Eat the Rich

Phil Burpee, Columnist, Pincher Creek Voice

Columnist Phil Burpee

There may be a few greybeards out there who remember this title as an old bumper sticker from yesteryear. It was always one of my faves. It expresses a sentiment that has been with us since about when they invented water. Ever since the first hoarder started amassing his booty at the expense of others, resentment has been building. I've often thought the typical meal of Rich Person would be some kind of veal  -  tender and devoid of muscle-tone, extracted from some plump and well-fatted haunch. But that would be a post-apocalyptic scenario, and there are more pressing matters at hand than converting Lakeside Packers to accommodate a new rolling stock of plush executive office chairs.


This morning I awoke to our dog Badger singing in that scratchy way of his. Out on the prairie the yippee-cayo-cayutes were yodelling away, and the eastern sky was afire in blazes of pink and apricot flourishes. Wow! Such perfection! The world spinning around and all the stars gone to bed in their heavens  -  what could be wrong in such a grand and sublime theatre of the possible? What indeed!? If only I hadn't developed the pernicious habit of reading the Voice and exposing myself to the News. Ah, sweet innocence, and ignorance, flown. And one particular little item in the Voice this week caught my attention. It was a snippet concerning an exchange between Kevin O'Leary, arch capitalist lizard of CBC's Dragons' Den and the Lang & O’Leary Exchange, and Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winning author, war correspondent, and current sober commentator on the perilous state of American business, government and finance. I won't recount the exchange, though it involved a delightful dumping on Mr. O’Leary  -  you can check it out if you just type in Hedges/O'Leary on any search engine  -  but I thought it was symptomatic of a broader malaise, and a source of some considerable concern.

O'Leary is, of course, a well-oiled buffoon who is taking considerable apparent delight in Fox-ifying the CBC, spewing what he no doubt considers to be very clever and titillating bad-boy gibberish from the extreme fiscal right wing, notwithstanding Amanda Lang's killer dimples. Having parlayed a $10,000 grub-stake from his Mom into a billionaire empire, he has been overcome with a missionary zeal in his belief that access to great riches is, in fact, the great emancipator for all humankind. He often cites the acquisition of wealth to be the only road to True Freedom, notwithstanding seven or eight thousand years of human spiritual and philosophical endeavour which indicates exactly the opposite. In the above-mentioned exchange, Mr. O'Leary suggests that any questioning of the unassailable role of Wall/Bay Street in the financial affairs of our countries is tantamount to radicalism and insanity, even while he himself enjoys the ongoing liquidity afforded him by a Canadian banking system which has resisted, through stringent charters and regulation, the conflation of savings and speculative investment that has blown apart American financial institutions. We now know all too well what happened with the whole sub-prime mortgage debacle. And we also know that those who suffered as a result of it were not the perpetrators of the collapse  -  quite the contrary. The captains of a financial industry run extravagantly amok have been handsomely rewarded courtesy of the American taxpayer, while the victims of what amounts to widespread criminal fraud have paid the price in lost homes, curtailed educations and increasing joblessness. These men on Wall Street are like some horrible children given an expensive and delicate toy, who abuse it, break it, and then devolve into a whining tantrum until they are given a new one to continue the game. As has been so pithily observed  - ' Capitalism on the way up, Socialism on the way down.'

The German Minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schäuble, responding to deep-set money problems in the European Union (and, of course, anguishing over buying the ouzo and souflaki for countless Zorbas and their indolent colleagues), has expressed his disdain for the whole culture of making money from money. The bulk of financial transactions do not, as he observes, "serve the real economy." They are functionally extraneous to it, and serve primarily to fatten the wallets of a tiny number of typically highly adrenalized operators. He advocates the idea of what has for years been known as the Tobin Tax, after the Nobel laureate economist James Tobin, which proposes a modest tax on all purely financial exchanges, including speculative profits. This has been vigorously and consistently resisted by various capital markets, and most especially by the Americans and their rampaging pirate brigands with now-familiar names like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, AIG, Citibank, Wells Fargo, some of which are now history, having been reborn with new names out of the public largesse. Mr. Schauble, and others who would seek to avoid the impending slide into global mayhem, would rather see those who create and exacerbate these problems be made to pay. There is a functional limit to the extent to which we can afford to reward the addictive and irresponsible behaviours of reprobates who care not a whit for the public good.

In our country, and especially in Alberta, that great sow with the bitumen-filled teats, we revel in our prosperity. With the USA and China firmly secured to the respective umbilicals of the Keystone XL and Gateway pipelines, we foresee a Lexus in every garage, holidays in the sun with wizened little retirees lumbering down the highways in their six-mile-per-gallon, globe-cooking, mega motorhomes, and a Wal-mart on every corner. The thing is, however, that the human population of the planet is due to hit seven billion this year on its way up to between nine and ten billion by about 2050. And the burgeoning and increasingly prosperous populations of India and China might well expect to achieve similar such material delights as those we take for granted. But it won't work. We won't be able to squeeze that much juice out of this faltering world. There's not enough -  nowhere near. We will need a more modest plan if we are to avoid chaos and untold, undue suffering. Kevin O'Leary is clever at making money, but he is merely another bombastic celebrant at the fire-sale that undermines our world's real needs. And, sadly, the Dragons' Den is currently the most popular show on CBC. Craven supplicants expose themselves to humiliation and ridicule, and we are the sniggering voyeurs, even as they assume the inguinal posture before these Dragons on their Thrones. But their thrones are really just biffies, filled with flies and the stink of excreted ideation. The rich have convinced us to offer them adulation and envy  -  what a clever ruse.

Last evening I watched two fine sundogs glowing either side of the Sun, even a halo lifting up and around the top for a while. Sundogs are, of course, long regarded as portents of a change in fortune. The nature of that change is left to the interpreter, however  -  there's good fortune and there's bad. Every day there are signs offered to us which might serve to help us in our increasingly difficult and complex decision-making concerning the future. Sometimes they are subtle, and the miasma of greed and self-interest blinds and deafens us to them. But the $$$ sign isn't necessarily a stairway to heaven. It's merely an often-abused tool, utterly meaningless in and of itself. Money does not confer freedom  - it is only a representation of work performed  -  or ought to be. Nothing comes for free. We really ought to pity those who scratch and clamber after the toys and tinsel of material idolatry. But it's hard to pity those who would lord it over us and disrupt our otherwise mindful lives. Hence the old bumper sticker. And, of course, it is the worms who will eventually eat the rich, along with all the rest of us, each in our turn. What price then foolishness?

Meanwhile, open up the window  -  can you hear them?   -  yippee-cayo-cayay......

Phil Burpee
October 15, 2011


Phil Burpee is a carpenter and farmer living north of Pincher Creek. He keeps an eye on the world from under the big Alberta sky.