Burn it all down

The coup is ongoing.

JFC.

UPDATE 04:41 pm:  Yep.  It's what they said they were going to do.

Freedom! Think of the Children!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Speaking of regulating banks...

Eight years before the second-largest bank failure in American history occurred this week, the bank’s president personally pressed Congress to reduce scrutiny of his financial institution, citing the “low risk profile of our activities and business model”, according to federal records reviewed by the Lever.

Three years later – after the bank spent more than half a million dollars on federal lobbying – lawmakers obliged.

  Guardian

Jesus, these fuckers. 2008 wasn't enough.  This is exactly what people were warning about back then when banksters got bailed out instead of serving prison time they deserved.

[Failed Silicon Valley Bank] reportedly did not have a chief risk officer in the months leading up to the collapse, while more than 90% of its deposits were not insured.

In 2015, SVB’s president, Greg Becker, appeared before a Senate panel to push legislators to exempt more banks – including his own – from new regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

[...]

Touting “SVB’s deep understanding of the markets it serves, our strong risk management practices”, Becker argued that his bank would soon reach $50bn in assets, which under the law would trigger “enhanced prudential standards”, including more stringent regulations, stress tests and capital requirements for his and other similarly sized banks.

In his testimony, Becker insisted that $250bn was a more appropriate threshold.

[...]

Becker, who reportedly sold $3.6m of his own stock two weeks ago, in the lead-up to the bank’s collapse...

Of course he did. And will he go to jail?

Two months later, SVB added the former Obama treasury department official Mary Miller to its board, noting she had previously helped oversee “financial regulatory reforms”.

And what's her cut?

[T]he Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act of 2015 [...] was the precursor to legislation ultimately signed by President Donald Trump that increased the regulatory threshold for stronger stress tests to $250bn.

Trump signed the bill despite a report from Democrats on Congress’s joint economic committee warning that under the new law, SVB and other banks of its size “would no longer be subject to nearly any enhanced regulations”.

That was the fucking point.

The bill was supported in the Senate by 50 Republicans and 17 Democrats, including the Democratic Virginia Senator Mark Warner, for whom Becker held a fundraiser at his Menlo Park, California, home in 2016. [...] The bank’s political action committee also donated a total of $10,000 to Warner’s campaigns in the 2016 and 2018 election cycles.

In 2019, when the Federal Reserve proposed regulations implementing the deregulatory law, financial watchdogs warned that its regulations on Category IV institutions – as SVB was later classified due to its size and other risk factors – were far too weak.

“The proposal to significantly weaken enhanced prudential standards for Category IV firms could be disastrous,” Better Markets, a non-profit advocating for stricter financial regulations, wrote in a comment on the Federal Reserve’s proposal. “Moreover, these are not small or insignificant firms. Recall that the smallest among this class of banks is over twice the size of the $50bn banks that automatically required enhanced prudential regulation under the Dodd-Frank Act as originally enacted.”

[...]

In 2021, SVB passed the threshold of $100bn under management, triggering some additional scrutiny as a Category IV bank but remaining exempt from the more frequent and detailed analyses that regulators perform to determine whether banks above $250bn of assets have sufficient capital to withstand a crisis.

[...]

SVB is the biggest bank to collapse since Washington Mutual failed in 2008 during the financial crisis, and the second-biggest bank failure in US history.

[...]

In 2019, Becker was elected to serve on the board of directors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Becker left the board on Friday.

No need to go to a country without an extradition treaty. Nothing will happen to him here.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 03/12/2023:

And, yes, the deregulation was signed into law by Trump.

Just like the railroad regulations were rolled  back by Trump.  But the fallout on both happened in the Biden administration, so that's who will take the blame.

UPDATE 03/13/2023:

And she's right.

UPDATE 03/14/2023:

There goes another one.  Signature Bank in New York has folded.

Pete's honeymoon is over

“Pete Buttigieg has taken a lot of bullets for the president on this,” one senior Democrat said Wednesday, insisting on anonymity to talk about a crisis that the person was not authorized to discuss.

[...]

Buttigieg was prepared to speak about the incident if asked, according to the DOT official — but for 10 days, no interviewer asked him.

[...]

Buttigieg acknowledged in a CBS News interview Tuesday that he “could have spoken sooner about how strongly I felt about this incident, and that’s a lesson learned for me.”

