Dear America,
The chickens are coming home to roost for all those Trump voters. They weren't careful what they wished for. They are reaping what they sowed. But I like another chicken metaphor the best. I can just see them walking back across the road saying, if I had known what was on the other side, I never would have crossed the road in the first place. The executive orders fly, and so does all the progress of the last eight years and more. That must be what they are feeling, those chickens going back across the road to whence they came. We had this enormous financial catastrophe, to use a word that the Trumper favors, and in its wake, congress passed and President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act, which admittedly was not the Glass-Steagall Act, but was better than nothing. Then the Republicans took over the House of Representatives, and the regulations that they were supposed to pass pursuant to Dodd-Frank underwent a dilatory process in which Republicans in The Senate in particular did all they could to interdict the implementation of aspects of the law like the creation of a consumer protection agency with the power to sanction banks that abused their clientele. Part of that agency's mandate was to enforce the "fiduciary rule" that was part of Dodd-Frank, which made it incumbent upon the investment banks and lenders to act only in ways that were in their clients' and customers' best interests. But as all regulations are anathema to the financial industry barons, they argued against it from the beginning, until they got a gift this past November: Donald Trump won the electoral college vote. He took that as a popular mandate despite the facts that he lost the popular election by nearly 3 million votes, and the Democrats gained six seats in Congress and two in The Senate. So, since he ran his mouth constantly about Dodd-Frank being disastrous, another favored word in Trump's hyperbolic vocabulary, he started right in on ordering repeal of the regulations he didn't like, like the fiduciary rule, which he now has ordered reconsidered by the agencies charged with implementing it. How could a regulation that puts Americans first, to borrow a phrase from the Trump campaign, be a bad thing? Don't expect the chickens to answer that question, but I suspect that they are wondering the same thing, though the hew and cry seems to have been more of a shrug and a whimper.
As to the coal industry, President Obama administration's EPA issued a regulation controlling how coal mining companies could dispose of the debris created by cutting off the tops of mountain tops to get at the coal. That debris contains pollutants that could pollute about 6,000 streams by the agency's reckoning, so they imposed standards for disposal of the debris in some regulations...also the subjects of a Trump anti-regulation executive order. How could the prevention of pollution of small streams along which miners and their families live in places like West Virginia be a bad thing? Again, the chickens may be dubious, but they have limited their displays of concern to nothing more dramatic than scratching their heads...again, no hew and cry. Of course, there has been a hew and cry relative to Trump's immigration order, but there, there has been actual resistance...from a federal judge no less. The order included a travel ban on persons from the seven countries whose populations have now been denominated a terrorist threat--notably, Saudi Arabia, from which many of the 9/11 murders came was not on the list--even if they had visas or green cards, on which that judge has now imposed a stay. Refugees from those seven countries were also included even though in the past twenty years there has never been a terrorist incident in this country involving a refugee. The San Bernardino killers were an American born man of Pakistani descent and his wife, who was born in Pakistani but had a green card stemming from the fact that she had married an American man...again, a terrorist, like American-born Timothy McVeigh. You will also note that Pakistan is not among the seven countries on the list.
It comes to this. The irrational chickens, who don't know why they crossed the road, elected an irrational fool to do their irrational foolishness, and now he is doing it...foolishly. No wonder they can't figure out what they can do about it, or more importantly, what they were thinking if they were thinking at all when they cast those votes. Once again, as always, the American people got what they deserved on election day...actually what the founding fathers who invented the electoral college deserved.
Your friend,
Mike
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