"The influence of these three families offers a stark illustration of how extreme wealth can distort a democracy": Three extremely wealthy families, the Mercers, the Kochs, and the Adelsons, all prominent donors to the Republican party, now seem locked in ...

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"The influence of these three families offers a stark illustration of how extreme wealth can distort a democracy." 

The three ultra-rich families battling for control of the Republican party — Quartz

Who are the Mercers, the wealthy backers of Breitbart? | In Depth | DW - M.N.: The "DW" seems to be very interested and very well informed which cannot be just a random occurrence. 

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How Mitch McConnell's weak-kneed cowardice makes him the perfect ...

AlterNet-Jan 14, 2019
Chief among these would-be plutocrats are the Koch brothers, the Adelsons and the Mercers. It comes as no surprise then that all three have ...
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Three extremely wealthy families, the Mercersthe Kochs, and the Adelsons, all prominent donors to the Republican party, now seem locked in ...
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... in-depth coverage of the political spending of the KochsAdelsons, and Mercers of the world?), and giant transnational corporate advertisers.
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NATIONAL VIEW: Do we really need billionaires?

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Three billionaire families — the Kochsthe Mercers, and the Adelsons — played a central role in bankrolling the Republican Party's shift to the ...
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Who are the Mercers, the wealthy backers of Breitbart? | In Depth | DW

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Steve Bannon's fall from grace apparently culminated on Tuesday, when he announced he would step down as head of the conservative outlet Breitbart.
Bannon's position has been deeply shaken by his feud with Donald Trump over the statements cited in the new "Fire and Fury" book. According to US media, the spat also created an open rift between the 64-year-old strategist and his powerful financiers, the conservative Mercer family, which had played a key part in Bannon's rise to power.
Read more: Four facts on Steve Bannon, the former 'Darth Vader' of the White House
Who are the Mercers?
Robert Mercer
The Mercer family patriarch is the 71-year-old hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer, until recently a co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies trade firm. Mercer is a computer programmer by vocation who worked in computational linguistics for the computer giant IBM for two decades before joining the hedge fund company in the early 1990s.
Mercer is an avid poker player, a model train aficionado, and notably tight-lipped — he avoids speaking openly on his political beliefs.
"I believe that individuals are happiest and most fulfilled when they form their own opinions, assume responsibility for their own actions, and spend the fruits of their own labor as they see fit," he said in November.
According to an in-depth report by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, Mercer is a Christian conservative, gun enthusiast, a climate change denier, religious, small-government proponent and a man who despises the political establishment as incompetent and corrupt. He has donated over $100 million (€84 million) to various right-wing candidates and think-tanks. Most of that money has gone through the Mercer Family Foundation, run by Robert Mercer's daughter Rebekah.

Bannon calls meeting with Russians ‘treasonous’

Rebekah Mercer
The 44-year-old Rebekah Mercer is the middle of Robert Mercer's three daughters. She is said to share her father's political convictions and cut an imposing figure even among ultra-rich US conservatives. On behalf of the Mercers, she backed Mitt Romney's presidential bid in 2012.
Read more: Trump meets with rival Romney, fueling secretary of state speculation
She did not mince words decrying the Republican Party leadership after Romney's loss to Barack Obama, stunning the attendees at a special dinner for big donors after the 2012 election. The loss reportedly prompted the Mercers to impose strict controls and checks on the way their donations were being spent.
What is the Mercers' stake in right-wing politics?
The family's influence seems to have grown suddenly in the wake of the so-called Citizens United verdict in 2010, when the US Supreme Court removed nearly all limits on corporations and individuals donating to politicians.
By 2011, the Mercers started attending seminars set up by well-known billionaire conservatives Charles and David Koch, also known as the Koch brothers. The Mercers have fed millions into Koch's political organization.
In 2012, Rebekah Mercer joined the non-profit Government Accountability Institute founded by Steve Bannon. The group produced a book on corruption allegations against Bill and Hillary Clinton called "Clinton Cash" and another one on the Bush family, dubbed "Bush Bucks," despite the latter being a Republican political dynasty.
The Mercers hold a major stake in a company called Cambridge Analytica, which uses digital data to tailor election propaganda to voters. They are also major donors to the Media Research Center, which aims to neutralize "left-wing bias in the news media."
Read moreSteve Bannon backtracks on 'treasonous' remarks directed at Donald Trump's son
  • Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally

    'Fire and Fury': A look inside Donald Trump's White House

    'Fire and Fury'

    Excerpts published by US and British news outlets from American journalist Michael Wolff's new book "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" about US President Donald Trump's administration have offered a look into the inner workings of the White House. From finding comfort in McDonald's hamburgers to Ivanka's presidential dreams, here are some excerpts from the book.
  • Melania Trump

    'Fire and Fury': A look inside Donald Trump's White House

    'Melania was in tears'

    "Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend – Trump might actually win – seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears – and not of joy. There was, in the space of little more than an hour ... a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump."
  • Ivanka Trump

    'Fire and Fury': A look inside Donald Trump's White House

    Ivanka Trump the 'first woman president'?

    "Balancing risk against reward, both Jared (Kushner) and Ivanka decided to accept roles in the West Wing over the advice of almost everyone they knew ... Between themselves, the two had made an earnest deal: If sometime in the future the opportunity arose, she'd be the one to run for president. The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump."
  • Screenshot of Donald Trump's Instagram page, showing a post of him eating a BigMac from McDonald's

    'Fire and Fury': A look inside Donald Trump's White House

    Finding comfort in fast food

    "He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald's – nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely pre-made."
  • Steve Bannon

    'Fire and Fury': A look inside Donald Trump's White House

    Bannon's theories

    "The real enemy, (Bannon) said, was China. China was the first front in a new Cold War. China's everything. Nothing else matters. We don't get China right, we don't get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they're not."
  • Donald Trump Jr.

    'Fire and Fury': A look inside Donald Trump's White House

    Bannon: Donald Jr. was 'treasonous'

    "(Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and campaign manager Paul Manafort) thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers … Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately," Bannon said.
  • Two people sitting before a Trump rally

    'Fire and Fury': A look inside Donald Trump's White House

    'Losing was winning'

    "Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement ... Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn't become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing was winning."
What is the Mercers' connection with the Trump campaign and Steve Bannon?
The Mercers first met Andrew Breitbart, the founder of what is now Breitbart News Network in 2011. Through him, they soon met Bannon, who took over the reins after Breitbart died of a sudden heart attack in 2012. According to the New Yorker magazine, Bannon served as the Mercers' de facto political adviser.
The Mercers also invested $10 million in Breitbart and gained a large stake in the nascent company.
The billionaire family originally funded Ted Cruz's presidential campaign, before switching to Trump after his primary win. After Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, the Mercers called for "all hands on deck" to ensure his victory, while also claiming that Hillary Clinton "would repeal both the First and Second Amendments" if elected. (The First Amendment guarantees free speech, the Second gun ownership.) The family donated money to the campaign and the Cambridge Analytica company was also hired to help with the effort.
Companies linked with the Mercers reportedly produced anti-Clinton content, with deeply conservative Breitbart playing the leading role. Some reports say that it was Rebekah Mercer who pushed Trump to hire Steve Bannon as his chief executive and Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager.
Read moreDonald Trump's chief strategist Bannon leaves the White House
With Trump winning the general election, Rebekah Mercer served as a member of Trump's transitional team. She was reportedly behind the appointment of Michael Flynn, who briefly filled the post of the national security advisor before being forced to resign.
Steve Bannon once praised the Mercers for laying the "groundwork" for the Trump revolution, saying that their impact was even bigger than that of the Koch brothers.
What caused the Mercers to break up with Breitbart and Bannon?
The cracks between the billionaire family and the news outlet became clearly visible in November 2017, when Robert Mercer announced he would sell his Breitbart stake to his daughters. In a letter to employees, Mercer criticized the notion that his "politics marches in lockstep with Steve Bannon's."
"I have great respect for Mr. Bannon, and from time to time I do discuss politics with him," he said in the letter carried by the US publication Business Insider. "However, I make my own decisions with respect to whom I support politically. Those decisions do not always align with Mr. Bannon's."
Mercer also bluntly criticized the former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos, whom he previously supported in his fight for free speech, after Yiannopoulos made controversial remarks on pedophilia.

Steve Bannon to leave Breitbart News

The feud was blown open last week, when Rebekah Mercer publicly distanced her camp from Bannon after his supposed remarks on Donald Trump Jr.
"My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements,” she said, pledging her support to "President Trump and the platform upon which he was elected."
According to the New York Times, Bannon initially denied the rumors that the Mercers were cutting him off and insisted that everything was fine.
"The Mercers haven't given me money in years,” he told multiple people, according to the newspaper. He also reportedly refused to admit any mistakes on his part.
He was forced to resign just days later.


Michael_Novakhov shared this story .

This week, the House and Senate will work to reconcile their different versions of the tax bill into something that president Donald Trump can sign into law. As they do, dozens of protests and rallies against the bill are being planned from California to Chicago to Staten Island, New York. Citizens are frantically organizing to try to shut down the only major legislative success of a president who ran on a platform of populism, and Democrats are growing optimistic about flipping one or both houses of Congress. How did the country get here just a year after Donald Trump’s historic win?
To understand that, you need to look back to the “Citizens United” Supreme Court decision in 2010, which opened the floodgates for wealthy donors in political races. Since then, corporations and the rich have plowed money into both parties. Three extremely wealthy families, the Mercers, the Kochs, and the Adelsons, all prominent donors to the Republican party, now seem locked in a struggle over the future of the GOP.
As campaigning for the midterm elections in November 2018 gets under way, the three families are facing off against each other in battleground states. They’re lighting a fire under Republican politicians who are now determined to get something, anything, passed in Washington—even if it’s a last-minute tax bill that most voters don’t agree with and legislators barely had time to read.
But Republicans who fail to pass tax reform risk losing donor support, and getting wiped out by a rival Republican candidate. As Lindsay Graham, the veteran Republican senator from South Carolina, told an NBC news reporter early last month, a failed tax reform will look a lot like a failed party.

The donors’ battle inside the GOP

Early in 2014, over a dozen big-name Republican donors attended a meeting in New York City organized by a wealthy hedge fund executive. They had one goal—come up with a strategy to win back the US senate from the Democrats in November.
A veteran Republican strategist laid out an optimistic battle plan capped with the GOP taking the House and Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, then minority leader, leading the Senate. At the mention of McConnell’s name, an audible groan came from one corner of the room—Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer, was making her displeasure known. “I can’t think of anything worse,” Mercer said, according to one attendee.
She would rather Democrats controlled the Senate “than have McConnell as the majority leader,” the attendee said, still sounding mystified years later. The Mercer’s “mindset is totally different from a traditional Republican donor mindset,” he said.
In recent decades, the US’s two-party system had been pretty tribal. Whether a Democrat or Republican, you mostly counted yourself a winner when you got more of your team into power than the other guys. That tribal glue started to give way when the insurgent Tea Party movement appeared in 2009, fielding ultra-conservative candidates against establishment Republicans in many congressional districts and splitting the party into two camps. It nonetheless remained largely united against the common enemy of president Barack Obama.
But since Trump, with no ties to either camp or its ideology, defeated a raft of other candidates for the presidential nomination last year, the Republicans have been cast into a growing civil war between mainstream conservatives, Tea Party-inspired libertarians, and the xenophobic and misogynistic groundswell that Trump has proven expert at tapping into. These schisms reflect genuine divisions in the Republicans’ voter base—and the Mercers, the Kochs, and the Adelsons are adept at exploiting them.

