Belfast News Letter
GEOFF HILL
December 01, 2000
Several readers have approached me in the street recently and
asked me what became of The Brownie Dawn Patrol, which they used to
pass around in work on Friday mornings.
The answer, of course, is that for the past year it had been
available on Saturdays. From today, however, in a dramatic response
to reader demand, we return it to you on Fridays.
To celebrate the occasion, here is a pocket-sized analysis of
world political systems, using the handy example of two cows, which I
picked up last week in a garage sale in Tyrone. To make the analysis
pocket-size, simply fold it up to the size of yourpocket.
FASCISM
You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take
care of them and sells you the milk.
PURE COMMUNISM
You have two cows. Your neighbours help you take care of them, and
you all share the milk.
APPLIED COMMUNISM
You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the
government takes all the milk.
DICTATORSHIP
You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.
SINGAPOREAN DEMOCRACY
You have two cows. The government fines you for illegally keeping
two unlicensed farm animals in an apartment.
CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull, which you use to
breed, to the other cow. Then you create a great website and start
offering to export sperm from the bull to anyone and everyone,
especially emerging markets, over the Internet. After a fewweeks,
your company completes its IPO on NASDAQ, and a few brokerage firms
start coverage with a strong buy rating for this wonderful new
Internet stock. Your stock zooms from the 10p per share initial
offering price to pounds 110, when you sell. Thestock plummets back
to 10p a few months later when the dopes who bought it realise that
your business has no earnings and never will, despite the Internet
connection.
Several law firms and the SEC bring various civil and criminal
actions against the company, all of the officers and directors and
(of course) you, under various fraud theories. You quickly settle the
civil cases so the lawyers get paid, but you stillhave plenty stashed
away. You plead nolo in the SEC case, and you are sentenced to ten
years in prison, of which you actually serve seven weeks. When you
come out, you can't resist the temptation to buy two chickens.
Then...
HONG KONG
CAPITALISM
You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly-listed
company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the
bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general
offer, so that you can get all four cows back, with atax deduction
for keeping five cows.
The milk rights of six cows are then transferred via a Panamanian
intermediary to a Cayman Islands company, secretly-owned by the
majority shareholder, who sells the rights to all seven cows milk
back to the listed company and proceeds from the sales aredeferred.
The annual report says that the company owns eight cows, with an
option on one more. Meanwhile, you kill the two cows because of the
bad feng shui.
TRUE DEMOCRACY
You have two cows. Your neighbours decide who gets the milk.
REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY
You have two cows. Your neighbours vote for someone to tell you
who gets the milk.
AMERICAN
DEMOCRACY
The government promises to give you two cows if you vote for it.
After the election, the president is impeached for speculating in cow
futures. The press dubs the affair "Cowgate".
BRITISH DEMOCRACY
You have two cows. You feed them sheep's brains and they go mad.
The government does nothing.
BUREAUCRACY
You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can
feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk
them. After that, it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and
pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you tofill out forms
accounting for the missing cows.
FEMINISM
You have two cows. They get married and adopt a calf.
TOTALITARIANISM
You have two cows. The government takes them and denies they ever
existed.
Milk is banned.
POLITICAL
CORRECTNESS
You are associated with (the concept of "ownership" is a symbol of
the phallo-centric, war-mongerish, intolerant past) two differently-
aged (but no less valuable to society) bovines of non-specified
gender.
SURREALISM
You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take
harmonica lessons.
(C) 2000 Belfast News Letter. via Bell&Howell Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
