Trump for the working class..

[Admin]

Perhaps Trump could take a leaf out of the book of this brave woman..

When Republican Sen. Susan Collins landed in Bangor, Maine on Friday, a crowd at the airport greeted her with applause. She was arriving home after a dramatic week in the US Senate, during which she defied her party leadership and voted "no" on all three Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. On CNN's "State of the Union" with Jake Tapper on Sunday, Collins said she'd never received such a warm welcome in her 20 years serving in the Senate.

Collins received round of applause after voting down healthcare repeal - Business Insider

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Basically, the race stuff is just a distraction as Trump really isn't doing anything for his white working class base either. Quite the contrary, as it happens:

Yet it’s not the case that nobody is helped by Trump’s policy agenda. Instead, over and over again Trump has put in place new politics that share a dominant plutocratic theme. Despite his well-documented struggles with the legislative process, Trump has gotten real things done, and they are overwhelmingly things that help incumbent businesses get over on the public interests.

Trump and congressional Republicans, for example, deployed the Congressional Review Act to roll back many of the Obama administration’s 2016 regulatory actions. Thanks to Trump:

• It’s easier for mining companies to dump pollution into streams.
  
• It’s easier for oil companies to bribe foreign governments.
  
• It’s easier for broadband internet providers to sell their customers’ user data.
  
• But it’s now harder for state governments to set up low-fee retirement accounts so people could save money without getting ripped off.
  

Trump doesn’t tweet about it much, but it turns out that making it harder for people to avoid financial rip-offs is something of a passion for the Trump administration. He has, for example, gutted enforcement of an Obama-era rule that would have made it illegal for financial advisers to deliberately rip off their customers.

None of this, obviously, has anything to do with helping white people any more than the Trump Federal Communications Commission’s ongoing efforts to dismantle net neutrality or the Trump Treasury’s efforts to reopen corporate tax loopholes are motivated by concern for the welfare of the European-American population. At the behest of the chemical industry, the Trump Environmental Protection Agency has approved the continued sale of a pesticide that poisons children’s brains, and at the behest of for-profit colleges, the Trump Education Department is rolling back regulations offering debt relief to students misled by scam schools.

Rich CEOs are the big winners of Trump’s race war - Vox

This must be one of the biggest bait-and-switches in political history..

[Admin]

And here is another way Trump lets his voters down, racial divisions as a phony issue, rather than directing the real issue, the cost of colleges:

There is no doubt Trump’s base is predominantly white and, generally speaking, it is hurting. Take college and jobs, for instance: according to the Economic Policy Institute, the earnings gap between those with and without a college degree is the widest ever recorded. Those with college degrees earn 56% more than those without college degrees and have seen a 3% drop in income since the Great Recession. This has hurt workers of all races, and people of color earn less than their white counterparts. But for white residents of the US, a greater barrier to college is cost, not increased diversity at their preferred schools.

A recent study by the Institute for Higher Education Policy (reported in the Atlantic) found that students in families earning around $160,000 or more can generally afford about 90% of the more than 2,000 colleges studied. Students from families earning $69,000 or less can only afford 5% or less of those same colleges. Thus Trump ignores even the interests of his struggling voter base by not tackling the real challenges at play. That is why it is unsurprising that Trump’s support appears to be shrinking among white Americans who need more educational and job opportunities.

Diversity is the great rightwing scapegoat for working-class woes | Maya Wiley | Opinion | The Guardian

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The Trump administration is getting ready to give working Americans a big pay cut. The Department of Labor recently moved to begin rolling back the overtime pay rule, taking a critical benefit away from millions of working people and their families. The retrenchment puts the administration squarely on the side of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other big-business lobbyists—rigging the economy further in service of the very interests voters already believe are unfairly profiting at their expense. It is the latest in a long series of betrayals from a candidate who vowed to stand up for ordinary working Americans. The overtime pay rule, finalized in May 2016, is a much-needed update to the pay rate at which salaried employees must receive additional compensation for working more than 40 hours a week.

