Trump for the working class..

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took steps Thursday to roll back Lifeline — a program that subsidizes broadband and phone service for low income households. The FCC voted in a 3-2 split along party lines favoring Republicans to reform the program during the agency’s monthly open meeting. Republicans, including Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), praised the agency’s decision to begin pushing the program towards jurisdiction of the states.

FCC votes to limit program funding internet access for low income communities | TheHill

Then there are those Republican tax proposals..

It lavishes generous permanent tax breaks on corporations, while modest tax cuts for the middle class would vanish into thin air after 2025. Millionaires would enjoy average tax cuts of $5,580 in 2027, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, at which point families earning less than $75,000 a year would pay more taxes. Let that sink in. This tax bill would take money from working families and give it to the world’s wealthiest people. The hardest hit would be in high-cost states like California, New Jersey and New York because the bill gets rid of important deductions and the credit for state and local taxes.

Further, it calls for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s mandate for most people to have health insurance. This would leave 13 million people without insurance and drive up premiums for many others who are already struggling to afford coverage, all in the interest of reducing spending by $338 billion so Republican lawmakers can cut taxes for big businesses, despite Democratic opposition.

And if that weren’t bad enough, this bill, along with a similar measure that the House passed on Thursday with lightning speed, would, because of a 2010 budget law, trigger automatic cuts to Medicare and other important programs that low-income and middle-class Americans depend on. All told, the bills would add more than a trillion dollars to the federal debt for future generations to pay off. What is this in service of?

A Tax-Cut Bill to Make Scrooge McDuck Proud - The New York Times

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Railing against Wall Street during the campaign, doing it's bidding when in power..

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s first and so far only director, Richard Cordray, abruptly resigned last week. President Trump wants his budget director, the ultra–fiscal conservative Mick Mulvaney, who has called the CFPB a “sad, sick” joke, to lead the agency. Leandra English, who was deputy director under Cordray, argues that she should be made acting director automatically, and filed a lawsuit this weekend saying that Trump lacks the authority to replace her.

Why is Trump playing such a strong hand? He says it’s because the bureau was “a total disaster” under the previous leadership. “Financial Institutions have been devastated and unable to properly serve the public,” he tweeted over the Thanksgiving break. “We will bring it back to life!” There’s no evidence at all, however, to back those claims. In fact, one would think Trump would be the CFPB’s biggest champion, given its wild success in helping everyday Americans square off against banks, which would seemingly fit with the populist façade he stood behind during his campaign. But as with so many things, Trump’s true colors bled through as soon as he got into office. Installing Mulvaney as the head of an agency he loathes is just one more kiss that Trump has blown to the finance sector.

Before the CFPB existed, there was no single government entity tasked with protecting American consumers from predatory practices in the financial industry. Some duties fell to the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision, but financial entities such as mortgage lenders, credit card companies, debt collectors, credit reporting firms, and payday lenders faced few rules and scant oversight. If you can now read the plain-English, two-page disclosures that come with credit cards and mortgages, you have the CFPB’s work to thank. Before it changed the rules, the typical credit card contract had ballooned to 30 pages.

After Wells Fargo was exposed in 2016 for illegally opening millions of fake accounts for its customers, the CFPB secured full restitution for the victims and a $100 million fine. When the Equifax hack became public earlier this year, the CFPB started an investigation. The same happened when hundreds of RushCard customers lost access to the money they had stored on their prepaid debit cards.

Its success can also be added up in dollars and cents. It’s netted nearly $12 billion from financial firms to provide relief for 29 million consumers, including about $3.8 billion in direct compensation. Almost $400 million of that came without consumers having to lift a finger, thanks instead to its supervisory actions. Firms have also been made to pay $600 million in penalties.

The CFPB Has Been Great for Consumers. So of Course Trump Wants to Gut It. | New Republic

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Donald Trump won the US presidency with the backing of working-class and socially conservative white voters on a populist platform of economic nationalism. Trump rejected the Republican party’s traditional pro-business, pro-trade agenda, and, like Bernie Sanders on the left, appealed to Americans who have been harmed by disruptive technologies and “globalist” policies promoting free trade and migration. But while Trump ran as a populist, he has governed as a plutocrat, most recently by endorsing the discredited supply-side theory of taxation that most Republicans still cling to. Trump also ran as someone who would “drain the swamp” in Washington DC and on Wall Street. Yet he has stacked his administration with billionaires (not just millionaires) and Goldman Sachs alumni, while letting the swamp of business lobbyists rise higher than ever. 

Trump and the Republicans’ plan to repeal the 2010 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would have left 24 million Americans – mostly poor or middle class, many of whom voted for him – without healthcare. His deregulatory policies are blatantly biased against workers and unions. And the Republican tax-reform plan that he has endorsed would overwhelmingly favour multinational corporations and the top 1% of households, many of which stand to benefit especially from the repeal of the estate tax. Trump has also abandoned his base in the area of trade, where he has offered rhetoric but not concrete action. Yes, he scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but Hillary Clinton would have done the same. He has mused about abandoning the North American Free Trade Act (Nafta), but that may be just a negotiating tactic. He has threatened to impose a 50% tariff on goods from China, Mexico and other US trade partners, but no such measures have materialised. And proposals for a border adjustment tax have been all but forgotten.

How far will Trump go to keep his core supporters on his side? | Nouriel Roubini | Business | The Guardian

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The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) overruled a controversial Obama-era decision late Thursday  that put employers potentially on the hook for labor law violations committed by their subcontractors. In a 3-2 decision, the Republican controlled board overruled the board’s previous 2015 decision in a case, known as Browning-Ferris, which found a company to be considered a joint-employer with a subcontractor if it has “indirect” control over the terms and conditions of employment or has the “reserved authority to do so.”  In a statement, NLRB said in all future and pending cases two or more entities will be deemed joint employers under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) if there is proof that one entity has exercised direct and immediate control over essential employment terms of another entity’s employees.

