No. I said I would take a break on writing my columns. And I will. But.....something came along. It's about Canada's billionaires - which are pretty much like billionaires all over the world.
Canada's biggest billionaire is David Thomson who is listed at 43.4 billion dollars. (Canada has a total of 45 billionaires.
They are, you will be pleased to hear, making more money than ever. Yes. They are making bigger profits. After all, they can cut staffs, reduce salaries, fire workers by the million while making their cheaper replacements harder working.
How rich are these billionaires? Nobody knows. In addition to not paying taxes, they can hide enormous sums of money that are kept secret. And it's assumed that within the current lifetime, they will hit a total of trillions. That's 100,000,000,000. And even that isn't counting that fact they already get lavish gifts of our money from the governments (Liberal and Conservative) that they own.
And I, yes I, have been on the edge of their world with the Irving family of New Brunswick.
It began with my decision to quit teaching high school and to go back to school for an MA. My choice was a university in Nova Scotia, Acadia University. It was a pleasant school in a pleasant town. I got a room in a university residence which contained an even greater thrill. I had been assigned to the same room that had been assigned to a student of 1920. By the time I got there, he was the richest man in the Maritime provinces. He was K.C.Irving, oil magnate.
Alas, he dropped out after only one year. By the time I arrived, there were already Irving rooms and Irving scholarships. And two Irving sons had been at Acadia just some ten years before I got there.
But like there daddy, they quit too, so they could concentrate, like daddy, on making piles of money. Both James Irving (6.9 billions) and Arthur Irving (3.5 billions). And, like their father, both sons lusted after recognition with the result that Acadia today is smothered under Irving buildings, Irving scholarships, pictures of Irvings..... I had never before seen such a craving after honours and praise from a university for a family that was largely ignorant of anything but making money.
The irvings learned early that all you have to do to get huge sums of money out of Canadian taxpayers is to buy off the Liberals and Conservatives. Then you can invade aboriginal land and get police lined up to shoot any who protest. (I was at one of those.) You can poison the land with oil development. You can hide money that should have been taxes. You can crash one of your trains killing people in the middle of a city - and not even have to say sorry. You can take money the government and people need for schools and hospitals, and instead give piles of it to Irvings. (And you can take comfort by going to Acadia university and looking at it's pictures of Irvings and it's magnificent display of Irving rooms, and it's list of Irving scholarships.)
The Irvings own all the newspapers in New Brunswick, and they're even more wimpy and lying than usual. (Check them. Tell me how many stories you can find critical of the Irvings.)
In the province's last election, one of the liars for the Irvings won. Of course, only the Liberals and Conservatives had the money for an election. The NDP was out in the cold with no money. Result - New Brunswick is going to hurt terribly in the coming years. Already, the homeless are showing up in the streets; and that is going to get worse, much worse
The Irvings, of course, have no shortages (except for their shortage of decency).
So far as I know, and much like all the other super rich, The Irvings are still making profits. And that's pretty much the case all over North America. The super rich are savaging all the rest. They are making huge profits as millions starve. It was like that in the Great Depression, too.
What we're watching is the old evil of the depression years and all the years before that. Greed and savagery are built into us humans. Unlike all other creatures, we are born with evil in us. That's why empires and kings rise and fall.
Right now, as I write this, humans like the Irvings are destroying Canadians just as Rome destroyed itself, as Britain destroyed civilizations, as the US today murders men, women and children all over the world. We've been doing it for thousands of years. And, as always, even our churches don't seem to notice - or care.
For the people of New Brunswick, I dearly wish you could wake up. You have very little time.
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