  Politico

I might have thought that would have been a lesson learned while he was a mayor in Indiana. He's done a lot of time on Fox News. Surely he knows the character of MAGA. They'd already been debasing him about the airline industry scheduling fiasco and FAA computer failure. He should have known to get out in front of this much bigger disaster and not wait to be asked to talk about it. Lesson learned, indeed. Hope it's not too late.

Three people in Buttigieg’s orbit admit to being exasperated by the furor, saying nobody asked him about the derailment in any of the 23 media interviews he conducted during the first 10 days after the accident. Then critics lambasted him for not speaking sooner.

Since then, conservative media outlets have used images of the Feb. 3 wreck — including the flames, plumes of black smoke and piles of dead fish — to lambaste his oversight of rail safety. They’ve also criticized his failure to visit the crash site.

[...]

The Ohio derailment comes after a series of other transportation-related snarls that have happened on Buttigieg’s watch, including a threatened nationwide rail strike, airline scheduling meltdowns and a Federal Aviation Administration computer failure that grounded flights nationwide. These have brought him unsparing criticism from GOP lawmakers and conservative media outlets, which have portrayed him as overwhelmed by or detached from the job — and mocked his interest in issues such as racial justice and climate change.

[...]

Fox News’ prime-time coverage of the derailment on Tuesday included a Photoshopped image portraying him as a suit-wearing bicyclist grinning in front of the wreckage. Former President Donald Trump weighed in during a visit to East Palestine on Wednesday, telling reporters, “Buttigieg should’ve been here already.”

Come on, folks. You know you can't win the critics wars. Expect it. Deal with it.

Employees of both DOT and EPA were at the scene within hours after the derailment, as were crash investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board. The heads of DOT’s Federal Railroad Administration and the department’s hazardous materials agency visited East Palestine on Wednesday, though their trip was upstaged by Trump’s appearance.

If you're going to go political - go straight to Biden. Which, of course, they have.

[A] White House spokesperson, also called it misguided for Republicans to expect Buttigieg to personally rush to the site of a train wreck.

“It’s like them pretending they think the State Department takes point on rescuing people in the water during hurricanes instead of the Coast Guard,” Bates said. “Case in point, under the last administration EPA was also in the lead on similar derailments.”

[...]

More than 1,000 train derailments happen in the U.S. during a given year, and Transportation secretaries don’t normally go to the scene. Rail safety veteran Bob Lauby said that in his 23 years at the NTSB and the Federal Railroad Administration, he remembers just one time when a secretary visited the site — and it was 30 years ago, when the deadliest incident in Amtrak’s history killed 47 people near Mobile, Ala.

[...]

“During the initial response phase, I’ve followed the norm of staying out of the way of the independent NTSB,” [Buttigieg] tweeted Wednesday. “Now that we’re into the policy phase, I’ll be visiting.”

[...]

Buttigieg also sent a scathing letter to the CEO of Norfolk Southern, the railroad involved in the disaster, for what he called the “vigorous resistance by your industry to increased safety measures.”

Buttigieg’s supporters have accused Republicans of showing only newfound interest in rail safety, noting that Trump’s administration had shelved an Obama-era rule that would have required faster brakes on trains carrying highly flammable materials. (The rule would not have applied to the train that derailed in Ohio, NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy wrote on Twitter last week.) Trump’s DOT also ended regular rail safety audits of railroads and killed a pending rule requiring freight trains to have at least two crew members.

[...]

[W]hen Norfolk Southern or EPA tell communities the air and water are safe, people don’t believe them.

That skepticism hasn’t kept [Michael] Regan, the EPA chief, from getting the warm welcome from Republicans that has eluded Buttigieg. Those include DeWine and others who have met Regan during his two trips to East Palestine.

Regan isn't gay.

Buttigieg met [at the derailment site on Thursday] with U.S. Department of Transportation investigators who, according to Buttigieg's office, were on the ground in East Palestine hours after the train derailed on Feb. 3 near the Pennsylvania border.

[...]

Nearly three weeks later, the burned-out husks of several tanker cars sit off to the side of the railway that travels directly through downtown East Palestine. A strong odor of chemicals permeates the air.

[...]

None of the cars exploded in the derailment, Keltz said. But days after the crash, Norfolk Southern conducted a controlled burn of vinyl chloride to avoid an explosion, releasing hydrogen chloride and the toxic gas phosgene into the air.

[...]

Buttigieg in the wake of the derailment is calling on Norfolk Southern and other rail companies to expedite the implementation of DOT 117 train cars, which are designed to prevent the release of the car's contents if something happens. Companies must have those cars in place by 2029, but the transportation officials want to see it happen sooner.

