(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post of the Week From the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadians)

There’s no more prominent target for the administration*’s Friends of the Plutocrats deregulation frenzy than the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Senator Professor Warren’s brainchild that was born out of the days in which people destroyed most of the world economy and stole the rest, and then got paid by the United States government for having done so. The CFPB was set up to give ordinary folks at least a fighting chance against a financial-services industry possessed of the fundamental humanity of a forest fire. And it was a project of the Obama Administration, so that was another strike against it.

The current administration* has virtually shredded the bureau. They put Mick Mulvaney, a Tea Party lackey from South Carolina, in charge of it, and he not only has worked to destroy its regulatory mission, but also actively arranged things so that the CFPB becomes a defender of the very financial institutions it was created to keep in line.

This week, for example, Mulvaney has taken the CFPB out of the business of lender discrimination. From The Washington Post:

The move to sharply restrict the responsibilities of the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity comes about two months after President Trump installed his budget chief, Mick Mulvaney, at the head of the bureau. The office previously used its powers to force payouts in several prominent cases, including settlements from lenders it alleged had systematically charged minorities higher interest rates than they had for whites. That unit now will move inside the office of the director, where staffers will be focused on “advocacy, coordination and education,” according to an email Mulvaney sent them this week. They will no longer have responsibility for enforcement and day-to-day oversight of companies, he wrote.

Mulvaney, of course, previously turned off the CFPB’s attempts to rein in the parasitic payday lending scam, an industry that previously had donated extravagantly to his campaign fund.

Beyond moving the fair-lending office, Mulvaney has also dropped a lawsuit against payday lenders and said the agency will reconsider rules the financial industry complained would be particularly onerous. He also updated the bureau’s mission statement to include addressing “outdated, unnecessary, or unduly burdensome regulations.” In a memo to staffers last week, Mulvaney said the CFPB would still look to protect consumers but would not try to “push the envelope.” “Bringing the full weight of the federal government down on the necks of the people we serve should be something that we do only reluctantly, and only when all other attempts at resolution have failed. It should be the most final of last resorts,” he wrote.

The embattled agency got something of a reprieve on Thursday when a federal appeals court ruled that its basic structure was constitutional, turning back yet another administration attempt to defang the CFPB. From The Los Angeles Times:

Although the Supreme Court could have the ultimate say, Wednesday's ruling upholds the broad powers granted to the bureau's director by Congress to oversee mortgages, credit cards and other financial products. Republicans and business groups have fought aggressively to reduce the bureau's authority, arguing its aggressive actions have restricted access to credit. But the calculus has changed since President Trump took office, said Alan S. Kaplinsky, head of the consumer financial services group at law firm Ballard Spahr. The bureau's first director, Democrat Richard Cordray, resigned in November and Trump named Republican Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, to be the acting chief. An outspoken opponent of the bureau, Mulvaney has moved quickly to make it more business-friendly and scale back enforcement actions even as his appointment is the subject of its own litigation.

The administration*’s assault on this most basic response to what nearly was a fiscal apocalypse brought on by massive fraud should prevent any further use of the word “populist” in near proximity to the name of this president*. At the very least, the CFPB likely will still be around when and if the country regains its sanity.

This does not fill me with optimism. W.J. Hennigan went deep on what the Trump Administration* is up to with nuclear weapons in Time:



Since 1993, the Department of Energy has had to be ready to conduct a nuclear test within two to three years if ordered by the President. Late last year, the Trump Administration ordered the department to be ready, for the first time, to conduct a short-notice nuclear test in as little as six months.

This is something when you decide to change the policy, you really have to know what you’re doing. Yeah, I know…

That is not enough time to install the warhead in shafts as deep as 4,000 ft. and affix all the proper technical instrumentation and diagnostics equipment. But the purpose of such a detonation, which the Administration labels “a simple test, with waivers and simplified processes,” would not be to ensure that the nation’s most powerful weapons were in operational order, or to check whether a new type of warhead worked, a TIME review of nuclear-policy documents has found. Rather, a National Nuclear Security Administration official tells TIME, such a test would be “conducted for political purposes.”

So, red baseball caps, scarves, and firing off some nukes. Re-elect the President!

The point, this and other sources say, would be to show Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Iran’s Ayatullah Ali Khamenei and other adversaries what they are up against.

God, these people are weird. Do they think any of those people already don’t know we have enough megatons to vaporize the planet? Do they think turning a little more of Nevada into a glass parking lot is going to convince those people to turn into good democrats? Can they do anything except flex, clumsily and unconvincingly, on the international stage?

The Trump Administration, by contrast, is convinced that the best way to limit the spreading nuclear danger is to expand and advertise its ability to annihilate its enemies. In addition to putting the Nevada testing ground on notice, he has signed off on a $1.2 trillion plan to overhaul the entire nuclear-weapons complex. Trump has authorized a new nuclear warhead, the first in 34 years. He is funding research and development on a mobile medium-range missile. The new weapon, if tested or deployed, would be prohibited by a 30-year-old Cold War nuclear-forces agreement with Russia (which has already violated the agreement). And for the first time, the U.S. is expanding the scenarios under which the President would consider going nuclear to “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks,” including major cyberattacks.

Never mind.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Brown Noise” (Egg Yolk Jubilee): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.



Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Seventy-five years ago this week, the Red Army defeated the Germans and liberated Stalingrad. “They rot in the land they wanted to enslave.” The Brits know how to do narration. History is so cool.

I suppose I should make a call on Sunday’s Great Commercial Opportunity between the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots. I think it’s going to be a better game than most people think it is. The Eagles are uniquely built to take advantage of some of New England’s season-long weaknesses—most notably, their jerry-rigged offensive line. Tom Brady is going to take something of a beating. He’ll win another Super Bowl, but he’s going to need a prolonged recovery period. It might be the last game Malcolm Butler plays for the Patriots, but he will never pay for a meal in Boston ever again because of the play he made against Seattle. If Butler’s not sending Pete Carroll a Christmas card every year...

It’s hard to explain what an important voice Nicholas von Hoffman was during the days when the country was coming apart in the 1960s and 1970s, and how many of us coming into the business during that time admired him. He was blunt, he was funny, and he was one of those people of whom you wished could have lived forever because he was a natural blogger. He lost a gig on 60 Minutes because he said that Richard Nixon was like a “dead mouse on the kitchen floor that nobody wants to throw away.” Which was awesome. And he actually worked for Saul Alinsky. NVH passed away this week at 88 and America’s voice grows even more sadly muted.



Is it a good day for dinosaur news, History? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Scientists are now raising a glass to what paleontologist Matthew Lamanna calls “the holy grail of dinosaurs”: a specimen known as Mansourasaurus shahinae. The dinosaur’s discovery in the Sahara upends long-held theories about the dinosaurs that roamed Africa millions of years ago. What makes this find so notable? Well, it shines a light on what was previously a mysterious period in Africa’s paleontological record, and demonstrates that some dinosaurs moved between southern Europe and North Africa at the end of the Mesozoic Era. Until Mansourasaurus shahinae’s discovery by paleontologists from Egypt’s Mansoura University, the fossil record for Africa during the Cretaceous period—the final chapter of the age of dinosaurs—was very sparse. Scientists were unclear about which dinosaurs lived on the African continent and how they may have mixed with dinosaurs who inhabited other land masses at the time.

A recent paper cataloguing the new species in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution reveals that Mansourasaurus sahinae has more in common with European and Asian dinosaurs than with South American and southern African dinosaurs, which disproves previous theories that Africa’s dinosaur fauna existed in isolation.

It’s nice to know that dinosaurs in Africa weren’t as lonely and friendless as we thought they might have been, because they deserved better, because they lived then to make us happy now.

The members of The Committee always have been suckers for a good Strangelove reference. This week, Top Commenter Ernest Lamonica obliged, writing on a post about the administration*’s slide toward carnage on the Korean peninsula.

A very limited Nuclear strike? Yes. How limited? Very limited. Like maybe 3-5 in major pop centers? There aren't that many pop centers. Ok. in Pyongyang. Yes. 1 in missile launch center. Yes. 1 in main Navy Base. Yes. in main Air base. Yes. 1 in Border CinC. Yes. So that's four (4) Yes. 5 Megs each. Yes. Have I missed anything? Yes. What? Kim's Barber shop. We need to mess up his hair a little.

I used to think that movie was pure satire. I don’t think that any more. Here are 77.19 Beckhams to keep you company in the shelter.

I’ll be back on Monday and I wouldn’t even begin to guess what we’ll be discussing in the shebeen. It’s a land of mystery and wonder these days. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake line, or your precious bodily fluids are really up for grabs.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page.



Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io