Shaking up the GOP after Obama

“If money could buy elections, Mitt Romney would have won,” was a familiar refrain among campaign finance experts and political strategists alike, after the wealthy former Massachusetts governor failed to unseat Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential race, despite outspending him by $110 million.
The Mercers, for years content to quietly donate to the Kochs’ political network, started to act alone after the Republicans’ failure to unseat president Barack Obama reportedly led Rebekah to decide (paywall) the Koch network was full of “fools.” The Koch brothers, stung by the 2012 election loss, doubled down on state races, while the Adelsons poured their moneyinto a political action committee run by former George W. Bush chief of staff Karl Rove.
Romney’s loss had shaken the Republican party so deeply that then-party chief Reince Priebus spent months putting together a soul-searching policy paper (pdf) about the direction it should go, based on thousands of interviews. Most people think Republicans don’t care about Americans, it found, and the party needs to reach out to women, and minorities. It included advice that now seems unfathomably quaint, like (pg. 6):
The Republican Party must be the champion of those who seek to climb the economic ladder of life. Low-income Americans are hardworking people who want to become hard-working middle-income Americans. Middle-income Americans want to become upper-middle-income, and so on. We need to help everyone make it in America.We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.
But America’s GOP oligarchs did not appear to have read the report. The congressional candidates that the three families have backed (sometimes together) bore little resemblance to that GOP prescriptive.
Instead, they helped launch a new era of even less compassionate Republicans that included a woman who thinks the UN is a conspiracy and wants to eliminate the minimum wage, and a former doctor who crafted a health-care bill that allow insurance companies to charge people with pre-existing conditions more.
Congressional candidates that the three families backed bore little resemblance to the GOP prescriptive.
Unlike Romney, these radical new candidates won. But Republican experts warn that the families’ picks may eventually hollow out the Republican party by pushing policies that American voters reject, or set the stage for a full-fledged revolt.
The latest example is the openly racist Roy Moore, the candidate in Alabama’s December 2017 special election for the Senate, who has been accused of sexually assaulting several teens when he was in his 30s. Moore, who is championed by former (paywall) White House advisor and Mercer family affiliate Stephen Bannon, secured the backing of Trump, and the Republican National Committee this week.
“The RNC is the president’s political arm, and we support him and his agenda,” a RNC official told Quartz today (Dec. 5). But Republican strategists say it’s a huge gamble.
“If the party nominates the slate of candidates that the Mercers are backing, [Democratic Senator Chuck] Schumer will be the Senate majority leader, and [Democratic representative] Nancy Pelosi will be the speaker of the House” in 2018, said one long-time Republican strategist and donor who is aligned with the Adelsons, before the Republican Party threw its support behind Moore on Dec. 4.
“If people question why Trump is unable to get anything accomplished, it will be the fault of the Mercers and Steve Bannon.”

Three Republican families, three visions

The influence of these three families offers a stark illustration of how extreme wealth can distort a democracy.
Each family is closely tied to the Republican leader of one branch of government: Robert, Diana, and Rebekah Mercer helped propel Trump’s bombastic rise to the White House. Industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch funded the Tea Party and its protege, House speaker Paul Ryan. And while casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam Ochshorn are on the party’s more moderate wing, they have long stood behind the calculating, conservative Senate leader, McConnell, who even before the Tea Party’s rise was known as an extreme obstructionist (paywall), dedicated to stomping out the bipartisan compromises that historically made the US government work.
American historians see a titanic clash on the horizon.
The Adelsons favor pro-Israel policies. Despite their anti-regulation stance, they are keen to squelch the growth of online gambling, and want to support moderate Republicans with a chance of picking up swing voters.
The Koch brothers have funded and organized a vast network of libertarian think tanks and grassroots movements aimed at sowing distrust of “big government” and climate science, the better to benefit their massive fossil fuel-heavy Koch Industries. There are other Republican donors who have spent more money, but the Koch’s network gives them great influence.
The Mercers seem to hold the most extreme social views: Robert Mercer complained that the US started going in the wrong direction “after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” according to a lawsuit filed by a former employee. He reportedly invested $10 million in 2011 into Breitbart, the news site run by one-time Trump adviser Steve Bannon, which regularly airs white-supremacist views. Early last month, Robert Mercer quit the hedge fund he worked at for years, and said he’d sold his stake in Breitbart News to his daughter, but he’s reportedly getting even deeper into politics.
Emboldened by Trump’s presidential victory, the Mercer family has been siding with extremist candidates for 2018 congressional races, hoping to wipe out incumbent Republicans and yank Senate leader McConnell from his seat.
In Nevada, another Mercer-backed Republican, Danny Tarkanian, is challenging incumbent Dean Heller for the 2018 midterms, on a platform of destroying McConnell.
The Mercers are also expected to attack Republicans in Mississippi, Nevada, Maine, and Michigan during the 2018 midterms who don’t hew with their extremist views. Many narrowly won their last races, and some, like Nevada’s Heller, failed to support Trump on the campaign trail.
American historians see a titanic clash on the horizon. What’s coming next is a battle between “the very idea of democracy, and that human beings are created equal” against the notion that power in America should be concentrated in the hands of a very few, very wealthy people, just as it once was in medieval Europe, predicts Heather Richardson, a history professor at Boston College and author of several books about the GOP.

