Shock and Awe a Bargain II

[Part two in a two-part series.]

The Taxpayers Protection Alliance is reportedly challenging some of the conclusions in the recent Division of Self-Defense report in which the DOD makes the case for the cost-effectiveness of America's self-perpetuating Shock and Awe program in Iraq.

Said the TPA's Ted Rutledge, "The report conveniently forgets to factor in the high cost of all the friendly fire Americans on the home front are suffering from in growing numbers as they're being Shocked and Awed by the unbelievable inhumanity of America's Shock and Awe program and all its ghastly traumatic fallout.

"How much high-dollar therapy did this Division of Self-Defense report alone put on the taxpayer's bill with all its graphic discussion of misshapen Iraqi babies and their phosphorous and uranium and misshapen baby-deranged moms and dads?

"And remember, most Americans don't have a cushy VA arrangement for when all the chronic difficulties with sleeping at night kick in and all the other wheels start coming off."

At a Stanford University gala celebrating the running out of the statute of limitations on many of her war crimes, former Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice told reporters that the TPA was overblowing the whole issue of friendly fire from America's Shock and Awe campaign.

Said Dr. Rice, "Look, I sleep like a baby at night, and I was one of the chief orchestrators of Shock and Awe. And as for my good friend The Decider, I am told he's putting the last touches on a suite of paintings titled 'Unleashing the oil-based lapdogs of my personal peace with my war.'

"So it sounds like he's sleeping just fine as well."

Tweeted former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "You go into a war's aftermath with the conscience you have, not the conscience you might want or wish to have."

Tweeted former Secretary of State General Colin Powell, "New Pottery Barn Rule: You don't pay for it till you're done breaking it, which may well be never in Iraq."

Tweeted former Halliburton CEO and former Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney, "Americans in the last throes, if you will, of all their bellyaching about Iraq."

For its part the current White House is standing firmly behind the Division of Self-Defense's finding that Shock and Awe has been a much needed bargain in these trying economic times.

Said Obama spokesman Jay Carney, "Something for nothing doesn't exactly grow on trees in theaters of war. In these times of austerity on the home front, thrift-minded Americans ought to be heartened by the volumes all these freebies speak about the new frugality of their Department of Defense."

Added Mr. Carney, "No question it complicates our Look Forward and Not Backward strategy when the horrific legacy of the Bush administration's questionable behaviors extends under its own cost-free power into the foreseeable future and probably well beyond.

"But  to piggyback on all the economizing associated with Shock and Awe, the president's got a plan for saving the American taxpayer the exorbitant, deficit-exploding government-wide war crime litigation that would otherwise come now that the American public can no longer avoid Iraq War horrors even by looking only forward.

"What we're going to do is shift seamlessly into a new phase of the ongoing overt plan of action we've covertly been calling Operation Bushie Freedom.

"Taking a page from his own killer drone program playbook, the president has set aside some of the now well-documented savings from Shock and Awe for training the former Bush administration in the complicated mental acrobatics of neither confirming or denying that Shock and Awe ever happened, much less that it is ongoing."

"That's just beautiful," said the TPA's Jeff Rutledge. "Forget about all the godforsaken inside-out  babies in Iraq. Now that all  the freak-job chickenhawks are getting off scot-freer than ever thanks to Obama, there's no way they're going to abort any of the truly grotesque brainchildren spawned in the little orgy they called Shock and Awe.

"What do you think the sticker shock and awe's going to be like on Operation Iranian and Syrian and Nigerian and Bumfuck, Egyptian Freedom?"

Report: Shock and Awe a Bargain

[This is part one in a special two-part series marking the 10th anniversary of Shock and Awe.]

Defending the US Department of Defense against mounting criticism over the enormous and growing price tag on the disappointing military adventure known historically as Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Self-Defense division of the DOD has issued a report presenting new evidence that at least with regard to the Shock and Awe feature of America's neutralizing of Saddam's neutralized WMDs, the American taxpayer is getting much more than his and her money's worth.

In a section of the report titled "Shocked and Odd", the analysts at Self-Defense painstakingly document the truly shocking assortment of horrible birth defects and neurological disorders and all the monstrosities that medical science has no names for yet that the white phosphorous and the depleted uranium and all the other toxic materials from America's Shock and Awe campaign have wrought in Iraq.

Said neocon and so-called chickenhawk William Kristol, "Fallujah's making post-war Hiroshima look like the white bread vanilla district of Normalsville, Utah. Seriously. We're talking about a multi-, multi-generational thalidomide situation on steroids. The really unsafe, cut-rate kind of steroids from Mexico.

"The beauty, though, is that in this instance American society doesn't incur the high cost of class action law suits."

Said neocon and so-called chickenhawk Richard Perle, "It's the gift to Iraqi freedom lovers that just keeps giving. Ten years on and the completely free-of-charge extra bonus echoes keep rippling out in all directions from the ground zero of our original Shock and Awe. In drone-speak it's sort of a double tap times who even knows what number of generations."

Said neocon and so-called chickenhawk Charles Krauthammer, "When the oil runs out over there in about 50 years they can transition into a circus freak show economy without missing a beat."

Said neocon and so-called chickenhawk Paul Wolfowitz, "Listen. If you want to shock and awe a country you have to break some eggs with respect to up-front costs. But now look at what you get for the price--in delivery rooms and nurseries and hospital dumpsters across Iraq you're looking at these shocking bundles of arms and legs and palates and spines and eyeballs that are everywhere and nowhere all at the same time.

"Into the very DNA of Shiites and Sunnis alike we've blasted the Shock and Awe of these blown-up looking little reminders of what you get when you make America think your leader's not really coming clean about your weapons of mass destruction.

"And you tell me, how much taxpayer money do you think we're saving by nipping more terrorism in the bud with each and every one of the miscarriages our Shock and Awe campaign is causing by probably the millions. And that's to say nothing of all the deadly and even just the debilitating cancers."

Added Wolfowitz, "And there's little or no truth whatsoever to the rumor that private military contractors are charging American taxpayers an annual fee for all the next generations of Shock and Awe given birth to by the reigning Mother of All Shock and Awe that is the centerpiece of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

"And in fact the toxic social climate that is a large part of Shock and Awe's fallout has now got Iraqis Shocking and Awing each other all on their own at absolutely no extra charge to America."

Truth Hurts Truthtellers

In a story reportedly being blacked out by the Obama administration, the Office of Self-Evident Truth, an apparently long-forgotten agency created and named in the patriotic first days of the new president’s soon-to-be aborted government transparency campaign, has filed an extensive report exposing all the obvious forbidden truths the government has spent roughly four years devoting untold resources to obscuring.

“Ironically,” explained David Axelrod, former Obama strategist and now a media personality at MSNBC, “in all the whirlwind of our frantically shifting from transparency to opacity mode with regard to inconvenient truths, we completely forgot to dissolve the half-fledged entity we were in the process of tasking with the disclosure of these truths.

“Left to its own devices, the skeleton crew thrown together at the Office of Self-Evident Truth must have taken it upon itself to complete the mission statement we left half-finished when we pivoted into a different direction.

“From the rumors I’ve heard about their report, it looks like a key element of the mission they came up with is to unequivocally document the unbelievably obvious hard truths being concealed so well out in broad daylight.”

According to Trina Martinez, on spring break from her internship in the Division of Photocopying at the department where the Office of Self-Evident Truth was housed until very recently, the report in question is “like totally well documented” and full of “mind-blowing surprises.”

“Oh my god,” said Ms. Martinez, “I almost wish I hadn’t read that report while I was Xeroxing it. Apparently President Obama actually does have his own killer drone program and it really does kill children, and America really is full of war criminals who got away with murder and other crimes against humanity, and all the killing in Iraq was actually senseless and it really is ongoing thanks to all the depleted uranium and the white phosphorous and the toxic social climate we left there, and corporations actually aren’t persons, and the One Percent really are above the law, and the One Percent really did manufacture the idea that the unrich can only expect to ever become rich if they sacrifice their safety net so the already rich can get richer, and the One Percent really have ruined the Democrats almost as much as they’ve ruined the Republicans, and the media actually isn’t liberal at all and it actually is the voice of the One Percent.

