Deregulate!

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Deregulate everything, so it's easier for companies can shaft everybody:

Richard Sackler is part of the family that owns Purdue Pharma, the company that is widely blamed for helping cause the opioid epidemic through its marketing of the opioid painkiller OxyContin. But now Sackler, who was previously the president of Purdue, is poised to profit from one of the solutions to the crisis.
According to the Financial Times and STAT, Sackler is listed as one of six inventors on the patent for a new formulation of buprenorphine, a highly effective medication for treating opioid addiction. .

Richard Sackler may profit (again) from an opioid crisis he helped cause - Vox

They say getting rid of regulations frees up businesses to be more profitable. Maybe. But regulations also protect you and me — from being harmed, fleeced, shafted, injured, or sickened by corporate products and services. So when the Trump administration gets rid of regulations, top executives and big investors may make more money, but the rest of us bear more risks and harm.

Robert Reich

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As for-profit colleges have come under fire over the past several years, the industry defended the low graduation and job placement rates and some of its schools by arguing that these colleges serve the riskiest students who might not otherwise have access to a degree. It’s true that for-profit colleges educate single parents, women, minority, low-income and other students with many obstacles in the way of getting a college education — an admirable or predatory practice, depending on who is looking at it. But a new study suggests that for-profit colleges actually do worse by these students. Students who attend four-year, for-profit colleges take out one more federal loan on average than their public school counterparts and borrow at least $3,300 more, according to a study distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research this week. Despite that extra money, these students are 11% less likely to be employed than students in public schools. They also and earn less. What’s more, among four-year students, attending a for-profit college increases the likelihood that a student loan borrower will default by about 11 percentage points, the study found.

Students do better at public colleges than for-profit colleges (just don’t blame the students) - MarketWatch

But they have Betsy de Vos on their side, so no worry for the for profit colleges. A host of regulations have already been scrapped, despite a series of high profile fraud cases that had some of these for profits have to close down.

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There’s a reason that groups like the US Chamber of Commerce are still backing Brett Kavanaugh despite serious accusations that he sexually assaulted one or more women in his younger days, which Kavanaugh denies. Big business knows that Kavanaugh could be a boon to their bottom line. One of the biggest questions facing the American judiciary is whether the Constitution allows elected representatives to meaningfully regulate the national economy. Kavanaugh clearly believes it does not: He has called the existence of independent regulatory agencies — notably including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau but potentially the entire alphabet soup of FCC, FTC, CFTC, SEC, FEC, etc. — a “threat to individual liberty.”

The Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight is also about the future of the economy - Vox

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This is why we need the consumer financial protection bureau, which right-wingers have been disarming..

The most recent bad headline? This week, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $5 million to California and relinquish its insurance license to settle allegations that it opened insurance policies for customers and charged them without their consent. A week before, the company agreed to pay $575 million to resolve investigations by all 50 states into a range of activities, including improper auto loan and mortgage charges.

The news is the latest in a spectacular drumbeat of banking malfeasance. This includes big items, such as opening millions of unauthorized bank accounts in customers’ names. It includes small items, such as nickel-and-diming college students with unusually high banking fees. Add it all up and you have a portrait of a corporate grifter, a company perpetually on the lookout for new ways, legal or not, to empty the pockets of people who trusted it with their money..

Wells Fargo: An embarrassment to banking | Charlotte Observer

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EU regulators based a decision to relicense the controversial weedkiller glyphosate on an assessment plagiarised from industry reports, according to a report for the European parliament. A crossparty group of MEPs commissioned an investigation into claims, revealed by the Guardian, that Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) copy-and-pasted tracts from Monsanto studies. The study’s findings have been released hours before a parliamentary vote on tightening independent scrutiny of the pesticides approvals process. The authors said they found “clear evidence of BfR’s deliberate pretence of an independent assessment, whereas in reality the authority was only echoing the industry applicants’ assessment.” Molly Scott Cato, a Green MEP, said the scale of alleged plagiarism by the BfR authors shown by the new paper was “extremely alarming”.

EU glyphosate approval was based on plagiarised Monsanto text, report finds | Environment | The Guardian

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The Food and Drug Administration is sacrificing American lives by continuing to approve new high-strength opioid painkillers, and manipulating the process in favor of big pharma, according to the chair of the agency’s own opioid advisory committee. Dr Raeford Brown told the Guardian there is “a war” within the FDA as officials in charge of opioid policy have “failed to learn the lessons” of the epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people over the past 20 years and continues to claim about 150 lives a day. Brown accused the agency of putting the interests of narcotics manufacturers ahead of public health, most recently by approving a “terrible drug”, Dsuvia, in a process he alleged was manipulated.

