The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
January 18th
P.I.C. PAUPERS and RENTED PRINCES!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
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"The world of high finance can be understood only when it is
recognized that the greatest admiration is accorded those who are paving the
way for the greatest catastrophe." |
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- John Kenneth Galbraith |
We are, all of us, accountable
to our betters. Bosses, stockholders... even politicians to the voters (well,
more appropriately and with the possible exception of our esteemed
Ex-President, to the donor class). George Washington was asked three times to be King George I... three
times he refused... as President, he could look forward to retirement in Mount Vernon,
which he wouldn't have been able to do as King, like all them French guys,
losing their heads once they were out of office. Smart... like most elite-class
playas of those days.
We could use a few
more like
Instead of an aristocracy,
now, we've got the termites. "The difference between the early-times
moguls and the recent wheeler-dealers is that, in the early years, the men who
got rich also created industries, jobs and entire societies along the
way," says Janet Celeste Lowe, as authored "The Secret Empire". "The
recent leaders of corporate America have merely siphoned off public wealth into
their private pockets. No public good has evolved."
Now I'm gratified that
Warren Buffett's donated a billion or so of the swag he collected during the
Dow bubble after Biden’s election to Bill Gates' charity... I never have figured
out how he makes his pile... and a few others of the one percent as promise to
remember America in their wills but, more and more, the effin'
majority of America's overclass reminds me of that
old miser in Pennsylvania as bought land on both banks of the river and spent his
retirement hanging out with a rifle, sitting on a stump and shooting at rafters
and kayakers until he finally potted some weekending CPA and got stashed away
in the bughouse. Even outliers like Elon
Musk or Richard Branson, making things and racing each other to Mars…
foreigners!
Surplus Americans, let
us agree, still have bodily functions that require money to satisfy. Food, a
warm, dry place to excrete the by-products of same, sleep and toys, sex or chemicals
to inflate their self-esteem against the unreal role models they see on the idjut boxes as aren’t made hereabouts anymore. Because we,
quite rightly, resent handouts to slackers... we build prisons.
Lots of
prisons!
It took more than
two hundred years, from 1776 to 1995 for the Justice Department to confirm we'd
gone over the million population in our state and Federal graybar
hotels.
It took only six years
more for us to hit two million and, despite the Big O (human variant) throwing
a few hundred pot smokers back onto the streets, that fella
after him springing a few wealthy pedophiles, briber-ers
and Roger Stone (and his Nixon tattoo, too) and the Big O’s vice allowing a few
more stoners freedom to make room for the pregnant women and traffic violators
shot, but recovered, while “resisting arrest”, we'll strike three before the next Presidential
election rolls round.
And that doesn't include
six million more on parole or probation or even home caregivers seeking to
re-enter the workforce after three or thirteen years keeping Mom out of the nursing
home and saving the taxpayers millions... barred from permanent employment
after being “redlighted” from Larry (“Iron Man”)
Ellison’s Taleo analytics… up from four only five
years back. And what's really amazing is that we're achieving all this at a
time when, according to which set of police statistics you believe, businesses
are crying out for more minimum wage workers, a handful of states are doling
out licenses to diseased nurses and ex-felon cosmetologists and, until the
plague rolled round, crime was down at its lowest per capita rate since either
1952 or 1949, depending on whose numbers you employ (the murder rates in
Chicago or Baltimore, of course, excepted).
Criminal justice is big
business... now that the family farm and American factories have floated off to
their happy hunting grounds, struggling rural communities
fight each other tooth and nail for state and the private prisons. There's the
profits from prison industries as pay wages competitive with Zimbabwe (if not
quite China), not to mention them Martinson-Newman illegal Mexican and debtors'
prison provisions as started kicking in last year as part of that sort-of ICE
breakthrough and, so I hear, have even got El Donaldo
rethinking that wall he still believes Mexico will pay for… someday once he
returns from Mar-al-Elba. Toss in the bribery and corruption of the
nanny-state, with its revenues from property seizures of increasingly nebulous
intent... and even royalties from the sale of those prison "gladiator"
videos to tabloid TV... and we're talking real money.
