One year in office: 50th Congress adjourns for summer recess

The First Session of Patria's 50th Congress (1·L 2014-15) adjourned today, following ratification of Patria's fiscal 2016 budget. The traditional Annual Message to Congress was delivered as the last function of Congress immediately prior to the Speaker of the House banging the gavel and blowing the vuvuzela to declare the House adjourned for the northern hemisphere summer:

Om anavadyangyai namah. Salutations to the Divine Mother whose body is worthy of worship. With the Divine Mother’s blessings, the 50^th Congressus Patriaë has come to the end of its first year in office. This session ends as it began – at the lotus feet of Amma Sri Karunamayi. As the Speaker of the House, Amma Karunamayi has kept peace and order on the floor of Congress. As a sadguru, her teachings have been an inspiration on the path of Sanatan Dharma. As an incarnation of Mother Saraswati, her spoken words and songs have brought life and light to the soul of all Patria even as Stephen Harper’s henchmen or Canadian border security authorities, possibly acting on orders from Canada’s spy service, apparently turned her away as she was about to bless her Toronto children. Jai Karunamayi!

In keeping with Patria’s traditions and congressional protocol, the last act of the First Session just moments ago was the ratification of Patria’s fiscal 2016 budget. It is thus duly noted that over the course of this session, Patria’s economy has improved to some extent. By pure statistics alone, the unemployment rate has fallen even if the jobs that have been created are less than ideal: short-term, contract positions or joblets that only throw those who accept such positions back on the unemployment rolls in short order, while the so-called permanent positions are mostly sub-entry level, minimum wage and with little job security or possibility for advancement. To state the obvious, we are still very short of the full recovery that was promised in the election campaign of one year ago. But as we know, over the course of a quarter century since the Dharmic Revolution, Patria is committed to offering its citizens more than simply “recovery” or subsistence-level dead-end jobs, while cutting “waste” or “gravy” in order to appease the bean counters, elites and plutocrats. This is why the austerity of the 49^th Congress, presumably in response to the global economic downturn that began in 2008-09, proved to be such a failed policy. As Amma recently said, “if the economic advancement of a nation fails to ensure well-being and happiness to its citizens, it should be assumed that there is a serious flaw in the process”. Whether a superpower like the United States, an emerging power like India, or an unrecognized micro-state like Patria, a nation’s growth should be measured in more than the numbers of its gross domestic product. To quote the Amrita Party leader again, “money alone cannot ensure happiness, which needs ethics and cultural values. Otherwise, it would be like putting makeup on a dead body”.

Along with the trillion-rupee economic stimuli, funding for social programs and the other components of a compassionate, progressive realm, the budget ratified today also includes appropriations for the celebration of “Ramrajyavarsham 200”, Patria’s bicentennial celebrations in 2018. On this day, one of the official bicentennial logos for the local and national celebrations has been released (and is viewable above).

As the 2014 election campaign sent the message that Patria would no longer be a safe place for social conservatives, Patria has indeed turned away from Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan and other mostly imported-from-America voices that would have taken Patria back to the 1950s rather than into the second decade of the twenty-first century. The tired war horses and hoary talking points of the social conservatives, such as opposition to same-sex marriage or advocating modest dress for women, are fading from Patria’s public squares and AM radio airwaves. Those who continue to push for restricted access to abortion, marriage only between a man and a woman, or abstinence-only sex education in grade school will prove to be on the wrong side of history, in Patria at least.

As the social conservatives were in retreat in 2014-15, the law and order conservatives have also become increasingly irrelevant over the course of this session. Nothwithstanding the National Union’s unrelenting push for mass incarceration, longer prison sentences, three-strikes-you’re-out mandatory life sentences for repeat offenders and a return to the death penalty, resistance is growing in Patria to the US-style prison industrial complex, also known as the “new Jim Crow”, filling cell blocks with mostly non-white males who – in America at least – become a permanent underclass, denied the right to vote and often virtually unemployable long after their release from prison. This session has taken action to ensure that privately operated for-profit prisons, whose bottom line is a steady supply of small fry caught in the failed war on drugs, must not proliferate in Patria.

Along with banning private prisons, Patria has said no to the literal definition of a police state – a state with a visible police presence on the street, where the police forces of major cities and even suburbs constitute an unaccountable above-the-law armed force equipped with more deadly firepower than the real Army. Wearing a badge and carrying a gun do not make police officers above the laws they are tasked to enforce. The police must not become a privileged elite corps or gang of bullies accountable only to themselves. No one in Patria – and certainly not in America – should be naive enough to believe that “if you are not breaking the law you have nothing to fear from the police”, or that simply having white skin will protect them from being falsely arrested, jailed without charges, bullied, beaten or even killed in cold blood by rogue police officers.

Even as Congress adjourns, the Jungle Party caucus awaits its most anticipated day of the year: the 2015 Smack-Off. Much of Patria will tune in to the Jim Rome show tomorrow, in Castoropolis on PMBC AM 1152, or will listen via Jungle Insider, to find out if Mike in Indy and Chael Sonnen can defend their shared king of smack title and take home the winner-take-all $5000 cash prize, and if not, whether the new Smack-Off champion will be a previous Smack-Off winner such as Brad in Corona, a sitting member of the Jungle Party caucus or a potential representative in the election of 2018.

And so the time has come; let us make a pledge to meet in September. As is traditional, this session is adjourned with a brief prayer, and a moment of silent reflection for those who have lost their lives during the course of this session as a result of war, terrorist acts, disasters or senseless violence, from Nepal to Charleston, South Carolina:

Lokah samasthah sukhino bhavantu.

Asato ma sad gamaya

Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya

Mrityor ma amritam gamaya. 

Hari Om.  Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.

Under the power vested in me by the Constitution of Patria, I declare closed the First Session of the 50^th Congress, and call this Congress to re-assemble here on Monday, 21 September 2015, to open the Second Session of the 50^th Congress.