  MSN

I heard someone discuss the issue with the braking systems that companies have been resisting. The new proposal for brakes would be a system where each and every car has brakes that are all applied in emergency situations, rather than stacking up like dominoes and derailing.

Buttigieg during his visit to this Ohio town near the Pennsylvania border sought to address criticism from some that he should have visited sooner. In a visit to the village on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump described the federal response to the train derailment as a "betrayal."

When questioned by reporters, Buttigieg said he was trying to strike a fine balance between being a public-facing official and giving NTSB room to investigate the incident.

Yes, Trump went to a McDonald's and bought everybody there "a nice meal," and gave people "good" Trump water "and some lesser water." Very helpful. Still, Biden and Buttigieg left themselves open by not visiting the site sooner. I know Biden was busy getting his trip to Ukraine lined up, but you can't turn your back on middle America and expect not to be assaulted for it.

Buttigieg expressed regret for not tweeting about the crash until a week and a half after it happened. "I felt strongly about this and could have expressed that sooner. Again, I was taking pains to respect the role that I have and the role I don’t have but that should not have stopped me from weighing in about how I felt in this community," he said.

Too little, too late, Pete.

“To any national political figure who has decided to get involved with the plight of East Palestine, I have a simple message, which is I need your help," he added. "If you’re serious about this, there is more that we can do to prevent more communities from going through this.”

In addition to stronger rail cars, Buttigieg wants federal officials to increase the maximum fine for railroads that violate safety rules. The figure is currently $225,455, which Buttigieg previously called a "rounding error" for companies that rake in billions of dollars.

Buttigieg also wants Congress to look at how trains are classified when they transport hazardous materials through states. The Norfolk Southern train was not considered a high-hazard flammable train, meaning it could pass through Ohio without any notification to the state.

[...]

"What we have seen is that industry goes to Washington, and they get their way," Buttigieg said.

You want to talk about that rail workers strike the Biden administration shut down, Pete? Those guys that have to work long hours with no - zero - sick days, and too few crew on board, for instance?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What caused the derailment? The interim report.

UPDATE 02/24/2023:

Too bad he didn't have some Trump air.  

UPDATE 02/25/2023:

That would be James Comer.

Destroying America from within

Over the course of the past week, the court handed down three landmark decisions, each disastrous in its own right. But taken together they reveal a dangerously hidebound court intent on turning the constitution into an instrument of obstruction, a formidable obstacle to solving some of the nation’s most pressing problems.

First, in New York State Rifle v Bruen, the court, by a 6-3 vote, struck down a New York law that required a person demonstrate “proper cause” to carry a concealed handgun.

[...]

A day after its emphatic defense of a right never recognized in over 200 years of constitutional jurisprudence, the court brazenly eliminated a constitutional right that had stood for half a century. In its decision in Dobbs v Women’s Health, overturning Roe v Wade, the court demonstrated how inaptly the label “conservative” applies to the present six-person majority. There is nothing conservative about a court willing to upset established precedent and to radically purge the constitution of a right that had been recognized and affirmed by numerous justices over the course of decades.

Roe, for whatever its weaknesses, recognized that while states have an interest in protecting unborn life, women have a right to “bodily integrity” and “personal autonomy in matters of family” that includes the right to terminate a pregnancy. Roe demanded a delicate act of balancing the state’s interest against a woman’s right, a balance that the court has now eliminated. [...] How a woman deals with an unwanted pregnancy is no longer an issue of personal choice; it is a matter of state control.

Those who defend the Dobbs decision as simply returning the abortion issue to the democratic process (the same democratic process that cannot be trusted when it comes to matters of gun control), overlook the fact that the court has simply eliminated the kind of balancing act often demanded of our most sensitive social problems.

[...]

Finally, in West Virginia v EPA, the same six-person majority held that in passing the Clean Air Act, Congress never granted the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to aggressively regulate the energy industry. While the text of the Clean Air Act authorizes the agency to implement the “best system of emission reduction”, the court concluded that when it comes to “major questions” of “economic and political significance”, Congress must “speak with particular clarity” in authorizing bold regulatory action.

[...]

Never mind that the court invented the “major questions” doctrine out of whole cloth. And never mind that Congress has more than sufficient means for reining in a wayward agency, by, if need be, amending the authorizing statute.

[...]

Congress broadly delegates regulatory power precisely because it lacks the institutional expertise to implement granular and effective policy, and now the court, with even less institutional expertise, installs itself as the last say on the delegated powers of agencies. Most catastrophically, the court’s decision limits the power of the executive branch to address the climate crisis, handing the matter back to a dysfunctional Congress stocked with partisans who continue to deny the very existence of the problem.