Sheldon and Miriam Adelson

Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam Ochshorn were the largest individual Republican donors in 2016, after jumping headfirst into Republican funding over the past decade. Adelson donated just $1 million to Newt Gingrich’s exploratory presidential campaign in 2006. Last year, the two donated some $83 million—much of that of it in congressional races after reportedly deciding (paywall) that Donald Trump had no chance of becoming president.
Net worth: Sheldon’s holdings in Las Vegas Sands (LVS), the US’s largest casino company, give him a net worth of $36 billion according to Forbes. Miriam, an Israeli doctor who researches drug dependencies, owned an equal share in LVS as recently as 2012, but her net worth is not listed separately.
How they donate: The couple are the largest supporters to the “Senate Leadership Fund,” linked to Mitch McConnell, which claims it has one goal—“to protect and expand the Republican Senate Majority.” In 2016, the couple donated $46 million to the fund, followed by Karl Rove’s One Nation, which donated about $22 million and works with the Senate Leadership fund to support the same politicians. They also supported Future45, an anti-Trump PAC with the tagline “America Deserves Better.”
Who they back: Traditional “establishment Republicans” like Arizona’s Flake—who has been an outspoken critic of Trump.
These include politicians who are fiscally conservative, who aren’t openly anti-gay marriage, but are probably supporters of Israel. The Adelsons fear that backing more extremist Republicans may drive moderate voters away, ultimately putting Democrats in power, strategists say.
“Love him or hate him [Adelson] sticks to his guys,” Michael Green, a professor of politics at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. During Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential run, for example, “he kept Gingrich afloat, and I don’t think anyone outside the Gingrich family thought he had a chance.”
Notable quote: “I don’t agree with the Republican stance on abortion. Religion shouldn’t be political. But nothing is perfect. Supporting a free-market society and Israel are more important issues,” Mrs. Adelson said in 2014.

The Koch Brothers

The Koch family has been involved in American politics since the 1930s, when Dutch immigrant Harry Koch railed againstworkers’ unions and New Deal programs like Social Security from a Texas newspaper he owned. His grandsons Charles, 81, and David, 77, ushered in a new era of Republicanism in the past decade that Harry would have appreciated.
The Koch brothers are considered the architects of Congress’s 2010 “Republican wave” and the patron saints of the Freedom Caucus, a libertarian right-wing group in the House that acted as a de facto “third party” in recent votes, threatening to sink bills that more traditional Republican colleagues supported. 

Despite the Koch brothers’ initial distaste for Trump, his cabinet is stacked with people they’ve funded, from CIA head Mike Pompeo to budget director Mick Mulvaney, to a host of coal-industry linked appointees.
Net wealth: Koch Industries, the private oil and gas empire they inherited from their father and have a controlling majority stake in, has made them both incredibly wealthy. Forbes estimates each brother is worth $48.3 billion.
How they donate: While the Kochs have personally have donated tens of millions of dollars to political causes, the network of wealthy donors and right-wing think tanks they’ve created is more important. Together the Kochs and their wealthy partners spent nearly $1 billion in the run-up to the 2016 election, and funded a grassroots libertarian movement.
When former White House advisor Steve Bannon called House majority leader Paul Ryan “a limp-dick motherf–er who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation,” the lab he was alluding to was funded by the Kochs.
The Koch brothers and their donor networks plan to spend $400 million on their candidates in the run-up to the 2018 election. They’ve also recently invested $650 million in a group that acquired Time.
Who they back: Tear-down-the-government candidates who are anti-regulation, vote against climate-change mitigation, and, at least on the campaign trail, said they wanted to repeal Obamacare.
The brothers say they are interested in civil-justice reform and slammed Trump’s Muslim ban.
Notable quote: “But if I had to vote for cancer or heart attack, why would I vote for either?”—Charles Koch in 2016, when asked by Fortune whether he’d vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in the presidential election.

