Dec. 11, 2011 – Finished Draft

 

 

The ‘84 Debt and Deficit Revolt- (and the attendant development of a World Meta Culture).

 

 

Chapter I

 

The Origins of a Modern Quiet Revolt

   

 

Introduction

 

In Canada back in 1984 the huge government deficits from the deep recession of the time triggered wide spread angst in the population. The deficits, combined with high unemployment and already high taxes, triggered a strong social reaction. A form of muted revolt against all the governments of the day broke out.  The population then also undertook a broad national grass roots soul searching, examining all manner of problems. This is such that the revolt against the governments was attended by an eye by the aroused public on the general dysfunction around, of individuals and of business management. The event proceeded in “diplomatic language” which the population networked back and forth by word-of-mouth and not everyone was aware of what was happening. Only about 1 in 10 adults caught on to the “diplomatic street lingo” being used. While the angst about the deficit was nearly universal only about that 10% participated in the muted public discussions about the issues. The national soul searching process that went on like this proved to be very contagious and the diplomatic communication on the street became an energetic national cultural phenomenon. There was considerable illegal protesting in the form of leaking of private information and then harrying people using some stylized sophistication-in-communication. This was as an alternative to other forms of civil disobedience, such as violence. The process then developed aspects that were well beyond normal experience and are actually new under the Sun. The popular issues were street communication, everyman’s economics, personality and psychology and some basic politics. The interwoven themes of the book then become (1) the hyper-community-communications on the street, (2) economic justice and a national political philosophy, (3) a new muted civil disobedience, (4) advanced  human psychology, (5) a polished adult personality and (6) some old is new again economics for our troubled nations – to blunt the slip in progress in the West. This book is the only record so far of what was happening, because there’s a social taboo on talking about the sensitive, moral and illegal issues involved directly. This book walks you through the development of the sophisticated diplomatic communication in the population, the new ideas of the revolt and the course of events. (tbd—daate2)

 

Originally the quiet revolt arose in the unlikely setting of the main Canadian cities but it immediately spread all across the land and then it quickly jumped to the United States and other Western countries that had a similar set of social and economic problems, deficits. The story herein tells of mass unrest and quiet, widespread civil disobedience that originated in Canada, in the late 20^th Century but the social process described was similar in nature and intensity in all the Western countries it occurred. Canadians enjoy flattery like “the world needs more Canada” but this story is a major twist of the idea and you are in for a surprise. This revolt eventually petered out; in Canada itself it was seven years latter in the deep recession of 1990-91, without having much effect on government. It did affect, improve, the 10% of citizens that participated in it though.

 

The whole political revolt was then repeated more recently, in 2002 – 2011, again in several Western countries, but this time it started out specifically as a concern about a lack of good jobs, middle class opportunity for the whole family – and again originating in Canada. This was at the peak of an economic recovery where the people woke up to the problem the recovery of the time wasn’t lifting all boats. This second event was based on the first, however, and was Phase II really. The second phase eventually, over the years, became the broad national soul searching that characterized the first. This book covers both Phases in detail. My book details this quiet but years long political revolt in the West in general that is unreported, which is certainly very odd state of affairs. (tbd—daate2)

 

This two phased mass event then was the first modern Western revolt. It involved the mobilization of wide public concern and saw the rise of an underground activist population. The activists took the route of understanding society down to local problems. The participating public also set about polishing their general knowledge, communication and own personality. This polishing of oneself eventually evolved the culture for the participating portion of the populace. This book, then, is about a social revolt based on the strength of human culture in the McLuhanesque context of the Global Village.

 

There’s been a quiet political revolt, a cultural revolution and then some science by a McLuhanesque mad mob of ten’s of millions on the streets. The activist society that emerged may reemerge from time to time as it’s latent in the culture.  This could affect the whole world as it heads into a troubled 21^St Century and beyond. This is Big Idea territory, the terrain is wild, so come prepared. My book is worth reading as it the map to this process and has a message of hope. We are looking for recruits as well.

 

This book describes human behavior in a McLuhanesque setting as something nearly miraculous. The story in fact is something of a series of modern miracles and many people won’t believe and accept this tale, they’ll be reactionary. However there is a step by step, logical explanation and I’ll be going over this carefully and in detail.

 

The revolt was non-violent but there was a lot of quiet civil disobedience, primarily a street level leaking of what is private and confidential about individuals and businesses and then the sophisticated harrying of citizens with this private information. The leaking of information had the effect of making the process more informed and more interesting to the participants, was a way of talking to the myriad problems around and armed it politically. It was like a vast and on going reality show. It was the grass roots protest of the times and it is tantamount to continental rioting about the status quo: the deficits, unemployment and lack of good jobs. It’s the proverbial “white riots” and leaking what is private and confidential was the form they took when it happened. The leaking was all by word-of-mouth, which is an effective traditional way of communicating but is now enhanced by modern technology, particularly modern transportation technology which can speed the dissemination of information. As of this day the democratic governments concerned have not officially acknowledged the wide social unrest although it is well known in the halls of power. This is the state of the political situation in the advanced countries at this time.

 

The origin of the sophisticated diplomatic language that is at heart of the quiet revolt is that savvy people have always made pithy comments in small talk and conversation by way of double entendres; they always knew how to operate. They use double entendres, parables, as direct communication simply doesn’t work. Savvy people will address the logic and fairness of a situation, like family or the workplace, in this manner. They’ll address sensitive and even illegal issues like this. Under pressure of out-of-control government fiscal deficits this social form heated up, heated up to plasma hot, with people addressing all manners of national and local problems in this way. Commenting by brief witticisms and short summary phrases became discussions in public of broad issues. This was surprisingly effective and led to a co-evolution of people’s understanding of society, of the culture and of personality. It’s effective as a proper code or signal word can abbreviate an entire discussion, be a lecture. This savvy communication is a tradition and the reason why the revolt was contagious, even spreading across oceans. A cult of a new adult personality emerged around this enhanced diplomatic communication that was and will continue to be a quiet political force. Typically a savvy comment is frank, self-depreciating and hidden and there is a taboo about talking more sharply than that so internecine psychological warfare doesn’t break out. This is how the revolt went forward and it’s positioned to become a human “eh” bomb in a wider world.

 

The networking back and forth by word-of-mouth of pithy comments and discussions became copious and very effective. It’s a discovery that this can actually form a medium in our modern McLuhanesque environment. It’s remarkable too that this was all done in a muted fashion such that it was undetectable by the non-participating ninety percent.

 

About 10% of the population is naturally attuned to savvy, diplomatic communication and this is the estimate of the adult participation rate in these mass events. Without the savvy street communication people did not pick up on the on going and at the same time it was not possible to explain it to them directly. However the event was contagious within the 10% and most people that were aware of what was happening became engaged in the on going. With people sharing ideas and insights it became popular, to the extent that it jump across international borders and various countries got involved. It is estimated that about 28 million adults participated in North America; that is Canada and the United States. The 10% participation is high enough to make it dense in every neighborhood, particularly your neighbourhood.

 

The new revolutionaries originally adopted a “question everything” attitude. However, they eventually focused on a philosophy of good jobs; on an expert level discussion of how the free market has normally broadened the middle class over time but this, very strangely, is all but ignored by professional economists in the West. I’m a “jobs activist” and amateur economist myself and had a leading role in the discussions of popular economics that went on in public in the second revolt. I discuss the problem of good jobs at length in the beginning of the second half of this book, all in accessible lay language. This economic section is detailed but it is worth a read as it has become a noted public punch up. In fact there’s nothing quite like this muted public punch up in modern history and I was the cause of it.

 

The economic issue is the world’s emerging economies are moving towards a form of the Knowledge Economy which has people moving to better jobs society wide and an atrophying of worst businesses to accompany this but this is not what’s happening in the West. In the West there’s downward growth towards McLabor and insecure jobs because population pressure, maintained in large part by over optimistic, political immigration. So this is quite backwards and low wages, difficulty of finding a good job and fraying social conditions from this are chronic in several Western countries. Here we are concerned with putting the brakes on the downward economic direction of the West by what we could call “the traditional Knowledge Economy”, specifically by getting immigration right and then edging back towards better jobs – especially in the big growth cities. This is the alternative to maximizing economic growth by immigration without proper attention by economic professionals and politicians to the actual social effects of economic growth.

 

While the “traditional Knowledge Economy” is the pat issue at hand there is a broader system analysis of the workings in the economy here as well. Basically the soft labour markets of our time, the unemployment, underemployment and McLabor, have eroded the functioning of the economy including forcing some of the unemployment into hidden unemployment, lowering wages at the bottom and promoting the growth of low paying businesses. These problems and other aspects of a soft labour market have rather broad negative social effects but this has been ignored by professional economists and sociologists. The revolt was the wake up call to what people generally knew well; society is slipping backward in these regards. Progress, our calling card for hundreds of years, has gone AWOL.

 

This report is thusly basically two short books; it’s double barreled. It’s the story of the Quiet Revolt but also the elaboration of an economic paradigm, the traditional Knowledge Economy and the associated issues around soft labour markets. This traditional Knowledge Economy is practiced around the world already by developing countries. Individually each of these two stories is all but unbelievable but the two are intertwined with one another and become one. They become intertwined by my personal story of events.

 

A bizarre discovery of the revolt is that humans can mind meld in a way, not unlike the Vulcans on Star Trek. I’m here to tell you that at its zenith the mad mob of millions achieved a cross continent network of informal communication that included a form of mind meld, or mass gang stalking with sustained mind patterning to be precise, with myself on that scale. This is as I became the leader, living symbol and whipping boy of the whole international economic, cultural and political revolt for various reasons. It’s a scientific discovery in human psychology and in the Global Village culture by a mob of millions and it is well beyond reason. It took the form of all day minute by minute harassment of me by intimate comments reflecting my thought processes as they occurred by the mob on the street, at work at home and even while “vacationing” throughout the continent. It’s quite hard to explain and describe; it’ll be hard to believe. It’s a form of persecution. The mind meld is an outcome of the copious leaking of what is private. This invasion of privacy became like a drug for the participating population and it turns out enough private information will create a map of an individuals mind, the individual mind not being that complicated. The mind meld is human magic, or rather human black magic. This mind meld is a secret of an adult society at this time and my story is thus a revelation. This continental mind meld took a huge effort by many millions of people but was motivated by misguided national democratic leaders, their lack of attention to the deficits for one. I outline how this was all done and my own experience early on in the book, by page 19. (tbd—page no)

 

There’s an interpretation of this story that it’s a psychotic delusion of grandeur on my part, a full blown delusion, but it’s actually the style of average people and the genius of average intelligence harnessed and this becomes folk magic. The logic and detail of my account is too elaborate and sustained to be psychosis. The genius of average people is part of my message to the world, my message of hope. The accusation that the book is a prank on the scale of that the CIA assassinated JFK the riposte is the story is well known by your friends and neighbors and you merely have to ask around a bit to find this out.

 

The story here details just how politically volatile high taxes, unemployment, low wages and deficits are in the modern milieu. As such it graphically illustrates some basic ABC’s to modern, Western politics, something many elected officials are still plenty naive about, sad to say.

 

This book is my personal account of a mass event. I was a central figure in both revolts and it took over my life for years and years so my personal story details what went on very well. I’ve actually had five special roles in North American society, Canada and the USA, relating to these revolts including that of opinion leader. I’m an average sort of person but I have this exceptional fate where I’ve played all these roles in society, new and unique to history in fact. These could be characterized as folk character roles and this book is the story of me as a North American folk character. They are more fold character roles than folk hero roles. My life has been so unusual it encapsulates the Western revolt aspect of world history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I lived on the front line of modern social revolution for thirteen years, was the spearhead of the revolt, and survived, but just barely. My life was molded by millions of activists and thus I’m unique and can tell the tale in first person. I essentially own the story of this first modern Western revolt. The book is my memoir, threads twenty seven years of social ferment in the West about the economy, politics and culture together with my point position on the front line. (tbd—daate2)

 

While I am a choice person to explain the 1984 and 2002 mass events I’m a flawed reporter. A characteristic of these central roles I played is certain main aspects of the goings on they blinded me to; society at large – millions of conspirators - were able to deliberately manipulate me and intentionally keep some things completely hidden from me. This was both during and after they happened. So I still don’t know all the details about the nuts and bolts of how the revolt process worked, the mechanics of the street word-of-mouth communication for example. I can report most the story though. That’s all you’re going to get as the rest is never going to be reported by anyone. The protesting was illegal, disturbing the peace and invasion of privacy --civil disobedience -- so the full tale probably won’t be told because of that and the fact that it needs an individual victim to explain clearly. The story through my eyes, the alpha victim, will have to suffice. My case was the most extreme experience by far, completely dominant, so at least that will be recorded.

 

My university degree is in computer science and I’m a neophyte writer however my tale is a manifesto of a world social movement. I rely on the fact I report a world’s first to carry the reader’s interest. I’ve tried to present the story of and lessons of the revolt clearly and plainly. There are paragraphs herein that should surprise and rankle. I’m not a genius rather I had the help of million of activists to give this all proper form. The book covers a wide swath of history and is reported formally like a technical report rather than being an easy to read narrative. (Tbd—daate2)

 

 

The Roots of a Modern Revolt

 

To begin in 1984 an economic recovery from the previous years’ deep recession in Canada was well underway. However neither unemployment nor the government deficit, both of which were very troubling, were improving. In fact the federal government deficit in Canada was getting worse even as the economy improved. The population began to pay attention to these problems and the people became spooked. People couldn’t understand how the national budget was going to be balanced without both deep spending cuts and steep tax increases, the deficit being about 8% of the GDP. They couldn’t see how their own private household budget could take the major tax increases to cover the government deficit; it would disrupt family life – possibly entail selling the car or even the house. They couldn’t imagine what the poor could do without in their budget when programs were cut. They were concerned about the unemployment which was affecting everyone’s family at some point. This was in a prosperous, modern country yet something was wrong. So people began to grumble in public. They grumbled in the workplace, in their home neighborhoods and on the street. This grumbling was the genesis of this first modern revolt. The grumbling, and that’s exactly what they were doing, became copious; it explored society and developed proactive aspects. It then developed scientific discoveries. It lasted for seven years, until July 1991, when another deep recession cooled it off.

 

This grumbling, or talking, started in the main cities where people determined their well organized lives were at risk. It quickly spread all across Canada, jumped the border to the USA and then went overseas. It went international because other countries had the same intractable government deficits, troubling unemployment and high taxes as Canada had.

 

One thing I should explain right off is this talk and grumbling was entirely surreptitious, hidden in various ways. That was the whole style. It was illegal in part for one and dealt with real, difficult issues that people don’t normally talk about. They tended to suggest and leave it for the listener to figure out the exact meaning. It was moralizing and moralizing is usually expressed after this fashion. This is communication and not everyone gets it but this is how people behave. Savvy people have always made comments in conversation, in self depreciating double entendres, and this now heated up and became an event.

 

What happens is the talk typically took the form of diplomatic code: double entendres, simple emphasis or, alternatively, “off stage” comments. These “off stage” comments were commentary from around the corner inside buildings, through walls of buildings or from some distance off outside. The “off stage” comments are always, always modulated to be low audibility, like whispers, so they are hard to hear. Also comments can be simply under ones breath. I’m sure this under one’s breath commenting has played a role in historically dissent. These forms of commenting are for material that’s cutting, pithy, witty or simply informative and important. People naturally use indirect, diplomatic communication about touchy issues and this can be ramped up it turns out. There’s this insistence you think about the codes.  It was all anonymous; no one ever, ever spoke directly to another.

 

This using diplomatic code comes naturally to people to some extent. For something like sexual advances it doesn’t have to be taught. People will get the subtle sexual references but just go “huh” when told there is also a similar form of for making social comments, say about one’s job, the logic of a situation or wage levels. Making savvy comments about social equations takes some practice. To comment you have to be frank about the situation and phrase this in a self-depreciating manner, such as being very honest about your own job. Otherwise warfare would break out.

 

While the grumbling and commenting became omnipresent many people never did catch on, they never heard a thing. They didn’t get the code or double entendres, which could include very vague references or complex extended metaphors, and they never heard the “off stage” whispers. While this strikes me as strange because I could hear the muted off stage voices perfectly well people that were unsuspecting didn’t tune them in, period. It’s the dumbest thing, that’s the way the ear works. So this protesting had this “underground” aspect to it and that’s the way history unfolded.

