THE CLASSIC VERSION

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The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.



THE MODERN VERSION

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The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. CBS, CNN, MSNBC and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper

next to video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

America and the world is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Then a representative of the NAAGB (National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on Nightline and charges the ant with "green bias", and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism.

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and

everybody cries when he sings "It's Not Easy Being Green." Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest appearance on the CBS Evening News to tell a concerned Dan Rather that they

will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Reagan summers, or as Bill refers to it, the "Temperatures of the 80's."

Richard Gephardt exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share."

Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism Act". Retroactive to the beginning of the summer, the ant was fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home

is confiscated by the government.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he's in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him since he doesn't know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in

the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's food, they are showing Bill Clinton standing before a wildly applauding group of compatriots announcing that

a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.

...yeah...that was a good one...I like Fairy Tales...

...can you tell us the one called "Iraqi Freedom"...that's my FAVORITE!

Hits the nail exactly on the head.

little red riding hood was heading to her grandmothers house in search of free room&board, as she was recently cut off from social welfare payments. It was a long trek and she had nothing else to think about so she devised a scheme to rip off her old grandmother of everything she owned.

An enterprising wolf fired up a conversation with littlered and offered to transport her for $50. Littlered agreed and the wolf carried her all the way nonstop.

Arriving at grannys place the wolf asked for his pay in cash, but little red had none and said she would give him an iou or a postdated cheque. Wolfie refused, based on past experience, and demanded an item of equal value in the house, or else he would eat her.

Granny came out and asked what the fuck was going on and who was the unshaven asshole over there. little red spewed a bs kidnapping story. The wolf grabbed some lawn furniture and said:"you deserve each other". and left.

So you think the working class of the world is divided into ants and grasshoppers or those who work hard and those who are lazy loafers and that explains the difference between rich and poor. How utterly asinine!

Coal miners work extremely hard all their lives and all they get is black lung. My mother worked for years in a factory and died from emphysema due to the steel dust in the air. Working hard is not the avenue to great wealth. Getting other people to work hard for you like a capitalist does and then skimming off the surplus value created by their labor is how it is accomplished. Then, one can become a contributor to George W. Bush's election campaign and have the government give you billions in tax breaks, subsidies, research and development, export promotions and even fight wars on your behalf. What we have in this country is socialism for the wealthy capitalists and so-called free enterprise for the workers. And incidentally, the media is controlled by the very wealthy and if you think they have great compassion for the poor, when all of history proves they couldn't care less, then you are living in fantasy land.

Your little fable is either a disingenuous piece of propaganda or you have the IQ of a clam. I guess the two are not mutually exclusive.

>>>Coal miners work extremely hard all their lives and all they get is black lung. My mother worked for years in a factory and died from emphysema due to the steel dust in the air. Working hard is not the avenue to great wealth.

Taking a job as a coal miner or factory worker and making a career of it is not exactly the fast track to the good life. People make choices and those choices have a lot to do with how they live their lives. Don't blame someone else for the bad choices your family members made on their own.

>>>Getting other people to work hard for you like a capitalist does and then skimming off the surplus value created by their labor is how it is accomplished.

All of the successful people I know work(ed) hard themselves, very hard. If and when they do get their business to the point where they’re able to ‘skim off’ and live the good life, they’ve surely earned it.

>>>Then, one can become a contributor to George W. Bush's election campaign and have the government give you billions in tax breaks, subsidies, research and development, export promotions and even fight wars on your behalf. What we have in this country is socialism for the wealthy capitalists and so-called free enterprise for the workers.

That’s a bunch of rot. The government doesn't give, the government takes. The government has no money or resources other than what it confiscates from us citizens in the name of taxation. The folks who voted for George W and who get those tax breaks are the same folks who pay 90% of the taxes in this country. They’re the ones who are carrrying most of the load Gary.

>>>And incidentally, the media is controlled by the very wealthy and if you think they have great compassion for the poor, when all of history proves they couldn't care less, then you are living in fantasy land.

Most of the major US media is controlled by Democrats. That certainly includes NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, LA Times, NY Times, Wash Post, etc.

no such creature exists. Not in thr USA.

People do indeed make choices. However, when one is very poor, those choices are extremely limited because of the inabilitiy to save money. In fact, most people go into debt. How is a coal miner, deeply in debt to the company store, possibly going to save enough money to send his child to college. Low wage earners spend all their money on food and rent and sometimes today they are homeless and sleep in their car because they can't even afford the rent. You expect these people to go to college and become doctors and lawyers. Give me a break! And please don't give me this BS that professional people who make a lot of money work harder than manual laborers and therefore have more money. I have done both and in my years as a scientist I worked a lot less hard and was under much less stress than when I did farm work, tree planting, logging and other strenuous work.

The government both takes and gives. It takes from the poor and middle classes and gives to the rich. Ronald Reagan lowered income taxes on corporations from 70% to less than 30% and it has been increased only slightly since then. However, most large corporations pay no income tax at all by sheltering their assets in offshore subsidiaries. General Motors for many years paid no income tax at all. However, these corporations do get money from the government in subsidies, research and development and indeed the whole military budget is one huge subsidy to high technology industry. So unless your name is Rockefeller or DuPont, you and I are paying taxes for their enrichment.

Democrats are just as committed to capitalism as Republicans are. The fact that a few media corporations are owned by Democrats is meaningless. You obviously don't understand the difference between being liberal and being a radical. Liberals complain a lot about injustices to the poor, but are very committed to capitalism and allow only a few reforms to the system. In fact, the liberals of the Weimar Republic in Germany were nearly as repressive on communists as far as prison sentences and executions as the Nazis. Let me know when media corporations are owned by communists who would place the ownership of corporations in the hands of the workers. Then you would have a point.

Gary says it right. Some people have more choices than others. My uncle died from an aggravated lung condition from working in a factory breathing fibers. My mom got arthritis working in a cold factory. These people didn't have choices and opportunities -- but is it ever right that these jobs cost people their lives? Is it right that the very same jobs pay less today than they did in the 60s and 70s, when they paid enough for both these people to buy modest homes?

Lefty, your "I got mine" attitude is bullshit.

Here's the real story of the ant and the grasshopper.

All summer long, during the good times, the ants worked to build up their collective. They were rather sour fellows, focused on work, communalism, meetings, and such, but they knew a hard winter was coming.

The grasshopper, instead, chose to party it up, chewing tobbacco and playing his fiddle. "Man, you commie ants are a real drag. Don't be so serious," said the hedonistic grasshopper.

The ants would cluck-cluck. They yearned to be free and liberated like the green grasshopper, but had known years of deprivation and death due to capitalist excess. Life, they knew, was work and sacrifice.

As we all know, the hard winter came, and the grasshopper nearly froze to death, but was rescued by the industrious ants. Saved from a horrible fate, the grasshopper repaid the collective by entertaining them, reminding the ants about the value of rebellious culture.

The next year, things got worse. The farmer who owned the land on which the insects thrived switched to a genetically altered crop that was resistant to pesticides.

The ants and grasshoppers were caught unawares as the chemical warfare commenced. A vapor filled the air, and the insects stopped in their tracks, hallucinated about fire and brimstone, then watched their souls evaporate into the silent heat of a gaseous Sun.

...klepty never worked a day in his life....