The Mercers

Robert Mercer, 70, is the former co-head of Renaissance Technologies, which runs the Medallion Fund, often referred to as the world’s most successful hedge fund for the returns it has made for the Renaissance employee-investors. Mercer, his wife, Diana, and daughter Rebekah seemed to burst onto the political scene in 2016, first backing Texas senator Ted Cruz and then Trump for president.
Net worth: Not entirely clear—Robert’s net worth is at least $1 billion based on his own investment in Medallion, Bloomberg believes. Rebekah was a stock trader briefly, and was married to a high-ranking Morgan Stanley executive. She’s listed as “retired” or “homemaker” on campaign finance databases, although elsewhere she’s known as the “First Lady of the Alt-Right.”
How they use it. The Mercer Family Foundation once funded “medical research and conventional charities,” according to a comprehensive profile of the family in the New Yorker.
In 2015, however, it donated $24.5 million (pdf, pg. 1) to charities and to political causes like the Media Research Center, which says it wants to “neutralize” mainstream media, and Reclaim New York, which critics believe is trying to crippleupstate New York government. In recent years, Robert funded Bannon’s Government Accountability Institute, and the white-nationalist Breitbart News, as Bloomberg’s extensive 2016 profile shows.
The Mercers’ other weapon is data-mining company Cambridge Analytica, which an executive brags has a “secret sauce” (paywall) that helped aid Trump. Others have questioned how effective Cambridge was.  The family also invests in a company that sells machine guns, and a Florida horse farm.
Who they back. A new generation of radical, race-baiting politicians, even further right than the Freedom Caucus, who seem loosely bound to the US democratic processes. In the words of an anonymous Mercer affiliate (who sounds a lot like Bannon), Mercer’s candidates want to “blow things up and start from scratch.”
As a Cruz donor, Rebekah was so involved that she reportedly pushed him to be tougher on immigration, sparking Cruz to propose suspending all H-1 B visas. “Their decisions on getting involved or not are not empirical or data driven,” said Constantin Querard, a Republican strategist and founder of Grassroots Partners in Arizona. “It’s that larger sense—does this person have the courage and backbone to truly change things?”
Notable quotes: The Mercers avoid the press. After a video emerged last year showing Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, Robert and Rebekah issued a statement condemning Republicans who abandoned Trump. “Those among the political elite who quake before the boombox of media blather do not appreciate the apocalyptic choice that America faces on November 8th,” it read. “We have a country to save and there is only one person who can save it.”

The one “reform” that GOP oligarchs can agree on

If there’s one thing the three families agree on, it’s cutting taxes for rich people and for the companies they control.
What unites the three families is a “feeling of grievance, which is ironic because they have all done well, financially,” noted Green, the University of Nevada professor. “Its hard to figure out exactly what they have great reason to be upset about, other than not having done even better financially.”
This October, wealthy donors in the Koch network described tax reform as a “do or die moment,” in which wealthy donors and activists would abandon the party if they didn’t get what they wanted, the Boston Globe reported. Congress’s current tax reform plan certainly addresses that, and both the House and Senate versions give wealthy families huge tax cuts on the passage of wealth down through generations.
The Senate plan specifically most benefits taxpayers who make over $500,000 a year, while eventually lowering incomes for the working class, and adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt. It will lower corporate tax rates from 35% to about 20%, while possibly knocking public school budgets and salaries for firefighters.
It’s going to be a tough sell for Republicans at home, who rushed the bill though Congress without a single Democratic vote, and will have to convince their constituents it is a good idea after passing it into law.
Tax reform was the major driver behind the Republican push to repeal and replace Obamacare, which would have allowed them to divert billions to offset tax cuts. But that turned out to be something that most Americans don’t want, Republicans learned this year after facing off with voters at acrimonious town halls. About two-thirds of Americans would prefer that Congress keep Obamacare as it is or improve it, a July survey showed—but the Senate version of the tax reform bill contains a provision that would essentially kill it as well.
Most Americans, no matter what party they vote for, don’t support tax cuts for the rich or for companies, a Pew Research survey showed in September.
So far, congressional Republicans have shown the most concern about pressure from donors, not voters, though. On tax reform, “my donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,’” Chris Collins, the Republican representative from upstate New York, said in November.
Trump's Deutsche Bank woes are worse than you think: MSNBC federal law enforcement contributor

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Raw Story.


A federal law enforcement reporter pointed out one of the under-reported threads in the bombshell New York Times report about Donald Trump seeking out a loan from Deutsche Bank in 2016 — for which he was rejected.
Daily Beast reporter Betsy Woodruff explained Monday that “it takes a lot for Deutsche Bank not to do business with somebody.”
“This is a bank that’s been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for not doing more to stop Russians from laundering massive sums of money through its bank,” Woodruff noted.
But one of the underlying threads beneath the numerous stories about Trump and Deutsche Bank, the reporter noted, is that the German institution sold financial products to the Mercers, a “multi-billionaire conservative mega-donor family that played a key role in getting Trump elected.”
“A Senate committee confirmed or assessed that the Mercers used this money to dodge paying more than $6 billion in taxes,” Woodruff added. “That’s larger than the GDP of some countries. They used these products in part to do that.”
The MSNBC political contributor pointed out that the Mercers have, since fall 2017, “been in negotiations with the IRSabout how to potentially settle that tax debt.”

