The Importance of Being Art

 Art. 

In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde makes the final statement that "All art is quite useless."

Here's a guy whose greatest gift might be the contradictory epithet writing a piece of art whose primary use is the description of the concept that art is useless. Oxymorons, inverted epigrams, contradictory epithets... these are the soul of Oscar Wilde's art. They are his stock in trade. Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray said he could believe anything provided it is quite incredible. "I can resist anything except temptation," said Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere's Fan. Indeed the eyelid half closed, opium-soaked, languid rhetoric of the upper class dandies Wilde obviously admired and worked hard to portray, and from whence most of his clever witticisms are derived, was effortlessness that could only come from a great deal of hard work and study. Hard work disguised as leisure that could only be enjoyed by the upper class since "work is the curse of the drinking class."

We need to consider the source of this preface. At the risk of putting words in the artist's mouth or being Caliban viewing his ugly reflection, I believe Wilde is saying art is useless because it's the most useful thing in the world. Art is life and life's ugliness revealed is a beautiful thing. He said in De Profundis, "I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction... I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram."

So rather than the masturbatory exploration of whether or not art is quite useless, a statement made by an artist who probably felt the irony could therefore be assumed, I think it might be more fruitful to explore whether or not it is the most useful thing in the world.

First things first, it's not easy to just make art. Imagine the struggle of the painter trying to portray life's ugliness in something beautiful. And speaking of masturbatory, how many of us have witnessed to critic or the plebeian trying to convince others that he/she sees the art or the beauty in something most consider inartistic or ugly. If you have a chance watch this. It is art itself!

It's the story of an old lady, a trucker by trade and member of the drinking class, who bought a picture as a joke gift for a friend, its hideousness being the humour, only to find that it might be a genuine Jackson Pollock worth millions. How much did she pay? The saleslady asked for 8 bucks but settled for 5.

If you want some art, go to the 8:40 mark or so and watch the art "expert" view this painting. It is absolutely hilarious! He looks at it upside-down, sideways, plays peek-a-boo with it and comes to the conclusion that it's "superficial and frivolous" and is NOT a Jackson Pollock.

To make that even more hilarious, here's a side-by-side comparison of a Pollock that sold for over 100 million and the one Teri Horton bought for five bucks. Could ANYone, even Jackson Pollock himself, explain 100 million dollars worth of difference? If so, THAT, my friends, THAT would be some art! Are these Pollocks or just bollocks? In my opinion the latter. I think, like Wilde, Pollock was satirizing the world of art. When asked how the layman should look at modern art Pollock said it should be enjoyed like music. Look at the painting and try to receive what it has to offer. After a while you may like it or you may not but it's important to give it a chance. The genius here is the appeal to the vanity of art critics and the subtle insinuation that if you cannot receive the "art," the problem lies with you, not the painting or the music. This is how you get the hilarious theater of rubbish justification. Pollock could literally sell his oversplash catcher or brush cleaning rags for millions. The art here is in the supreme satire that has led to wildly fanciful descriptions of splashing and blobbing identical to kindergarten classes and the outrageous price tags attached to these fraudulent pieces.

Before you object, let's use Pollock's example of music. The irony is that Jackson Pollock HAD talent. He could make a picture that looked like something. But he became famous for making works of "art" that don't use that talent. It's like if Eddy Van Halen went on stage and brushed, swept, tickled, and whacked his electric guitar with a broom then told the audience to try to receive what that music had to offer. Do you think THAT would outsell the other Van Halen albums? I guess it depends on how badly the listening audience wanted to appear like they understood the art of the revolutionary new form of guitar playing called "sweep strumming."

I went to an Indonesian traditional play that was an old folk tale involving magic, dragons, witches, etc. The costumes and acting were great! There was some humour to it as well. But I said to my guide that the music was annoying. He told me that it's just musicians randomly banging on their instruments depending on the gods to make it musical. Well that day the gods were not cooperating. It was just plain noise. To admit that I must be a Philistine, right? An art hater. Well, I'm okay with that. But I'm sure there are people in the traditional art world of Indonesia who make their livings convincing others that they can "hear" the music in that random bashing and blowing. In my opinion, if you pay a thousand bucks for a recording of that noise, or millions for a Jackson Pollock, it is a fitting punishment for your hubris.

Deriving beauty from the hideousness of even a genuine Pollack takes some artful dodgery, but let's go in the other direction. Teri Horton in the movie says that to her art has to look like something, like a Norman Rockwell painting. Well, here's a classic:

It's Triple Self Portrait and I defy you to find any ugliness in it without going beyond the superficial and the frivolous. He has pictures of his influences tacked to the corner of his painting, Rembrandt, van Gough, Durer, and Picasso (I learned from looking them up). Consider the darkness in the lives of those men. Rembrandt was considered a difficult, arrogant, and litigious man. Vincent van Gogh, a great admirer of Rembrandt, was described as socially abrasive, exhausting to live with, and mentally unhealthy. Albrecht Durer painted a portrait of his lifelong friend with Greek text along the edge that translated to "With the cock in your asshole." Pablo Picasso was a deeply flawed, manipulative, cruel, and misogynistic individual. As you might expect, even Norman Rockwell's life was far from the idealized vision of America he created in his art.

In Somerset Maugham's The Moon & Sixpence a novel partially inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, the narrator suggests that the subject of the work, Charles Strickland, an artist with few if any redeeming social characteristics was a tortured soul who had something profound that needed to be shared with the world and the price of his struggle to somehow do that was being a misunderstood outcast.

Can artists, for this reason, be forgiven for their abhorrent behaviour and are their works necessarily artistic in direct proportion to the depths of their social depravity? Does biographer and public exegesis - critically deep interpretation of their art - tend to become eisegesis in proportion to their popularity? Do we tend to read our own biases and opinions into artist's work? Let's go back to Oscar Wilde's preface. In it he says that the highest as well as the lowest forms of criticism are modes of autobiography whereas he says that to reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

From this we are to understand (superficially) that it is all in the mind of the critic or the reader if they find any of Oscar Wilde himself in the pages of his literature. This smacks of a court hearing defense rather than a legitimate fact and to anyone familiar with Oscar Wilde, it should read as nothing more. His comment in Dorian Gray that the more insincere the man is the more purely intellectual his ideas will be and completely uncoloured by wants, desires, or prejudices was 0% autobiographical? Was it just Lord Wotton who believed that conscience is merely the trade name of the firm of cowardice? Was it merely an entirely intellectually created character who believed in the Hellenic ideal - the harmony of body and soul - to be a man who lived his life not adhering to blind dogma but completely indulging every feeling, expressing every thought, and making every dream a reality? Was it only a character he created who compared the moral self-deprivation that comes with modern ethics to savage tribal self-mutilation like tattooing or scarring? I think he would have preferred this to be the case at his hearings, but there were some in attendance who knew better.

Yes, Oscar Wilde got in trouble for his art not being completely non-biographical and useless. BIG trouble. I don't know how accurate it is but if you watch the 1960 movie starring Peter Finch as Oscar Wilde called The Trials of Oscar Wilde, go to about 8:30 and you'll hear, "I consider that to conform to the narrow moral standards of this Victorian age the grossest form of immorality." A gutsy thing to say in the rather demure social environment of his times. In fact it is quite well known that Wilde relished the idea of being a martyr and being taken down for standing against what he (and a LOT of his characters) considered to be social, particularly sexual, foppery. Many believe his entire purpose for taking the stand was to create a real time work of art in which he dissected the restrictive laws of English society, cut the attorneys' arguments to ribbons with his razor sharp wit, and in the end got what he eventually ended up getting for the cause of progressive thinking.

