So there I was at the supermarket with a 50 ton truck loaded to the top of the windscreen with household essentials, and pulling up in front of the cash desk after the other twenty five people in the queue had finished stating that that was not what they intended to buy, the price on the shelf said something else, and oh dear, they left the other credit card at home.
“Voter Registration Card” the checkout engineer at the cash desk barked between gum chews.
“Voter Registration card? What is that?”
“Voter Registration card. To be allowed to pay,” she said
“I don’t have one”
“Then you aren’t allowed to pay. Go over to the Voter Registration Desk and register if you want to be able to pay. NEXT”. She yelled “next” in a voice that you could have heard if you were lying in deepfreeze reading Dickens.
So with enormous skill I maneuver my 50 ton truck round enormous hurdles and over to a great big desk with a great big label over it “VOTER REGISTRATION” and I only knocked over 5 little old ladies on the way but you don’t get any bonus points for those. You only get bonus points if you whack the fast movers.
Actually the VOTER REGISTRATION” desk was a row of desks, each one manned (or I should say “womanned” in this egalitarian age) by service engineers who looked like they ate horses for breakfast and spat out the pips. Of course you only got to see the full beauty of this after you got to the front of the queue, which is about a third of a mile long and moving at the rate of about two to three snails per hour with the occasional surge of a snail and a half.
Three days later I got to the front of the queue where the barker – the sister of the cash register engineer I think - awaited my nuisancely presence.
“HI-dentification-passport-drivers-licence-or-other-legally-acceptable-identification-with-photo” and, elbow on the desk, swung out her hand like a tray reception arm for a tray full of cups with delicious coffee in them or as if she expected her arm to come back with a gold ingot (heavy) in it.
“Please” was on holiday that day. Snapping smartly to attention, I slapped my passport smartly into the waiting identification reception arm and wondered if I should salute or perhaps discreetly add a banknote to the inside of my passport a la Eastern Europe Border Patrol Standard Procedurski for Handling Stupid Furinovs.
After examining the passport the right way up and upside down as well (perhaps to verify which way up the letters were, or to ensure that there was not some secret code which you could only see when walking down the street on your hands) she yelled out my name in a voice that I think would indeed have got through the freezer to the Dickens-reader inside.
“DAVID SQUIGGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARLS”
I didn’t know I was called “SquigARLS” until then. I mistakenly thought I was called “Squiggles”. Not a day goes but you learn something new.
I imagine she had to give it this mega-kilobel power because the ladi next to her had to be (or at least looked to be) stone deaf and could only hear by transmitted vibrations, which is why she has a ladi, which is like a lady with something missing but not in front.
This Team member 2 now, she had sheets of paper the size of a newspaper full of names, 1 per line, and it seemed uncertain if the S of “Squiggles” came before or after the letter T in her alphabet. She too (some minutes later) having re-verified the writing in the passport (both ways up) with the sheet (one way up, I hope she didn’t miss anything) yelled out,
“IS REGISRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARD” which sort of rhymed with bastard.
This all seemed to be pretty good and a jerk of her head, plus the empty slot at the next table coupled with a shove in the behind from someone else whose name had just been yelled in my ear, seemed to indicate I should move one station sharply to my left and get my head shaved or whatever they did at the next slot. Maybe install my carburetor, though a coffee would be nice. “VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Yelled the assembly worker at position 3.
“Vote? What do I vote for?”
“You vote for whatever you want to buy.”
“Uh?” (My wife never told me about this when she handed me the shopping list),
“You take one of those lists on the table, the one you like (I looked over at a long table she indicated by the wall, which seemed to have a lot of different piles on paper on it, all different colors and shapes in a long line) and you can then vote it. If your list wins, you get to buy what’s on it. If not you have to buy whatever is on the winning list.”
“Buy? What is all this?”
“Are you new here? Each one of those lists is a shopping list and has on it what you will have to buy every week for the next three years if your list wins and if not you have to buy every week for three years whatever is on the winning list. Go and choose a list, take an envelope, go into that booth over there so your choice is Confidential and nobody can see which list you are choosing (as if they’d care), put your chosen list into the envelope, seal it and come back to me with the envelope and exercise your SOCIARL RESPONSIBILITIES and VOOOOOOOOOOOTE. NEXTTTTTTTTTT.”
In a state of shock, I went over to the list table and started looking at lists.
The first one I picked up had on it “15 pounds of putrid dog”. Erf. Who wants a three year diet of dog, let alone putrid dog. I went onto the next one. “2 ounces of caviar” it said which was promising but then the next line was “10 bottles of 15 year old milk with poisonous fungus”. I hot potatoed that one. The next one had on it 15 pounds of pigs feet, 1 chicken (with feathers) and _ oz coffee. A bit on the frugal side and I am not hot on feathers at least not without mustard and there was no mustard on that list – mustard was only on the putrid dog list that I saw. Probably could not get by without it.
Eventually, I picked a list which seemed to be the least disgusting of them all, because the worst thing on it was one and a half pounds of hay which the dog could sleep on and a 15 pound sack of frozen fatburgers but with only 80% fat and God knows what the rest was – probably ground up pigs ears or chicken feathers. Or dried dog nostrils. Or something else unmentionable, which was probably why there was no small print to clarify it.
I went back to the voting station, clutching my hay and fatburger list. The woman was standing by a big Perspex box with a lot of small blue cheap envelopes like mine lying in it and a slot in the top and her hand on a big lever connected to some kind of a machinery on top of the slot that looked like it was originally designed for beheading rats. Seeing the envelope in my hand, she operated the lever with a CLACK! And invited this voting rat to pop its envelope in. I looked in the Perspex box for signs of blood and cut off finger tips and seeing none, delicately dropped my envelope in the slot (and got my fingers out of the way before the executioner could blink) which fluttered down to join the rest. The operator slammed the lever shut, the jaws of the beast closed preventing any of the envelopes which were not happy with their lot or the company in which they found themselves from escaping - as unhappy envelopes are wont to do.
“HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAS vo-TID” she yelled loud enough to wake up the guy in the freezer reading Dickens if he had fallen asleep. She eyed me and sort of remotely head butted me to get my butt to the next place in line.
Next Place In Line took my passport, looked up my name in another sheet of paper the size of the Sunday Times before they had an economy binge and put a line right through the middle of my name.
That hurt.
“What happens now?
“Wait till the winner is announced and then you can go and buy whatever goods are on the winning shopping list. You get to buy the same goods every week for the next three years. NEXT”
Later that night, the results were announced.
Oh no.
Three years of putrid dog.
With mustard.
AND – 150 a month free for life? Ah. Oh yes. That was the bribe of course. After all, what fool would vote for putrid dog if there was no bribe?
Now, if that was h
ow you really had to buy your food, you’d freak.
So? Why AREN’T you freaking? Because this IS how you buy your political food.
Lists of candidates sold in packages. You vote for the socialist “list” or someone else’s “list” and get 16 people you’ve never heard of about which you know nothing at all. Some of these will rape your children financially, but others will only murder your wife and if you are lucky you get 80% fatburger who will only completely wreck your financial future. Pick one. You have COMPLETE freedom of choice.
If all this is too much of a mind warp and you want to get back to reality and safe ground, in the above fable just change “shopping list” for “candidate list” and change 3 years of putrid dog for 3 years of budget deficits which saddle your grandchildren with massive debt without their consent and you’re done.
So, considering that is how you have to buy your political candidates (with this super-cozy system they have set up to preserve their jobs) it is high time you did freak. Or maybe you like years of putrid dog and 15 year old milk with poisonous fungus?
You can see the truth of it when it comes to the money – money talks louder than words as someone once didn’t say.
Now, you are the boss of the politician, or that is the lie and the pretty bait concealing their financial suckerhook with which they go fishing for sucker votes like yours And if you are the boss, you can (of course) (ha ha snigger) tell him what to do.
Oh Yes?
When it comes to a Politico telling YOU what to do, like take 50% of all the money you earn and give it to him in a plain brown envelope to do with whatever he fancies, then a plain brown envelope in the ordinary mail is more than enough to tell you to cut your salary in half and give him the rest NOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW and Go straight to Jail if you don’t.
