To learn more about Trump’s choice for Secretary of Labor, read what he wrote about how to reduce poverty in California.
In Andy Puzder’s worldview, when government tries to ameliorate poverty, it only makes it worse.
A simple solution: free enterprise, less government regulation, more charter schools, no tenure for teachers.
That’s it, folks.
Andy Puzder, owner of multiple fast-food restaurants, is the likely choice of Trump for the post of Secretary of Labor. He advised Trump during the campaign and raised money for him.
He believes that machines can replace people, and that will be an effective way to cope with rising wages and costs.
He objected to a federal increase in the minimum wage for fast-food workers, although he is paid millions every year.
“Government needs to get out of the way,” Puzder told Yahoo! Finance in an interview Monday. “If government gets out of the way, businesses will create jobs and wages will go up.”
So far, the federal government has largely stayed out of the way. Congress has not taken up President Barack Obama’s call to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from $7.25. And with the exception of a few companies, like Costco, In-N-Out Burger and Boloco, businesses haven’t taken the initiative to create higher paying jobs.
Puzder made $4.4 million in 2012, according to Forbes. That’s about 291 times what a minimum wage worker makes in a year, if they’re earning the federal minimum and working full-time. The average fast food CEO made 721 times what minimum wage workers took in in 2013, according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute.
We need a system where people are paid enough during their working years to put money away in order to retire peacefully in old age.
We need to change the current system, where people like Puzder make more in one day($17,192) than one of his minimum-wage employees would earn after working full-time for an entire year ($15,130).
This system was created by people like Puzder and political leaders who, like him, blame the very people who are just trying to make ends meet. But we have the power to change how the system works.
Not surprisingly, the road to change doesn’t involve taking away supports from the people who need them most. It involves creating good jobs for the people who need them most; jobs that provide a fair wage and benefits—that give people options rather than forcing them to choose between bad and worse.
Amy Moore is a teacher in Dems Moines, Iowa. In this post, she congratulates Donald Trump and explains to him what it means to be a public servant, like her and other public school teachers.
“Congratulations on your recent successful interview process. Though I understand that the hiring committee was divided in their selection, you were chosen to run the United States of America. As a public school teacher, I welcome you to the ranks of those of us who are servants to the people.
“Knowing that you are used to being served by others rather than being the support to others, I am here to help. Many in the education world believe that having an expert mentor to show the ropes to those who are new is essential to success. While I’d not necessarily call myself an expert, I do have lots of years of practice in the public service sector, and I heard that I might get a little stipend for the extra time spent assisting you, which would really help save up for the amount of money I will need to put my children through college.
“Speaking of money, we teachers have another similarity with you. Many of us have more than one job as well! And, while your career in business is able to fund your yachts and mansions and our second jobs often fund our groceries and child care, it’s still a connection. It’s really great that you’re giving up your presidential salary. We have that in common, as many teachers give up a portion of our own salary — although ours is given up to buy materials for our students.”
According to various news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Trump is expected to choose Andy Puzder as Secretary of Labor.
President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name fast-food executive Andy Puzder as labor secretary, according to people familiar with the decision.
Mr. Puzder, chief executive of CKE Restaurants Holdings Inc., the parent company of the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s burger chains, has been a vocal advocate for cutting back regulations he says have stifled growth in the restaurant industry, which represents 10% of the American workforce.
Mr. Puzder, an adviser and contributor to Mr. Trump’s campaign, has criticized the Affordable Care Act and has argued against raising the federal minimum wage higher than $9 an hour. Democrats have called for raising the federal minimum wage for as high as $15.
This is a cabinet of deplorables. Billionaires and generals. The most reactionary possible choices in every area. They will compete to see who can do the most damage to the agency and issues for which they are responsible. One will gut healthcare. Another will gut environmental protection. Puzder will diminish the rights and wages of working people. DeVos will attack public education. Is this what the ‘white working class’ wanted? How many millions of his voters will lose their healthcare?
Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, attorney general of Oklahoma and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to lead the EPA.
This signals an end to efforts to protect the environment.
The New York Times writes:
“Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.”
“Mr. Pruitt, 48, who has emerged as a hero to conservative activists, is also one of a number of Republican attorneys general who have formed an alliance with some of the nation’s top energy producers to push back against the Obama regulatory agenda, a 2014 investigation by The New York Times revealed.
“At the heart of Mr. Obama’s efforts to tackle climate change are a collection of E.P.A. regulations aimed at forcing power plants to significantly reduce their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution. It will not be possible for Mr. Trump to unilaterally cancel the rules, which were released under the 1970 Clean Air Act. But it would be possible for a legally experienced E.P.A. chief to substantially weaken, delay or slowly dismantle them.
“As Oklahoma’s top law enforcement official, Mr. Pruitt has fought environmental regulations — particularly the climate change rules. Although Mr. Obama’s rules were not completed until 2015, Mr. Pruitt was one of a handful of attorneys general, along with Greg Abbott of Texas, who began planning as early as 2014 for a coordinated legal effort to fight them. That resulted in a 28-state lawsuit against the administration’s rules. A decision on the case is pending in a federal court, but it is widely expected to advance to the Supreme Court.”
Look west for hope!
The New York Times has a good article about the new generation of leaders in California who have the dynamism and energy to replace the aging lions, the national leaders who are now in their 70s.
The leaders of the party affirmed their intention to ward off the worst of Trump’s policies.
Previewing an adversarial relationship between California and the federal government over the next four years, legislative leaders opened a new session on Monday by vowing to preserve California’s liberal agenda and passing a resolution rejecting President-elect Donald Trump’s hardline immigration stance.
Members of both houses directly confronted Trump’s tough-on-immigration rhetoric, which has included calls to deport millions and block immigration by Muslims. Lawmakers passed a resolution that says “California stands unified in rejecting the politics of hatred and exclusion” and exhorts Trump “to not pursue mass deportation strategies that needlessly tear families apart, or target immigrants for deportation based on vague and unjustified criteria.”
“We have all heard the insults, we have all heard the lies, and we have all heard the threats,” said Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount, adding of an undocumented immigrant population that is the nation’s largest, “if you want to get to them, you have to go through us.”
Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, opened his chamber’s business by accepting the election results but rebuffing Trump. He urged Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to “treat immigrant families and children humanely, with a modicum of dignity and respect.”
“They are hard-working, upstanding members of our society who contribute billions of dollars to our economic activity and tax revenue to our state each year,” de León said.
The immediate challenge to Trump drew criticism from Republican members who said Democrats were demonizing a man who had not yet taken office. Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, R-Lake Elsinore, said the tactic “seeks to flare up tension between communities.”
“To throw down a gauntlet and say ‘here we go’ without ever having time to discuss this” is inappropriate, said Assemblyman Rocky Chavez, R-Oceanside.
But dark warnings about the coming Trump administration set the tone, with Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-San Rafael, saying the president-elect had advocated “ethnic cleansing policies.”
With fiery language that broke from his usually staid public demeanor, Rendon said California faces a “major existential threat.” He spurred raucous applause for an apparent dig at Trump aide Stephen Bannon, saying that “white nationalists and anti-Semites have no business working in the White House.” Bannon’s Breitbart website has drawn admiration from nationalists and opponents of multiculturalism as well as criticism for pushing bigotry into mainstream discourse.
“It is up to us to pass policies that would firewall Californians and what we believe from the cynical, short sighted, and reactionary agenda that is rising in the wake of the election,” Rendon said, adding that “unity must be separated from complicity…Californians do not need healing. We need to fight.”
Katherine Crawford-Garrett and Rebecca Sánchez are professors in the school of education at the University of New Mexico. They wrote the following commentary:
Like so many universities across the country, the University of New Mexico, a minority-serving institution, has experienced a sharp increase in hate-related incidents since the presidential election last week. These events, which have included swastikas being spray painted around campus and the attempt to remove a Muslim woman’s hijab in the library, have triggered responses from departments, colleges, and senior level university officials such as the President and Provost.
The chair of the American studies department, for example, immediately sent a note to students inviting them to an informal gathering to process emotions and share thoughts and insights; a colleague who teaches Spanish reported that faculty and administrators in her department were collectively planning a teach-in. A professor in Chicano studies initiated a petition to have the campus designated as a sanctuary for undocumented students. The Provost shared insights about the role of the university in comforting those who “are hurt, scared, and disenfranchised.” As professors in the College of Education, we wondered how our college might respond, aware that our students were not only navigating a treacherous environment on campus but simultaneously working as pre-service teachers in public schools where they were struggling to debrief the election, address issues of bullying and aggression, and ease the anxieties and fears expressed by their students from immigrant backgrounds.
As the days passed, we became increasingly confounded by the silence from our college and department and tried sending emails inquiring whether a message would be sent to education students and faculty within our community. Specifically we asserted that, “As the College of Education at a Minority-Serving Institution, we have a moral obligation to acknowledge the events of the past several days, re-affirm our commitments to diversity, and offer our students an opportunity to discuss and process what has happened.” We understand that addressing these issues is difficult and that members of our college community hold diverse political views and experienced the aftermath of the election from a variety of different positions and perspectives. Yet we argue that we have an ethical responsibility to foster dialogue, generate discussion and encourage solidarity. As a result of these convictions, we also attempted to start a conversation among our colleagues directly by sending an email to our faculty listserv. In our message, we posed critical questions about the purposes of teacher education, including the following:
While many of our colleagues expressed interest in discussing these questions, we later discovered that certain responses to our email were not distributed by department leaders, including one particularly powerful response authored by a Black, female professor. Lastly, we sought to reach out to the elementary education students enrolled in our program by compiling a comprehensive list of resources to support them as they attempted to confront the numerous issues surfacing in their classrooms in the wake of the election. These resources included links to news accounts of school and university-based violence occurring across the country, guidelines for discussing the election from organizations like Teaching Tolerance and Facing History and Ourselves, a list of our College’s core values which include tenets like social justice, diversity and advocacy, excerpts from U.S. court cases that affirm children’s rights to an equal education, and suggestions on how to move forward collectively in an era marked by deeply divisive rhetoric. Unfortunately, we were denied access to the elementary education listserv (though we are both faculty members in the program) and told the resources we sought to provide did not constitute official business.
While we both found creative ways around these obstacles by contacting our individual students directly (a fraction of those we could have reached through the listserv) and working to organize a community forum, which will be held on Inauguration Day, we remain alarmed by the silence and resistance we encountered in our college. What is most damning about this silence is that it subverts the very core of our work as teacher educators. What could be more essential to our profession than helping pre-service teachers conduct meaningful, urgent discussions with students about what it means to live and participate in a democracy?
When we finally saw our students in class nearly a week after the election, they had stories to share regarding personal experiences on campus and the conditions they encountered in their elementary and high school classrooms. One high school teacher was told by her principal that discussing the election with students was unprofessional and would be marked as such on a forthcoming evaluation. An elementary school teacher shared a note written by student who said he wouldn’t be participating in class that day because he was so worried about his family’s impending deportation. Another teacher shared that a group of 5th graders were bullying younger students at the school with the justification that “If the president can talk like this, so can we.” A Middle-Eastern graduate student conveyed fears that if he chose to leave the U.S. to visit his family over the summer, he may not be allowed back in to complete his degree. These concerns serve as tangible and concrete reminders of the necessity of creating the space to have difficult conversations in our classrooms.
We still don’t fully understand the silence we encountered within our college and cannot definitively identify its roots, but we believe it may be related to fear — the same fear pre-service teachers often express about raising controversial topics in the classroom, confronting homophobia directly, or discussing race with their students — fears that we connect, at least tangentially, to school reform initiatives that extol compliance over criticality and creativity. Our teacher education program, like those across the country, faces pressure to comply with a host of increasingly meaningless standards and mandates while the potential for real, transformative work is essentially lost. As a teacher education department, we seem to dedicate a tremendous amount of time to discussing assessment, analyzing standards and designing performance indicators but precious little time to the hard work of interrupting hate in K-12 classrooms, on college campuses, and in the world at large. Even when many of us attempt to do this work individually in our own courses and through our research endeavors, how much more powerful and potentially transformative would this work be if it were given the institutional attention that standards and evaluation so often receive?
Our nation is clearly at a crossroads and education will undoubtedly play an essential role in how we collectively move forward. If our goal as educators is to develop critically-conscious citizens capable of engaging productively within our democracy, we must live these values as well. We must talk fearlessly with one another, engage in dialogue even when it feels uncertain and uncomfortable, and be willing to affirm one another’s humanity. As Holocaust survivor and scholar Elie Wiesel noted, “To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.”
Steve Mnuchin, the Goldman Sachs partner that Trump has chosen as his Secretary of the Treasury, is a very, very lucky man. ProPublica reports that he made a killing during the mortgage meltdown, among many other lucky breaks.
Jesse Eisinger writes:
The former Goldman Sachs banker nominated to become Donald Trump’s treasury secretary had the perspicacity to purchase a collapsed subprime mortgage lender soon after the financial crisis, getting a sweet deal from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Now, if he’s confirmed, he will likely be able to take advantage of a tax perk given to government officials.
Mnuchin was born into a family of Wall Street royalty. His father was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for 30 years, serving in top management. He and his brother landed at the powerful firm, too. After making millions in mortgage trading, Mnuchin struck out on his own, creating a hedge fund and building a record of smart and well-timed investment moves.
He dodged disaster when he inherited his mother’s portfolio. She was a longtime investor with Bernie Madoff, the largest Ponzi schemer in American history. After she died in early 2005, Mnuchin and his brother quickly liquidated her investments, making $3.2 million. The Madoff trustee, Irving Picard, sued to retrieve the money from the Mnuchins, as he did from other Ponzi scheme winners, contending that they were fake gains. A court ruled that Picard could only claw back money from those who had cashed out within two years before the collapse. The Mnuchins, having pulled out roughly three years before, got to keep their Madoff money. That something was dodgy about Madoff was an open secret on Wall Street.
After the financial crisis, the FDIC seized IndyMac, whose irresponsible mortgage loans failed as the housing bubble burst. Desperate to offload the bank, the FDIC subsidized the takeover by sheltering Mnuchin and his team of investors, including hedge fund managers John Paulson and George Soros, from losses. The investors injected $1.55 billion into the bank in 2009. They changed the name to OneWest and five years later, sold it to lender CIT for more than $3 billion, doubling their investment.
There is more, much more about Mnuchin’s good luck. If you lost your mortgage and your home when the bubble burst, you were a loser. But Mnuchin was a winner.
Some people have all the luck.
Trump has put the fox in charge of guarding the hen house.
Mike Rose is a gifted writer who has written many books about education, work, and culture.
In this post, he reflects on the meaning of the election. I exchanged emails with Mike, and he told me felt paralyzed by the election. And then he wrote this essay, which I think you will enjoy reading.
He begins like this:
Some friends and readers have been wondering why I haven’t written anything about the presidential election. The truth is I was numb with disbelief and anger and felt as hopeless about politics as I can remember feeling. What else was there to say other than the obvious: so much pain is going to be inflicted on so many. I also couldn’t get out of my head the fact that if a relatively small number of people in a handful of districts in a few states had voted or voted differently, this catastrophe of suffering would have been averted.
One of the things that has baffled me from the start of Donald Trump’s rise in the GOP primary is how he could become the darling of so many White working class voters. I know some segments of this population, particularly the people who worked in heavy industry in the Northeast, many of them, like me, are the children or the grandchildren of the Southern and Eastern European immigrants who came to the United States in huge numbers between 1880 and 1920: Italian, Polish, Slovakian. Many of my contemporaries’ children also worked in those industries as they were in decline, or didn’t get to work in them at all, for by the early 1980s (a decade before NAFTA), the processes of deindustrialization had begun. If someone like Donald Trump, pampered and entitled, a braggart, demanding and overbearing… if such a guy happened into their midst—perhaps his limousine broke down en route from Northeast Ohio to Western Pennsylvania—if such a thing happened, many of them would certainly not embrace him, and could well dislike him, for he represents everything contrary to the codes of behavior they grew up with, the kind of man they respect, the way you talk about yourself in public.
I know rural America much less well, though benefited tremendously when I stayed with local teachers in small towns during my travels for Possible Lives. I feel comfortable saying that the majority of the people I met in places like Southwestern Montana or the coal fields of Eastern Kentucky would have the same reaction to a Trump-like fellow descending into their midst. They would regard him with suspicion.
So what gives? Well, as numerous political commentators have noted, especially after the election, Donald Trump was saying what a lot of people wanted to hear. The messenger didn’t matter.
Trump said many things, most of them shockingly blatant—no subtle dog whistling, except, perhaps, with anti-Semitism—assailing Mexicans, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, women, you know the list. His pocketbook appeal to working-class voters was his anti-trade message—which got intimately wrapped up in anti-immigrant, nativist language—and his bold proclamations that he was going to bring jobs back to economically devastated regions. And though it gets much less mention than the White working class issue, we should not overlook the fact that many in the traditional Republican base who are not blue-collar folk at all—the banker next door to me, the flower shop owner in Omaha, the dentist in Atlanta—voted in large numbers for Trump even though they might have done so reluctantly. He would reverse the Obama policies they don’t like, cut taxes and regulations, put conservatives on the Supreme Court. A lot of White Republican women voted for Mr. Trump, defying predictions that his loutish behavior would drive them into the Clinton camp, or at least lead them to not vote on the top of the ticket. And, Good Lord, Evangelical Christians overwhelmingly supported our Sinner-in-Chief, justifying their vote with talk of forgiveness and redemption. Certainly on their minds were social issues and the Supreme Court. While some high-profile Republicans—foreign policy experts or big players like Meg Whitman—supported Clinton, most Republicans voted for Trump, with some opting for third party candidates. What elites wanted in this election—elites from the Never Trump GOP types to Katy Perry and LeBron James—was rejected in an angry spasm by those who felt ignored one time too many. In the bitterest of ironies, they voted for the most elite candidate of the lot, cocooned in a world of chandeliers and self-absorption.
Please read on.
Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, asks, what’s the worst that can happen with the U.S. Department of Education and Congress leading the effort to privatize public education. He has two scenarios: one is the worst-case scenario where the administration does maximum damage to public education and the teaching profession; the other foresees structural limitations on the damage they can inflict and offers hope for surviving the next four years.
