Andrew Puzder, Donald Trump’s nominee for labor secretary, is uniquely unqualified for that job. As secretary, he’d be charged with enforcing health and safety, overtime and other labor laws. But as CEO of CKE Restaurants, the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl's Jr., he’s made his considerable fortune from violating these very same laws, according to a report by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United released this week.

ROC, which advocates for restaurant workers nationwide, surveyed 564 CKE workers, 76 percent of them women. In discussing the results of the survey, it’s important to note that while ROC surveyed a large number of workers, the respondents are people who chose to fill out a survey distributed by a workers’ rights organization, which they learned about through their social media networks. Still, ROC reported “unprecedented” interest in the survey among workers at CKE and their eagerness to be part of the study, and the experiences they reported, are striking reminders that by tapping Puzder, Trump has made clear that his administration will be a dystopian nightmare for U.S. workers.

A recent national survey among non-managerial women working in fast food found that 40 percent of such women have experienced sexual harassment on the job. Under Puzder, the problem could worsen: A whopping 66 percent of female CKE workers ROC surveyed had faced sexual harassment. Harassment came from supervisors, co-workers or—most often—customers, and took the form of sexual comments, groping, unwanted sexual texts and pressure for dates.

The progressive economist outlines his vision for reviving the economy, reinventing the party and resisting Donald Trump.

One wonders what Bill Clinton thinks of the fact that one of the most relevant political thinkers of the early 21st century is Robert Reich. As secretary of labor, Reich tried to get the Clinton administration to address growing income inequality, but the “new Democrats” would have none of it.

Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, began his career in public service as an attorney in the Ford administration, worked in the Carter administration and served in Clinton’s first term.

A longtime advocate of independent media, in 1990 Reich cofounded The American Prospect, a D.C.-based liberal magazine, and in 2013 narrated the award-winning documentary Inequality for All.

Most recently, Reich stepped up to the political plate with a full-throated endorsement of Bernie Sanders’ candidacy and a clarion call for a radical restructuring of the Democratic Party.

On Feb. 26, 2016, Reich tweeted that the senator from Vermont was “leading a movement to reclaim America for the many, not the few.” Explaining his endorsement at greater length, he wrote:

This extraordinary concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the very top imperils all else. … We have little hope of achieving positive change on any front unless the American people are once again in control.

As for Hillary Clinton, with whom Reich went on a date while an undergraduate at Dartmouth? He wrote that she is a woman for whom he has “the deepest respect and admiration.”

As the Obama administration makes a final push to reduce the number of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, President-elect Donald Trump is vowing to halt transfers, saying that those remaining are “extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield.”

Mr. Trump’s latest Guantánamo remark, delivered in a tweet on Tuesday, is consistent with his misguided campaign vow to keep the offshore prison open and “load it up with some bad dudes.” He seems oblivious to the risks and costs that keeping the prison open, and perhaps expanding it, would entail.

This makes it imperative that the Obama administration spare no effort in its remaining days to release the roughly 18 detainees who are cleared for transfer to a handful of countries that have agreed to take them. That would leave about 40 detainees, down from the 780 men who have been held at the prison, which was created after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Anyone who visits a prison these days might be shocked to see what looks more like a nursing home with bars and metal detectors. Prisoners put away years ago under the wave of draconian sentencing are now turning gray and frail, suffering from heart disease and hypertension and feeling the effects of Alzheimer’s and other age-related illnesses.

Corrections officials once thought they had time to prepare for this, but something unexpected happened. Federal data shows that prison inmates age more rapidly than people on the outside — because of stress, poor diet and lack of medical care — so much so that their infirmities qualify them as “elderly” at the age of 50.

This problem is overwhelming the state and federal prison systems’ ability to manage it. And unless prisons adopt a common-sense approach of releasing older inmates who present no danger to the public, this costly group could soon account for a full third of the population behind bars.

Granting early release to sick, elderly inmates with families who want to care for them would be the humane thing to do. But it also makes good policy sense, given that they are far less likely than the young to commit new crimes. For example, a 2012 study by the American Civil Liberties Union documented that criminal activity drops sharply as people age. In New York, the study found, just 4 percent of prisoners 65 or older return to prison with a new conviction within three years of release; only 7 percent of those who are 50 to 64 do so. In contrast, 16 percent of those 49 or younger return.

