As media follow Trump tweets, dangerous deregulation is in high gear

The mainstream media follows every Trump tweet. The funny thing is the nonsensical communication from the president has just a short-lived effect. In the meantime, the administration’s minions are busy with deregulation throughout the country that will hurt most Americans.

Robert Reich wrote the following about who benefit from Trump’s deregulation.

They say getting rid of regulations frees up businesses to be more profitable. Maybe. But regulations also protect you and me — from being harmed, fleeced, shafted, injured, or sickened by corporate products and services.

So when the Trump administration gets rid of regulations, top executives and big investors may make more money, but the rest of us bear more risks and harm.

And then he points out which people get hurt and how.

After heavy lobbying by the chemical industry, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency has scaled back the way the government decides whether some of the most dangerous chemicals on the market pose health and safety risks. Which may increase the profits of the chemical industry but will leave the rest of us less protected from toxins that can make their way into dry-cleaning solvents, paint strippers, shampoos and cosmetics.

Scott Pruitt may be gone from the EPA, but Trump put a former coal executive in his place. Which means the EPA will continue to try to repeal the Clean Power Plan, a regulation that set the first-ever limits on carbon pollution from U.S. power plants. If it’s repealed, wealthy shareholders may do better, but most of us will bear the costs of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and faster climate change.

Trump’s Education Department under Betsy DeVos has stopped investigating for-profit colleges. Which may result in more profits for the for-profits, but leaves many young people and their parents more vulnerable to fraud.

Trump’s Labor Department is reducing the number of workers who are eligible for overtime pay. And it’s proposing to allow teenagers to work long hours in dangerous jobs that child labor laws used to protect them from. Again, more profits for business, more cost and risk for the rest of us.

Trump is weakening banking regulations put in place after the financial crisis of 2008, even rolling back the so-called Volcker Rule that prevented banks from gambling with commercial deposits. The result: More profits for the banks, and more risk on you and me.

Robert Reich concludes as follows.

Trump’s gang of industry lobbyists and executives who are busy deregulating the same industries they once represented will no doubt do very well when they head back into the private sector.

But the rest of us won’t do well. We may not know for years the extent we’re unprotected – until the next financial collapse, next public health crisis, next upsurge in fraud, or next floods or droughts because the EPA failed to do what it could to slow and reverse climate change.

Those who are complaining about deregulation are are not just hyperventilating, offbase, or overblowing. The New York Times is now reporting the latest assault on our health and our environment.

The Trump administration, taking its third major step this year to roll back federal efforts to fight climate change, is preparing to make it significantly easier for energy companies to release methane into the atmosphere. Methane, which is among the most powerful greenhouse gases, routinely leaks from oil and gas wells, and energy companies have long said that the rules requiring them to test for emissions were costly and burdensome.

The Environmental Protection Agency, perhaps as soon as this week, plans to make public a proposal to weaken an Obama-era requirement that companies monitor and repair methane leaks, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. In a related move, the Interior Department is also expected in coming days to release its final version of a draft rule, proposed in February, that essentially repeals a restriction on the intentional venting and “flaring,” or burning, of methane from drilling operations.

The new rules follow two regulatory rollbacks this year that, taken together, represent the foundation of the United States’ effort to rein in global warming. In July, the E.P.A. proposed weakening a rule on carbon dioxide pollution from vehicle tailpipes. And in August, the agency proposed replacing the rule on carbon dioxide pollution from coal-fired power plants with a weaker one that would allow far more global-warming emissions to flow unchecked from the nation’s smokestacks.

“They’re taking them down, one by one,” said Janet McCabe, the E.P.A.’s top climate and clean-air regulator in the Obama administration.’

While we sit back and watch the media discuss aspects of Trump’s behavior that have little effect on our lives, his administration is demolishing the walls that protect us from the worst behavior of the unfettered capitalists. If we allow this charade, deregulation and more, to continue past the November 2018 election, we would have deserved the result of complete capitulation to the Plutocracy.