100 People Who Are REALLY Screwing Up America -- #8: Elaine Chao

[Chichiri]

The first Asian-American woman to serve on the Cabine, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao is also probably the most anti-labor person to ever sit in that post.

Born in Taiwan and immigrating to America at the age of eight, Chao attended an impressive list of schools: Mount Holyoke, Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth and Columbia. Oddly enough, nobody at those five schools bothered to tell her that civil rights are a good thing. Before being appointed Secretary of Labor by Bush*, Chao worked for the conservative Heritage Foundation, which according to Alfred Ross is "engaged in a battle to turn back the clocks on the civil rights gains of the last four decades."

Chao happens to be married to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Whip and one of the most conservative members of Congress. This couple, as it turns out, had connections with high-ranking Chinese officials, including Chinese leader Jiang Zemin -- the Chinese officials used the Chao family to gain influence with McConnell. When Chao was appointed to the Cabinet, she failed to disclose on a require form that she was director of a firm involved in a joint venture with the Chinese government.

As Secretary of Labor, however, Chao is doing a job anyone can love. Unless you happen to not be a corporate leader, that is. She's strongly anti-union, for one thing. After a meeting between Chao and labor leaders in Florida, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said, "She was angry at points. She was insulting at points. (...) In all my years I have never seen a Secretary of Labor who's so anti-labor."

She also has no problem with flooding American markets with imports. At a speech she gave in a Wal-Mart appliance section in Missouri, she stated, "American companies need to realize that competition is now global. American consumers have shown time and time again that they dont' care about a washing machine's flag, but about its price tag." The remark was applauded enthusiastically by the minimum-wage Wal-Mart employees hanging around.

In 2003, Chao authored and published proposed regulations that would raise the minimum salary for automatic overtime eligibility, thus denying the right to overtime to those who need it the most. The plan would also have ended overtime pay completely for anyone who is serving, or had served, in the Armed Forces. Fortunately, the bill to which these regulations were attached failed to pass the Senate.

While it's disheartening to know that a person with such America-screwing tendencies is in such a position of power, there is one silver lining to this dark cloud: Chao, not being an American-born citizen, is Constitutionally ineligible to become President. That's assuming, of course, that the relevant parties in the federal government play by the rules when it comes to Constitutional matters. I wouldn't bank on it.

[Moosepoop]

1. She screwed America's workforce.

The overhaul to the Fair Labor Standards Act, her big project, are what got me into politics in the first place. Those changes did go through, and they're permanent. Chao is right up there on my most-hated list, along with *, Cheney, Rice, and the others.

[Chichiri]

2. Point well-taken.