Alexander Soros quietly stepped up his political giving the last election cycle/
Soros’s Son Continues Generous Donations to Dems with Maxed Out DNC Contribution
http://freebeacon.com/issues/soross-son-continues-generous-donations-dems-maxed-dnc-contribution/
July 11, 2017 - Alexander Soros, son of liberal billionaire George Soros and the managing partner of Soros Brothers Investments, gave $33,900 to the Democratic National Committee, according to Federal Election Commission records.
The $33,900 donation from Alexander Soros to the DNC, the maximum amount that can be given to a national party in a calendar year, was made on April 28, records show. Alex also provided
a $2,700 contribution to Friends of Maria, the campaign committee of Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell (Wash.), and $1,000 to Ossoff for Congress, the campaign committee of failed Georgia Democratic candidate John Ossoff this year.
Alex has outpaced his father in political giving to Democratic campaign committees so far this cycle. George Soros provided
a $2,700 donation to Sen. Cantwell's campaign and a $1,000 contribution to John Ossoff, filings show.
Alexander, who has posted pictures of himself on social media day-drinking with Democratic leadership, including
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y),
has quietly stepped up as a major donor to liberal campaigns and causes in recent years. Throughout the 2016 election cycle, Alex increased his donations to Democrats by millions of dollars, the Washington Free Beacon previously reported.
The Senate Majority PAC, the political action committee of now-retired Democratic
Sen. Harry Reid (Nev.), was the biggest beneficiary of contributions from Alex, who gave $3.5 million to the PAC between August and November 2016.
Alex added a $1 million donation to Priorities USA Action, the largest Democratic super PAC that backed failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. George Soros gave $9.5 million the super PAC throughout the 2016 cycle, making him the largest contributor to the group.
Alex also gave a $33,400 to the Democratic National Committee and another $33,400 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). In addition to the national party, Alex cut $10,000 checks to numerous state Democratic parties including Illinois, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Texas, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
He maxed out contributions to Hillary Clinton, former Sen. Russ Feingold (D., Wisc.), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D., N.Y.), now the deputy chair of the DNC.
Soros gave more than $4.5 million to Democratic efforts in the 2016 cycle, a drastic uptick compared to the $400,000 he gave throughout the 2014 election cycle. Alex did not return requests for comment by press time.
Warren Buffett on Monday donated roughly $3.17 billion of Berkshire Hathaway Inc stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities, his largest contribution in a more than decade-long plan to give away his fortune.
Buffett donates $3.17 billion to Gates charity, four others
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2017/07/11/528091/Buffett-donates-317-billion-to-Gates-charity
July 11, 2017 - The billionaire investor's 12th annual donation to the five charities comprised 18.63 million Class "B" shares of Berkshire, valued at $170.25 each as of Monday's market close.
Berkshire said Buffett, 86, has made $27.54 billion in donations since 2006 to the five charities, including roughly $21.9 billion to the Gates Foundation.
Buffett still owns about 17 percent of Berkshire, the Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate he has run since 1965, despite having donated more than 40 percent of his holdings.
The Gates Foundation, which focuses on improving health, reducing poverty and aiding education,
is receiving about $2.42 billion of Monday's donations.
Buffett also donated to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his late first wife, and the Howard G. Buffett, Sherwood and NoVo Foundations, respectively overseen by his children, Howard, Susan and Peter.
Following Monday's donation, Buffet remained the world's fourth-richest person, according to Forbes magazine.
Before the donations were announced, Forbes estimated
Buffett's net worth at $76.3 billion, trailing Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates' $89.4 billion, Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos' $84.8 billion, and Spanish retailing magnate Amancio Ortega's $81.8 billion.
Buffett typically reduces the number of shares he donates by 5 percent from the prior year.
The charities usually sell the Berkshire shares to finance their activities, reflecting Buffett's desire that his money be spent. Buffett also makes smaller donations to other charities.
Bezos, Slim, and Buffett, Publicly Pleading Poverty, Ask Congress for Help With Their Newspapers
http://www.nysun.com/national/bezos-slim-and-buffett-billionaires-pleading/90026/#.WWOtitqH7Gg.twitter
Mon. July 10, 2017 - It’s the sort of brazen move that might ordinarily trigger a front-page news story or an outraged editorial — a bunch of rich individuals asking Congress to write them a law that would give them better negotiating power against other rich individuals.
Yet in this case, the rich individuals wanting special treatment are the newspaper owners themselves. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (worth $83.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index), New York Times owner Carlos Slim (worth $61.1 billion), and Buffalo News owner Warren Buffett ($76.9 billion), publicly pleading poverty, are asking Congress for a helping hand in their negotiations with Google, controlled by Sergey Brin ($45.6 billion) and Larry Page ($46.8 billion).
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, David Chavern, president and chief executive of the News Media Alliance, whose board has representatives of Bezos-Slim- and Buffett-backed papers, complained about what he called “an economically squeezed news industry.” The Times, in a column sympathetic to the effort, likened the news providers to “serfs.”
