web1_20180728_094117.jpg

United Way of Wyoming Valley hosts 5K run starting on Public Square

web1_120942289-d01421d124de4a27bf1527d8890d5269.jpg

Can free water machine be a cash stream?

<p>WASHINGTON &#8212; While Donald Trump has positioned himself as a tough, &#8220;law and order&#8221; president, he has mostly excluded one group of offenders from his sights: those of the corporate class, according to a report released Wednesday by Washington-based watchdog Public Citizen.</p><p>The report found that in 11 of the 12 federal agencies led by a Trump-appointed official during the president&#8217;s first year, penalties imposed on corporate violators dropped, in the majority of cases by more than 50 percent.</p><p>Penalties dropped at the Justice Department by 90 percent, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission by 80 percent and the Securities and Exchange Commission by 68 percent.</p><p>The largest drop was at the Environmental Protection Agency, formerly led by Scott Pruitt, where overall penalties dropped by 94 percent, from nearly $24 billion in President Barack Obama&#8217;s last year in office to $1.5 billion. Penalties at the Federal Communications Commission dropped overall by 85 percent.</p><p>The EPA and FCC data doesn&#8217;t break out actions against corporations as well as municipalities and individuals. The FCC&#8217;s data was mostly made up of corporate offenders while the EPA&#8217;s data was mostly a mix of municipalities and corporate offenders, according to Public Citizen.</p><p>Reducing regulations on business, in general, was one of Trump&#8217;s earliest campaign promises. And the Public Citizen report found that it was indeed a promise kept.</p><p>&#8220;Despite all his various tics and tantrums, he&#8217;s a corporate CEO,&#8221; said Rick Claypool, who co-wrote the report. &#8220;So he&#8217;s coming into it with that corporate mindset, and his sympathies are going to be with the companies on the receiving end of that enforcement action.&#8221;</p><p>The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.</p><p>Claypool said he found it striking that federal agency heads are willing to work with companies to bring them into compliance and avoid harsh penalties while their attitude toward low-level drug offenses and first-time border crossings has been zero tolerance.</p><p>One example given in the report was the case of Minnesota-based Syngenta Seeds LLC. In the last full month of the Obama administration, the EPA announced it would be seeking nearly $4.9 million in penalties against the company for violating pesticide regulations meant to protect agricultural workers at its farm in Hawaii.</p><p>Two months later, in the first full month of the Trump administration, the EPA agreed to have the company&#8217;s penalty lowered to $150,000 and have it spend $400,000 on a worker safety curriculum and training program.</p><p>Of the agencies on the list, one did have a sizable increase in penalty sums. The amount of penalties issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control increased its penalty sums by 465 percent, from $22 million to $124.2 million. The increase is representative of a more overtly robust stance on the issue.</p><p>Trump has used the threat of sanctions in his diplomacy efforts, including against Chinese institutions in its dealings with telecom giant ZTE &#8212; which ultimately became a bargaining chip for Trump&#8217;s own business operations. The president also allowed the threat of sanctions to loom in a recent tweet about &#8220;consequences&#8221; against Iran for its behavior. The agency under Trump has added more than 100 people and entities connected to North Korea to its blocked persons.</p><p>And yet, enforcement actions otherwise have dropped in 10 of 12 agencies under the Trump administration in 2017, according to the Public Citizen report.</p><p>There was a 48 percent drop in enforcement actions &#8212; from 27 to 14 &#8212; during Trump&#8217;s first year in office. Enforcement dropped by 44 percent for the SEC and 39 percent for the FCC.</p><p>Since enforcement actions span years, the report credited the administration in power with the action. The researchers also noted that because these are ongoing processes that aren&#8217;t susceptible to abrupt changes, given typically unchanged career staffs, the findings are more notable.</p><p>The report was released with Violation Tracker, a corporate enforcement database produced by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First, and only included agencies with reliable public data and where a Trump-appointed leader or commission chair was in charge for at least half of 2017.</p><style>
.neFileBlock {
	margin-bottom: 20px;
}
.neFileBlock p {
	margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}
.neFileBlock .neFile {
	border-bottom: 1px dotted #aaa;
	padding-bottom: 5px;
	padding-top: 10px;
}
.neFileBlock .neCaption {
	font-size: 85%;
}
</style>
<div class='neFileBlock'>
<div class="neFile"><img class="neImage" src="https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/web1_120942303-c8ee0a453fcc476ca64faa45c511c856.jpg">
<div class="neCaption">A new report by the Washington-based watchdog group Public Citizen found that while President Donald Trump has positioned himself as a tough, &#8220;law and order&#8221; president, he has mostly excluded one group of offenders from his sights: those of the corporate class. </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/web1_120942303-c8ee0a453fcc476ca64faa45c511c856.jpg</photo0><caption0>A new report by the Washington-based watchdog group Public Citizen found that while President Donald Trump has positioned himself as a tough, &#8220;law and order&#8221; president, he has mostly excluded one group of offenders from his sights: those of the corporate class. </caption0><photoCredit0>AP photo </photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Tami Abdollah</p><p>Associated Press</p></bylineMeta></div>

Report: Trump soft on corporate offenders