Canadian
billionaires aren’t greedy enough
by
Robert LaFrance
One of those economic study groups –
I never did catch the name – created a 10-second splash last week when they
announced that of the ‘new wealth’ created in 2017, about 82% found its way into
the wallets of the top one percent of Americans and about 54% slid quietly into
the pockets of Canada’s richest one percent.
What’s the matter, Canadians?
Where’s our greed? We have let Americans trim our sails once again, when we
should be leading them down the Yellow Greed Road. In fact, 100% of this
so-called newly created wealth should be going to out to richest one-half
percent. No more mister nice guy for us.
While I am not quite among Canada’s
top money ‘earners’ (as the rich like to see themselves) I still feel that we
should be doing better in separating the lower income earners from their
minimum wages. Tim Hortons, especially that Ontario one run by the real Tim
Horton’s grand-daughter, have the right idea: when the workers get their minimum
wage increase, find some way to take it back – by phone from the Cayman Islands
if necessary.
Which allows me to segue to the
subject of a phrase I often hear: ‘the middle class’. Excuse me, but I thought
the Class System was something we left behind in Europe. Correct me if you
must, but Lord and Lady So-and-so were supposed to be absorbed into what the
great writer H. L. Mencken called “the great unwashed”, but listen to this
logic:
If there is a middle class, there
must be a lower class, right? And if there is a lower class and a middle class,
there must be an upper class, right? And if those classes exist, then we must
be back into the Class System, right?
Let us rise up, like a piece of cork
in a woodland pond, and demand our rights. We don’t care about money, do we?
But we do care about being classed as upper, middle and lower.
***********************
It is a bit ironic that ‘privacy
concerns’ are so dominant, now that there is no possible way that a person can
maintain his or her privacy. Of course, like most things nowadays, it’s a scam.
(Man, am I ever cynical!)
It seems as if every time anyone
wants some information about another person, he runs up against the “Privacy”
wall, even if it makes no sense whatsoever. As an example, Flug’s nephew
Jerraldo fell down in front of the bank in Campbellton and was carted off to
the hospital with a broken arm and a fractured skull. Flug heard about it, with
full details including Jerraldo’s shoe size, on Facebook, but when he, Flug,
went in to the hospital to see his favourite nephew he ran into that wall. They
wouldn’t even admit that such a person as Jerraldo existed.
He eventually did find his nephew
happily strumming his sitar in a lounge. “How ya doing, Uncle Flug!” he said.
“How did you get past the five layers of security to get here?” Flug said that
he had looked in the window and there was Jerraldo doing his Ravi Shankar
impression.
Another example of this privacy
fanaticism is the way governments and companies use the old scam “I can’t talk
about that because it’s before the courts” so they don’t have to say a word on
a certain case. They wouldn’t to jeopardize their pensions by actually saying
something, would they?
And then there’s the ‘voice mail
scam’ where anyone trying to information (even their own) from an insurance
company, bank or government finds himself facing an electronic wall of “Your
call is important to us, leave your name and number and we will get back to you
about the time that hell freezes over and pigs fly up to their nests”.
On the other hand, when a male
politician resigns because he’s accused of ‘sexual misconduct’, we immediately
hear every detail about HIM but nothing about his accuser. The old concept of
‘innocent before proven guilty’ doesn’t seem to matter in those cases.
Everywhere we go we are confronted
by people who refuse to give us information on the grounds that I mentioned and
there are dozens of other ways governments and other organizations keep us
citizens from learning what they are up to. I would lead a charge against this
but I’m too lazy and too much of a private person.
Anyway, if we really want to learn
secrets, we can always go to Facebook.-end-
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