But when the foot is on the other boot and it is YOUR turn to tell HIM what to do, since you are paying the fake-head AH HA HA HA AH. T-H-A-T, dear sucker, THAT is QUITE another story. “We shall have to considerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr that very CARE-CARE-CARE-FUL-FUL-FUL-LY then perhaps we can fix something like choosing one of us every x+ years to take care of it for you since you are brain dead. So if you want to tell ME or us what to do, weeeeeeeeeellllllllll………. once every X years AFTER we have PROPERLY hidentified you in the LEGAL voting process (as sketched out above), you can choose ONE of whatever “Polifishans” we serve up to you – but NO,YOU CAN’T TELL US WHAT TO DO YOU BRAIN DEAD MORON ARE YOU CRAZY ONLY DIVINE-WE KNOW WHAT IS BEST FOR STUPID-YOU SO CHOOSE ONE OF US AND THEN BUGGER ORF AND LEAVE US IN PEACE TO PISS AWAY YOUR MONEY AND GO PAY PAY PAY. NOW SHUDDUP AND GET LOST AND QUIT RAINING ON OUR SPENDING PARADE.”
You have to study history to understand how you got yourself in this unbelievable mess. Political stuff began as the King Business which had a profit motive. No profit = no troops = no head = next please. The King had absolute power plus a profit motive, and if his King Businessing was not well done, someone else grabbed the palace. Then Kings as a whole blew it because they forgot to pay off the supporters, and Republics like English took over. Now the Pol still had the absolute power but the motive changed. Now the motive was to keep his big fat job spending your money, and ANYTHING was good to assure that. So the best method they have all latched onto like lice in every country I can think of, except strangely in some countries like Russia, is to give you – the boss – a whole bunch of stuff which there is no money to pay for, and the habit is that the guy who offers you the most bribes - things there is no money to pay for - gets the job as you are just a sucker for a bribe and putty in a briber’s hands. The Pol has no problem with this as he just borrows on your behalf (based on YOUR good name) from anyone stupid enough to lend the money and sticks your children and their children ad infinitum with the bill and the problem of paying it back somewhen. Having done the borrowing, he divides up the goodies – child support for you, palace for me, retirement benefit for you, private jet for me to the Gabfest which costs us Pols about $10 million EACH to attend, and so on. One for you, one for me principle just like any thief divides the spoils of thievery amongst the thieves (which includes you) and sticks the kids with the tab.
Now somebody who does an honest day’s work, like a painter, comes to you and says,
“Listen up gov, its going to be X dollars to paint your house and Y dollars to maintain it for a year.”
So you decide to employ him, or not.
But a Pol? HIS pitch, once you strip off the decoration, obfuscation and general oratorical misdirection of skillful oratorical clowns such as President Oh Ha Ha, boils down to this neat little proposition:
”I wanna plush job. If you give me the job I want, I will give you these goodies 1,2,3,4,5 which I will steal from your grandkids OK?. You give me the job, and no, I won’t tell you what it is going to cost to you, but I will look after your house for you and I will pay whatever comes into my head for fancy planes, 60 person junkets in a Boeing 300,747,000 for my wife, banquets on the nations’ Louis one hundred and ten porcelain and Gerrumptian Crystal with solid gold meat axes, junkets, palaces and the like including fat checks for Outer Mongolia, Inner Africa, and any other thing I can throw away the billions you don’t have and get a nice press article in return.
But they like to preserve a masquerade of you, the sucker punter, of being able to choose, so they say “Pick ANY one - of US!”
So you land up with a list of one guy, who says he is a Stick-o-Crat, who promises to give you one hundred and fifty six weeks of putrid financial dog, and another fellow who says he is a Screw-o-Can who PROMISES he will give you one hundred and fifty six weeks of 15 year old financial milk with poisonous financial fungus, pick one, and go away and shut up and pay, your diet is assured. Then the Stick-O-Crats and the Screw-o-Cans have a fantastic game of financial football with your money which keeps them off the streets and stops them from having to go about their thefts in a more direct manner such as daily house tax collection calls with a Kalashnikov.
Of course there are checks and balances. The Stick-o-Crat who heads the Budget (aka the Approve Ways to Spend Money You Don’t Have) Committee comes up with, “I live 40 miles from anywhere and I want a 4 lane road to my front door” (that is the CHECK bit). The Screw-O-Can then does the BALANCING, “Sure, provided you pay off General Mutters to stick a new factory in MY bailiwick (so they will vote me in next time) and put the arm on them to pay at least 5 times what each worker is worth in the open market.” No sweat. My check, your balance, your check, my balance, the sucker punters who flatter themselves they are our bosses will pay.
Of course, really, if you are happy to go along with a confidence trickster who PROMISES to stick it to your kids, just to feather your own nest today, then frankly, you have it coming and you deserve whatever you get, and that, left to a Politico, will be plenty. The politico is sick, and so are you.
Me?
I have another idea.
Last I checked, this is no longer 1492, the Magna Carta has been at work for some time and last I checked it is 2010 and NOW! TODAY ! ! ! ! ! We have things like the following which I will describe to you in 1492 terms, as that is where you seem to be living politically right now:
COM-PUT-ERS They figure stuff out and it is like a brain in a box that is a bit stupid. Kind of notvery- bright dog level. Most people in civilized countries have a comput-er which they use to do things. You may find you have one too, if you check.
INTER-NET. It’s like string that connects things. Words go down the string and Comput-ers talk to one another using the string. Most computers are connected to one another with this string.
CREDIT CARDS. These is like a portable cattle brand without the sizzle and saves you having to take your pants down in public to show the brand on your ass to prove which political lord owns you and what your number is. Kind of like a cattle ear tag without the ear – you can tell which hoof is whose. A “Credit Card” is a piece of plastic which enables you to be identified for the purpose of emptying your bank account
.
BANK. A place composed of bricks, mortar and hype, which has pulled the ultimate confidence trick of making people think it is a safe place to put their money. In fact, the second they get your money they run off with it and go and punt it in their private casino (called a “Stock Derrange”) so their bosses can get bonuses they could not possible earn in any ethical manner. If they blow it and loose it all, you’re out of luck, your government will give them their money back and add the bill onto your grandkids tab. So a bank account is just a way of financing compulsive gamblers.
BANK ACCOUNT. This is a place where “banks” pretend your money is when it isn’t. They just print a number on a piece of paper called a “statement” (of what?), which you think is money you have and they know it is money they are using to gamble within their private casino, which is called a “stock derrange” where only they are allowed to gamble with stocks, bonds and Deceivatives, which are a sort of derived stock which appears to be valuable but isn’t because it represents worthless stock like subprime mortgages taken out on houses they can’t afford by people who can’t pay for them.
Got it now? You can have an ear tag instead if you want.
These bits of financial-techno-fiddle were not around when the Magna was doing its cartering but since we are all living politically in 1492, nobody has noticed that yet as far as politics is concerned, because all the politicos like it very much in 1492. That time warp suits THEM just fine.
Now I notice (for example) that the credit card people have got things down to a fine art, and these itsy bitsy bits of plaaaaaaaaahhhhh-stic are adequate to identify billions of people and take jazillions of money from their accounts day and night and put it on other accounts and they almost always get it right. Unfortunately.
So the credit card processors have a pretty good record of not getting someone such as me mixed up with my rich Aunt Sally, (or better still, with Bill Gates) and debiting their credit cards instead of mine, I do so wish they would.
So if such a system is good enough to move jazillions of dollars out of people’s accounts without them setting up a squawk like a fleet of seagulls on a bad feather day, it seems to me to be quite good enough to give an order to your employee and tell the slob what the hell you want the slob to do with YOUR money – your employee being the slippery eel-eyed politico who has weaselly worked out this neat wheeze of a confidence trick for getting most of your money and then doing whatever the hell he likes with it (including boosting his own office staff, charter jets, chauffeured cars, banquets, 10 star hotels, international conferences in the Bahamas and spending 0.35 per year of YOUR money each year on an Academic study of the sex life of the lesser brown spotted pink eyed blue owl, of which three are left alive in lesser greater outer inner Mongolia and 0.95 per year of your money as a gift called “aide” for a bunch of people who are too lazy to work in a country in Africa you have never heard of and can’t pronounce, and another 1.95 to build missiles which never will be used to radioactivize people like your grandmother or someone else’s grandmother and is just fine unradioactivized, et-cetera. Add on to this list almost any folly you can dream up, and there is practically zero chance you will be wrong.
So I think it would be nice if we did a startling, Superman-like time-warp leap out of the distant past of 1492 where everybody is living politically right now but where all the real people have been dead for several centuries, where there are these nice 1492 election systems I described to you in lurid detail, living in a time when magna could not spell “computa”, and land with an ear-splitting, mind-bending screech in the here and now.
Maybe the politicos hypnotized you.
When I snap my fingers, you will now come into political present time
SNAP
So I think we need a system where:
Everybody has a Vota Card and heaven knows one spends just as much money with Politos as one does with a credit card so why not use the same system? So everyone gets a Vota Card just like a Visa card. If the government can issue a “passport” with out issuing the same number to me and to Bill Gates, and can manage to identify each taxPAYer correctly, it can probably, with a great banging thumping brain strain manage the same trick for a VOTACARD. If it wants to, which of course, is the very last last last thing it wants to do. Accountability is not their bag. Empowering the voter is not their bag either.
Every week, the main issues (those which are most popular and Google got that down pat many billions of dollars ago) are at the top of the voting site, and you can vote on every damn thing the politico wants to do including this week’s top 20, top 50, top 1000 and the journalists and TV stations can have a fantastic time with it. All draft laws have to go on the box and if they don’t get enough votes they die. So keep 'em short, and keep 'em intelligible or you won’t ever get a vote.
When it comes to budget time, every damn thing goes on the list and Joe gets the chance to vote for or against his paying out of his pocket to study the sex life of the third Mongolian owl and whether or not to radioactivize somebody else’s grandmother faster and more luminously than we could five years ago. No votes = no pay. No votes for a 60 person Air Fluff holiday, and she takes the package tour like the rest of us. No votes = no owl sex life. No votes = no Mark 900 pretty catapults. Anything about that you did not understand? Were the words too big?
Whenever you make a major change, you run the old system alongside the old one. So the VOTA CARD can run for a couple of years alongside the present system and at the end of that time, 1492 goes out of the window with concrete boots and you can pull your head out of the 1492 sand where you ass is decorating 2010 landscape and take a look at 2010. There is a slim chance you might survive the time transit.
If billions of normal people are quite capable of going round jazillions of huge supermarkets and choosing from tens of thousands of items on display, and choose those that they do and do not want to pay for, and then going to the checkout and lose their hard earned cash in exchange for those items based on being identified with a piece of plastic, then:
It stands to reason (unless you are a politico in which case you don’t have any), that Billions of people can go round the political supermarket on a website and choose what they do and do not want THEIR employees to do and what they will and will not pay for. Just because the political supermarket is today filled with putrid dog and milk with fungus and stuffed to its gills with outrageously priced and completely useless junk like atomic submarines, rivers of money for people too lazy to work, 60 person private 747 holiday for Mrs. Oh-Ha-Ha in Air Fluff 2, and lovely houses for lunatics who bankrupt their country, does not mean that the common man cannot be relied upon to vote for what is sensible that he wants done with HIS money.
After all, it is HIS money.
And my bet is, 90% of the stuff in the political supermarket will hit the shit can so fast they will run out of shit cans first time round. Then, sense will smilingly and sunily prevail and break through the night of political theft and the country will suddenly get unbust real fast and the grandkids will thank papa for putting in political jail that bad OhHaHa man who tried to steal all their money.
Give Joe the Vota Card and the outer-inner moongolian owl sex life investigator will be out on his rear so fast he will get bum burn sliding over the mountains into the sea of Japan, where maybe he can find honest work gutting fish which even so is probably above his social responsibility level.
Of course, if there was a foxy politico around who had more than one brain cell, he would go for this. This is unlikely, since to get on a list as a political candidate you have to first submit to surgical removal of the only other brain cell which is all that those with a political inclination were born. If any of them had a freak event and somehow got away with having that second cell in working order, they would realize that since, with VOTA CARD they will always be doing what their constituents want, why, they’d NEVER get voted out of office. So this is the route to political job security, if any of them ha
d the wit to realize it.
Or they may have the wit, but the lure of doing whatever they hell they want with an unlimited supply of somebody else’s money (and when they run through that, borrowing more and sending the bill to the grandchildren) is too much of an addictive follypop juiced with mon-o-in (like heroin but costs less and is more addictive) for them to give it up.
Time travel anyone?
Grab a ride out of the past, to the present, and you have an easy way NOT to give Politicos 10% – 20% - 30% of your income sitting right there ready for you any time.
Because this IS 2010 - see here kiddies – computers ‘an stuff exist which did not exist in 1492 where you have been living politically.
Or, do you want to go on being ripped of?
You like it perhaps?
Perhaps you like it when the hired help steals from your kiddies to give you lollypops?
Perhaps you are politically comfortable back there in 1492 ?
Perhaps you are just a big a crook as the politico is?
Perhaps you ARE just a plain old head-in-the sand, socially irresponsible thief, just as he is?
Birds of a feather, rip off the grandkids together, hmmm?
Where do I spit?
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