Trump Threatens to Strip Away Overtime Pay | Demos

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The Trump administration is planning to quash an Obama-era rule that prevents employers from pooling workers’ tips. The change could allow restaurants to share tips waiters receive, for example, with untipped employees such as kitchen cooks. The Department of Labor (DOL) announced its plan to change the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulation in its semi-annual Unified Regulatory Agenda in July. The agency said the change would only apply to employers that pay tipped employees the full minimum wage directly. It would not apply to employees who make less than the minimum wage and earn tips to supplement their pay, also known as tip credit.

Trump targets Obama rule on workers’ tips | TheHill

President Trump sent a letter to Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Thursday announcing his intention to cut pay raises for civilian government workers. In the letter, Trump cited his authority in times of “national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare” to make adjustments to the 2018 pay schedule for federal employees. Under the previous plan, workers were scheduled for a 1.9 percent bump. Trump will use his authority to lower that to 1.4 percent. “We must maintain efforts to put our Nation on a sustainable fiscal course,” Trump wrote.

Trump to cut pay raises for government workers | TheHill

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And of course he's right..

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka ripped President Trump on Labor Day for repealing key protections for workers. Trumka said Monday on CNN that Trump has repeatedly “assaulted” major regulations aimed at keeping American workers safe. “He’s assaulted just about every health and safety regulation out there, whether it’s from beryllium or silica,” Trumka said. “He attacked the overtime regulations, he attacked regulations for consumer protection.” Trumka acknowledged that Trump had attracted support from workers during the 2016 campaign, but argued he “hasn’t really done a good job” since taking office. “He hasn’t really done a lot to help workers,” the labor chief argued.

AFL-CIO head rips Trump on Labor Day: 'He’s assaulted' worker regulations | TheHill

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Christians against unions?

President Donald Trump likes to tout his affinity for the American worker. He’s climbed into an American-made big rig in the White House driveway. He’s donned a hard hat while addressing West Virginia coal miners. And he’s boasted about hiring “thousands and thousands and thousands” of union workers. But on Trump’s first Labor Day as president, it’s clear that his Labor Department is mostly focused on rolling back regulations that protect the blue-collar workers Trump celebrates. The department has delayed several rules that would limit workers’ exposure to carcinogens and has begun to undo the Obama administration’s signature labor achievements. And its policy and regulation team is now led by a man who has made a career out of fighting unions.


Nathan Mehrens became the department’s head of policy in June, leading an office that Sharon Block, who headed it under President Barack Obama, says served as the Labor Department’s think tank. Bloomberg reported last month that Mehrens is also running the department’s regulatory reform office. In that role, he will work with a still-unformed task force to identify regulations that should be eliminated. (The Labor Department did not respond to requests to confirm Mehrens’ role.)

Since getting his law degree from a conservative Christian correspondence school that emphasizes “the centrality of Scripture,” Mehrens has spent his professional life rooting out union corruption. That work appears to have begun with a stint at Stop Union Political Abuse (SUPA), a now-defunct group started  by Linda Chavez after unions helped sink her nomination to be President George W. Bush’s secretary of labor. Chavez would go on to write that donating to SUPA would “cripple liberal politics” by helping pass a right-to-work law that makes it harder to form a union. “If we stop now,” she added in the fundraising appeal, “the terrorists win.”


From the start, the Acosta Labor Department has rolled back worker protections. In April, it delayed a rule that would limit construction workers’ exposure to crystalline silica, a workplace carcinogen that causes a potentially fatal lung condition. The next month, it delayed a rule to increase mine safety by requiring inspections before workers start their shifts. In June, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which oversees workplace safety, announced that it plans to weaken a rule that would save an estimated 90 lives per year by decreasing workers’ exposure to beryllium, an industrial mineral. Last month, Politico reported that OSHA had scrubbed workplace deaths from its home page.


The two biggest achievements of the Labor Department under Obama have not been spared either. In July, the Labor Department said it will rewrite, and likely roll back, a rule that would make 4.2 million additional workers eligible for overtime. On Thursday, the Labor Department announced an 18-month delay for a rule that requires financial advisers to act in the best interest of clients who are saving for retirement. It also said that it will allow retirement advisers to block their clients from filing class-action lawsuits.

Trump’s budget proposed cutting the Labor Department’s funding by about 20 percent while boosting funding for the department’s union watchdog by 22 percent, despite the fact that union membership is at a record low. Most of the proposed cuts targeted workforce training programs that enjoy bipartisan support.

Meet the Anti-Union Crusader in Charge of Rolling Back Regulations at Trump’s Labor Department – Mother Jones

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Two officials with a history of anti-worker behavior nominated to be worker advocates
Late last week, President Trump announced his nominees to several key positions at the Department of Labor (DOL). Trump nominated Cheryl Stanton to serve as his Wage and Hour Division (WHD) administrator, a position responsible for enforcing our nation’s basic wage protections. Since 2013, Stanton has headed the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce, an agency that does not handle wage enforcement. Much of her career has in fact been dedicated to representing employers, not workers, in wage and hour cases. Stanton has also faced her own wage and hour litigation. The Center for Investigative Reporting recently revealed that she was sued last year for failing to pay her house cleaners. If confirmed, Stanton will be tasked with holding employers accountable when they steal workers’ wages. Her history of siding against workers certainly raises the question of how vigorously she will approach this task.

Trump also nominated former coal mining executive David Zatezalo to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Zatezalo formerly served as chief executive of Rhino Resources, a coal company that had numerous clashes with MSHA officials during the Obama administration. Following the Upper Big Branch mine disaster on April 5, 2010, MSHA stepped up its enforcement efforts, and identified a number of health and safety violations at Zatezalo’s company. In fact, in 2011, MSHA sought a federal court injunction against Zatezalo’s company. If confirmed, Zatezalo will be charged with ensuring safety standards in our nation’s mines. Twelve coal miners have died on the job to date this year..

Policy Watch: Two more foxes nominated to run hen houses in the Trump administration | Economic Policy Institute

We could just as well have published this under "drain the swamp"..

[Admin]

Could file this under "Trump lies" or "Drain the swamp", but let's try it here first..

McCaskill focused in on part of the Republican tax framework that would cut the tax rate on partnerships, limited liability companies and other so-called “pass-through” businesses to 25 percent -- down from a current top rate of 39.6 percent. She also cited economic statistics that almost 9/10 of the benefit from the pass-through cut would benefit the top 1 percent of taxpayers by income. “And I guarantee you: Anybody who looks somebody straight in the eye and says, ‘This is not going to benefit me’ -- that has hundreds and hundreds of LLCs -- is just lying to the American people,” McCaskill said. “Flat-out lying.”

Trump’s financial disclosure forms show that he has interests in roughly 500 entities, most of which are organized as limited liability companies. As he prepared to help roll out the GOP tax framework last week, the president told reporters he wouldn’t benefit from the plan.

McCaskill Blasts Trump for Saying Tax Plan Won't Benefit Him - Bloomberg

And indeed, Trump has hundreds of these, and he is going to benefit.

[Admin]

Not this government, not their nominee for the Supreme Court will do much if anything for working people, rather the opposite:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in a new op-ed calls Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's ties to the Charles Koch Foundation an ethics problem.
Warren, writing in Politico, called for the Supreme Court to establish an ethical code. In the op-ed, Warren referenced Gorsuch's keynote address during a luncheon he attended at Trump International Hotel. "That arrangement was bad enough on its own," Warren wrote.

"But there was another potential conflict of interest created by Justice Gorsuch’s speaking engagement—and it highlights the ongoing ethical issues that threaten the credibility of our nation’s highest court." Warren said on the same morning Gorsuch spoke at the luncheon, the Supreme Court said it would hear a case that "will determine whether public sector units—which represent teachers, nurses, firefighters and police in states and cities across the country—can collect fees from all employees in the workplaces they represent."

Gorsuch is expected to "deliver the court's deciding vote to strip unions of this ability," she wrote, adding that the decision would "seriously undercut workers' freedom" to fight for high wages and better working conditions. "Here’s the rub. Justice Gorsuch’s speech at the Trump hotel was hosted by the Fund for American Studies. And who funds the Fund of American Studies? The Charles Koch Foundation and the Bradley Foundation," she wrote. "The Charles Koch Foundation is dedicated to promoting limited government, free markets and weaker unions; and the Bradley Foundation has worked for decades to, in their own words, 'reduce the size and power of public sector unions,' " she added..

Warren: Gorsuch’s links to Koch brothers are an ‘ethics problem’ | TheHill