Trump Has Been Scrooge McDuck
Remnant Review
“President Obama is a very good man. I will seek his counsel in the future.” — Donald Trump (November 10, 2016)
The honeymoon with his supporters did not last long, did it?
I began with two statements.
First, Donald Trump is not part of what is sometimes called “the conspiracy.”
Second, he will be on January 20, 2017.
We are about to see the capture of Donald Trump. It has already begun.
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The mainstream media are beginning to see this. By January 20, it should be clear to anybody who wants to look at his nominees for the top cabinet positions. CNN’s headline has it right: Team Trump is already filled with Washington insiders.
We have already learned that the transition team has approached Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase. He was offered the position of Secretary of the Treasury. Anyone who thinks that this would be an improvement over the former CEO’s from Goldman Sachs is living in a fantasy world.
The handwriting is on the wall. We can expect more of the same. We had better expect more of the same.
Just for the record, the phrase “handwriting on the wall” comes from the fifth chapter of the book of Daniel. May I remind you, that was originally written in Hebrew, and Hebrew is written from right to left. So is everything in Washington. You should also recall what the handwriting said.
And this is the writing that was written, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. His is the interpretation of the thing: Mene; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. ekel; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Peres; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians (vv. 25-28).
That was a revolution. It was not just a coup d’état. Accept no substitutes.
CABINET-LEVEL SECRETARIES
There are two cabinet positions that really matter in every presidential administration. This goes back to Washington’s first administration. First, there is the Secretary of State. Second, there is the Secretary of the Treasury.
The other cabinet positions of importance are the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, which determines who is going to get prosecuted, and the Department of Homeland Security, which is the real enforcement arm of the government.
Watch who gets appointed to these five positions. That will tell you the direction of the Trump administration.
All of the rest of the departments are agencies for the enforcement of rules designed by special-interest groups and cartels. If President Trump is really serious about undermining the federal government, he will leave these other positions unfilled for four years. In doing so, he would help de-legitimize each of the departments. All but one should be shut down. Of course, so should the Department of Homeland Security. But it is not possible for a President to shut them down, so he can at least send a message: these departments are irrelevant, and ought to be shut down. No one should be appointed to run any of them. I am speaking of these departments: Agriculture, Education, Transportation, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Commerce, and Interior. If the budgets for all of these were cut to zero, the nation would be better off.
He should turn over the Department of Veterans Affairs to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They should take care of their own, institutionally speaking. They should run it like a military operation. It has proven again and again that it is utterly incompetent. Put the generals and admirals in control of it, and let them take the heat when another scandal emerges.
This would be a real revolution. This would strike a blow for liberty. This would make it clear to the public that these departments have long since been captured by the bureaucracies. They cannot be changed except by budget cuts. Therefore, we should stop pretending that the President and the voters have any control over them. There is no way to control these departments, because everybody in them, except for about 4,000 temporary figurehead appointments, are ineligible to be fired. If you can’t fire employees, you can’t change the departments. Therefore, the cabinet level positions are merely figureheads. They exist to placate the special interests associated with each of the departments. They are there to reassure the various cartels that in fact control these branches of the government that everything is just fine, and the money will keep flowing.
In every case, the money should be completely cut off. But this is impossible politically. So, the government should give paid leave to everybody on the payroll for the rest of their careers, not to be replaced. Again, it would be better to fire all of them, but Congress would not go along with that. So, it is best to stop the charade. Since you can’t change the system, you should at least admit this in full public view. Washington is an unstoppable bureaucracy that responds to nothing except the threat of budget cuts. This has been the essence of the federal bureaucracy ever since the establishment of Civil Service in the 1880’s. It was designed to work this way.
There should be no federal Department of Education. The federal government should have nothing to say in the area of education. It should have no rules to enforce. The same is true of agriculture, business, and so forth. But because conservatives are committed to capturing the levers of power rather than removing them, there is always a fight to get into control, and without exception, the conservatives always lose the fight. This never ceases to baffle them.
Candidate Ronald Reagan promised to shut down the Department of Education. President Reagan didn’t. Neither will Trump.
Let me explain how the Cabinet-level selection procedure works. It would be easy to find voters who would be ready to set up a Department of Whorehouses in order to regulate the nation’s whorehouses, making them safer for the customers. They would then find that the Secretary of Whorehouses is always somebody who is a successful developer of a chain of whorehouses and is ready to gain recognition for the fine work that she has done. They would look long and hard to find a woman to represent them in this department.
I think this establishes my basic position. Anything less than this is a compromise.
Trump should look for the hardest-core people he can find for State, Treasury, Defense, and Justice. The people who occupy these cabinet level position should reflect his revolution if any.
Whoever gets the position of Secretary of State will either reflect the existing commitment to internationalism or else reflect a real revolution, namely, the shutdown of the American Empire. But the conservative movement basically is committed to the Empire, which is why we can never get budget cuts in the Department of Defense. So, we wind up with neoconservatives or outright Wilsonian internationalists as Secretary of State.
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