These days, not only is unemployment in the US on the verge of dipping into the 3% territory for practically the first time since before Kim Jong became ill, but there are lots of individuals who are working longer and harder than ever before.
Coal miners, in addition to removing coal from the earth, are now working overtime to assure that the coal is big, clean and beautiful. Construction companies are building so many wall prototypes along the US-Mexican border that it’s more than enough to cover the entire border, with excess wall samples being sold for cash to the highest bidder (some of which, I’m certain, Mexico would pay for). I, myself, have been working harder than ever attempting to convince people that at this point there is no way Trump actually runs for reelection in 2020 (expect the full analysis in an upcoming article). It could even be argued that no single entity in the world has been working as hard as the company that produces the slips of pink paper that the Trump administration uses to fire those hordes of senior officials.
But all this is—as Trump would say—peanuts compared to the intense levels of exponential increase of the job requirements of one particular individual. Pak Pong-ju’s workload is about to skyrocket from entailing absolutely nothing to levels entirely unprecedented, and if Pak is getting his news either from North Korea’s state-run media or from Western civilization’s mainstream media, then he, in all likelihood, has no idea what’s about to hit him. Here’s why:
Pak Pong-ju is known as the person with the most useless job in the world. As the prime minister of North Korea’s parliament, his job includes doing literally nothing. On paper he’s supposed to assure that the Supreme People’s Assembly, which is of the people, for the people and by the people, votes unanimously in favor of the will of one person. I’ll give you a hint: That one person is not Pak Pong-ju.
As North Korean parliamentarians aren’t generally renowned for voting against the wishes of their dear dictator, the odds of Pak being called upon to cast a tie-breaking vote are as uncommon as locating a Michael Wolff admirer.
Also, whatever happens to someone who fails to vote along party lines is not the concern of the prime minister, as that falls entirely under the purview of the firing squad. In fact, Pak’s position as prime minister seems to consist of nothing, aside from attending the funerals of his deputies, and even that event rarely takes place more than once a year. The last two Vice PMs who were reportedly executed by the DPRK are Choe Yong-gon in 2015 and Kim Yong-jin in 2016.
However, the era of high volumes of twiddling produced by Pak’s thumbs is about to come to an end. For more than a year now I’ve been prognosticating and preaching about the relative ease through which Trump and China could solve the North Korean conflict. Kim would still be in power, but suddenly Pak Pong-ju (or whoever is the prime minister at the time) will find himself the beneficiary of full-time employment running his country’s parliament. Let’s take a step back to 2003.
Around the same time as the US invasion of Iraq, Israel entered the Gaza Strip. As more and more targets were identified, terrorists were eliminated and the Palestinians appealed to the world for sympathy. But the world, at the time, was more fascinated with the pre-mission-accomplished component of the Iraq War.
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