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Old August 26th 19, 06:55 PM posted to rec.aviation.piloting
Larry Dighera
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 3,953
Default US Senate Confirms Airline "Fox" To Head FAA "Henhouse"


No. **** the bankers/Wall Street, military profiteers (the military
industrial complex), Charles Koch, Mercers, Adelson, Putin's Russia,
Eric Prince and his sister Betsy DeVios, and the neo-Knight's Templar
spreading their corrupted evangelical new-world-order dogma throughout
the world.

Have a look here, and you will begin to understand who is behind
today's worldwide unraveling of democracy:
https://www.netflix.com/title/80063867
https://people.com/politics/why-the-...ip-foundation/

But, we can vote the bums out of office if we can get everybody to the
poles in 2020.

On Sun, 25 Aug 2019 00:52:18 +0000, wrote:

No! Please? Do they have to ruin everything?

**** this world.


Here's a clue:

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...strative-state
How Trump is dismantling a pillar of the American state
Donald Trump is presiding over the most withering, devastating, and
trenchant attack on the American administrative state this nation has
ever known

by Jon Michaels

Main image: ‘In a little more than nine months, Trump has taken aim
and hit his bull’s-eye.’ Composite: Getty Images

Tue 7 Nov 2017 08.36 EST Last modified on Thu 5 Jul 2018 16.47 EDT

There is no shortage of adjectives to describe the Trump presidency.
Venal. Shameless. Bigoted. Impulsive. Feckless. Amid the never-ending
stream of scandals and outrages, it is easy to lose sight of just what
this administration is doing well – and where it is proving to be
spectacularly disciplined, calculating and effective.

Donald Trump is presiding over the most withering, devastating, and
trenchant attack on the American administrative state this nation has
ever known.


The latest major Trump resignations and firings
Read more
The administrative state, a pillar of modern American government, is
tasked with making and enforcing economic and environmental
regulations, designing and running social welfare programs, fighting
crime and corruption, providing for the national defense and so much
more.

Yet, in a little more than nine months, Trump has taken aim and hit
his bull’s-eye. Far from the public’s gaze, he’s rescinded, rolled
backed, and reversed countless environmental, labor, education,
transportation, food and drug, and consumer protection rules and
regulations.

Cast largely as liberty enhancing, these deregulatory efforts endanger
the safety, health, and welfare of all Americans, not to mention a
good deal of the rest of the world who depend on the United States to
do its part to combat global warming, banking and securities fraud,
and worker exploitation.

At the same time, Trump is vilifying the professional bureaucracy,
that vast community of apolitical, career officials whose work it is
to design, administer, and demand compliance with administrative
regulations—and who are, by congressional design and longstanding
practice, well positioned to question and challenge the directives of
an abusive, impulsive, or simply hyperpartisan president.

Trump has repeatedly referred to the bureaucracy as a “swamp,” which
must be drained; his surrogates have repeatedly alleged that these
officials are part of a shadowy “Deep State” – and intent on
subverting our democracy; and his deputies have taken steps to
marginalize their involvement in federal policymaking.

This one-two punch of policy deregulation and bureaucratic
delegitimization is a combination that erstwhile White House
strategist Steve Bannon gleefully calls the “deconstruction of the
administrative state”. Already this deconstruction is turning back the
clock, sometimes years, sometimes decades, on the kinds of protections
and assurances that enable Americans to be confident and productive
participants in the national political economy.

Consider the Trump administration in action. While all eyes are drawn
to the three-ring circus of White House saber-rattling, indictments,
and Twitter wars, Trump and his cabinet secretaries have been quietly
at work on this project of regulatory deconstruction.


Let’s start with the basics. Donald Trump is hardly the first
president to rail against the administrative state, or to promise a
massive downsizing of the federal bureaucracy. But, so far, he’s been
the most unflinching.

Previous presidents – including Ronald Reagan who famously intoned:
“government is not the solution to our problem; government is the
problem” – either softened their stance once confronted with legal and
technocratic arguments in favor of basic safety, health, and welfare
rights and protections; or they took their hand off the deregulatory
throttle once they encountered sufficient public or congressional
pushback.

Conservative folklore aside, public pressure during the Reagan years
led to the preservation and partial strengthening of the Clean Air
Act, the softening of the campaign promise to “mine more, drill more,
cut more timber,” and the expansion of federal welfare and education
programs that the Gipper regularly attacked.

By contrast, Trump, in this respect, has been a conservative’s dream.
Championing the interests of big business, Trump has engineered the
rescission of 14 major environmental, financial, and labor rules.
(Prior to 2017, only one other rule had been formally rescinded, in
2001 under George W Bush.)

In addition, Trump has begun the process of withdrawing from the Paris
Climate Agreement; relieved builders (just a couple weeks before the
devastating hurricanes in Texas and Florida) of the responsibility to
account for increased flooding, rising sea levels, and other
manifestations of climate change in their design plans; reversed a ban
on drilling for oil in the Arctic; and revoked an order requiring
federal contractors to take affirmative steps to prevent and combat
sexual harassment and discrimination as well as to reduce wage
disparities between men and women.

Trump’s surrogates – those hand-picked to lead the various
administrative agencies – are proving similarly committed to the White
House’s deregulatory agenda. Consider, for example, the current EPA
chief, Scott Pruitt.

A climate change skeptic and long-time critic of the agency he now
runs, Pruitt has blocked or delayed dozens of would-be clean air,
clean water, and carbon emission rules. He has also worked to rescind
the heralded Clean Power Plan, and rejected the recommended ban on
certain agriculture pesticides, reversing the expert findings of
career staff detailing the disastrous effects of these chemicals
particularly on low-wage farm laborers and their children.

Pruitt is hardly alone. In department after department, Trump
appointees are busy dismantling critical health and safety regulations
– much of this work happening light years away from a spotlight hardly
large enough to cover all that is salacious and scandalous in the
Trump White House.

For example, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has made the
all-but-unprecedented recommendation that Trump declassify protected
national monuments – sprawling tracts of land possessing significant
natural, cultural, or historic significance. (No other presidential
administration has sought to declassify a national monument in nearly
40 years.)

Zinke has also moved to withdraw rules regulating the controversial
drilling practice known as fracking. And he has shelved an important
report documenting the health risks associated with specific types of
coal mining – a report that would, under ordinary circumstances, serve
as the basis for a federal rule banning or severely restricting such
mining.

Lastly, the Trump Labor Department has, among other things, delayed
implementation of important enforcement provisions of a fiduciary rule
requiring financial advisors to put their clients’ interests ahead of
their own.

This is hardly a comprehensive list. Many more regulatory reversals,
big and small, have already occurred; and we should expect more in the
weeks and months to follow.

Indeed, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross recently gave voice to these
expectations, urging wavering Trump allies to stay loyal, to overlook
the administration’s glaring failures precisely because the Trump
deregulatory agenda is so important to the American business
community.


But in many respects, the instant policy rollbacks and recissions
aren’t the most profound or important ones. Trump hasn’t just taken
steps to deregulate in the here and now. He and his lieutenants are
also damaging the machinery of regulation, perhaps to such an extent
that federal agencies won’t be capable of swinging back into action
when outcry over lax environmental, labor, and health and safety
protections propels a pro-regulation president into office.

Through active campaigns to, again, “drain the swamp” and disable the
“deep state,” the infrastructure of government—and not just the
programs themselves—is eroding before our very eyes.

To be clear, Trump’s regulatory successes have not been cakewalks. At
nearly every turn, he and his agency heads have encountered career
personnel who’ve challenged the administration’s decisions as unsound
and, at times, illegal.

But Trump has been waging and winning a battle of attrition. He’s set
out to fire those he’s allowed to—think FBI Director James Comey,
Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, and US Attorney for New York
Preet Bharara. He has also disbanded working groups of distinguished
scientists – the Interior department alone has shut down the work of
more than 200 such groups – and bullied those career experts protected
against at-will termination.

Among the administration’s preferred tactics to cow that last group of
career employees into submission or, better yet, to push them out, has
been to cancel, defund, or ignore their programs. That has happened,
among other places, at the State Department and the EPA.

He’s conducted investigatory witch hunts against career employees.
He’s exiled some to positions far outside of their expertise and has
directed others to advance legally and programmatically unsupportable
policies. These tactics have been used against employees at the EPA as
well as the Departments of Education, Interior, Justice, and State, to
name just a few.

This attrition campaign has paid dividends. Hundreds of frustrated
senior officials have already left. The departed are, invariably,
among the best educated and most talented – those scientists,
engineers, economists, lawyers, and social workers most readily able
to secure rewarding employment elsewhere.

Those left behind must now compensate for the loss of their
exceptional colleagues and thus are at an even bigger disadvantage in
efforts to challenge unsound and unlawful deregulatory directives.

As a result, we already see rudderless program administration, the
withering of transnational alliances, legal flip-flopping in cases
being argued in the federal courts, and inadequate responses to
various crises.

But, again, that’s just the immediate effect. Attrition will continue
apace; recruitment shortfalls will soon become evident; after all, who
wants the thankless task of working for federal agencies demonized
both within and outside of government? In time, key agencies may find
themselves incapacitated, lacking the talent, morale, and experience
to carry out their congressionally mandated responsibilities.


Wilbur Ross and others bent on a laissez-faire America may hold out
hope that Trump is a Joshua to Reagan’s Moses, ready to lead the
overtaxed and over-regulated into a libertarian Promised Land that
until now has remained just out of reach.

But Trump is no Joshua. His corrupt, abusive, and otherwise
incompetent presidency proves as much. Instead, he’s Fonzie on water
skis, and his campaign to deconstruct the administrative state may
well be poised to jump the shark.

Simply put, Trump’s bullying of the federal bureaucracy may serve to
show Americans how much they need the administrative state, how
important professional, apolitical civil servants are to the stability
and well-being of the nation, and what a dangerous game we play when
we let presidential surrogates demonize civil servants as part of
treasonous deep state intent on subverting the government.

Trump may, in fact, be the only man alive capable of making
bureaucrats—bureaucrats!—popular. All of a sudden, we’re no longer
primed to think of federal employees as lazy and lackluster, an
all-too-frequent characterization in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

Now we think of them as stellar scientists, lawyers, and diplomats—the
very best this country has to offer—and conservatives and progressives
both are mourning their untimely and largely involuntary departure
from government employ.

When the dust settles on this presidency, we should be ready and
willing to encourage a bureaucratic renaissance—and make the necessary
investments to redeem and restore an administrative state capable both
of protecting our health, safety, and welfare and serving as a bulwark
of the rule of law.

For now, it is best to remember (and remind others) that bureaucracy
was never a swamp but rather a deep reservoir of talented, loyal, and
devoted experts, whose effectiveness turned in considerable part on
their political independence.

This independence enabled them to serve across presidential
administrations; to develop technical proficiency uncorrupted by
political fads; and to speak truth to power to Democrats and
Republicans alike.

Jon Michaels is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. His latest
book is Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American
Republic.

This piece is the first in a series of essays entitled ‘While you
weren’t looking - how Trump is dismantling the administrative state’
As the crisis escalates…