[...]

If all this were not bad enough, the court ended its present term by announcing that it had agreed to hear Moore v Harper in the fall. It is widely feared that the case, which involves a North Carolina redistricting plan, will provide the court’s reactionary core the opportunity to adopt the so-called “independent state legislature theory”, a previously fringe notion that the constitution gives state legislatures plenary control over elections, free from the oversight of state courts and regardless of contrary provisions in state constitutions. Adopting this dangerous theory could, for example, give legislators spouting the big lie in swing states the power to determine the outcome of a presidential election.

  Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Justice Stephen Breyer's last day on the court is today

Breyer, who had announced his retirement in January, sent a letter to President Joe Biden on Wednesday confirming that he will leave the high court as its current term ends on Thursday.

“The Court has announced that tomorrow, beginning at 10 am, it will hand down all remaining opinions ready during this Term. Accordingly, my retirement from active service… will be effective on Thursday, June 30, 2022, at noon,” Breyer wrote.

[...]

[Ketanji Brown] Jackson will join a heavily conservative court, where the liberal minority has been on the dissenting side in most major contentious cases.

[...]

The court’s next term is set to start early in October.

  alJazeera

And, of course, today's decision on the EPA's authority was to limit it.

The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a decision limiting the power of regulatory agencies within the federal government, saying the Environmental Protection Agency overstepped its authority in 2015 when it tried to limit greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants.

West Virginia led a coalition of Republican-leaning states and coal producers that asked the Supreme Court to weigh in and clarify the limits of the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority, raising broader questions about how far the regulatory authority of federal agencies extends. The coalition said powerful and wide-reaching policies should come from Congress, not agency-level regulators.

  WSJ

Come November, vote for more Democrats, especially to the Senate.

Surprisingly, the Court allowed Biden to end Trump's "Remain in Mexico" policy. Next session, they will take up cases about voting districts in Louisiana and Alabama.

UPDATE:

If you thought there was a bottom to GOP freedoming, think again

In a question-and-answer session Monday at the Bipartisan Policy Center, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina, argued that restaurants should be allowed to “opt out” of certain regulations - such as employees washing their hands. Such a rule, he says, is an example of how America is “one of the most regulated nations in the history of the planet.”

[...]

“I said that I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says, ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom.’ The market will take care of that,” Tillis said.

“If you let a business or industry opt out as long as they indicate through proper disclosure, through advertising, through employee literature, there’s this level of regulations that maybe they’re on the books,” Tillis said. “But maybe you can make a market based decision as to whether or not they should apply to you.”

The Republican senator from North Carolina went on to say that a move like that by a restaurant would probably result in it going out of business.

  ABC

Depends on its location.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Burn it all down

I want safe bacon!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Burn it all down

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Nancy's first day

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) defended her vacation to Hawaii during the government shutdown, taking a jab at President Trump on the day she is set to be elected House Speaker.

[...]

In an interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie on "Today," Pelosi said [...] she would have been easily able to return to Washington if necessary.

“The president may not know this, but Hawaii is part of the United States of America, maybe he doesn’t realize that,” she said. “That’s why he said Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States when he was born in Hawaii.”

“Hawaii has airports and airlines and telephones, so the communication is good,” she said.

  The Hill

And he won't dare respond.

The 116th Congress convenes today, with Democrats taking a majority in the House amid a partial government shutdown that enters its 13th day.

[...]

Lawmakers will vote today to make Pelosi the Speaker of the House for a second time, making her the first and only woman to hold that position.

  The Hill

I guess we're not allowing for a Trump-like surprise vote on this.

One of the first things Pelosi will do as Speaker is bring two spending bills to the floor for a vote. The Democratic legislation would fully fund the government, but will not include the money Trump wants for the border wall, effectively rendering it dead-on-arrival.

[...]

In an interview that will air this morning on NBC’s “Today,” Pelosi will tell Savannah Guthrie that Democrats will not budge on money for the border wall.

Guthrie: “Are you willing to come up and give him some of this money for the wall?”

Pelosi: “No.”

Guthrie: “Because apparently that's the sticking point.”

Pelosi: “No, no. Nothing for the wall.”

I wonder if Nancy will remind her that the Democrats already voted once to give Trump money for the wall, but he wouldn't approve the DACA guarantees as a trade.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that his chamber will not take up the legislation, calling it a “total non-starter.”