 

Calling this first modern revolt “quiet” is thus just a manner of speaking. It’s necessitated by this circumstance that most people didn’t hear any of the noise in the entire seven years. It was actually anything but quiet; it was actually an awful racket.

 

All this talk had a lot of purposes; it wasn’t just idle. It had effects and lead to new social phenomenon and scientific discoveries. And that’s how my story goes.

 

The audience for this book, then, is these people that never heard anything rather than all the initiates, as I call them, that followed the story along closely for years and years. The initiates already know the entire tale; they are about 10% of adult society. That is it’s for these other people and for posterity, who should be informed of these things. The audience of people who were non-initiates will not all believe what they are reading and will find ways to discredit my tale, mainly by accusing me of hearing voices and  being schizophrenic, or possibly just by shrugging and saying I made the whole thing up. However, the social issues in this story are pressing and you have to discount them to ignore me.

 

For the people who find my assertion that there’s been an invisible revolt hard to swallow I’ll say it doesn’t even matter because everything in this book is logical and systematic and it all could happen in the future. If you insist on calling me crazy, as some in my family do, I’ll ask what is it then, a mystic revelation? One thing for sure I didn’t dream up a sophisticated world revolution in my apartment by myself while having a schizophrenic episode.

 

In 1984 when the grumbling broke out it was something that came naturally. It was just personality at work. It grew into a full fledged revolt against the government and management and the participating public simply took it in stride and never questioned what they were living through. Everyone was just absorbed in the grousing and the style of it, which became sophisticated.  The word “revolt” is my own description and it took me several years in fact to realize what I was living through. The muted grumbling on the street grew into a cultural revolution and revolt against the government.

 

 

The Genesis of the Revolt Process -- Office politics

 

There exists a precedent and origins of the revolt in our culture and that is simply office politics. Office politics is my own personal downfall and the source of my first role of folk character in Canada. I can explain the whole shooting works of the world revolt from an episode of office politics that happened to me in 1981 which is so bizarre it’s unique in cultural history. I can explain from there how I became the first sign of social ferment, lost my lucrative career as a software programmer, went on to become the central character in an international revolt and how the process of the revolt is latent in western cultures. It’s latent in office politics. The international revolt of 1984 was, basically, heated up office politics

 

The revolt of 1984 started in the spring but there was this early warning of it three years earlier in 1981 that involved exactly one person and that is me. In that year I became my own social phenomenon so I’ll start my tale there. As my experience is key to understanding the evolution of entire revolt process I’ll describe it in detail. It’ll explain how there could be a quiet international revolt and how the majority of people weren’t aware of what they were living through.

 

 

Extreme Office politics

 

Earlier on in my adult life, in 1975, I completed a university degree in computer science at York University in Toronto. The micro chip had just made it to computer memory in IBM computers as a 4 kilobyte device and my future looked secure. Computer Science was a fortunate career choice for me as by that time there was unemployment in the other disciplines. Professionals in general were having trouble getting employed but that wasn’t the case for Computer Scientists. It was another world to have a Computer Science degree at that time. Then at the six year point from my graduation, 1981, I could say I worked fast and accurately and produced a well crafted product. I also enjoyed the work as software programming is something like chess playing to an aficionado. This was all a good thing as at age 29 I was still somewhat immature and unbusinesslike. My immaturity was that I didn’t understand yet that on the job your personality is a formal role, not friendly or soulful, and strictly intended to smooth the process of making a living over a period of a life time. Also I became slightly depressed. And I made the mistake of carrying my depression to work. The rule in big bureaucracies is if you have some personal problem you just work as if you don’t and your co-workers will assiduously avoid looking at your personal side. I tended to be embarrassed and kept to my own because of my depression. I was very sensitive to this depression and by 1981 I had quit three jobs in quick succession because of people’s reaction, or my perception of people’s reaction, to my state-of-mind. This is taking one’s personal problems to the workplace and it’s unprofessional.

 

So I started to work on a contract basis to deal with the fact I was an unstable employee. There were contract jobs around and you could get valuable experience and make contacts by working that way. Mostly I specialized in computer software that interacted with machinery, real time control software, so this made me an adjunct to Research and Development work – which was becoming problematic and marginal at that point in history. I landed a long term contract on a research project at Ontario Hydro, the giant publicly owned electrical utility in this province. Ontario Hydro is a land where there are big problems and the key to solving them is good, high paid and committed people who they take care of including with training. I was in a small department called System Engineering based at the Ontario Hydro head office complex which is located in downtown Toronto. What happened to me at Ontario Hydro is one of the worst cases of office politics ever, it anticipate the revolt and is the model of the entire world protest process.

 

The project I was working on was a micro processor that was to be put in private houses and whose purpose was to switch off the hot water tank, the electric furnace, if any, and other electric devices in homes during the peak load. As peak load demands billions of dollars of additional electrical generation capacity utilities are keen to shave that demand. However not only is the public going to pooh pooh the idea of switching off their hot water tank back in 1981 microchips were rudimentary and not ready for installation on a per house basis. In addition the work I was being given simply was not worthwhile as the hardware was still being designed and thus the software was not yet definable. So I was doing busy work. However not all of the chiefs saw it that way, some thought I was doing some actual work. So those were the “hold ups”.

 

Now the key thing for me was I didn’t understand office politics what so ever. In fact it wasn’t until years later that it was clearly explained to me that the workers try to solve problems and police productivity with office politics. I took everything that happened to me at Ontario Hydro as personal, or rather more like a mystery. In all I was at Ontario Hydro for just three months until the place became too much for me.

 

This story is not just about gossip by the water cooler, which is what people think when I say “office politics”, but rather about the extreme form of office politics where jobs are on the line. I’ll explain the basis of this serious office politics later as it seems half the world understands this well but the other half doesn’t understand it at all.

 

In an office when “something is wrong” the workers are really very perceptive in reading the situation. The collective intelligence can be more than the sum of the parts, as it were. Once they figure out the situation, suss it out, people will begin to make surreptitious comments. By surreptitious I mean they talk in double entendres, codes, gesture, implication, very indirect suggestion, riddles and also they focus attention just with emphasis or by being loud; basically Diplomatic Language. Of course they hide their comments and distribute them around because harassment is not allowed at the workplace. They hint rather than point to the problems directly, which I suppose is necessary as it’s all diplomacy about touchy issues.  Also people will not tell you you’re your problem is directly, as direct communication simply doesn’t work usually. This means it’s all riddles and you have to figure out what they are talking about. The expression is you have to “find” your mistake. Then, because the workers extract a price for the attention, after all they are in competition with one another, the process is negative or rather frank. To get through problems with not listening and incompetence, the origins of troubles, they use these generic formats such as the weather or personal comments as a carrier wave. Comments about personal problems that workers have unwisely brought to work are preferred as they are the most embarrassing, and the more embarrassing the better the communication device.  And that was my case with my depression.

 

This Diplomatic Communication is thee communication process. There’s a need to keep communication indirect, various reasons for it, and this is how it’s done. Mothers should explain this to their children but apparently they don’t. In the event, the revolt, indirect communication proved to be an excellent mechanism for smartening people up.

 

Being frank and honest about one’s job has always been part of being professional it turns out. You are the expert in the job, no one else including the manager pays that close of attention, and if something is wrong you’re supposed to be aware of it and report it. Typically this doesn’t get much action but the professional is supposed to upfront about it and what will happen is the professional will make a brief comment to anyone that’s inclined to listen. It’s a critical point, as employees have family responsibilities to look after of course and need the job.

 

People on the job play a role and they keep any comments to their role of employee. So the double entendres at work are always couched in terms of the work situation. This is something like living in the here-and-now.

 

This role playing is carried on in private life as well, when people communicate on the home front say. Within a family the double entendres will reflect the family role.

 

This role playing is some big rule about adult style and it requires sophistication. It’s difficult to detect as practitioners adults don’t deviate from the rule. I call it socially savvy role playing. The idea is to express the social equation, hidden in style. So when the revolt heated up every situation developed its own local double entendres to express this. At every different place there eventually was a different lingo for talking about the social problems being addressed in the revolt. That is, at Tim Horton’s donuts there was a “Tim Speak” and so on. There must have been millions upon millions of “lines” developed over the years of the revolt.

 

Interestingly enough while places like donut shops are largely staffed by immigrants in Toronto these immigrants, working in their second language became adept at the double speak. While you could not communicate to the 90% that didn’t catch to the diplomatic language the savvy immigrants at these coffee shops and restaurants became skillful in the ideas and lingo. To me they were a source of comments, which included the immigrant point of view.  

 

Now I am a reasonably intelligent person and had been trained to talk in double entendres at earlier jobs but still I was a little slow about communication in all its facets. For example, I was traditionally slow about, er, picking up on all the signals from the opposite sex. In any event a hubbub, extensive commenting, started at Ontario Hydro and I could make out that it had to do with me.

 

Ontario Hydro pays the highest salaries in the province and they emphasize commitment and training as to how to solve any problems. They have a philosophy of Ontario Hydro is where you want to work. They deal with staff problems by office politics at times.

 

At Ontario Hydro I would hear something that sounded similar to my own work situation or personal situation or people would just be loud and exaggerated. At first it was the blue collar unionized workers who were around the office fixing and installing things (and who tend to be critical of management) then it became general throughout the large office area I worked in. All of this was not clear to me and I would lie awake at night trying to figure out what point a comment about numbers, colours, sports and the weather could possibly mean. I could not imagine people being perceptive enough to determine what I was doing in my daily work, which was nothing productive, and I certainly didn’t think that was my fault.

 

Eventually they seemed to have singled me out and the attention appeared to follow me around the entire head office complex as I visited here or there in performance of my duties. I would go to the next building and there’d be this following trail of commenting. It seems I was attracting attention to myself. This all gave me the hebby gebbies as the Ontario Hydro head office houses 1000s of people and I’m a private person normally, my normal preferences was not to be understood or known, like a hermit. They had focused in on me, spread gossip around, and now followed me around the head office complex.

 

I can explain a couple of issues of the situation for the half the population that doesn’t understand office politics.

 

The best way to communicate when there’s a stubborn problem on the job is a sharp insult about someone’s personal problems as an analogy but which is also a comment about the speaker’s own shortcomings. This is so you do not unduly focus on and embarrass the trouble maker. You don’t want to persecute the trouble maker such that he or she quits. When there’s some outstanding problem people here and there in the group, as they read the situation and find a similarity with their own, start to make these triple edged comments. Then these people are “covered” by others making self-depreciating comments in turn. As there’s always lots of problems on the job the whole workplace can be light up thusly by one person, some worst case. This triple sting commenting has “class”, which has two interpretations. In the end everyone winds up looking bad, there are no individual winners left – but business or organization is improved. The technique is to be frank about your “ass” side. That is the style and when it heated up in the revolt instead of calling it “ass” they called it “the funny”.  You have to be self-depreciating otherwise what you get is blame and some form of internecine psychological warfare. You do need the rule, an informal rule, to keep people somewhat civil. Don’t being expecting to have a dignified experience on the job, there are too many problems. The self-depreciation is a way to harness people’s natural meanness and cynicism as well. This is a traditional social form, although most Moms don’t explain it to their children.

 

The “class” bit is actually normal human personality. Normally if you share something with someone they will share back to make you comfortable. So it’s all that natural, just premeditated and polished up at the office. And it’s actually why the grumbling in the revolt was so contagious. When someone heard of a problem they’d immediately return it in kind. This is to the extent that the grumbling in Canada jumped overseas.

 

Not only can the commenting spread through out an office or workplace like Ontario Hydro’s head office but it can be picked up by visitors, suppliers and contractors, and carried off. So already you have office politics spilling out to the street and down the road which is what happened in the Quiet Revolt of 1984.

 

The problem areas and people in an office become case studies for the employees. It’s their education and maturing, how institutions train staff and remain competitive. That’s part of the function of office politics.

 

Another essence is problems are caused by not listening. People generally don’t listen: they are illogical, hypocritical and in denial. And people are sensitive, that’s the other problem, and they never quite grow out of this. You have to deal with sensitivity, always. So what happens is co-workers will stand back 10’ and talk under their breath about their own problems as if they were talking about you all as an analogy for some trouble on the job. People, the target, have to figure out what they are doing wrong for themselves. This is socialization and it takes a fair amount of personal style by the initiators to pull off. No one will ever, ever admit that they are commenting either, ever. This not admitting to surreptitious commenting is the Prime Directive for communication problems. People will not talk to you directly about your problems and call me crazy but only I, in this book, will ever attempt to explain the mechanism of indirect communication. And that is for what that’s worth. There is no point, absolutely no point, until people learn to listen, especially about their own shortcomings. This rule is kept to the extent that you could have a world event revolve around it. So there you go, voila, that’s the origins of the style of the international revolt. It’s from this Prime Directive.

 

If the story of the revolt were to become popularized a wave of frankness in society might occur. Initiates will respond to the news by demonstrating the Prime Directive rather than with long conversations. The long conversations simply would not work. This is a problem with surfacing my story in the main stream media, or at least that’s what they warn me about.

 

Office politics is active in the workplace at all times but it isn’t explained in the literature. I couldn’t find it anywhere; neither management books nor self help books. The only thing I read about office politics in the literature is that there will always be harassment about questionable jobs. The helpful aspect of it, the teaching aspect, is juxtaposed by its intent to go so far as to get someone fired. In the mean time it’s never clear whether or not the pushing and shoving will be helpful to the target. In North America efficiency is valued over job security, the non-productive are expected to move down the street, but this may be entirely different in more socialist cultures, say Japan or Scandinavia.

 

I’ll add here that the double entendres aren’t spread around evenly in office politics but rather tend to focus on hot spots. Class or no class dog packs develop. So it does become persecution to the hot spots despite the theory of spreading the insults behind the technique. And this became a feature of the nation wide Quiet Revolt as well.

 

My immediate supervisor at Ontario Hydro was a PhD. in physics from Oxford University no less who had lost his belief in research and development projects. His attitude was such jobs were mostly just bureaucracy positions on dead end projects in these modern times just like his and mine and that’s what one did for a living. Later the point of diminishing returns to research and development in the traditional industries became a theme of the 1984 revolt.

 

So there was this vague but continuous commenting at me going on at Ontario Hydro. I was very uncomfortable. My attitude was I wasn’t doing anything wrong whereas they figured I lacked commitment, that I was going to be on contract for years and was in line to get hired permanently as there was a demand for people with my specialty. I grit my teeth and put up with it because I did not want to quit a fourth job. I figured I might never get employed again. Then a funny thing happened. People on the street began commenting at me as well. Something about my stressed out appearance signaled them that there was trouble on the job and the commenting became general. When I went into a retail store I would hear in a raised voice something like “key”, “shortie”, “zero” or “it sounds like a chain reaction” and I determined there was a pattern of my being noticed. This turns out to be part of our culture. These things, trouble on the job, can actually become a community effort.

 

Then what happened is my girl friend of five years and soon to be my wife, Donna Sankee, had a family get together. There was some of this similar commenting going on at the get together by then. Then my girl friend’s cousin Steve said “hey baby” to me and this sole comment somehow turned on a light that confirmed there was a pattern of wider communication going on at me, at young, sensative me specifically. It was exactly that comment that did this some how – although it doesn’t entirely make sense.

 

I was shocked. I realized that workers at Ontario Hydro, the whole head office complex, had come out of themselves to figure out what my job was. I realized the obscure commenting was definitely about details of my situation. And I realized that these strangers understood me as well. This was part of my immaturity. I had always been a private person and didn’t feel understood or even wanted to be. At Ontario Hydro they had focused on me, because I had “attracted attention to myself” by working temporarily because of a personal problem, and they responded which is to say frankly and negatively. That’s my story, what happened to me and how I became aware of communication. It could happen to anyone; it could happen to you.

 

What happened next is I thought through my entire life, reinterpreting things I had heard years previously with my new attenuation to indirect communication. I didn’t sleep for three days. Then for seven more days I didn’t go to work as I realized I was radiating more depression than ever and one thing I was learning was you had to look like everything is fine. That’s the rule. You can’t attract attention to problems on the job by looking depressed and unprofessional, it reflects on the job. That is how things work.

