Tilting the Playing Field, Trump Style

There’s a host of reasons why California resists Trump. First, our culture is deeply rooted in our Hispanic/Latino heritage. California was, after all, once a Spanish territory and then part of Mexico. It was wrested from Mexico under President James Polk, who invaded that country with territorial expansion as his goal. “In 1846 Colonel Hitchcock, commander of the 3rd Infantry regiment, writes in his diary: ‘...the United States are the aggressors....We have not one particle of right to be here....It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses....My heart is not in this business.’

“[In] 1848, Mexico surrenders on U.S. terms. The U.S. takes over ownership of New Mexico, California, expands Texas, and more, for a token payment of $15 million. Native Mexicans are given the choice to become US citizens or leave the area one year after the Treaty was signed.” Quora.com.

Our labor force, from construction to food services/hospitality to agricultural, is heavily dependent on a significant undocumented workforce that our system has accommodated for many years. We eat Mexican food, teach our children about Mexico’s and Spain’s cultural reach that defined who we are, and we look admiringly on the Camino Real and the missions along the way. Sorry, Donald, we are not threatened by Mexican and Central American asylum seekers, but we are terrified of you and your heartless policies.

We are clearly the most populous state with the largest state economy in the union, big enough to be the fifth largest economy in the world if we were our own nation. We are a major food producer, have several of this country’s leading financial and tech centers, and are the cutting edge in non-polluting and exceptionally profitable industries. Loose gun laws may work within your rural state base, Donald, but they are totally out-of-place in crowded cities.

Our state colleges, particularly the University of California system (with UCLA, Berkeley, Irvine, etc. in that mix) and private schools like Cal Tech, Stanford, Claremont and USC, are among the best in the land, and our industrial base is heavily dependent on STEM-educated graduates and the ability to import exceptionally well-educated immigrants to make sure we remain on the technology’s leading edge. So when the government pulls back on student aid and makes recruiting international STEM superstars into our industries really tough with short-sighted immigration policies, we deeply resent such intrusion.

Because we have so many large cities – Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose. Sacramento, San Diego, etc. – we have an oversized burden that comes with urbanization. Crowded cities need more social programs, infrastructural support, uniformed services, a bigger judicial system (the California judicial system is the single largest judicial system on earth!), healthcare and public education than do states with smaller or no real urban populations. We have more homeless and poor folks (blame the weather) and greater pressure on medical treatments for the poor. As Trump and his cronies cut back on state support for healthcare and social safety nets, that burden falls particularly heavily on California.

As a result, our state income, sales and property taxes are among the highest in the land to accommodate those needs. So when Trump’s failed tax plan (it pretty much was a give-away to the rich with nothing tangible coming back for “most of us”) imposed limited deductions against federal income tax for state and local taxes, he slammed mostly blue states like high-tax California that are heavily urbanized and totally favored red states that voted for him and just happened to fall within those deduction limits.

Having fought to reduce killer smog, particularly in Los Angeles, we do not appreciate his trying to deregulate polluters to undo years of efforts towards more breathable air… to risk major oil spills in off-shore drilling permits and strip our millions of acres of national parks of their status as environmentally-protected areas. Trump’s propensity to place blame has led him and his administration to fault California for its recent spate of wildfires, products of global warming and underfunded forest maintenance (much on federal lands), suggesting that federal aid for such natural disasters just might be curtailed.

Bottom line, except for a very few underpopulated counties, California is deeply anti-Trump. Without the slightest equivocation, I can tell you that Donald Trump does not represent California. The Republican Party, now Trump-controlled, did not elect a single candidate to any California statewide office on November 6^th. Virtually all the contested House seats here turned blue.

But while Donald Trump is the president for those rust belt and fossil fuel extraction workers whose jobs that are falling or have already fallen into obsolescence (they actually believe in Trump’s false promises for a return to their halcyon days of their high blue-collar paychecks), for traditional white evangelicals seeking to ban gay marriages, abortions and institute Christianity as our official American faith and for mega-billionaires who want low taxes and virtually no consumer, environmental or financial regulation, he sure isn’t president for the rest of us.