“And oh my god, wealth doesn’t actually ever trickle down.”

From the single room they have indefinitely taken up residence in at the Ecuadorean Embassy in Washington, the so-called skeleton crew from the former Office of Self-Evident Truth told Shining City Gazette they are victims of their own dedicated government work.

Said crew leader Michael Redding, “We were working so hard on documenting the mind-boggling proliferation of obvious forbidden truths under America’s noses that we missed the most obvious truth of all—that we’d somehow missed the White House memo re-defining government transparency to mean making it crystal clear to everybody under the sun that embarrassing the president and/or his government with obvious inconvenient truths is definitely not what he was talking about when he was encouraging whistleblowers back when he was a candidate.”  

Added Mr. Redding, “So now of course the newest obvious inconvenient truth is that the president will use the obvious inconvenient truth that America can’t handle the truth to obscure the obvious truth that a report exists that unequivocally documents all the obvious forbidden truths America has become much too cowardly to handle.”

Report: Drones, US a Bad Match

According to multiple sources, a US Department of Defense feasibility report that has surfaced in recent days is shedding new light on what’s holding up the president’s transporting of his killer drone program to US soil.

One killer drone program operative, granted anonymity because he or she is not in a legal position to confirm or deny her or his personal existence, told or perhaps couldn’t have told Shining City Gazette because he or she doesn’t exist that the report is basically a several hundred page headache the president doesn’t need right now.

Said the source in question, “How would you feel if you were basing your entire legacy on personally waging a deadly extra-judicial all-out totally no-holds-barred so-called Global War on Terror and some pencil pusher told you you couldn’t even train your signature weapon on the globe’s number one country?

“I’ll tell you what, if it was me who wrote that downer of a feasibility report, I sure wouldn’t be venturing off American soil anytime soon.”

Just one example of the many roadblocks the report outlines with respect to the president’s pet plan to roll out his killer drone program in the homeland is the “sky-high likelihood” that US consumer groups would poison the well of public opinion on killer drones by launching an all-out legal battle when the life insurance industry began adding contractual clauses that voided any and all payouts in the event that a policyholder proved irrefutably to be a criminally anti-American militant by dint of his or her having been obliterated by a drone strike.

Said John Brennan, newly confirmed CIA director and confirmed architect of the president’s unconfirmed killer drone program, “What’s the president supposed to do with that scenario? Unless you want to just scrap the Rule of Law, you can’t really have a militant-killing killer drone program if you can’t define “militant” as anyone blown up by a killer drone. It just doesn’t work.”

Said Leon Panetta, former CIA director and former US Secretary of Defense, “In light of this report, I think my successors at Defense and the CIA may have to seriously entertain the possibility of telling the president that American society is just not the best fit for his killer drone program.

“Would it really be worth it to take on the powerful American Medical Association, which in all likelihood would stand behind the Emergency Medical Technician union’s highly likely protests against the indispensible use of double taps to exploit the enemy’s sense of responsibility to the body parts of its blown-up loved ones?

“Does the president really want to launch an endless nationwide city-by-city war against an army of lawyers defending the local noise pollution ordinances all the overhead droning would violate?

“What happens when the nation’s women, who are already feeling like war has been declared on them, start being blown up in large numbers by Hellfire missiles?

“And this is to say nothing of the report’s well-documented finding that American day-to-day life is rife with patterns of behavior that would flip the switch on the green light on the drone program’s signature signature strikes.

“Any number of the nation’s playground and neighborhood and birthday-party children’s games are virtually indistinguishable from terrorist activity, for instance.

“And the erratic habits of the long-term unemployed, of which there will obviously be a rapidly growing number as the country pursues austerity to address the unemployment problem, would make America an almost impossibly target-rich environment. I mean, even the most American looking American job seekers even start looking like terrorists as their personal grooming habits deteriorate more and more with each new month they go unemployed.

“And a not untrivial consideration is that bringing the drone program into plain sight of Americans would very likely cut into the effectiveness of the president’s shielding his illegal killer drone program from scrutiny by neither confirming or denying that he has his own illegal killer drone program.”

