Courtier Journalism in Crisis

The ripple effects from the Obama administration’s having looked the gift horse of an unbelievably sycophantic courtier press in the mouth one too many times has reportedly spread to the far reaches of America’s Media-Industrial Complex.

Said Alan Bjerga, president of the National Press Club, “All that howling you hear is the hurricane of butterfly effects unleashed when America’s less than grateful power players decided to raise a big flap over the one time in a blue moon a reporter or two go old school and don’t quite toe the government line to a T.

“As just one small example of the unintended consequences this government hack job on the First Amendment has duly wrought, think about all the Beltway temp pools overcrowding even as we speak with all the stenographers whose services the DC press will no longer be needing. Metaphorically speaking, think about how many Americans in the nation’s printing press rooms will be printing their own pink slips now that the press will no longer be cornering the market on the printing of free passes.

“Speaking, again, metaphorically, think of the joyless glug glugs coming from the drain now swallowing up all the time and energy the Beltway’s reporting corps poured into learning the steps of so many court dances—the lively galliard and canario, the stately pavane and almain and bassa danze. Think about how silly all the figurative face painting and wig powdering and snuff dipping must now be feeling.

“Think of what it must have felt like in Versailles and the Forbidden City of Beijing and Topkapi Palace in Istanbul when the party was over.”

Said Dr. Carol Newman, Curriculum Committee chair at the American University School of Journalism in Washington, DC, “The journalism world is not really very well situated right now for dealing with this crisis. The truth is, we’re having some trouble nailing down the objective reality of the situation. We’re running into a little he said/she said confusion about where we stand.

“I’m personally in the camp that believes that whether we like it or not, we’re going to have to start teaching our fledgling journalists to recognize and even feel the impulse to report on and not undermine unequivocal empirical evidence that shows beyond doubt that one side is right on an issue and the other is not.

“In my mind, we’re also going to have to start weaning ourselves off of government and/or corporate talking points, rediscover the lost art and science of connecting dots, start dramatically reducing the record number of arguments for granting anonymity to government sources, and really start breaking down the block we’ve developed with regard to truth and objective reality.

“And I’m afraid this pretty pass we find ourselves at also means we’re going to have to break down and call off construction on the exciting new School of He Said She Said/She Said He Said Journalism we’ve already laid the theoretical foundation for.”

Added Dr. Newman, “Sure it’s all kind of sad, but Courtier Journalism has had a good run. Assuming the press doesn’t just circle back around after a while to our current mission of obscuring the truth on behalf of the powers that be, our colleagues in the future will look back at this moment in American history and report in all its unbalanced glory that we were simply dead right in reconciling ourselves to telling the truth no matter how much balance and self-interest we had to throw out the window.”

Candidate Obama Resurfaces

The Associated Press is unapologetically reporting that in independent pre-testings of the water the committees to explore forming exploratory committees for potential 2016 presidential candidates from both major parties have all made the same discovery—that Obama must in recent weeks have decided to seek an unconstitutional third term as President of the United States.

“Look at him,” said Maggie Williams, former campaign manager for Hillary Rodham Clinton. “I mean, slam bam abracadabra alakazam, it’s candidate Obama all over again. It’s like, who are you this time and what have you done with the superior mediaphobic kill list owning selectively only forward looking touchy and tricky Dickian grand imperial corporate bargaineer in chief you keep turning into after elections are over?

“Does anyone really think we’re still looking at the President Obama we’ve all come to know and love—twice. Come on, folks. That was our old pal Candidate Obama up there at the podium giving a big shout out to Medea Benjamin for basically shouting out that he’s a low-life scumbag war criminal.

“Can everybody really not be feeling déjà vu all over again when he starts up with the whole Guantanamo’s gotta go slogan?

“Should somebody not be nominating the man for an academy award when he starts using these AP and IRS scandals as golden opportunities to bang an indignant fist on a podium and share with the American people all his exalted intolerance when it comes to looking backward and spotting a government official flaunting the rule of law? Or when he gets all moist and doe-eyed over all the kids and other innocents he’s been killing pretty much indiscriminately with his drones and other organs of permanent preemptive worldwide war?

