My Vote Is For Sale, Too

[dbt]

Attention Giant Corporations! Walmart, ExxonMobil, Blue Cross, AT&T. Come one, come all! I have decided to sell out to the bare walls—MY VOTE MUST GO! Cash is King, Time is Master! It’s (wait for it) the Opportunity Of A Lifetime!

See, I keep on voting in every election. From dog catcher right on down to President Of The United States, every time there’s an election, I go and vote. But I’m just not doing it right, am I?

I want some of that Tax Relief for myself. I want a set of tax forms that I can read without hiring a translator. I want to be able to actually fill out a tax return without laying out fifty bucks for TurboTax. I want some tax breaks that apply to ME. I don’t have a 300-foot yacht that needs depreciating. I don’t have tons of dividends pouring in from the stock market. I don’t have capital gains or income from foreign sources. Hell, I barely have any income from domestic sources.

Yet when I vote for somebody who promises to cut my taxes, they go up. When I vote for somebody who promises to look out for me, it’s more like “Look out! You’re about to get screwed AGAIN!” When I vote for somebody who promises straight talk, I get letters back from my Congressional Representative that read like fucking PRESS RELEASES, coming down squarely on all sides of every issue. When I vote for health care reform, the only reform I can see is that I need to reform myself from voting! But maybe I’m just not voting correctly.

I see Mike Ross and Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor dressed up all fine, living like kings and queens, riding around in Clown Victrolas and eating swell food at those thousand-dollar-a-plate soirees in Washington and I think to myself “Now THEY know how to vote!”

And it’s so simple that I’m throwing my back out, trying to kick my own ass for not having glommed onto it a lot sooner: they vote the way the corporations tell them to vote. The corporations send them truckloads of money and they vote in favor of the corporations (sound of slapping forehead)!

Well, shit, I want ME some of that! But I won’t be nearly as high-maintenance as my Senators or Representatives. I won’t even make a pretense of Listening To The Voice Of The People. Just give me enough money and I’ll vote like you want me to—and I won’t say a WORD.

But wait. There’s MORE! All it’ll cost you high rollers is fifty thousand dollars a year. Of course, it will have to be paid in fifty- and hundred-dollar bills with non-sequential serial numbers and delivered to a rendezvous point WAY out in the sticks well after dark, but c’mon. You spend more than that scraping the shit off of Mike Ross’s nose every quarter! And fifty thousand works out to what? About a minute’s income for the CEO of Exxon? It may be chump change to you, but this chump could live pretty well on it!

And the Extra Added Bonus is, I’ll shut up. You won’t even pay shipping and handling on this part! No more phone calls to my CongressCritter, no more letters, no more outraged emails, no more working for their opponents. Gimme the money, tell me how to vote and it’s a Done Deal.

BUT YOU MUST CALL NOW. This Once In A Lifetime Opportunity will absolutely not be repeated. My phone lines are open, operators are standing by!