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It's somehow mythological creature week here at SMBC.

Almost literal Lee Zeldin: “the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is to ensure that the environment is despoiled to make goods cheaper and businesses more profitable”

In a barrage of pronouncements on Wednesday the Trump administration said it would repeal dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks, protections for wetlands, and the legal basis that allows it to regulate the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet.

But beyond that, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, reframed the purpose of the E.P.A. In a two-minute-and-18-second video posted to X, Mr. Zeldin boasted about the changes and said his agency’s mission is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”

“From the campaign trail to Day 1 and beyond, President Trump has delivered on his promise to unleash energy dominance and lower the cost of living,” Mr. Zeldin said. “We at E.P.A. will do our part to power the great American comeback.”

Nowhere in the video did he refer to protecting the environment or public health, twin tenets that have guided the agency since its founding in 1970.

And this isn’t just symbolic:

Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. would unwind more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. It would overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin. It would get rid of the “good neighbor rule” that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds into neighboring states. And it would eliminate enforcement efforts that prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities.

In addition, when the agency creates environmental policy, it would no longer consider the costs to society from wildfires, droughts, storms and other disasters that might be made worse by pollution connected to that policy, Mr. Zeldin said.

A Supreme Court that wasn’t dominated by hacks who share Zeldin’s views about both environmental policy and the rule of law might raise serious objections to unilateral attempts to nullify the objectives of an independent agency, but um yeah.

The post Trump administration to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency’s woke “environmental protection” agenda appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Over the last few days I’ve been hearing stories (anecdotes, really) about a rapid scaling up of pressure on workers from a few separate and distinct corporate contexts. I also sat in a meeting this week in which a senior administrator described the early details of new systems of workplace management designed to ensure that faculty were doing a “fair” amount of work. Anecdotes though they are, when combined with the horrors of DOGE they feel like a concerted effort on the part of the employer class to recreate then reap the rewards of worker precarity.

The Silicon Valley Tech Bros have made clear their rage against the very idea that workers should be able to make any kind of demands about the nature and governance of their workplaces. Wage growth and the concomitant freedom of movement that this implies is, to their minds, at the core of worker rebelliousness. The idea that if workers get paid too much they get uppity is the clear line that links the Tech Bros to both the traditional corporate ownership class and to the petit bourgeois that runs rural America. Moreover, all of these groups (along with right-affiliated economists) have long felt that government employment serves to distort the labor market and unfairly increase the bargaining power of workers.

For these folks, wage growth and worker mobility are the source of other “problems.” Frustration with inflation during Covid was, as much as anything, frustration with an increase in the wages that other people get paid. Wage growth was one of the most important drivers of inflation and contributed to some of the more annoying trends of the period, including rising restaurant prices, increasingly large demands for gratuities, and the inability of businesses to keep workers on staff. The rising price of produce is linked to the higher wages that workers demand for picking fruits and vegetables.

These folks pay attention to one another; they talk in country clubs and follow the same newsletters and sometimes sit on the same corporate boards. They can see Elon tightening the screws on the government workforce and it makes them believe, even at this very early date in Trump 47, that they can tighten the screws on their own workforces. It won’t be long, after all, until the labor pool is a lot more liquid and much more favorable for employers, so why not cut out the bad wood now (the employees who don’t want to be screeched at while sitting in a pressure cooker) in anticipation of a much more desperate workforce in a few months.

I’m curious about other reports of a shift in management tactics in the last six weeks. Is this all just conjecture or is there something to it?

The post The Empire Strikes Back appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.