Corruption Overload
The rich aren't like us — they pay less taxes.
— Peter De Vries, American author, 1910–1993
Here I always tought it was H.L. Menken — sure sounded like something he'd write — or maybe Will Rogers or Gracie Allen*, but De Vries is fine with me. I mostly liked his books, his satire was brilliant (I fondly remember Slouching Towards Kalamazoo), although he could seem awfully straight sometimes and obsessive about sex. But anyway….
When I was growing up, it was received wisdom that the rich, in addition to paying "less taxes", could easily get away with screwing people out of money as desired. The secret was this: if you were going to lose, you had to lose really big. No dinky-shit debts for which we little people would surely wind up in jail, even in the days before credit "reform".
Nope, if you were going to default on a loan, make it a really big one, then they won't throw you in jail. (Remember Neil Bush — same Bush family, yep** — and the Savings & Loan "scandal" during the Reagan/Bush years? $1.4 trillion tax-payer dollars? That scandal?) Of course, there are more modern incarnations of the same sort of thing, until recently pronounced "Enron" but which, in consideration of their recent pension shenanigans, may be pronounced "United Airlines" for awhile.
Anyway, there may be a bigger picture here. I oinly talk about big debts of rich people as an analogy, and not a terribly good one. I'm really thinking of political corruption. A lot of people seem to have learned how to do it a lot better recently than they used to.
I mean, once we had Nixon and the Watergate Plumbers and their ilk, but that was so dinky, so trivial and petty, so amateurish, and look what happened: Scandal! Impeachment! Crisis! Obviously, Nixon didn't think big enough, like a really rich person.
The latest rhetorical device these days, the formulation most used to demonstrate that one is talking about something important, is to talk about how little play it gets with the Mainstream Media. It's tiresome, really. Hear me people: tell your own stories and quite whining that the MSM isn't doing it for you.
Because they may simply be overloaded, like I am, on the corruption of this administration. That's my new theory: that this administration is really, really rich, except that they're applying the methods not to money but to power, which they grab and abuse without apparent limitation. And so, like rich people who are so rich that they are never called upon to pay their debts, the abuse of power is so great, so relentless, so manifest in myriad ways that it simply becomes overwhelming. It's like a guerilla war with continual battles breaking out everywhere, too many to fight, too many even to report on.
Who doesn't get tired of hearing each different voice trying to get out its story about some new evidence of administration corruption? There's just too much of it, too many little fires to stamp out. Maybe we need bigger fire-fighting equipment than our feet.
So here I am at the part where I offer, with stunning, ironic wit, a brilliant solution to the problem: how to denounce political corruption with a voice big enough to be heard, how to reform the systems so that it's of the people, by the people, and for the people.
But, once again, I've painted myself into a rhetorical corner and don't have a way out. Not yet, at least, but I'm working on it.
[Addendum]
AmericaBLOG quotes the NYTimes,
Democrats [in Ohio] have tried to turn the missing coins into a morality tale about the dangers of one-party government. Indeed, in Ohio it is hard to find anyone responsible for government problems who is not a Republican, since Republicans control not only the governor's office, but also the Legislature, the attorney general's office, the Supreme Court and the state auditor's office.
"One-party rule has made the Republicans much more sloppy in their corruption," said State Senator Marc Dann, a Democrat.
Shouldn't the apparently inevitable corruption one finds in "one-party government" be the biggest issue right now for the Democrats? Maybe it's the answer, the meta-issue that can sweep up all the little corruption issues into one big issue. Wouldn't it be interesting if no party could have a majority? It almost makes one long for a viable multi-party system.
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*A lot of people, of course, have had a lot of things to say about taxes:
- Benjamin Franklin: "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
- G.H.W. Bush: "Read my lips: no new taxes."
- H.L. Menken: "Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages."
- Leona Helmsley: "Only little people pay taxes."
- Will Rogers: "The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets."
**To be fair, all of the Bushes were implicated in one way or another. For instance:
Jeb Bush defaulted on a $4.56 million loan from Broward Federal Savings in Sunrise, Florida. After federal regulators closed the S&L, the office building that Jeb used the $4.56 million to finance was reappraised by the regulators at $500,000, which Bush and his partners paid. The taxpayers had to pay back the remaining 4 million plus dollars.
["The Bush family and the S&L Scandal".]