I'm torn on the two sides of Oscar Wilde's story. On the one hand his sentence of two year's hard labour broke and eventually killed him. He was 46 when he died of complications related to the hard labour for which decades of leisurely, languid living left him uniquely unprepared. Who knows what masterpieces he might have composed had he been, I dunno, more Hemingwayish? On the other hand, he absolutely WAS the sodomite that he was accused of being so despite the idea that it shouldn't have been against the law, (was in England till 1967 in fact) his whole case was a lie. He even began the trial by lying about his age to give you an idea of how seriously he did not take this trial for his life.

Do you know that after he was accused by the Marquess of Queensberry he was so scared that he went on a lavish, romantic trip to Algiers with his beau (and son of the Marquess) Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas? During the trip they met French author Andre Gide who said that Wilde seemed to be a man aware that his tragic fate was approaching. When people warned him to be careful Wilde's response was that that would be a step back. He had determined to go as far as possible even unto death. The events of the trip included the exploration into the seedy underbelly of Algiers were just useful fodder for the opposing attorneys during his trial.

So in answer to the question of whether art IS the most important thing in the world, it is pretty clear that it was to Oscar Wilde. Contrary to his statements that art should be no reflection of the artist, he was determined to live the life Lord Henry Wotton described to the young Dorian Gray flouting dogma like social convention and laws and devoting body and soul to the indulgence of dreams and desires. He was a devoted aesthete to the end. I can't decide whether this was more heroic or tragic.

There is a kind of mythology that people are wont to create around those who show any aptitude for art. Somerset Maugham writes that the faculty for myth is innate in the huma race. Do we seek out people who have at all distinguished themselves from others in some way, invent legends about them, and attach fanatical beliefs to these legends as they grow? I have to believe this to be true, perhaps more true than for anyone, about Jackson Pollock. It seems there are an awful lot of artists that were secretly horrible people. Could it be then that their gift of artistic talent, their insight into the most important thing in the world, is such a heavy burden that it drives them to become so? And if this is true, should we forgive them their transgressions as the cost of their art?

Whether art is the most important thing in the world or not, am I willing to forgive character flaws in great artists such as Oscar Wilde? Gauguin left his wife and five children to go to Tahiti where he married multiple girls, all under the age of 14. Though Wilde was blowing huge wads of cash in his beautiful Bosie, in the end he neglected his wife and kids. Is their art more important than the lives they destroyed? What about other authors, painters, singers, or other artists?

I'm going to have to land on I don't know. What do you reckon?

Past Peg-Pulling Time?

 I'm going to begin by referring to my previous post and, regrettably, I have to suspend my license to practice medicine for the moment. The one I bestowed upon myself last post. I can re-bestow it if I want. You're not the boss of me. 

I read a bit further on the subject of the little-known SECOND job of the pancreas, the EXOcrine as opposed to the ENDOcrine functions we're all familiar with. Turns out that PERT (pancreatic enzyme replacement therapy) could actually RAISE blood sugar by causing foods to be broken down more rapidly and, uh, turned into glucose. The enzymes help in proper digestion which includes improving the absorption of carbs and starches, or more to the point, the glucose they become. 

However, I have so much stomach acid, which is destroying the limited digestive enzymes my pancreas produces anyway, and this can cause both reflux and malnutrition. I may be eating more than I need to get the nutrients I need. It seems to me that (and again I may be making assumptions here) my stomach acid is working so hard BECAUSE of a lack of pancreatic digestive enzymes. My stomach is trying to do the job they're supposed to be doing. So maybe PERT might still be worth a try. Maybe if I introduce more of the enzymes my pancreas is producing too few of (do we get these from pigs too?) my stomach might go back to producing normal levels of acid and my reflux won't be such a huge problem. I might even get more nutrients and feel healthier. And if we're going to dream big, maybe if the PERT increases my digestive efficiency, maybe I won't feel like I need to eat so much. If this all happens, I'm officially giving myself back my license to practice medicine. I'm still going to suggest it to my diabetes doctor when I visit him next month.

But I still have doubts about convincing him to try it. I find talking to doctors very similar to talking to Trump supporters. It's like they have one foot pegged into the ground like circus elephants and they can only talk, relate, (dare I even say reason?) within the circle to which the peg limits them. 

I've said it before and I'll say it again and again until I'm dead: What we need is for the whole world to collectively realize what our individual pegs are what are preventing us from making this whole world the relatively happy place it should be. The resulting stampede would crush a few rich, greedy asshole plutocrats but it'd be well worth it. 

But, like this poor elephant in the picture who would probably let people spray her with water, throw rocks at her, take her baby, starve her, and possibly kill her before she just plucks that peg out and attacks, what are the lengths we are willing to endure before we pull pegs and attack? I am daily affronted with new examples of these seemingly limitless lengths in news stories and most of them are from just one country. I'll give you a few. See if you know what country they're from.

A woman strangled her kids (5 years old, 3 years old, and 8 months old) then jumped out a window. It's okay though, her husband forgave her. I say if a guy is a murderer when he drinks too much then kills someone in a car accident, YOU are a murderer if you have a mental condition, don't take your meds and then kill someone. But then in even a halfway normal world would we even be here? How many times a day do YOU ask that question?

The supreme court of that same country recently ruled that since AI-generated child porn does not depict real persons, (even though it's generated using real pics of real kids) it's okay. 

Any guesses yet? What "civilized" country is this? In case you think the protection of kids in the country you've guessed is the only problem there, the country in question is quite international in its neglect of the vulnerable who are in need of adult protection. A rapper got kicked off the tour of an even MORE famous entertainer recently for declaring that kids in Gaza shouldn't be slaughtered. I had to use a link from reddit because Facebook has blocked this video of Gaza kids telling the artist to stay strong and thanking him for doing the grown-up thing that is outside of other's circles who have Israel as the spikes in their feet. Israeli attacks in Sept of 2026 included an 11-year-old boy in a "safe" zone in Gaza. But the country is not Israel if that was your guess. Just spiked to them ironically through a religion that spiked its saviour to a cross. Ostensibly. 

I better be careful or I'M gonna get blocked like the above rapper. The CIA might send one of their beastial, beastly, beastiality agents after my ass. I might be labelled a terrorist for condemning terrorism.

And if they don't get me, tech experts from this country say that AI will end ALL of humanity within a decade anyway. 

Pssst... it's the U.S. If you haven't followed any of the links above. The United States. You've heard I'm sure how the US is sometimes called the greatest social experiment the world has ever known. Here's an article that shows how the successes of capitalism are the very reasons that the social experiment that is America has failed. And while reading it, remember it's over a year old and think of all that's happened just in the past year in the U. S. of A. and adjust every statistic to make it worse accordingly. It's time to pull the peg, or the plug, on that experiment. Long past. And given the effect America has on the other countries of the world, I'd say it's long past peg-pulling time all over.

It's fall. While death is not always nice, I could add to my favourite smell list the pleasant aroma of dead leaves I get while strolling through my new neighbourhood. I passed this house just yesterday.

