Tag: D.O.G.E

Potomac Fever: The cost of reforming government

We saw a bit about what Anthony Scaramucci meant when he warned Elon Musk over the Holidays of 2024 to stay out of the politics of Washington, D.C.  He specifically cautioned Musk not to get Potomac Fever as he had worked for the White House for a while, which caused a rift with Trump that has lasted to the present and he played like he didn’t want Musk to get that sickness.  Looking back on it, and I’m sure this time won’t be much different, there were many people that Trump liked and supported and tried to bring with him to Washington, D.C., that fell apart and off the rocker without too much time.  Steve Bannon was one of those who got caught off the reservation a bit and had to be removed from the administration.  At one level what Scaramucci said on cable news about Musk could have been viewed as a warning.  “Don’t let what happened to me happen to you,” kind of advice.  Politics is a bloodsport, as I say all the time, and things do get bloody around Trump for many reasons.  But looking deeper into the matter, and it only happened a few days later, when Scaramucci said to Musk to run his businesses and leave people alone in government, what happened to Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy over the H-1B visa issue was just a tiny glimpse of things to come.  Surprisingly, the worst critics of Musk’s position were the MAGA people, some of the president’s biggest supporters.  But I wasn’t surprised.  It’s going to get a lot worse than that.  What happened with the H-1B visas was that the SWAMP defended itself from reform, which is what Scaramucci meant as a spokesman for the Beltway’s ruthlessness.  Enjoy your business.  Go live a good life and leave those government people alone.  Or they will ruin your life. 

If you want to do this kind of thing, you have a couple of ingredients that you have to bring with you if you want to reform the government away from the many parasites that are often in it.  You can’t care what people think of you, which Elon Musk doesn’t appear to do in the usual way.  You have to be independently wealthy because the bad guys in the government first pursue your ability to make money as a means to attack.  There are vast evils made daily by people who trade ethics for money, which is why Washington, D.C., has spiraled so far out of control.  That is also why there aren’t more Donald Trumps in the world.  You have to have independent wealth to fight the SWAMP.  When people complain that all these rich people are in Trump’s government, including the come lately types like Elon Musk, you have to understand that you really can’t fight this fight unless you have independent wealth, and in most cases, a lot of it.  If you have just average wealth, that’s not enough because you will be wholly cancel cultured at the bank faster than a bullet from a gun can leave the muzzle.  Yeah, there is a reason that things are the way they are, and the corrupt often end up ruling over everyone else.  Once the bad guys get control of a government and find that they can use the power of it to steal money from everyone through taxation, they aren’t going to give up that racket easily.  So, anybody wanting to challenge that system must be at a place where they no longer care what people think and where the world’s parasites can’t impact their income.  Because they have so much money, people are always willing to be their friends to get some of it. 

But to Scaramucci’s point, yes, these are ruthless and vile people, and if you want to have any kind of good life while fighting them, forget about it.  There is no upside except in doing the right thing; that is the not-so-well-spoken part of the message.  Looking at all the people who came and went within Trump’s orbit over the last decade is truly astonishing.  And when you see how many MAGA supporters were ready to blow up the whole thing over one disagreement over H-1B visas, the immigration issue that is the cornerstone of the entire Trump support system, you get a good idea of the scale of the problem.  To answer the question about America First, what does that mean if the American worker is a unionized slug not willing to do much work beyond the 40 hours a week and leaving a lot of unworked tasks still unfulfilled at the end of a week and call that a lack of capacity, rather than a lack of willingness to be productive?  You can’t build success in the world like that.  So that’s why there is support for immigrant labor, not because they are cheaper, but because they outwork all the unionized slugs, and there are a lot of government workers in Washington D.C.  Most of them belong to some union, and that’s where all the money goes, we pay too much money for too little work.  And because we have brought this big tent into the MAGA movement, there will be a lot of disagreements on policy items.  And if there is anything to exploit, the SWAMP will do so to preserve itself from reform. 

What Anthony Scaramucci said was essentially the old mafia utterance about minding your own business; otherwise, you’d be swimming with the fishes.  The government is no longer, or if it ever was, a representative government.  It’s organized crime under most conditions.  And the crime bosses essentially tell society that if you want a minimal government running your life as opposed to outright anarchy, then you have to pay the price.  A little bit of corruption isn’t going to hurt anything, from their point of view.  Just pay your fee through taxation, and we’ll leave you alone for the most part unless you get some funny ideas about being a hero.  Nobody wants to be a hero.  That is until someone wants to be a hero and save everyone from the system at any cost.  And that perspective often comes from wealth, the kind where they can have anything they want and aren’t concerned about being removed from the Christmas Party list where you get to flirt with the unhappy wives of their typical combover bootlicker husbands and call it high society.  Washington, D.C., is where the Lords of Easy Money set up their racket, and people pay for protection from the very thugs that run the whole outfit, just like the mob.  And Anthoney Scaramucci understands what Potomac Fever is because he’s had it.  And most people get it.  It’s that sickness that people get when they find out they can make friends with people who become powerful because of their access to confiscated wealth and can live a good, easy life if they only join the government union.  Fighting against that union takes a lot of effort, which comes from the defense of that system by those who most benefit from it.  To stand up to it, you have to have abundant wealth and not care about the social impact that comes with it.  What was said to Musk from Scaramucci was more than a warning; it was a vision statement for the government crime syndicate running things.  And that is where the real fight always was. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Best Way to Show How Useless You Are, Work From Home: Ahead of D.O.G.E, it would be great if federal employees just resigned by the hundreds of thousands