“And is it just me or did somebody on his re-reelection team cue up the tear-jerking sound track from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington when he started in last week on his tried and true, high-toned, one-man rhetorical showstopper about how very very necessary and American it is meticulously and if anything with a hypersuperoverabundance of both balances and checks to construct not only a legal but also of course a moral framework for holding up to the world one’s illegal and immoral worldwide personal assassination and collateral damage program, not to mention how even more important not to mention crucial and even vital it is to perhaps one day even share some of this framework with those outside his innermost national security circle of one.”

Said Patti Solis Doyle, also a former campaign manager for Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Gee, why can’t I shake this sneaking feeling that any day now we’re going to be hearing about Obama sitting down and drinking beers with his buddies Dick Trumka and Karen Lewis at the Grand Hyatt Chicago while his union-busting, tax-evading billionaire sugar mama and now Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker serenades the one big happy threesome with the Kumbaya she’s personally leading a happy happy choir of hotel service workers in the beautiful singing of in perfect harmony?”

“You have to remember he’s a constitutional lawyer,” said the RNC’s Reince Priebus. “What you and I see as the 22^nd Amendment to the US Constitution he sees as a big wheel of legal Swiss cheese he can worm his through along any number of routes.

“For instance, he could finally cop to never having been the person America supposedly elected and then run for president for the first time as the Kenyan he really is, crossing the bridge of Article II, Section I of the Constitution when he gets there.

“He could also claim he’s only ‘seeking’ a third term and that if the American people elect him it will be them who are guilty of violating the 22^nd Amendment, in which case he could executively pardon everybody, or if not pardon them, at least convince them not to look backward at their widespread crime spree.

“For that matter, he could simply give a speech about how for the good of the country it would be best if everybody just looked forward and not backward at the two terms as president he’s already used up.

“Of course it could also be that he’s shifted into candidate mode because he plans to run for the top spot over at the Military-Industrial Complex he’s turning into a fourth branch of government, or I guess a fifth branch if you don’t include Wall Street in the MIC.

“No matter which way he goes, though, one thing’s for sure—all the hopeless boneheaded lefty fallers for the old Hope-A-Dope will be walking America right into another Obama sucker punch.”

America's Killer Revealed, or Not

In what some are calling more fallout from the AP phone-tapping scandal, the AP will reportedly not be honoring the White House’s routine request that they sit until further notice on the leaked outcome of the real-world, full scale game of Clue recently conducted by war games engineers from the Navy’s Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES) Institute.

Said Gary Pruitt, CEO of AP and apparently its press secretary, “We hate to seem petty, but we’ll be reporting whenever we feel like it on what we firmly believe is a story the American public has a right to hear—that the nation’s intelligence community now knows well beyond a reasonable or even a shadow of a doubt who killed America.”

According to a credible anonymous source close to the game, reportedly thought to have been a junior refreshment procurement officer on the Red Team, it was America’s Best and Brightest in the Beltway with Kool Aid.

Surprise is already being registered on all sides of the nation’s major political fault lines. In a sentiment echoed over and over up and down the political and other spectrums, anchorman emeritus Dan Rather tweeted, “Can’t believe American newsman found grit/integrity to stop bending over for big boys.”

Great surprise is also being registered everywhere with regard to the who, where and how of America’s tragic undoing.

Said one self-described orphan of a dead and gone mother country, “I would have bet money it was Dick Cheney in an easy chair with a telephone, but only because George Bush in Texas with a chainsaw is too obvious and Obama in the White House with a great big white smile sounds kind of racist.”

For her part, Michele Bachmann has reportedly just tweeted, “It was actually the homos in the marital bed with their penises.”

And a pushback tweet offensive is already being mounted in earnest by the League of America’s Best and Brightest, who are deflecting attention from themselves by variously tweeting, “The poor in their feather beds with the hands they’re holding out,” “The bleeding hearts in their own gauzy la la land with kindness,” “America’s enemies all over the world with their hatred for our freedoms,” “Whistleblowers in our midst with the nation’s national security secrets,” “The teachers in our public schools with their unions.”

The tweets have been pouring in as well from America’s second and third best and not as bright, who are variously sharing what would have been their guesses before learning who killed America and where and with what: “Greedy bastards on Wall Street with America’s elected officials,” “Chickenhawks in the comfort and safety of their own homes and offices with other people’s loved ones,” “Right wing Supreme Court justices in lifetime gigs with unbelievably stupid, partisan rulings,” “Eric Holder in the so-called DOJ with the thumb up his butt while elite criminals screw the world,” “Neocons on a high horse with a squadron of think tanks.”

For her part Sarah Palin has reportedly just tweeted, “Pussies in the lower 48 with the lamestream media.”

And Shining City Gazette is now hearing reports that the Associated Press will soon be reporting that based on new up-to-the-minute information, the White House now has reason to believe America has not quite been killed by her Best and Brightest in the Beltway.

So the good news, according to the White House, is that America is not dead yet. The bad news is that the White House believes the press, working in the shadows, is trying to finish the job with mortifying government leaks about what America’s Best and Brightest have been up to. 

Terror Conference Call a Success

In a bombshell dropped by the hacked and leaked minutes taken by the American side at a recent secret global perpetual war summit via conference call and confirmed by the hacked and leaked minutes taken by the Muslim side and vice versa, the principles on both sides of what both sides are now calling the Global War on Terror, only in different languages, are admitting that they have lost track of who’s outsmarting whom.

In both sets of intercepted minutes a note is made of how well the hastily thrown together Robert’s and Ahmed’s or Ahmed’s and Robert’s Rules of Order worked in sorting things out when the two sides simultaneously raised the same point of order just after the two sides simultaneously made a motion, which the two sides simultaneously seconded, that it be entered in no uncertain terms and immediately into the two secret records that the summit at hand was in no manner a matter of negotiating with the terrorists.

After the little bit of housekeeping that followed the jointly seconded joint motion to give the two sides equal credit for the motion to put on the two records that no terrorists were being negotiated with, the conference callers moved quickly on to the only other item on the agenda—getting a handle on where everything stands with respect to who’s winning on the all-important front of framing what the Global War on Terror’s all about.

The minutes on both sides become quite hard to follow, but with the help of a pamphlet provided as a public service by a division of CliffsNotes International specializing in the raveling of brain-raveling and raveling geopolitical plot lines, Shining City Gazette is reasonably sure it now has straight the major strands in the tangled webs within webs of snarled reasoning that have snared the globe in a War on Terror.

It seems the Muslims now hate us for hating them for still hating us even after we’ve fearfully given up most of the freedoms they were supposed to have hated us for.

At the same time, Americans and Muslims alike are hating each other and each other for being made to hate themselves for becoming the thing they hate by hating their fellow Muslims or Americans either for letting the terrorists win by demanding their freedoms back or letting the terrorists win by not doing so.

Said an anonymous source in America’s so-called private army corps of word warriors, “When both sides have to send out legions of Special Ops search teams to track down pronoun references in the delineation of your casus belli, you know your war’s gone a little haywire.

“If we’re going to keep up this War to Perpetuate All War it behooves us to keep it straight and simple why we hate each other and who’s winning and who’s losing the war of words. You start playing with the net down and everybody starts losing interest in a hurry.

“It’s a very good sign that the chief jihadists on both sides have agreed to agree that it’s time to press the reset button. I’m heartened as well that one of the action items the summit attendees came up with is to look at the Crusades for guidance as they move forward with reducing the Global War on Terror’s color palette to one plain white and one plain black.”

In more confusing news, the Associated Press is reportedly thinking seriously about beating the White House to the punch by reporting itself on the internal debates that led to AP’s breaking protocol and not exclusively using White House talking points or even story-thwarting he said/she said journalism in their coverage of the Obama administration’s unconstitutional probe of AP phone records.

Said AP CEO Gary Pruitt, “If scooping the White House makes for some uncomfortable moments at the next government-press corps mixer, well so be it.”

Left, Right Confused

Sources inside the White House are telling Shining City Gazette that according to their sources the Associated Press will soon be reporting that a bright orange advisory warning has been issued to all Republican and Democratic lawmakers alerting them to the disorientation some have been experiencing now that with this rash of Democratic scandals America has been given the go-ahead to go forward with looking backward again, but only in the left direction.

Said Chuck Schumer (D-NY), co-chair of the newly reconvened Joint Senate Steering Committee on Looking Backward, “It’s not as easy as you might think to tell your left from your right when you’re trying to look backward and left at the same time you’re maintaining your focus only on the forward direction with respect to what’s been left behind you on the right.

“Basically it’s like your left brain having to remember to flip everything you see in a rearview mirror at the same time your right brain has to remember not to flip what you’re seeing as you look directly forward and/or vice versa.

“And it doesn’t help either that when you look over your right shoulder at what’s behind you on the left if you were facing backward, or I suppose backward would then be forward, it looks almost exactly like what you find when you get confused and look over your left shoulder at what’s behind you on the right.

“Well actually, I guess what you see on the left is quite a bit smaller than what’s on the right. But then again it’s also blown way out of proportion at the same time that what’s on the right is being minimized like a big object appearing in a left and/or right side rearview mirror.

“Anyway, it’s all very confusing. That’s why we’ve been trying to get an appointment at the DMV to talk to somebody about borrowing copies of their training video for new boat owners.  

“The hope is that if steering the wheel left when you want the boat trailer in the reverse direction to go right and vice versa can become second nature to America’s lawmakers on the left and right maybe they can avoid running the Ship of State so to speak smack into the literally dozens of Benghazis and the countless instances of politicizing government agencies and kicking the First Amendment in the teeth and the untold other scandals and outright felonies and all the crimes against humanity the right has dumped in America’s backyard.”

Said Rene Ellsworth, senior conspiracy analyst at the for-profit anti-government organization ObamaWatch, “I hope that while all the lawmakers on the right are busy sorting their reverse left out from their reverse right they bother to notice all the evidence Obama has left right and left right in front of their about faces that he’s up to the no good of reneging on his promise to let the bygones on the right be bygones. Typically, he’s tricking everybody into looking backward at the relatively small-time scandals he planted so everybody would go back to noticing the big-time crime spree that went on on the right side of America’s past.”

“I have to respectfully disagree with Rene,” said Sally Hawke, principle conspiracy analyst at ObamaWatch. “Obama may be a socialist and a Muslim and an African and the product of a broken home, but he’s not dumb. He planted those scandals knowing that the right would know he deviously planted them and proceed to outsmart themselves by letting Obama off scot-free again by not looking back at the scandals he planted so the right would not look back at them.”

Said analyst Ellsworth, “But we are looking back at the scandals.”

“Exactly,” said Ms. Hawke.

“This is nonsense,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney. “I assure you, President Obama would like nothing more than to have America join him again in looking only forward to the day that his successor promises that America will not look backward at all the criminal and other kinds of wrongs his administration will have piled up by then.”

"Home of the Brave" in Jeopardy

The Brand Protection division of the US Department of State is reportedly sounding the alarms over the suddenly impending international legal retention proceedings with respect to America’s exclusive ownership of the label “Home of the Brave”.

According to sources, a recent friendly notice from the Title and Leasehold branch of the World Court reminded America’s marketing corps that in 1814 when the Georgetown lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key paid out of his own pocket to legally confer on his young country the honorific of his own poetic making, “Home of the Brave,” he perhaps over frugally and/or shortsightedly chose to spend three dollars on a 200-year lease instead of paying an extra two dollars to make America the official Home of the Brave in perpetuity.

Said senior brand protection officer Victoria Bennett, “As if we didn’t have enough to worry ourselves sick about with all this holding of the fort against the growing lowdown that America is no democracy anymore, now we get to argue before an international court of law that the people who just let a government of, by, and for the people be taken away from them without putting up anything remotely resembling a fight are somehow uncommonly stout of heart.

“So yeah, you bet that sound you hear is me pissing myself. You bet you’re looking at an aneurism waiting to happen thanks to this big brick I’m passing here because all of a sudden by next year we have to build the case that America is still the Home of the Brave, all while sweating bullets over what happens if we fail and the world quits fearing our reputation for bravery.”

“No problem,” said a visibly shaken member of the American marketing corps speaking on strict condition of anonymity. “I mean, all we have to do is explain away to the entire world the meteoric rise of the American chickenhawk in all spheres and at all levels of public and private life.

“Oh, and I guess we’ll need to address the use of flying remote control weapons of mass destruction to kill an American teenager half a world away from the homeland everybody was afraid of him terrorizing. Oh yeah, and we shouldn’t keep forgetting the hundreds if not thousands of non-American children and their mothers and old grandparents we safely explode based on legalisms we’re not even brave enough to shine a light on.

“And I guess we need to cover the torturing of clearly innocent and also maybe guilty but also quite possibly innocent and also clearly guilty but in any case still completely defenseless and legally protected people in our secret custody.

“And I guess there’s all the debilitating fear of facing such simple and so often and clearly proven truths as the fact that the people we fear so much don’t hate us for our freedoms, which, by the way, we don’t really even have anymore because we gave them up in all our fear of those who “hate us for freedoms”. They hate us because we keep committing the acts of violence and other kinds of harm against them that we’re not brave enough even to admit to ourselves that we’ve been committing against them for decades.

“There’s also of course all the fear of God and debt and science and homosexuals and women and the UN and brown people and other kinds of aliens and anybody who might maybe take away any or all of the guns needed for protection against all there is to fear.

“And of course we can’t forget the tens and tens and more and more tens of millions of non-rich Americans who just keep letting their lunch money be taken from them by a small band of overgrown schoolyard overcompensators for some unbelievably deep-seated fears about their worth.

“I fear we’re experiencing not only fear but also the fearful fear of fear itself in the scary face of this horrifying World Class War the Makers are waging so cagily that the American Taker can’t stop fearfully vilifying the Scandinavian and Latin American and Icelandic heroes acquitting themselves with such true bravery in the taking on of the capitalist class war mongers that they’re likely to start bravely staking their claim to America’s Home of the Brave label.”

Said Ms. Bennett, “I’m beginning to think America should exercise the better part of valor and prudently bow out of this court battle for the title to the title of the world’s Home of the Brave.

“Perhaps our poet laureate Natasha could just append a disclaimer of some kind to the end of our national anthem. Maybe the last line could go something like ‘…and the home of the brave…when it comes to brutally fighting off the awful truth about our cowardice.’

“This embarrassing disclaimer of course would be drowned out by the automatic roar the word “brave” inspires in the crowds at any event where the Star Spangled Banner is ever sung.”

In related news, sources inside the State Department are telling Shining City Gazette that a notice from the World Court has been sitting unopened for weeks on a desk in the division of Brand Protection. The fear apparently is that Francis Scott Key also skimped when it came to registering the title “Land of the Free”.

Rape-Whistleblowers Remain Unnamed

President Obama is reportedly already growing frustrated by the code of silence sealing the lips of the distaff side of America’s armed forces despite a direct order to blow the whistle on the rape-whistleblower or blowers responsible for the unfortunately so-called “broadcasting” of the national security-compromising intelligence that last year another 26,000 of the nation’s female men-at-arms joined the 19,000 who were sexually assaulted the year before.

Said Pentagon spokesman George Little, “The problem stems from all our lady warriors now uniformly seeing themselves as military prisoners in America’s War on Women.

“What this means on the ground is that we’re now dealing with an impenetrable network of 200,000 female wingmen for whom the US Military Code of Conduct just kicked in, specifically Article 4, which reads, ‘If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will give no information or take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades.’

“In other words, our drill sergeants have basically drilled too much duty and honor into these female fighting men for the nation’s own good. They have been infused with a mental attitude and placed in a state of training which, as the definition of Military Discipline lays out, “renders obedience instinctive under all conditions,” up to and including a situation like this in which obeying the mandates of a Code of Conduct means obediently disobeying one’s every feminine impulse to obey a superior’s direct order.

“Given their impregnable feminine proclivity for obedience, the most the commander-in-chief himself--using any interrogation enhancement he liked, even inspired by his desire to keep his record of tracking down and persecuting military and government-embarrassing whistleblowers perfect--could hope for is a bunch of names, ranks, serial numbers, and probably fudged dates of birth, at least from the older ladies.”

