Back to the Adder's LairYou remember how Dubya's first nominee, Linda Chavez, got canned over that undocumented Guatemalan immigrant that she was not employing, oh no, she just did some work around the house and Chavez used to give her some cash but the two things were totally unrelated. Well, her replacement, Elaine Chao, at least has the decency not to have tried to pass THAT off on us, but I heard her on NPR the other day, and...oy.
First sign of trouble was her talking about how people really misunderstand Dubya's tax cut because the Democrats define anyone who makes over $30,000 a year as "wealthy." She then went on to clarify this a bit: a household where both people make over $30,000 a year is, according to some Democratic definition she dredged up somewhere, considered "wealthy." Explaining that in fact, they were not, she said, "You know, two high school teachers who...you know, can afford maybe to go out to a nice restaurant once a week...that's not wealthy."
Yes, one listen to her and you can just tell she's going to be a real advocate for the working poor. First of all, where is this woman's head that she's measuring standard of living by the number of times you eat out at fancy restaurants? I suppose her point is that Dubya's tax break will benefit even those who are barely scraping by, struggling and scrimping so they can go out to La Spiaggia twice a month. As secretary of labor, you might think she would have some idea of how many people in this country are running households on considerably less than $60,000 a year, or feel that she was in some way responsible for getting them a better deal. But then again, this is Dubya's secretary of labor, and we can't be keeping our expectations too high. After all, we should be excited to discover that she can read, write, and talk, which puts her a cut above her employer.
Then she goes on to talk about minimum wage. She says Dubya has already agreed to sign off on the federal minimum wage increase. However, she says, for very depressed areas where the minimum wage "is much higher than the prevailing wage," she and Dubya want the states to be able to make an exception so that employers in these regions can pay wages below minimum, "in order to attract industry to the area."
I see.
If people are allowed to pay wages lower than the minimum, HOW IS IT A MINIMUM?
All right, so before doing this job she was secretary of transportation. She's new to the business. Maybe she doesn't understand that the point of the minimum wage is not to make things easier for corporations, but to ensure that people who work full-time do not fall below the poverty level. Or perhaps she doesn't realize that when you give states the "option" of not standing up to big business, it is a rare legislature indeed that will refuse to exercise it. Or that given how many states there are in which unions are already practically a thing unknown, doing something like this will have the result of starting off a race to the bottom among the big employers just to see who can find the most exploitable workforce.
Oh, who am I kidding. Of course she knows all this. This is all part of Dubya's grand master plan to transform America into a Third World country. First the coup d'etat, then the exploitation of underdeveloped regions. Why should businesses have to pay to relocate to Mexico or Indonesia when it could be so easy for them to pay their workers $1.50 a day right here at home? As Swift pointed out so long ago, the beauty of cannibalism is that it's so convenient. Why go all the way to Asia to drink the blood of the workers when you can go out into the backyard and tap your own?
Speaking at the end of the interview about her goals, Chao started talking about the technology of the workplace and how we have to get a more "flexible" and "agile" workforce. Yeah. "Flexible" as in "disposable" and "agile" as in "outsourced." I can't fucking wait. And this is just the white-collar workforce she's talking about. I do not even want to know what this administration is going to do to the blue-collar sector...and yet, I am quite sure I will see the results very shortly.
Well, there is one bright spot in all this. It'll give Michael Moore plenty to do over the next four years.
Yee ha,
The Plaid Adder
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