Said CIA director Brennan, “I do give the report credit for at least imagining ways the drone program could be made financially self-sustaining should the president decide to ignore its key recommendation that in his Global Drone War on Terror the president should have his senior word redefiners take advantage of American Exceptionalism to make “global” mean any and all nations but America.

“In light of these hard economic times the military has fallen on thanks to the sequester, I in fact think someone might be in line for the Distinguished Drone Warfare Medal for thinking up the idea of using aerial advertising banners to make up for Pentagon budget cuts.

“In my mind, though, drone-tugged sky ads are a brainstorm for perhaps a later day. We’ll see what austerity brings, but for the time being I don’t see how unleashing drone strikes on the American society as it currently stands doesn’t just make the president’s life miserable.”

Bad News for Obama Apologists

Researchers at the National Academy of Oculopolitical Science announced today that Obama partisans are now scoring off the charts on the Graduated Beaumont-Nelson Scale, the field’s primary yardstick for measuring the intensity of a blind devotion to a party leader.

The Academy’s chief politico-oculist, Dr. Stephanie Reed, told Shining City Gazette that she hasn’t seen a partisan blindness this acute since fairly early in the first term of President George W. Bush.

“Really,” said Reed, “we’re talking about a pitch darkness of a shade that doesn’t actually occur in nature. To get an approximate sense of the kind of blindness we’re looking at, you’d have to imagine an already totally blind person in the deepest darkest cave on Earth at night in the shade of a thick forest during a total solar and lunar eclipse with his eyes squeezed shut under a double-wrapped blindfold made of a high light reflective fabric like French crepe or maybe an uncoated or even a coated nylon polyester.

“I suppose that in light of these Obama idolizers having spent four-plus years now gazing starry-eyed at the president’s dazzling million dollar smile while he so glaringly flaunts all their former principles, you could also capture the partisan blindness we’re talking about with the analogy of a child unwittingly staring directly into the sun without blinking day after day for something like a decade.

“Anyway, the point is that these blind devotees of the president just can’t see what’s wrong with him killing children and other innocents with his drones or letting the world’s worst criminals off scot-free while he mercilessly prosecutes any and all heroes with the courage to blow the whistle on all the criminals he’s letting off scot-free when he’s not grandly bargaining away the nation’s hard-bought commitments to its non-rich citizens while he oversees a period of unprecedented wealth and power accumulation by the rich ones.

“And as our colleagues over in the audiopolitical sciences point out, these Obama adorers are also experiencing so profound a partisan deafness that they can’t even hear the irony in their calling themselves the Obama Nation.

Countered former Obama spokesperson Robert Gibbs, now a non-professional leftist media personality at MSNBC, “If anyone’s gone stone blind it’s the Magoos on the professional left thanks to all the nonstop masturbatory hatchet jobs they’re doing on the president.

“Let’s just take Obama’s brilliant stroke of going along with the right’s hundreds of millions of dollar corporate-sponsored nonsense about the need for austerity. If the Obama haters weren’t all squinting so hard getting their jollies trying to spot more nits to pick they’d maybe see the wisdom of reducing more and more Americans to poverty and into the open arms of the Democratic party.

“This president’s got the Republicans right where he wants them. The more he adopts their policies and ways of thinking, the more Americans slip into  socioeconomic classes that know better than to vote Republican.”

In more bad news for Obama partisans, the Center for Olfactopolitical Research is set to announce their finding that the so-called Obama Nation has now lost the ability to pick up scents in the putrid/rotten range on the spectrum of political smells.

Said a spokesperson for the Center, “What we have now is a situation where the Obama Nation can’t see, hear, or smell the capital rat their president has been putting in Democrat. I’m not sure Anne Sullivan herself could save these people from the senseless bubble they’re trapped in.”

Leader Accountability in the Works

The American Federation of Playground Monitors is reportedly using its members’ trademark conflict resolution skills to come up with a compromise that makes America’s public school teachers feel less singled out and picked on by all the pushers of teacher accountability through high stakes testing.

