Serving the Metropolitan Area

Since 1872

March 8th

ENTER the CABBAGE!

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

Syndicated by Acme Features

I'd left the Congress, been to Branson, even helped bury Al Goethals by the time of that accident at the Helium Reserve, so I can honestly say it didn't happen on my shift. Of course I was responsible... voted twice to keep the damn thing funded as a courtesy to a colleague in Texas whose own vote I needed on behalf of some locals at Lexmark... as then downsized near a thousand constituents and should be called "Mexmark", now... anyway, half of Amarillo floated off a’fore those FEMA people came in and tied it down.

Helium's not so bad as some... doesn't explode, doesn't combine with other gases to make fumes that'll burn out eyes and lungs. Just makes things rise up and people start talking Donald Ducklike... forever, if you get too big a dose, as those visiting Generals down in Amarillo found out. So Congress had to pension off a couple dozen floaty four-stars and brigadiers before their time... hard to march into a Costa Rican jungle, and maybe get shot, on the say-so of any General as talks like Donald Duck.

The Federal Helium Reserve's just one of thousands of Congressional pork projects, most of which do, at least, keep people in districts at work and children fed. (S'also a grand source of campaign contributions.) You got right-sliced pork, divvied up between subsidies for corporate billionaires, the prison-industrial complex and Pentagonistas... not for boots on the ground, but for pomp and brass. Our Navy has one admiral for every two ships, as opposed to one per 130 during World War II, the Air Force one general per 21 airplanes, as opposed to one per 244 in 1945.

Your left-slicers, meanwhile, tend to rub their liberal stilettos with sanctimonious poisons afore they slip between your ribs.

Footsteps on a moonless night in old Venice or Florence, maybe; an upwards explosion of pigeons from cobblestones... a horrid stench of putrefaction, the briefest instant's glimpse of a cruel, plague-ravaged face beneath a Carnival mask, and then... Eternity!

The NEA throws four hundred large at J. Evan Lighter, this university hustler down in Knoxville, for a 1006 page Dictionary of American Slang (as proved mostly out-of-fashion cusswords)... then let his German publishers charge fifty bucks a pop atop of that! "Retraining" scams churn out thousands of Rust Belt fingernail manicurists, Enterprise Zone schemes, as set mountain and valley people of my father's day scrapping over EZ handouts... ultimately the exhumation of infamous "Negro Removal" projects, where city slums were bulldozed, then money ran out, leaving tenants on the streets or under jails. So liberal welfare-state and right-wing PIC porkers touch pinky fingers in a hi-five, giggling like Teletubbies at the distillery tour.

That as ain't coherently ideological is, sometimes, just plain strange. The World Health Organization drenched Borneo with DDT, illegal over here, so to kill off its bugs. The bugs went on living, though WHO's pesticides did kill off lizards, which ate them, then all the island's cats, which snacked on lizards. As a result, millions of plague-bearing rodents descended on villages and, according to Tim Redmond and Marc Mowrey's book "Not In Our Back Yard", the United States doled out more cash "...to help parachute in new cats to control the vermin."

Speaking of rats in foreign places, we have a holy host of termite agencies like the World Bank, IMF, Export-Import and such (as never met a psychopathic dictator they didn't like) showering American taxdollars at nationalized criminality from Argentina to Zimbabwe... even at Chinese dragons and the oil an’ natural gas-rich Russian mafia, now led by this dude Kapusta who translates, the FBI lets me know, as "The Cabbage". Why not! Our own organized crime's rakin' in big cabbage off gumment pork... bailed-out savings and loans, tobacco subsidies, breaking up predatory but stable monopolies like Microsoft and the phone company so as to brew up a whole sauerkraut barrel of confusion and chaos not seen since some cities discovered crack gangs starting to move the kat.

Now I'm not saying our bureaucracies are that much more corrupt or incompetent than any as flourished since the royal courts of Europe in Dick Whittington's day, or among certain Asian dynasties where dragon ladies and eunuchs and Emperors with six-foot-long fingernails oppressed their toiling masses. We've had 'em ourselves, and for more than a century as a reaction to that cruelty overclasses wield against those beneath them, just because they can. Thank the Smithfield and Tyson people, if you will, for the metastization of OSHA... after they refused to let workers go to outhouses, just to keep them in their place, so many began crapping themselves (and the wings and chitlins people eat) it had to become a matter for the bureaucracies. Marc Linder, this Iowa law professor, even wrote an effin' book on employers as feed their macho by making employees crap themselves, calling it... and I kid you not... "Void Where Prohibited". The problem, Linder says, is "much more widespread than we had originally believed."

Even capitalism's great apologist, Adam Smith, remarked on tendencies for his "men of system..." as "cannot suffer the slightest deviation" to obsessively arrange people like pawns on a chessboard and so usurp the Invisible Hand as it's reachin' for a sheet of Charmin'.

Once upon the time, Ameriswine abided by the codes of conduct. A century back, this Tammany termite, name of George Washington Plunkitt, even differentiated between "honest and dishonest graft"... explaining, of the former: "I seen my opportunities, and I took 'em!" Honest graft kept people fed during the depression, resulting in highways, sewers and various works of "magnificence and utility" as directed by our Constitution.

So this Catfish would start dismantling bureaucracy, but slowly! And, of course, discriminatingly. At least until the various users and abusers in the private sector are deterred or detoured away from their depravities by real sanctions, like jail terms.

Have to find some chow to keep the PIC afloat – wouldn’t want Kansas goin’ bankrupt!

So join the CNC, folks, and vote for candidates as we run or, at the least, endorse. 'Else consider investing in Perfessor Ev's cuss-dictionary for a few choice phrases, as best explain such situation as finds us floating away on the gumment helium, and without parachutes, or pussies, either!

CLICK the CATFISH to go to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS