We can never again say that Jeanne Shaheen didn’t try to cut Federal Spending. Her Senate office slipped a last-minute addition into the 1,000+ page “keep the government open or the world will end (again)” budget bill that would cut 50 million in spending. Fifty million. It was a hiccup, to be sure.
That sum isn’t even a corroded penny under a couch cushion on the government porch compared to the generational debt she’s helped accumulate (roughly 24 trillion, so far, on her watch), but it’s a small price to pay to keep her corporate donors happy (subscriber wall).
Shaheen aides slipped the budget-cutting provision into a must-pass 1,050-page bill to keep the government open. The language would strip the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division of nearly $50 million, or roughly 18 percent of its resources.
The proposed cut comes out of a Shaheen-chaired Senate appropriations subcommittee, which issued a summary of the bill that failed to mention the controversial provision.
“There’s going to be a bunch of companies that would have been sued for monopolization that will no longer be sued for monopolization,” said Matt Stoller, director of research for the American Economic Liberties Project. “And there’s going to be a bunch of mergers that are going to go through that shouldn’t go through because there aren’t the resources.” [emphasis mine]
The move runs counter to a push by her ideological boss, Joe Biden. The White House has been making a lot of noise about cracking down on big business.
Shaheen’s staff inserted the language just days before Biden announced a new “strike force” of officials from the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division “to crack down on unfair and illegal pricing.”
“This strike force will strengthen interagency efforts to root out and stop illegal corporate behavior that hikes prices on American families through anti-competitive, unfair, deceptive, or fraudulent business practices,” the White House announced on March 5.
The spending deal to slash regulators’ enforcement budget would overturn a 35-year-old rule that outlines the way the Antitrust Division gets money.
It’s all noise. Smoke and mirrors. Misdirection. Joe needs someone else to blame for his crappy economy. You need to decide whether to eat or pay rent and Joe’s bitching about fewer chips in a bag which – if that’s dinner is a problem, but one he created with the help of Democrats like Jeanne (her real first name is Cynthia by the way) Shaheen.
But Shaheen’s fifty-million dollar haircut to the DOJ anti-trust division is her’s and nothing to sneeze at – it’s 15-20% of their budget. Add the provision to end how they get funded, and that’s an even bigger slice of a now diminished pie. The correct question to ask from someone who has signed off on government spending that added 24 trillion in new debt is, why? Who benefits?
Jeanne Shaheen and the industries that have so generously funded her political tenure over the fiscally deplorable abuse and debt slavery of future generations.
