I have had to print out, sign, scan and email so many documents that it would have cost me more to go to Staples and use their facilities than buy a new printer and do it from home. So I bought a new printer and did it from home.
All this while accessing my Service Canada account every morning and receiving the "We have received your application for E.I. and are doing our best to process it as soon as possible..." or however they say, sorry, you've been out of work for almost two months and the INSURANCE we force you to buy for just such an occasion still ain't paying out. Why don't I feel any sense of insurance?
I can't say I'm not (almost) enjoying this stuff though. Apart from the wait for employment insurance, because I am really looking forward to the goal that it all leads to. I'm pretty excited about living in a place with a pool! I'll be gutted if for some reason I can't find one. But I'm sure having a maid, driver, back yard garden, and a nice place, even without a pool, I'll get over it. Also I will have a new language to try to learn, new places to go, people to meet, a fairly new culture to explore, (went to Bali for a month in the early (?zeroes?) two thousands), new place to work, new co-workers and I'll be back to doing the job that I love most. Of all the jobs I've done. I mean I'm sure I'd like it better if I were the personal biographer of Bear Grylls or something but I've never had that job.
But stress is the result of change, negative OR positive, and I think it might have just caught up with me all at once over the last few days. I guess it could have been the wait in the clinic waiting room for an immigration physical including HIV/drug blood and urine tests, which I still haven't been able to get; or it could have been the rush hour C-train ride to Mark and Sherrilynn's place that was so crowded with people and germs it brought me right back to Asia; or maybe something I ate or drank... I dunno. But Sunday, Monday and Tuesday my body has spontaneously orchestrated a sort of all exit enema the likes of which I HAVE experienced only once before, in the Philippines, where I'm pretty sure I had malaria. All I have managed to do is sleep, watch Netflix, and eat two meals, which were instantly liquefied and purged. That and moan and groan. I'm pretty sure I had a fever because every time I got up or even turned over in bed I got the tingles. Call me weird but I like the sick boy tingles. They remind me of my childhood when I was always sick. This is the first time I've had anything but a cold since that time in the Philippines with my self-diagnosed malaria. I am just never sick. And I said that during my telephone interview with my new boss, John. And now look at me.
Today I feel better but don't think I'll go out and try to get that physical at the clinic today just to be sure I give the appropriate amount of time for this bug, if it happens to be the flu, to run its course. I'm happy to be up and about though. I'll tell you whatever I had sucked all the energy right out of me! Just being in an upright position at the computer using my body for something other than to fight that ague feels like a victory. Yesterday I had no choice but to go out and buy some essentials. Milk, margarine, bread and eggs. Can't make ANYTHING without those things! I walked up to the Family Market and back. Taking off my backpack full of groceries when I got home I felt like I was removing my frosty gear at basecamp after having just completed a successful but gruelling descent of Everest.
So what, in my lengthy absence from blogging, has ping ponged around the one part of my body that remained productive during my convalescence? How to save the world, of course. It's that crazy graphic I found a while ago that illustrates what a trillion bucks looks like. Combined with some stats in the trillions of dollars and metaphorically fused with my recent gastrointestinal lava spewing.
Please click on THIS LINK if you haven't seen this graphic graphic yet.
Isn't that nuts? I can't believe how little a pile a million bucks is! But then if I think about it, just ONE of those little sheets of paper would be really nice right about now. I'm probably like a huge chunk of this world in dreaming about the first picture in that illustration. "Oh I wish I had an extra hundred bucks!" I'm proud to count myself among the impoverished majority on our planet. The second graphic removes me from the majority I reckon in that I have HAD that much in my lifetime. A few times I have had 10 thou. to my name. Not today, but... that's pretty much the neighbourhood of the most money I've ever had.
So the million dollars represents 100 times the most money I've ever had. It seems unattainable to me. Here I think I am back in the majority. To conceive of people who understand the next couple of phases is, I freely admit, beyond my mental scope. I mean there are people out there that have attained positions in this world that enable them to think of the 100 million pile the way I, and so many others, think of the 100 dollars: "Oh I wish I had an extra 100 million!" What blows my mind even more is that I think, (and there's no way of knowing this, but), I THINK these people feel the same way as I do now when they make this absurd comment. They actually feel that they NEED that extra 100 mil. cuz they're BROKE! This is a legitimate sickness, my dear readers.
But if that sickness is the common cold of money dementia, what economic Ebola is being spread amongst the very few on our planet who can actually say that about a billion dollars? And don't kid yourself, they're out there. "Oh I wish I had an extra billion dollars!" I guarantee you people have uttered this phrase or something like it. Maybe while trying to impoverish a nation by supporting a shaky temporary military government coup, maybe while funding the troops that oust that government, or maybe while draining the country's resources while making it look like they are financially supporting the establishment of a new, more democratic nation, people have definitely said this! As I commented on facebook not long ago, these people can afford the best mental facilities available in the world. Put them there immediately because they are extremely ill. The one unique thing about this ailment is that it's not the sufferer who dies from it, it's almost everyone else. While they're in the mental facilities, study them, create an antidote and a vaccination for this virus, and while they are in the hospitals, have clear-minded individuals dispersing their billions throughout the world in a socialist therapy that would, indeed, be the cure itself!
Like all good rehabilitative therapy it would need to be gradual. You have to crawl, before you can walk, right? Send a few billion to one of the countries the patient has ruined and show him how it actually helps the country and makes people happy to be well fed, healthy and productive. Do this slowly but surely until the patient is learning how to take pleasure in the happiness of other people. Then when you break it to him that he has a net worth only in the hundreds of millions he will be better able to incorporate that into his fractured and malfunctioning intellect. Continue with this until the patient's fortune is merely enough to support him and his entire extended family for the rest of their lives and you may actually have brain functions approaching normal once again. Some patients may require a more aggressive type of therapy that incorporates actual WORK, possibly exposure to, and in some remote cases, living amongst the public, but only if necessary.
I think Roger Waters and Pink Floyd said it long before me, and much more melodically:
take all your overgrown infants away somewhere
and build them a home a little place of their own
the Fletcher memorial
home for incurable tyrants and kings
and they can appear to themselves every day
on closed circuit T.V.
to make sure they're still real
it's the only connection they feel
"ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Reagan and Haig
Mr. Begin and friend Mrs. Thatcher and Paisley
Mr. Brezhnev and party
the ghost of McCarthy
the memories of Nixon
and now, and in colour, a group of anonymous Latin
American meat packing glitterati"
did they expect us to treat them with any respect
they can polish their medals and sharpen their
smiles, and amuse themselves playing games for a while
boom boom, bang bang, lie down you're dead
safe in the permanent gaze of a cold glass eye
with their favourite toys
they'll be good girls and boys
in the Fletcher memorial home for colonial
wasters of life and limb
is everyone in?
are you having a nice time?
now the final solution can be applied
It's from the album "The Final Cut." I think it's a highly underrated album. You can tell how old the problem is by the names in the song. The names of corporate big wigs could be easily substituted. Names like Hugh Grant, (Monsanto CEO), Bob Dudley or Tony Hayward who would be the more recognizable B.P. head man, any of the Waltons of Wal-mart fame, maybe a person in politics or two like Dink Cheney or other architects of the new world order. We shouldn't hate these people, we should pity them. They are sick and need our help. They just don't know it. We need to institutionalize them for their own good. And it needs to happen soon because there is a danger on the horizon. The danger is a super virus that makes Ebola and this money sickness look like a hangnail. Soon there will be people who might say, "Oh I wish I had an extra TRILLION dollars!" And I don't believe there can be any help for these people.
Let's look at the signs of this imminent pandemic. First check THIS out. Then there's stuff like THIS and THIS about the 21 to 31 TRILLION bucks hidden in "tax shelters" overseas in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland. This should make us ALL nervous.