And God help you in this country if you are poor; Donald Trump is clearly not your president either. The November 23^rd Los Angeles Times explains: President Trump’s push to roll back federal regulations will take a significant toll on Americans’ health and finances, according to a surprising source — the Trump administration itself.

These human costs — which include more deaths from air pollution, higher medical bills and increased student debt — rarely get mentioned by the president, who often touts the economic benefits of his deregulatory campaign.

But a review of thousands of pages of federal regulatory and legal filings shows that multiple agencies predict in their own analyses that the changes will cause an extensive list of harmful, even deadly, effects.

The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, calculated as many as 1,400 more premature deaths a year as a result of its proposed rule providing incentives to electric utilities to keep coal-fired power plants operating longer.

The Department of Education, which has taken several steps to scale back rules on for-profit colleges and universities, conceded that one of its rollbacks had left students with more than $50 million in additional debt.

The Department of Homeland Security acknowledged in regulatory filings that its proposal to curtail immigrants’ access to Medicaid and other government safety net programs risks increasing malnutrition among children and pregnant and breastfeeding women.

And the Department of Health and Human Services predicted that a regulation lifting restrictions on health plans with skimpier benefits would reduce sicker patients’ access to medical care and expose them to higher costs…

Federal agencies often say in regulatory filings that those costs are outweighed by economic benefits. Officials project that their moves will spur economic growth, cut government spending or reduce administrative burdens.

Trump routinely cheers such benefits. “We’ve cut regulations more than any president ever,” he told Fox Business News at a recent White House event in which he claimed deregulation was saving billions of dollars.

But hundreds of patient groups, public health organizations, consumer advocates and others dispute that, saying that many of the administration’s proposals pose particular risk for vulnerable Americans, including children, patients with serious illnesses and struggling students.

‘The notion that deregulation is good for the economy and good for consumers is ill-conceived,’ said Sally Greenberg, executive director of the National Consumers League. ‘In fact, the overall cost of deregulation is actually a drag on the economy because it ultimately hurts consumers and harms their health.’

Since the Reagan administration, federal rules have required agencies to lay out the anticipated costs and benefits of proposed regulations through regulatory impact analyses… The rigor of these analyses has varied greatly, according to experts. Under Trump, several major policy initiatives have been undertaken without a full accounting of their potential effects, particularly on vulnerable populations.

The Education Department, for example, did not report how many student borrowers would be affected by a proposed rule issued earlier this year making it more difficult for students who have been defrauded by colleges to get debt relief. Nor did the agency report how much more debt these students could face.

Only when borrowers sued did the agency acknowledge in court filings that scaling back the federal government’s debt relief program had left students with $56.9 million in additional debt...

Nowhere has this been more apparent than at the EPA, an agency that has long set the standard for evaluating the costs and benefits of proposed regulatory moves… When Trump ordered in 2017 that the EPA scrap President Obama’s landmark initiative to fight climate change by limiting power plant emissions, agency scientists reported the move would cause up to 4,500 premature deaths annually.

The administration’s proposed replacement — known as the Affordable Clean Energy rule — pushed the projected death toll even higher, according to EPA scientists, who estimated also predicted an additional 1,400 premature deaths every year.

The agency that workers sickened by increased air pollution from the added emissions would miss up to 48,000 days of work annually, and sickened children would miss up to 160,000 days of school… Another proposal by the EPA to rescind a ban on polluting diesel-engine trucks known as glider trucks also would have been deadly, causing up to 1,600premature deaths in just one year of glider production, EPA scientists said in regulatory filings.

Perhaps someday even the red states will appreciate California’s resistance. But Trump has so tilted the playing field toward the wealthiest incumbents, shifting a massive financial burden on the bottom three-quarters of society, that this country just might never recover in time for the hoped-for renaissance of post-Trump America. Income inequality, polarization and irreconcilable hatred have so infected the land that the United States simply could just end. What might follow is hardly a comforting vision.

I’m Peter Dekom, and unless we figure out how to live in a fact-driven political system where we all pull together for what best for “most of us,” this plutocratic adhocracy just might put an end to the great American experiment in democratic government.