Yeah, I think that'd be a case of premature e-Jack-o-lantern. But it's getting close to the glorious month of October, isn't it? In October here in Canada we have Thanksgiving and then in November we honour our fallen war heroes on Remembrance Day. This is the time of year when I think we should give the greatest consideration to what we've done with our countries (or allowed to be done TO them) and whether or not our "Greatest Generation" foreparents would be happy or tell us to pull our pegs out and stomp the shit out of the people who've made things the way they are. 

You know what I think. What do YOU reckon?

Dr. Dave's Self-diagnosis

 I feel like this post has been percolating inside me smelling up the room and now it's time to pour it out. Percolating. Anyone remember those old coffee pots with the glass part at the top you could see the coffee bubbling up into? And the smell of it? 

Coffee wasn't a thing in my house growing up. My Mom never drank it and while we were young we only experienced that major part of Canadian culture when we went out. I recall one thing more than any other about my Mom's best friend when I was a kid - Verna Fletcher - and that was the smell of coffee that hit you like a bean bag (full of Columbian coffee beans) the second you entered the Fletcher home. I think the Fletchers had some of these 

Or some of these

to drink the coffee from. I actually don't remember seeing her without a coffee actually. I wonder if she had a problem... Things you just don't think of when you're a kid... 

Anyway, I think it might be the infrequency of that smell for so many years as a young kid that makes it so special to me now. I just brewed a cup in my Keurig and can smell it a little in my apartment. It's one of the better smells in life IMO. Popcorn, grass, bacon, old timey gasoline with no additives, lavender on the right person, KFC in the winter, Vick's Vapo Rub, freshly baked white bread in a paper bag, A535 on the rugby bus, cigarette smoke - but not just a burning cig - I mean the kind that has been inhaled then exhaled, campfire smoke on clothes days after the campfire... I could go on and on.

But that wasn't what I'd planned to blog about. I gotta try to avoid words like "percolate" or I might go off on a trundle like that again. I wonder if I've done this before. Off on a tangent and I haven't even started with the main topic. Maybe it's age. Tell me THAT wasn't revealed the second I talked about the percolator coffee pots! ha ha ha. I wonder if I could even buy one nowadays.

Nevertheless, the doctors, pharmacies, and general medicine supply chain in Ontario sure have a sweet thing going for themselves! Segue? What's that? I gotta believe it's the same in every province but since I'm here in Ontario I'll concentrate my stream of vituperation. 

I was living in Cheonan teaching at Gongju University there. I believe it was 2020. The Fam had come from Pyeongtaek to have a Sam Gyup Sal feast with me at a restaurant near my apartment in The Love House on the campus of Gongju U. Heather had been testing her blood sugar because it was low and she said we should use her equipment to test mine just for fun. My blood sugar level was 542 or something outrageous like that. So began my days as a conscious diabetic. I don't mean that I've ever been an UNconscious diabetic although I have since thought about a blackout or two that I blamed on alcohol which might have been attributed more accurately, or at least equally, to the diabetes. I mean that I was a diabetic for many years before I was aware of it. How many years, I couldn't say. 

Being employed in Korea while diabetic was a definite plus since basic health coverage made the cost negligible. Virtually everything was covered. YES all you misinformed people, it's MUCH cheaper to be a diabetic in Korea than in Canada - a country that has long been resting on free health care laurels that it no longer deserves. As a point of fact, I visited The Fam for 6 months in 2024 and I paid less for insulin other diabetic supplies in the USA than I do in Canada! THAT'S how bad things have gotten and THAT (finescally) is to be the meat of this post.

I've been getting my drugs and stuff since around April of this year from the pharmacy attached to the walk-in clinic where my doctor is here in Sarnia. I've been to that office a half dozen times or so and only seen this doctor of mine once. He doesn't work at his office I guess. I saw a young male intern, a rude, inattentive, obtuse doctor a few times, and most recently a young female intern. They all want to give me the meds I was on in Korea, or their Canadian versions, which is fine, but in the 6 years I've been treating my disease, I haven't made much progress. A few things have been tweaked, for example, I was on Metformin and it just made my guts go super garburator and give me emergency toilet sessions that I thought endangered the structural integrity of the porcelain fixtures upon which I was blasting out the said guts. I got a substitute that is better called Sitaglipton. It's much more expensive than Metformin. I thought maybe this is why it was readily substituted, but then the doctor (my new diabetes doctor Dr. Shetty) did the opposite. After 6 years of injecting insulin and juggling different meds, some of which I never needed such as the blood pressure medicine I got prescribed because of a flawed BP testing machine in Korea, which I finally put a stop to just a few days ago, I was prescribed this wonder drug called Taro-Gliclazide. 

To give you an idea (now using the western scale for blood sugar) I have been hovering around 10 for years. When my blood sugar goes over 10, like to 12, it's high. When it goes below 10, like to 9, it's good. I have never been in the 8's or 7's regularly. Since starting this Gliclazide I'm in the 7's and 6's! NORMAL blood sugar is 5.5 and 7.8 two hours after eating. I'm practically at a normal blood sugar level! Where was this drug for the last 6 years?

When I took the prescription to the pharmacist, you should have seen him! He asked if I was positive this is what Dr. Shetty prescribed. I said yeah why? He said it's strong stuff. I said so what does that mean, I've been on weak stuff all this time? He chuckled but I wasn't joking. 

As you know, I have the time that most folks don't to research things. I got online and found out a little bit of the history of this drug. First of all, we know who Banting and Best are, don't we? I'm sure it's not just because they're Canadian that I know they're the two dudes who isolated the hormone insulin. They knew the discovery was too valuable NOT to give to the world so they sold it to the University of Toronto for a buck if I remember correctly. Somehow it's now $120 for a box of 5 pens here in Ontario - the same province where it was GIVEN away! Again I am trying not to Google everything so I can maintain a little memory so I think it's pig insulin we get in those pens. 1921 the discovery was made and since then diabetics have been squirting pig hormone into our bodies. Nothing better has happened in science since then? 

Au contraire mes amis, in 1942 (in France) a guy named Marcel Janbon was researching typhoid fever and by accident discovered that a medicine he was using lowered patients' blood sugar dramatically. It was discovered a few years later that this medicine stimulated the pancreas to MAKE MORE INSULIN. Well DUH! This is exactly the drug we need for diabetes, isn't it? But we don't know Marcel Janbon, do we? Do you know what a sulphonylurea is? No. I think this might be because they're dirt cheap. Remember what I said a month's worth of insulin cost me? That's what a YEAR'S worth of this wonder drug costs. 

It doesn't work on type 1 diabetes because it requires a functioning pancreas, but instead of just squirting expensive pig hormone into my body, wouldn't it have been a good idea to see if Gliclazide or some other sulphonylurea worked? I wonder now if I had known about this drug and asked for it, maybe I could have been taking it all this time. And maybe I could have been paying less all this time. But since it's so cheap I guess the doctors hang on to those pills like manhole covers. Just a theory.