Explained Don Holland, stay-at-home dad and president of the Playground and Hallway Monitors local 2217, “If you think about it, life in general is a school. It even has a name—The School of Hard Knocks.

“So just to be fair to the teachers in the regular kind of public schools, we’re proposing that we start high stakes testing the students in the public School of Hard Knocks to see how their teachers are performing.

“The teachers of course in this case are the various leaders in charge of this giant overcrowded classroom called America and the students are all of us Americans minus our leaders, or I should say teachers. Let’s just call them leachers for lack of a better name.

“With the help of some old hands in the well established business of no-nonsense school standards adoption and with generous funding from the for-profit high stakes testing industry, we’re pretty sure that within a semester’s time, if not a quarter’s, a nationwide standardized test can be developed that will shine a bright light on how well all of us and our classmates are learning our lessons in this School of Hard Knocks called America.

“To be fair to regular public school teachers and their schools we’ll of course need to put some teeth in the consequences for poor performance.

“Obviously we can’t shutter the entire country if, for example, we find that Americans are not learning the simple lesson that how they vote no longer has any bearing whatsoever on how the wealthy run the country. Or if in large numbers we’re all still failing to grasp even the most basic ways our leachers are failing us.

“But we could and should take over the governance of any state that can’t raise its test scores above a certain threshold.

“And we can also key our leachers’ pay to how well Americans do on the test.”

Said Jim Rollins, president of the American Association of School Accreditors, “Our experience with the current public school reform crusade tells us that the nation’s leaders slash teachers, or leachers if you will, would very likely begin teaching to any standardized test we came up with on the basic facts of American life.

“But that may not be the worst thing in the world. In some ways I actually like the idea of basing our leachers’ pay on how well Americans are mastering basic concepts like the simple truth that Lady Justice in America has miraculously been cured of her blindness or that the reform craze in the regular public schools has nothing to do with anything but serving corporate interests and individual egos.

“I’m actually, in fact, beginning to love the idea of our nation’s leachers holding on to their jobs only by teaching Americans that their leachers in this School of Hard Knocks are not only subjecting them to unnecessary hard knocks but are also getting in the way of Americans ever learning any lessons from these completely unnecessary hard knocks.

“Certainly the so-called classroom could get a little unruly if such concepts become common knowledge, but contrary to popular anti-unionist belief, nobody ever said teaching’s supposed to be a picnic.”

Said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, “I have to say, as much as I’m against high stakes standardized for-profit testing, I kind of like this idea the yard duty folks have come up with.

“And in fact, I don’t think it goes far enough. While we’re at it, let’s start high stakes testing the nation’s Sunday schools. For decades now the teachers there have been doing a seriously lousy job of passing on to their students even the most basic of Christian principles.

“And oh my god, schools of journalism and college economics departments and military academies have been turning out some truly unbelievable dumbshits, pardon my French.

“And my union loyalties notwithstanding, I’m all in favor of summarily mailing pink slips to whoever it is teaching the Beltway refresher courses in civics to the class clowns running this country.”

The People to Wage Psych War

Senior strategists from a consortium of populist organizations brought together by The People’s Think Tank have reportedly arrived at a plan for remedying what’s being called the government’s ever-worsening bad habit of just automatically running counter to majority opinion on every issue.

Explained Joe Tanaka, spokesperson for The People’s Think Tank, “We’ve been hollering at our so-called representatives till we’re blue in the face about the oddity of their constantly steering a democracy in the opposite direction of where the majority wants to go.

“We’re done doing that. The People have put their untold heads together and come up with a Plan B that is fabulously elegant in all its simplicity. We’re going to let the government keep wallowing in the rut of all its knee-jerk contrariness while we start using reverse psychology to restore democracy to the land.

Said Dr. Wayne Drummond, psychological warfare scholar at NYU, “There’s nothing necessarily malicious about all these elected officials thwarting the common will at every turn. At this point I really don’t think they’re even thinking when they do something like choose austerity over the people’s choice of making the ones responsible for the debt explosion by being responsible for the recession pay for fixing the debt with some of all the astronomical amounts of money they keep making.