[...]

McConnell said he’s hopeful the two sides can reach a deal, but that it might take “weeks.”

While Congress has largely been out of town for the 13 days of the shutdown, pressure will grow if the impasse continues.

And it doesn't seem like a well-supported idea for Mitch to refuse to even bring a House approved bill to a vote. ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi (D Calif.) in an interview that aired on Thursday said that she believes it is an "open discussion" on whether special counsel Robert Mueller could seek an indictment of President Trump.

"I think that that is an open discussion," Pelosi said on NBC's "Today." "I think that is an open discussion in terms of the law."

  The Hill

Way to scare Old Lardass, Nance.

“He was used to serving with a Republican Congress, House and Senate that was a rubber stamp to him. That won't be the case,” Pelosi told USA Today. "Oversight of government by the Congress is our responsibility."

Pelosi and other Democrats have laid out a host of areas where they intend to conduct oversight or investigations. Top Democrats have in recent months said they plan to look into the president's finances, his daughter Ivanka's use of private email and his foreign policy decisions.

Pelosi told USA Today that she does not intend to seek grounds for impeachment unless it's "clearly bipartisan."

“The facts will indicate a path and I don't think we should impeach a president for any political reason, but I don't think we can ignore any behavior that requires attention and that was all based on the facts," Pelosi told USA Today.

  The Hill

There is ample reason to impeach Trump, from his obstruction of justice (criminal reasons) to his lack of fitness for office (25th Amendment), but after listening to wiser heads on the case, I agree that it would not do to impeach him in the house without bipartisan agreement and Mitch McConnell in control of the Senate.

As for Ivanka's use of private email, I hope that being in the top three reported here was simply a choice by the reporter, because it's way down the list of things that need to be investigated. It's there. But to start out with something like that would be sure to make MAGAheads, and perhaps all Republicans, dig in even deeper.

Top progressive lawmakers Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said this week they will vote against bylaws to govern the 116th Congress, a challenge to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the likely next Speaker.

They are objecting to the inclusion of what's known as a pay-as-you-go budgetary rule, which requires that legislation be deficit neutral, meaning any costs would need to be offset with new revenue or cuts elsewhere.

  The Hill

"It is terrible economics. The austerians were wrong about the Great Recession and Great Depression. At some point, politicians need to learn from mistakes and read economic history," Khanna tweeted on Wednesday.

[...]

Yeah, that was almost as dumb an idea as Trump's "for every new regulation we make, we have to drop two old ones." (BTW, according to the Washington Examiner, it was 16 for 1 as of July 2017.)

But the two failed to convince other progressives in Congress to vote against the package, a good early sign for Pelosi, who will have to work to keep an ideologically fractured caucus together.

House Democratic leaders adopted pay-go rules the last time they were in power, and Pelosi and incoming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) indicated months ago that they planned to adopt pay-go rules again if Democrats won control of the House in the midterm elections.

[...]

Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill shot back, arguing pay-go would be an improvement from current GOP rules, which he called "CUTGO," that prohibit tax increases from being used to pay for legislation.

Without a pay-go rule in the House, he said, the White House budget office would be required by law to offset deficits from new legislation by cutting certain mandatory spending, such as Medicare.

"We must replace CUTGO to allow Democrats to designate appropriate offsets (including revenue increases). A vote AGAINST the Democratic Rules package is a vote to let Mick Mulvaney make across the board cuts, unilaterally reversing Democratic initiatives and funding increases," he wrote, referencing the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

The pay-go rule would not block deficit-producing legislation from going forward, but it would create a legislative roadblock.

Ideologically, it's probably something that sounds "responsible" to conservatives, so it's probably inevitable.

Eighteen Democrats would need to vote against the rules package on Jan. 3 to sink it. A failure to pass the rules package would be a significant setback for Pelosi on the same day she's expect to reclaim the Speaker's gavel.

That, too, and at this point, the Dems can't afford to be fractured.

Progressives got a win during the negotiations over the rules package when leadership agreed not to include a proposal to require a three-fifths supermajority for legislation that would raise taxes on lower-and middle-class families.

That's a progressive win?

Khanna, the first vice chair of the CPC in the new Congress, told The Hill later on Wednesday that he is sticking to his decision to vote against the rules package.

[...]

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who challenged Pelosi for the House Minority Leader position in 2016, hadn’t decided Wednesday evening how he would vote on the rules package but said that pay-go was a “no go” for him.

