The Art of Political Rhetoric
I am glad you asked me that question
(and not the other one). Absolutely.
Under no circumstances,
except those that will definitely arise.
We need to have a conversation;
and offer the public big solutions
to problems they didn’t know they had.
We must build an economy based
on real people going
backwards up the escalator
towards a future in which
they can all equally
disbelieve. The inquiry into these
matters must have teeth,
or at least, dentures.
We will make this country a hub
for inward upvestment from
the Apples, the Googles,
the Redtubes. It’s a zero-sum
game between Limerick
and Drogheda United in which
neither team will turn up,
if they know what’s good for them.
Hardly anyone will die
because of what we propose. We will provide
the twenty first century hospitals
the squeezed muddle have been roaring
and shouting for. We are committed,
absolutely, to exclusivity in the arts.
Ballet dancing for big people. That sort of thing.
We will fill the country
with so many green-house gasses,
it will float off, of its own volition,
into the sky.
I was privileged to attend yesterday
the least important meeting
in the history of the world.
This is not a time for soundbites,
but I can feel
what I sincerely hope
is the hand of posterity
up my derriere
and think it might be stuck there.
.
KEVIN HIGGINS is the Bogman’s Cannon satirist-in-residence.
*Most readers I am sure, are aware of the tax rate in Ireland that lures many US tech companies to that country and set up headquarters there. The practice is called Corporate Inversions. It is not considered tax evasion. The recent $160 billion merger of Allergan and Pfizer is also a strategy for Pfizer to move its headquarters or domicile as they call it as if a corporation lives somewhere, to Ireland. The move will reduce Pfizer's tax rate from around 25% to 7.5%, "one of the lowest effective tax rates of any company on the planet,”
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