Federal Scofflaws

It’s starts at the top, a president who tells his Border Patrol agents that if the break the law doing what he believes is correct, even such actions violate federal law, he’ll pardon them or cover their legal costs. It continues as he instructs those associated with his administration not to honor congressional subpoenas relating to his possible impeachment. It is amplified by his executive orders attempting to repeal statutes he doesn’t like, from healthcare to military assistance appropriations to trade policies, immigration policies, healthcare laws to press credentials. His policies of blame eviscerate First Amendment protections, create fictitious interpretations of the Second Amendment combine with his failure to take responsibility for his own failures – like refusing to acknowledge that the worst offenders in removing dry forest debris in California are far and away those forests under exclusive control by the feds.

And so, Donald Trump is wildly popular with his constituents. He’s picked on the way his followers feel picked on. His racism affirms what many already feel: foreigners and people of color are siphoning off their jobs and wasting their tax dollars on benefits they do not deserve. Many also feel that they would be richer, perhaps on a rise to the ultimate millionaire dream, if Trump’s vision of America could just get by all those freeloaders and obstructionists. But for the grace of God, they too could be Donald Trumps as well. Tree huggers should be stripped of power; climate change is either not man-made, doesn’t exist or simply does not matter enough for any form of economic compromise. Anything Trump does to disrupt, to challenge, to disassemble government and throw money back into the private sector is to be lauded. Trump’s base actually identifies with him!

Trump’s appointees mirror his disdain for the Constitution and federal laws to the contrary. Any thing that reduces white power, the only thing holding back the socialist hordes, is horrible… while anything that enhances white power, especially at the polls is good. God will, after all, look after them. Take away minority votes any way you can! Terrified of losing that populist base, even if it requires elected Republicans to vote for massive federal budget deficits and anti-free-market tariffs (once GOP apostasy), Republicans are in lockstep to support their populist autocrat.

They argue that the impeachment effort is nothing more than a desperate Democratic Party, out of tough with real Americans, playing a purely political game through a witch hunt that lacks a scintilla of due process. They apparently have convinced their constituency that it is all Democrats to the exclusion of any Republicans. Facts tell you that there are a proportionate number of Republicans on every House committee of inquiry, an inconvenient truth that has fallen between the cracks. And the President knows, just knows, that he doesn’t have to follow the law, that if impeached (now probable), there is virtually no possibility that a two-thirds Senate vote will remove him from office. So he and his administration are free to ignore state and federal laws, regulations and, of course, any state laws… even against federal court orders.

No one embodies this scofflaw mentality more than under-educated, anti-public education advocate and U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, widely acknowledged as the least competent member of a profoundly subpar cabinet. Writing for the November 3^rd Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik illustrates how completely defiant DeVos has become (and why Donald Trump loves her).

“As is true of many legal concepts, ‘contempt of court’ can be inexact in its definitions or implications. But that doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her department’s treatment of thousands of students defrauded by the for-profit company Corinthian Colleges.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim in San Francisco on Oct. 24 slapped DeVos and her agency with a $100,000 sanction for civil contempt… Kim found that, despite her having ordered DeVos’ agency in 2018 to cease collecting on federal loans taken out by the defrauded students, the Education Department had sent payment demands to 16,034 students. They included 847 whose credit reports had been dinged by the agency and 1,808 whose paychecks had been garnisheed or whose tax refunds had been withheld. ‘There have to be some consequences for the violation of my order 16,000 times,’ Kim ruled.

“Kim’s ruling, stern as it is, fails to communicate the full flavor of the contempt DeVos and her department have shown toward those students — and students of other dishonest firms in the for-profit higher education sector — as well as for the processes established years ago to grant them loan forgiveness… Don’t expect DeVos to feel the pain from Kim’s sanction. Although she’s an heiress by marriage to the DeVos family’s Amway merchandising fortune and estimated to be worth more than $1 billion, she won’t be getting the bill for the contempt citation — it goes to the taxpayers.

“Those feeling the pain are the former Corinthian students, who were cheated of the opportunity to better themselves, and some of whom still struggle to make ends meet because the government hasn’t resolved their claims. DeVos’ undermining of the forgiveness procedure started almost instantly after her confirmation as Education secretary in February 2017. She put a hold on a system that had been crafted under the Obama administration that effectively granted former Corinthian students full recompense on their government loans. Nearly a year later, she substituted an alternative process that was so legally flawed it was blocked by Judge Kim.”

Other federal appointees have eviscerated the agencies they now head from implementing the mandate for which the agencies were created. As the Environmental Protection Agency turns away, tons of industrial waste are once again dumped into the air, our waterways or shoved underground to seep into aquifers, polluting drinking and agricultural water accordingly. As consumer protection agencies repeal or simply fail to enforce regulations against predatory corporate and business wrongs, those miscreants have amplified their efforts.

The relevant agencies are now relegated to reporting the misdeeds even as they simply stare at the results and continue to disassemble their agencies, one of the most immediate priorities as they took office in 2017. Older folks, embarrassed by their own gullibility, are particularly vulnerable. With federal oversight increasingly passive, the results speak for themselves. Wrongdoers generally have little to fear from federal regulators.

“In 2017, financial institutions filed 63,500 suspicious activity reports tied to the exploitation of older adults, quadruple the amount reported four years earlier, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for a total of $1.7 billion in attempted thefts and losses. That estimate, however, is a tiny fraction of the real total… The reports ‘may account for less than 2%’ of actual incidents, the CFPB says. Estimates of total losses ranged as high as $36.5 billion, according to one financial services firm.

“One in 5 older Americans is a victim of financial exploitation, said Jilenne Gunther, who heads the BankSafe initiative at the AARP’s Public Policy Institute, costing U.S. financial institutions $1 billion in deposits annually. The vast majority of such attempts to separate the elderly from their money, both legal and illegal, go unreported .

“Shawna Reeves, director of elder abuse prevention at the Institute on Aging in San Francisco, says few understand that such activity can involve professional firms and companies, including banks, financial advisors, insurers and law firms.

“‘This is big business, perpetrated by actors people think are legitimate,’ Reeves said. According to social workers, prosecutors and other officials across the country, common stratagems involve attempts to sell the elderly ill-advised annuities and reverse mortgages, as well as solar panel installations and access to veterans’ benefits.” Los Angeles Times, November 4^th. 

That so many of these victims actually voted for Trump is simply a reflection of how much they identify with the great decimator of federal bureaucracies, non-military federal employees who have been “stealing” their tax dollars for years to implement a “socialist” and Godless agenda. After all, those aren’t just “conspiracy theories;” those are Trump base “facts.”

            I’m Peter Dekom, and removing an almost deified political icon supported by oceans of “conspiracy as facts” and  heroic identification – regardless of his anti-democratic, mendacious and bone-headed policies – is why change is so hard to come by.