OOOORRRRR... since for 6 years I have also been complaining to my doctors about extreme reflux and stomach acid problems, you'd think that maybe one of them might have clued in to the connection between pancreatic digestive enzymes being destroyed by stomach acid and high blood sugar? There's a treatment called PERT Pancreatic Enzyme Replacement Therapy during which replacement enzymes are given through meds like Creon, and proton pump inhibitors like omeprazole or Prevacid (lansoprazole), which I plan to request from Shetty next time I see him next month, are used to make sure the stomach acid doesn't destroy the replacement enzymes. Now, Creon can be a couple thousand bucks a month so this makes me think that none of my doctors even thought about it as an option. Perhaps Shetty HAS thought about it and since he is the one who gave me the cheap pancreas stimulator, maybe he is leery of prescribing Creon because he knows I'm paying out of pocket. BUT, there are alternatives like Pancreaze or Pertzye that can cost... $154 a month. About the same as insulin. 

I requested a medicine for my reflux and Shetty prescribed rabeprazole, which just makes me shit 5 times a day, but I've heard from a few people who have found good reflux meds that they went through a few "prazoles" before they found the right one for THEM as well. 

So I'm thinking Pancreaze + Prevacid PERT treatment would be perfect for me. Or it might be worth a try. By the way, a month's worth of Prevacid is about 20 bux. Would I pay $174 a month to have normal blood sugar and be able to sleep lying down and go through a day without coughing 1500 times? Hell yes! Are Pancreaze and Prevacid pills that pharmacists hold on to like manhole covers? I guess we'll see when I go to see Dr. Shetty next month. And I wonder how the pharmacist will react if I manage to get the cheap drugs prescribed. Just as an aside, the same pharmacist who hesitated to give me the wonderdrug Gliclazide put my prescriptions together again for this month. I checked the bag of pills after paying and, what do you know, no Gliclazide. I asked him and he acted like he didn't know what it was. I told him to check what he'd given me last time. I didn't know the name of it at the time but I said if he showed me and I could smell it I'd recognize it. He showed me some that had no smell and then the right stuff and immediately I recognized it. Why hadn't he just given it to me? Why had he been reluctant the first time? Probably because it's so cheap. So I can just imagine what he'll be like if I end up doing the PERT. I may not even NEED the other drugs! What if I can stop using the Metformin replacement drug and the insulin? I hope to find out someday.

Should I be the one diagnosing my own health problems here? Especially now that I'm back in Canada where we are practically synonymous with stupendous healthcare? No! It's shameful that I am doing this. But that's the new Canada. If there's a way to do something cheaply you just can't expect the experts to tell you what that is. You gotta figure it out on yer own. 

Now, I fully expect Dr. Shetty to shoot down this idea when I suggest it to him. But if he doesn't and if it works, what does that say about doctors, pharmacists, and the whole medical profession here? This is going to be interesting folks...

Averaging Disagreement

 What does the word "omnibus" mean to you? Maybe nothing. You might be lucky enough to have never heard it. To me it represents the evil at the heart of politics that makes me sick as a dog, both literally and figuratively, when I think of them. Canada has a long history of omnibus bills being part of politics that dates back to the year after confederation - 1868. Did you know that? Do you know what these things are? Not really? Well of course not really - we're not really supposed to know.

Think of the last time your pet was sick. I'll use a dog for my example because, as Groucho Marx says, "Outside of a dog, books are man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read." He was a brilliant man but even his brilliance was not enough to illuminate the inside of the dog - presumably a St. Bernard or Newfoundlander or one of the roomier species - where he tested his theory. But I digress.

Maybe we should read more as Groucho's pithy little saying would imply. Inside or outside of any animal, if you read more, you might learn things like the thing I'm about to teach today. What politicians do is analogous to giving medicine to a sick dog. We wrap it in bacon or squash it into a piece of pizza or just jam it into the dog's kibble and say, "Mmmmm... yummy! Who's a good dog? YOU'RE a good dog! Here's a nice healthy piece of bacon/pizza/food to reward you for being so 'good.'" I enclose the word "good" in the single quote marks (or whatever they're called) because in this case the words "dumb" or "gullible" or "stupidly trusting" might convey a more accurate meaning. But let's not be so hard on our best friends. At least the dog isn't as dumb as us. At least it's getting something that will make it better and not something that will make it sicker.

You see folks, when a politician draws up an omnibus bill and says to the Canadian people, "Mmmmm... yummy! Who's a good consumer? YOU'RE a good consumer! Yes you are! And here's a nice french-fry wrapped in Canadian bacon, smothered in gravy, and sprinkled with maple syrup. You've EARNED it by being so 'good.'" I enclose the... etc., etc. We're MORE gullible than the dog and after 159 years of falling for this same old trick I can safely say we're more stupidly trusting as well and you know what makes that literally and figuratively sickening? The fact that what our politicians have concealed in our favourite foods is not medicine to make us better, it's something that will make us, as a people, sicker. 

Before you get swept up in a love affair with Doug Ford for opposing Trump like the WWF wrastler he resembles, and with about the same amount of veracity, let me give you one specific example from just about 7 years ago. If you carefully read the linked article you will notice the typical Fordian support of Canadian BUSINESSES not Canadian workers. This is something awfully Trumpian and, indeed, the gist of the example I will now describe. And rest assured, this is a microcosm of Canadian political work. It's what our politicians do.

Anyone ever heard of Bill 66, the "Restoring Ontario's Competitiveness Act" of 2019? It was an omnibus bill in that it covered a wide variety of diverse and unrelated topics sold to GOOD GOOD Ontarian girls and boys as a YUMMY way to cut corporate "red tape" to lower the cost of doing business and stimulate job creation. Now I've talked about Canadian politicians taking one 30-dollar-an-hour job, dividing it into 3 10-dollar-an-hour jobs and calling it "job creation" before. The aspect of Bill 66 I'd like to focus on today is much like that.

Have you ever heard of an averaging agreement? I think I probably should have enclosed the word "agreement" in single quotes (or whatever they're called) because the words "demand" or "imposition" or "hoop-job" would convey a more accurate meaning. It's an "agreement" to which no worker has ever willingly agreed. It's a do this or you lose your job type of "agreement." I think you know what I'm driving at here. It's something that has recently become common in security work and, despite the reported membership in the United Steelworkers union (which I have yet to confirm) my current job includes. You will understand my skepticism about union membership after I explain what an averaging agreement is. It is the very apotheosis of what unions were designed to fight. Any union that would allow one cannot rightfully call itself a union. It is, and has consistently been ruled on in labour arbitration in Canada, businesses stealing money from their workers. 

I guess I should explain how it works. Okay, if I work three 12-hour shifts one week, that's 36 hours. If I work 4 12-hour shifts in the following week of the pay period, that's 48 hours and in Ontario where a worker gets 1.5 times his/her normal wage for any hours after 44 in a week, that worker is due 4 hours of overtime pay. What the averaging agreement does is exchange reality for fraud that benefits the company. Instead of recording the hours as they were worked, the company and the worker "agree" to pretend that those 4 extra hours worked in the second week were actually worked in the first week. They WEREN'T but let's go to the land of Make Believe for the benefit of the companies. These are often companies paying their workers minimum wage or very little more. RICH companies that need this overtime money FAR less than their struggling employees. So now that we have averaged out the hours, our worker has worked 40 hours in week 1 and 44 hours in week 2 and the company gets to avoid the "red-tape" of paying overtime wages that makes the cost of doing business higher.

