A Modest Proposal for Preventing Congressmen From Being a Burden on Citizens

Jonathan Swift, the 18th-century author of the masterpiece Gulliver’s Travels, described his passion about satire this way: “The chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it.” My favorite essay of Swift’s is “A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.” He pretends to be a social planner in solving the absolutely deplorable poverty in Ireland by selling year-old babies to the rich for food.
He begins: “It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town…when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms. These mothers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all of their time in strolling to beg sustenance for their helpless infants. ...whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth…would have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation…

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout….A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.”

Swift then provides an economic study of how his proposal will help families and the state. He also takes a whack at Irish Catholics by writing that at times during the year the market will be “glutted” because fish is a prolific and fertile diet, so three times as many Catholic children will be born “nine months after Lent.” He insists his plan is beneficial because it will also lower the number of Catholics in Ireland. Swift in his early days was ordained an Anglican priest.

Would Dung Beetles Serve Our Country as Well as Swift’s Proposal Served the Irish Poor?

From e-mails, letters, personal comments, and exchanges on radio talkshows I have determined I also “vex” people in my columns. Good. That’s my shtick. Barack Obama had a bad beginning in 2010 when the Democrats lost a Senate seat in Massachusetts and took a licking from the right-wing Supreme Court in the decision about “free speech” and all those corporations complete with souls, arteries, and veins. How “speech” equals “money” has always “vexed” me–but that’s another story.

There are a few jokes going around about the economy. I like this one: “The economy is so bad, Dick Cheney took his stockbroker hunting.” This one is more real: “The economy is so bad, Wall Street has laid off 50 Congressmen and ExxonMobil has put over 25 on administrative leave.” We could only wish.

I have a modest proposal. I understand from Googling that a few hard-working dung beetles can consume or eliminate an average cowpie in about an hour. Just think of what several quadrillion dung beetles could do for all the crap dropped on Capitol Hill.

There are about 5,000 species of dung beetles that operate out of three groups: rollers, tunnellers, and dwellers. Some like it hot while others want it to cool down a bit. We could certainly use all three groups to attack congressional dung. The dwellers would serve best in the Senate chambers. Dwellers simply love to live in manure. There is a tremendous amount of dung available at all hours because senators love to drop their pearls at the drop of a gavel or martini.

Some smaller dung species attach themselves to regular dung providers and wait for their reward. I would think that Senators Joe Lieberman and Orrin Hatch would be covered with clinging dung beetles because they are constantly looking for TV cameras to drop their principles.

I must fault President Obama for creating a warm environment for dung beetles. First, he was naive enough to believe that a few Republicans would actually be for healthcare and insurance reform. Big mistake. The Republicans are only interested in two personal “insurance” programs: power and low taxes. They don’t do healthcare and other social programs. I still remember former Texas Senator Phil Gramm’s response to a request to support a special education program for handicapped children. Gramm replied, “Republicans don’t do special ed,” implying that all Republican offspring are Lake Woebegon above-average.

The “Gang of Six” Disaster

Obama’s major mistake in the healthcare debacle was agreeing to the appointment of the “Gang of Six.” What Senate majority Leader Harry Reid expected to get out of that bunch on the Senate Finance Committee beyond obfuscation and obstruction is beyond me.

Chairman Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana), one of the dimmer bulbs in “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” has raised over $11 million in the last five years from finance, drug, insurance, and healthcare corporations for his campaigns. Without these corporations Max would be on some township board. His top supporters are Schering-Plough (drugs), Goldman Sachs (author of obscene bonus plans this year), Aetna Inc. (one of the largest insurance companies), American International Group, commonly known as A.I.G.(which has now taken about $170 billion of taxpayer money), and KKR & Co., another expert in leveraged buyouts, derivatives, and credit default swaps. Well, lobbyists say a good politician is one who stays bought.

By Max’s side was North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad of Countrywide Financial fame (“I didn’t know I was getting a hot deal”), who has Goldman Sachs, Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Northwestern Mutual, Anheuser-Busch, and other investment firms among his top contributors. His contribution to the health proposal? Co-ops that would take two decades to establish. Of course, corporations didn’t contribute directly to politicians. They use the company PAC. But when the CEO of Citigroup tells his staff he is contributing to Conrad, I would think many automatically reach for their checkbooks and write in what the boss says.

