USA - Trump Gets His Way Again As US Supreme Court says Trump can proceed with plan to spend military funds for border wall construction - by Robert Barnes

A split Supreme Court said Friday night that the Trump administration could proceed with its plan to use $2.5 billion in Pentagon funds to build part of the president’s wall project along the southern border.

The court’s conservatives set aside a lower-court ruling for the Sierra Club and a coalition of border communities that said reallocating Defense Department money would violate federal law.

Friday’s unsigned ruling came in response to an emergency filing from the administration during the court’s summer recess. The majority said the government “made a sufficient showing at this stage” that private groups may not be the proper plaintiffs to challenge the transfer of money.

The court’s action is a stay of the injunction issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on a 2-to-1 vote, and the litigation continues. The administration wants to finalize contracts for the work before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh voted to lift the 9th Circuit injunction. Three justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — would have left it in place.

Note EU-Digest: Bottom-line, the US Taxpayer is ending-up picking up the bill for Donald Trump's wall.

Read more: Supreme Court says Trump can proceed with plan to spend military funds for border wall construction

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USA - the divide between rich and poor: Walmart family’s ‘obscene’ wealth subsidized by taxpayers says Sen Bernie Sanders. - by David Ferguson

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) appeared on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” on Saturday and scoffed at the idea that major corporations like Walmart can’t afford to pay their workers a living wage and that to raise the U.S. minimum wage would be bad for the economy.

Sanders said that the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population believes that the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is “obscene” and a “starvation wage.” He said that he hopes to mount a strong push in the Senate to raise the minimum wage and that if enough grass roots support builds around the country, “we can force the House to do the right thing.”

“We have to create millions of new jobs” to help the economy, he said, “but we also have to make the minimum wage a living wage.

The Senator laughed when host Ed Schultz asked what he would say to people who insist that mega-corporations like Walmart and McDonald’s can’t afford to raise their wages.

“Ed, do you want to hear one of the great obscenities of our time?” Sanders asked. “The wealthiest family in this country is the Walton family. They are worth about a hundred billion dollars. That’s more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people.”

“One of the reasons that the Walton family, the owners of Walmart, are so wealthy is that they receive huge subsidies from the taxpayers of this country,” he said. “When you pay, at Walmart, starvation wages, you don’t provide benefits to your workers, who picks up the difference?

The answer is that many of the workers in Walmart end up getting Medicaid, they get food stamps, they get affordable housing paid for by the taxpayers of this country while the Walton family remains the wealthiest family in America.”

“If that is not obscene, I don’t know what is,” Sanders concluded.

Read more: Bernie Sanders: Walmart family’s ‘obscene’ wealth subsidized by taxpayers | The Raw Story