“In my professional opinion our government leaders can no longer help saying ‘black’ and ‘down’ and ‘right’ when the people say ‘white’ and ‘up’ and ‘left’, respectively. It’s all become a full-blown mindless reflex for them.

“And in being so it leaves the nation’s leaders wide open to a reverse psychological assault.”

Said chief People’s strategist Cindy Sherfield, “When rank and file Americans are asked by pollsters what they think is wrong with America, they’re going to start answering that the One Percent is just not making enough of the country’s money and that not enough disgruntled Americans are in possession of assault rifles with endless ammunition clips and not enough Americans are needlessly dying in the interest of America’s distinguishing herself as the one and only developed country that can’t medically insure its people and the minority party in the Senate doesn’t have enough power to put the skids on governance and the president has not surrounded himself with enough Wall Street people and we’re not hanging in there long enough on these senseless wars we’re not spending enough on waging and anticipating the waging of and corporate persons don’t have the right to vote to go along with their right to buy elections and our media is not monopolized enough and the social safety net is too generous and banks are still too small to shut everybody up once and for all about all this talk of their possibly failing or their filthy rich people ever going to jail.

“On another front, we’re going to use the president’s We the People Initiative to petition the White House to have ALEC write up a new Oath of Office in which all elected government officials pledge their allegiance to Corporate America.”

Said Mr. Tanaka from The People’s Think Tank, “If in all its involuntary contrariness with regard to the People’s will the government starts agreeing with rank and file Americans’ pretended sentiments because they sense we want them to disagree with them, we’ll simply shift into double reverse psychology mode until triple reverse psychology becomes necessary.

“With enough discipline and sheer grit I firmly believe the People can stay one step ahead of their leaders in this long, hard march toward democracy.”

CDC to Sequester Beltway

From the relative safety of his office in Druid Hills, Georgia, Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control, announced today that he and his agency are recommending in the strongest terms possible that the entire area known as “Inside the Beltway” be locked down in a Class 5 Premises Quarantine Containment action.

Said Dr. Frieden, “Something very very bad is going on in there.

“Our scientists have come to the chilling end of a decade-long ride that has taken them implacably from the mildly disturbing to the truly terrifying end of the spectrum of theories that might explain why the Beltway Elite have become bent on national suicide.

“Our biologists have ruled out the relatively benign hypothesis that the proliferation of lobbyists and consultants and media personalities and hosts of other kinds of players Inside the Beltway has led to some sort of almost natural lemming-like consensus on the wisdom of leading the nation over a cliff.

“Our social scientists have come up empty in their search for a Jim Jones figure behind the scenes stirring up the Kool-Aid of perpetual war and neoliberalism and austerity and plutocracy.

“Our neuroscientists have reported to me that the state-of-the-art mood enhancer the Beltway Elite are all taking to mitigate the suicidal ideation that is a side effect of the designer mood enhancer they’re all taking has forced their team to abandon the theory that the communal scorched-earth death wish being so aggressively acted upon in Washington is drug-induced.

“The good news, as bleak as it is, is that the CDC has pinned the source of the problem down in the realm of abnormal social psychology.”

Explained Dr. Barbara Fischer, head of the CDC’s team of social psychiatrists, “What we’re looking at is the product of years and years of incestuous relations between federal office holders and lobbyists and media commentators and socialites and academic and religious and corporate titans.

“What the Beltway has bred is one big inbred many-headed walking and talking cauldron of psychological pathology.

“The Freudians on our team at first were convinced that the Beltway Elite are engaged in an over-the-top Oedipal killing off of the Fatherland out of some unbelievably warped and inappropriate love of the Motherland, whom, metaphorically, they’ve become single-mindedly intent on screwing.

“What we’ve come to find out, though, is that the cream of the nation’s crop have fallen victim to a collective masochistic personality disorder marked by a seething subconscious self-hatred that’s got us all locked into the most vicious of cycles: their self-hatred over all the self-destructive behaviors they engage in out of self-hatred over all their self-destructive behaviors leads to more self-destructive behaviors and of course more seething self-hatred.