FDA's opioids adviser accuses agency of having 'direct' link to crisis | US news | The Guardian

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But we can dismantle the consumer financial protection bureau, right?

Most bank advisors work on commission and their job is to look out for the bank’s interest, not yours. Their job is to sign you up for so-called “investment” products but in reality, are designed to extract the highest fees. As a percentage, a one percent or two percent management expense ratio, or MER, doesn’t sound like much. But over time could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, and bank advisors know this. They don’t particularly care, because the higher your fees, the bigger their commission. What if I told you there was a way to (safely and legally) steal from Wall Street? Endorsed by none other than Warren Buffett, this is a strategy he famously advised his heirs to use after he was gone: Buy the entire stock market using index funds. This is also the strategy I used to become a millionaire and retire at the age of 31. I figured out how to keep Wall Street from robbing me and robbed them instead. But it wasn’t easy. In fact, when I first tried to buy index funds, the bankers tried every dirty trick in the book to stop me. Try it yourself. Walk into your bank, talk to a salesperson and ask to put your savings into index funds. It’s the funniest thing ever. Armed with the knowledge of why index funds outperform actively managed funds, I did exactly that. I had done my homework. I knew the literature and research down cold; I knew the statistics. I had looked up the commission the salesperson would earn on an index fund:  precisely $0. So, I was expecting an amusing spectacle. And boy did I get it. That salesperson spun story after story about why I was making a huge mistake, and I slammed down chart after chart onto his desk proving him wrong. Eventually, he resorted to outright lying. This account, he claimed, couldn’t purchase those types of investments. But after I asked to speak to his supervisor, he relented. I got my account set up, and I invested in my index funds.

Two heroes of the FIRE movement show you how to steal from Wall Street – Alternet.org

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Doctors have called for an urgent international effort to combat a “pandemic of bad drugs” that is thought to kill hundreds of thousands of people globally every year. A surge in counterfeit and poor quality medicines means that 250,000 children a year are thought to die after receiving shoddy or outright fake drugs intended to treat malaria and pneumonia alone, the doctors warned. More are thought to die from poor or counterfeit vaccines and antibiotics used to treat or prevent acute infections and diseases such as hepatitis, yellow fever and meningitis.

Fake drugs kill more than 250,000 children a year, doctors warn | Science | The Guardian

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Almost a classic case against libertarianism already:

This morning Canada became the latest nation to temporarily ground all Boeing 737 Max 8 airliners after two deadly crashes in the last six months. Max 8 aircraft are not only banned from taking off in Canada, but banned from entering the country, as well. The plane has also been grounded in the European Union and elsewhere, leaving the United States as the primary holdout.

Dallas News found that Max 8 pilots had filed multiple federal complaints about the “safety mechanism cited in preliminary reports” of the October Max 8 crash in Indonesia, including one who called the flight manual “inadequate and almost criminally insufficient.” The problem, apparently within the autopilot systems, was reported to have caused sudden nosing-down of the plane during initial ascent.

A software fix for the problem was planned for last January, but the ongoing federal government shutdown delayed those updates, halting the work for five weeks.

It is unclear why United States authorities have not grounded the aircraft, as other nations have. Under Trump, the Department of Transportation has emphasized deregulation and a hands-off attitude toward industry. The Federal Aviation Administration’s top post has even vacant for more than a year, and fines against major U.S. airlines have dropped nearly 90 percent.

But Boeing has long spent tremendous resources lobbying Washington, and the company has made notable efforts to court the Trump administration after a rocky start. Weeks after Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenburg visited Mar-a-Lago to convince Trump to pull back on his threat to cancel the construction of new presidential aircraft, the company donated $1 million to the Trump inaugural committee. That initial rift seems to have been well-healed, at this point. Critics complain about too-tight bonds between the company, the regulators charged with regulating them, and lawmakers themselves.

Canada just grounded the 737 Max 8 aircraft: Why is the United States the primary holdout? – Alternet.org

By the way, Canada saw enough similarities from radar images in the two deadly crashes to instigate the ban.

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About 70% of fresh produce sold in the US has pesticide residues on it even after it is washed, according to a health advocacy group. According to the Environmental Working Group’s annual analysis of US Department of Agriculture data, strawberries, spinach and kale are among the most pesticide-heavy produce, while avocados, sweetcorn and pineapples had the lowest level of residues. More than 92% of kale tested contained two or more pesticide residues, according to the analysis, and a single sample of conventionally farmed kale could contain up to 18 different pesticides. Dacthal – the most common pesticide found, which was detected in nearly 60% of kale samples, is banned in Europe and classified as a possible human carcinogen in the US.

Pesticide residues found in 70% of produce sold in US even after washing | Environment | The Guardian

Doesn't need regulation either, let's just poison ourselves..