ArcaMax

There is a species of birds named "superb starlings," and I propose that we elect one of them to be our next president.

These wise creatures have figured out how to make egalitarianism central to their society, with a diversity of birds actively supporting each other. When bringing food back to their chicks, for example, adult starlings commonly share some with hatchlings of an unrelated flock. In turn, those birds repay the good deed in later breeding seasons.

Contrast this bird-nest ethic of the Common Good with the culture of right-wing minginess now being pushed furiously by President Donald Trump's kakistocracy of billionaires and despotic ideologues.

Four of his overprivileged cabinet appointees, for example (Bobby Kennedy, Mehmet Oz, Brooke Rollins and Scott Turner), recently ganged up on hard-hit poor families who receive modest public help for essential human needs, like food and health care. The four politicos piously wailed that welfare programs are an intolerable burden on wealthy taxpayers, so they intend to slash spending by forcing the poor to take jobs before getting any public help.

But their claim that hordes of worthless sponges are living high on food stamps and Medicaid is the same nonsense such plutocrats always spread when trying to keep our society from being as smart, decent and ethical as starlings. Their scolding dictate that "you must work" is pointless grandstanding. Nearly all Medicaid recipients, for example, already have jobs -- or they are children, seniors or disabled.

There's a four-letter vulgarity that fits Kennedy, Oz, Rollins and Turner: "mean." Okay, technically, "mean" is not an obscenity, but when powerful tax-paid elites like them are mean to poor people for political gain, they are, in fact, obscene ... and disgusting.

WHY WOULD ANYONE BUY A TICKET TO HELL FROM ELON MUSK?

The most embarrassing thing about the ballyhooed war-on-government-waste, run by Elon "Chainsaw" Musk, is not even that it has generated more waste than it has cleaned up. More damning is that the clean-up crew quietly tiptoed around the biggest and smelliest piles of waste -- namely the billions of our tax dollars doled out annually to corporate welfare moochers. Such as - hello -- Elon Musk!

Son of a South African diamond dealer, Musk glided from a life of privilege all the way to being filthy rich, transported by extravagant taxpayer subsidies and government favors. And now he's back at the trough, demanding a blank government check for his biggest boondoggle of all: Rocketing to Mars.

Not him (unfortunately), but you and me. A flaming megalomaniacal flimflammer, Musk says he's a genius rocket scientist who will "save civilization" by relocating our human species to the Red Planet. Proclaiming that our Blue Marble is doomed to a hellish future, he is already using millions of earthly tax dollars to fund his fever dream.

Getting there, however, would be the cheap and easy part. Mars is already hellish, with killer levels of surface radiation, toxic dust and so-called air that analysts say "will boil the saliva off your tongue before it asphyxiates you."

The only real question is why the hell anyone is listening to this narcissistic flimflammer. He can't run a government waste project, much less a planet. Speaking of waste, why is he so eager to throw away Earth? Our salvation lies not in the stars, Musk, or other techno-profiteers, but in our democratic values, connection to nature, and down-to-Earth creativity.

Let Musk go to hell -- I'm sticking with the home team.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

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