A Congress of cowards

What red-blooded, true-thinking American would call members of our Congress “the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum” — scum being multimillionaires, who can bribe a congressman or senator as easily as you or I could tip a barmaid, with as much harm to our bank account

Who said that? Some commie named Mark Twain.

And which communist called our first generation of billionaires “malefactors of great wealth … who combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the government … so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evildoing.”

That was Teddy Roosevelt, President Roosevelt to you, whose name we have attached, forever, to the teddy bear. He was a Republican.

Teddy continued, in his address at the Pilgrim Memorial Monument, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Aug. 20, 1907: “I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country — the people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization.”

A link to TR’s address has been erased from the White House website, at the direction of a malefactor of great wealth. I got the link from A Boat Against the Current.

Hiding “behind the breastworks of corporate organization” is a favorite trick of our corrupt Congress and White House today, as the federal government “privatizes” essential public services by selling them off to campaign contributors. The purpose of this filthy gimmick is not just for corporations to reap the riches of legalized bribery, but to shield the government from scrutiny, and its own laws.

I described this two weeks ago in this space, reviewing Miranda Spivack’s new book, “Backroom Deals in Our Backyards.” Spivack’s fifth chapter examines the government’s dumping off prison operations to private corporations, and, just as bad, to artificial intelligence. The purpose of these transparently corrupt shields — aside from the campaign contributions — is to let the government duck its own laws about public accountability, and let its campaign contributors hide their abuses under the guise of “trade secrets.”

That our government thinks it appropriate to pay private businesses to imprison and punish people, and call these punishments protected trade secrets, is a horror so grotesque it suggests a collaboration of George Orwell with Stephen King on acid.

I worked as a paralegal in five immigration prisons and can bear witness that government agents — and “contractors” are government agents — tortured civil detainees and abusively strip-searched children and babies, for the despicable crime of trying to escape from war. It’s still happening. Don’t kid yourself.

Today, many of Mark Twain’s works — our country’s greatest writer, who made the United States beloved around the world — have been banned in public school libraries. Teddy Roosevelt’s speech, as I mentioned, has been flushed from the White House website.

A bit of history here, while I’m still allowed to tell it, and you’re allegedly safe to read it:

After President Lincoln was assassinated for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, the Republican Party became known as “the party of Lincoln.” For more than a century it was hated in the Southern states precisely for that. But it all flipped when President Lyndon Johnson, a Southern Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In doing so, he said privately, “We’ve lost the South for a generation.”

Two generations, actually. And a third on the way.

I grew up under LBJ. I did not particularly respect him, but on civil rights he stood up for what was right though he knew it would cost him the presidency: his job, his influence, his power. Name one Republican member of Congress who would do that today, rather than suck up to an ignorant fascist fantasist.

Even before LBJ put his pen to the Civil Rights Act, Republicans had become the party of racism, the party of the Ku Klux Klan. Now Trump is their Imperial Wizard.

Don’t believe me? Read any sober analysis of his Onanistic Bullshit Budget Bill. Peerless columnist Dana Milbank summed it up: “Taking into account the loss of Medicaid, food stamps and other benefits, the poorest 10 percent of American households would see their incomes drop $1,600 on average, while the wealthiest 10 percent would see their income grow $12,000, on average. [Washington] Post contributor Natasha Sarin, head of the Yale Budget Lab, calls the legislation ‘the largest wealth transfer from the poorest Americans to the richest Americans in modern history.’”

Still the wink-wink-nudge-nudge party of the Klan, Republicans are willfully harming the country to stuff their own bank accounts and the purses of their campaign contributors. And like members of the Klan, congressional Republicans are cowards: hiding their pointy white heads under stupid hoods while they slurp up their own tax cuts and take away food and medicine from children.

This is the most spineless, traitorous, bought-and-paid-for Congress our country has ever seen; it makes the cowards who called the McCarthy Hearings 70 years ago look like NFL linebackers.

Their Onanistic Bullshit Budget Bill proves again what Will Rogers said 90 years ago: “It ain’t no crime to be poor, but it might as well be.”