Trump for the working class..

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Donald Trump got a higher share of the vote among union members in last year's election than any Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan, helping propel him to victory in key Rust Belt states and to the White House. Since his inauguration, he has continued to sound populist notes. He signed a "Buy American, Hire American" executive order and promised to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. He has invited labor leaders to the White House for chummy photo ops, and some have praised him in return.

But beyond these symbolic gestures, Trump's actual track record on organized labor is quickly moving in the opposite direction. That's because his greatest impact is likely to come from his high-profile appointments, which appear poised to decimate the power of unions.  Trump's overtures to unions have so far struck labor advocates as hollow. His Buy American order is vaguely worded and unlikely to have much effect on manufacturing and trade. On NAFTA, his stance has seemed to change several times just in the past few days, and he now says he won't scrap it "at this time."

"Those are just sort of optical moves," says Susan Davis, a labor lawyer who has represented national and local unions. "In terms of substance, every single thing they have done and intend to do is damaging to workers and unions." "On collective bargaining issues, he's following the script from the Chamber of Commerce," says Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America union. "Probably literally." On Thursday, the Senate approved Alex Acosta as secretary of labor, installing a corporate-friendly attorney as unions' chief regulator. Trump had initially nominated fast-food executive Andy Puzder, who was considered rabidly anti-union, but Puzder lost support even among Republicans amid revelations that he had employed an undocumented housekeeper and the reemergence of old accusations of abuse during his first marriage.

Labor advocates worry that Acosta's Labor Department could come to resemble the one under President George W. Bush, which dedicated more staff and resources to regulating and investigating unions, required them to file more paperwork, and ramped up audits and investigations of unions.

Despite Populist Rhetoric, Trump Is Poised to Preside Over a Crackdown on Unions | Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump championed himself as a savior of the American worker during his campaign. But he has been largely silent on the biggest crisis facing these workers: the collapse of the retail industry. According to government data, general merchandise stores like Macy's and Sears have bled more jobs since October — about 89,000 total — than the total number of people employed by the entire US coal industry, which Trump repeatedly pledged to revive both on the campaign trail and in office.

Trump has been silent on retail job losses - Business Insider

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After the headfake of bringing back phantom coal jobs, here is what he's really doing..

Yesterday was the final day congressional Republicans could use the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to block regulations issued in the final months of the Obama administration. The CRA is a controversial law that gives Congress the power to overturn rules put in place by the previous president for 60 legislative days after the president leaves office—and robs future administrations of the ability to implement new rules. Republicans have used this rather obscure law to block an unprecedented 14 regulations.

The rules blocked by congressional Republicans and President Trump provided important protections ensuring the health and safety of consumers, working people, and the general public. The five labor-related rules that were blocked would have made it harder for companies to get federal contracts if they violated labor laws, made it easier for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to track workplace injuries, helped people save for retirement, and made it easier for people to collect unemployment insurance.

Policy Watch: Congress blocks 14 Obama-era rules in an unprecedented blitz of CRA votes | Economic Policy Institute

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Rising the minimum wage? Hahaha, not if the Republicans have any say in it

But Republicans and their business allies are fighting back with a two-pronged strategy. First, they’re working to derail the minimum-wage increases that have already passed. Business groups in Washington and Arizona have gone to court to block the November ballot initiatives, and lawmakers in Maine have introduced a number of bills that seek to roll back or weaken the wage increase.

Second, in violation of their much-lauded belief in decentralized government, Republicans are moving aggressively to block more cities and states from boosting the minimum wage. In Arizona, GOP lawmakers have approved bills that make it harder to pass citizen ballot initiatives, a democratic process enshrined in the state constitution for more than a century. And legislatures in 24 states have passed so-called “preemption bills” to block cities and counties from passing their own minimum-wage hikes. Many of the bills are the product of model legislation written by the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council, which has made the fight against minimum-wage increases a top priority..

How Republicans Are Blocking Cities From Raising the Minimum Wage | New Republic

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The 2018 budget that President Trump proposed serves as the starting point for negotiations about programs central to our nation’s success.  While funding increases for security and defense are understandable given our nation’s security needs, the budget unnecessarily burdens low-income families by ignoring our nation’s severe affordable housing shortage and offering no valid policy reasons for its lack of financial support for housing.  As Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing under President George W. Bush’s administration, I oversaw the nation’s more than 4,000 public housing authorities. Public housing is an invaluable and long-ignored national asset that desperately needs Congress’s support in order to continue to change and better serve our nation’s communities.  Yet the Trump administration’s budget proposes cuts of $1.9 billion to the operating and capital funds of public housing agencies nationwide, which will effectively cripple these agencies and shutter thousands of units that currently serve the poor.

Trump’s plan to cut public housing is a mistake for America | TheHill

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A series of Obama-era labor reforms were targeted by Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta this week: among them an overtime rule that greatly expanded the number of workers eligible for overtime. The Labor Department told a federal appeals court on Friday that though it had the power to use salaries to set thresholds for mandatory overtime pay, it did not advocate for the $47,500 maximum salary level set by the department under Obama. The Obama reform was set to expand overtime pay to more than 4 million salaried workers.

Forget Trump Tweets and Travel Ban, Here's Five Major Moves the Administration Made When You Were Looking Elsewhere

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Keep America safe!

This is basically immoral. So the Republican's can't even pass their own miserly healthcare plan and what does the President?

