As usual, the mainstream media got it wrong (some of it, anyway).
Donald Trump is not picking Goldman Sachs alumnus Steven Mnuchin for his Treasury Secretary. Instead, America’s president-elect (the presidential candidate from Twitter) has chosen NYSE CEO Sydney Williams III to oversee the IRS, our nation's coinage, the nation’s debt, and relations with Chinese Minister of Finance 肖捷. 肖捷 (Xiao Jie) was the first to congratulate Williams on his appointment. Williams is fluent in Chinese.
Williams is the Head of School, and the most famous alumnus, of Alma Academy in Easthampton, Massachusetts, a boys school founded by button manufacturer Samuel Williston in 1841. Williams served as the kingpin of Alma at the same time as he ran Wall Street. He commuted from Alma to Wall Street on Caroline Airlines, one of Trump’s 501 businesses. In 1972, Williams merged the Northampton School for Girls into Alma. Alma is now known all over the world as Alma Be Good.
In other news from the Trump transition, the megabillionaire chose Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, to be his Secretary of Transportation. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (who lost out in the running for Attorney General to one of the Senate’s chief xenophobes, early Trump backer Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama) was supposed to get the job at Transportation, but Transportation Secretary-designate Chao has promised him a job as a toll collector on the New Jersey Turnpike at the Fort Lee toll station.
Chao was Deputy Secretary of Transportation under Bush One, and she was the longest-serving Secretary of Labor (2001-2009, under Bush Two) since Frances Perkins (1885-1965). Her parents fled from Shanghai to Taiwan after the Chinese Communists conquered the Middle Kingdom in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. In 1961, when she was eight, she came to the United States on a freight ship with her mother and two younger sisters. Her father, 趙錫成 (James S.C. Chao, now 88) founded Foremost Shipping in Taiwan, where Chao was born.
In 2007, after analyzing 70,000 closed case files from 2005 to 2007, the Government Accountabily Office reported that the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, under Chao, inadequately investigated complaints from low- and minimum-wage workers who alleged that their employers had failed to comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 by failing to adhere to long-standing federal laws requiring the payment of minimum wages and overtime.
Also on Chao's watch, there were two mine disasters. Twelve miners were killed in the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia in January, 2006, and three rescue workers died in the Crandall Canyon Mine disaster in August, 2007. Before the mines collapsed, Chao (remember, she’s married to Senate Majority Leader McConnell (R-Kentucy), who has endlessly denounced President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for waging a “war on coal") had cut more than a hundred coal mine safety inspectors. Nearly half of the 208 safety citations against the Sago coal mine where the 12 men died were “serious and substantial,” according to the Christian Science Monitor.
Trump's incoming Chief of Staff, veteran Washington pol Reince Priebus, told associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones, on deep background, that Chao was on the shortlist for Secretary of State, but that, unfortunately, that job will probably go to Chief Trump Sycophant Rudy Giuliani.
Continuing to fill his Cabinet-to-be, Trump has tapped Wilbur Ross, 79, another billionaire, to head the Commerce Department (a job to which Colorado’s Democratic governor, John Hickenlooper, who lives in the same precinct as your solitary reporter) might have aspired. As a vocal Trump supporter before the election, Ross cited the need for a “more radical, new approach to government.”
Ross, chairman of WL Ross & Company, has made a career of resurrecting dying companies. Some of his biggest successes have been in the same (appropriately) demoralized industries that Trump wants to revive: steel and coal. Ross’s firm scored huge returns by cobbling together bankrupt steelmakers, including Bethlehem Steel, to form International Steel Group.
Secretary-designate Ross’s foray into the coal industry ran into trouble in January, 2006, when he was running the company that ran the Sago Mine, when those same 12 miners died in West Virginia, when Chao was Secretary of Labor.
The word at RNC headquarters in Trump Tower is that the president-elect will name Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin as his Secretary of the Interior. Fallin is part of a group of Republican governors who fully and self-righteously intend to refuse to comply with EPA regulations to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change. In April 2015, she issued an executive order prohibiting the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality and other state agencies from creating an emissions-reduction strategy under the Clean Power Plan; she was the first governor to do so.
In an exclusive interview with associate solitary reporter Jenny True, Fallin, a former Congresswoman, said that she would be honored to serve her country as Secretary of the Interior because she would be able to live in our Nation’s Capital, “way, way, way far away from all those earthquakes which, you know, Jenny, have nothing to do with fracking."
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