 

I figured out that they wanted commitment from me with a little help from a national politician. Certainly the people at Hydro weren’t so direct. When people harass you they will be indirect so that you do your own thinking. There was a federal election in the offing at the time and one day I went to the grocery store and a former finance minister of Canada, Donald McDonald, was there campaigning for his replacement. He took a double look at me and momentarily shouted out to someone “Make a commitment!” Somewhere inside me the light went on again. Intentionally or not I learned from him that all these people were complaining about my level of commitment. That’s how I learned that particular lesson.

 

My situation at Ontario Hydro was they wanted me to make a commitment for my own good for one. In office politics, with respect to bad jobs, each situation is treated differently and this is called “the design”. It’s like local culture, the unique attitudes of each business. So there’s variation on the theme, the theme being to solve wastes of company time and money.  While the local design might be a come hither “whistle” it may not be all that coherent and consistent. The social form was confused at Ontario Hydro, they insisted on being polished and professional, not looking depressed about your job, but at the same time the bureaucracy there was chronic.  It turns out the jobs scene in many large organizations is that way now I found out latter, so this is actually an all around unhappy and threatening situation and the local “design” might get out of hand. That is what people are saying and what they will do maybe different; they may want you out. Although bad jobs will always be with us the community will continue to insist that it’s about productivity and will “draw the line” at some point. I believe they drew the line on me because I had an early degree in Computer Science plus 5 years of experience so I was in my prime and they had expectations for my sort.  It was news to me as a young person that some professional corporate jobs simply make no sense but it turns out this is part business life.

 

Unfortunately there are plenty of managers that are illogical, don’t communicate or are themselves stuck in compromised positions. Bad managers can affect you career negatively by putting you in a dead end position. It’s something you have to keep a watch out for.

 

Sometimes, in theory at least anyway, intense office politics like I describe isn’t about the job or project but simply person’s incompetence. They are supposed to be educated and fixed by the on going so as the company gets things done properly. The commenting “is supposed to close”, they say, when the incompetence is addressed. I saw a lot of office politics in after years but I never saw a simple case like this, mostly it had to do with the job itself. 

 

I go over this story in blow by blow detail because communication is key to this narrative. The audience, which is people that don’t communicate expertly, will have trouble following it but that is my experience and that’s an extreme example of how these things go.

 

In the end I decided my work at Ontario Hydro was just another job but I was being abused for it so I quit again. I recall I put my feet up on the desk one day to say that was happening here and the one guy on the job, an older guy who was watching out for me, laughed out loud and said “Pack it in.” I packed it in alright. I packed in my whole career and means to a living. After that I only worked one more year as a programmer as I became highly stigmatized and continually attracted comments on the street and at work and this ended my career. That’s what “broadcasting” there’s trouble on the job earned me. I became a social phenomenon that was triggered at Ontario Hydro. Eventually it cost me about a million dollars in lost income.

 

I can recall writing my letter of resignation at my desk. As I wrote it out I could hear a young woman commenting from another part of the office. It was like clairvoyance as it was sentence by sentence. This clairvoyance is a key part of the technique. People can do it; it’s around although I don’t understand it myself. The thing I didn’t realize, the double point, was that woman felt the same way as I did about her awful job. It was a poke in the eye and I still didn’t understand the double point aspects of comments.

 

I didn’t completely understand that office politics was about problems on the job. It doesn’t make sense to blame the professional worker for staying on a bad project although that’s the social attitude. They treat the workers badly for manager’s mistakes for some reason. I had heard in my younger days the big unions sometimes negotiated that people that were redundant were kept on the payroll but now the issue was white collar jobs that didn’t make sense was somewhat the same situation, and unpopular.

 

That’s what can happen when you have a bad project, a bad manager and a bad employee at once. It results in this grand diplomatic dance around issues. At Ontario Hydro it was “Bruce, you shouldn’t even be here, but if you hang in there’s the probability you’ll get a great job – say programming our nuclear reactors. You’ll be ahead of the rest of us, because of your specialty. ” And I was supposed to pick up on all that from the coded short phrases. Issues like these were always part of the culture and always picked up by the public but I then became a walking, talking social phenomenon – which was a new turn in the culture.

 

In the end the provincial government appointed an entrepreneurial outsider to be the CEO of Ontario Hydro and he downsized it by thousands of jobs, just clobbered it, which would have terminated such projects and aspirations as mine.

 

 

Office politics takes to the Streets

 

After I quit Ontario Hydro I was actually taken back by my contracting firm, Quantum Systems, that I was working with. I was called in and allowed to explain my side of the story and they simply nodded and said they’d still try to fill that contract but they did have something else for me to do, this time at DuPont Canada.

 

The next thing I find happening is I walk into my new job at DuPont and the commenting starts the first day I’m there. I had been at Ontario Hydro for a while before things turned ugly and now I have no idea what is happening. At Dupont the workers sensed I had problems previously and simply continued on. They do this; they are sharp like this in business. This is perception which is central to my whole story although it’s hard to explain or understand. I lasted two weeks and refused to go in one day and they fired me. I got nothing done in the two weeks because of all the constant riddling.

 

That was too much for Quantum; they let me go. So now I was my own little social phenomenon with me not being able to hold a job and people on the street making comments at me whether or not I was employed. This, it turns out, is part of the culture. I was caught in a tread mill of bad projects, and specifically bad research and development work, and was broadcasting that message. It was getting harder and harder to find worthwhile research projects in the traditional industries and this is what I was encountering and would continue to encounter, as the harassment then went on for years. So personifying this and broadcasting it on the street just by my look of stress was my first special role in Canadian society. It’s a cultural reporting mechanism, a social form it turns out, an index in the village. It was now magnified, I was a McLuhanesque event. Unfortunately it comes out as persecution. This new social phenomenon around just me to start with is part of the uniqueness of my point-of-view and voice. However, eventually what was happening to me became generalized.

 

You know the role of research and development in society has changed in my life time. As a youngster in the 1960s everything was improving and we were used to new products appearing all the time. That phase is past, the main discoveries have been made, and people no longer expect the future to be like the Jetsons. Everyone knows this. Now science is expanding in some limited fields like biology and micro-chips. The slow down in new inventions from research and development was what I was encountering.

 

This situation of mine of attracting unwelcome comments everywhere persisted for one year, faded with the deep recession of 1982 and 1983, and returned with a vengeance in the revolt of 1984.

 

In the meanwhile my girlfriend Donna Sankee agrees to marry me. She doesn’t believe any of the stuff I’m telling her about people talking in code and remains oblivious to all of this for the rest of her life. Donna is a History studies graduate and simply has a black view of human nature and the workplace in general. This makes her slightly paranoid but supportive when I have trouble on the job. Also she believes in supporting family, friends and her man. I can’t believe my bad experiences as a software programmer are going to continue and we have a good relation otherwise and decide to make it life long. So when I become this unemployable professional phenomenon I get married and Donna becomes my support. I owe her a lot. It’s unfortunate and ironic that I got married as a professional, a good prospect, but then spent my entire life as a dependant.

 

While I describe how my life is turned topsy turvey, and Donna doesn’t have a job either at that point, we are never short of the rent.  Even though worse things are about to happen to me, which would mean us now, we are never poor. Life was greatly simplified by the fact neither Donna or I ever wanted to have children and we remain childless such that no ugly family complications will appear in this tale.

 

To move things along I was then hired on a sonar 3D imaging project at a small company funded by the federal government. I lasted two weeks before I quit again. It was an embarrassing, bewildering and unproductive comment ridden two weeks.

 

Then it was a company that made mass spectrometers, a very high technology. That was two more weeks of the same. They funny thing in this case is I think they had a legitimate job for me. In the decades since the company has done well and expanded. In any event they honoured the social form of making me a focus.

 

Then I had a little luck and got hired by the Toronto arm of Litton Systems, a big American defense contractor. I was to work on the computer controls for a shake table for the American cruise missile. I say some luck because while there was no commenting there in the first four days after that I was fired for being too slow, after just four days.

 

Finally I got hired by Shell Canada in Toronto here who was trying to get out of the oil business and into the computer business. They were manufacturing a commercial control computer for refineries and that worked out a little differently. I was there for several months before the entire project got canned. There was some “rain” or “water” there, as they call the abusive commentary, but it fell on the misguided project manager, not me, so that was the first time I saw it happen to others. That was a relief.

 

Landing all these jobs took me to a year out from Ontario Hydro and I was still getting the occasional comment in the street. For example Donna and I went camping 200 miles from home on the Bruce Peninsula which juts into Lake Huron. A couple of commercial fishermen passed me, and noticing my stressed out appearance, started to talk loudly about how they’d like to catch more salmon, which are quite lucrative. The moral of their tale is simple. Salmon are a “common good” and the fishermen are policed from taking more than a share. This is a public issue, as are bad jobs in fact. It was “Fisherman Speak”. Still with all the storms of commenting that had been buffeting me I didn’t get this simple point about jobs and was distressed that people seem to still be commenting.

 

This commenting on the street tended to make me stay at home. I was uncomfortable with this mystery. If I felt depressed I thought I was attracting attention and comments. So I tended to avoid contact with the neighbors and so on and this aggravated my isolated nature.

 

By the summer of 1982 a deep recession had been on for sometime and it became hard to find a programming job. I was on Unemployment Insurance for the umpteenth time and Donna worked part time as a supply teacher. Because of my apparent unemployability I became hysterical about money and Donna had to handle the household finances. Having someone to fall back on sure was a comfort.

 

I did find a contract job in Ottawa for about a year during the height of the recession. I got hired because I had contacts in Ottawa. I left Donna in Toronto and rented a room. It was quiet on the job and also on the street. The recession had quieted the commenting that I attracted. This was fortunate as the contract I was working on was an airborne naval radar imaging device, which was really socially unacceptable on a number of counts including the fact that enemy vessels would shoot at a low flying reconnaissance airplane slowly taking a three dimensional radar image.

 

This job took me up until the spring of 1984 when the revolt first broke out. I completed my junior work on the radar imaging project, returned to Toronto and set about finding another job. The recession was over for the computer industry so I was regularly being called into interviews, despite my by now shaggy resume.

 

I forget exactly how it started but the commenting at me on the street returned with a vengeance. However this time it was different as people were saying it, the commenting, had become general and was affecting all sorts of people. Individuals everywhere were being “stoned” verbally on the street. I was unemployed, at home and socially isolated so I don’t have a good record of how the revolt started and evolved. However, it was very similar to what I had experienced already.

 

I do recall taking the bus trip to Ottawa from Toronto for an interview with a telecommunications modem manufacturer, Gandalf Limited, during which the key of the new philosophy the community has was explained to me. On the bus trip home there was this guy making these comments about which I was certainly the target of for the entire five hours. This would be because I still looked self-conscious. Then at the end of the trip he explained himself. He said there had been “a change in the rules”. Whereas before the rule was you weren’t supposed to attract attention to yourself, put on a “show”, and people wouldn’t “look” now they wanted you to do so but to indicate “your role in your problems”, to exaggerate your responsibility. They wanted you to signal this, to explain it by commenting aloud or even just by wearing tell-tale clothing. They called this “editing”. The grumbling had started, had evolved a common philosophy, a consensus view that had emerged, and the first thing they decided was they didn’t want to hear how bad the system was, lots of people were doing well, rather they wanted the starting point to be you taking responsibility for your part in your problems. People, instead of minding their business, were now going to be forthright about what all was going. There were lots of problems and people were going to be frank about them because of the national emergency the deficit represented. Essentially “Private and Confidential” flew out the window. This let the cat out of the bag for a change in the personality of the culture. That’s my understanding of the change of rules and the first bit of community philosophy. This is an essence of the revolt.

 

The rule “your role in your problems” is very useful. You take responsibility rather than needing the wisdom of King Solomon to make a judgment. It’s a key philosophical device.

 

I’ve described how I would get hired for a high-tech job, start but then last only two stormy weeks. The pattern now repeated itself six times over a year on R & D projects with major corporations. I first went back to Litton Systems, then to Westinghouse, then to Montreal with the national railway, CNR, then back to Ottawa with a Bell Telephone company, BNR, then to the Toronto General Hospital and finally to Spar Aerospace  -- the major manufacturer of aviation and spaceship equipment in Toronto. They all had office politics, questionable projects and questionable jobs.

 

By the mid point in this run of jobs, at CNR in Montreal, the pestering on the street was so constant that I couldn’t go anywhere. It was like having the “mark of Cain” on my forehead; this was my slight look of self-consciousness. This “mark of Cain” is a very subtle part of the story but essential. In Montreal I had to stay off the subway because of the pestering.

 

Part of the style of extreme office politics is round robin harassment of the hot spot. As I experienced it the co-workers could set up a constant stream of surreptitious harassment by taking turns. There’d be someone having a conversation with a co-worker for a while and he or she would lace his conversation with comments and then when that conversation was over someone else, say someone on the telephone, would take over the role of continuing the stream of riddles. This was going on at all of the places that I lost jobs. This style of harassment by constant round robin participation became the style of the revolt as well.

 

While this was going on I asked everyone I knew what was happening. I consulted the self-help literature and I did go to several professional psychologists. No one could or would help. Basically they won’t talk directly about communication; adults will not talk about hypocrisy and fairness directly. They will only illustrate it by example, just as I said, and I didn’t quite get it yet. This is a secret of adult behavior and most the world doesn’t know about it.

 

All the while I’ve kept my apartment in Toronto and was also collecting Unemployment Insurance from the government. My neighbors in Toronto are noticing me coming and disappearing to other cities and that I must have set a record for collecting poggy even though they know there are all these jobs in software programming in the advertisements in the newspapers. So they are noticing me.

 

My wife says nothing at all while I go through the six jobs. Her dark view of humanity and of the business environment keeps that at bay. I didn’t move her when I took the jobs in Montreal and in Ottawa (My co-workers insisted that was a very bad sign, showed a lack of commitment.) Still my wife has a contract teaching job by then and I have Unemployment Insurance so we make the rent.

 

I should explain here what people had begun to think as the political solution to the deficit was nowhere in sight in1984. People may have forgotten that this was the case.

 

In 1984 the Canadian economy improved but the government deficit went up rather than down. It then reached some $32 billion a year, some 8% of the GDP, which translated into $4,000 or so per family. No one could see the average family cutting that amount plus the amount that would have to be spared the least well off. Much latter in 1995 there was some judicious cuts to government spending, the economy grew so federal revenues grew and the deficit was eliminated quite gracefully, or at least without killing people. In 1984 the deficit had been high for six years, the government did not actually have a proper plan to deal with the deficit, and people were worried as to just what was going to happen to the country.

 

Unemployment was the same. Only it had been high for eleven years and average people didn’t know that there was even was job growth in the economy, let alone enough growth to deal with 11% unemployment over time. Also what growth there was was in small business and good corporate jobs were being missed.

 

People believed that neither the free market nor the central authorities, the government, could solve the problems of the day. These are the basic forces in society, there’s only two, and it was believed a third way, community involvement, could be called on to solve the economic crisis. To economists this is similar to what they call “tribalism” where people assume economic roles by tradition in primitive societies. This is what evolved on the street and as we shall see technology, McLuhan’s Global Village, gave them reasons to believe they were on to something radically new and potent, a revolution.

 

The conclusion people came to, the philosophy, was the government was too political to deal with the economic crisis and that community would have to take over, a true third way. If you think about it, and no one did, this was a withdrawal of the citizens’ belief in democracy. It was that profound. This withdrawal in belief in democracy has happened before in history and learned historians just say it happens from time to time. The government was excused from dealing with the deficit by this attitude it couldn’t be done. Of course the government took the blame latter at election time but in the meanwhile they were excused.

 

The government of the day, the Brian Mulroney Conservatives, didn’t ever respond to the public commotion. In fact, incredibly, they ignored the lesson from the previous government not to run threatening deficits and never had a realistic plan to deal with the deficit problem. Ten years latter they entered another deep recession with a large deficit which then promptly went back, to some $42 billion. This lack of a plan is what sustained the revolt. (The $42 billion is two thirds the deficit by percent o f GDP than before.)

 

Brian Mulroney inherited a deficit and an economy with high unemployment from Pierre Trudeau who had ruled for 16 years. I sometimes call the revolt Trudeauhysteria. Pierre Trudeau had become Prime Minister on the bases of an incredible resume, a stunning resume. He had PhDs in politics, economics and law; was eloquent, Liberal and French. He was a swinging, millionaire bachelor expert in Constitutional Law in an era concerned with the separation from Canada of the French speaking province of Quebec. He was a natural philosopher King. He had engendered Trudeaumania originally. The 1960s was the zenith of prosperity in Canada and Trudeau’s promise was the best society the world had ever seen. He then ignored essentials – money - and shipped out jobs, the nation’s finances, then public peace and democracy. He compromised the ability to fund the nanny state, his raison d’etre as a Liberal. The charismatic Philosopher King shipped out Canada as we knew it. The media and elite haven’t come to grips with this in thirty years; they are stilled amazed by his resume, and refer to him as a Canadian icon. Trudeau’s main contribution to the world was to be the cause of a Canadian and Western cultural revolution (That is along with the Bank of Canada that caused a deep recession by its fight with inflation, to be fair). It was the need for change that produced the social discoveries outlined in this book.

 

The intractable problems Trudeau ran into were inflation, unemployment and deficits. The nanny state was newish, only decades old, but it wasn’t per se what the problem was. I read the budget deficits resulted from increases in payments on the national deficit due to inflation and Trudeaus’s own tax cuts rather than increased costs of the nanny programs. Nevertheless the government couldn’t handle its total load of responsibilities and deficits resulted. What happened is the Liberal government ran expansionary deficits right into a deep recession and the deficit mushroomed to unmanageable levels.

 

A problem boss can cause office politics that heat up an entire building or even an entire company. In the 1980s problem Prime Ministers, Trudeau and then Mulroney, heated up the entire country in a similar process and produced civil disobedience coast to coast. These Prime Ministers produced mass hysteria and in fact mass hysteria that harnessed itself into an event that was to inquiry into society to fix itself. A nation of activists emerged, an underground society walking around and talking on the streets everywhere.

 

 

Chapter II

 

Revolt!

 

 

Panic about the Deficits on the streets

 

I can best describe the situation in the country by getting back to my own story as my life was shortly totally consumed by this new social process.

 

The last stop on my computer programming career was Spar Aerospace here in Toronto. I was hired there and lasted the usual two weeks but this time there was a dramatic conclusion. This was in July 1985, one year into the national social ferment.

 

When I got to Spar there was a storm of commenting as per usual. I was hired to fill a role of fixing computer software that was troubled by a system’s bug. So again it was an impossible job and a waste of company money. Attention had focused on this job by the time I got to it such that the other workers had clairvoyance with my testing. I would run a test, it would fail, and I would clearly hear someone from down the hall say “now that was error 1501”, and so on all day long. The equipment manufacturer’s representative was in and he explained that error 1501 meant “the program was looking for another computer”. Ha, ha, ha. That certainly was what Spar was going to do.

 

However the social situation out on the street was considerable evolved by the time I got to that job. That would be one year into the revolt, July 1985. I explained how office politics can spread beyond a whole head office complex by people coming and going. The customers and vendors that come and go to a building pick up on the goings-on and carry them outside. The workers go to local restaurants and infect the situation there. So the lighting up of a hot spot can ignite a neighborhood. Spar Aerospace is a supplier to Atomic Energy Commission of Canada Limited (AECL) which makes Canada’s commercial nuclear reactor. My uncle, an engineer, happened to be a senior purchasing manager for AECL so he was known as an important customer at Spar. The office staff at Spar started to comment to me about my uncle’s family life, which is to say my cousins. The issue was that he had two university trained but barely employed adult children and, I believe, my Uncle brought his worries about them to work, his worries about his insecurity of employment at AECL – which works on a project by project basis. So in my two weeks at Spar I was introduced to the fact that this gossip had spread across the city along the lines of suppliers and vendors. Stories had flowed out of the workplace, down the highway and across town about index situations like my Uncle’s family. This word-of-mouth networking is a fundamental mechanism of the revolt. Interesting stories were repeated and repeated and could be spread around a whole city in a matter of days. The mega city had become a mega-village.

 

There’s a natural contagion that comes from discussing problems. People respond to mention of someone’s problems by sharing their own, of course. Normally people are diplomatic and keep their troubles to themselves but once the rules on this changed and there was open season on issues the social process spread like wild fire. In the panic it quickly spread across Canada, then into the USA and even overseas. It spread from nation to nation.

 

The workers at Spar knew me, of course. I heard “they knew the one” in reference to me which turned out to be an understatement. Not only where there workplaces that were infecting the city with hot spots but there were neighborhoods that were doing exactly the same thing. Community is a process parallel to office politics. My neighborhood, which had become suspicious of my comings and goings, was working an intimate network around me to figure out what exactly my problem was. By the time I got to Spar the network around me was not only city wide but region wide. They were spreading the story of my troubles that far and wide. They were also getting my associates from my whole life to communicate back details about me. They were building up a file on the life and times of me and also my friends and associates in the populace. As I was isolated at home I was not aware of the extent of this public activity. It was kept secret from me.

 

Anyway at Spar on my birthday, July 3, 1985, they opened the curtain for me on what had been going on as gently as they could. I was called to the contractor’s office; there was this deal that I was temporarily at Spar as a contractor, and the contractor’s office was half an hour’s drive away. As I drove out on the highway there were construction workers fixing the overhead signs who could mark the passage of a specific speeding car with gestures and seemed to do so with me. Then my immediate contact at the consultancy posed himself so he was a look alike to someone I had known at university. When I got back to Spar they asked about the construction workers, as they were having the same experience. There was assorted other commenting and gesturing at Spar that day as well, mostly about people close to me, family, which is the “gentle” part. (The gentle part was to include people close to you in the persecution.) While all this sounds very paranoid I have to tell you interest in me was that intense and it was growing exponentially. From that trip on I was surrounded by commentary and gesturing by the populace in terms that were personal to me, just to me, all the waking hours of the day and late into the night for the next six years. I was some sort of alpha case. This was something else.

 

In the Revolt the community at large became active and my bizarre story was of interest as it was prescient to the whole uprising, actually unique in the world. It had anticipated what they were now doing, was about bad jobs and it was also about computers and research and development which people were counting on for economic growth. In the last year they had combed the city with their informal network for my life story, not just my struggle with employment and the resulting phenomenon on the street but rather my entire life story. They had their community technique of spreading information around the city through people coming and going to the neighborhood just like in office politics.  They assembled my life story by getting my friends and associates to report in the details of me they remembered. These people combed their memory for details of interaction they had with me even long ago, particularly conversation. This was new and it proved to be an entirely effective way of understanding a person in detail. The shared memory of associates seems to capture essential moments and this is a discovery. It’s a bit tricky, the shared moments can be quite subtle. They experimented with me thusly widely and wildly. I became an exercise in consciousness raising as the style of the intrusion was to use the information to figure out other people’s experience, what that person was doing, feeling and thinking to the nth degree. While gossipy story telling usually becomes inaccurate at each retelling in the Revolt they meditated on each story and treated it religiously so it actually became more refined the wider it was distributed. This was new and different as well. They deconstructed my conversation, personality, then my psychology and then even my stream-of-consciousness. They spread it all around, trained everyone in all this. It was popular as it was an education, political activism and soft gore at once. They had copious details on me and they then found out that they had enough personal information to know what I was thinking much of the time; to break into my cranium - the vault. They found they could actually do close mind patterning. It’s a discovery in the science of psychology, and made more amazing by the way it was done by a large angry community mob. It’s more advanced than regular psychiatry, the psychoanalysis industry.  

 

Their decision then, for some reason, was to step up the harassment of me to region wide, minute by minute, 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week round robin style, as in office politics. They broadcast on the street my appearance, my characteristic looks, and the details of my daily whereabouts so that the community could keep me under a constant eye and a constant stream of harassing cat calls. They used the detailed understanding of me, my thinking processes included, to harass me intimately constantly. This process sounds unlikely and awkward but in practice it was a high tech precision machine.

 

The harassment couldn’t just be idle commentary rather it had to be aggravating. If it wasn’t threatening me, my employability, it was an invasion of the privacy of my mind and even my dark areas and secrets. Typically the populace would follow me around, figure out what I would be thinking from clues in the environment, and echo the very thought I was having with a word or phrase. It’s a new social phenomenon of mind patterning, mass mind reading. It’s possible. It was by the populace in general in real time as I moved about the city. This was all of the time; there was a constant blanket of attention. It was all disciplined commenting: timed, brief and very personal and all anonymous, from around the corner.  It’s very intrusive and it’s very upsetting. They manage to steal the privacy of my own mind. My head, the internal chatter, became the site of a very sophisticated political protest for six years. This then is the human mind meld and it can be done by society in general so is more advanced than the Vulcan mind meld of Star Trek fame. It was a political protest but so far it’s a secret of adult society in the mega-village. I’m here to tell you it’s now been done; it’s a fact-of-life. It turns out the mind melding came naturally for the participating population, flowed from the all the details they had on my life. It is the ultimate expression of the new network of word-of-mouth communication that society achieved. However, for me the intimate harassment was like an invisible prison, the mind meld cage, as the harassment was constant. It’s entirely amazing, entirely amazing by each the hour of the day in my case, and it went on for six years.

 

The mega-city community developed this word-of-mouth network of informal communication fostered by the commute people take daily, dug up and told and continuously retold 1000 stories on me, thought the stories through for common cultural references, worked out the psychology of these, broadcast my appearance and whereabouts, kept me under continual observation and one year on they could keep up a more-or-less constant stream of cat calls that mimicked what was going on in my mind. It took about a year. It was considered a good idea, was extremely popular.

 

The community, the gang, had to keep me under very close watch to effect the mind meld. That and they had to communicate every detail back and forth across the mega-city. They had to communicate what happened to me daily. It was a huge undertaking and you won’t believe some of the small, detailed stories I tell in the following.

 

They must have been working on mind patterning generally, figured out it could be done to associates, and I became the experimental, test case. I did not see them do the mind reading to other people, though.

 

So I now heard voices all the time, voices on the street that reflected my thought processes. One reaction to this story is that it is classical mental illness, audio hallucinations, and there is a close resemblance.  The similarity of what I experienced to a schizophrenic’s symptoms is very detailed. It even seems like it to me at times but actually it’s something new and what it is is genius. The product of the community cooperation was genius, the genius of average people. It’s the product of a million mind energy formed into a medium. When people put their heads together they found they could fathom human psychology. It’s a discovery about psychology and about the species ability at psychology as they were able to train the average person in this. On the street all they told me from the participant’s perspective “it was an experience”. It must be something of a natural high, thinking on this level. It became cult like, this attention to one person’s mind by the population for years and years. The cost of government borrowing is the interest on the principle and as I complete this book in the summer of 2011 that cost is approaching a trillion dollars so it costs on such a scale that produced this social phenomenon. Truth is stranger than fiction and there’s an underlying effort to change the world here. It’s a case of a failed democracy going to public scrutiny. The trillion dollars produced this magic amongst the common folk, human alchemy. Still this revolt process was everywhere in the country so the interpretation of me as schizophrenic is personal -- because it’s either me or the reader. Some people will accept my story without batting an eye and some just won’t. And schizophrenia is the alternative interpretation that government officials will be taking in this story to excuse themselves from doing anything. (tbd—daate2)

 

These “voices” are less like mental illness and more like something out of this world.  While it’s understandable some people interpret my experience as mental illness the relevant life issues are pressing and you have to be an indifferent person to make that interpretation. While they patterned my mind they also went to great lengths to lecture me on what topics were evolving on the street. The “voices” were thus all informed, witty and make good sense. The voices became reasonable discussions by a resourceful public of adult responsibilities in trying times. I got good information from them on diverse subjects: politics, technology, economics and life. The voices are mostly in the savvy street pidgin that the people began to speak in. The voices were my source of information for this book. I’ve included lots of specific examples of them as illustration of the cleverness of the street talk. What I heard was mostly “the voice of reason”. It was the language of the times.

 

Schizophrenics are known for hearing voices and the resemblance to my experience is close to that but in fact there’s the second form of voices and always has been – people simply making “comments”.  People that don’t catch on that communication is in comments are likely to die a little stupid.

 

My very sensitive self was now public exhibit No. 1. The intimate knowledge of me and harassment made me feel like dying. I can recall screaming a couple of times. I thought maybe I should just blow my head off with a shot gun. The population took a ho-hum attitude to my suicidal bent.

 

Attention by one’s village has probably always been intimate and now that’s how far a word-of-mouth network can go in the McLuhanesque Village. They achieved a level of familiarity with me an order of magnitude higher than normal family. It was referred to as “scientific intimacy” and at its peak produced this mind meld. This, then, was the second of five special roles I played in this country, of being the alpha case in an experiment in society, of having an “open” mind and being tormented with it moment to moment for six years for the sake of a political protest.

 

The populace had more details on me than my than my wife, a lot more. They became adept at picking off the small details one would be most concerned with daily, say my daily to do list. The attention to details by the populance, say on the bus on the way to work, was much, much higher than what family paid attention to.

 

The exercise to understand personality must have improved people’s ability to relate, say on the home front. Deep understanding of other people is what’s normally thought as “soulfulness” but in my case eventually pretty much a million or millions could do it. Pffffff.

 

This discovery in psychology is like Newtonian mechanics, which was a major discovery in physics but is now accessible to first year university students.

                                                                                     

This opening the curtain was at about the two week point at Spar and I didn’t go into work one day and didn’t telephone either. They said on the street I should have phoned in sick. And so I was fired from that “job” and to my relief I might add. That was the end of my software programming career.

 

What was happening on the street in general was something even more incredible, I’m here to tell you. There was a discussion in-the-air by part of the population as to the state-of-the-union, a grand inquisition into the entire system. It was an anthropological study of a modern nation state by the participating mass population. There was this common interpretation of modern society emerging on the street, our Liberal social philosophy. This was by the population, a mob, rather than by some articulate leader or genius author.

 

The national deficit was heating up local problems of all manners as well and these were being addressed. What emerged by the end of this first year was an understanding that all this new process was going to be proactive. The uses of these new community capabilities were to fix individuals with problems, to fix local business problems and to fix the economy. It was a common sense revolt against management and leadership. It made the nation one giant reeducation camp too. It was an attempt to improve human nature through education, a revolution in behavior. People were going to co-evolve. It was new and it was amazing. It was some sort of new science fiction like world and people believed in it, the population believed in it completely.

 

The networking of information across a mega-city was an amazing development. It connected a million individuals closely. The citizens then applied their smarts to social philosophy, the street language and the neighborhood. The thing of it is it works. It produced millions of well informed activist citizens, which normally are quite few and far between. It produced this genius of the collective.

 

I heard a line about politics from a standup comedian that was pithy and fits here so I’m going to quote it. A Canadian comic by the name of David Broadfoot does political jokes and he waxes “there is only one type of revolt, and that is the tax revolt”. It was true in the present case. People just wouldn’t pay for all the programs the government was buying with the deficit. And this apparently was across the developed Western nations. Although all the countries pay different rates of total tax they all dug in at no-more-taxes, the status quo. This does mean the government has to manage with what it has. There’s a need for a catchy name for the similar Western uprisings. The suggestion that drifted in my open apartment window from the parking lot down below was “The 84 Revolt”, which neatly works in a double entendre about the essence, the tight family budget.   

 

 

A Hero of the Revolt Emerges

 

Now I described my work history, the associated social phenomenon that sprang up around me due to bad jobs, and the unusual position where it landed me. But that’s not all that was going on. Ooooh, no,no,no,no. There’s something besides myself that’s at work here making me the worst case in a world that’s become quite extreme. And what that was was my neighbor in the apartment overhead of mine, an older Greek immigrant stay-at-home housewife and mother. There was a mass event going on around this woman, and it had to do with me.

 

Overhead from my apartment was a family of four. Their name was Anastakoples. They are immigrants with two teenage children, a male and a female, all living in a nice but only two bedroom rent control apartment. The wife, who is sixtyish, has been interested in but disturbed by my comings and goings over the years. Also my special role of my being the lightening rod for what’s happening in Canadian workplaces was active and she’d been participating in that from upstairs, learning from it. She had been watching out for me and thumping on the floor and so forth, to make communication points. However, by the time I got to Spar Aerospace she’s volunteered to become my “guardian angel” and keep the focus of attention, the commenting, on me from her apartment. She does this as a full time vocation. She’s actually a stranger to me, I never did meet her formally. The new special role I now played is keyed by the fact she’s willing to volunteer to be my full time guardian angel and to keep me under the focus all the while I’m at home. While outside the community keeps me under close observation and under a torrent of constant commenting and mind reading while at home this Mrs. Anastakoples does the same. She gets better and better at this as the community gets better and better at psychology and the mind meld. The people call all this “taking care” of me and they believe in their very bones it’s a privilege not persecution. My neighbor’s own role is dedicated to fixing one social problem, me, and as volunteerism is the theme of the new community activism she was regarded as a hero of the revolt. Mrs. Anastakoples volunteered to do me a favour and lead the charge of the revolt and the population became dedicated to her. She had no power except what comes from the cooperation of the community. She becomes wildly successful at getting public cooperation in her role of activist. The mechanism is obscure but it caught on with the participating community and the rest is history. It’s not logical, it’s a phenomenon.

 

My early memory of this dedicated neighbor is a hazy recollection. This is too bad as she plays a unique role in Canadian history. She started to comment through the floor early on and was a key to my entrapment before I got to Spar but I don’t recall exactly how early she started on the other role, her role as guardian angel. I actually forget whether she was interested in my first role of index on high tech employment or became interested as this evolved into my broader second role as the whole country heated up. Even after they opened the curtain on the theatrics surrounding me at Spar I didn’t realize what this woman was doing. She would comment at me constantly all the time I was at home but her voice was barely audible and she hid her harassment in the noise of passing cars outside, the whizz of their tires, or in the noise of my TV. All this was done through the concrete floor that separated us. I had no idea that direction the voices were coming from. So I didn’t realize she was the source of what I was hearing for the first six months of my persecution, until Christmas time 1985. After that she was more forth right and we’d talk back and forth on occasion through the concrete floor. 

 

Approaching Christmas 1985 my brother, who lived in Vancouver, suggested to me on the telephone the noise I was hearing was from upstairs. By that time my neighbor was less guarded when she made her comments and it became clear to me that upstairs was the source of these voices. I called the police. They actually came over and went up there to look into the problem. They came back down and said they couldn’t hear anything and that upstairs was just an older immigrant couple. 

 

The attending constables may or may not have been aware of the broad social disturbance but their co-workers at 32 Division, some of them, would certainly have been. As the key to my special persecution was what this Mrs. Anastakoples was doing my whole ordeal could have been stopped by arresting her for disturbing the peace, mischief or besetting my home. Even just threatening to arrest her if she continued would have been adequate. (Mrs. Anastakoples was “stalking” me, but at that time this was not covered by the criminal code. A few years latter it was made a criminal offence by Parliament.) In this way the police were my keepers, actually my wife’s and mine keepers. This was the hole in society that was being exploited; I was the victim of some sort of police bug. It was a police bug. In the ensuing responsibility percolate upward to the senior police departments, the Ontario Provincial Police first and then the national police, the vaunted Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Although no one thought of it for years I was really the responsibility of the police chiefs and their bosses, the elected officials. A six year long public hostage taking for political reasons by the local police, which is essentially what I was, certainly has the leverage to be the Prime Minister of Canada’s political and criminal responsibility. That’d be so if he had normal hearing, but I don’t think our Prime Minister Brian Mulroney did. And somehow they didn’t inform him of the protest, the grumbling. Anyway people did eventually think to identify the government’s responsibility and five years later when there was another huge deficit at the provincial level there were calls on the street to put new Ontario Premier Bob Rae in jail via me. However no one would serve as witness and that was that and still is that to this day. Without a single witness the legal system can be your own prison.

 

The savvy local constables very probably didn’t think the invasion of my privacy was a big deal. They didn’t think. They just shrugged off the mind reading by the community as no big deal, a new trick. By the time they came to their senses they were in deep trouble so weren’t about to correct their mistake. In addition, and this key, but I don’t have good information, the invasion of my privacy probably predated Mrs. Anastakoples volunteerism so the police responsibility came after the fact. In Toronto the police are well paid but are not very professional it seems. However, this book outlines later how many professional disciplines are not very polished and are a problem.

 

One occasion about this time I went upstairs and knocked on the door of this neighbor. The husband appeared and right away he gave me punch. He wasn’t enjoying his wife’s vocation of folk hero. The police were called and the upshot of this was my wife told me never, ever to bother my neighbors again. She otherwise told me to stop thinking that people were commenting to me in code. She could not hear the muted voices. She is stubborn so that was the end of my efforts to describe to her what was going on. I had 5 ½ years to go.

 

To go over the situation my role as alpha case in the revolt had three synergetic motivators. I was a unique social phenomenon all by myself leading up to the revolt and was prescient to it. Then, while the nation’s social costs climbed I had become the country’s worst case of Unemployment Insurance dependency despite being qualified and experienced in the promising Computer field, just the type  of thing people were on the watch for. Finally, my neighbor decided to dedicate herself to my case and became a hero of the revolt. The original, unique social phenomenon around me started at Ontario Hydro just kept climbing until I was the point position and symbol in a cultural revolution.

 

A mechanism of the 1984 revolt that was very much like office politics was its focus on worst case individuals. These were used as study cases in the public discussions like I was and I call them “stars”. However it wasn’t a total throwback in the treatment of individuals as there was a decision and commitment by the community to support these stars. That meant straightening these individuals out behaviorally or preferable straightening out their lives through affirmative action in their employment. The stars were supposed to be given preference in hiring, that was the deal. So in fact people became “stars” and were happy to do so since it meant they’d get special consideration in any job application. That was the theory. This new form of persecution was highly stylized, purposeful and there was to be this deal. In the event it didn’t work very well. A good job was like winning a lottery at that point in history and there was stampeding to turn friends and associates into stars. It was so much Gold Fever. However while the participating population would go to great lengths, incredible lengths, for one individual what seem to happen is that cooperation stopped at the hiring supervisors door. And there was a problem with the participation level of the revolt as while it appeared to the ear to be everyone in fact the majority of people weren’t following along so this affirmative action was rather a hit and miss affair with hiring supervisors.

 

Oddly they didn’t tell me of the compensating side of affirmative action for myself for a long time, years in fact, and I was in the dark as to what everyone including my dedicated neighbor was trying to do.

 

In most cases the affirmative action simply didn’t work, I saw lots of this, and it didn’t work in my case, the alpha case. They ran my case for six years until my resume became useless. It seemed actually to work in reverse. While I had landed six job offers in the 14 months previous as I described in the six years I was the subject of affirmative action I never got a single corporate job offer. This is one of the lessons to posterity of this book.

 

 

Philosophy, Themes and Scope of the Revolt

 

The revolt movement had this ability to run discussions, arrive at a consensus and evolve philosophically, it’s amazing. A philosophy emerged on the street through the discussions in-the-air. This was explained to everyone participating and I will go over it here. The community did go to great trouble to explain it to me, often by references to parts of my life and experience. It’s convoluted, dovetailed and a serious subject suitable for an eloquent writer but I merely enumerate its aspects.

 

I like to call this mass event that started in the spring of 1984 a counter revolt. The original revolution was the massive Keynesian deficits of the governments. By 1984 it was generally perceived that one’s children and grandchildren would be saddled with the government debt. The Western world was no longer going to pass on a better world to their children rather it was going to pass on their debt. People were mightily offended. One’s children were going to have to face other problems such as burgeoning world population and diminishing non-renewable resources including oil. Calling the mass hysteria a counter revolt is awkward so I shorten it to revolt. As there was also a study of the whole culture I sometimes refer to it as “The Course” as well.

 

The revolt was an education. It was a moral education as it would ever be. The general feeling in 1984 was people needed to know what was going on in the first place, and where was the morality. So calling the revolt “The Course” is appropriate. It investigated most major aspects of modern life. It investigated everything from growing up, to technology, to employment to politics. It did this all in through abbreviated and muted in-the-air discussions which haunted all public spaces and work spaces at the time. There was no dollar cost to the process, the cost was the persecution, and it became popular and copious.

 

When the grumbling began people perceived that there was a lot of money around so they began to wonder just what the problem actually was. The latent forces of office politics, its brother process of community, and also the class war came together in the context of the Global Village to produce a mass event. The class war was an element of the event as this friction is a natural part of society although we tend to forget about it. In particular that aspect of the class war that was emphasized is the contention is between general labour and well paid middle class skilled workers.

 

A central theme was being a good citizen. As the Counter Revolt was a moral education this was featured as axiomatic. The point was to have an economic system that catered to values. The use you were putting your money to, which is such as family responsibilities and charities supported, were considered good or bad citizenship. Having money in the first place was considered positive as well as it implied you were playing by the rules and consumerism stimulated the economy. People that didn’t get it together and were poor were considered part of the problem. So having money was actually esteemed and being poor was vilified. There was the manifest attitude that people that had money problems were at some level the author of their own situation. There was the attitude wages are set by social agreement, not by the market, were socially sanctioned at some point. This is true for parts of the economy such as unions and government which in turn affect the whole market for highly skilled people. The agreement to pay well has to do with the cost of living for people with children, a moral issue. An implication was that well paid people, such as government employees, that didn’t have children were something of black sheep. This remained a theme.

 

The point of doing something for free was made, either as a volunteer or through charity. It was pointed out that people don’t do much for free in their entire life; it’s a good lesson to keep in mind. The point of just how much you had actually contributed to society in your life was explicitly made. People in high tax brackets contribute substantially although this is often overlooked by these self styled leftist moralists that are around.

 

If you want to have an economic system that caters to values, which was much discussed, it behooves you to examine your values. This is as people have this reflex reaction to issues such as fairness but it’s often superficial, hollow values. Hollow values are an age old problem. In the revolt good examples of this were the way Research and Development and Immigration were supported without thought about what was going on.

 

The counter revolt evolved this country wide network of word-of-mouth communication which was incredible. People discussed issues at work and took stories and ideas home and repeated them. There were these lectures, actually brief comments or hints, drifting through the air everywhere. With jet travel the same ideas and even some of same small details circulated nationally and internationally. It expanded people’s personal contacts greatly.  It was consciousness expanding. There was a discipline to keep the process by word-of-mouth and to this day the revolt does not Google the slightest reference to events or even ideas. The network became mercurial.

 

As the alpha victim the discussions I heard were always Bruce-centric and would have been rather different from what other people experienced. What I heard was always expressed in terms of what I knew, was interpreted specially for me by society. A lot of information was passed on and the sheer quantity of it came through to me. For other people there had to be a rather lot of exchange of stories. It would be interesting to hear a report on just how this went.

 

The new word-of-mouth process was a discovery and incredible but word-of-mouth communication has been effective through out history. I’ve heard it described as the traditional way of communication. In our modern society we are familiar with its effects when people talk up a good book to read, a good movie or a new rock band song. The emergency the government deficits represented jumped it up two orders of magnitude. This was possible because of technology, our McLuhanesque Global Village environment, particularly the road system and vehicle traffic.   

 

The activity in the word-of-mouth network got people to take an interest, read up and to think things through. They thought through science, society and life. The process of discussing, listening and thinking through enhanced personality, competence and it did address fairness. They learned the trick to think about the essentials – essentials being at the heart of the on going theatrics.  They emphasized arriving at good sense; that thinking carefully does lead to common sense judgment. The people learned to watch how they talked, to control the logic, negativity and implication of what they said. They learned to speak in their own voice and watch their own hypocrisy. They learned to include themselves in any critical comment of others or society in way of a double entendre. They learned to hold their tongue as well. They sharpened their understanding of how other people’s personality work. The revolt advanced the understanding of human psychology, what they termed “the science of the mind” as I have described in my case. People learned style; the revolt actually harnessed average people’s ability to be polished personalities. This thinking through was very productive in the event and became like a national sport with people making smart points in the public forums. The participating population became more coherent than the leaders, experts and general public. It tended to produce a consensus, although this was trendy in nature. They were working with average people and while average intelligence sounds a little insulting it turned out to be very bright. It turns out to actually be phenomenal and that is a message to the world. It’s the same with individual “style” as well. It maybe what the world needs is more personal style. They managed to do all this, to find the time to get it all done, despite typically being very busy with work and family responsibilities. They got it done, trained tens of millions of people in this in North America by a process on the street. This is all actually an evolution of the culture. It is similar in this regard to organized religion, mass education and prosperity, which are civilizing forces. That’s what grouching on the street, working with indirect communication and being frank, led to. It’s the result of a McLuhanesque community communications revolution. It was based on their idea “doing the work” matters most. It’s hopeful.

 

One of the reasons thinking through works so well is because too often there is actually no thought. There is knee jerk reflex, emotion and just lack of thought instead. Issues; at home, on the job and in politics are often approached emotionally. So you do the work, think things through, and it starts to produce somewhat sobering results immediately. We are all familiar with illogic all around us and in fact the national revolt addressed this. It was the effort to “cure stupid”.

 

The thinking-things-through sometimes means spending a minute of thought on a topic. It’s as simple as that in some cases. The short hand maybe to have a minutes thought to change the world. They should make it a rule. Suggest it to your spouse or significant other.

 

The problem of no thought is particularly acute when it appears at the very top. Issues like the deficits have been dealt with with no particularly clear thought, sometimes not even arithmetic. No thought at the top, it’s amazing.

 

Another reason thinking through is necessary and works so well is because of all the disinformation around us. I heard this line, “what truth is there in what anyone says anymore” and it rings true. So you have to think about the source of what you hear or read pretty much as a routine.

 

Some aspects of politics, elected officials pet turkey’s or attempts at public relations, are very ham fisted, not thought through and in the revolt they came to think of them as “cartoons”. You can see them in the newspapers. History is significantly these cartoons. This became a popular reference in the revolt.

 

The revolt was successful at getting people to sharpen up. I’ve described the main mechanism of getting through to other people as insulting them but diplomatically and including yourself in your comments, generally by being frank and negative. There was this change of the rules in the culture to being frank about what was happening which was fostered by leaking of what was private. I know how it worked on me but I’m in the dark on how it worked generally, on all these other people. This is the short coming in my report, this book, as it’s the message to posterity. When I asked about this process they said it wasn’t so much the embarrassing of other people as focusing on the problem of jobs, money.  They said that is people’s interest. You can embarrass people with a comment but to really get through you should stick to the problem of money, which is threatening. In addition they could only get through to the 10% that were listening anyway, and they could not get through to friends, co-workers and family that were not inclined to listen in the first place.

 

The other thing about getting through to people was the extent of effort they were willing to put into it. They had a general term for such efforts, “The Try”. They wanted to improve society and the route to this was to do the patient work of getting people better thought out, socialized. They would try for years and years on certain individuals or projects as I shall be relating. One of their themes was to be a “caring” society, and the effort they put into is a lot, humongous in fact.

 

The revolt was an act of group thinking and it was without virtually any dissent at the time.

 

The counter revolt was heavily thematic and stylized as well.

 

A main thrust of The Course was anti-big-government. This was something new. That’d be in the sense in the past the popular theme had always been capitalism is corrupt, and what can the government do for us. People in Canada hate the free market and had always been bribed by governments willing to spend, spend their own money. Now the government was the problem so all aspects of the government side of things was put under the microscope. Now it was the turn of the 44% of the Canadian GDP spent by governments to be considered the problem. Everything from rent control, to unions, to secure government jobs were properly considered to be privileges rather than fairness, which is the usual trick. The advantages of a post secondary education in the workplace, 80% paid for by government in Canada, was thee big example.

 

Another one of the themes was money counts. In the 1960s a popular theme was that people were too materialistic, of course. When the deficits rose up and the living standards were threatened people focused in on how you need some money to do almost anything. This includes even taking a bus ride to the library. You need a certain amount of money for the extras that make life worth living. There was a manifest concern about how people were affording these “extras”, affording life. The summary of money counts is that people want an active life. This is for enjoyment but also personal growth’s sake. An active life is a pat phrase and a good summary. It takes activities to grow up, to develop competence and to relate well. Without personal growth you pretty much are left a backward peasant. So The Course was a moral education about values but they also esteemed money at the same time. So “living” replaced the idea we were a wanton consumer society by a focus on people that were have-nots. Later they commented there are two main issues in life, love and also money, and they are connected.

