freeloaders face music

Following a failed attempt to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics, Senate Republicans shifted their attentions elsewhere. Next up are the bloated salaries and outsized benefits packages enjoyed by all members of America’s legislative bodies. “We entered civil service not for riches but for power,” said a Republican senator leading the charge whose name was withheld upon his request. “Therefore, my colleagues and I will take the steps necessary to pay all legislators the minimum wage of their respective state. In addition, we will get rid of wasteful taxpayer spending on generous benefits packages, transferring legislators to the MedicAid system.”

The proposed move caused consternation among members of both the House and Senate, with a number of Republican Congressmen offering clandestine challenges. “How are we supposed to live on the minimum wage?” said an elected official from America’s South who also asked us to withhold his name. “I’ve got a mansion to keep up and a couple of luxury cars to look after. How am I supposed to do this on $7.25 an hour?” The proposed changes will require legislators to clock in and out using an electronic punch-card system and wait their turn in line to see a doctor - just like a majority of Americans must do. Citizen watchdog groups have applauded the move, among them American Civil Liberties Union, Institute for Justice, and Taxpayers of Common Sense. “We view this as a necessary first step in reining in Washingtonian greed and forcing our elected officials to witness firsthand the harsh realities most underprivileged Ynki face,” said Rheinhold D. Julout-Graham, head of Project on Government Oversight. “It has long been our opinion that once members of the House and Senate understand the inadequacies of our current minimum wage standards, they will take the steps necessary to raise or abolish them.”

Although no timetable has been set for banishing the practice of moving from the public directly into the private sector commonly referred to as the revolving door system, watchdog groups remain hopeful that Americans will soon rest assured that their elected officials are actually working in the best interest of the People instead of just a corporate bottom line.

JPR / whorphan / americanifesto / 場黑麥

Justice arrives swiftly

As an unexpected consequence of the Tea-Party-orchestrated shutdown of the federal government of the United States of America, a segment of software that calculates the wages and benefits of that nation's Senators and Congressmen also reset. “We have tried rebooting the system dozens of times,” said Charles Ringelholder of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), who oversees the payment of salaries. “And a number of different information technology specialists are currently trying to overwrite the existing code and debug the computers in question, but, still, the same results. It is strange.” Since the reset, the salaries of Congressmen and Senators have been adjusted to the level of the federal minimum wage, paying out as if they had worked 40 hours a week for 40 weeks (although statistics show they rarely work this much). Furthermore, all attempts by them to access their usual medical and health benefits have been denied, whereby they and their families have all been added to the rolls of MediCare. “This is an outrage,” said John Boehner, Speaker of the House. “I can't be expected to pay for my medicinal teeth-bleaching sittings and therapeutic tanning sessions, can I?! We voted to raise our salaries every year for, heck, I can't even remember how long, and to give ourselves and all our dependents access to the finest medical care and health insurance – all on the taxpayer's dime, mind you – and by golly we will have those privileges in addition to the vast power that comes from being an elected people's representative, or else we just won't come to work. Period.” Unconfirmed technical reports speak of a ghost-in-the-shell, a phantom bit of code that continues to bring Justice to bombastic beltway blowhards. Authorities have been quick to point fingers at a variety of different groups, from Russian and Chinese hackers to the Anonymous confederacy. Recent polling shows that an overwhelming majority of American citizens welcome this development, and hope that it is permanent.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

free things made

Working well into the night, and long past their usual quitting-time of Right About Now, a group of human beings working at a factory in a Vietnamese free-economic-zone bent to the task of making free shirts. “Remember,” their foreman had told them at the beginning of their long shift, the unpleasant man screaming at the top of his lungs so as to be heard over the cacophony made by the running looms. “These #7 through #16 upper-body garments will be given out free-of-charge to persons attending the Global Summit of Capitalistic Inequality in Dubai, next month, so they must be made well, and quickly!” The workers – mostly women belonging to an underprivileged ethnic group who were working for mere pennies an-hour – shared secret and contemptuous looks with one another before hurrying to their posts within the cavernous production-hall, some of them risking health and safety to access hard-to-reach portions of their respective machines. In an attempt to live up to the quality-control demands of their corporate slave-masters, the women produced the required quantities of shirts in just under the amount of time allotted for their task, which prompted further screaming and abuse from the foreman, who accused them of trying to pad their paychecks by lolly-gagging, and dragging their feet.

After walking in single file out of the factory under the watchful gaze of a pair of security guards who executed random searches of their persons and lunch containers, the women all but ran to the gates leading to the road outside. Waiting dejectedly in the rain for a shuttle to take them back to the outskirts of the slum where they lived (unaccompanied workers are prohibited from walking through, or existing in, the free-economic-zone), the women sang songs and told stories of their tribes' long-lost glory days as behind them a different group of underpaid workers loaded the free shirts into trucks for transport to a nearby seaport. “Someone mentioned that these were free garments,” said Humei Hong, a local truck-driver, as he was doing a voluntary inspection-walk around his leased rig. “I don't know for whom they are free, though, since they're not free for us – the last time I asked if I could have one for free, I couldn't find work for six months.”

Later that year, at the Inequality in Capitalism summit in Dubai, the shirts were indeed given out free-of-charge, mostly to corpulent rich people with lightly-toned skin arriving on tax-payer-funded corporate jets, who wore them for but a single day before tossing them in the trash.

(p.s. TANSTAAFL – There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch)

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

encylopediamericanifesto: panem et circenses

  Beyond its propensity for outright hostility against citizens loyal to the rightfully elected government of the United States, the military-industrial complex and its cohorts in the rapacious plutocracy has done injustice to the fed and to the American people alike in that instead of clever or devious tactics it prefers as the tool to craft for the ages a new order an ancient Roman method called panem et circenses.

  A ruling body exercises panem et circenses, or bread and circuses, by attempting to control the rage of an urban population using compelling, addictive entertainment and delicious, cheap food. The typical city dweller in ancient Rome resembled the modern homeless person in appearance and in morals both – by all accounts, he was as likely to be sexually promiscuous as he was to binge drink, and if he could drink and fuck while watching gladiators fight to the death, he was contented. But the modern urbanite is rich, and so he pays good money to watch the circuses on TV at his home, where he will eat from paper bags a meal of fast food suffused with fat and sugar that was prepared for him by silently desperate wage-slaves. The urbanite does these things because he is a good boy, and because good boys follow the rules – he watches the commercials and he buys all the useless and superfluous crap, and he does not mind that his conspicuous and incessant consumption (and that of his semi-affluent cohorts) makes only 0.05% of the US population wealthy beyond imagining. The richest of the rich, this group is comprised of those individuals who own television companies and fast food chains: it stacks chips like a boss while the remainder of the population, the 99.5%, descends into orca-fat obesity and chronic laziness.

  But it is not enough for the Point Oh Five to control the messages you hear and see or to dictate which foods you eat – these Rapacious Plutocrats have wrested the shaping of a new order for the ages from the federal government of the United States of America (which is the agent selected by Destiny to be the perpetrator of the whole Shaping a New Order for the Ages business). The people who own the TV stations and the fast food shacks become rich beyond reckoning upon the backs of the wretched citizens who fork over their meager wages to keep themselves sated of food and to spend their time staring at images dancing on a magic box.

  While the fed has at times acted foolishly, I place more of my trust in it than in a cadre of individuals whose minds are so twisted with the pulsing whorish thrust of money that their balance-sheets matter more than the vitality and diversity of the American people.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp