Americans don’t want to see cut. Americans overwhelmingly oppose cuts to SNAP, housing assistance, Social Security dis- ability benefits, home heating assistance, and a whole slew of programs that help families get by—particularly if these cuts are to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. What’s more, as polling by the Center for American Progress shows, Americans are less likely to vote for a candidate who backs cuts.
By contrast, vast majorities of Americans across party lines want to see their policymakers raise the minimum wage; ensure affordable, high-quality child care; and even enact a job guar- antee to ensure everyone who is able and wants to work can find a job with decent wages.
These sentiments extend far beyond the Democratic base to include majorities of Indepen- dents, Republicans, and even Trump’s own voters.
President Donald Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen used the same Delaware limited liability com- pany to facilitate payments to two women, according to a re- port Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.
Essential Consultants LLC was used for the partial payment of a $250,000 fee paid to Cohen for negotiating a non- disclosure agreement with a for- mer Playboy model who claimed she was impregnated by Elliott Broidy, a venture capitalist and former deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.
In a statement, Broidy ac- knowledged the relationship, but did not address whether he impregnated the woman.
Essential Consultants was also used to pay $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clif- ford, to prevent her from speak- ing publicly about an alleged sexual encounter with Presi- dent Trump.
It was partly these payments that led authorities to raid Cohen's home, office and hotel on April 9, according to the Journal.
President Donald Trump's lawyers argued in a
Michael Cohen called himself ‘The Fixer’ when handling the af- fairs of President Donald Trump and other RNC
new court filing Sunday against the FBI search of Michael Cohen's records, and sided with the former Trump Organ- ization lawyer's legal team to make sure confidentiality to his legal clients hasn't been breached.
The President's attorneys called the federal searches of Cohen's home, office, hotel room and cellphones last Mon- day "an operation disquieting to lawyers, clients, citizens, and commentators alike.”
The Sunday night filing places the President directly in oppo- sition to the wishes of one of the most significant US attorney's offices in the Justice Depart- ment. Instead, Trump backs his business colleague, who finds himself amid a months- long criminal investigation.
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