CONGRESS IS BOUGHT AND PAID FOR

Sheesh, what a performance by the congress of the United States.

These people are so bad that taking shots at them sort of feels like
picking on a 90-pound weakling. When was the last time you heard anyone say
anything good about Congress -- except after that lovely man John Chafee
died, and even then many of the mourners promptly started screaming in
horror at the thought of his replacement as chairman of the Senate
Environment Committee.

Robert Smith of New Hampshire is so right-wing that he actually quit the
Republican Party on grounds that it isn't conservative enough, and then he
came back when he saw the committee chairmanship. Lord save the wilderness.

Take this little gem: ``Efforts to soften a bill that would expand
sanctions against drug traffickers and the businesses that work with them
have touched off a furious dispute on Capitol Hill'' (New York Times). Sen.
Richard Shelby of Alabama says he is merely trying to fix flawed
legislation that ``might allow overzealous government officials to seize
the assets of legitimate companies tied to drug trafficking by scant
evidence.''

Thank you very much, Sen. Shelby. For your information, overzealous
government officials have been seizing the assets of legitimate individuals
in this country for years.

The excesses of the War on Drugs, particularly the nasty phenomenon of
taking everything away from people who are only tangentially or
inadvertently involved with someone else who in turn may be involved with
drugs, are so well documented that we need not dwell on them. This has been
happening to people for years; but now, God forbid that it should happen to
corporations -- businesses that have lobbyists and give big campaign
contributions.

Rep. Bill McCollum of Florida said on the floor: ``We have discovered in
this Congress that we are not insulated by the efforts of the kingpins to
buy influence and corrupt our political institutions. Their narco-lobbyists
were paid well to try to shape and gut this bill.''

Duh. You're also not insulated from the sugar lobby, the ethanol lobby, the
oil lobby, the defense lobby, the telecom lobby, the tobacco lobby or any
of the rest of them that buy influence and corrupt our political institutions.

Another revolting development: The Republicans took the bill to increase
the minimum wage and loaded it with $30 billion in tax breaks for special
interests, more than half of which would go to wealthy families by lowering
the inheritance tax.

Oh, please. They vote to increase the minimum wage by $1 an hour over three
years, and then they ``balance'' this with a tax break for the
Rockefellers. Like Cameron Wooster Stanford IV really needs a tax break on
his daddy's millions. I remind you again that the wealthiest 20 percent of
the people in this country already have 84 percent of all the wealth,
leaving 16 percent for the other 80 percent.

The disproportion is so incredible that Donald Trump, that man of the
people, has just proposed a special onetime tax on people worth more than
$10 million. He says that a one-shot tax of 14.25 percent will raise $5.7
trillion -- more than enough to pay off the national debt in a single year.
Imagine.

The minimum-wage bill written by Sen. Don Nickles of Oklahoma also changes
tax laws to give pension-tax breaks to highly paid executives, has
provisions that could reduce pension coverage for some low- and
middle-income workers, and raises the deduction for the famous
three-martini lunch from 50 percent to 80 percent. Quite a minimum-wage bill.

You elected them, folks -- especially those of you who didn't vote.