“We have too many investments to make to rebuild the middle class and make us globally competitive,” he said in a statement. “Critical investments in education, infrastructure, and health care should not be held hostage to budgetary constraints that Republicans have never respected anyhow.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the only Senate member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, chimed in as well.

“At a time when climate change threatens our planet, when our infrastructure is crumbling, when 30 million people have no health insurance, I'm concerned that the concept of PAYGO will make it harder for Congress to address the many crises facing our working families,” he tweeted Wednesday, though he did not specify whether he was referring to the proposed House rule, an existing Senate rule, or the 2010 law that requires mandatory cuts.

Some budget experts said concern over the rule was overblown precisely because the House rules could be waived for high-profile bills.

In other words, it's meaningless?

Khanna said a waiver to the pay-go rule may require a House vote.

"We should not give Republicans a talking point every time we ask for a waiver," he told The Hill. "We need to reject the entire frame of the austerity school of economics. We need to argue that our policies are pro-growth."

That sounds like the only advantage, and it's for the Republicans.

"In a prior life, I spent plenty of time trying to make a House PAYGO rule have teeth and consequences," Zach Moller, who previously worked as a senior policy analyst at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, wrote in response to Khanna. "This PAYGO rule, as proposed, is not that. Progressives should not lose a minute of sleep over it."

Another reason Congress is full of bullshit. Why are they making rules that have no teeth?

Anyway, new Congress. Let the bullshit resume!

Banksters need LESS regulation say 16 Dem senators

This week, 16 Senate Democrats voted for the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act. It’s a cleverly misnamed bill that would peel back regulations on 25 of the 32 largest banks in the country, removing a slew of consumer protections while relaxing stress tests and other reporting requirements for a range of financial institutions that were developed in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Ten of those Democrats co-sponsored it. This morning at the Congressional Progressive Caucus strategy retreat in Baltimore, [Elizabeth] Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, used her keynote address to call them out.

[...]

Warren told the annual gathering of progressive elected officials and advocates, “Just this week we lost the first round in the battle of a bad banking bill — a bill that would take the reins off of Wall Street’s most reckless actors and put as greater risk of another financial crisis. When I saw a handful of my Democratic colleagues vote for it, it felt like a stab in the heart. Not for me, but for all the homeowners who were cheated and all the taxpayers who bailed out those banks. That is wrong.”

While she was angry at Wall Street, she said, she felt most betrayed by her own colleagues. “It is so hard to fight against all the money and all the lobbying. It is so hard to fight when we fight and lose. It’s worse when some of our teammates don’t even show up for the fight,” she said.

  The Intercept

Some? Sixteen of 44 Democratic senators is over a third of them.

A few days earlier Warren tweeted out the names of the officials who had voted for the deregulatory measure. “Senate Republicans voted unanimously for the #BankLobbyistAct. But this bill wouldn’t be on the path to becoming law without the support of these Democrats. The Senate just voted to increase the chances your money will be used to bail out big banks again,” she wrote.

[...]

Framed as providing relief to community banks, the bill Warren was referring to this morning would — among other things — exempt banks valued at under $250 billion from abiding by some regulations imposed by Dodd-Frank, intended to help prevent against the kinds of systemic risk that led the last recession to spiral. Countrywide Financial was $200 billion when it collapsed and shook the foundations of the mortgage market. It would further exempt small banks from following the Volcker Rule, while also loosening restrictions on the U.S.-subsidiaries of foreign-based banks. It could also open the door for community banks to discriminate against rural borrowers and people of color.

Oh, if they can, they will.

Here's the Senate roll call on the bill.

....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Charter provides a positive data point for Libertarians and deregulators

Charter is raising the minimum wage for its 95,000 employees to $15 per hour, including target commissions, the company announced in a blog post Friday. The telecom giant is crediting "the general deregulatory environment" in Washington for allowing it to increase its workforce and capital investments.

  Axios

I'm feeling skeptical. Why?

Charter says the regulatory environment will allow the company to invest in more than just employees, but also its high-speed broadband network in rural areas.

Re-elect Trump.

I'm glad to hear about the pay raise. I'd be even happier if they raised it to an actual living wage. But now I wonder what they want deregulated aside from their win on net netrality.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Actually, this is pretty good

Liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore threatened to begin fracking off the Florida coast near President Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.

His tweet appeared to be a response to a new administration proposal to increase offshore drilling for natural gas.

"Our fracking off the coast of Mar-a-Lago begins right after Labor Day," Moore said in a tweet referencing his upcoming TNT documentary series "Live From the Apocalypse." "I’ve already got the rig — a beautiful Halliburton G-0008 fracking system with a monster Caterpillar engine!"

