The Undrainable Swamp and the Fantasy of MAGA
By; David A. Stockman
A very good friend gave me this book to read. As I started I got madder and madder as Stockman’s whole premise was to mock everything President Trump has been trying to do. The first half is devoted to unbelievable monetary numbers that boggled my mind. I never claimed to be a financial genius. It was not that he didn’t agree but more that how Trump was tackling these issues were inadequate to solving. As I continued to plow through the book I called my friend and bawled him out for asking me to read. His council was to be patient and continue, so I did.
Comments I plucked out of the text.
“The Donald isn’t leading America to the Promised Land. Instead he’s leading it to war abroad, fiscal and economic calamity at home and a crisis of governance that pales Watergate into insignificance.
“The Donald never had a snowball’s chance in hell of Draining the Swamp”. “He lacks even a simulation of a program to rectify America’s falling economy”.
“The history books will record that the Donald peaked on September 20, 2018.---that is when the Donald went all in embracing the most dangerous and unstable Everything Bubble in modern times”.
He really goes after the Federal Reserve.
“Financialization- The Fed Fruit of Rampant Money-Pumping”.
“What we are saying is that the effect of Greenspanian central banking has been to financialize the economy and drive a giant, unsustainable wedge between values on Wall Street and economic performance on Main Street. This has been going on for nearly 30 years now, and with the Fed-driven bubble cycle the de-coupling of Finance and Economy has become ever more tenuous”.
In short he puts the blame on the Fed for deliberately keeping interest rates as low as possible. This has resulted in soaring stock values while the commoners’ income has been essentially flat for the same period of time. If you are old enough to remember during the end of Carter’s reign as president interest rates reached 20% as it needed to be. Not allowing real interest rates to rise overvalued the American dollar which in part resulted in the mass exodus of jobs overseas.
He really comes down hard on Trump and his war on immigrants. He believes it is counterproductive. He proposes a simple plan to provide a much needed work force and solve the drug problem.
“Legalizing all drugs and turning the distribution job over to nonviolent operators like, say, Phillip Morris”.
“Freely handling our guest worker permits at the 48 border control stations and regularly renewing them on demonstration of gainful employment”.
“Denying any and all forms of Federal welfare to non-citizens”.
“Providing guest workers a ten year route to citizenship if they hold a steady job, don’t break the criminal law and pay an admission fee based on a modest percentage of their cumulative W-2 wages”.
“Permitting all so-called illegals already here to obtain a guest worker permit at the nearest federal courthouse and to embark on a 10 year route to citizenship if they hold a job, observe the law, pay the admission fee and also a reasonable fine for their original misdemeanor”.
He firmly states that there is a shortage of workers young enough to be in the work force. With the Millennials reaching Social and Medicare age there are not enough to keep paying into those programs. Enacting the type of programs listed above could solve this shortage.
On some of the following he credited Trump with having the right idea but not being able to accomplish because of the constant haranguing from the Democratic members of Congress and the hostile news media. In addition those of the military who he hired for his cabinet for the most part didn’t agree and either resisted or resigned in protest.
I want to stop here and make a statement. I learned a great deal about our country’s history which has altered my thinking on any number of issues. I now realize that some of the thoughts I wrote about in my “Angry Man” books were not correct. As you read through this article you may remember those issues. On the other hand he echoes the many comments I made which pleased me as I had felt so alone in my thinking. I will leave it to you to determine where I was wrong or where I was right.
He bowled me away with his conviction that President Wilson is responsible for WWII. Had he not declared war and sent 2,000,000 soldiers to Europe; France, England and Germany as exhausted as they were, would have been forced to stop fighting and sign an armistice. Had that occurred the Versailles Treaty would not have been signed which carved off pieces of Germany to Poland, Belgium and France, and saddled Germany with the total responsibility for the war and forced to make painful reparations which brought misery to the German people and made it possible for a tyrant like Hitler to come to power. The excuse Wilson gave was the sinking of the Liner Lusitania with the death of civilians. In the hold were large quantities of war material. America was never told this. Let this sink in for a moment. The most important happening in my lifetime was WWII. What if it had never come about?
He believes that Trump sees the futility of listing Russia and N. Korea as mortal enemies. He tried to reach out to Putin in Helsinki but again the Democrats and the Press castigated him as being a fool, lead along by Putin. Other than their huge nuclear arsenal he points out that Germany’s GDP is 3 times greater than Russia. He does not consider Russia a threat. He points out that the Crimea was always a part of Russia. It was purchased by Catherine the Great in 1783.It was transferred to the Ukraine in 1954, after Stalin’s death by Nikita Khrushchev. The residents are nearly 90 % of Russian heritage. The same is true for the Donbas Eastern end of Ukraine. Therefore it could be relatively agreed to between Putin and Trump to settle the line at these points. His belief is that it was a U.S sponsored putsch that resulted in the turmoil that unseated a duly elected president of the Ukraine. A man who believed their country should be aligned with Russia not the West. We obviously disagreed. George H.W. Bush in 1989 promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward. Since then NATO has expanded from 15 to 29 countries abutting Russia. If agreement could be reached the 35,000 troops in Germany and the others scattered in the region could be brought home and NATO dissolved, at least as far as America is concerned.
He states Trump‘s instincts were correct when he arranged to meet with Kim John-un in Singapore to try to end the occupation of Korea. There are still 29,000 American soldiers stationed there. I addition there are another 100,000 stationed in Japan or on ships close by. Can you even imagine how many billions we have spent during the last 65 years? Every year we conduct war games that involve 350,000 soldiers. The only possible threat to America is the nuclear arsenal
N. Korea possesses. Attacking us would amount to suicide. We would reduce our military costs by billions if we left Korea. With us gone the two sides over time would reconcile. He blasts President George Bush with his axis of evil speech to Congress which effectively stopped any chance of reconciliation.
As to Iran he disagrees with Trump backing away from the nuclear agreement. He minimizes the threat. It has always been a split between Sunni and Shia Muslims. In the past the skirmishes were of no consequence to the rest of the world but now with the flood of weaponry to the region great harm can be done.
I particularly enjoyed his paragraph about George Bush. It starts with “The Unforgiveable Sins of George H.W. Bush” “The man should never be forgiven for enabling the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Gates and their neocon pack of jackals to come to power”. His trumped up wars in Afghanistan and Iraq created total disorder in the Middle East. Obama following up against Libya extended the chaos to that area as well. I have said many times that America is responsible for the turmoil that has engulfed the entire region
He states America has become a welfare and warfare state. With a military budget of $800 Billion, a carrier fleet of 11 including the latest which cost $14 billion to build. Should we ever back away from being the world’s protective shield our budget could be reduced to $250 billion, an amount sufficient to protect our country.
As to the Mueller controversy, he refers to it as “Mueller’s Comic Book Indictment”. Enough said about this.
Believe it or not he agrees with Trump that the rise in temperature worldwide is a hoax when blamed on human activity. He bases this on his reading of scientific history relating to ice ages which occur every 10,000 years or so. I would like to think that before the next one occurs humankind would have devised a counter to decrease the effect. In the meantime every indication proves that the world is heating up rapidly. Should we not attempt to decrease we are delinquent, in my opinion.
Read this book carefully and your eyes will be opened as mine were. My final thought is I wish Mr. Stockman was running for President. Under his enlightened guidance we might be able to prevent the bankrupting of our government and recover from the decades of thoughtless decisions which have resulted in the chaos we may soon discover.