Doesn't sound as good when you find out what the words of the politician actually mean, does it? And when I said that arbitration had repeatedly ruled on averaging agreements as stealing money from workers, I wasn't kidding. Before Bill 66, any company in Ontario who wanted to sodomize its workers with one of these "agreements" had to justify it through an application to the government Director of Employment Standards. This was the arbitrator, the regulator, the overseer of business in these matters. The DES had to evaluate whether there existed a legitimate business need or a mutual benefit for employer and employee to the averaging agreement. Aaaaand the number of times that was ruled to be the case? Zero. It's just stealing money from your workers. Despite the creative explanations I'm sure the companies devised to try to convince the DES that they were NOT just breaking overtime pay laws, the employers never won. So the obvious solution from the business standpoint was to get rid of this arbitrator. Well when Doug Ford's government introduced Bill 66, under the guise of making Ontario's businesses more "competitive," they eliminated this whole procedure. By the way, when you hear a politician using the word "competitive" to describe business, he/she means tilting the competition even more in favour of the business and screwing the worker and the consumer. Doug Ford is in favour of rich companies stealing money from their employees. So he may not be as different from Trump as he's trying to appear.

But where did this rule of getting paid overtime after 44 hours come from? Where did the rule of 8 hours off between shifts come from? Or the 11 consecutive hours of free time every 24 hour period? These are all established labour laws in Ontario and these laws were brought to us by that generation we call the Greatest Generation. They weren't just great because they fought in wars. They were great because they also fought for our rights. I get really angry when I see Canadian politicians and lawmakers, at the behest of big business who control them, chipping away the rights and freedoms that our forefathers fought and died for. We ALL should get angry when we see this! But that's the tricky part about these omnibus bills. They hide this. Bill 66 allowed businesses to open faster. It increased childcare options and flexibility for parents. It mandated filters on school computers blocking things kids shouldn't see. This is the bacon, poutine, and maple syrup of the omnibus bill and even though it attacks Canadian workers and endangers nature, some people are like Quickdraw McGraw's dog Snuffles begging for that dog bis cue it. Sigh... I'm old.

The other day my employer called me up at 2 PM for a shift from 6 that night to 6 the following morning. I have been hired on a "casual" basis. "On call" is another term they use. What this means is that I will be judged on whether I accept or decline shifts. The idea that they are offering me a shift and I have the option to take it or not is much like the "agreement" of the averaging agreement. My employer pressures me into granting their unreasonable requests by granting or withholding future work to/from me. This is the sort of stuff that unions USED to fight. Now it's becoming more and more common because our labour rights are being eroded in the exact same way we in Ontario got averaging agreements reinstated. I had been up since about 6 that morning. If I took that shift I would have been up for 24 hours straight. What would I do the next day? Sleep? Try to stay up? Besides, I am moving. I had things I needed to do. During daylight hours. I would have had to stay awake even longer to do them. So I turned down the shift.

I don't think employers should have the right to compromise the health of their employees like that. This is the reasoning behind the 8-hour break between shifts and the 11 hours of free time every 24 hours. But we just don't have the type of people we had in the days of the Greatest Generation, or the unions, that would fight for things like these. Because of this we will continue to get omnibussed right back to the days when kids worked 18-hour shifts in the factories for room and board. And because of this, I will probably get fewer shifts at my job. Leastaways, that's what I reckon.

Give Me A Little Credit Won't You?

 I can't say I'm surprised at being refused an apartment due to my bad credit score. As established in the previous post, that's just the way things are done 90% of the time now in Canada even though it don't make no kind of sense. But then a whole helluva lotta things we do in Canada, banking is high in the running for best example, don't make no kind of sense. 

During my research for my last post I learned that there are two places - two private, for profit businesses (not government agencies, boards, or commissions) that compile debtor data and establish credit scores. These scores have somehow become cherished and protected bits of bogus information that we all protect like they are pets or children. Anybody remember teachers back in the day who, faced with the realization that the student was not being intimidated by them any more and would continue to misbehave would say, "That will go on your permanent record!"? The gasps and exclamations of terror from anyone within earshot represented the sum total of the power of the mystical permanent record in that it existed only in the minds of the dumb schmucks who fell for the con and the grifters and scammers who were perpetuating the myth. Our permanent records were nothing but carefully manufactured records used by people in authority to scare us into behaving like obedient students. 

Folks, I am starting to believe that credit scores are not a whole lot different. They're just carefully manufactured scores compiled by entities who want to scare us into behaving like obedient consumers. We're trained to believe that they reward honesty and punish delinquency and cheating but in my experience I have found evidence that they are exactly the opposite. Because the institutions that compile and calculate the scores are private businesses they operate under the same auspices as other companies that not only don't punish unethical behaviour from their workers and customers (creditors) but can actually reward it. 

I explained my situation in the last post in which Telus made it impossible for me to cancel. Recently there have been efforts by the CRTC to force the big three telecom providers to allow people to cancel more easily but those efforts are no damn good to me now are they? They're about three or four years too late, as it were. I have a bad credit score and a $550 debt because Telus took advantage of impotent laws that were not being enforced that WERE on the books saying a company has to make cancellation as easy as signing up. We've always had these laws across Canada but this is the kind of law you can get away with breaking if you are a monopoly. Telus broke the law, made it impossible for me to cancel, actually sent me fraudulent bills even after my account with them was zeroed out, sent those fraudulent charges into collection, and caused my bad credit score and $550 debt. Those are the facts and they are not disputed. 

But in my last post I speculated that calling the credit dispute lines that Equifax and TransUnion have would most likely be an exercise in futility. Since I'm off today and just doing laundry I figured I'd put my theory to the test. I called 1 800 871 3250 and after the requisite phone gymnastics I was shocked to receive an option to press 2 and speak to a representative. It wasn't more than 5 minutes on hold either until I got my phone call answered by a human being. He didn't even have an Indian or Filipino accent! Was I wrong? Was I underestimating Equifax? This was intriguing...

So I got the usual introduction: My name is flabbetyfuckfuck and I will be assisting you. Nobody enunciates their names when their job is working for a helpline the purpose of which is to offer anything but help. So right there I lost a bit of the flash of hope I received when a human answered. I said, "What did you say your name is, Raoul?" He paused for a long time and said, "Yes." So it WASN'T Raoul but the name he was working under today was something that sounded like Raoul. Although, he had a French accent so maybe it was. It doesn't matter. You see, I don't care that much about the identity of the person on the other end of the phone when I am trying to do something about a fraudulently acquired debt and credit score. Unfortunately, Raoul took a familiar tack, one I've experienced with a few Canadian government organizations and consumer help lines I managed to reach humans on: the old we cannot help you if we can't verify who you are ploy. 

I gave Ben a few pieces of information and he was able to get my credit score and tell me how much I am on record as owing. I gave Raoul so many different pieces of information about myself over the next 25 minutes that there is nobody else on the planet it could have been, but without a utility bill or a piece of ID with my current address on it, Raoul was not satisfied that he knew who he was talking to. 

He told me I needed to write to National Consumer Relation Box. That was confusing. What the hell is a consumer relation box? I said, "Do you mean organization or agency or something like that?" "No, box." "Okay whatever. Continue the address." "190 Montreal, Quebec.H1S 2Z2. So it was National Consumer Relations Box 190... you greasy Frenchman. I wish I'd said that but didn't. 

He said I need to send them the front and back of my health card and passport (which don't have my address), a bank statement with an address on it and a letter stating that I want to update my address. Include Social Insurance Number, date of birth, phone number, and address. And here I said, "And then tell them what I just told you about Telus and how they cheated me and that's how I have bad credit?" He says no, just ask them to update your address so they can verify who you are. 

I said at almost the 30-minute mark, "Okay stop right there Raoul. IF you were able to verify who I am, or IF the people at the Consumer Relation Box were able to verify who I am, would I get any help? For instance would anyone be able to contact Telus and ask them to verify my account there and see if what I am saying is true?" "No, we were unable to verify your identity so I would suggest you contact the collection agency or contact Telus and make the payment or get a statement from them stating that you do not owe them. We have received this information that you owe from creditors." I said, "Yeah, who lied. And you believe them. So there's nothing you CAN do is there? Except get me to pay Telus who I don't owe anything. What I want to know is can you make this right, not can you make me pay. It's not right for me to pay. I don't owe Telus anything. Can you believe me instead of believing Telus?" Raoul says, "We would require letters, okay?" I respond with, "Well as I've been telling you I can't contact Telus. The only time I was successful they told me I don't owe them anything, yet here we are." "In that case sir I'm very sorry to inform you that this is the best that I can do for you at this point in time." 

So then I gave up trying to be nice. I said, "Well that's about what I expected. You're not really legitimate, are you? You believe the corporations and not the people they're screwing." He then says, "You can get in touch with the legal department..." Right! I can't even get in touch with the BILLING department who fucked up my bill! The person I got in touch with and told me I owe Telus zero asked me for the email of the assholes who kept sending me bills and even SHE was throwing around the word "fraud" when referring to them. She said she'd report them to the Telus fraud department and get things straightened out, but I guess she never did. I continued, "This is fraud, I hope you know this. Your organization is supporting fraud." He then says to me, "You can contact the legal authorities for this, okay?" I said, "I guess that's all I can do isn't it?" He then asked if there was anything else he could do at this point and I said, "No. There's nothing you can do. You did your job." And I hung up.

So it's pretty much exactly what I expected. At "Equifax" there is no equality and they don't deal with facts. The Creditors are never doubted and the debtors are guilty until proven innocent. In order to clear my credit I need to get a letter from Telus saying "Yeah, we sure did break the law and block you from discontinuing your service. Hell, we also fraudulently charged you for two extra months after your internet was switched off. And that ain't all, we charged you a shit ton of interest on the charges we fabricated! We screwed you good boy!" 

These collection agencies are just corporate shills helping businesses keep Joe consumer in line and their help does NOT confine itself to the legal limits of Canada. Which begs the question, why the fucking fuck are people falling all over themselves to take these things seriously? Why have we allowed them to become so invasive? I need to find a place to live. Do I have to go out and get a fucking credit card so I can do that? How is this system any different from this shit:

I'm almost proud to have a bad credit score. Maybe I'm a bad Canadian citizen. The way this country is going, maybe I should be proud of THAT too.

Give Me a Little Credit Will You?

 I'm going to start off this post the way I have started some others because some of the things I blog about come up from time to time, not to say rear their ugly heads, so I sometimes refer to previous posts. If you are a frequent reader you will know to whom (or what) I am referring when I say the Unholy Triumvirate. We have lots of telecom providers in Canada, but Canadians prefer either Bell, Rogers, or Telus. Roughly 86-90% of telecom revenue is sucked in by these three totally corrupt corporations. There ARE dozens of other providers, but they lease lines from the big three so, yes Virginia, that IS a monopoly. They cheat, lie, and steal like a monopoly and we allow them to. They are massive contributors to what I call "the cult of inconvenience" and in the post bearing that title I mention Korean telecom providers who are horrible, but MUCH better than the Unholy Triumvirate. 

Here's a blogpost from Feb. of 2024 called "How is Telus Like The Hotel California?." Please read it. It won't take long. One of my shorter ones. The answer is that you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Note in this post that I wrote, "I really do not have a credit rating." To give you some context I was living in Calgary back then working part time at the Centre for Newcomers, living with Rob and Terri, and doing my 10th course in my master's degree (still believing it was legit). I had been told by a landlord in Trail where I lived the summer before, that I had no credit rating. He was a banker and did credit checks all the time and in 2023 when I got hooked up with Telus and moved into my own place in Trail, I had no credit rating. I signed up for Telus internet so that I could do my 8th or 9th course of my master's' degree. I forget which one. This was while working as a security guard for Teck. 

When I moved out and tried to cancel my Telus and was blocked from doing so, I started getting emails that I could not answer and bills that I could not pay from Telus for the ensuing months after I had moved out of my apartment AND given back the internet box. Here's a blogpost from that time explaining this experience in more detail. Some time after that I guess Telus wanted to appear like they had done their due diligence in getting me to pay what I did not owe them for service they did not give me and they gave my account to a collector who threatened to mess up my credit rating.

So today I got a text from a guy who is taking care of renting an apartment for a Chinese lady here in Sarnia. It's a cheap basement apartment that's right between the two sites where I work security and right beside the school where I volunteer. It would be perfect for me! But Ben, the guy representing the landlady, said he had done a credit check on me. I told him I didn't think I had a credit score but I also mentioned there had been some trouble with Telus so that might give me one. He said I have a very low credit score. He also said that I owe something like $550.

Now... The 550 dollars has to be mostly interest on the one or two months of cable I didn't get and didn't pay for. I can't remember what I paid back then but I don't think it was even 100 bucks a month. I had nothing but internet, no TV and no phone. That amount happens to be the exact monthly rent on the apartment I'm trying to get. So, after 59 years of life I owe 550 bucks. That shouldn't result in a bad credit score really. And I don't really owe that much. 

The landlady will be getting first and last month's rent - if I don't pay and take off, she's lost nothing. Unless I trash the place and I dunno, there might be a damage deposit too. Also, during my interview with Ben I told him that I have over 20 years of teaching experience and 10 years of security work. People trust me with their kids. I have to get regular criminal record and vulnerable sector checks for the teaching. I also had heightened security clearance for some of my security work. Shouldn't that have more weight than a bad credit score or a 550 buck debt? He told me that they've had a lot of people contact them about the room and I have two things going for me that the others didn't: I'm employed and I'm not a whackjob. I also explained that I had tried to pay Telus but couldn't. If they don't give me the apartment because of this, that would be insane.

But let's look at this closer because it falls into the category I've been pursuing in these pages lately. We just follow stupid rules without thinking. Let's examine a Canadian credit check and see if it's a good indicator of honesty and/or something that would indicate whether a person would be a good tenant or not. First of all who does it? You might think they're done by some government agency but they are not. In Canada either Equifax or TransUnion does your credit check and they are private, for profit businesses. These two credit reporting agencies gather data reported by lenders like banks, credit card companies, auto loan providers, and utility companies. All are paragons of virtue and stellar examples of institutions that would NEVER report anything fraudulent EVER! And if they DID provide what's known in the business world as IKYABWAI credit reports (I know you are but what am I) in which THEY cheat the customer but claim the customer has cheated them, SURELY Equifax and TransUnion would check it out, no? Absolutely not! The citizen has to do that through their online dispute portal or mail-in or call-in services. But we can't/won't do that until we know our credit has been fucked up and by then it might be too late. And let's face it, those dispute services are probably designed with the very same dedication to the cult of inconvenience as the Telus cancellation services that don't fucking exist.