We use jails to sop unwanted
(and mostly dusky) Americans up like the red gravy, keeping our official
unemployment stats low and emptying out institutions that reflect more negatively
on manly society... mental asylums, homeless shelters etc. While one former President was commuting those
thirty year sentences for a few (mostly white) clueless pot smokers down to about
fifteen, to grease the slide for the rest of us, the Christian Coalition and
American Farm Bureau finally prevailed on Congress to shut down legal services
to the poor... established by Richard Nixon in '74, and described by the
American Bar Association as their only alternative to "insurrection and
rebellion". Eight states, now, even have female chain gangs as cut weeds
and pick up trash by the road in tight, sweaty t-shirts and Daisy Dukes, making
any David Duke's drive into town to get his laundry laundered sort of a lottery
for voyeurs.
Those six Supremes… Congress
still holding up three nominations, now, after the last two assassinations (as
have Mitchy stalling and President Joe rethinking,
but not reneging on his plea to bring us all together a’fore
the twenty-twenty four race) …made their bones in that Jersey case, where some
abused children were locked up for contempt as bein'
unable to pay for their unmillionaire pedophile
father being confined in a bughouse after his jail term ended. They cited
And the fear still
just keeps on comin'!
There's whole colonies
of "security communities" up the highway atween
Lexington and Louisville; zip by of a night and you'll partake of their infrared
and ultrablue surveillance lighting, sizzlin' small birds and animals... and with all them bristlin’, fluorescent antennae, they seem to be broadcasting
out signals for the Mothership. "If you make ugly places," warned
If Americans are bringin' back
slavery, under the cause of sealin' the border, sending
those ten and twelve year olds from Guatemala and Honduras to Camp Trumpy, making shirts to compete with the Vietcong, and
still lockin’ up the nwords no much how President Joe
nor Kamalala genuflect to Black Criminals Matter or
how BillBarr and The Donald fulminated about states
rights and even gave celebrity dopers, ivy college hopers and CEO gropers get
out of jail cards, why not fix matters up at the high end, too... take all
those good 18th century people up on their original offer. You want to give the
bumblers and disgrungeled MAGA sorts a bone, let's
set up an American royalty... a Game of Thrones theme park complete with titles
and ribbons and all that bowing and mincing ‘round with courtiers, fops and
eunuchs, red velvet and pointy slippers! Real castles, with real moats and real
gators! Start off at a million for the knighthood... Dom Perignon
money... and work up. Ten mil for a Baronship,
fifty for Dukes, hundred for Dukes of Earl and a quarter bil
for Dukes of York like good Prince Andrew, complete with the non-prosecutorial
jailbait amenities such as the Queen Mum took back from her wayward boyo. Best of all, the sitting President gets back his
birthright: if elected King Jack, the First (royal Johns are unlucky – ask
streetwalkers and those thirteenth century Brits!), I'll be giving serious
thought to the mechanics of putting the "droit du' seigneur" back
in the Constitution in a way that Bill Clinton could only have dreamed of (and
his wife probably dreams of, too!).
(Not right away, of course
– I have my reservations about King Donald the Second, let alone King Erik. Maybe we could weasel in a Queen or two, which
would leave the ambitious… if not necessarily competent… Jared
in full Doug Emhoff or Prince Albert mode, if he
doesn’t end up in the can!)
It'll be like ol'
Frank Menifee all over again. Frank, after
Fox ran all those crime specials last fall during the sweeps, bloody pictures
from Orlando, Colorado and the such, made up his mind to move to Costa Rica
just as their troubles were starting
– looking into the quote unquote security
communities down there, which he got brochures for, all trailers.
It took Shaky Gus from
the feed store to disabuse Frank of his dream. "Frank," Gus said,
hitching up his trousers (which haven't fit good since
he started taking all them gumment unpaid X-rays
himself with this machine from a bankrupt dentist, in lieu of that cancelled
Obamacare radiation for the cancer), "they got can openers down
there!"
CLICK the CATFISH to go to
PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |