Perspectives

My gawd, I just love Republicans. That they remain bootlicks for corporate welfare should surprise no one. A snake recently killed a little chickie I was raising. I came across this distressing scene as a yellow rat snake was just finishing squeezing the life out of it. Folks asked, did I kill the snake? I debated doing just that but quickly determined, no, it was just being a snake, doing what snakes do.

So too, Republicans. I had to laugh out loud when Congressman Joe Barton from Texas got down on his knees, genuflected hat in hand and coughed out an apology to BP's CEO Tony Hayword. Ol'Bootlick Barton said, "I think it's a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown." Not content with just burying his nose half way in, Barton finished with, "I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong and is subject to some sort of political pressure that is, again, in my words, amounts to a shakedown. So I apologize."

Hah-hah! An American shakedown. Too funny. Republicans apologize for holding an environmentally irresponsible foreign corporation accountable for the worst incident of pollution in American history. How dastardly un-American, how "cheeky" of President Obama to ask for $20 billion from BP to get the ball rolling on clean-up expenses and to compensate Gulf businesses for lost income.

So is anyone surprised by Rep. Bootlick Barton's Republican observations that holding a corporation responsible for its actions is un-American? That is what Republicans stand for. Corporate protection and corporate welfare. Rather Tony Soprano/mob-like in philosophy and practice.

I'm of two minds when it comes to business. I greatly admire the self-starting entrepreneur who comes up with a new idea, risks all, invests her time and energy, sacrifices his life to "git-r-done" and creates something grand out of hard work, ingenuity and perseverance. Nearly every imaginable corporation has its roots in such stories.

And over time, if the stars align, the little concern metastasizes into a corporate behemoth that requires bootlicking politicians to ensure its quarterly profit statements (and margins) are an uninterrupted stairway to a fiscal heaven of preference and privilege. It's not peculiar to America or capitalism. It's "the system." It's timeless. It's a fact.

And what is factual is that all "moneyed interests" will seek out and identify politicians who are 1. already of that class and/or perspective, or 2. easily seduced (wined, dined and bought); politicians who put their fingers on the scales (and their hands in the pot), precious little toadies and officious little bootlicks who do the bidding of their corporate masters over the interests of, hmmm, uh, yes, over the interests of the "small people" as Tony Hayword so endearingly described "us."

It helps to know whose interests our congressmen are working. A snake is inevitably a snake. Sadly, so too, our elected toadies.