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**MAY 13, 2025**
On the Prospect website
Trump's Flagrant Racism
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It's the flip side of Trump's DEI for incompetent white people. BY ROBERT KUTTNER
'We Are in a Moment of Unparalleled Peril': An Interview With Naomi Klein [link removed]
The author and academic speaks about an apocalyptic future and strategies for survival. BY CERISE CASTLE
Trump's China Charade [link removed]
It's the usual script-create a crisis, then back off and claim victory. BY ROBERT KUTTNER
Meyerson on TAP
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**** So Much for Consumer Product Safety
Last week, Trump fired the three Democrats on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and is sacking much of the staff.
Read down
MAGA's enemies list and you'll find oodles of presumably woke causes and customs, along with the universities that leached them into our national bloodstream and the government agencies that imposed them on an unsuspecting public. It's a long list, customarily free from such woke constraints as having to provide credible documentation.
But you won't find consumer product safety on that list. Nobody, save miscreant manufacturers, really wants the public to unknowingly purchase dangerous cribs or flammable toddler PJs. Even the Klan wants safe sheets.
So, there's been no groundswell to cripple the Consumer Product Safety Commission. But the absence of discontent even from America's most discontented has posed no obstacle to the demons of DOGE, who in recent weeks have been busy slashing the CPSC's massive staff (of about 500, which you might think is actually rather small considering their charge is to investigate and assess potentially dangerous defects in products that
consumers call to their attention, and that the number of products in the American marketplace is, well, large). At last Wednesday's meeting of the Commission, which has five members, all confirmed by Congress and appointed to fixed terms, two of those members-Richard Trumka Jr. and Mary Boyle-spoke out against stripping the agency of investigators who were expert in specific types of products and specific types of hazards and specific forms of safety remediations. The following day, in the middle of their fixed terms, both Trumka and Boyle were unceremoniously sacked, and their colleague Alex Hoehn-Saric was fired the day after that. The three were the Democratic members of the Commission; two Republicans remain, apparently indifferent to the mass firings of staff.
The previous week, the three Democrats had supplied the three votes (a majority) in favor of preliminarily adopting a proposed safety standard that would be opened up to public comments before coming to a final
vote on its adoption. That standard would add safety precautions to the lithium-ion batteries in electric scooters and electric bikes, which CPSC investigators found had flared into fires that have caused at least 181 injuries and 39 deaths nationwide. Electric scooters and bikes not themselves being totally woke, some of the deceased were likely MAGAnauts and their children.
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Opposition to such rulings, as I mentioned, is generally confined to the manufacturers who make those products and the retailers who refuse to recall them after they've been found to be unsafe. One such retailer is Amazon, which the Commission ruled last year [link removed] needed to recall products found to be dangerous that were sold on its platforms, and to refund the
consumers who'd bought them there and returned them in response to the recall. Amazon went to court arguing that it's only a delivery service, like FedEx and UPS, but the keen-eyed commissioners at the CPSC apparently noticed that Amazon actually has a platform that markets goods online. (I'll note that in contesting a ruling of one National Labor Relations Board region that Amazon was really the joint employer of its drivers who nominally work for independent delivery services, and was thus responsible for obeying the relevant labor laws, Amazon argued, in effect, that it
**wasn't**a delivery service. Jeff Bezos's lawyers are nothing if not flexible.) Sensing a certain weakness in these lines of argumentation, Amazon then sued to have the courts declare the CPSC unconstitutional-just as it had sued to make the NLRB unconstitutional-because their members have fixed terms and thus can't be hired and fired at will by the president, and because the Commission is empowered to
make rulings, rather than have its cases go straightaway to the courts. These are the same arguments that other behemoth corporations are making against the constitutionality of the NLRB and the Federal Trade Commission.
It wasn't just the staff's reduction in force that concerned the CPSC's Democratic commissioners; it was also the threat of politicizing what were evidence-based rulings. In a statement she released shortly after her firing, Commissioner Boyle noted that by her vote to approve the preliminary lithium-ion battery safety standard, she had
rejected the delay tactics of this administration, which has put in place a so-called regulatory freeze and a byzantine process requiring White House officials to review proposed safety standards in advance. Not only is that process contrary to CPSC's statutes, it is designed to occur behind the scenes and outside of public scrutiny. This would be in stark contrast to the government-in-the sunshine ethos CPSC has long
embraced. Along with my two Democratic colleagues, I voted instead to advance the safety standards and gather public comment-a practice the agency has followed for decades.
I suppose that one possible Boyle concern could be that a decision on the safety of a product made by a company owned by, say, a major donor to a Trump campaign or, say, a major purchaser of Trump's cryptocurrency, or, say, some foreign potentate who gives Trump a really cool 747 might just tilt that decision the manufacturer's way if it were made at, say, Mar-a-Lago rather than by the CPSC.
Just sayin'.
Like Gwynne Wilcox, the NLRB board member whose fixed term, as set by Congress, was also terminated mid-term by Trump, the three sacked Democrats at the CPSC will be contesting their sacking in court. If they don't prevail, you'd better hope that the guy who makes your electric scooter isn't gobbling up so much Trump cryptocurrency that he'll be at that dinner Trump will be hosting for the rich guys
who are making him richer.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
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