The Republicans of the “Gang” were Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi, the top-rated conservative on the American Conservative Union’s ‘reliable” list, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who continued to mumble about Sarah Palin’s “death panels” until all the elderly got the message, and Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, who was there only to pick up a few Democratic votes back home. New Mexico Democrat Senator Jeff Bingaman was the third Democrat on the “Gang”, but he is known as a soft-spoken Westerner, so soft-spoken I don’t remember one word he said about health care reform! The “Gang” proved to be a total disaster for the Democrats because the “Gang” Republicans filibustered for months, creating a heap of dung nobody understood. Thanks, Max.

The Gang of Six came from tiny states representing only three percent of our total population. These senators were not a representative sample of mainstream thought. California has over 11 percent of our total population, yet had no senator on the Gang. This was a mess created by Senator Harry Reid and evidently approved by Obama. A terrible strategy.

And Then We Have Senator Aetna From Connecticut

Obama should have taken Senator Aetna from Connecticut to the emergency arm-twisting room immediately. Lieberman has been shilling and whining for insurance companies for decades. Actually he has no principles except personal survival and locating the closest TV camera.
Joe was against the public option because his bosses in the insurance industry knew it would cut into their obscene profits.

The U.S. currently spends $7,439 per capita on health care, double what most industrialized, civilized countries spend, and still has 48 million people uninsured. Switzerland spends $4,417 and covers everybody. Luxembourg spends $4,162 and covers everybody. “Socialist” France spends under $3,000 per capita, covers everybody, and has the highest rated medical care in the world, according to the World Health Organization!

The U.S. leads the world in nothing medical, such as life span, infant mortality, and other significant medical benchmarks. It leads only in bilking its citizens of hard dollars and transferring the funds to insurance company shareholders, doctors and hospitals, and $100 million-a-year insurance CEOs. Joe should have been stripped of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee and sent into “independent” obscurity when he blasted the public option.

Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, a so-called Democrat, put the screws to Obama by pimping for Nebraskan pro-lifers and for the Medicare extortion. A former insurance company CEO, Ben should have been told, “Vote with your party, or forget about any Democratic dollars in your campaign chest.” That deal smelled worse than a factory hog farm just outside of Omaha. It made practically every decent person in the country—Democrat, Republican, or Independent—gag. I think it was the main reason for the Massachusetts election of Scott Brown. Even Senator Nelson finally recognized he was in dung way over his head and desperately needed millions of beetles to clean him up.

Will the Corporatocracy Elect Halliburton or Goldman Sachs as President?

Well over 100 years ago Republican Mark Hanna developed this maxim: “There are two things that are important in politics. The first thing is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.” Just a couple of weeks ago the conservative majority of the Supreme Court which always supports the corporation over the individual threw out over 100 years of political wisdom and decreed that a big corporation was just like a teeny-weeny individual when it comes to free speech. In a 5-4 vote the Court said free speech is money and that corporations could unload millions and perhaps billions to elect their lobbyists to high public office. Finally corporations were free to use their checkbooks directly.

We already know which politicians have been bought by corporations. Senators like Baucus, Conrad, Lieberman, Hatch, Reid, Ensign and many others may as well wear NASCAR-like patches on their dark blue suits representing ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Pfizer, Merck, Aetna, United Healthcare, Morgan Chase, and others who feed continuously at the Washington Buffet. The fact is we already have a corporatocracy instead of a democracy and the Supreme Court just insured it will continue to dominate the political scene.

During the 2008 election cycle the Fortune 500 companies had profits of $743 billion. Over two billion dollars was spent just on the presidential election. Recently Goldman Sachs reported it had made $3.4 billion in the last quarter–during a deep recession! With the recent Supreme Court decision, do you think Goldman Sachs will spend some of it electing its “friends” to congress?

An astute observer of our body politic in Arizona summed up the current situation in a letter to the editor: “I am too old to see what is eventually going to happen, but I see the country slipping back to a time when the worker owed his life to the country store. The standard of living is going to decline much more than it has in the past few years.”

Dung beetles live from three to five years and can roll balls of dung that weigh up to 50 times their own weight. They are really nature’s septic system. Without the dung beetle the earth would be suffocated by manure. In the past, philosophers said that the growth of a society depended on who won the race between education and catastrophe. It now looks as if the survival of our society will depend on whether hard-working dung beetles can swallow all the crap deposited by corporations.

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