I've got an idea,one that should be applied to every dirty,rotten,greedy,vain,criminal,disgusting politician who does nothing to help his or her constituency.
Once the jail time is over and done,there should be a car waiting to pick up the newly freed former politician. The car will then take them to the poorest part of their former district,call attention to them,and then leave them with 10 dollars in cash and nothing more. They then have to figure out how to live,in that area(they'll be tracked by some sort of GPS type gizmo)with the people they were supposed to be representing, for no less than 5 yrs. Let's call it The Fresh Start Plan For Criminal Politicians.
For Bob Ney(R-Nefarious Piece of Crap),I do believe this drop off location would be the area where my grandparents got married, my parents grew up,where I was born,and where my daughter and grandbabies live now. Oh,and as Ney enters The Fresh Start Plan,I get to snatch that ridiculous toupee off his head before he's dropped off to start the program.
That place where I was born used to be lovely farm country and stunningly beautiful forests(alot of the forest is still there,thank heavens),though the process of industrialization had begun before I was born. But family farms were still running,and industry had provided lots of jobs without being totally intrusive. Very few family farms remain today,the last of the larger ones went under in the 1980's,as the auto and steel industries also began to go to rust.
As industry moved in,and more and more people were dependant on that for income,people also moved away from "old fashioned"things like huge single family victory garden holdovers(my grandparents and many of their neighbors were children during the Depression,and vowed never to not have access to food again),root cellars,home preservation of food,neighborhood food exchanges("I'll trade you some of my potatoes,corn and tomatoes for part of one of your cows when you make meat out of them") and community co-operation.
When all those big industries finally abandoned the area(a drawn out,rather painful process)families and the small towns where they live were completely devastated.People who had pretty much always had decent(mostly union) blue collar jobs had NOTHING once those jobs left. And being at least a one to two hour drive from a major city meant being stuck in a place far away from any decent job prospects. A few of the factories are still around and running on the cheap,mostly til the remaining older workers are gone,and then those places will be nothing more than empty buildings sitting on parking lots with tall weeds breaking thru the concrete,joining the other abandoned factories from companies like Goodyear,Mead Paper,and something called Carborundum(which killed people from crap in the air,industrial diamond dust to be precise). And we won't even talk about the toxic shit dumps some of these places left behind that are just sitting there today,unattended. Goodyear dumped benzine there(I was also in a fire at that plant,where open containers of benzine were being used near a heat source,part of why I got laid off permanently.How no one got hurt or killed that day is nothing short of amazing),I saw it happen,so heaven only knows what else sits on just that site.
I left my birthplace for a shot at a better job when my job at the Goodyear factory ended,I was 21.I tried moving to a bigger city an hour away,working retail management,which sucked,I couldn't live and support myself,let alone raise a baby that would soon be a reality, on that kind of money.I decided to follow my parents to GA,stay with them for awhile(a nightmare) and start over. That Goodyear plant sits empty over 25 yrs later,though I hear that the front offices are being used for some sort of menial community service program and the occasional parenting class.
The generation after mine,today in their 20's,live in abject poverty.Many have never held more than a minimum wage job,if that.A whole generation,who are now having babies of their own,who have never worked and have no hope of working and no means to leave. Meth has moved in and taken a tremendous toll,and to be frank,all there is for young people to do is party and fuck.Or get into trouble. There's nothing but a Super WalMart(of course,which shut down damned near any remaining local businesses except the bars),a rinky dink Blockbuster,a few fast food places,bars and liquor stores,a few churches,a simply shameful school system,and a teen pregnancy epidemic. Think Appalachia,which isn't too far a drive from my birthplace. Hope and Opportunity is a rare commodity in this place,and political and business interests are directly responsible for that.
But meanwhile,back at the ranch,Bob Ney never felt a thing or visited the area even once that I know of. I imagine the only politicians there are local,and the little cabal of Republican operatives that control the election process(my daughter and her friends,poor white people,all had issues with voting in 2004,including intimidation).
It's more than just the bribes,or the gifts or the money grubbing greed that needs to be punished. Political corruption is a direct cause of human suffering. Callous disregard for the people you are supposed to be representing should be considered treason,in my not so very kind opinion.
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