Equifax and TransUnion do not verify the data they receive from lenders or creditors, they just rely on these notoriously unreliable entities to report everything honestly. Errors and mismatched scores occur frequently as you might expect. But having said all of this, it's still a valuable source of information for landlords because they receive information about delinquent renters, right? Wrong. They only lower renters' credit scores if they are reported as delinquent by third-party rent reporting services such as FrontLobby, Zenbase, or TenantPay. For most of us, Equifax and TransUnion have none of our rent history data at all. Yet 82-90% of landlords nowadays do credit checks on prospective tenants. Why? Cuz it's just a rule. It's what we do.

I'm not going to get too deep into the Blue Jay game the other night in which the STUPIDEST thing I have seen in sport happened. Here's a pretty factual (but not even close to GOOD) explanation of it. The game was delayed for what seemed longer than 15 minutes. Fans and players were upset. We STILL don't have a valid rule or explanation. The fact that he ran home on a fly ball without tagging up is a rule that supersedes this fake rule that everybody is trying to claim exists. I dunno if the umpire Guccioni is the son and heir of the Penthouse Bob Guccioni fortune, or maybe has ties to the mob but you can't go home on a fly ball without tagging up. Most people in the ball park know that rule. It seems that even when we know we've done something stupid the go-to move is to double down on the stupidity and everybody is just far too inclined to go with it. Change the rule. Or eliminate it. If the ball had been caught, both runners tagged, and the guy on first got tagged out, not forced out, trying to advance to second AFTER the guy on third had made it home, THEN it would be a timing play and the run would count. 

Anyway, what do you think the odds would be of getting my credit rating restored if I managed to find someone at Equifax or TransUnion who gave half a hunk of shit and explained my whole story? They would KNOW FOR A FACT that I was right and they are wrong but what do you want to bet they'd be mealy mouthing and making themselves look stupid defending the established but stupid rule of believing the company and not the customer? 

Before I go, I want to add to this that I had been on the phone, after trying so many different ways to reach someone to help me cancel my Telus internet, I got a girl on the phone who said she was at a Telus office and said she could help me. I told her that I was trying to cancel and I couldn't and I kept getting email saying I owed for internet I wasn't getting. She said she'd open up my account on her computer. So I gave my name and account number and she assured me that I had a zero balance. That is, my internet was cancelled and I owed Telus no more money. But I kept receiving emails and messages that I couldn't respond to even after that! Do you suppose Equifax or TransUnion would even believe that? And what do you want to bet I end up having to pay that $550 someday when it has ballooned even more. And can somebody please tell me why they are allowed to charge interest? If I really DID get a month of service without paying then I owe them that much forever. Maybe indexed for inflation but interest? This is just something we allow because they are a monopoly and we can't stop them!

So anyway, I want to move into this apartment but I might lose it for having a bad credit score that was generated by dishonesty that was in no part my own. It may be believed by Ben or the landlady because we believe for-profit businesses before honest people nowadays and for some reason we evaluate prospective tenants based in part on a credit score that in all likelihood bears exactly no connection to past tenant performance on the part of the renter. But that is the world in which we live. Those are the rules. It is what it is. Right?

Addendum: Today I got a text message from Ben. I have been refused as a tenant. Even though he said I'd be a dream renter I guess the landlady got nervous about my outstanding debt with Telus. What does Telus (and Bell and Rogers) do anyway? Their infrastructure is predominantly to BLOCK Canadian airspace and stop people from broadcasting or receiving broadcasts for free. What we pay for from them is for them to UNblock what they've blocked for us. How many times have you heard people say that soon there'll be a company hoarding the air of the world and selling it to us. We already have these companies. Telus is one. And even though I had told my story to Ben and even though I HAD done everything I could to pay Telus, and even though I actually HAD connected with them and been told my account was zeroed out with them before it continued to increase and was eventually sent to a collection agency and interest accrued and resulted in the bad credit score and debt I'm in now... the landlady STILL trusted Telus over me. 

Today I applied to rent a place above a Chinese restaurant in town here. The rent is similar and the place looks even better but there WILL be a credit check. It's being handled by one of those middlemen companies called Mutual Property. We'll see if my story has any effect on them. Not holding my breath.

Stay Poor Anne!

 I've never done this before but if you want to watch the video to which I will immediately refer, go to almost the end of this post. 

If the guy who seems to have trouble looking at Anna Bocca can be believed... Mate, look at her! She's young but not airhead, non-contributing, dependent-type young, she's hot but not Chekhovian cheat-on-your-husband-but-don't-divorce-him, predatory hot, she's brainy, and oh yeah, by the way, English accent? No? I'd be looking at her. Anyhoo, if the guy who has been researching wealth inequality for 15 years knows what he's talking about... and good for Anna! This is why her vids are so informative I guess and why I have learned a lot from them, trust her, and have put her on this blog before: she is brilliant at finding answers. Not data, not biased opinion, but the unvarnished truth. It's hard to get from people with political, social, or professional associations that would cause them to "varnish" the truth, so find a broke-ass intellectual who has the money to survive (maybe student loans or parental support?) and the non-affiliation to be objective. That's how this dude strikes me: he's a starving student. Maybe he's not looking at Anna cuz he doesn't have the dough to take her round to the pub. Maybe he's got a mid-term exam tomorrow and even this interview is going to necessitate an all-night cram session. But I could be wrong. What do I know? Maybe he works for GE, but I think he'd look more in his element wearing his little toque aboard the Rainbow Warrior saving whales than in a business suit and that's why Anna rode her bike over to visit him. Rode her bike. Man I love this girl!

At any rate, if this guy knows his stuff, things were unequal, then there was a short period of what seemed to be experimentation during which the royalty, robber barons, elite, less-than-one-percent, puppet masters, call them what you will, allowed a middle class to form and the gap between the few Haves and the unwashed masses of Have-nots to close a little bit. In my previous post I speculated that gratitude might have played a part in this experimentation since it happened on the heels of two world wars in which those unwashed masses saved their owners' businesses and countries in which and with which to do their businesses, but that's just me humanizing their patrician indifference to help myself try to relate to the money sickness a little better. In reality it might have just been coincidence. 

They pinpoint the start of these "golden years of capitalism" to the Bretton Woods Conference from July 1st (hey, Canada Day) to July 22nd in 1944. Much like golf rules and Bill 66 (see previous post) a LOT of things were decided for (not by) the people of the world and they, or I suppose WE were blissfully ignorant of how (disastrously) we would be affected by these new RULES. To the victor go the spoils and you can bet the American influence on victory in WWII played no small role in all these new rules heavily favouring the U.S. In fact it'd be a safe bet that a lot of this stuff was negotiated BEFORE the US entered WWII. Just look at the economic conditions that allowed the US to fight. World war is expensive. War bonds were issued, prices were controlled, and things were rationed. Regular folks made sacrifices. The Fed set interest rates low, like 3/8 of a percent, and, as mentioned by our expert, top rates of tax on the rich were up to 90 or 95%. Then after winning the war the US brought the gold standard to the world linking all money to the dollar, they thrust the IMF and the World Bank upon the world (and, if I'm not mistaken, this is what coaxed the rest of the allied countries into the central banking systems they all currently have), and true Keynesian economics were employed. What do you know? The Golden Years! 1945-1973.

