Add another fox
Of course. Who better to run the Labor Department than the CEO of a fast food chain? CEOs are of course the people who are best placed to understand the needs of workers, and the least disposed to put profits ahead of workers’ need for a living wage. So well done, billionaire worker-cheating Donald Trump – you found such a CEO.
President-elect Donald J. Trump is expected to name Andrew F. Puzder, chief executive of the company that operates the fast food outlets Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. and an outspoken critic of the worker protections enacted by the Obama administration, to be secretary of labor, people close to the transition said on Thursday.
Mr. Puzder has spent his career in the private sector and has opposed efforts to expand eligibility for overtime pay, arguing that large minimum wage increases hurt small businesses and lead to job loss among low-skilled workers.
That’s richpeoplespeak for “gives pay to workers that should be profits going to rich people.”
In selecting Mr. Puzder, Mr. Trump appears to be banking on the idea that he can replicate some of his own appeal. Mr. Puzder, too, is a successful businessman prone to making populist pronouncements — he complained that “big corporate interests” and “globalist companies” were supporting Hillary Clinton in the presidential election — and the occasional streak of political incorrectness.
The advertisements that Mr. Puzder’s companies runs to promote its restaurants frequently feature women wearing next to nothing while gesturing suggestively. “I like our ads,” he told the publication Entrepreneur. “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American.”
So workers’ wages will stagnate or fall under Trump, if he and Pudzer have anything to do with it, but that’s totally ok because there will be more sexist jokes to giggle at.
In a 2012 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Puzder’s company listed his base salary as over $1 million. “Annual base salaries should be competitive and create a measure of financial security for our executive officers,” the filing said.
But the peons at Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr don’t need no stinkin’ financial security.
It’s really become a (very unfunny) joke already, hasn’t it?
Find a person with a seething antipathy toward the very thing a government agency oversees or protects or regulates, and appoint that person to be in charge of it.
It’s not a rogues’ gallery. It’s a reunion of Bond villains.
They all do this, of course. It’s inevitable – Republicans have declared themselves enemies of federal government as such, so naturally they see it as their job to staff departments with enemies of the departments’ missions…except of course for the Big Guns Department. But Trump is upping the game.
Good to know where not to eat next time I’m south of the border.
And that’s it…that’s an argument. I like it. No matter what damage it does to the women, no matter how much it might promote rape culture and the objectification of women…no, he likes it, and that’s enough. That’s American…or so he said. Unfortunately, he’s right…and not right. Rape culture is American, but not uniquely or exclusively American, it’s rather globalized, right? Lad culture…man caves…it’s everywhere, though the names change.
I don’t need to cite the statistics for the increasing share of profits going to capital, the stagnation in real wages and the USA’s already high Gini inequality index, do I? Trump’s minions will make the situation even worse.
By the by, I remember boycotting Carl’s Jr. way back in the ’80s because the company supported “pro life” organizations. They were founded by conservative reactionaries, and apparently the company ethic has not changed over the years.