Maybe Serf Bezos should have considered the economics of the news industry when he bought the Washington Post, or Serf Slim when he bought his stake in the New York Times. The idea that Congress needs to roll to the rescue of “serfs” like Messrs. Bezos, Buffett, and Slim to bail them out of bad investments just doesn’t pass the laugh test.
In respect of the Times, it’s particularly comical, because, as an editorial matter, the paper generally favors stricter antitrust enforcement. The newspaper that less than two years ago was editorializing that Congress “should also study whether there are ways to strengthen the antitrust laws,” now is backing the move for what its own columnist describes as “an anticompetitive safe haven,” “a limited antitrust exemption.” (Article continues.)
Donald Trump isn't alone in his focus on rich and middle class voters
Why Politicians From Both Parties Ignore the Poor
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/07/10/why-politicians-both-parties-ignore-poor
Monday, July 10, 2017 -
At a rally in Iowa in late June, President Donald Trump responded to criticism of his millionaire-and billionaire-studded cabinet by saying that while he loves both rich and poor people, "I just don't want a poor person" running the economy.
Trump’s comment was offensive. But it was also a rare instance of a politician actually mentioning the poor.
A higher percentage of Americans—14.8 percent—were living in poverty in 2014 than during the late 1960s and early 1970s. And extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $2 a day, has roughly doubled from 1996 to 2012, according to Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer’s book $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.
But you wouldn’t know it from listening to the 2016 presidential campaign.
Both Trump and Hillary Clinton's economic addresses focused much more on the middle class than on the poor, a New York Times analysis found. And transcripts of the three presidential debates show the middle class was mentioned thirteen times compared to just four mentions of poverty, the poor, or low-income people.
In ignoring the poor, Clinton and Trump have plenty of company.
During his presidency, Barack Obama spoke less about people living in poverty than any of the past ten presidents. In contrast, Obama led those ten predecessors in talking about the middle class. Obama’s 2012 opponent,
Mitt Romney, said he was "not concerned about the very poor" and was instead focused on "middle-income Americans."
To be fair, some presidential candidates have treated poverty as an issue worth discussing.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders brought up topics related to income inequality and poverty so much that Clinton accused him of being "a single-issue candidate." John Edwards also made poverty a central aspect of his 2008 presidential campaign, taking his "two Americas" theme to the end of the primary season, before his campaign blew up.
Congress has also been criticized for ignoring the poor. "Missing in action," is how Representative Marcia Fudge, a Democrat from Ohio, described Congress's record on poverty.
Robert Moffitt, Krieger-Eisenhower professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, agrees that
politicians generally avoid the topic of poverty and the poor.
"Most people in Congress aren't really addressing it," he tells The Progressive.
"They seem to be more concerned with the prospects of the middle class." (Comment - But Congress is screwing the middle class - widening the gap between rich and poor?)
The poor have noticed how little they seem to matter to the politicians. "I feel like they're not talking to me,” one struggling mother told CNN. Many poor people don't trust that the government has their back, and 60 percent of them believe the government should do more to help those in poverty.
Why do politicians ignore the poor?
C. Nicole Mason, executive director of the Center for Research and Policy in the Public Interest, believes
politicians focus on those they think can help them the most.
"The middle class is a strong, vocal voting block, so they tend to get a lot of attention from politicians," she tells The Progressive. "The poor, not so much."
Timothy Noah, labor policy editor at Politico, tells The Progressive that
the middle class is simply bigger than either the upper or lower classes, leading to a greater focus on them.
It wasn’t always this way.
In his 1964 State of the Union Address, President Lyndon Johnson declared a "war on poverty." During his presidency, he ushered in programs to help the poor, such as the Food Stamp Act and Medicaid.
But the very notion that government should help those less fortunate came under attack in the 1980s by a renewed rightwing intent on destroying social safety-nets.
President Ronald Reagan's "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" revolution changed the political and public mindset toward poverty.
"When Reagan started talking about poverty as a cultural pathology linked mostly to black women and communities," Mason says,
"the public will to really confront the root causes of poverty eroded."
But the Democrats are also to blame.
In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton made Reagan’s rhetoric and actions against those in poverty bipartisan by limiting the poor's access to welfare. The effect was devastating, leading to a huge spike in extreme poverty. And the Democrats have never undone the impact of that blow against the poor.
Mason says both parties tend to scapegoat those in poverty. "Some liberals and Republicans all think the same way about the poor," she says.
"They blame the poor for their condition of not being able to reach the middle class."
Noah argues that
this kind of rhetoric has "dehumanized" those in poverty. And he says today's politicians are still steeped in that political attitude.
"The poor are still demonized by conservatives, and I think Democrats are intimidated by the Republican rhetoric on this," Noah says. "So you don’t see much discussion of poverty."
It's worth noting that under the current administration, the poor might be better off being ignored. During his campaign, while rarely explicitly naming the poor, Trump promised to help struggling people. But since taking office, he has proposed a budget that would slash programs many in poverty rely on and a health care plan that would kick many off of their insurance. (Comment - In this statement, it misses the point - that under the Obama administration, illegal immigration went mostly unchecked and that Obama set up a system where "illegals" were granted full assess to Welfare and lower income benefits, even receiving benefits that American citizens under the same poverty status were "denied". President Trump has re-set guidelines to reduce benefits for those who do not hold full American citizenship. )
Meanwhile, Moffitt says the large number of people still in poverty has created a perception among many lawmakers and voters that poverty is an intractable issue.
However, politicians may be missing out on potential voters by not talking about poverty. About 68.5 percent of adults with an income under $30,000 a year didn’t vote in 2014. That increases to 75 percent for people making under $10,000. Politifact reported the more money a person makes, the more likely they are to vote.
One reason people living in poverty don’t vote in big numbers is because of an explicit strategy to lock them out: voter ID laws minimize poor people's ability to vote. However, it’s also plausible that many poor people don't vote because politicians aren’t speaking to their main issue—escaping poverty.
If Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party had spoken more directly to these voters and their needs, rather than focusing almost exclusively on the middle class, they might be in control of the levers of government instead of completely out of power.
Moffitt insists it's possible for politicians to focus on both the middle class and the poor.
"There shouldn’t be any conflict," he says. "The middle class has their problems and the poor have theirs, and neither one of them deserves priority over the other. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game."
It's been nearly six months since Donald Trump took office, and some families with illegal aliens get food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) while identical all-citizen families of the same size and with the same income do not receive them.
Gov’t Food Stamp Program Discriminates Against US Citizens, Favors Illegals
http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/david-north/
July 11, 2017 - This is not a question of treating illegal aliens like other residents of this country, it is clear-cut discrimination against citizens and in favor of illegals.
This long-standing (and peculiar) arrangement is the sort of thing that one would expect to be corrected by the third, if not the first, month of a new get-tough-on-illegal-immigration administration, such as that of the campaigning Donald Trump.
I checked with the Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service this week, the $110 billion-a-year agency that runs food stamps and some other nutrition programs.
Two questions were on my mind: 1) does the food stamp program still, under a particular set of circumstances, operate with this anti-citizen bias, and 2) has the Trump administration made an appointment of one or more outsiders to help run the agency?
Two questions were on my mind: 1) does the food stamp program still, under a particular set of circumstances, operate with this anti-citizen bias, and 2) has the Trump administration made an appointment of one or more outsiders to help run the agency?
The answer to the second question came quickly: No, but there is a civil servant running the program on an acting basis who was placed in that job by the White House. Does an agency have to have a budget of, say, $200 billion a year before the administration notices its existence?
It took a little longer to get the answer to the first question, because the nature of the discrimination is subtle and a lot of professionals in the welfare business do not want to make the distinction between legal and illegal residents of this country.
Here's how the system works: Illegal aliens are not allocated food stamps, but if the family is mixed, with some citizens and some illegals, the mixed family still gets some benefits. States are allowed, to some extent, to pick and choose among benefit-determination methods. Most states have chosen a technique that does not record some of the earnings of illegal aliens, while always recording all the income of citizens.
Let's look at the system as applied to two similar families who live in adjacent houses; both have incomes of $2,400 a month, both have the same assets, both families consist of a working male, his stay-at-home spouse, and their stay-at-home toddler. The only difference is that one of the men is a native-born citizen and the other is an illegal alien. Everyone else in the two households is a citizen.
OK, so far. Now let's walk through Alice's special mirror, and see how the government handles the situation. It sees the three-citizen family as three people and says that $2,400 a month is too high an income for food stamps. It looks at the other family and sees it as a two-member family, because the man is an illegal, and then — here's the key — the government decides that only two-thirds of the family income should be counted, and that $1,600 is not too high for a family of two, hence the family with the illegal alien in it gets food stamps and the other family does not.
There are bands of income in which this situation plays out with different sized families, giving benefits to some mixed families, and denying them to all-citizen families of the same size and with the same income. For more on these strange arrangements, see the CIS report "An Aid Program that Routinely Discriminates in Favor of Ineligible Aliens". https://cis.org/Aid-Program-Routinely-Discriminates-Favor-Ineligible-Aliens
That's the way it was under Obama, and after I explained the (admittedly bizarre) matter to the Food and Nutrition Service publicist, she told me that it remains that way under Trump.
This story is symptomatic of two larger realities. Both the Obama and Trump administrations managed to conduct big immigration operations to their own liking; think of DACA with Obama, and, under Trump, the way that enforcement people were given the freedom to do their jobs.
But Obama was much more successful in the minutia of immigration policy than Trump; for years I wrote about this little move to admit a small class of migrants, or that little move that prevented another subclass from being deported. We are not seeing that, or maybe not yet, with the Trump administration. You can't change policy, at least at the retail level, without people to write and push the new policies.
So an unknown but substantial number of mixed (illegals plus citizens) families are getting food stamps when equally poor neighbors, who happen to be in all-citizen families, go hungry. 