There is no better way to show how useless you are than not being at work and nobody missing you.  And ahead of Trump becoming president and his staff moving into their positions, federal employees are threatening in mass to resign.  Around 2.3 million federal workers in roughly 24 civilian agencies employ about 98% of that number.  Just over half, 1.2 million, work in jobs that require them to be fully present. The remaining 1.1 million are eligible for remote work, or what they are calling “telework.”  Of those, around 228,000 are in remote positions and are not expected to work in person.  Of the remainder of those 1.1 million, they spend only 61% of their working hours at an office, meaning they report for work only sporadically during a work week. And for anybody working in a job that does not require you to be fully present or that you are off a lot, you only prove that your employer is wasting money on you because they have learned to function without you.  COVID and the work-from-home policies that came with it were some of the dumbest ideas in the history of the world and were a prequel to the concept of just giving everyone a universal wage just for existing, as the attempt was to redefine what productivity meant to an economic culture.  And now, even three years later, many of these federal employees, and many who work with government contracts at large companies, still believe that they can work from home doing a few Teams calls with people and to call that work.  Behind that lunacy is this assumption that we can get to a zero-emission world if people just stopped coming to work and stayed in their homes. The government would pay you to do a job they created without any value on a spreadsheet.  It was always a dumb idea.

Darryl Parks and I, from WLW radio back when he was the guy who ran the whole place, used to talk about this on air all the time: federal employees were useless and made way too much money for doing too little.  Most of them belong to labor unions. Everyone remembers the protests in 2012 when Senate Bill 5 in Ohio was put forth that would strip any government worker from belonging to a labor union and impose collective bargaining on taxpayers who had to pay the bill.  All government jobs created are essentially a tax.  They have created positions that only serve the growth of government, which often works against taxpayer interests.  Public school teachers were some of the worst back then, demanding extraordinary amounts of money for essentially working only 6 or 7 hours a day and having off all summer.  The anger that came from the idea of stripping government workers of their ability to join a labor union didn’t go over well politically, and many Republicans lost their way during the outrage.  And I was in the thick of it; I received a lot of radical union harassment ranging from death threats to open conflict everywhere I went publicly.  I was the face of the effort in many ways because I was on WLW radio all the time talking about it, which directed a lot of anger in my direction.  For which I have no regrets.  It got bad at times, and a lot of people got hurt. You would have thought they’d learn their lesson.  But 8 years later, when Covid came along, all they did was justify everything I said about them.  When they had a chance to shut down schools, attempt to keep people from attending church, and use the virus to stay home from work perpetually and still get paid, they proved how useless I had been saying they were all along.  And it was a redeeming moment that many people noticed and suddenly wanted to do something about. 

Since COVID-19, people who live everyday lives and don’t work for a lazy, bloated government getting paid too much money for doing too little decided they didn’t like this arrangement.  Federal employees typically made 30% more than regular workers, and voters were unhappy about it.  They might have listened to me back in 2012 when Darryl and I spent all those Saturdays talking about how dumb it was to have all those government workers charging too much against the taxpayers for useless jobs.  But most voters weren’t ready to do anything about it.  At the time, they thought it was a good gig if someone could get it, a federal job that was overpaid and didn’t require much performance.  So I was in the minority back then, along with other Tea Party-minded people.  But time proved our arguments extremely valid, and all the violence leading up to Covid was much warranted.  I had to hurt many people for a not-very-good reason just because there was a belief that collective bargaining had a right to overrule individual opinions.  And that if everyone didn’t just shut up and put up with their radical labor union mentality, they had a right to force you to think what they wanted you to think.  Well, that didn’t work out very well, and many of them who engaged in such violence learned the hard way what a bad idea it was to take that position.  But COVID only washed away their arguments and forced the masses of society to see just how dumb and worthless these federal positions were.

I’ve been saying during every government shutdown to call the bluff of federal employees who are always willing to strike if they don’t get to extort trillions of dollars from a budget that is entirely out of control.  Nobody will miss those workers if we shut down the government.  But politicians would get weak-kneed just as they did with SB5.  However, with the work-from-home policies from COVID-19 and the federal employees still working from home all this time later, people now see the truth, and politicians are starting to smell the roses.  If you are working in a job where you don’t physically have to be at the office talking to other people, you are not working in a real job, and you can and should be removed from the payroll.  A job is not a right, it’s a privilege, and usually, the people who provide the pay for those services are getting screwed over if the employee they are paying for doesn’t respect the job enough to be in an office working hard for the contents of that position.  But when it comes to the general federal workplace, we have too many people doing too little.  And the best thing they could do ahead of the efforts of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, D.O.G.E, is to quit.  Nobody will miss those workers.  When you work in a job where nobody misses you or knew you were ever there, you know you are working in a useless position.  And I think having millions of these workers suddenly unemployed would be great.  There are other things to do in an expanding economy.  And we don’t need to be paying people to work from home.  And if many of those people all simultaneously put in their resignations, nobody will miss them. They are proving once and for all that all the money we have spent on these federal employees was a waste of time and money all along.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707