The Five Percent President
March 29, 2002
By Madison

Sherlock Holmes had his "Seven-Percent Solution" and we have a five-percent president, George W. Bush.

Yes, I have written president, not resident, as many prefer, because GWBush IS the president of five percent of the American population. He's their friend; he's their booster; he's their befriender; he's their benefactor; he's their financier.

Where does he get the money to finance that five percent of the population? Ah, there comes the rub, because he gets the money to finance his 5% of the population from the rest of us - the other 95% of the population.

He takes our Social Security money and, after cleverly telling and convincing the uninformed that it is "their money," proceeds to take "their money" and give it to his Five Percent (I'm going to start capitalizing Bush's Five Percent from here on in because it has become, for Bush, the moral equivalent of a country - HIS country!)

Bush's land of the Five Percent is a lovely place: the citizens of Five Percentland live in grand houses with more bedrooms than are in most neighborhoods around where I live. In Five Percentland, they have three-, four-, and five-car garages. And that's just for the cars they drive regularly; their "antique" and "collector" cars are kept in vaults somewhere.

The people in Five Percentland speak only to one another; that is, they speak sweetly only to one another. They also speak to their servants, but never so nicely as they speak to "their own kind" - there, in Five Percentland.

How do they do it? How do they manage those extravagant lifestyles? Most of them work, if they work at all, very short days and very few hours. But they make gobs and mega-gobs of money for those paltry hours they work, because they have worked out deals with some of the officials in Five Percentland to deregulate their industries, giving them monopolies, which they can then manipulate and exploit at the expense of those of us who live in Ninety-Five Percent Country.

The Big Question, of course, is: who is our president, out here in Ninety-Five Percent Country? It cannot be the same president as they have in neighboring Five Percentland, as that would be a conflict of interest. It is necessary to exploit the ninety-five percent of us in order to pay the bills for those "friends of the family" in Five Percentland

Well, here's the Good News and the Bad News: We don't have our own president; that's the Good News. But George W. Bush, with the help of his Super Patriots on the Supreme Court of Five Percentland has installed himself as our president - whether we like it or not. That's the Bad News.

It gets worse.

Having installed himself, with the help of the Super Five, he has proceeded to take our precious and well-loved National Parks and has given them over to his country's drillers, miners, loggers and all round exploiters - for their benefit.

He has taken our guarantee of future Social Security benefits and sold it as Lottery Tickets, but sells those tickets only to Five Percenters. They will get all the money Bush is scooping out of our national treasury.

It goes on and on like that. He takes our airwaves and gives the rights to them to his Five Percenters - for their enrichment, and at the loss of our publicly provided services. Not to mention we cannot get any news that is not controlled by the Five Percenters.

What can we, here in Ninety-Five Percent Country - it's really what used to be known as the United States of America - do? Well, for starters, we can insist on having our own president, one who looks out for our best interests, one who does not take our national treasury and give it to his people, one who leaves our national parks alone so we can enjoy them and our children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy them without having to climb over and around the oil rigs and mining camps of the Five Percenters.

How do we do this?

We wake up; that's first. We talk to one another and share information. We recognize that there are more of us than there are of them, over there in Five Percentland. And we take our country back. Yes, the ninety-five percent of us who are being ripped off by the five percent, consisting of Bush's "friends of the family" and campaign contributors

And we don't divide ourselves up into sub-groups over petty grievances. We stick together. We vote for our country, not for the party of the five percent of the population that benefits from ripping us off.

We stick together, we vote, we win, we take back our glorious country. That's what ninety-five percent of us, by sticking together, can do!

And must do.