Washington, DC - (Oct 28) - Gil Bates, the absolute poorest man alive, was found guilty in DC Federal Court, today, of not even trying to monopolize or control or even influence a single fucking thing on earth -- not even the nanoscopic market for still-functioning insect musculature, like live flea hamstring or living earwig sphincter.

Bates was sentenced by Judge Rebecca Kramer to spend the rest of his natural life running this hot new hi-tech startup formed by merging Microsoft, Intel, Yahoo, Amazon, Bertelsmann, Time-Warner, Fox, Disney, General Electric, Genentech, AT&T, MCI, General Motors, Toyota, Sony, RJR Nabisco, MIT and MTV under one roof, and which, according to Bates' secretary, will soon release its first hot new product, a hot new hit TV series called "Botched By An Anglo," where, each week, some happy, successful, peaceful, loving, fulfilling, spiritual situation is totally fucked up by some drunken white guy who stumbles in off the street and just starts sleeping in the kitchen of some formerly happy, peaceful, successful, spiritual, fulfilled, loving family, till they all go berserk and wind up killing everybody, regardless of social class, religion, or national orifice.

Bates, who lives in a cardboard shack on the outskirts of town, officially became Misfortune magazine's "Poorest Man Alive" a few months ago, when representatives from the Mastercard Corporation knocked on his shack door made out of old newspapers, and told him it was time to pay the $38 billion tab he'd run up by, apparently, charging all his meals to his credit card, since birth.

Bates who, literally, "has nothing to wear," appeared in court yesterday and attempted to dispute government charges by projecting huge slides on the wall showing alleged emails sent to him allegedly indicating that he was actually CEO of a huge company that attempted to abuse its monopoly of the freight train muzak industry in order to illegally control the rapidly growing market for selling financial services to the rapidly growing class of messed-up losers who hop freight trains in the middle of the night in the rain, then go berserk and pass out mumbling something about "value" being just a big ponzi scheme played on the self by the self, under the guise of existing at all.