Sometimes I get the impression that President Trump is applying no discernment or judgment when it comes to reversing the regulations the Obama administration put on a wide range of areas -- to protect the environment, to ensure that banks maintain sound asset to loan ratios, to protect consumers from credit card excess fees, to protect workers from harmful conditions, to ensure standards for education and health care, to prevent local police from abuses of power, and a myriad other things.
True, nobody likes to deal with all the bureaucracy that regulations entail, least of all small business owners on whom it is an onerous task, relative to their staff size.
But Trump has gone "de-regulate" on a universal scale. The only thing that comes to mind that he hasn't deregulated, or plans to, is air traffic control, and he's making noises about privatizing it. Heck, his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, even had a plan he was pushing to privatize the whole Afghanistan War to Blackstone's mercenary soldiers. Fortunately, that last crazy scheme died with Bannon's exit from the White House.
So I'm not sure how much it is that Trump just really hates regulations himself (he has one of the least regulated minds this side of insanity) -- and how much he just wants to erase Barack Obama, along with everything he accomplished and stood for.
Trump's unstated mantra seems to be: "If Obama did it, I'll undo it."
His latest reversal (unless he does something else between now and the time I post this) is cancelling Obama's restrictions on what surplus military combat hardware could be acquired by local police departments.
This came to attention during the aftermath of the police killing of an unarmed young black man in Ferguson, Missouri, when peaceful demonstrating crowds were met by police in a heavily armored vehicle with a machine gun on top, using battlefield grenade launchers to fire tear gas canisters into the crowds.
The effect of such a show of military-style force was later analyzed by progressive experts on crowd control and handling of riots and deemed to be counter-productive. It sends a message of an army fighting against invading insurgents.
It is the very antithesis of "community based policing" that has proved effective in Dallas and other cities, where policing has much in common with community organization work, along with its law enforcement. function. One of its basic tenets is building trust between residents and police, so that people feel safe and motivated to cooperate with the police to keep their own neighborhoods safe.
Advances that were made over the past few years under Obama and his Justice Department are rapidly being undercut and destroyed by President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. They are stuck in the past "law and order" mentality, such as ordering judges to return to giving maximum prison time sentences in drug trials.
Trump revels in feeding red meat to his dwindling right-wing base. So he's pandering to them with rhetoric about "giving the police the equipment they need to do their job," and by pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was "convicted of doing his job" and "keeping our borders safe."
Even without the politics, I don't believe either Trump or Sessions is capable of seeing social problems through any lens but the authoritarian one. While making military battlefield equipment available again does not, in and of itself, signal a move toward fascism, it certainly does nothing to assuage those fears that have legitimately emerged from statements, attitudes, and actions coming from Trump himself -- actions such as pardoning Arpaio for violating suspects' constitutional rights and for his long-standing abuses of power.
Ralph
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment