The first time I heard of Carl’s Jr. was when I began taking some classes at Santa Monica College in the summer of 1989. The college didn’t have much of a student union, but it did have this little fast-food hamburger joint that wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t too long, though, before some earnest liberal caught me with a Carl’s Jr. burger in my hand and informed me that there was a boycott of their chain because the owner was an extreme homophobe and anti-choicer.
I didn’t like the sound of that, but I also didn’t like taking classes on an empty stomach. I think, for a time, I was more discreet about where I ate my lunch. And then I joined the boycott, which I’ve observed from that time until today.
A few years later, I moved to Michigan and then back to the east coast. On the east coast, Carl’s Jr. is called Hardee’s. I don’t eat there either, although to be fair I don’t eat fast food of any kind. It’s not good for you.
It looks like the old man died in 2008. The CEO of Carl’s Jr. today is a guy named Andy Puzder.
He met up with Karcher around the same time that I was being urged to shun his burgers.
While practicing law in St. Louis, Puzder authored legislation which The United States Supreme Court upheld in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services in 1989. Following the Webster decision Puzder was a founding member of the Common Ground Network for Life and Choice.
Also while practicing law in St. Louis, Puzder met Carl Karcher, the founder of the Carl’s Jr. quick-service restaurant chain. Karcher was embroiled in serious financial difficulties and asked Puzder to move to California as his personal attorney. In 1991, Puzder relocated to Orange County, California. Puzder has been credited with resolving Karcher’s financial dilemma, allowing Karcher to avoid bankruptcy and retain a significant ownership interest in the company he founded, CKE Restaurants, Inc. (CKE).
Actually, the previous year Karcher had been nailed by the SEC for insider trading, so finding an anti-choice lawyer to clean up his mess was a nice two-fer.
Karcher and Puzder were obviously kindred spirits, as Karcher had been the biggest bankroller of the Briggs Initiative, a failed 1978 ballot proposition that “would have banned gays and lesbians, and possibly anyone who supported gay rights, from working in California’s public schools.”
Karcher was also involved in the John Birch Society, most notably supporting the political career of John George Schmitz who served Orange County in state legislature and in Congress. In 1972, Schmitz was the American Independent Party’s candidate for president of the United States. Schmitz was so vocal in his opposition to President Nixon’s trip to China that Nixon orchestrated his political defeat.
I mention all this because Donald Trump has just named Andy Puzder as his nominee for Labor Secretary.
Now, Puzder and Trump have a lot in common. For example, Trump is a fan of professional wrestling and just named the co-founder of World Wrestling Entertaining Inc. as his nominee to head the Small Business Administration. Puzder hired Ultimate Fighting champion Ronda Rousey to do advertisements for his restaurant chain.
Trump and Puzder are also famous for making unhinged criticisms of President Obama. For example, Puzder went on the Fox business channel back in 2011 and blamed Obama for the downgrading of America’s credit rating. He also explained that he moved his corporate headquarters from California to Texas because it is a Right-to-Work state.
But to fully appreciate how alike Puzder and Trump are, you need to watch this recent Carl’s Jr. ad which features Mexican and American two-woman volleyball teams playing each other. The volleyball net has been replaced, however, with a “steel-barred border wall.”
Is the ad sexist? Yeah, obviously.
Is it the best way to promote the melding of Mexican and Texan cuisine? Border walls usually inhibit melding, or are supposed to, anyway.
I kind of grow weary of folks who relentlessly promote “family values” in the guise of being pro-life and anti-gay, but then give us advertisements in which women are scantily-clad sex objects.
“I like our ads. I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American,” Puzder told Entrepreneur in 2015. “I used to hear, brands take on the personality of the CEO. And I rarely thought that was true, but I think this one, in this case, it kind of did take on my personality.”
My wife took one look at that ad and said, “All I can say is that I’m glad I have sons instead of daughters.”
Of course, most people will focus on Puzder’s unsuitability to be an advocate for Labor in our country since, as Justin Miller at The American Prospect points out, he’s clearly about as anti-Labor as you can be.
In his frequent op-ed and cable news commentaries, Puzder has championed every aspect of right-wing trickle-down economics. Rolling back taxation and regulation for the rich and corporations will lift the economy, he’s argued, as will getting rid of all those minimum-wage hikes.
Last year, the fast-food CEO made more in one day ($17,192) than one of his full-time minimum wage workers would make in a year ($15,130), according to TalkPoverty. Yet Puzder opposes any increase to the minimum wage, believes that workers are kept in poverty because of government assistance programs, and thinks expanding access to overtime pay would diminish the prestige of entry-level management jobs.
Here’s what Puzder said about his preference for automation over human employees:
“They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” says Puzder of swapping employees for machines.
Overall, he’s about as far from an advocate for the working man and woman as you can get.
Puzder even attacked working-class Americans during an appearance on Fox & Friends, claiming that low-income workers might be wary of higher paying jobs if the salary increase results in a loss of government benefits. Puzder wrote in an op-ed in The Hill of a so-called “Welfare Cliff,” where employees turn down promotions that could lead to $80,000 salaries because they “don’t want to lose the free stuff from the government.” Yet, by Puzder’s own admission, the company he runs does not pay anywhere near the $80,000 annual salary that his employees were supposedly passing up so as to qualify for anti-poverty assistance.
Before I go any further, I just want to share the Department of Labor’s mission statement:
Our Mission
To foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights.
Now, it’s understandable that Trump has made this nomination. He obviously wanted to reward Puzder because Puzder was shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for Trump Victory, the joint fundraising committee, at a time when Republican donors were shunning him and the Republican National Committee.
But if you can find any evidence that Puzder will approach his job as head of the Department of Labor with anything but the most dedicated opposition to the department’s stated mission, I’d love to see it.
You can oppose nominees because they’re crooked or because they’re unqualified. But you can also oppose them because you know that they won’t do the job they’re supposed to do.
I can’t see how any Democrat could vote to confirm this man for this job.
I can’t see how any Democrat could vote to confirm this man for this job.
I can. Joe Manchin. If you sent this post to Heidi Heitkamp, maybe you could get her to vote against him. Otherwise, she might be a second.
Manchin is in a bad position, obviously.
His constituents strongly favor Trump.
But Manchin isn’t some knee jerk opponent of labor. This is actually an opening for him to oppose Trump on the merits while his constituents nod in agreement.
Manchin is as good as it gets from W. Va.
Look I am a Sanders guy but there is such a thing as political reality.
I believe he is under consideration for Sec of Energy. His replacement would be a Democrat – but far less likely to hold the seat.
I don’t think people at this point get just how bad the Senate looks right now.
Oh, I do. It’s going to be ugly unless Trump completely shits the bed in his first two years…which is possible, but unlikely.
We have to play next year to not let the GOP get to 60 votes, at the absolute worst.
Why is he the best WV can do? Sanders won there in the primary. Maybe it’s because the party doesn’t want to offer anyone better. You do know that a “Democrat” won the WV Governor’s race last month, right? Granted, Jim Justice is a Trumpy type character. Ask yourself how the Democrats ever came to letting Justice be their standard-barer.
Your first sentence is answered by your fifth sentence.
“Do the job they’re supposed to do?”
Hah! Incoming Democratic presidents for the most part nominate people to do just that. Republicans, almost never.
You’re looking at another of Pence’s picks.
Cheetoh Donnie’s cabinet’s mission will be twofold:
Each pick thus far, with the possible exception of SecDef, has been selected with those two qualifications in mind.
Even somebody who’s not as obviously unsuited to hold a cabinet-level position like Chao are still essentially party apparatchiks who are being appointed to do as they’re told which is “1” and “2” above.
I’ve said this before here, the Bushies threw out the playbook when it came to their mission of looting the Treasury. The Cheetoh Donnie gang will do it on steroids. Repubs on the Hill have no problem with that as long as their agenda is implemented.
Elaine Chao is no apparatchik! She is smart and ruthless. She instituted the loss of overtime benefits to millions of workers. Never reversed, either.
http://prospect.org/article/workers%E2%80%99-menace-becomes-commuters%E2%80%99-threat
Now she gets to oversee the development of driverless vehicles. Wheee!
Perhaps the oversight will be so shoddy and the crashes so frequent it will push back the unemployment of millions of drivers for a few more years.
Well, think about crude oil tankers on aging train tracks.
50 cal sniper rifles are going to slow the development of driverless vehicles. Some driver who loses his job is going to come to that conclusion.
Well I favor strong gun control over anything more than a hunting rifle or shotgun so I cant get behind that.
(sorry) either of those:
3. poke as yuuuge a thumb as available as hard and directly in the eye of each and every liberal as it’s possible to manage. And most especially any liberal Trump ever thought himself insulted or disrespected by (a “target-rich environment”).
Think your other two, though valid, are probably relatively minor and secondary considerations by comparison.
Trump’s has never been able to forget the stinging rejection he received in Manhattan. He’s a hump from Queens whom never could make it across the 59th Street bridge with all his crass buffoonery. The only reason he’s turned Trump Tower into White House East is he never, ever, ever was going to reside in Gracie Manshion and he knew it.
This whole shameful fiasco is just payback for the disdain of cultured New Yorkers who correctly derided him for being an oafish embarrassment to their wealth. Most people don’t understand how flagrant tastelessness and public ostentation is Trump’s lifelong revenge on the elite whom refused him on grounds of boorishness. He has become an aesthetic suicide bomber and the tabloids have always loved him for it; a sideshow freak and a complete phoney.
joking at his expense at that WH Correspondents’ Dinner (at least I think that was the venue). I’ve seen the suggestion that that was a major motivator for his candidacy in the first place, which makes sense in light of his nanometer-thin skin, and unrelenting grudge-nursing and vengeance-seeking.
(NB: both your uses of “whom” are wrong. Since “who” is increasingly accepted usage even where “whom” is actually correct, much better to just use “who” if not reliably sure which fits. “Nobody” will even notice that (well, I would, but I’m weird that way), while using “whom” when it should be “who” sticks out like a sore thumb and also comes across as pompous, but ignorantly/wrongly so. Jus’ sayin’.)
First is wrong but second correct, no? ‘Most people’ vs ‘the elite’.
Nope:
“hump…who never could” and “elite…who refused him”; the “who” is the subject of the verb.
Mnemonic: “who” (subject) objectifies “whom” (object).
Other than that scrape of the fingernails across the chalkboard, spot-on post, Shaun.
Cheers. I will keep trying.
“who”=subject pronoun
“whom=object pronoun
Gets tricky in complex sentences where the same pronoun functions as object of main clause and subject of subordinate clause.
My advice in such cases (already stated): just use “who”! That’s become so widely accepted that you can’t go far wrong that way; while “whom” wrongly used can make you look bad.
A rule of thumb that isn’t foolproof, but following it would have you batting a far better average than you managed here: if it’s followed immediately by a verb, “who” is correct. (I think, technically, it need not be “immediately”, e.g., there could be, say, an intervening adverb; but if it’s followed by a verb that carries/performs the action of “who/whom”, then it should be “who”, because it’s functioning as the subject to that verb (see Janicket’s examples).
Reminder to the “immigrant hardliners” in our midst who thought Trump would be your friend: Sec of Labor is in charge of enforcing labor law among employers, particularly “documentation”, and Andy here is radically open borders. In fact, he argued that the 2013 immigration bill’s biggest flaw was that it had too much border security (I agree with him there).
Point being, if you want to ally with the fascist right to help your wages from “illegals”, those fascists will always sell you down the river in favor of capital.
Whereas the Culinary Union in NV comprises a significant number of immigrants, and those workers have actual power.
Choose your allies wisely.
Will there be a Puzder door in the Trump wall to maintain the cheap labor pool of employees for CKE?
A point on rewarding donors without political experience: it’s been common for a while on both sides to put them in Ambassadorships, which really is corruption, but at least doesn’t do active harm to the country since the real work is done by career state officials and the ambassadors can just look pretty at parties. But it’s unprecedented in recent history to stuff top cabinet posts with donors and campaign helpers like Carson with minimal or no experience in the relevant fields. Even W overwhelmingly chose at least technically qualified top officials. One of the exceptions (Michael Brown for FEMA) resulted in a huge catastrophe. Now we’re looking at an entire cabinet of Michael Browns, or worse.
That’s a comparison that even my Trump-supporting acquaintances can understand.
Who, btw, say they’re ready to toss Trump if he screws up.
A wee bit late to the party, eh?
CKE HQ used to be just up the road from me in Carpinteria, in Santa Barbara County. We don’t miss them around here.
Schmitz was a rightwing wackadoodle that even Nixon couldn’t abide. And the party responsibly got him defeated after one and half House terms.
Mama was a in the Schlafly orbit. Two sons served in the GWB admin and one went on to Blackwater. The “family values” of Papa and one daughter were disgusting.
I don’t really see how the automation statement is problematic. The rest of it though obviously he is anti-labor so I wouldn’t vote for him and I’d urge all dems not to either. No one is going to lose their seat over voting against a cabinet nominee. No one lost their seat even over a supreme court nominee, not even Kelly Ayotte.
I didn’t go to that particular college, but I did spend some time in Santa Monica. We did have a Carls Jr. outlet that was placed at my university right around 1989, and yeah, it was one I avoided, just the way I avoided Coors beer. Carcher had a nasty rep, although he sure fit in with the Orange County GOP contingent. Still avoid the chain (Hardees throughout much of the US), and probably will for whatever remains of my lifetime at this point.
Karcher. Can’t seem to spell tonight.
Current Senate HELP Committee:
The only announcement so far is that Patty Murray will remain the HELP Democratic Ranking member on the committee. Most of these members should have no difficulty slicing and dicing Puzder in his confirmation hearing. Will Collins and Murkowski toe the party line or ditch the Putz?
Something to warm the hearts of Wall St. liberal Democrats from Reuters:
Trump offers Goldman executive Cohn key economic post: NBC
Trump is lame enough that the guy’s name alone made the sale. A tribute to Trump’s long dead bff Roy Cohn.
. . . Democrats” is oxymoronic defamation of actually liberal (as distinct from “neoliberal”) Democrats.
And that you’re either victim of, or aiding and abetting the decades-long rightwing propaganda campaign to demonize “liberal”.
Why would you be willing to do Rove/Gingrich et al.’s dirty work for them?
Self-identified and self-labeled “liberal Democrats” were fine in 2016 with GS and other WS bankers having the ear of the Democratic nominee and have been fine for a few years now with GS/WS bankers holding high level executive branch positions. So, why wouldn’t they be fine with Cohn?
Where do you come up with reading anything I’ve ever written here as being Rove/Gingrich dirty work? Maybe you should consider that binary choices are artificial and rejecting A doesn’t default to acceptance of B.
it’s hard to know where to begin. But may as well begin with my standard objection to assertion as fact of propositions that demand skepticism re: whether they are, in fact, fact:
1. Facts-in-evidence notable for their absence.
–Who are they? (Remarkably, you do not name a single one.)
–Once you’ve identified them, where is the documentation of them “self-identif[ying] and self-label[ing]” as “liberal Democrats”? (It would actually be interesting to see such documentation, since within my awareness, for quite some time now, essentially no elected Democrats so self-identify . . . even the likes of Bernie or Warren, whom I would quite proudly claim as fellow “liberals” [notably, iirc Bernie self-identified as a “socialist/social democrat”]. A sorry state of affairs that I attribute largely to the immense success of the Rove/Gingrich et al. dishonest propaganda campaign to demonize “liberal/liberalism” by distorting what it means, is, and has accomplished.)
–Once you’ve documented them so-self-identifying/-labeling, where is the documentation that these same self-labeled-“liberal-Democrat” individuals “were fine in 2016 with GS and other WS bankers having the ear of the Democratic nominee and have been fine for a few years now with GS/WS bankers holding high level executive branch positions”? [Just noting here as a placeholder the obvious problem of equating “having the ear of” (the nominee’s supposed to refuse to even listen to constituents? odd conception of democracy, that) and “doing the bidding of”.]
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