“Those negotiations are done entirely in secret,” Woodruff said. “Obviously, tax issues are supposed to be confidential — but this is something where Trump’s political appointees in the IRS have access to very sensitive talks about billions of dollars on the table for some of his most powerful donors and Deutsche Bank is right at the center.”
Host Nicolle Wallace asked the reporter if special counsel Robert Mueller has access to the same IRS information and Woodruff said that although she has not gotten confirmation that he does, “he would be able to through traditional law enforcement means” to obtain it.
Watch below:

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Trump furious after Schiff hires former NSC aides to help with probe

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Markle rumors: 'Best friends' set the record straight
EU says no to renegotiating Brexit deal

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The Operation Trump and The New Abwehr: A Study In Psychohistory by Michael Novakhov – Google Search


German Intelligence Chief Wilhelm Franz Canaris – The Operation Trump and The New Abwehr: A Study In Psychohistory by Michael Novakhov – Google Search

Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Trump Investigations.

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>> Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks Review In Brief 
» German Intelligence Chief Wilhelm Franz Canaris
24/01/19 06:17 from Mike Nova’s Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Warfare History Network. Adolf Hitler’s spymaster, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was actually a dedicated anti-Nazi who did everything he could to frustrate the Führer’s plans. by David…
» Canaris and Heydrich – Axis History Forum
24/01/19 06:16 from Mike Nova’s Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . Canaris and Heydrich #1 Post by Ezboard » 29 Sep 2002, 21:37 GFM2001 Member Posts: 55 (8/20/01 12:32:55 pm) Reply Canaris and Heydrich ————————————————————…
» Canaris – Heydrich Gay Love Affair – Google Search
24/01/19 05:53 from Mike Nova’s Shared Newslinks
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» Canaris – Heydrich Gay Love Affair – Google Search
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» Canaris – Heydrich Gay Love Affair – Google Search
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» Service record of Reinhard Heydrich
24/01/19 05:43 from Mike Nova’s Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . SS- service record cover of Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei Reinhard Heydrich The service record of Reinhard Heydrich was a collection of official SS documents maintained at the SS Pers…
» RUSSIA and THE WEST – РОССИЯ и ЗАПАД: – Командир, ручка от жопы отваливается! | – Ништяк, а мы её стразами укрепим! – 6:10 AM 1/7/2019
24/01/19 05:26 from Mike Nova’s Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from RUSSIA and THE WEST – РОССИЯ и ЗАПАД. Monday, January 7, 2019 – Командир, ручка от жоп…
» 1:55 PM 9/5/2018 – Canaris’ love affair with Reinhard Heydrich, both of whom were at least in part Jewish and Gay… | The Global Security News
24/01/19 05:12 from Mike Nova’s Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from The Global Security News. Upon the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, gay men and, to a lesser extent, lesbians, were two of the numerous groups targeted by the Nazis and were ulti…
» Heydrich’s homosexuality? – Axis History Forum
24/01/19 04:52 from Mike Nova’s Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story . Heydrich’s homosexuality? #1 Post by Ezboard » 29 Sep 2002, 19:03 HannahR New Member Posts: 1 (5/26/01 5:43:01 pm) Reply Heydrich’s homosexuality? ————————————————…
» Canaris – Heydrich Gay Love Affair as the source and the engine of German Fascism of 1930-1940-s – Psychohistorical Hypothesis by Michael Novakhov
24/01/19 04:15 from Mike Nova’s Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from Trump Investigations. Canaris – Heydrich Gay Love Affair as the source and the engine of the German Fascism of 1930-1940-s  Psychohistorical Hypothesis by Michael Novakhov 9:19 AM 9/21/20…
» 9:19 AM 9/21/2018 – (Abwehr? Drag?) Queens (Are?) Flushing (With Rage? Shame? Anger? Angst? All of the above? None of the above?) | The Global Security News
24/01/19 03:56 from Mike Nova’s Shared Newslinks
Michael_Novakhov shared this story from The Global Security News. Mike Nova’s Shared NewsLinks Drag Bang Drag, Gala de Eleccion Drag Queen 2015 LPGC – YouTube   mikenova  shared this story  . Drag Bang Drag, Ga…

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