 

There was a lot of pointing at who was “living”, had a few extras, because some advantage from the government. The prevailing tendency of Canada’s politicians “to subsidize everything” provided fodder for this national event.

 

The Course focused on jobs. The reference point became secure, well paying positions with a pension. The expression “a way” caught the problem a lot of people were not secure. They were struggling to make ends meet and /or had no provision for old age, “a way” to have a successful life to the end. One’s job is an essence and a way of understanding a person as well. It has always been like that but in these times of insecure employment it was more biting and a proper reference point. It’s easy to forget a person’s security and keeping it in mind is being thoughtful. Ideas that corporations were somehow the problem were normalized by awareness that it’s big organizations that offer better employment.

 

The Course was analytical and moral. Motivating fears were the deficit was uncontrollable and the debt would be passed to one’s children. On inspection, the informal accounting, what was being passed was the cost of the extra’s in life. These extras one are “on top” of the household budget and would be eliminated by any tax that’d go toward balancing the budget. So the next generations were paying for the current one’s life style. This included savings. The looking at the extras one has is effective informal accounting.

 

There was this revolutionary inversion of youth paying for their parent’s life style but this was also while youth were not finding good jobs. So this was the nut; the driving force behind The Course. It was family.

 

There’s a whole ocean of individual sins that are covered by the universal social programs of course and was explored by the broad topic of individual responsibility of the well known individual cases.

 

As a moral education a big theme in The Course was individual responsibility, of course. I went into a McDonald’s at one point early on and a young black guy, I presume he was a Caribbean immigrant, said “Bru, they even want us to think back”. The idea was everyone was supposed to do some soul searching of their own life and their own part in their own troubles. So they approached individual responsibility from the life long point-of-view. Of course it had another meaning for immigrants; they’d maybe have to “go back”. They said when I thought back it’d be painful. In the end they did analyze the stars closely for mistakes in life but people in general didn’t do this thinking back about themselves. This was for years and years.

 

The revolt did use a star system of case studies. The revolt focused on individuals as the study mechanism. They would elevate Joe citizen to very well known status, star level. To be “elected” as a star you had to represent some educational story be a problem to be solved, preferably with some ironies. Many people’s life situation was deconstructed and broadcast through the air and this put a face to various aspects of modern life. They sussed out these star’s behavior until they had a template of their personality. People learned from other’s mistakes in this way. This breach of Private and Confidential was the drug of the 1980s. This invasion of privacy on the street completely circumvented the legal system. In my case they went as far as to accumulate a critical mass of information on my mind until it was as detailed as an exploded view engineering diagram, a hair complex engineering diagram, and spread it all over the country.

 

The detail of stars employment gave people a lot of information and insight into specific jobs and into specific industries. This is actually a rich vein as you can make out general workings of the economy from detailed anecdotes of single workplaces. For example they knew about my brother, who ran a small wood factory of 40 people, but actually exported to Japan. And they knew that my father, who was a scientist and did research, was concerned about the difficulty of the marketing inventions and not just the difficulty of coming up with original ideas and patents. So there are key understandings in each case study of employment. Certain workplaces became very well known – were basically just walking around on the streets. This is spying and is a form of civil disobedience.

 

An investigation into one star’s life touched on a lot of subjects and so makes a broad story. Details of growing up, how the school system is working and how employment opportunities are panning out can all be told from the experience of one person and also his or hers friends and associates, who in my case also became well known themselves. This broader story of one person’s life tells a tale about the times. The whole process of invading the stars’ private life told the tale of a generation as it has itself never been told before. As modern life is complex this is quite interesting.

 

 “Work” was considered the answer. Work is key to personality, competence and, hey, fairness. It turns out communication, relating closely and awareness take work, effort, as well. Working hard is part of the rational of wage differentials in our meritocracy. This is part of playing by the rules and is a key to producing the actual businessmen and experts we need to compete in a world of 6.9 billion. Working hard for all your life, or most your life, is a high standard. The modern state is very expensive and an open question on the street in the revolt was “Who’s going to do the work?”

 

Everything takes some effort, the brain takes effort, and without it there’s stupidity. Some people are just lazy enough to be backward their entire life; they never grow up. It’s a world issue and it’s pretty much attitude – backwardness is attitude.

 

Another theme was how education, schooling, was hard work and should be rewarded monetarily. The middle class ideal that an education, playing by the rules, should keep you from a dead end job was the prevailing philosophy. This is the model and actually the ideal of the middle class. Canadians are comfortable with living in a meritocracy; it’s how a trading nation survives.

 

Wage differentials were embraced for jobs that require skill and expertise. They were embraced as part of the work ethic and as part of proper middle class values. Also corporate jobs pay better than small business and this was accepted as it’s simply not realistic to not do so. In more socialist countries, Japan and Scandinavia, wage differentials between high school graduates and university graduates are lower than in North America and this seems to be the result of philosophy  as much as labour markets. Higher wages for skills aren’t guaranteed by markets although they ignored this.

 

The Revolt actually embraced the class war. There are generally two points of view in society depending on your class. The tension between the classes will always exist. The one view is that middleclass skilled workers are coddled and the other is that high pay is the reward for ambition, skills. There’s contention between those that think a good wage is deserved by people with children while the other view is a premium for a wage should go to the achievers who are critical to keeping society prosperous. So it depended on which side of town you lived on. The joke on the street was very typically marriages consisted of a skilled husband and an unskilled wife and mother so the division was in the house. When you include the entire family the situation is very conflicted these days.

 

Jobs were often regarded in the view of what their actual market value might be. That is, all advantages in wages that were artificial, not really hard skills were disparaged. This is as corporate and unionized jobs aren’t really sensitive to the market. Some skills are puffed up as well. And a particular attitude around was this was a concern because the lowest wages on offer were not a living wage and were unfair. An eye was kept on the economic justice of paying difficult jobs more.

 

In the classic union confrontation the union demands more money based on the cost of raising a family. And skilled people base their wage demands on what the union got. However in the modern mix you have childless couples that both earn high wages and they do quite well off a system which is designed to be fairer. Single people earning good wages are similar as they don’t have the pressing responsibilities of family. Unions and governments continue to pay based on the cost of living of a family while corporations follow along to keep competitive. So the pay system of the modern world is conflicted by people without family responsibilities who do quite well.

 

The Revolt took the view point of the working class man to heart but at the same time insisted that education and skills should be the route to an easier life.

 

In the event they looked into the stars life in detail and with accuracy. They set up a nation wide dragnet to accumulate information on me as the alpha case and developed a close understanding of my entire life. They moiled every job I had ever had and every school I had ever been to for obscure remembrances of me, even just brief sightings. I want to emphasize that this was not at all like gossip rather it was done with the utmost concern for accuracy; they rather thought about and discussed each story. The empathy with me was all but perfectly crafted. Complicated things such as my adult attitude to my upbringing were nailed with precision. That this is how the gossiping worked is a feature of the process and a discovery. They developed high style for the investigations into the stars. It was an enormous effort. I note that society could focus thousands of people on a star and develop a reasonably balanced view rather than, say, focus on their idiosyncrasies, advantages and sins as people do. They eventually developed some knack at focusing on people’s positive side – for example they colorfully rationalized my major problems latter. It’s persecution but it’s precise and amazing at the same time. An understanding of others is hopeful as well.

 

If you are in complete empathy with a person you follow the very thought they are having. So this is the mind reading, the attention to what the thought of the moment would be. In my case the village had a million eyes and together they could figure out my exact thought. This requires an extreme amount of background information but also attention to mundane details. So my persecution was this close care and attention, it’s an irony. It sold because the whole world is a little mean.

 

They tried to educate people about technology simply by the thinking-things-through. There was this street science going on and it was based on in our daily life, general information rather than on exact scientific detail and articles. It has an advantage over technical journalism which is special interest oriented while thinking-things-through emphasizes important facts. They got people in general, say house wives without and prior interest and education in science, to be technically savvy. Their information on science and technology became pretty good, excellent. It’s another amazing aspect of The Course.

 

My own area of real time software, computer programs that control machines, was an example. It’s not that deep of field of study and key ideas from it I heard here and there, mostly compressed into witisms. For example the technique of initiating an input/output operation and then continuing on with other processing was called the “no wait” option which is a multi-entendre about menial jobs.

 

Under the microscope there were ins and outs to society. When tax increases were announced there was a general consideration and accounting of whom all was going to pay and who was going to benefit in the end, or at least they tried. A classic line is the Rolling Stones phrase; in I don’t know which song, is about “my side”. In our complex culture everyone’s story is so complicated that what you are left with when you boil it down is the individual’s own side.

 

Later they refined the explanation of “my side” to the problem that in the modern world we play more than one role. We may be an employee, a spouse and a parent at once so are inherently conflicted. That’s what’s become of the Class War.

 

They analyzed the average life closely. You can examine a person’s life in such detail and it’s interesting. Good examples I recall were things like number of parties given, number of years socially isolated and dollar cost of your first kiss.

 

The Course wanted to be a moral education but it relied on out and out illegal methods and persecuted individuals. That’s sort of a wrinkle on human behavior that was brought out by the inequity. It was more community might.

 

The Counter Revolt was another one of these churches, it was moral. However, as with a lot of moralizing it was overwrought; it was actually never ending complaining. I have an example. They developed the philosophy that businesses were “supported” by the community. The Revolt was left leaning in its way and it considered businesses a community effort that people supported. However we know people direct their business to companies that provide good value and they pay little attention to the quality of the citizenship of the owner and management.

 

The anonymous voice of the revolt, the commenting from off stage and so forth, is perfect for moralizers. Speaking in the third person they can moralize all they want, all day long.

 

There was the funniest thing going on in the Course. There wasn’t one suggestion of cuts in spending. That’s neither to the public side nor the private side. No one could figure out how to cut anything from the government side without being very mean spirited to the worst off. On the private side there’s no finger pointing to the car and the spacious house. At least there wasn’t for many years. In the fourth year the expression “take the bus” was popularized as the suggestion where the private side cuts can come, the family car. (I’ve had the thought that the huge deficits saved the automobile industry. It’s a possibility.) The Course was otherwise so exciting and all encompassing that people though it was going to tune up individual’s behavior, productivity and economic growth such that there’d be no need to do anything else. The Course itself didn’t come up with any cuts to useful government programs. While the people tried to suss out the logic of government spending and the culture at large it missed the point, which is ironic. And no cuts to the private budget were figured out, regardless of the comfort level. In short hypocrisy in The Course prevailed. The Status Quo proved pretty solid, pretty much hypocrisy too.

 

When the people applied themselves to cuts to the government budget they came up empty handed. Cuts are not popular and there is now this evidence of a popular revolt on the issue. Some right wing politics remains oriented to smaller government but typically the cuts required are not mentioned. It is largely rhetoric, a dream in fact.

 

The attention in the Course was mostly to illogic, inefficiency and to illegal activities. This was summed up and pointed out to me one day. I was at an evenings event at York University and some students there called out “Bru, its stupid science”. That was what The Course amounted to, a sussing out of stupid behavior and stupid spending. The double point is basic science degrees are not marketable so why do people go to all that work to get them?  

 

I have also heard them call The Course “debt science”, after the national deficit concern.

 

There was a considerable attention to illegal or marginally illegal activities that cost the government. To be sure people, the codgers, thought the problem was just that they were being ripped off as tax payers.

 

I wasn’t alert to the equation of public and private cuts myself. When The Revolt first broke out in the spring of 1984 I was watching the weather forecast on the TV one night and the usual weather man was giving his spiel from a suburban house. He was in the front lawn of this bungalow and he, I swear I remember this, had an automobile dip stick inserted in the flower garden to “test the moisture level” (rain being the traditional metaphor for negative attention by the community). It would appear he anticipated the screwy direction of the entire revolt when it first broke out and made this editorial in the first few weeks. People went on about the individual responsibility of others for at least four years without examining their own lifestyle critically.

 

The government was excused for inaction by The Course but it was blamed in the election. In the following election, actually the second federal election following, the government of the day was reduced from a large majority to two seats only in Parliament, they were crushed. The Conservatives, when first elected, replaced a very unpopular Liberal government and the economy had just been through a deep recession that brought inflation down a lot so they were more-or-less assured of two term of prosperity in government. However, they developed no realistic plan to deal with the deficit over ten years in government, never realized there was a tax revolt afoot, ran up 100 year debt and left office after another deep recession with the same huge level of deficit as they inherited. For that they were reduced to less than one percent of the seats in Parliament and then eventually liquidated. Prime Minister Mulroney never commented as to his failure in the years after and will probably die in denial.

 

The fact that nationhood is dominant in one’s well being was understood early on in. In an immigration city like Toronto this is close to the surface. We all benefit from the state, are dependant for our well being on which country we live in and share in the pluses and minuses of our country. Looking after the nation state is looking after yourself and yours. The state is our community and is something of a church in the modern world.

 

Talking about productivity, about industry and the economy, isn’t actually all that popular usually. However it’s latent in just about everyone and The Course brought this out. Even the beautiful young blondes were attuned to it. As a person who had always been obsessed with technology and industry I was actually in my element. It fit my role as alpha case about the inquiry into the state of the economy. I take more interest in productivity than in commercial sports, TV or music. I heard there’s a manifest obsession with efficiency in Germany and that’s what evolved in Canada. The way I heard it the obsession with productivity in Germany is oppressive and not to everyone’s taste but I think it should always be part of the culture.

 

There was a great deal of a socialization going on in the Course. People were criticized, corrected and expected to mature. You learn a correct set of ideas on behavior as you mature - rules. There must be 1000 of them in your inner vocabulary as an adult, do’s and donts. Competence takes a little practice. Also, individuals have an endless variety of ideas that lead to awkward behavior. With the community attention and thinking things out better they were expected to fix these. Discussions about ideas of behavior would have facilitated the polishing of personality that was going on. Ideas drive behavior and people have to sort the ideas out, particularly youth.

 

I trust that most of the fore going sounds like good sense to the reader. It sure sounded that way to the listening public circa 1984. This was the product of harnessed mass hysteria. It’s the wit and wisdom of the public thinking as one for the first time in history. The participating population developed an interpretation of society and culture. It’s Liberalism for idiots for one, main stream social philosophy –which is not often articulated in our society, not even by politicians. It was a review of the state-of-community in part, and the modern nation state in now our community. The nation state then became a mega-village. The investigation and process was amazing enough to sustain mass interest for seven years.

 

 

The Revolt is style

 

The Course was styles, techniques and it was patterns.

 

People adopt patterns very readily, almost without knowing exactly what they are doing as they do with grammar. You see patterning at the work place where each company has a certain style or culture. In the Course they did so without thinking closely, or thinking through about what they were doing which was ironic considering thinking through was a theme.

 

There was a set of rules that were closely adhered to. There were these rules, as there ever would be. There was an entire national movement, a revolt, based on informal rules. I have long had the term “informal” as a way of describing how things work and this instance of an entire revolt proceeding thusly is the penultimate instance of how important informal rules can be.

 

The styles of the event were very consistent.  They favored embarrassment, negativity and frankness. This is not unnatural or unlike what you get out of cynics usually. They were logical and thoughtful also and so the results were smart. Being confrontational was taboo and no one ever, ever broke that discipline by commenting directly. As well the discipline of harassment, of maintaining the focus on the other person and waiting for the right timing to make a comment on topic was extreme. Everyone honored the social forms. They had a vague reference to their dedication. They just called “we obey”.

 

The technique of sharpening the focus on the other so they could see what that person was seeing, experiencing and think was honed pretty sharp. I call this the “point-of-view” of the person, for lack of a better term. It’s a good practice and an antidote for the self-absorption of human kind. Relating requires taking an interest of the details of the other person’s life and this was sharpened to myriad details. This is what they were doing to the stars. The mind meld with me is the ultimate expression of the attention to another person through the careful and complex exploration of their “point-of-view”. It became minute-by-minute concern with what is going on in the other person’s life in my case and so was describe as “pure mind meld”. The mind meld demonstrated how relating, being aware of the other, required very considerable effort

 

If you want to communicate to a stubborn person you can wait until the right moment, perhaps when that person is look at a sign and you can guess his thought, to get your point in. If a person is doing something very specific and then hears an echo of that they’ll notice it.  It sounds like a delusion if you try to explain you heard something to someone too. This is the alternative to trying to use personal problems as a carrier wave.  

 

Part of the style was the negativity. I don’t understand why this was part of the philosophy but it does seem to be natural. It’s normal for people to be smartie pants, negative. Also it seemed the attitude was just to have mutual harassment to wear one another down, a form of psychological warfare. In addition if you comment positively to someone, even a small thing, they will react - get off on it.  Thus for commenting on the street to strangers they keep it negative as a discipline.

 

Lampooning ones self in a double entendre as a way of criticizing another person is the basic way savvy adults communicate negatively. It’s the basic way to get people thinking. It’s the way to make people “discover their mind”. The best comments are ones that are so sharp that the target goes blind to the second meaning until he thinks about the source. People are sensitive and don’t think so that’s all that can be done. It can take a whole community, an office or a neighborhood, to do this effectively. It’s actually very popular to do this it turns out. They have a code word for this self lampooning after sports, “hockey”, and the term “score’ means to land one of these lampoons. I don’t know why there is this sports reference. This is actually the new political correctness. In fact it’s always been that way amongst mature adults.

 

I never got polished at the new style of self lampooning. However, very often I would think of a criticism of someone only to find that I was or had been in my life guilty of something similar, maybe not as bad. It takes some thinking to keep an eye on ones self. If I think about it I have lots of dysfunction to go around, lots and lots. You’re probably the same. If you have a troublesome, social inept and performing at grade 10 level or lower in certain areas person in your life this should be kept in mind.

 

The style for commenting is a little flexible and difficult to articulate. The idea of criticizing someone with a self-depreciating comment was modified to mentioning to someone a political or philosophical point, actually still in the same self-depreciating voice. I got rather a lot of comments but people were always careful not just to jab me with an insight, rather they would always make a modest point. The style held though, the process was a revolution in style, and people would not surface that they were talking about issues.

 

The idea that we all have to watch our denial was a major theme in the revolt. Time and time again you’ll rationalize your position and they thought that be honest with yourself was the key to hope for the community.

 

The surreptitious communication techniques used on the street are all very tricky. It takes some practice to use them and it takes some practice to get used to hearing them. I will try to describe their use. I have gone into considerable detail to provide a record for the event.

 

A key way of being surreptitious is talking in puns, in double entendres. They came up with these catch phrases that referred to several things at once. The additional meanings are references as much as they are puns. A word might have some uses in the culture that comes to mind if you think about it and these would be the references. Typically there are dominant references for certain words. The number 9, for example, can be a short hand for pregnancy – pregnancy being that important to people and the 9 month gestation period is that common as a thought. So the communication technique was cultural references as much as actual puns. Multi-entendres with as many as eight meanings, all carefully intentional, were around in The Course.

 

A style was speaking in multi-entendres on the hoof. People would come out with these double meanings casually while they talked. Not only that they could do it on cue. That is when I stepped into a restaurant or something right away I’d hear some suspect conversation in the background, someone raising their voice on a point. It’s probably because they had a large repertoire of good lines pre-canned.

 

Teaching the use of multi-entendres is a way of teaching personality. One was encouraged to speak in double entendres but carefully intending the logic and voice of what you were saying. This got everyone to sharpen their act and it seems to work. It produced a more sophisticated adult personality and tends to be dominant over other aspects of personal style. While our culture is increasingly crude this was a movement back to being sophisticated and reserved. They had their trick of being “bad” by lampooning one’s self as a form of criticizing. They formalized misbehaving, which was popular. It’s all very complex if you think about it. The comments have to be hidden in the local pidgin, which each work place developed,  had to be about the listener and had to be in the proper voice – the speaker – at once. And it had to be philosophical. Low wage immigrants in fast food places, for one,  mastered this and it is rather a triumph of style so it sticks. It’s adult style.

 

The whole participating population developed sharp wit. There was a polishing of the language to brief but apt expressions. They actually tuned their personality into folk art.

 

Another part of personality they practiced up was awareness, perception. Very interestingly average people can get quite good at this when they work at it. Again it’s a matter of work. One exercise they went through constantly with me as the alpha case is if I said something out loud in public me they’d tune into what I said for my exact meaning, which they usually got. So I didn’t have to say much or be articulate rather I could just mumble something on the street and I got this acute attention and perception.

 

The in-the-air communications used a variety of literary techniques. They used code words with a history to them from the case studies. Sometimes they would talk in someone else’s character to make a particular point. They’d use words that meant something to the listener as a carrier of the message. They had a style of making a statement that became the opposite as you thought about it, which is a bit hard to explain. When it was perfected it was invisible. It’d be hard for the uninitiated to detect although it was clear enough to the participants.

 

Part of the technique and style was close study of the details that are all around us. This would be to many aspects but aimed at the point-of-view of the other. For example people usually had the visuals of their workplace pinned down exactly. So if one stepped into their work space you might immediately hear a comment about the first thing that struck your eye, say a decoration. Typically it would be an editorial at the same time. People were assiduous about this.

 

The modulation of the voice was a main means of being heard but not seen. People talked from another room, through the concrete floor and walls in buildings and across considerable distances outside. The sound of the distant modulated voice is quite different from someone just yelling, some how. They talked under their breath when standing right beside you. These voices were always low audibility. Some people heard everything and some people didn’t hear a thing in seven years. This is half the secret of the revolt. There’s this need to train the ear to catch on.

 

While the modulated voice is low audibility you can’t just shut it out with ear plugs. It would have been a solution for me if that were so. I found I could hear just the same with drug store ear plugs.

 

A key means of this community communication that went on was the talking car. People found they could be heard from their car. This is all in the modulated and barely audible voice. They found that you could run a conversation on the highway. It took three years for them to get this down pat but then it became the dominant forum of communication. Discussions would go on during the commute to and from work and in fact all day in the traffic. These discussions could be spread across town at highway speeds and so was very effective. The “conversations’ on the roads were in “pidgin”, compressed to just sayings that you had to think about or think about their effect, so it could be communicated at highway speeds and conditions. So the daily commute became like daily group contemplation. Driving is typically were the think through took place as driving can be time alone and the experience was enhanced in The Course.

 

The forums for the repetition of all the information and evolution of the discussions were in-the-air in public and work spaces, through thin apartment walls and between vehicles on the streets and highways. I describe the language of the revolt as a savvy pidgin similar to any jive talk but in fact there were long, stylized conversations going on in these forums. They were in hints, phrases, short points, codes and double entendres. That’s community communication.

 

All of this revolt business was hidden, as I say, and as in office politics. This was for similar reasons. Much of it would be disturbing the peace for one. On the job it’s not allowed. Also there’s people’s denial, my wife says denial is people’s favourite place. Direct communication has a bad reputation, it just doesn’t work, and so people hint and are indirect until you do your listening homework. On the street they came up with the expression “check your blind spot” to describe communication.

 

The technique of analyzing society from the perspective of individual experience had a great deal of leverage. If you looked around you could find individuals that personified a situation. The diminishing returns on research and development, for example, can be measured by researchers whose positive contribution over a life time was zero. Such are good measures, if threatening to the careers of the individuals concerned.  

 

The Course worked with indirect communication and essentials. Sometimes it took me months to catch on as they were terse but when I did figure it out it made sense.

 

People are plenty illogical and just thinking about what you are doing, the logic of what of what is going on, can sort this out. Some times this can take a long while; probably you’ve changed your mind about personal events over years. This moiling a situation for its logic became a feature of the process. In the revolt the stars’ histories were investigated and typically a particular troublesome scene from the past would be recalled, reconstructed and detailed for the logic, idea or perception at work. It’s interesting to examine the logic of what people say. People should do it more of this moiling, it’s part of style.

 

The anonymous harassment is safer than directly confronting some idiot, of course. If the insult or threat is anonymous the target has no one to focus their resentment on. If it’s from a specific individual you focus on that person and you get much madder, that’s the psychology of it. If you torment an individual directly you’re likely to get assaulted.

 

The intimate network or grapevine that was set up across the physical region was one of the discoveries and big achievements of The Revolt. It used technology to spread this information around, especially vehicles. With jet travel it was possible to link up distant cities too. Eventually this grapevine spread across the country. Virtually everybody in my life, all my acquaintances, were reported on and that included my childhood friends from over twenty years ago that were located half way across the continent in a small town in British Columbia. 

 

There were some rules as to how the story telling about individuals went on. The idea I gathered was that people communicated some sensitive part of their lives back and forth through the grapevine in kind. For every embarrassing moment there was a “cover”. These embarrassing bits were descriptive, improved the victim and intended to be a lesson to the participating public at the same time. This cover was supposed to mitigate the humiliation to the individual. I don’t entirely understand the rules how the whole network functioned but my understanding was that this was part of it, or was at first.

 

On the other hand the extreme detail that they went over my life in appeared to be more just free form, people didn’t follow any rule. In my case they were just complete pigs. The searching the city and country for details, telling and retelling of the thousand stories about me such that they became common knowledge and the sorting of these stories and situations was incredible. Then instead of making self-depreciating comments at me they tended to simply echo what my mind was thinking. Latter the echo tend to come with a double entendre that had some meaning, a lesson. That’s was the new style. It’s highly evolved harassment.

 

The friends and associates I had had through out my life reported in details of what I had said or done. These details became part of the content of the drama around me. I never actually witnessed a detailed story about someone being told, which they presumably did through the night air or apartment walls. Whereas the philosophy of The Course was carefully explained to me this detailed story aspect remained hidden from me.

 

The leaking of the private data by friends was predicated on a great deal of trust in the larger, impersonal community. People did not think it would be hurtful; rather the greater community would be helpful. I heard a comment on the street that best friends were leaking data. That would be someone trying to smarten up a best friend. I also heard some skepticism at the entire idea, that this is the way people treat one another anyway.  Presumably sensitive data like criminal acts was not circulated.

 

One thing that gets me is these associates of mine would have had a half life behind them now but all I heard is what they were like when I knew them. So while the associates had complete details of what my life turned out like I never heard any update on them. The public never leaked a little detail through; rather they maintained a disciplined focus on what I knew happened 20 years earlier.

 

They had a special, high style for me. The more they learned about me the worse I looked and this lead to my alpha role. As a corollary of their philosophy of the point being to be a good citizen I was considered to be a bad case. They found I hadn’t helped a friend, donated any significant sums to charity, volunteered, or even spent for consumer goods for my whole life. I had catered to my depression rather than worked. When they “thought back” for me, they thought back for the stars, they found in my early adult period I took an Unemployment Insurance holiday. I actually spent an entire summer holidaying and collecting Unemployment Insurance and this led to my being treated as a criminal. They pretty much flogged to death that holiday, which I took when I was fired for incompetence from my first professional job and didn’t know just what I was going to do to survive. They really emphasized that Unemployment Insurance holiday because I was in denial that I did it, and denial is a major theme they were working on. When they looked into my life at the age of 34 they found not much of it was useful, I was considered a bad case, and for this was the given reason no one would level with me as to what all was going on in the revolt. This was one more of the rules they came up with; don’t explain to a bum what was going on. What’s more my neighbor had volunteered to be my personal “guardian angel” and so I was a worst case with a dedicated volunteer and they saw fit to abuse me without limit as a matter of their style and philosophy.

 

I was net debtor karma wise. This was the posture they adopted to me although my life was simply basic. When they focused on me they hid the techniques they were developing and also they hid all the other stars roles from me. Uniquely in the country they kept me isolated but then made my point-of-view a national event. That was the role adopted for me alone as this nation’s alpha case. They took this creative license in my case, treating me as a worst case but then maximizing the community assistance. That was the design. This explains why I don’t know the nuts and bolts of the revolt process.

 

Being blindsided as I was is, as I said early on, a short coming in my account of the events I lived through. However, they did explain the philosophy of what they were doing, made me a national priority and kept me otherwise informed so my tale is detailed.

 

The Course was also very introspective with people examining their own lives and their own mind closely. That’s how the culture and human psychology were sussed out. They did this all extensively. It took a lot of smart people looking closely at themselves and the culture to do this.

 

For an example of sussing out the culture the impact of movies was amplified. Movies are shared experiences and when a expression in a movie was isolated by introspection this was circulated. This famous sayings and scenes is the usual case with movies but with the scrutiny of the culture a second tier of memories was found.

 

I have an example of this second tier of cultural references. There’s a modern WWII movie called “Skin” which has a scene where an Allied general is served a meal in the shape of a new born human in a local restaurant in newly liberate Italy. The locals are protesting their treatment to the Allied General. The scene is so bizarre and off color it stigmatizes the entire movie; you don’t forget the dumb scene. The term “skin” in the revolt came to refer to something so egregious it left a stigma. (They managed to avoid references to racism with this expression at the same time.)

 

Introspection was how human psychology was decoded as well. People noticed their reactions to daily events and this would be “installed” in-the-air bound discussions. It was in this way that the community became so good at patterning what I was thinking.

 

An example of this psychological breakdown is how when you go about your business through the day when you finally rest what will come to mind is the most beautiful person of the opposite sex you saw. The mind is very sensitive to beauty and sexuality and it will typically go back to that person. This can be a person in a crowd, even just being on a bus. This then became a part of the mind melding with me, noting the most beautiful women I saw that day would come to mind later in the evening.

 

The common experiences were explored in the Counter Revolt. However when they discussed anything with me they would translate it into terms that were from my background. Thus the whole language of The Revolt seemed to be about me as I heard it. That is it was Bruce-centric. There must have been rather a lot that I missed. For one the issue of parenting was almost absent from what I heard, being childless myself. 

 

In point of fact there were so many references on the street to me there was an entire “Bru” jive talk, an entire lexicon. These were used to make intimate comments to me. To the non-initiate they would have been invisible.

 

One thing further that I found missing was the general mocking of people’s sexual misadventures. Although The Course tried to be embarrassing at all times I didn’t hear much, or anything, about other peoples sexual episodes. All I heard is about mine which they went to pains to piece together, plot out and spread around. In our society these misadventures must be legion. It was like they all lived this saintly life in this regard.

 

Each neighborhood had intense theatrics over local individuals and local issues. People had all this information, like a local encyclopedia. One’s experience of the neighborhood and one’s range of experience generally was expanded in this way.  

 

The attention paid to the stars was very empathetic. It was a course in how to walk-a-mile in another person’s shoes. They were trying to do the stars a big favour and wished them the best. Again, human nature won out. In my case, the foremost case, they got right into my mind but insisted on tormenting me. And they eventually helped me so much that I never recovered, they wrecked my career. Their logic circuits were never quite up to their natural duplicity.

 

There were all these in-the-air discussions going on. These were not lectures rather they were one word or one phrase hints, typically double entendres or metaphors. You were expected to do the figuring out yourself. Often they would use negative psychology and disagree with you to get you thinking about a topic. And everything was all knowing. The comments were in this matter-of-fact and you-just-think-about-that tone but at times were just poppy cock.

 

The city service personnel vehicles with siren capability, the various emergency forces, all got into the act. That is the police, the fire department and ambulances would all run these editorials with their sirens. The fire department, as far as I could make out, would advertise emergency cases to the neighborhood by making a special run. The editorials in this fashion by the police grated my fanny the wrong way as they were supposed to be policing the stalking and harassing going on and they were participating instead. Some days there’d be five or six sirens in my neighborhood whereas normally about one is all that one would hear.

 

People in dodgy jobs had to announce the fact. The human nature side of it is co-workers are keen about you knowing and admitting publicly to the problems with your job. There may not be a solution but there’s this insistence you know it and comment on it. In fact this has always been part of the culture although not everyone was aware of it. In the Revolt it was enforced.  

 

Being embarrassing was a theme and a major one of The Course. In particular it made all the stories emotional, rang your bells and made it contraband. It was the style to work up stories that were otherwise unmentionable and to make a point with them. For example they might be frank about one’s looks, love life or competence. The talk in the Revolt thus had this unmentionable in polite society quality to it.

