[Newspoetry] Are you ready for the gut-wrenching, rip-roaring '00s?

[Donald L Emerick]

Are you ready for the gut-wrenching, rip-roaring 00s?

***

NYT NEWS:
Bush Restoring Cash Bonuses for Appointees
The White House will make several thousand political appointees
eligible for lucrative cash bonuses, abandoning a Clinton-era prohibition. 

***

Couple this with the authority to fire arbitrarily (ie, for reasons of National Security) any federal employee, which Congress has granted the President, 

Add the authority (also in the guise of National Security) to do anything that it wishes to do to Federal employee Wages and Benefits (such as arbitrary modifications for the "good" of the country  -- all without any bargaining).

and, finally, Add the authority to sweep Federal workers out the door and into the waiting clutches of for-profit private contractors, who'd chop wages and benefits of former Federal employees, to show "cost-savings" -- maybe by shipping these jobs to offshore corporations, for performance in 3rd world sweat shops -- and who would vie with one another, for the favors of these federal contracts, by furthering the already rampantly corrupt scene in DC.

***

This is the recipe for the scene of Washington DC as it existed in the late 1800s.  Tammany Hall is coming back!  Mayor Daley, the last of the big city bosses, will finally be eclipsed by the first presidential political boss -- who appears to be setting up a machine that will steal everything in sight, being sure to call it first "a reform needed for National Security".

But, of course, they came into office, just like an old-time machine candidate, by stealing the election, and then having their rubber stamps certify it as valid.

***

Of course, Americans know so little American history (or anything about Geography, for that matter -- for too many of them could not the Pacific Ocean on a map, and a very large number of them could not find Iraq or Iran (which makes you wonder just where they think this war might happen, this war that they supposedly support, somewhat, somehow), that they have no idea at all that there even was anything at all that happened between the Civil War and the Spanish American War, except for those massive slaughterings of those savages out on the plains, which they forgive (themselves) because who wouldn't react harshly to people who try to engage in a modicum of self-defense?  I mean, it seems plain awful to be shot with a bloody arrow, and have it thunk into you, and be sticking out of you, where your putatively dying eyes could see it there, the cause of your present pain and possible death.  How much more civilized is the white man, what with his tiny bullets, that hardly make a noise at all on impact, and often leave only the smallest of holes, and kill you so cleanly that you hardly have time to know that you are dying or dead.  (I guess I have watched Dancing with Wolves too many times.)

But, I suppose that savage death talks wander away from my topic of slave labor being defined by terms, badges, or conditions as contracts of slavery -- except for the incidental fact that every system move toward greater enslavement of its own peoples seems to be so intimately connected with the possibility and the actuality of massive bloody deaths.

Were I a social scientist, that would be my model for discussing what the world is like when peace is not happening to the people.

***

Now, were I to do something NewsPoetic with this News,
assuming that I could accomplish the activity standardly,
then I would, perhaps, try to present an inversion of News,
to invert the meaning of the actions, given the persons.

For instance, 
Bush will make several thousand political appointees
eligible for food stamps and other welfare benefits.

or

... eligible bachelors by stripping them of reasons
for not working 24/7 for Bush Administration goals.

or 

... into communists who win or loose as one,
as the theory of communism might say,
we're all in this together,
in the team there is no I,
we shall hang together to hang others
or else we shall be hung by them,
and not just in metaphoric effigy.

Thanks for listening
Donald L Emerick
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