What are these stories telling us? Well, let's break them down. First of all the euphemism of the day: "tax shelter." I just love that! This is one of the symptoms of the money sickness: vocabulary variance. The difference between "tax evasion" which people, relatively poor people, can be jailed for, and "tax sheltering" is dependant upon membership in the extra billion club. "Slave labour" becomes "outsourcing." Screwing the local employee before outsourcing to a more "economically viable location" becomes "downsizing," or "redundancy." People, they are shipping American and Canadian chicken to China to have it plucked and processed then shipped back! Of course then this will create a need to change food safety "rules" to food safety "guidelines." Rather than support your own people and chop up chicken at home, it is "cost-efficient" to send it to China and back. That can only come from decades of careful cultivation of slave labour through systematic impoverishing of nations in order to MAKE labour so inexpensive in those countries and workers redundant anywhere they are paid enough to pay the bills. But that's not "oligarchy" that's just "business." This is HOW that money that is so dirty it needs to be "hidden," I'm sorry, "sheltered" overseas is made. And if it's hidden you just know no matter how thorough this James Henry was, it could just be the amount that the super rich allowed him to uncover in order to ensure that the bulk of the money remains unaccounted for. Do the super rich EVER tell Forbes their actual worth for their list every year? Of course not! That would scare people! And rightfully so! Same thing happening here and that is probably what prompted Henry's statement that the real total IS closer to 31 trillion.
And these are the same heads of the same companies, the same mentally unbalanced individuals who are accepting, indeed, feel ENTITLED to "corporate welfare," or as they would phrase it, "government subsidies." So, they have enough money to end the world's problems, but the world's problems is what made them that money. Pssst, they purposely CREATED the world's problems! They have this money stashed away so nobody gets any big ideas about doing anything silly like allowing everyone to be self-sufficient and for the added purpose of not paying taxes. Furthermore, they take government assistance for their obscenely successful companies because.... GASP!!! .... THEY WISH THEY HAD THAT EXTRA TRILLION!
I don't know what the stats are for Canada but have no reason to doubt they would be much the same. And I am here listening to people whinge about how their tax dollars go toward supporting welfare cases who are lazy and spend their free money on tattoos and should be drug tested before they get their checks. We have a fraction of a clue what the government does with our tax money. It's the only thing we pay for that we know so little about. Excuse me, it's the only thing we are FORCED to pay for that we know so little about. Yet we keep on doing it like the good little chattel we are. I said to my friend the other day that if there were a sign at the movies that read, "Billionaires free, everyone else pays double," we'd still go to the movie. That's not even a good analogy because at least you get to watch a movie and it could be good.
I know it may not be all that simple. Like I said this is something that hasn't happened overnight. It's been a systematic process that has taken some time. The ever decreasing fraction of the world's population who are the ones I am talking about here are probably not the ones who are brain damaged. But the system has been well entrenched by their predecessors and it is probably safe to say they are brain WASHED. Either way mandatory therapy is needed. In most, if not all cases it will need to be against their will. And they won't be easily brought in to the facilities where they belong. But it is our job to do it. If not this sickness will rage through US, not them, until it saps all of our skills, ideas, creativity, ingenuity, and happiness like shit we voluntarily flush into the corporate toilet then slump back to bed until the next bowel movement. Stop squirting into the New World Toilet. Take some economic Imodium and book a rich person into a home. Or steal their money and redistribute it like that great Socialist hero, Robin Hood. Short of that we could just show a rich person a video like THIS. Let the rich know that a tiny bit of their money could make others deliriously happy while a mountain of it to add to their pile won't create a fraction of that happiness in themselves. Make them see giving as more than a tax loophole. Nah! Just put them all into homes! Then the final solution can be applied. Redisperse all the money evenly and start the world over again. Take two. Let's try a different tack where we share and work together this time. See how long that lasts.
THIS is how we can save the world. Leastaways that's how I reckon.
No comments:
Post a Comment