The Sweetness of Contemporary Corruption

I am getting tired of cynics who tell us that Congress in an open septic tank overflowing with the raw sewage of corruption.

In truth, it’s a bit more sophisticated than that.

Granted, raw sewage is pumped into the Beltway via open trenches. While the widest and deepest trench runs down the East Coast from Wall Street, other trenches snake out from the country’s other power centers. The defense industry is no slouch when it comes to sewage pumping.

However, contemporary corruption is polite and elegant. The bagman is an extinct species, and envelopes crammed with small, unmarked bills are no longer passed under the table.

The raw sewage is never pumped directly into the capitol. Instead, it is pumped, first, into the K Street Sewage Treatment Plant. There it is sanitized, deodorized and packed into innocent looking bales before being trucked over to Congress in the form of “campaign contributions.”

It’s still sewage, but it smells sweeter.

We would do well to think of this corruption as the fertilizer that feeds our greatness. It is the new democracy in which the rights of our corporations are jealously guarded with the assurance that as our corporations prosper, their wealth will trickle down to the poor and the disenfranchised.

It is unfortunate that our current economic meltdown has revealed that the only thing that trickled down was the urine of the rich. This is why our oligarchs need the best PR firms money can buy to convince the masses that the piss is really milk and honey.

Let the rest of the world riot. America takes care of her own by feeding them a steady diet of this milk and honey.

--Belacqua Jones