Saturday, August 11, 2018

No Thanks


The Interior Secretary is planning to undermine implementation of the Endangered Species Act and a peeved Malcolm Nance remarks
Environmentalism is the raison d'etre of the Green Party which, among other things, helped pave the way for the Trump presidency and probably put George W. Bush, instead of Al Gore, into the White House sixteen years earlier. And so Dr. Stein and her cohorts probably are unconcerned that, as the Los Angeles Times found earlier this week

The day before she was to testify before President Trump’s school safety commission, Jennifer Johnston, an expert on media coverage of mass shootings, received a phone call from an Education Department advisor who asked her to “refrain” from any gun-control remarks.

The official, Kent Talbert, cited a section of her pre-submitted testimony that called for federal officials to “greatly restrict the sale of semiautomatic and automatic weapons across states,” Johnston recalled.

Johnston ultimately backed off and additionally

During more than 20 hours of testimony in five panels, three field visits and two public listening sessions so far, commission officials have largely avoided, limited or, in Johnston’s case, suppressed discussion of gun-control measures, according to interviews with participants and a review of official video recordings of events available on the commission’s website.

Gun safety probably is not a high priority of 77-year-old Connie Kessler, an Ohio resident of the Mahoning Valley, which is midway between Pittsburgh and Cleveland. It is an "old steel country full of labor union members," which "has been loyal Democratic turf for generations" and

"He's the one that turned me," she says at her makeshift reception desk near a giant cut-out of the president, with his signature thumbs-up gesture. "When I walked in here to sign up as a volunteer, I was a Democrat," she says. "I don't want Democrat next to my name anymore."





The Administration headed by Donald Trump continues to address the interests of such hard-working, salt-of-the-earth traditional Democrats by

- rescinding a Department of Labor regulation which required employers to pay overtime if employees worked over 40 hours a week;

- rescinding a Department of Labor regulation in which employers were barred from "tip pooling," which redistributed tips paid to service workers'

- signing a congressional resolution which required employers to report workplace injuries or illnesses to OSHA;

- blocking "the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, which banned government contracts from going to companies with poor safety or labor records, and kept track of violations;"

- killing the fiduciary rule, in which economic advisers were bound to act in the best interests of their clients;

 - appointing to the Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch, who cast the deciding vote in a  May decision which made it more difficult to file class-action lawsuits against employers, and in June's Janus vs. AFSCME, which puts all public employees under right-to-work laws, in which unions cannot charge non-members fees for representation, and which mandates new employees opt-in for membership.





President Trump is only getting started. Laws or regulations protecting the environment, workers, the elderly, schoolchildren, poor people, and others are in his sights.  There is a whole lot of blame to go around for Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party, and many others who assisted the election of Donald Trump. It may be that the animals to which Malcolm Bunch referred are not the only endangered species.




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