Tag Archives: Trump

A Ferengi Approach to Public Safety

Elizabeth Kolbert is a measured, thoughtful observer of government who writes for the New Yorker. So when she characterizes a bill as a measure to “undermine public safety,” I listen.

A handy rule of thumb in Washington is that the more pernicious the act, the more high-minded the title. Thus, last week, the House of Representatives approved the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2017, also known as the REINS Act. The bill would strip the executive branch of the power to issue significant new rules on topics ranging from air quality to food safety. In normal times, such a power grab by Congress would surely face a veto threat from the President, but, of course, these are not normal times.

Under the latest version of the REINS Act, a regulation with “an annual effect on the economy of $100,000,000 or more” could not take effect without congressional approval. In this way, either the House or the Senate could easily scuttle a major new regulation—one that requires food producers to sanitize their tools, for example—simply by doing nothing. “Given partisan gridlock in Congress, this could result in a de facto ban on new public interest safeguards,” Alison Cassady, the director of domestic energy policy at the Center for American Progress, noted in a recent post on the bill.

As Kolbert points out, agencies don’t impose regulations having “an annual effect on the economy of $100,000,000 or more” overnight; such measures require considerable research and go through lengthy and multiple levels of review and public comment. Of course, these are also precisely the regulations likely to be opposed by large corporations, in areas such as energy, workers’ safety, and lending practices, who often don’t like them.

According to the climate-change-focussed Web site DeSmogBlog, among the REINS Act’s most vigorous supporters are the various lobbying organizations sponsored by the Koch brothers. (During the 2016 election cycle, contributions from Koch Industries and its affiliates, to individual candidates and to PACs, came to more than ten million dollars, according to figures compiled by the Web site Open Secrets.)

“Tellingly,” Steve Horn, of DeSmogBlog, noted recently, “the only person President-elect Donald Trump has spoken to on the record about REINS” is a conservative political activist named Phil Kerpen, who, for several years, served as a vice-president of the Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity. In an op-ed published in USA Today last month, Kerpen said that, in 2015, Trump’s campaign provided him with a statement in which Trump vowed to “sign the REINS Act should it reach my desk as President.”

In the wake of the election, I have been binge-watching old Star Trek series. (It’s healthier than drinking myself into a stupor every night…) When I first read about the REINS ACT, I couldn’t help thinking that it was something one would expect from the Ferengi, an alien species that elevated pursuit of profit over every other value, and lived according to “rules of acquisition.”

There is a substantial likelihood that the REINS Act would violate the Constitutional Separation of Powers, but even if it fails to win Senate approval, or passes and is subsequently struck down by the courts,  it is only one element of what is sure to be a wholesale assault on regulatory activity during the Trump Administration.

Trump’s cabinet choices have all evidenced a contempt for regulation entirely unconnected to the specific merits or demerits of any particular rule, and the aptly-named “lunatic caucus” of the House of Representatives is enthusiastic about allowing businesses to decide for themselves how to operate–insisting that market forces are sufficient to rein in any harmful behaviors.

Even the Ferengi know better. Like the GOP these days, they just don’t care…..

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Rejecting Science

In my Law and Policy classes, I discuss the influence of Enlightenment philosophy, with its emphasis on empirical inquiry and scientific discovery, on those who drafted America’s founding documents.

If there is any doubt that Americans have left those Enlightenment precepts far behind, the Age of Trump should dispel them. As Dorothy said to Toto, we aren’t in Kansas anymore.

Luddites occupy both ends of the political spectrum.

Does the scientific consensus about the existence and cause of climate change threaten the bottom line of the fossil fuel companies that make significant campaign contributions? Well, then, those on the Right “reinterpret” the evidence to show that settled science is wrong and must be dismissed.

Meanwhile, the Left’s suspicion of anything emanating from corporate America drives rejection of the scientific consensus that GMOs are simply a newer method of making the hybrids we’ve been eating for centuries and that widespread vaccination has saved millions of lives.

Our incoming President, of course, has never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t love, and he certainly doesn’t seem to have much interest in the numerous, genuine problems facing America’s Chief Executive. So I wasn’t really surprised by the Washington Post headline about a meeting between Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a proponent of a widely discredited theory that vaccines cause autism, said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump asked him to chair a new commission on vaccines.

Hours later, however, a spokeswoman for Trump’s transition said that while Trump would like to create a commission on autism, no final decision had been made.

If Trump follows through, the stunning move would push up against established science, medicine and the government’s position on the issue. It comes after Trump — who has long been critical of vaccines — met at Trump Tower with Kennedy, who has spearheaded efforts to roll back child vaccination laws.

As the article points out, there is already a federal advisory committee on immunization composed of medical and public health experts — but as we have seen with his assertions that he knows more than “the Generals” and his contemptuous dismissal of uncongenial information from our national intelligence agencies, Trump believes he knows more than those “elitist” experts.