NLRB overrules joint-employer decision on labor violations | TheHill

• So, employers can again employ dodgy subcontractors without paying any penalty..
  

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And then this..

President Donald Trump told a Republican member of Congress that he is willing to go after Social Security and other entitlement programs at the beginning of his second term. The Republican member of Congress spoke to a small group of reporters Thursday about a wide range of subjects on a condition of anonymity. The member said both parties and past administrations are to blame for the lack of effort to reform entitlements, citing a gap in leadership on the issue.

Trump told GOP member of Congress he would go after Social Security - Business Insider

The Big Con, or Bait and Switch. It's already ongoing anyway with the deregulation of labor laws, the sabotage of Obamacare, etc.

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Trump for the working class!

On December 5, the Trump administration took its first major step toward allowing employers to legally pocket the tips earned by the workers they employ. The Department of Labor (DOL) released a proposed rule that would allow restaurants to take the tips that servers earn and share them with untipped employees such as cooks and dishwashers.1But, crucially, the rule doesn’t actually require that employers distribute “pooled” tips to workers. Under the administration’s proposed rule, as long as tipped workers earn minimum wage, employers could legally pocket those tips.

Employers would pocket $5.8 billion of workers’ tips under Trump administration’s proposed ‘tip stealing’ rule | Economic Policy Institute

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Can't pay your parking ticket? Of to jail you go..

In an extraordinary move that is not getting nearly enough attention, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded a Justice Department letter that warned state courts about the unlawful practice of forcing low income defendants to pay fines or face jail. Courts across the country were (and many still are) enforcing these type of fees in order to generate revenue. When people fail to pay the fees typically imposed for minor traffic infractions or city code violations, courts have been issuing arrest warrants, sending people to jail or taking away their driving licenses.  The problem with all that? In America, we don’t believe in debtor’s prisons. Oh, and the practice is unconstitutional. That means illegal. The U.S. outlawed debtor’s prisons in 1833. In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court also ruled that jailing indigent debtors was illegal under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause

Sessions Made What Might be His Most Racially Discriminatory Decision Yet and Barely Anyone Noticed | Law & Crime

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A giant bait-and-switch..

As a candidate, Trump promised a crackdown on abusive pharmaceutical pricing. As president, Trump has put a pharmaceutical executive in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS is changing regulations to better fit the needs of pharmaceutical companies, and Trump is personally pocketing club membership fees from people with business before the federal government, including the CEO of Allergan. The candidate who ran as the champion of the forgotten man has led an administration dedicated to such causes as making it easier for financial advisers to rip off their clients and ensuring that workers suffer continued exposure to toxic chemicals in paint-removing solvents. Trump has abandoned a huge swath of populist campaign promises and picked up the mantle of congressional Republicans’ agenda. In exchange, Republicans have abjured any meaningful oversight of the executive branch — allowing Trump to run the government and shape tax policy in a way designed to enrich himself and his family.

Trump ran as an opponent of global financial elites, who promised to curb the carried interest tax loophole and reimpose Glass-Steagall regulations. Even while voicing skepticism about climate change, he swore to protect clean air and clean water and even floated a $10-an-hour minimum wage along with a $1 trillion infrastructure investment. As president, he’s done the exact opposite — promoting financial deregulation, rolling back all forms of environmental enforcement, and making a corporate tax cut the centerpiece of his economic agenda. It adds up to a 180-degree reversal from his campaign promises, including on his signature issue of trade... His team has, instead, moved quickly on issues like reversing an Obama-era rule to protect servers from having their tips stolen and making it harder for consumers victimized by their credit card company to sue for redress.

Trump’s economic populism has been abandoned - Vox

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The Department of Labor is reportedly hiding an unfavorable report on its proposal to pool workers tips. Bloomberg Law, citing current and former Labor Department sources, reported that department leaders scrubbed a report that showed employees could lose billions of dollars if it follows through on its plan to reverse the Obama-era ban on employers pooling workers’ tips. According to the report, senior department officials ordered staff to revise the data methodology to lessen the expected impact and were still uncomfortable including later calculations that showed progressively reduced tip losses.

Report: Labor Department hiding unfavorable report on impacts of tip-pooling rule | TheHill

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Donald Trump ran for office promising to protect the “forgotten man and woman” and to Make America Great Again for Americans who feel left behind. “It’s not just the political system that’s rigged, it’s the whole economy,” he told supporters during a 2016 speech on the campaign trail. But now in office, Trump isn’t doing much to “un-rig” the system. His administration has systematically dismantled consumer protections for ordinary Americans and compromised protections for everyday investors as well.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the guide of interim director Mick Mulvaney has moved to rein in many of the consumer protection and enforcement actions taken by his predecessor, Richard Cordray. The bureau has dropped cases against predatory payday lenders, reportedly rolled backits investigation of the Equifax data breach, and reformulated its mission to scale back its reach.

Federal regulators in September released AIG from special government oversight mandated after the financial crisis and set aside a legal fight with MetLife. Enforcement actions at the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodities Futures Trading Commission, Wall Street’s top regulators, have declined, meaning they appear to be going after fewer bad actors and imposing less fines. Mulvaney over at the CFPB hasn’t taken any enforcement actions since taking over at the CFPB in November..

Trump is tearing up the system that protects ordinary Americans from financial scams - Vox