"Here’s our fracker! We’ll be drilling right off the coast of Mar-a-Lago," Moore continued. "God Bless You Donald Trump for making this possible! The oil we drill just off your beach will pay 4 our entire show!"

[...]

Moore's tweets also come after the Trump administration rolled back offshore drilling safety regulations that were created after the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 killed 11 people and sent at least 4.9 million barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico.

  The Hill

Don't actually drill, though. Just park a honking big rig right off the Mar-A-Lago beach.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Why the rich get richer

This article says this incredible rise is not due to trade, information technology, unions, immigration or rising ranks/earnings of executives or company managers.

So What’s Going On?

Almost all of the growth in top American earners has come from just three economic sectors: professional services, finance and insurance, and health care, groups that tend to benefit from regulatory barriers that shelter them from competition.

[...]

Problems [...] include subsidies for the financial sector’s risk-taking; overprotection of software and pharmaceutical patents; the escalation of land-use controls that drive up rents in desirable metropolitan areas; favoritism toward market incumbents via state occupational licensing regulations (for example, associations representing lawyers, doctors and dentists that block efforts allowing paraprofessionals to provide routine services at a lower price without their supervision).

[...]

The United States also stands out in terms of how much money its elite professionals earn relative to the median worker.

[...]

This ratio, the elite professions premium, is very highly correlated with income inequality across countries. 

       New York Times

But you know - say it with me, Trumpettes: The New York Times is FAKE NEWS.  (And the rich people deserve it.)

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

We voted for Trump because he's for the little guy

[A] a Trump administration decision to block proposed agriculture regulations may blow up [small turkey farmers' prospects], preserving the multibillion-dollar meat industry’s power over the smaller turkey farmers.

[...]

Obama-era rules that had yet to take effect would have given smaller farmers more power to set the terms of their deals with massive meat companies, empowering the growers to sue and better define abusive practices by processors and distributors under federal law. Trump’s Agriculture Department killed two of the proposed rules, one of which would have taken effect in October.

[...]

Distributors and large poultry growers, for their part, have praised the decision to ditch the proposed Obama-era regulations, which were developed under USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration and are commonly referred to as the GIPSA rules. If allowed to go into effect, they "would have opened the floodgates to frivolous and costly litigation," said Mike Brown, president of the National Chicken Council.

Meanwhile, turkey farmers have fewer and fewer choices about where to sell their birds. Contract farmers account for 69 percent of turkey production, according to the USDA. As of 2011, 58 percent of turkey slaughter was controlled by just four companies: Butterball, Jennie-O, Cargill, and Farbest Foods.

  Politico

I just find it so hard to sympathize, even though I know I should. These Trump voters who thought he would work for them, just because he said so, obviously didn't bother to look into his personal dealings with contractors and other businessmen. They were too crazed about the possibility of having a woman president, I guess. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

We don't need no steenkeen regulations

Perhaps they learned they needed to be sure they hid what they were doing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Deconstructing America - Part Whatever

I'm sorry. It's a trivial complaint, I know. But what the hell is it with his mouth? Is he creating his own bullhorn? Can he hoover up more oxygen like that?  When they knock his teeth out in prison, it will be a perfect place for somebody.

Yes, that was disgusting and perhaps uncalled for, but how many of you are thinking the same thing? And don't pretend he shouldn't be in prison.

Okay, that's out of my system.

For now.

Here's the story:

President Trump entered office pledging to cut red tape, and within weeks, he ordered his administration to assemble teams to aggressively scale back government regulations.

[...]

So far, the process has been scattershot. Some agencies have been soliciting public feedback, while others refuse even to disclose who is in charge of the review. In many cases, responses to public records requests have been denied, delayed or severely redacted.

[...]

The EPA also rejected requests to release the appointment calendar of the official leading its team — a former top executive for an industry-funded political group — even as she met privately with industry representatives.

[...]

Most government agencies have declined to disclose information about their deregulation teams. But ProPublica and The New York Times identified 71 appointees, including 28 with potential conflicts, through interviews, public records and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Some appointees are reviewing rules their previous employers sought to weaken or kill, and at least two may be positioned to profit if certain regulations are undone.

The appointees include lawyers who have represented businesses in cases against government regulators, staff members of political dark money groups, employees of industry-funded organizations opposed to environmental rules and at least three people who were registered to lobby the agencies they now work for.

[...]

