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The Rich vs. the Rest of Us: Deregulation Edition [1]
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Date: 2025-04-21
The administration of four-time indicted, twice-impeached, sexual assaulter, tax fraudster, insurrection inspirer, wannabe fascist dictator, convicted felon, Russian puppet, mob boss, President Donald Trump has brought together groups of people with various agendas, none of which have anything to do with the greater good of our country or its citizens.
These of course include those driving the overriding goal of the Republican Party: more for the rich, less for the poor and middle class.
This aspiration takes multiple forms, one of them being efforts by the GOP at “deregulation,” which mostly means less rules for their big donors in sectors like the fossil fuel and banking industries. It’s costs less when you don’t have to do things like protect the planet, treat your customers fairly, or provide a safe working environment for your employees.
During his first term, Trump took a chainsaw (I know, I’ve come to hate that image, too) to our nation’s regulations, particularly those involving the environment. He has no intention of stopping now that a plurality of voters in this country have committed the greatest electoral mistake in our history by returning the criminal president to office.
The New York Times ran a story recently titled, “Inside Trump’s Plan to Halt Hundreds of Regulations.” The subhead reads, “The White House will soon move to rapidly repeal or freeze rules that affect health, food, workplace safety, transportation and more.”
What are we talking about here? We probably do have too many regulations. I’m sure there’re some we could get rid of that wouldn’t hurt anybody. But that’s not what this is about.
This is about going after rules that big political donors in the business community don’t like because having to follow them cuts into their bottom lines. Here’s some examples of regulation cuts that the Times said are being talked about in various government agencies:
*The Environmental Protection Agency has already announced a list of 31 rules – including involving climate change, chemical pollution, wetlands protections, and auto emission regulations, that it intends to roll back.
*The Labor Department wants to repeal rules that increased the number of workers who are eligible to receive sick leave, minimum wage, and overtime pay.
*The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives would like to get rid of rules that expanded background checks for buyers and sellers of guns.
*The Federal Trade Commissions is looking to nix a rule that forbids hotels and ticket vendors to advertise prices that fail to disclose certain fees.
*The Department of Agriculture can’t wait to streamline the procedures governing production speed in pork and poultry plants, allowing more meat to be produced each day. It also wants to replace some government food and safety inspectors in the plants with corporate inspectors.
If you find anything in these examples that benefit workers, consumers, or the general public, as opposed to the corporations’ profits, let me know. Never mind, we already know how that exercise will end.
“This affects airplane safety, baby formula safety, the safety of meat, vegetables and packaged foods, the water that you drink, how you get to work safely and whether you’re safe in your workplace,” Steve Cicala, co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Project on the Economic Analysis of Regulation, explained to the newspaper.
As the Times reports, the scale will be huge.
“Across the more than 400 federal agencies that regulate almost every aspect of American life, from flying airplanes to processing poultry, Mr. Trump’s appointees are working with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) … to launch a sweeping new phase in their quest to dismantle much of the federal government: deregulation on a mass scale,” the Times said.
Trump “has marshaled a strategy for a dramatic do-over designed to kill regulations swiftly and permanently. … While Republican presidents have for generations sought to rein in regulations, experts say there has never been such an immediate and comprehensive strategy to so quickly erase or freeze this many rules that are woven throughout so many dimensions of the American economy and daily life.”
The White House is planning to build a master list to guide what the president called the “deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.” Sound familiar? Slimy Steve Bannon, that human pile of grease, has talked about doing just that, and you know that guy’s up to no good.
The carnage is being overseen by Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. The Times said it “rests on a set of novel legal strategies (based on a couple of U.S. Supreme Court decisions) in which the administration intends to simply repeal or just stop enforcing regulations that have historically taken years to undo.”
For example, the White House has directed agencies to bypass the lengthy legal requirement that proposed changes to rules be posted for public comment. Instead, regulators have been told in many cases to simply move to immediately cancel the rules. This would circumvent requirements of the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act and would probably trigger court challenges, legal experts said.
See a trend here? It all follows along with the Right-wing theory/goal/wet dream of the president having the ultimate power to do whatever he wants, with no one able to stop him. Trump and his allies want total control of government to fall within his purview. So much for the U.S. Constitution and its three co-equal branches of government.
As the Times explains: “The broad scope of the effort has created a major opportunity for businesses and their allies, who have long lobbied Washington to soften regulations and now have willing and even eager partners spread across the administration – including many agency appointees with close ties to industries – to help rewrite the rules we live by.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who’s written and talked a lot on this subject, calls that “agency capture,” where folks who worked in a particular industry are now in the federal agencies charged with regulating it. Nice gig if you can get it.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Donald Kenkel, a professor of economics at Cornell University, who served as the chief economist to the White House Council of Economic Advisers in the first Trump administration, told the Times. “It’s going on much more quietly than some of the other fireworks we’re seeing, but it will have great impact.”
Here’s a stunning paragraph from the Times story:
“Mr. Trump and his allies see the new steps as the coup de grâce in a systematic overhaul of the federal government that began with mass layoffs and efforts to shut down some agencies. They believe that the rapid repeal of some rules – and the stop-work order on enforcing others – will quickly and permanently uproot a vast network of regulations that many see as a safety net, but that they view as a drag on industry and a tool for what Mr. Vought has called a ‘woke and weaponized’ bureaucracy.”
Here's a couple of clues: When the Right talks about “woke,” it means they have no answer or explanation, so they just instinctively throw that word out. When they’re talking about “weaponized bureaucracy,” they’re projecting one of the main goals of our current mob boss president onto the people they want to attack.
It’s really that simple.
You can read the Times story here.
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It all comes down to the same sad state of our politics. A campaign finance system that’s nothing more than legalized bribery allows the rich to pour huge sums of money in support of candidates who’ll vote to increase their wealth at the expense of the rest of us. Be it tax cuts, deregulations, eliminating important programs, whatever, the final goal remains the same.
Add to that the folks who really hate government and are foaming at the mouth to destroy it to the greatest extent possible and the grifters looking to hop onto the Trump corruption train, and you’ve got the real “enemy of the people,” a label our criminal president seems to want to put on everyone and everything except those to which it actually applies, including himself.
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