President Donald Trump has said the new Republican healthcare policy should be to allow the current law to collapse. "I'm not going to own it," Mr Trump told reporters of Obamacare, "I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it." Support for the Republican Senate bill fell apart on Monday when two more senators said they could not back it. The party's Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, immediately vowed to hold a vote to repeal Obamacare only.

Let Obamacare fail - Trump's new plan - BBC News

This is simply terrible. Allowing Obamacare to collapse will bring untold problems to his own supporters, because it collapses mostly in red states

When he talks about his efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Trump almost always asserts that Obamacare is “exploding.” Republican members of Congress make similar claims, insisting that Obamacare is unsustainable—and that they therefore have no choice but to “repeal and replace” it. 

There is some basis for this argument. More than 1,300 counties only have one insurer in their exchanges, meaning there is no competition. But there is a nuance that Republicans willfully ignore: This is a problem of their own creation that is largely confined to red states. Where Republican governors have sought to sabotage the program, they have largely succeeded. Where Democratic governors have tried to make the ACA work, they too have largely succeeded. 

Here are the basic numbers. In states with Republican governors, more than 40 million people live in counties with only one insurer. In states with Democratic governors, there are 10.7 million people who live in such counties. Republican governors had little interest in making their exchanges work. The difference is far more dramatic if we exclude North Carolina from the Democratic list. While North Carolina does now have a Democratic governor, it had a Republican governor until January, and even now the Legislature is overwhelmingly Republican. 

Not counting North Carolina, only 2.1 million people in Democratic states live in counties without competition. Put another way, if someone lives in a state with a Democratic governor other than North Carolina, they have a 1.8% probability of only having a single insurer in their exchange. If they live in a state with a Republican governor, there is a 20.7% probability of the same.

There are two main ways in which Republican governors have been effective in sabotaging Obamacare in their states. The first and most important was by refusing to expand Medicaid.

The other issue is the extent to which states took the initiative to promote Obamacare. Less healthy people generally don’t have to be prodded to buy insurance, since they know they need it. The issue is whether more healthy people buy into the system. Insurers are going to lose money if all the people they insure have serious health problems.

Democratic governors generally tried to persuade people to buy insurance, while Republican governors were more often neutral, if not openly hostile, to the program. As a result, fewer healthy people bought into the exchanges in their states, making the system less profitable for insurers.

Obamacare is only 'exploding' in red states - LA Times

Repealing Obamacare without replacing it is even worse:

The BCRA's failure has pushed McConnell toward a bold backup plan: a vote on a repeal-only bill that would give Congress two years to come up with a replacement. Since the bill would go through the budget reconciliation process, only certain aspects of the ACA could be repealed, but they are some of the most important: funding for tax credits to buy insurance, as well as for the Medicaid expansion, and the individual mandate to purchase insurance.

A similar idea taken up by the House in 2015 was scored by the Congressional Budget Office earlier this year. It projected that 32 million more people would go without insurance by 2026 than under the current system if there were no replacement in effect. 

The CBO separately projected that 22 million and 23 million more people would be uninsured under the Senate and House replacement bills, respectively. Given the massive projected coverage losses, it's unclear whether the more moderate-leaning wing of the party would sign on to such a plan. Conservatives could also be repelled by the trade-off in voting to move such a bill forward for consideration..

Senate Republican health care bill, Obamacare repeal unlikely - Business Insider

All that suffering just to make a political point.. Really immoral.

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One of the very few Republicans who gets it:

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), one of the senators focused on Medicaid who was hesitant to embrace BCRA over its cuts to that program, also said that she could not vote for a repeal bill that included no replacement plan.
“I did not come to Washington to hurt people. For months, I have expressed reservations about the direction of the bill to repeal and replace Obamacare,” she said in a statement. “I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians.”

The last-ditch Obamacare repeal plan looks dead in the Senate - Vox
Especially if these people are mostly your own supporters..

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Blaming everybody but himself, what else is new..

As Republicans’ latest attempt to repeal and/or replace Obamacare went down in flames on Tuesday, President Trump tried to shift blame to everybody but himself. During remarks to reporters, Trump falsely claimed his plan all along has been to “let Obamacare fail”—he in fact publicly supported simultaneous repeal and replace as recently as March — and said that if that happens, “I’m not going to own it.” (The Congressional Budget Office concluded earlier this month that, absent Trump administration sabotage, Obamacare exchanges are likely to be stable for the foreseeable future.)

Despite Republican control of both chambers of Congress and the fact that the latest Trumpcare bill was actually killed by Republican defections, Trump added, “I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it.” “We’ll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are gonna come to us and they’re gonna say, ‘How do we fix it? How do we fix it?’” continued Trump, who campaigned on “insurance for everybody” but now supports legislation to strip coverage from more than 20 million Americans. “Or, ‘How do we come up with a new plan?’ So, we’ll see what happens.”

5 Trump tweets about taking responsibility for failure that are very awkward now

Actually, just repealing Obamacare strips coverage from 32 million Americans, not 20 million, per CBO

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If the millions of voters—most prominently, workers in the Rust Belt—who switched their loyalties from Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016 were crying out for anything, it probably wasn’t for the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division to submit a Request for Information about the Obama-era rule that was supposed to expand overtime pay to millions of workers last year.

But that’s precisely what happened Tuesday as Trump’s Labor Department gave its clearest signal yet that it intends either to considerably weaken or simply eliminate the Obama overtime update that would greatly increase the number of salaried workers who would qualify for overtime. The move is a swift kick in the teeth to those forgotten men and women who voted for Trump—as well as the millions of workers who didn’t.

Gutting Health Care Not Enough? Trump Moves to Undercut Overtime for Millions