Added Mr. Little, “Further complicating this whole SNAFU within a SNAFU is that because one of our own, acting alone or in confederacy with others, decided to blow the rape whistle or whistles, we’ve had to use up so much brig space keeping all the sexual predators on the spear side of the armed forces out of sight and mind for a while, that even if we did capture the rape-whistleblower or blowers in question nobody’s sure where we’re supposed to find even a footlocker for converting into a cell for subjecting her or them to the enhanced hard nut-cracking techniques we’ve developed thanks to lessons learned from Bradley Manning.

“Thanks to this damn sequester, we can’t just requisition a sensory deprivation tank to let a whistleblower stew bare-nakedly in for 23 and three-quarter hours a day until she recollects that the US Military Code of Conduct also has an Article 6, which says, ‘I will never forget I’m an American.’

“As in, ‘I will never forget to keep upholding the collective national understanding that the US military always acts honorably no matter how dishonorably it keeps acting at home and abroad.’”

In related news the nation’s chickenhawks are complaining bitterly that thanks to whoever blew the rape whistle on Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, head of the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program, their jobs just got a lot harder with regard to using Islamic misogyny to egg America into manning up and attacking Syria.

Said chickenhawk Bill Keller from the New York Times, “Contrary to what people might think, another woman-hating Muslim state for America to invade doesn’t present itself every day. You’ve got to strike when the political window has been cracked open, for instance by a new US Secretary of Defense’s switching the green light on the idea of women going into combat.

“We were all ready to capitalize on the novelty of the prospect of the nation’s ladies going hand-to-hand with Syrian lady-haters and then out of nowhere we’re all suddenly being shrilly reminded on multiple fronts that military women have long been on the front lines of the War of the Sexes.

“By the time we could have Kathryn Bigelow work with the CIA to throw a film together that did collateral damage control so to speak on this whole over-friendly firing on the ladies, the Syrian window would likely be closed tighter than the lips on these women who won’t give up the whistleblowers.”

Geneva, The Hague Reject Takers

In yet another heartbreaking battle lost, a small contingent of American middle and lower class class warriors have returned empty-handed from a last-ditch international mission to secure from Geneva and/or The Hague a pledge to hold a convention spelling out some consequences for the heinous widespread class war crimes the 1% has been flagrantly committing for more than three decades.

“I’m not going to lie,” said one disappointed envoy with lower middle class standing, “after all the back-breaking car washes and bake sales and pancake breakfasts and silent auctions and lotteries and raffles they held back home to make a jet-setter out of me, I’m not exactly looking forward to standing up there at the podium in the Odd Fellows and telling everybody, ‘Hey, I didn’t quite find that wild goose you all broke the bank to pay for me to go chase, but I did bring back a big fat wild goose egg.’

“And just for the record, the chocolate in Switzerland isn’t even as good as a Hershey bar.”

A reporter embedded with the Takers told Shining City Gazette, “The sticking point for both Geneva and The Hague was the very distinct possibility that in this global economy if they started holding upper class class war criminals in America to account they’d also have to start going after the perpetrators of economic genocide in Europe and elsewhere.

“There was even some fear that enforcing the rule of law in the economic world would mean they’d have to start going after the army so to speak of regular war criminals in America, and nobody in Europe, not even Germany, has close to the resources for a massive undertaking of those proportions, not in the middle of what’s being called either World Class War XI, XII, or XIII depending on whether you see feudalism as one long lopsided 600-year class war or as two different class wars separated by The Plague, and whether you count slavery as a class war or place it in some other sub-category of man’s and woman’s unbelievable inhumanity to man and woman.”

Said one crushed Taker from the middle class in response to the news that no help can be expected from the international community, “The morale is just going to keep getting lower and lower as our commander-in-chief keeps looking forward and not backward or even side-to-side at all the class war atrocities that just keep piling up.

“Rank and file class warriors on the Taker side are beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t maybe be better if President Obama snuck a quick peek at what’s been going on all around him while he’s been busy strategically keeping so many of our enemies so close to him. Then maybe when he went back to looking only in the forward direction he’d see that the history of dumb cold-blooded aristocratic sociocide was about to finish repeating itself again.”

Said Dr. Brett Adams, adjunct professor of Surrender Studies at Glendale Community College, “The asses of the 99% are in a real sling here. The Takers have tried everything they know how to do to unconditionally surrender to the 1%, but the Makers are not taking any prisoners.

“They’re just going to keep up all the blatantly fraudulent foreclosures that appeared out of nowhere after the popping of the housing bubble they made so much magical money from. Uninsured Takers by the tens and tens of thousands will just keep dying every year from a formerly treatable unnatural cause going by the name of unchecked Maker greed.

“In Wisconsin and Chicago and elsewhere across the land the Bradleys and the Emanuels and the Rhees and Gateses of the world will just keep working night and day to make the schools where our children used to be publicly educated a big chain of safe places for privately sucking vast amounts of money upward while also making our children into either the suckers of money from others or the suckers who have the money sucked from them till the day they die and the privatizers of Social Security can no longer keep sucking money from the measly sums the suckers were supposed to have lived on.

“All this and no towel or sponge to throw in, no white flag for waving or colors to strike or even arms left to deliver up. According to my calculations, playing dead’s about all the Takers have left, unless of course what they’ve been doing all along is already a matter of playing dead, in which case of course they have nothing left except maybe call their going to bed hungry every night a hunger strike.”

“Goddamit,” said one lower class former member of the middle class, “innocent hunger striking terrorists from the other perpetual war are treated better than the defeated class warriors in America. I’d pay to have some jack-booted war criminal force-feed my hungry kids—that is, if I had any money left over after paying the high and rising cost of being a Taker in America.

“It’s humiliating. It’s like a whole medieval village with a population of thousands saying uncle without a fight to a horde of three spoiled Mongols. We outnumber these glorified pickpockets by so many hundreds and hundreds of thousands to one that there’s barely enough of their dust for all of us to eat or room for throwing ourselves at their feet so we can all fall all over ourselves outdoing each other in the licking of their boots.

“Like I say, it’s humiliating.”

Profits Stoke Anti-Tax Fervor

In a new development that experts say bodes well for America’s so-called 99%, the 1% has now taken so much control of the US government that wildly exorbitant corporate and personal profits have become completely indistinguishable from taxes.

Said the Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, “I don’t think even one of these filthy rich plutocrats has a bathtub big enough to drown the government in now that it includes every Wall Street fat cat and his big fat brother and big fat sister along with the whole cast of literally thousands in this blockbuster puppet show we’ve been calling representative government.

“The hard-working American taxpayer’s paying a 20-cent federal excise tax on a gallon of Chevron gasoline, 30 cents in state and local flat and excise taxes, and a buck fifty in pocket-lining taxes that go straight to John S. Watson for adding to his 30-plus million dollar annual salary and for making sure the well of taxpayer-funded oil subsidies doesn’t dry up and of course for making damn sure he doesn’t end up spending his own money on lining his own pockets by paying any corporate taxes or anything above and beyond the most nominal amount of personal income tax.

“Why in the hell do Jane and John Q. Taxpayer keep getting the bill when the Watsons and the Kochs and the Dimons and the Petersons of the world keep going way way over budget in their 30-year Washington-sponsored business venture of annexing a big platinum capital ISM once and for all to the end of the nation’s capital?

“Predictably, the more reins of government these titans of formerly private industry take, the dumber and more wasteful they get. I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry anymore when all the multi-millionaires and billionaires in this Fix the Debt Club sit there in the overstuffed seat of government and carry on about shrinking the very government they’re packing wall-to-wall with Wall Streeters.

“I’ve got a not so funny feeling I’m not going to have too much luck getting these plutocrats to sign a ‘No New Profits’ pledge.”

Said the 99%’s Gary Prince, “Hear that? That’s the sweet sound of the tables turning now that outrageous profits have been exposed as the taxes they really are. Now that the 1%’s become synonymous with big government, we’ve got a bottomless supply of anti-tax mania to bring to bear in our efforts to bridge a little the yawning wealth and power gap between us and the plutocrats.

