From HUSTLER Magazine
Trump’s Chainsaw Massacre
Donald Trump came into office spouting the usual Republican mantra that government is the source of all of our problems. “If there’s a new regulation, they have to knock out two,” he said. So he’s taken a chainsaw to more than 860 federal regulations since he’s been in office, ground all that paper to pulp and buried it, claiming it’s fertilizer for his promised 3% GDP growth. But even if he achieves the 3%—and that’s questionable—what kind of barren, polluted ground will this corporate bumper crop leave behind?
So far Trump has killed, suspended or gutted regulations that restrict carbon emissions, oil drilling in the Arctic, power plants dumping toxins (including arsenic, lead and mercury) in rivers and lakes, use of brain-damaging pesticides, predatory payday loan sharks, concentrated media ownership, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms…and the list goes on and on.
Of course we wouldn’t need all of this government regulation if bankers and corporations behaved like angels, or even ethical human beings. But from Enron to Lehman Brothers to Merck to Wells Fargo, they’ve proven again and again that without regulatory oversight, they invariably go on white-collar crime sprees that cost the rest of us a bundle. The one-percenters rake in the spoils, while the greater public is poisoned, cheated and stuck with the bail-out bill.
Trump’s gang of appointed industry cronies and ignoramuses have been violating the law in their rush to deregulate—specifically, the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires any new deregulation to calculate the costs to society, just like new regulations are required to calculate the costs to industry. For instance, the rule restricting toxic dumping by power plants had a calculated net benefit of $565 million according to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists, who took into account items like healthcare costs and the expense of having to clean up polluted waterways. But for Trump’s short-term conquistadors, costs to society don’t even enter into the equation.
And whatever happened to the Glass-Steagall Act that Trump and the Republican Party platform vowed to reenact? That legislation kept our banking system and economy on a successful track for 60 years; yet Trump hasn’t uttered a word about it since he took office. Instead he’s letting the banksters run amok again.
The Department of Energy (DOE) is now almost as defunct as the EPA, with Rick Perry in charge—the man who wanted to abolish that agency, but couldn’t remember its name in the 2012 Presidential debates. What does the DOE do? Half of its budget is devoted to the security of our nuclear arsenal; managing the gigantic toxic dumps at places like Hanford; and tracking nuclear materials proliferating around the world, possibly into the hands of terrorists. Trump said that Perry “should be forced to take an IQ test” and then appointed this hostile idiot to “manage” the DOE.
It’s obvious that Trump and his whole team of third-rate hucksters and stooges should be forced to take an IQ test, but the average would probably be lower than Trump’s approval rating.