“Competition will be fierce,” the law firm Clark Hill, which represents businesses pitching the Environmental Protection Agency, said in a marketing memo. “In all likelihood, interested parties will need to develop a multi-pronged strategy to expand support and win pre-eminence over competing regulatory rollback candidates.”

Jane Luxton, a lawyer at the firm, said she advised clients to pay for economic and legal analyses that government agencies, short on staff, could use to expedite changes. She declined to identify the clients.

  ProPublica, co-published with the New York Times

Nice. Real nice.

Continue reading.

Deconstructing America

Since the Trump administration began, more than 90 Obama-era federal regulations have been revoked or delayed or enforcement has been suspended, in many cases based on requests from the industries the rules target.

In many cases, records show that the changes came after appeals by corporate lobbyists and trade association executives, who see a potentially historic opportunity to lower compliance costs and drive up profits.

[...]

Congress, with Mr. Trump’s approval, has erased three Obama-era rules in the last month, lifting regulations related to coal mining and oil and gas exploration, as well as the sale of guns to the mentally ill. More than 25 additional rules could also be erased in the coming weeks, with the House having already voted to eliminate nearly half of them.

[...]

On a near daily basis, regulated industries are now sending in specific requests to the Trump administration for more rollbacks, including recent appeals from 17 automakers to rescind an agreement to increase mileage standards for their fleets, and another from pharmaceutical industry figures to reverse a new rule that tightens scrutiny over the marketing of prescription drugs for unapproved uses.

[...]

Mr. Trump has separately signed executive orders directing agencies to pursue the reversal of other rules, including a requirement that financial advisers act in the interest of their clients, and a rule aimed at protecting drinking water from pollution.

[...]

New White House appointees [...] have also personally intervened in recent weeks to block, delay or start the process to nullify other rules, such as a requirement that corporations publish tallies comparing chief executive pay with average employee wages.

[...]

Ajit Pai, a Republican whom Mr. Trump recently named as the F.C.C. chairman, has also made clear that he intends to push to roll back or abandon several other major rules, including the landmark net neutrality regulation intended to ensure equal access to content on the internet

[...]

Mr. Trump, in his address to Congress last week, called it “a historic effort to massively reduce job-crushing regulations,” a line that drew thunderous applause from Republicans.

[...]

“Americans did not vote to be exposed to more health, safety, environmental and financial dangers,” said one letter, signed by leaders of 137 nonprofit groups, that was sent to the White House last week.

  NYT

Non-profit groups? Why that's downright un-American.

The Trump administration could face a host of [...] challenges — the new requirement that agencies must find two regulations to eliminate before enacting any new rules is already being challenged in federal court by two liberal groups.

In addition, Democratic attorneys general from New York, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Oregon and Vermont have threatened in recent days to sue the Trump administration to try to block some of the regulatory rollbacks.

Enough with threats. Get to it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile, Down Here Where the Economy Is Booming...

Color Me Jaded

” If you look at the lobbying effort that takes place it Washington it is beyond belief. When we look at what happened at Wall Street and the collapse of the Wall Street as a result of deregulation, we can never forget that Wall Street spent $5 billion over a ten year period lobbying for that deregulation.

“I don’t look at Congress having a personality defect, people can’t get along and all that stuff, that’s not the issue,” he continued. “The issue is Congress is dominated by people who have a whole lot of money and if you look at what has happened in recent years, in fact Congress has been working very, very well for the top 1 percent or the top 2 percent.”

[...]

Sanders has introduced the Saving American Democracy Amendment to the Senate. The constitutional amendment would state that corporations are not entitled to the same constitutional rights as people, ban corporate campaign donations to candidates, and give Congress and the states broad authority to regulate spending in elections.

  Raw Story

Well, that won’t fly.

And thanks, Bernie, for waiting until people were in the streets before you put forth your proposal. You wouldn’t want to have done it before you knew it wasn’t popular to have Congress bought and paid for.

And speaking of people in the streets…

Anti-Wall Street protesters remained in a camp of about 20 tents in the Northern California college town of Berkeley on Thursday, a day after authorities threatened to stop overnight camping.

Rising tensions over a possible eviction in Berkeley came as authorities in Tuscon, Arizona, said they had shut down a similar camp at a park in that city.

[...]

Protesters had been at the park since November 3, and there were up to 10 of them at various times, but a high number of crimes at the site led to the decision to shut it down, said city spokesman Michael Graham.

  Raw Story

What’s a high number of crimes for 10 people in tents I wonder.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.