Corporatchiks

I sure hope people like this one. I had fun writing it.
It is less historical and more pop-cultural than
most of my stuff. Feedback, as always, is appreciated.

arendt

----------------

Corporatchiks - a horror movie
by arendt

The Bush administration looks a lot like the classic
scifi horror movie "Alien".

We have a creature of dubious provenance (Bush) allowed
into our ship (government), against regulations, due to
the intervention of a corporate agent with secret orders
(Felonious Five Supreme Court justices).

The creature has a gruesome life cycle: 1) attachment by force (ABF)
to the victim; 2) a gestation period (GP) in which the victim is
rendered comatose; and 3) an abominable "birth" (B) as the creature
consumes its victim from the inside out. This is exactly the life cycle
of the destruction of our government agencies by the Bush Cabal.

Here are four examples:

1) Securities and Exchange Commission

ABF: The corporate lawyer, Harvey Pitt, is appointed to
regulate the very people he has spent his entire
career defending.

GP: The SEC looks the other way while massive fraud occurs.

B: Enron collapses from internal looting, consuming large hunks of
capital. Confidence in the honesty of American markets collapses.


2) Department of the Army

ABF: The Enron insider and mastermind of the California Energy
Piracy, Thomas White, is appointed Secretary of the Army.

GP: Rules are changed to allow massive privatization of army
logistics.

B: Our soldiers in Iraq are dying and suffering due to logistical
collapse caused by understaffed, underfunded civilian logistics agencies.


3) Department of Justice

ABF: The screaming fundamentalist, John Ashcroft, is appointed
Attorney General. During his confirmation hearing, he promises
to uphold the law.

GP: There is a brief period of ludicrousness, including the covering
of nude statues. But, behind the scenes, the Patriot Act is being
drafted in secrecy.

B: In the aftermath of 911, the Patriot Act is rammed through Congress,
and our Bill of Rights is gutted, destroyed. The Democrats cower, and
the Separation of Powers collapses to one-party government.


4) Department of Defense

ABF: The PNAC insider, Donald Rumsfeld (The Alien Queen), is appointed
Secretary of Defense.

GP: Rumsfeld immediately starts in on his "army of the future", which
is based on Special Forces, Special Weapons, and an abandonment of
the conventional army. He feuds with all branches of the military.
He starts the "Office of Special Plans", his own private "intelligence
shop", in spite of having the DIA. The OSP is a nesting place for all
the PNAC warmongers.

B: In the aftermath of 911, he immediately attacks Afghanistan. Then
he cranks up the OSP propagnda mill to lie his way into an attack on
Iraq. These attacks leave the military overstretched, exposed, and in
turmoil over bad mission planning, lack of exit strategy, and the
deliberate provocation of enemies. The army is now heavily reliant on
disgruntled National Guard reservists and shafted enlisted men. It is
in no condition to take on more assignments unless a draft can bring
in new manpower. In short, the military is on the verge of psychological
collapse.

-----

Any amateur xenobiologist can recognize what is going on here. There is
this alien species of corporate executives which is implanting itself
in positions of power in our government, which they see as nothing more
than a food source. Just to have a short handle for them, let's name
these corporate suits playing at being GOP Trotskyite party apparatchiks
"corporatchiks".

Corporatchiks are alien to government. They are self-funding and destructive.
They proliferate at will and gravitate to food sources. We can examine
the wreckage of previous crashed spaceships (governmental bodies)infested by
these creatures (e.g. the states of Texas and Florida) to understand what will
happen to our Federal government if this plague remains uncontrolled.

The latest corporatchik spawn, the Governor of Utah, nominated to be EPA head,
fits the pattern exactly. The best anyone can say about him is that he
looks for "pragmatic solutions" and "may not" be "completely" in industry's
pocket. What a joke! "Pragmatic" is just a codeword for cynical and amoral.
That control of the EPA has been coveted by all kinds of extractive industries,
polluters, stripminers, and clearcutters is so obvious that the GOP have issued a
media plan to "confuse" the public on scientific arguments, which arguments
the media plan admits they have lost. But, confusion is the modus operandi
for corporatchik ABF.

Meanwhile, the majority of the Democratic party are as clueless as the
hapless guy on the ship in Alien, who walks around looking for the cat
as the audience screams "forget the cat, you moron!". Those Democrats want
to bring the focus back to Head Start, and other warm and fuzzy issues.
Those Democrats will be devoured. Then there are the out-and-out corporate
agents, like Joe Lieberman and the DLC. They are the slimeballs that opened the
door to these corporatchik creatures by caving in during the 2000 Florida election
hijacking.

A few Democrats have "Ripley" potential. They understand what they are facing.
In this short list are Dean, Kucinich, and perhaps, Kerry. Sharpton gets it,
but he is too weak to make a difference. The future of our ship (government)
depends on whether these Democrats can dodge the aliens, get to an exoskeleton,
and start to kick corporatchik butt.

----

There is one more analogy to the movie. The aliens have acid blood, which
is highly toxic to humans. The corporatchiks have managed to incorporate
fundamentalism into their body makeup without being poisoned by its intellectual
and social corrosiveness.

It took me a long time to understand exactly what deal has been worked out
that turned the corporatchiks and the fundamentalists from enemies to symbiotes.
They have come to an agreement on the division of spoils.

The corporatchiks get to loot middle-class America (send the last good jobs
overseas, give themselves a huge tax break while bankrupting the government) and
set up shop as extra-territorial entities, equally untouchable in any country in
the world, including the soon-to-be-third-worldized U.S. of A.

The fundies get to devour the corpse. They get to impose their life-hating,
woman hating, book-learning hating, Manichean hell on the human wreckage left
in the wake of the corporatchik blood-meal. Its a perfect match - a bunch of
necrophiliacs and a fresh corpse.

I'm leaving the theatre now; but I will have trouble sleeping tonight.

good story :)

I do believe your 'story' will make a terrific documentary, Hannah!

:hi:

n/t

I tried "undead" last week, and this week aliens.

What, nobody wants to Bash Bush? You all want to
talk about Ah-nuld and Pie-in-Face Nader?



arendt

This isn't enough "red meat" for DUers? :-)

arendt

shrubees are showing a physical manifestation of evil from many sci-fi plots (think Shadows from Babylon 5, Emperor from Star Wars, Ferengi from Star Trek, Dark Time Lords from Doctor Who)

Methinks trotsky was a saint next to this breed. Perhaps "typically american plantation owners" would be a better term.

I'm glad you can leave the theatre. What a terrible film. None of the casting is done well, and nobody gives a toss, as if life is no longer magic, and rather derives its source from CNN. :-) ha ha.

You'll like "equilibrium" if you have not seen it arendt.

All i can figure is that we live in a very dark time post atlantis 10000+ years where the population of the earth is 6000 times what this planet was groomed for. :-) And, after a great flood and a few 10's of thousands of years of ignorant tribes of men with retrograde signatures of enlightenment.... so we live on this trashed garbage dump of a planet where the idiots have fouled every pool... and in that appearant postindustrial dystopia does the postatlantean know, as plato, the true magesty of the possible... and even greater the sadness of the decline of the west to barbarian times. In the end, this emergence of criminal psychopathy as a republican disorder may indeed harden the immune systems of the world at large... one has to hope.