Memo to the One Percent: You’re cordially invited to commit “legal” murder, if you first pay a fee. (Fee schedule follows.)

Why is this man smiling? Possibly

because he contributed enough to

his local Sheriff's election campaign

to ge away with what some consider 

murder.

So among the police brutality cases that won’t go away is a case of civilian brutality aided and abetted by the police.

It happened in the vicinity of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where we now have a case of sport-hunting a human being for money. A so-called “reserve deputy,” age 73, who had generously contributed to the sheriff’s office (and gave $2,500 to his election campaign) got to “ride along” with the deputies, armed with both a taser and a pistol. And when they came upon a man who turned and fled when these weapons-bristling “peace officers” saw him, guess what?

Right, Mr. Ridealong Casssidy, actually a 73-year-old insurance executive named Robert Charles Bates, in search of an adventurous payoff in return for all the financial support he gave his local sheriff, shot and killed the suspect.

“Whoops,” he in effect said, explaining that he thought the pistol was his taser and his taser was his pistol, “My bad.” Or something like that.

Of course the sheriff’s office went to the most impartial investigators they could find — themselves — and learned through meticulous self-investigation that they and their honored guest killer were totally absolved, and that it was all an innocent mistake.

As for what happened when the mortally wounded man complained, “I’m losing my breath,” and a (real) sheriff’s deputy on the scene replied, “Fuck your breath,” that’s a mere bagatelle. I mean hey, the wounded man would have died anyway.

One begins to wonder if the One Percent, bored with making their billions and buying elections, haven’t gone on to the next level and now have a sporting arrangement to kill civilians, paying a fee for the fun.

They wouldn’t publicize it, of course. But the word-of-mouth would almost certainly get around at the club. For those government entrepreneurs who want to make money serving up fun to billionaires, I recommend the following fee schedule:

The $2,5000 Local Yokel: Pay $2,500 to an approved local official or candidate for office and get to chase and shoot dead one person of color in a “bad” neighborhood. If chastised by some lefty member of the press, you may be initially charged with a crime, but guaranteed you will be excused. Your pal the sheriff will simply investigate the incident and say, “Aside from the fact that the dead man shoplifted a banana five years ago and therefore got what he had coming, it should be noted that my honored honorary deputy was merely participating in a hot pursuit. Besides, he thought he heard gunfire coming from the dead man's direction.”

The $500,000 fatal clubbing: Using a police baton or a hammer, you may may enjoy the thrill of clubbing to death, a handcuffed suspect — while he is in police custody. Severing the arrestee's spinal cord is optional. This is a socially useful activity that relieves police officers of the onerous and tiresome duty of killing already-captured and manacled suspects by themselves.

The $10,000,000 Sheldon Adelson Decapitation Special: Why should ISIS executioners have all the fun? Contribute a Sheldon Adelson-size ten million bucks to any senatorial, congressional, gubernatorial, or presidential campaign and you too can get to take a knife and saw off the head of a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit. Whether you wear a mask or not is optional. However, you may want to remain masked to keep the kids or grandkids attending progressive lefty schools from asking embarrassing questions. It takes a while before they get to understand that your wealth entitles you to this kind of fun. You might want to treat them to participate in a decapitation for their 21st birthdays.

The $889,000,000 Koch Brothers mass murder deluxe:  Make a near-billion-dollar political campaign contribution, matching what the Koch Brothers will spend to defeat Democrats in 2016, and the sky’s the limit. If you’d like, we’ll line up 100 people against a wall, hand you an AR-15, and let you mow them all down. There’s actually a choice of weapons. People with a taste for classic weapons may prefer a Browning .30 caliber, tripod-mounted machine gun. Or you can use a bazooka. (Limit: one shell per firing squad victim.) For a slight extra fee of, say, $30,000,000, we’ll even put you in an Air Force plane and let you nuke the entire population of a small Pacific atoll. Then go home or to the club and tell all your friends, “My boom was bigger.”

Now I can almost hear some of the non-one-percent tut-tutting me and telling me not to publish this post because it’ll give people ideas. Hey, I’ve got news for you. The idea has already been conceived and field-tested in Oklahoma. And if it occurred to me, even in jest, that this is the kind of atrocity that can be scaled up, I’m sure somebody else is thinking about that one, too. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, even before this was posted, somebody had submitted a business plan. Maybe even to the Koch Brothers.

A letter to the editor from an outraged rat

Today's guest contributor

Hey Crank!

I live in New York City, on the east side of Manhattan. My home is a hole under a bush in St. Vartan’s Park over on 36th Street between First and Second Avenues. I make my living mostly scrounging rotting sandwich crusts from garbage cans in and around the park. Sometimes I get lucky and find a few rice grains or some birdseed that somebody scattered for the pigeons.

It’s a tough life. Some days I go hungry. And it’s worth your life to ignore the predators out here, including an occasional New York red tailed hawk, feral cats, and those bastards from the city’s department of health who put out poisoned rat bait for us. Did I mention speeding cars when I try to get across the street?