As an article in the New Yorker addressing Trump’s support for the “anti-vaxxer” movement  put it,

Asking Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to chair a commission on scientific integrity is like asking Ted Kaczynski to run the United States Postal Service.

In his Rolling Stone article, Kennedy wrote that vaccines exposed infants to a hundred and eighty-seven times the daily limit of ethyl mercury, as determined by the Environmental Protection Agency. If that were true, they would all have died immediately. Rolling Stone soon printed a correction—and then later corrected that correction. The actual figure was a hundred and eighty-seven micrograms, which is forty per cent higher than the levels recommended by the E.P.A. for methyl mercury (not ethyl mercury), and a tiny fraction of the figure cited in Kennedy’s paper.

I am no fan of Charles Krauthammer’s politics (to put it mildly), but he was trained as a doctor and is familiar with scientific evidence. He was appalled.

In a week packed with confirmation hearings and Russian hacking allegations, what was he doing meeting with Robert Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist pushing the thoroughly discredited idea that vaccines cause autism?…

Kennedy says that Trump asked him to chair a commission about vaccine safety. While denying that, the transition team does say that the commission idea remains open. Either way, the damage is done. The anti-vaccine fanatics seek any validation. This indirect endorsement from Trump is immensely harmful. Vaccination has prevented more childhood suffering and death than any other measure in history. With so many issues pressing, why even go there?

Conspiracy theories are embraced when people lack the information needed to evaluate their credibility. Civic literacy doesn’t require that citizens all be scientists–but it does require knowing the difference between a scientific theory and a wild-ass guess. It does require familiarity with the scientific method, and with the concept of falsification.

I think it was Neil DeGrasse Tyson who said “Science is true whether or not you believe in it.”  Rejecting reality is a prescription for disaster.

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If All Politics is Local

So yesterday, the President-Elect held what may have been the most surreal, embarrassing, childish such event ever held by someone preparing to assume that office. If there was any doubt about the need for resistance–the need to assure that this manifestly unqualified “man” and his collection of appalling cabinet choices do as little harm as possible–that display should have put it to rest.

So remember–local action can throw sand in the Orange One’s gears.

In the wake of the election, several cities have confirmed their intent to provide sanctuary to undocumented immigrants, in defiance of Trump’s threats to withhold billions in federal dollars.

Vox reports that Colorado is currently exploring how to keep an Obamacare marketplace open in a post-Obamacare era, continuing to use the technology the state built as a way to make shopping for insurance easier.

Jerry Brown has made it abundantly clear that California will continue to fight climate change. Aggressively.

Meanwhile, sites such as Resilience are actively encouraging what they call “anti-Fascist” organizing.

Policy innovation is already taking place at the municipal level. The practice of sanctuary cities is just one example. City governments in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Greater Boston, Chicago are increasingly funneling resources into worker-cooperative development, and devolving fiscal capacity to the community through participatory budgeting— both of which have also empowered undocumented immigrants in the policy realm as well as in their day-to-day economic well-being.

These developments are limited, even within the context of the cities themselves, but they can be pushed much further. The way for this to be done is through anti-fascist coalitions. In many of these cities there exists a smattering of progressive and even left-wing forces. This election has provided the sustained impetus for such groups to come together beyond the level of protest and contestation we have been seeing in recent weeks.

Although several of the suggestions in the Resilience article are framed in unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric and somewhat “out there” (and in my own opinion, highly unrealistic), the emphasis on local action has much to recommend it.

It’s great that several blue states will resist the incoming Administration, but many of us  live in Red states, where it’s easy to get discouraged. If we live in urban areas of those Red States,however, we do have options.  If you look at the vote distribution in the Presidential election, it becomes abundantly clear that city-dwellers decisively rejected Trump and Trumpism .

Those of us who live in urban areas, surrounded by others who reject the racism, misogyny and xenophobia of the incoming Administration, who believe in science and environmental protection and endorse the moral and economic imperative of an adequate social safety net need to map out our counter-insurgency.

We need to decide what measures we can take at the municipal level to counter Washington’s likely retreat from governance. And then we need to work hard to implement those measures.

Bitching on Facebook is no substitute for face-to-face civic engagement.

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Outrage Overload

I’ve never been a fan of outrage. People who respond to every news item with righteous indignation at high decibels tend to have their arguments dismissed–they are viewed (correctly in my opinion) as predictable and (eventually) tiresome. (Remember the old story about the boy who cried wolf?)

Instead, I have always believed that “pick your battles” is sound advice, as is “don’t sweat the small stuff, and most stuff is small stuff.”

The incoming Trump Administration is going to test that thesis. Severely. Virtually everything Trump is doing is genuinely outrageous, and in saner times would be so far beyond the pale that we wouldn’t be discussing a Trump Administration.

Case in point (just one of literally hundreds, and far from the worst): This week, “Celebrity Apprentice” returned to NBC with Donald Trump as an executive producer of the show.

Ignore, for now, this addition to the daily evidence that Trump is far more concerned with celebrity than governance of the most powerful nation on earth. As one activist organization put it, “one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, Comcast/NBCUniversal, has, for all intents and purposes, a contractual arrangement with the president-elect of the United States.”

Can we spell conflict of interest?

Trust in all media is at rock-bottom levels, and this simply increases public disdain for and skepticism about so-called “mainstream news.” What credibility can NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC  retain, when they have a business agreement with a sitting President–a man they have an obligation to objectively monitor and investigate. How are Americans supposed to trust that their reporting on Trump is not compromised by the fact that they are doing business with him?

The problem is, this obviously improper behavior of both Trump and NBC comes in the midst of an absolute avalanche of corruption and incompetence. Several of Trump’s cabinet nominees are disasters-in-waiting. His collusion with Russia is now too obvious to ignore. He proposes policies likely to have dramatically horrible consequences that he quite clearly doesn’t begin to understand (Complexity-R-Not Us). He continues to pander to the white supremacists whose votes elected him. And I try not to think about the fact that this childish, mentally-ill narcissist will shortly be handed the nuclear codes…

Checks and balances? The ideologues, lapdogs and looters in Congress–many, if not most of whom were elected thanks to gerrymandering– show every sign of facilitating the Orange disaster.

If our national version of democracy is majority rule that respects minority rights, America is no longer a democracy.

At this point, the only way to retrieve government “by the people” is for “the people” to engage in a level of activism we haven’t seen in a very long time.

If outrage fuels such an uprising, I may modify my distaste for it.

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Picturing Resistance

I would not have expected to find a manifesto for resistance to Donald Trump on Rooflines, a wonky publication of the National Housing Institute.

But there it was. With a reference to Gandhi, no less.

“Public opinion alone can keep a society pure and healthy.” – Gandhi

Gandhi believed in people—all people. He believed that everyday people both in India and England would reject colonialism if they really understood it. Gandhi’s civil disobedience, built on this faith, was carefully calculated to hold up a mirror to show people (on both sides) the true face of British colonialism. Rather than confront the superior British military, Ghandi won independence by changing public opinion.

Seen from Gandhi’s point of view, Donald Trump is a gift.

The critical problem the author identifies is a lack of public awareness. When large numbers of Americans don’t see injustices and corruption, when we are unaware of the fault-lines in our society, the result is apathy. History confirms the insight: it wasn’t until television brought images of vicious dogs being loosed upon peaceful demonstrators that public opinion coalesced behind civil rights; it wasn’t until that same television brought the Viet Nam war into American living rooms that support for the war decisively turned. It wasn’t until ubiquitous cell-phone cameras documented police misconduct that calls for better training and appropriate disciplinary action became too numerous to ignore.

Trump is the face that America has been hiding since the 1970s. It is almost impossible to fight an invisible enemy, but with the enemy out in the open, we have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to pick the kinds of fights that permanently change people’s hearts and minds and fundamentally alter what is politically possible…A majority of American adults (96 percent) believe in equal rights for women, and 87 percent have a personal relationship with someone who is gay. I don’t believe that the vast majority of Americans will let people be pushed back into the closet—if they manage to notice it happening. Given a clear choice, they won’t allow Muslims to be targeted or immigrant families divided.

The post makes the obvious point that as long as the people who voted for Trump continue to support him, Congress won’t stop him. The only strategy that will work is a strategy that will change public opinion–and that will require a unified effort by the various groups now working to protect everything from the environment to reproductive rights to fair housing laws.

If we fight for our separate issues separately, we have no chance of penetrating anyone’s media bubble or changing anyone’s mind. But if we stand together we can draw clear lines in the sand that highlight (sometimes symbolically) the choice we are facing about what kind of country to be. And if we draw the lines in the right places, when Trump crosses them, the American people will stand with us—and they will remember that choice for generations.

I would add two observations: first, those of us who are opposed to–and terrified by–Trump and Ryan and McConnell begin with a solid lead in that all-important public opinion. Thanks to the archaic Electoral College, Trump will be President, but Clinton won nearly 3 million more votes. The majority of people who are already engaged with the system, the people who have been paying attention, are with us. Our task is to engage those who have been passive, inattentive and oblivious.

Second, history and political psychology (and more recently social media) teach us how to engage those people. It isn’t through graphs, or philosophical arguments, or blogs like the one I’ve quoted. It isn’t even through exposes of Trump’s conflicts of interest, sexual assault history and corrupt practices. It isn’t through blogs like mine. It’s through stories. Pictures. Videos. The effects of Trumpism on our neighbors and friends. We need to support good journalism that tells those human stories, that brings individual examples of injustice and self-dealing out of obscurity and into the light.

We need a constant stream of stories illuminating the human toll of Trump’s appeal to the racist, mysogynistic, xenophobic underside of American society, stories illustrating the effects of policies that ravage the environment, benefit the plutocrats and crush the hardworking poor.

Sometimes, you have to paint a picture. This is one of those times.

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