People could buy a house with 2 years' salary! Labour unions were strong (and less corrupt). The economic system, banks, investments, the stock market, corporations, these were all tightly regulated by government (which was less corrupt) and the IMF/World Bank (which was less corrupt). So what happened in 1973? In a word, corruption. In two words, Reagan and Thatcher. 

It didn't JUST happen like that of course. Greed didn't just disappear for 25 years. Things were happening in the US like the Vietnam War, less competitive prices, and the soap opera saga of world oil supplies that disrupted the US gold standard and blew up the Bretton Woods economic bliss. Interest rates went up, taxes on the rich went down, unions were demonized, and along with oil, absolutely everything got much more expensive. Yeah... just like today, they had (carefully manufactured in my opinion) massive inflation. Since unemployment went up and wages stagnated, it wasn't just inflation, it was STAGflation.

Now, here's where we want to start asking about the RULES again. Where do they come from, who makes them, and, as they ask in the vid, why do we even play this game? Why do we put up with unpaid overtime (again see last post), rising costs, shittier jobs featuring more work for less pay? How did we get sucked into playing this game and who sucked us in? Meanwhile, businesses have had sustained record profits since the early 70's while us regular folks have been losing at this game. In short, there's more money out there and we're getting less of it. Are we just not working hard enough? Are we just not smart enough? Are we getting outwitted, outlasted, outplayed? Nope, we're getting fucked. 

If you're now thinking, "There he is again, conspiracy theorist Dave," it's because you've been carefully and expensively socialized into thinking that. The "game" to which I'm referring is Capitalism if you haven't worked that out yet. We have known that this game or system does not work for quite some time. The utter failure of the system exhibited itself in the Great Depression that gripped most of the world in the 1930's and partially led to WWII. We have known of a way to win this game for quite some time too: socialism. But, as its name might suggest, that is only good for society, which is not good enough for the rich, and since they are the ones making the rules, we have to play by them if we want to play their game. Why oh why we would want to I just don't know but here we are. 

Lest we forget, FDR implemented programs like unemployment insurance, social security, labour protections, market and bank regulation (or RE-regulation), and other such socialist policies to save America from capitalism just before WWII. I.e., the government, not the "free market" or the private sector, had pulled America's asses out of the Depression. As America goes, so go most other allied countries, so really THAT'S when we all started playing the people's game, and it was a fun 40-year long game for the people until the early 70's when the rich flipped the table and said, "We're not playing this game any more. Even though we're having fun and we like the game, we have a better game." Better only for them as it turned out.

So... how did the rich convince us to go back to playing their game? They flat out lied to us. We just covered how it was government that saved the people from the Great Depression. Then government regulation carried the people through the best years of their lives. People trusted, even LOVED the government! FDR got elected 4 times! But the Reagan and Thatcher administrations had the job of painting government as "the problem, not the solution." That, as you might expect, took some doing. 

This is when a bloody well organized propaganda campaign to bring back capitalism and funnel the money that had leaked into the public back to the top where it belonged began and the wealth gap re-widened with it. Not surprisingly, Big Oil were leading the campaign with J. Howard Pew characterizing the New Deal as a Trojan Horse for socialism, which it totally was, and that would be a BAD thing once "socialism" became a scare word. Newspapers became unsourced propaganda filled rags poisoning the minds of the electorate against the government that had given them the best years of their lives and in favour of the corporations that had led them into the Depression. How did they do it?

Rugged individualism, competition, anti-communist thought, scapegoating, blacklisting, oh yeah, it got UGLY! It wasn't just the newspapers, it got into the movies too. The message that regulating the "free market" was absolutely unconstitutional and unamerican was at the heart of most of the rhetoric. The result was socialism and/or communism and both were evil. The very American prosperity gospel replaced the Biblical idea that chasing money is NOT a virtue. It is fascinating how THAT scam was perpetrated on the American people! Anna does a great video on that too called The Big Church Grift. "If you want to be perfect sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor." Matthew 20:21. Jesus said that. Christ. I guess the verse the prosperity gospel considers to trump that is, "Nobody's perfect." Fakeziah 6:66. (The use of the word "trump" is no coincidence there. heh heh)

Corrupting religion to make Jesus into an entrepreneurial spirit rather than a loving one was bad. You might even say it was evil. But I think what was done to corrupt education was probably worse. Maybe it's my natural progression in life through religion to education that makes me feel this way, maybe it's faith vs. fact, I dunno, but it just seems diabolical to me. You see, much like pastors were paid to link money to virtue and God, academics were paid to write false studies and coerced into fudging textbooks and corrupting general education along those same lines. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the US contains the Haymarket Affair and the heroic efforts of Americans in America to oppose industry and demand human rights. There's even a song! This is why it isn't used much in American classrooms. They have been controlled for over a century by the powerful corporate lobby that fondly reflects on the days when kids could work in factories for long hours with no overtime pay, no benefits, no minimum wage, and no safety regulations as soon as they were tall enough to reach the machine controls. Educating the public on the heroism of citizens who opposed such conditions and fought for human dignity just didn't fit into the aspirations of the ruling class. So they changed education. Just changed it.

You may wonder, "Well, how the hell could they just do that? Knowledge is knowledge, no?" Unbelievably, the corporate lobbyists and think tanks of the day just took people who had spent lifetimes proving that capitalism has inherent problems - like it doesn't fucking work! The "golden years of capitalism" were 4 decades of socialism. Markets don't correct themselves and businessmen just connive to take as much money from the poor as they can. The Owners can't have us knowing this so they took guys like John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith and just lied about them! I'm not making this up! Anna Bocca is an economics student and I know several more who rant and rave about how Keynes and Smith are purposely misrepresented. People sympathetic to the cause of corporate (bullshit) economics were hired to teach and fund major university economics programs despite their academic WRONGNESS. This happened only because the lobby had the money to make it happen. Like religion, education had been messed up by money. Anna's video about this is very long but very informative. Check it out. 

One of the major bought and paid for quasi-economists was a name that might be more well known: Milton Friedman. Capitalism and Freedom was his highly biased pulp fiction on economics. 

So by buying people, schools, media, churches, and (Reagan/Thatcher) government, the rich ended their experiment with surrendering a little bit of money to the other 99 point whatever percent of the world and decided to take it back. If you want to learn about the aggressive expansion of the American Chamber of Commerce and the loads of cash they poured into buying politics in the early 70's, here's the link to the video I referenced at the very beginning. 

Sorry about the ads within but I think they're worth it. Not the ones from YouTube but Anne's sponsors. 

So there you have it. This is how we got sucked into playing the game of the (less than) 1%. In the end it boils down to money. Money made it happen and to truly understand how bad it is, you need to not have very much of it. To understand how those with money always end up being the ones in control boggles many a great mind. 

"The most improper job of any man, even saints, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity." J.R.R. Tolkien

It seems to me that a guy could do worse than adopting the philosophy that the amount of trust you should put into a person is directly disproportionate to the amount of money that person has. So going back to the beginning, I truly hope that the guy Anne consulted was as poor as he looked and I hope Anne does well enough with her sponsors to keep producing such informative videos... but just barely well enough. Stay strong and stay poor Anne!