Define The Trump Regime— James Baldwin's Prescient Old Warning: Ignorance Allied With Power...

Republicans Know Exactly How To Make America Worse

"Strike!" by Nancy Ohanian

On Tuesday, Ro Khanna gave a speech a Yale Law School. He referenced JD Vance but could have easily been talking about Señor Trumpanzyy, Russell Vought or Stephen Miller... or most anyone in the Trump Regime. “Vance,” he said, “has not only declared war on the courts, but on the universities. And it is no accident. As Stephen Kotkin observed in his study of Stalin, strongmen do not fear recessions or even failed wars as much as they fear the university.”

In a TV interview, James Baldwin once said “Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” It should be the MAGA motto. And today we have the most ignorant enemies of justice in charge of the U.S.— and determined to turn back the hands of time and wipe out everything Americans have won to make our lives better. Yesterday Coral Davenport looked at the Regime’s moves towards stripping hundreds of regulations from American law. MAGA America will have fewer medical staff on duty at nursing home. Coal miners will be exposed to Black Lung disease, having won the freedom with their votes for Trump to inhale the dust of crystalline silica, just like in the good old days. Not to mention mercury poisoning's big comeback. And Trump, Musk and Russ Vought are stealthily ignoring the rules and regulations about how to repeal rules and regulations!

“Trump and his allies,” wrote Davenport, “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 Vought has called a ‘woke and weaponized’ bureaucracy… ‘Many people don’t realize how high the American quality of life is because of the competent and stable enforcement of regulations, and if that goes away a lot of lives are at risk,’ said Steve Cicala, co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Project on the Economic Analysis of Regulation. ‘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.’… [T]he White House is planning another startling approach to regulations that it may not be able to immediately repeal. For those, according to people familiar with the discussions, it will simply stop enforcing the rules while going through the legal notice-and-comment process to roll them back— effectively ignoring them until they are off the books.”

Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers are ready for the moment: They have long hoped to see many regulations stripped away, particularly on labor and the environment. Many have delivered the White House wish lists of the rules they want terminated.

“This is a real opportunity to rebalance the regulatory environment,” said Marty Durbin, senior vice president for policy at the Chamber, the nation’s largest business lobby.

Trump’s agency heads have been preparing their target lists as next week’s deadline nears.

The E.P.A. administrator, Lee Zeldin, finished his homework early, offering what Trump allies called a model for other agencies. On a single day in February, Zeldin announced a list of 31 rules, from climate change to chemical pollution to wetlands protections, that the agency intends to roll back— including the rule on auto emissions that has bedeviled Trump since his first term.

At the Labor Department, Trump officials are eying the repeal of rules that increased the number of workers who are eligible for sick leave, minimum wage and overtime pay. 

At the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, regulators are targeting rules that expanded background checks for buyers and sellers of guns.

Federal Trade Commission officials are viewing a rule that forbids hotels and ticket vendors to advertise prices that fail to disclose certain fees.

And at the Agriculture Department, Secretary Brooke Rollins wants to streamline the procedures governing production speed in pork and poultry plants, allowing more meat to be processed each day. The changes would also replace some government food and safety inspectors in the plants with corporate inspectors.

The changes would cut “unnecessary red tape, empowering businesses to operate more efficiently and strengthening American agriculture— all while upholding the highest food safety standards,” Rollins said in a statement.

Mark Lauritsen, vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, said the changes would endanger workers’ bodies and consumers’ health.

“Worker safety and food safety goes hand in hand,” he said. “If the work force is under more pressure for speed, with less safety oversight, that can lead to a miscut on a carcass, bile that could leak out of the intestine, that contaminates the equipment, and then the next carcass and the next and the next.”

Who will protect us from this rein of terror? NO ONE. Americans who want to be protected need to keep focused on the midterms and making sure that the non-voters they know, are registered and ready to replace every single person in every single office who has an “R” next to their name— or, in primaries, who has a “D” but has been enabling Republicans, like Jared Golden (ME), Adam Gray (CA), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA), Don Davis (NC), Angie Craig (MN), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Laura Gillen (NY), Henry Cuellar (TX), April Delaney (MD), Mikie Sherrill (NJ), Greg Landsman (OH)… Oh and one more thing: a General Strike. It's time.