“Think about it. How would you feel about yourself if you’d been responsible for all the mind-bogglingly senseless carnage in Iraq? What wouldn’t you want to do to yourself if year in and year out tens of thousands of your fellow Americans were needlessly dying and countless others were needlessly suffering physical and emotional and economic misery just because the conventional Beltway wisdom you pulled out of your butt said America can’t insure all her people?

“What wouldn’t you want to do to everybody Outside the Beltway for letting you just keep doing all this horrible nonstop damage to your soul?”

Said CDC director Frieden, “We’re in the middle of a psychological meltdown of Chernobyl proportions. As soon as humanly possible we need to put a bubble over the bubble already encasing the Beltway.

“This should save us for a while, but I’m afraid our only real hope long-term at this point is that the global warming the Beltway Elite hasn’t been letting anybody address will somehow make the Bermuda Triangle migrate north and west until it swallows this whole problem up for good.”

Corporate America Embraces Austerity

Thomas J. Donohue, president and CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce, has reportedly arrived at the conclusion that the US government will soon need to take over control of the control Corporate America has taken of the US government.

Said Donohue, “All of us here in Corporate America need to admit that there’s a role for the public sector to play in the private sector’s takeover of the public sector.

“The truth be told, I’m just not that much more impressed with Corporate America’s running of the government than I am with the government’s running of it.

“Maybe it’s the sky-high standards we’ve set for ourselves in the private sector with respect to profits, but I’m growing more and more disappointed in the returns we’re seeing on our investments in government-sponsored mechanisms for hiking our sky-high profits.

“Certainly our government-procured profits have never been higher, but this record accumulation of wealth is coming at absurd costs.

“We’re pouring billions into armies of lobbyists and squadrons of think tanks and flocks of media and political peacocks and legions of astroturfers and all the PACs and Super PACs and Super Duper PACs we’re bankrolling around the clock thanks to this borderline rathole otherwise known as a perpetual local and national election cycle.

“If I didn’t know better, which I do, I’d say our guys on the Supreme Court are screwing with us. That Citizens United ruling is just killing our bottom line.

“We can’t really afford the out-of-control spending habits of untold corporate persons when every other week we’re playing Cecil B. DeMille throwing millions at the casts of thousands starring in these action-packed high-dollar horror shows and all their sequels revolving around and around fiscal cliffs and debt ceilings and sequesters and more fiscal cliffs and new debt ceilings and god knows what else.

“Corporate America’s maintenance bill on the nonstop revolving door between Washington and Wall Street alone would break the bank of most nations.”

Added the Chamber’s Chief Misinformation Officer Rebecca Waters, “No matter how much we spend footing the bill on the government’s covering up of the obvious fact that Corporate America is running the government, more and more Americans are coming to the conclusion that Corporate America is running the government.

“So I ask you. How much business sense does it make for us to keep sponsoring this decades-long, exorbitantly priced campaign to convince Americans that government is the problem? Seriously. Corporate America is now paying unbelievable sums to basically tell America that Corporate America is the problem.”

Said the Chamber’s Donohue, “The system’s broke. Just take this whole Fix the Debt disinformation campaign. We’ve been at this thing for how many months, spent how many tens of millions of our dollars on it?

“And where are we? Last I checked I wasn’t making any money on a privatized Social Security system. Medicare seems to still be alive and kicking and the prognosis seems to be pretty damn good, at least from its point of view.

“While the clock keeps ticking down to the fast-approaching day that the debt just ups and fixes itself, everybody’s wasting everybody’s time promenading around and around in this big song and dance about anyone in government, or Corporate America for that matter, giving a good goddamn about common ordinary everyday Americans.

“Are we supposed to wait around and start paying the ridiculous costs of keeping a Fix the Debt campaign going after the debt’s already been fixed?

“The time has clearly come for Corporate America to pull back for a while. The guys and gals making five and six figures can do as good a job getting nothing done as the big boys can.

“Maybe in a year or two Corporate America can take control of the control the US government has taken of the control Corporate America has taken of the US government. But for now, we need to practice our own brand of austerity and stop throwing money at the government.”