By Eric Wilson

The shutdown continues: American families suffocate as disinterested billionaires gather in Switzerland. Our country, and our president, are no longer their concern.

As 800,000+ Americans employed by the government — democrats, republicans, independents, undecideds, and others — brace for a second month without pay, the toddler-in-chief and architect of this shutdown is throwing yet another tantrum in the White House. Inside sources report the president has been stomping about and complaining that he can’t take his 44th(?) (I’ve lost count) vacation since his inauguration, until someone cleans up this mess.

The mess he made — by himself.

Early on in the shutdown newly elected congresswoman and billionaire taint-chaffer extraordinaire, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had been searching hi and low for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in an effort to force him to call for a vote on the Senate floor to reopen government. His actions last Thursday mark the third time that McConnell has blocked House-passed government funding bills in as many weeks.

Mitch disappeared after delivering to the president a government funding bill unanimously passed by the Senate just prior to Christmas (which Trump vetoed because some lich with tits hates brown people, and in all likelihood, high-level lawful good clerics) and has only popped his head out of his shell to ease sanctions on Russian oligarch and Putin ally, Oleg Deripaska, and to vote on the Hyde Amendment. That bill “would have expanded and made permanent the discriminatory Hyde Amendment, devastating access to reproductive healthcare for millions of women.” It was ultimately defeated.

Billionaires and multi-millionaires convening at Davos (a yearly retreat where obscenely overvalued thieves gather to congratulate themselves on their ill-gotten gains, measure their bloated portfolios, and discuss how to wring the last vestiges of sweat-equity from the rest of us still breathing their air) bristled at the idea of paying taxes on their stolen interests; one claiming anonymously that the 70 percent tax rate on yearly income over $10,000,000, which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has proposed, will “never happen.”

Luckily, American Shithole managed to sneak one of our top investigative reporters into the World Economic Forum — where a surprising number of billionaires felt comfortable expressing their complete lack of empathy on the record. Here are a few choice statements:

“I’m miffed it will require an afternoon of phone calls from my underlings to squash this ridiculous tax on high-bracket earnings,” said Thornton Wadsworth Fingerbottom III, “My minions have better things to do; like gathering the blood of innocents for my weekly bathing ritual.”

“Those kids aren’t going to bleed themselves,” he added.

“Tax the wealthy?” scoffed Archduke of Hell, Asmodeus, visiting the Koch brothers on holiday. “You’ve a better chance convincing evangelicals Jesus was black.”

“Seventy percent on everything we steal over $10,000,000!” exclaimed one exasperated hoarder of several countries worth of wealth. “That’s my disposable income earmarked for climate change denial!” When asked how he would feel about American kids desperately in need of medical care receiving that aid via taxation of the ultra-rich, billionaire industrialist Bartholomew Shitsgold added, “I’d rather burn every children’s hospital to the ground.”

Yes, Universe forbid that children be free from ringworm. As I have said before, a billionaire’s eleventeenth yacht isn’t going to pay for itself, right? So yes, it will “never happen.”

Well, it would happen, if we just — as a species — took a weekend, and beat the shit out of as many billionaires as we could. We even know where they’ll be every year in January. Seriously though, there are only a couple thousand of you fucking scumbags out there, and as a species of 7.7 billion that you are putting at risk of extinction, we could knock all of you the fuck out in a weekend. Hell, we’d be done by Saturday afternoon.

Would it happen then, fuckfaces?

If we knocked a bunch of your greedy dicks in the dirt, could billions of starving and sick humans get the bare-minimum of assistance, then?

What an amazing Monday morning that would be for humanity. A bunch of black-eyed billionaires stuttering apologies and making donations, all in the time it takes to regret camping.

Alas, I’ve let my dream of a better world and my naughty imagination get the better of me…

As of Tuesday evening, the Senate is preparing to vote Thursday on separate bills, ostensibly to reopen government — the GOP bill would, among other things, prohibit Central American children from applying for asylum at the U.S. border.

That’s what they will be voting on this week. That’s what’s important.

Good to see the fucking republicans have still got their priorities straight. We literally have a traitor in the White House as well as several other powerful republicans whose actions indicate they too have been compromised by the Russian government — and yet the GOP is focused on a handful of children that may, or may not, survive a 2,000-mile odyssey in order to reach our southern border.

They want to make sure those kids can’t even ask to come in.

Millions of Americans are suffering because of this shutdown; millions more are suffering around the world because of this administration. More Americans than ever before — including (as we’ve now come to understand) government employees — are living check to check. Middle Class America (or what’s left of it) is a fucking check stub away from bankruptcy. Still, we wait and we hope for someone to wake us from this fevered dream. Someone whose energy and ideas pull some air back into the room, because we’re suffocating. Maybe that will be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I don’t know. Billionaires are scared of her, and that has certainly piqued my interest.

More than likely, it’s just us — the have-little and have-nots — although I do believe she is one of us, and whether you like it or not (unless you winter in Davos) you are one of us, too. Yes, you too, red hat.

Meanwhile, the world’s richest, greediest assholes are hobnobbing in Switzerland having the fucking time of their lives watching the rest of us tear each other apart.