“Now that Grover’s on our side, we finally have a fighting chance. If the man can spend well over a generation enjoying so much success at making the world safer and safer for a small minority of sociopathic profiteers at the expense of the vast majority of Americans, imagine what he can accomplish when it’s actually the vast majority of Americans he starts going to bat for.”

In related news, researchers at the Centers for Abnormal Economic Psychology are reportedly closing in on pinpointing the precise amount of personal wealth and power it takes for a human being to turn sociopathically self-satisfied.

Said a spokesperson for the Centers, “Knowing the tipping point at which compassion for one’s less fortunate and/or less lucky fellow man and woman disappears would obviously be invaluable in the event that someone in America’s Maker class ever became interested in preserving his or her soul.

In more related news, a peer-reviewed paper just published in the Journal of Political and Social Relativity is advancing the provocative proposition that banks have not failed and bankers have not been jailed not because the banks have gotten too big but because Americans have gotten too small.

New Science Is Born

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is announcing a new addition to the Registry of Recognized Scientific Disciplines. Called First-Response Economics, its practitioners are, in the words of the official definition, “the first on the scene when the science or pseudo science of another conservative economist goes up in flames.”

Said Dr. Winfried Davis from the AAAS, “These so-called reactional economists, as opposed to the reactionary economists whose botched science they pseudo scientifically explain away, have been proliferating in the economics departments of the nation’s top universities.

“Of course the most notable examples these days of this uncommonly well funded new breed of economist, Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff from Harvard, also wear the hat of the standard reactionary economist whose shoddy and self-serving and ideologically compromised science has created the abhorrent void nature has filled with this new scientific field.

“Coming to their own rescue in the aftermath of the recent scientific train wreck we’ve all been reading about, these so-called highly regarded economists are redeeming themselves by painstakingly making the scientific case that the anti-austerity conclusions their science would have reached had they conducted it with even a modicum of accuracy and integrity are all beside the point in light of exciting new discoveries in the area of gut feelings and also owing to new state-of-the-art scientific techniques like factoring the immorality of debt into the equation and making a nation exactly equal to a single-family household in all the algorithms.”

Said Vincent Reinhart, husband of Harvard’s Carmen Reinhart and resident economics scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, “The science of First-Response Economics could not have blossomed at a better time.

“This UMass schoolboy who’s been harassing my wife and Ken [Rogoff] is now doing hit jobs on the foundational science of all the best and brightest free-market economists in the country. He’s even calling into question the findings of the seminal paper that gave birth to modern-day supply-side economics.”

The UMass graduate student in question, Thomas Herndon, appears to now have proof that the bedrock conservative economic principle that money trickles down is actually the byproduct of shabby scientific work.

Said Mr. Herndon, “Had one of the founding fathers of Reaganomics, a hydrological economist from Chicago, not forgotten to carry the one on a relatively simple addition problem, the flow of money in the highly influential trickle-down formulation would not have been designated a trickle but a class 4 flood.

“Unfortunately for the 99%, though, at the same time this mistake was being made, the graduate exchange student from Germany in charge of typing up the paper in question, the so-called economic gospel according to Ronald, chose the word ‘down’ instead of the more precise word ‘south’ for the axiom for which this gospel has come to be known.

“So the scientific reality is that money doesn’t trickle, or flood, down—it floods south, as in toward the Cayman Islands and Barbados and the Bahamas. The science was right all along, but due to human error and other factors the economic world keeps getting spun in the diametrically opposite direction of what it naturally should be spinning in.”

Said Carmen Reinhart’s husband Vincent Reinhart, former George W. Bush economic advisor now with Morgan Stanley, “Gosh, I really hope this Herndon kid doesn’t get himself trampled too badly when our economic first responders arrive and start madly applying the basic scientific law of what goes around comes around to make it perfectly clear that whatever goes south in a 'global' economy inevitably winds up north of the original north relative to the original south, so the flooding money all of a sudden can be said to be heading again in the direction of those in the down position back when the money was said to trickle down.”