The Two Stooges

I highly recommend this as a strategy for anyone who maybe watches too much news or is otherwise overly observant of the world around them.

Because that will fuck you up, and we all need a release from the insanity.

I live in a country called Canada. In a province called Ontario, which is the biggest province in Canada in terms of population and business.

Ontario is basically a good place. Lots of good people. Lots of immigrants being welcomed into it. Lots of white people too, who don’t seem to be overly concerned about all this immigration. Or at least they didn’t until this asshole Donald Trump took over the US and got himself elected president on the idea that America was being flooded with bad hombres who were there to rape and pillage and narcotize and terrorize all the poor helpless white folks.

This ignorance and racism is something that a lot of Ontarians got exposed to simply because they had access to American news outlets.

And because almost everything that happens in the US happens here a little later, a lot of people started harbouring fears about all the same things that this asshole Trump was shouting about every day on every news outlet.

What happened was that a lot of people here, who used to be pretty liberal minded, suddenly decided that they needed to go in another direction, and so they elected an asshole of their own. (I say they, because, well, the guy they elected is an asshole and they should have known better.) His name is Doug Ford. He is a rich guy from Toronto, a former city councilperson and a bit of a corporate stooge. Sound familiar?

He got elected for two reasons only. 1. He had managed to convince a good number of people that the Liberal Government was an epic fail, which is something any idiot could have done with ease, because it was. But 2. He also managed to convince those same people that he was all about righting all the wrongs of the previous administration.

Sound familiar?

Well it should because this guy Ford believes that the sun shines out Donald Trump’s butt crack. And so he went about cutting and slashing and giving huge perks to corporations just like the asshole Trump.

He even restructured the entire Toronto City Council, reducing the number of seats by about 50% while a fucking municipal election was going on. That was pure insanity, especially for all the people who were running and had already spent a ton of money on their campaigns.

This was clearly a vendetta against a city council that treated him and his now deceased brother and former Mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, like so much entitled white trash.

Sound familiar?

Now we’re stuck with our asshole for the next four years. But the bigger question that keeps on popping into my head, when you see people like Ford and Trump being put into positions of power based on promises to clean up real or imagined messes, is, have they been put there for a reason?

Who is benefiting from having these assholes in power? My answer, as always, is the corporate world. They are the ones reaping the biggest benefits. It’s surely not anyone who actually has to work for a living because neither of these clowns has managed to attract much in the way of business development. Neither one can be trusted as far as they can be thrown and they are both pretty hefty. And neither one really seems to understand that they were elected to serve all the people. Not just the rich and the corporations.

Trump, who has now been in office for two years, has completely alienated almost every country in the world, reduced America's reputation to rubble. has added 2 trillion bucks to the US’ already staggering 20 plus trillion buck debt, has damaged the internal economy of the country by starting a trade war with China and other countries (including Canada), and has shut down the entire Federal government in order to extort $100 billion dollars to build a wall along the Mexican border, which be great if illegal immigration from Mexico was any sort of problem, which, it isn’t.

Ford has slashed school budgets, forced a restructuring of Toronto’s city council and is now looking at restructuring at least a dozen other areas, including the one I live in. He is currently responsible for virtually no job growth or new business development anywhere in Ontario. (Toronto’s Mayor John Tory is responsible for most of that), And now he is now looking for ways to privatize the province’s health care system and wipe out the entire social safety net in the province. There’s a lot more, but it would just make you sad to hear it.

Following the money, you don’t need me to paint a sign to show you where it’s all coming from and where it’s all going.

And in a way, it’s kinda the way things have always been. Except the trade-off used to be that in return for the all benefits that government gives big business, there would be room to take care of everybody else.

And that’s the thing I don’t get. It’s all going to the corporations and everybody else gets fucked in the ear. The new Conservative ethos.

Complete with a lack of understanding that money provided at the bottom in terms of salaries, a fair minimum wage and good job growth opportunity filters up to the rich anyway.

Money given to them by bought-off politicians in the form of tax cuts and operational savings through deregulation only benefits the wealthy, who just keep it all and even move it into tax shelters so pitifully little goes back to the government or the economy.

This is about as fucked up as it gets and Ontario and the US are really two of the most glaring examples of this shortsightedness in action. Simply because they have bought-off idiots with no business in politics running things into the ground with their incompetence.

My theory has always been that the civilization would not end by nuclear war or some cosmic force, but though the slow rot of psychopathic corporations and greedy big business owners, in some pissing contest to see who ends up with the most toys before the lights go out.

I can feel the lights blinking…can you?

jim out