Victories have been steady and significant in the Fight for $15, a nationwide movement for higher pay that began just over four years ago with walkouts by fast-food workers in New York City. In 2017, nearly 12 million workers will get raises as seven states and 18 cities and counties begin phasing in higher minimums approved in 2016. In all, 30 states have now set their minimums higher than the federal level of $7.25 an hour.

Despite this growing movement, the federal minimum hasn’t budged since 2009, and there has been little progress in some regions of the country, including the South. Now comes the election of Donald Trump, whose convoluted statements on raising the federal minimum boil down to “no” or “maybe a little bit.”

If that’s the attitude of the next administration, more states and localities could take matters into their own hands, which may suit Mr. Trump just fine. In the past, he has said raising the minimum should be left to states, an idea also advanced by Andrew Puzder, the fast-food executive Mr. Trump tapped for labor secretary. What they fail (or refuse) to see is that state and local raises, while laudable, are not a substitute for a federal raise.

WASHINGTON — In February 1945, in the twilight of World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill convened in Yalta, a Russian resort town in the Crimea, to deliberate on the direction of the war and the peace to follow. They agreed to a postwar order managed by Roosevelt’s “Four Policemen” — the United States, Britain, Russia and China.

Roosevelt was convinced he could cajole Stalin into keeping his Yalta commitments to collective security and an undivided Europe. Stalin had a very different vision: a world shaped by spheres of influence within which the will of the strongest prevails. In the Soviet sphere, darkness descended on Eastern Europe for 45 years.

It fell to President Harry Truman to contain Soviet expansionism. He built America’s first peacetime alliances, starting in Western Europe, then in Asia. The United States took the lead in shaping the norms, rules and institutions of what became the liberal international order, including the United Nations, the international financial institutions and the Marshall Plan.

Nobody knows yet what Donald Trump is going to do to immigration enforcement. Only a month has passed since the election, and the president-elect is no different from the candidate: erratic, self-contradictory, hazy on principles and policies.

But states and cities that value immigrants, including the undocumented, do not have the luxury of waiting and hoping for the best. They are girding for a confrontation, building defenses to protect families and workers from the next administration.

They fear that Mr. Trump, who ran on a pledge of mass deportation, dehumanizing immigrants and refugees, will remove humane discretion from immigration enforcement. They understand that not all unauthorized immigrants are criminals, that not all should be detained or deported and that the country cannot enforce its way out of its failure to reform unjust immigration laws.

But they know that the nativist ideologues and white nationalists around Mr. Trump are itching for him to be merciless. They know that if he does anything close to what he has repeatedly vowed to do — set dragnets for millions of unauthorized immigrants, triple the number of enforcement officers, immediately revoke President Obama’s administrative actions shielding young people from deportation and pull federal funds from cities that defend immigrants — their prudence will have been justified.

Mr. Trump has reportedly chosen a retired Marine general, John Kelly, to run the Department of Homeland Security. He seems to fit the Trump pattern of seeing immigrants not as a resource to be tapped, but as a threat to be neutralized, beginning at the border. General Kelly, who led the United States Southern Command, warned Congress last year of the danger of terrorists and “weapons of mass destruction” coming in from Mexico. He admitted he had no evidence, but was clanging the alarm all the same.

All Americans now face threats under Trump. The question is how to respond.

A xenophobic hatemonger is about to take office as president of the United States. For marginalized people in our society—the undocumented, African Americans, Muslims, Native Americans and many others—life has always been precarious. Now, all Americans are experiencing threats: to our healthcare, our basic rights, our principles of community and justice, and, for many, our physical safety. How to respond?

One urgent task, as Zack Exley writes, is to harness the legitimate grievances that carried Trump to victory. Many Trump voters, like the voters inspired by Bernie Sanders, were responding to economic populism. They are not to be shunned, but engaged as potential members of the resistance. And we must retire the current Democratic establishment in favor of one that represents the needs of working people.
At the same time, strong multiracial alliances must be forged to protect those most vulnerable under the new administration: the Muslims Trump wants to surveil, the black and brown neighborhoods he wants to aggressively police, the immigrants he wants to deport. We must take to the streets and stand with those who refuse to go back into the shadows, as Prerna Lal urges. Every day, our voices and our bodies will be needed.

The mainstream media and the political establishment pretend all is well. Hillary Clinton enjoined us to grant the next administration “an open mind.” No, we won’t. As Rick Perlstein writes, a Trump presidency cannot be normalized.

Here’s our counterproposal. Let’s instead keep an open mind to the new ideas and alliances rising out of the urgency of this moment. Let’s dare to imagine how our movements can emerge from this dark time stronger and less isolated. Let’s resist the urge to cocoon ourselves in our usual echo chambers. Let’s engage everyone we can to join us as we organize to protect the rights of immigrants, women, people of color, workers and LGBT people. Let’s advance our shared interest in economic justice.

Welcome to the resistance.

By the IN THESE TIMES EDITORS

Top Republicans haven’t been doing a very good job defending democracy lately.
When Russia intervened in the presidential election on Donald Trump’s behalf, most leading Republicans said little. When Trump lied about “millions of people” voting illegally, there was no outcry from his party. When Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina lost last month and refused to concede, other Republicans largely remained silent.
And of course dozens of Republican officials across the country have taken steps to restrict voting rights.

This pattern is especially worrisome because the newly elected president is a Republican who has repeatedly disrespected basic democratic values, including free speech and the right to protest.
When Trump takes office, there will be no more important check on his power than other Republicans. They control the House and the Senate and are soon likely to control the Supreme Court again. The country needs Republicans and conservatives to stand up for democracy.
That’s why I was cheered to see today’s Op-Ed by Evan McMullin, a former adviser to House Republicans who ran for president as a conservative alternative to Trump this year.
McMullin writes: “We must never forget that we are born equal, with basic, natural rights, including those of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Those rights are inherent in us because we are humans, not because they are granted by government. Government, indeed, exists primarily to protect those natural rights; the only legitimate power it has is that which we grant to it.”
The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including Joe Walston on the rash of killings of wildlife rangers.

David Leonhardt
Op-Ed Columnist

NYT/The Opinion Pages

ISTANBUL — The election of Donald J. Trump as the next president of the United States came as an unpleasant shock to much of the world. But in Turkey, my country, it was applauded — not by everyone, for sure, but by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his enthusiastic supporters.

As it became clear that the Republican candidate had achieved an upset, pro-government Turkish columnists, some of whom are also members of Parliament, began cheering it as a blow to the American establishment. Mr. Trump won, they emphasized, despite the opposition of the American news media, Wall Street, the C.I.A. and Hollywood. Hillary Clinton’s defeat, they declared, was the defeat of “the globalist fascists.”

The first official statement from the government came from Bekir Bozdag, the justice minister and an Erdogan confidant. “Nobody can win elections with newspaper headlines, polls, televisions,” Mr. Bozdag said. “The American people said no to their will being manipulated.”

Then came the response from Mr. Erdogan himself. He congratulated the American president-elect in a phone conversation that went “unbelievably well,” the news media here reported. He also invited Mr. Trump to visit Turkey “as soon as possible.” Then Mr. Erdogan criticized the protests in the United States over the election as the work of the same global cabal that he says is constantly trying to topple him.

There are pragmatic reasons for this Turkish love affair with Mr. Trump, which was evident in the pro-government media months before the election. The primary reason is a strong distaste for Mrs. Clinton.

The Democratic candidate was accused of having ties to the Islamic group led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish imam living in the United States who is widely believed to have orchestrated a coup attempt against Mr. Erdogan in July. Moreover, Mrs. Clinton’s vow to continue American support for Kurdish fighters in Syria, whom Turkey considers a terrorist threat, angered the Turkish government.

In contrast, Mr. Trump has not seriously suggested that he would support any policies that would upset the Turkish government. He did give “great credit” to Mr. Erdogan right after the coup attempt “for being able to turn that around” — a message that was well received in Ankara.

But Mr. Trump and Mr. Erdogan also seem to have a more fundamental connection. Supporters of the Turkish president see the American president-elect as a similar figure: an outsider who horrifies “the elite” yet is able to win at the ballot box.