Anyway, the other day I found a copy of The New York Times and I decided to rip off a few strips of paper to line my nest for winter. And guess what? 

I found a feature story by a reporter named Corey Kilgannon about a rat whose name is Toby. That’s right, the Times these days is writing feature stories about rats. You want to make your name in journalism? Forget people. Go for the rodents.

Now Toby isn’t your average rat.  She’s not struggling to get by, like me. She’s so well off she even has a personal trainer named Lydia DesRoche, who also admits, according to The Times, that “she has become sort of a social secretary, chaperoning Toby as she interacts with the smitten cast and crew backstage at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.”

Right, Toby is a well-fed, well-paid,  probably well-bathed, carefully cosseted Broadway theater rat, part of the rodent world’s One Percent. I’ll stake two mud soaked bagel crusts that her monthly upkeep costs more than the average out-of-a-job factory worker’s unemployment benefits. 

Toby’s in a Broadway play called, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” on Broadway. She lives better than the other 99 percent of us who are hiding out in holes in the ground and in sewers.

While the rest of us struggling rats get by on scraps and rotting food, Toby gets hand fed. She gets sleepover dates arranged for her, as if she was an incipient debutante at Spence, or Brearley, or one of those other academies for the one percent that charge $35,000-plus a year for tuition.

I’m not making this rat up. Don’t take my word for it. This is what the Times said:

 “While Ms. DesRoche takes Toby home on the weekends to her apartment on the Upper West Side, the rat goes home on weeknights with members of the cast and crew. There is no shortage of takers; members with children usually get first choice.” 

I’ll bet she gets free medical care, too.

Hey, this rat is better off than a lot of people I’ve run across, so to speak. With rents in this town easily getting to $2,800 a month for a studio apartment, Toby has her own spacious dressing room. Well, okay, she shares it with a dog who’s also in the show, but even so. I mean, check out this passage from the Times:

“Inside, yes, there are lightbulbs around the mirrors and fresh roses on the makeup counter (Toby likes to nibble on roses). Also, on the counter is a long tube, for scampering through, and a glass of water, which she climbs up into, and nearly hops into, as she drinks.”

Right. Ninety-nine percent of rats have no time for anything except scrounging for food and reproducing. I’ve got relatives so impoverished, they sleep in the subway, along with the homeless people. And this snotty, overprivileged rat has a light-up makeup mirror and her own toys. Toys! Not to mention the roses.

I mean, this is an outrage. I scooted past a flower shop over on Third Avenue the other night, and roses were going for eighty dollars a dozen. And this spoiled rat eats them? That’s in-your-face conspicuous consumption, if you ask me.

Hey, this is another example of how only the One Percent get the best of everything, from real estate, to rose salads, to  their own personal trainers and social secretaries, while the rest of us New York rats live in squalor and danger.

We’re sick and tired of being vilified pariahs. Toby undoubtedly comes from a family of very rich rats, because when the rest of us tried to raise money by putting together an act that consisted of some gymnastics and a bit of rodent-dancing, Fox News came down on us like a ton of bricks – like we’re liberals, or Democrats, or demonstrators, or gun-grabbers, or terrorists, or something. I mean, just look at this disgusting anti-rat political screed from Fox. Go ahead, I'll wait while you play it:

“We slant, you try and decide.” I mean, that was what I call a completely biased piece of reporting. Not one pro-rat spokesperson was interviewed.  All you see is a bunch of Fox pimps and their patsies making out like we’re disgusting. We weren’t being disgusting. We were trying to break into show business.

Anyway, Crank, please do me a favor and post this letter to your blog. It’s time people knew the rats have their one percent, too, and that characters like Toby are just as irritating to us as the Koch Brothers are to you.

Whether we're talking about rats or people, the one percent gets the best of everything. For the rest of us, life’s nothing but a rat race.

Sincerely,

Roscoe Norvegicus

P.S. The Times article also quoted Lydia DesRoche, the rat’s personal trainer, as saying, ““I’m just a rat servant now — I’m the rat butler.” Right. And hell will freeze over before the rich rats give it up. Taxing away a tiny little bit of extra income from the one percent might deprive them of their ridiculous luxuries, like butlers, and that’s why they pay off legislators to write laws in favor of the rich. Meanwhile, the greedy S.O.Bs. don’t care if the rest of us starve, or drown in a backed up sewer.  

P.P.S. While the rich drink Perrier, us poor rats have to slurp our water from puddles in the gutter. Wake me up when the revolution starts.

The text of this blog post was written by Pope Francis. Boldfacing my cranky own.

Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. 

How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. 

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “disposable” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers”.

Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.


54. In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.

No to the new idolatry of moneyhttp://www.vatican.va/holy_father/francesco/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium_en.html#No_to_an_economy_of_exclusion