Our beloved citizen-politicians in the Senate have been quite unimpressed with the need for a jobs program to keep our millions of unemployed from starving. Human need alone is not enough, nor is the societal need for repairing infrastructure, improving energy efficiency in our public and residential buildings or restoring our devastated environment.
But we have to eat, and to eat, we need jobs, so in the spirit of accommodation, compromise and, above all, pragmatism, I propose a new jobs program modeled on a tried and tested model adopted from Egypt and other ancient cultures.
Let's hire people to build big pyramids, temples and mega-statues dedicated to the prominent in our society. We could start with some projects designed to win the right votes and voters to get this through Congress:
- A reprise of the three pyramids at Giza dedicated to Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson and Scott Brown.
- A new Parthenon with statues of the Maine twins rather than Athena. (This should really appeal to Snowe!)
- A new version of the Sphinx with Lloyd Blankfein's face on it.
- A new Colossus of Rhodes, bigger than the Statute of Liberty, at the southern end of Manhattan in the likeness of Jamie Dimon. To really get this Master of the Universe behind the project, we should get an artist rendering showing a nude and very well endowed male statue.
Put together a list of projects like that and watch the votes line up behind it. After we get that first bill through, we can go for a really big jobs program building a new Tower of Babel with each floor dedicated to one of the revered 1%-ers in our country.
I realize that these programs will have little or no social utility, but change is hard. We have to go with what we can get through the Senate.