 

Another subtle communication trick became the “transmission” of mental images. It turns out mental images can be induced by a short, obscure reference. And they found they could communicate an image with precision. They could communicate a nuanced idea with a complex image while I was driving in the Toronto traffic. They completely mastered this folk art. Eventually the psychic images became copious and very polished. Topics with energy, such as one’s parents, easily communicate an image. Also images that summarize a situation seem to transmit. These psychic images are communication at its peak, extreme community communication.  This is what became of their use of diplomatic language and codes. It’s the subconscious mind calculating, I suppose, which is competitive with psychic energy as an interpretation of the mind. I am not sure how they do this but found I could project an image myself in the traffic that they would comment on. It’s pretty amazing. Psychic images as editorials, it’s human magic – extreme communication. The only thing similar in everyday experience is the way you can detect expressions over the telephone without actually anything direct being said. Now how would that discussion go with a non-initiate, I’m getting messages off the street in mental images?  

 

The images were editorials and typically nuanced to convey a complex message. A very strange thing is at times they conveyed images to me which I didn’t understand the point of. They can actually conjure an image that you don’t understand and have to think about; think about what the image is exactly and what it means. Boy. I investigated this purposely one day and they commented that I was getting the image correctly. Boy.  

 

An example of a psychic image is how they summarized their social philosophy. It revolved around the circumstance of concerned, middle class women. This was the heart of their discussion about the status quo, the symbol. The image is of a woman driving a mini van that has been decked out as a Brinks truck; that is with plate glass and armour. Only there are curtains like at home. That was their symbol for the bourgeoisie life they were protecting. And it’s women, the wife, as this goes to the “heart” of how society is organized. This image came up routinely in the mind meld.

 

The Course was theatre. The word “plays” was used and reused such that it took on five meanings.

 

First of all that’s what they called the goings-on around the stars.

 

Secondly they called puffed up jobs and careers, puffed up skills, “plays”. An example that was indicated to me was my apartment superintendent’s job which was pretty simple.

 

They worked fictions on people. When I first got together for a social outing with my friend from my university days, Kathy Lowe, after the harassment started they, the participating bystanders, would drift these comments at me as if Kathy had said them under her breath. In fact she wasn’t an initiate, she didn’t know what was going on, but this took me over a year to discern because of this theatrics.

 

Sometimes they worked fictions, plays, as a way of communicating a specific lesson for a hard to crack case. One way this works is to play along with a person’s idea or perception, to feed it, until it becomes absurd. This is one way to get through to people with a mal-formed idea or philosophy.

 

Then some of the local stars became so well known that the population would work up vignettes about them. These would be stories told in the usually compressed pidgin of the revolt. Some of the ones I heard were just a phrase or so that set a whole scene that they added to every half minute or so. These “plays” or stories drifted through the air while I was out walking in the neighborhood, at home in my apartment and even at work.

 

Then the idea of play was broadened to explain a process. For example that fist fights are allowed in professional hockey is referred to as part of the “play”. The emergence of China as a world economic leader and powerhouse was referred to as the Chinese play. 

 

The Course developed its own “jive” talk, a complex diplomatic pidgin. I call it a socio-economic jive talk. Much of it was obscure “in” references, codes. Some of the “in” references had an entire history to them. Some of the words are concepts that became popularized, as happened in the 1960’s with the Hippies. I was completely immersed in this for years. Some examples of the more basic ideas follow:

 

salary: White collar work that was not worth the price or outright not worth anything. It tended to be well remunerated so people stuck to it. In typical instances its benefit was as training. People are not tolerant of this excess. In the revolt it was a common whipping boy, thee whipping boy, and it was the theme of my own persecution originally.

 

green: The code word for economic growth. People came to understand that capitalistic societies normally grown and they became focused on this. Some people began to wear bright green clothes to symbolize or “edit” their hope for their own future, a job from growth in the economy.

 

paper: The code word for governments printing money to pay for programs.

 

cig: This is actually the pidgin short form of “signify”. It refers to the significance of a key piece of information. Typically people don’t react to information, they just blink and look the other way, but in the Course when they were trying to figure things out a piece of information might have some significant meaning. Of course people do their thinking and communicating when they have a cigarette break, a “cig”. (In my trials as a computer programmer I landed at corporations that didn’t actually have a job for me, which I didn’t think clearly about – to properly and correctly “signify”.)

 

hair: meant risk taking from the original term “hair shirt” which meant bold or brave. It tended to refer to pubic hair as a symbol of taking the chance of having children.

 

ham: A person broadcasting an issue by their circumstance. That’d be like unemployed skilled workers in a reportedly tight market. Ham was named after the amateur radio system. My first special role was of informal broadcast or “ham” of the high-tech jobs situation. There are lots of problems and lots of ham broadcasts. Ham tended to refer to a situation where the individual could afford more expensive cuts of meat for dinner.

 

open: When people were intruded on as stars they were said to be “open”. The same applied to workplaces. In general in the revolt you had to have cost the government something illegitimately to warrant this public role. It’s intrusive and punitive.

 

seven: There’s a loose system of rating jobs from zero to ten. Seven is almost a good job and anything above that is over sized. There are no really good jobs in the rating system.

 

water: This was the short had for having a family, that is short hand for child birth.

 

ball: This referred to a skill. The word seems to come from the phrase “balls in the air” crossed with the old IBM electric typewriters that had a ball print head instead of individual keys. The reference would appear to be obscure but I heard it repeatedly and do think that is the origin of the pidgin.

 

bag: Also meant skill. Typically it was used to refer to a skill that was not that hard but indistinct rather and so kept shrouded, like in a bag.  

 

Ahead: This was the expression for highly skilled people. People with actual hard skills are paid well and were called “ahead”. They tend to corner the market and are coddled for their ability. It’s difficult to catch up to them. There was this focus on how to get this experience.

 

Caught: This is the phrase for the compromising situations people get themselves in. The prime example is people that have children before getting trained in a skill and are thus on a treadmill. This is what the working class is now days. Young people in good relations are also “caught”. This is a concern to young females as they then look towards having family rather than getting some skills training. People get into a job and are caught there as well. You can be “caught” by debt. You can be “caught” by age. Of course, being caught meant at the illegal harassment as well. So “caught” could be a multi-entendre.  

 

Apple: People are generally values run, it seems to be genetic, and this tendency was captured by references to the wholesome apple. There were references, images, of people munching an apple – to explain them.

 

two: This referred to either having a couple supporting each other, having two children as is standard or not having the money to afford food on table. The issue of being too poor to afford food was referred to as not having the money to shit, which is the unmentionable way they liked to discuss these things.  

 

t: Stands for trillion, as in a trillion dollars. So, yo, tea.

 

a: This would stand for the “eh” of people that don’t take a hint. Typically it would be used in a pun with the school grade “A” as the alternative. The problem with the elite being well schooled but still not good at communication is pretty pervasive.

 

s: This was a reference to a downward spiral of bad decisions or luck such as I had, which is a threat in modern life. I always thought the reference was from the game Snakes and Ladders. The “s” is for the snakes. It’s plenty obscure but the term was used often enough and did refer to a slip like landing on the snake square in the game. 

 

face:  This term was just a short form of the idea of what you have to face in the future. That would mean your old age in particular. That the very beautiful young women may actually “face” a life of struggle was a popular response to them. 

 

frost: There is often “frost” in personal relations. This can actually come and go so the word has this dynamic to it. It’s a handy word.

 

happy: People philosophized about jobs, love and poverty but came up with the comment “Happy?”   It can be a twist. For example people in palliative care can still be happy.

 

on top: This was a generally useful term for looking at issues, money issues.  For example extra income comes on top of the ability to pay the rent and feed the kids so it goes to the luxuries that we are all about.

 

over investment: The 1950s idea of investment is that it’s all good, progress, but by the 1980’s there was over investment, too much competition and capacity, in many areas so the problem was the inefficiency of over investment. Again, it’s a useful term.

 

mechanical: This was a concept that found general use. For example some skills are actually following rules by rote. My software programming “skill” was actually a formula about how to check my work. It was mechanical, I could write down. So mechanical referred to something that had been simplified, that maybe appeared to be complex but was actually a routine.

 

“That’s us.” At certain points in the discussions in the air the cohesiveness of the group was apparent and people would call “that’s us”. In particular it was used when it meant the whole participating segment of society, actually the whole society. Other times it was meant emphatically when it referred to core groups, like working class women.

 

dominant: This was an idea that was quiet useful in general application. For example when there are two incomes in a family one of them will be more lucrative, dominant.  

 

 

To anyone not initiated the jive words most of the above had no meaning what so ever and they’d miss the comment.

 

I have an example of how the pidgin could tag people in a mega-village. I lived in Ottawa, some 250 miles from Toronto, for two years at one time. There’s a large, central indoor mall that most of the city’s citizens eventually visit. I forget the name of it. Anyway one time I visited there were these two perfect in every way young ladies walking around together each with cut-off sweat shirts that exposed the mid-drift and had “No Sweat” printed on them. It’s a comment. In the privacy dragnet years later they came up with this scene in the Bru-Speak and I’d occasionally hear the phrase “No Sweat” drifting through the night air. That was from the girls in Mall in Ottawa, made well known in Toronto some years latter.

 

I am not the best reporter of these events. As the alpha case the whole of the participating society kept a focus on me and I do not exactly know how the discussions went amongst the general participating public. I never saw how the dissemination of the copious information went. I do not know all the topics they covered. I do not know how the training to mind meld worked, in particular. It takes hearing a thousand stories in the first place and then taking the effort of thinking them through. I actually missed out on that difficult grooming. They did explain their philosophy to me carefully and I have that. They went to great lengths, extreme lengths to educate my thinking so I have an experience of that as well. Some of my descriptions of how they did all this might be unclear as a result of the isolation. However it’s around, and you’re free to ask a friend or family member about it. I am, of course, thee witness of how well the mind meld worked.

 

The Revolt was the most complex cultural event ever. It was spontaneous, had no organizers and no funding but was like a war mobilization. It was entirely cooperative rather than competitive. There’s nothing quite like it. It’s unique and it’s in a category of its own. It produced scientific discoveries, the community mind meld and a new adult personality. It was a cultural revolution and produced a mega-village.

 

And that, my pretties, was Canadian “hockey” in the late 20^th Century.

 

 

The Human Mind Meld and Me

 

I should describe to you a little bit of how the 24 hours a day harassment of me worked. It’s nigh on impossible but it’s a fact now. The verbal harassment would typically be an accurate echo of what I was thinking. Sometimes there would just an echo of a phrase that was also in my mind while sometimes there’d be an entire 20 minute sequence of mind meld. I am not privy as to exactly how they did this, penetrated my personality and mind, but I will give an outline of how it plots out. My outline should make sense. This was all done by a million people, a million mind microscope.

 

There are actually two sides to one’s mental life. There are your daily activities and then there’s your thinking.

 

The daily activities can be investigated like a nature study, some Jane Goodall style investigation into Homo Sapiens. The subject has a favorite food in the refrigerator so he’ll be preparing that in the kitchen at such and such time. In the event my overhead neighbor was able to keep good track of such by close, dedicated observation. In fact this is a new science and it became elaborate and very precise. The population mastered it, the wholesale predictability of people’s daily behaviors. It took a lot of effort.

 

Your activities can be patterned simply by someone paying acute attention to what you are doing. In fact to really closely harass a person you’d premeditate the subject activities so you are familiar with each routine as it happened. They plotted out what I had to do daily and just when I’d do it but in amazing detail. Some of it is of very mundane details. And typically there’s “associated thoughts” invoked at each step of some activity and these were plotted out as well.

 

For example something like changing the oil on my car would be accompanied by unseen commentators. They’d make comments on just what part of the car I would be looking at as I went through the process and the associated thoughts about car engines or technology.

 

The other side, the thinking part is psychology; working out what will be of concern to a person today and so what his/her thoughts on it will be. This is a gestalt. Your thoughts are patterns and are not as sophisticated as they can’t be figured out, not as sophisticated and random as you might think.

 

A key to an “open” mind is the daily concerns of a person. Usually you have a short list of concerns for the day, a to-do list.  In fact internally and without you being aware of this the concerns are nicely sorted into priority and picking them off in sorted order as one thinks about them is not too difficult for another person it turns out.

 

Another key is the highlights of your past conversations, your oral history. Quite a bit of what goes on in your mind is the interaction you’ve had with other people over the years. People have these key memories; sometimes it’s “preferred” memories. Also things that are important to you, stick in your mind, you will have talked about with someone at some point. You really only have a limited experience and the highlights of it will be shared with your friends and associates. If you happen to be the subject of a grand public study as I was these highlights can mostly be dredged up by your buddies from memory by a nation wide drag net. A 1000 or 2000 stories on such is the living memory of your life. This technique is new and it worked very well; it produced a map on my information base, interests and unique personal psychology.

 

The mind does a lot of associative thinking, jumping from one subject to another by some link. So it then forms chains of thoughts. Some of the links will be on personal information and some of these will have cultural information, common reference points which are shared and can be figured out. They called to me these chains are like the road system. That is they are like directions to a specific address. You go down this road, take a left then the next two rights and you are at such and such address. They said the mind had a collection of these. Your life time memories form some of the turns and these were effectively plumbed from my life through my associates, as I said.

 

I believe they premeditated my private thoughts and these routes and repeated them when I stumbled on a topic on the street. They knew when I started down one of these sequences what the concluding topic would be and they’d echo that. This would seem mysterious to me as typically the final echo would be quite removed from the original topic. The actual level of detail of information on my past that was required to do this, the number of stories on me, is daunting but I shrugged it off.

 

A similar analogy is the branching on a tree. The branching to smaller and smaller limbs is like the directions to the thought and the tree is like your mind.

 

While they collected a complete repertoire of stories from my past they intimated to me that the process was general in society in the revolt. That is they had detailed reports from the past of other stars. A few good stories will provide the links to figure out what someone’s favorite memories and favorites thoughts are.  The called this detailing of the past of other people that they “suffer tree”. In particular one’s family life produces a “tree”. So there’s a family tree.

 

I have an example of this associative patterning. One evening I had a sore foot which they caught me noticing as I walked along in the neighborhood. They then followed my thought sequence and commented on its conclusion. My sore foot had me wondering what could eventually happen to it in a worst case and made me think of a guy at work with an artificial leg. He got fired by the nasty female accountant for no reason, so my thought turned to this accountant. Then, as she’s blonde and attractive my thought turned to a discussion of her good looks I had with a customer one time. Then I heard a comment in-the-air about that specific discussion with the customer; they actually located that discussion. They had noticed me limping caught this sequence of thoughts as the information on me was that dense and processed on the street that they could follow the chain. This went on all the time, the example is general.

 

The chaining seems to work by prioritization. When you go about your business, say enter someone’s workplace as part of your job, you’d have some several thoughts about that workplace. But the mind sorts one out as dominant, such as what the local workers think of their job. Then the actual chaining will be from that dominant thought.

 

One’s formal education can be sussed out as well. In 1985 I was a decade out of university but major lessons of my education were fresh in my mind. I was still thinking about some of the questions raised at school such as the veracity of the soft science of sociology, for example.

 

In fact your education covers your entire life. Much of your personality is learned by little lessons. Attitudes, details of your behavior and even specific words can be pinned down to a lesson from a specific person.

 

Aesthetic response is a large part of your mental make up. When you’re watching TV, say, there’s a whole lot of judgment as to how the actors look, to how natural the dialog is and if you’re bored. Aesthetic judgment goes on in your head pretty much constantly. So whenever I was watching TV with my overhead neighbor in place I’d get a scene by scene running commentary on my aesthetic response to the show.

 

(It’s a good term, “aesthetic response”. If you have a youngster in your life that is a little awkward try hitting him with that zinger as how to behave.)

 

One has another short list of maybe twenty life interests which the mind returns to. I would call these one’s personal themes. One of mine is the language although I don’t work on it all that much.

 

And there’s a further list of maybe 100 favorite ideas, statistics and stories that the mind will return to constantly. You’ll know people that tell the same story repeatedly, for example.

 

The mind also has a certain amount of inappropriate stuff going on. People normally ignore this but the mind is going “get out of my way”, “what a face” and so on to people all the time. In the Counter Revolt they actually caught this stuff and echoed it. It was all unmentionable in polite company.

 

Another thing that happens in your conscious mind is you’ll be doing one thing, reading or watching TV, but thinking about something else. You’ll be thinking about your daily concerns perhaps. They caught this in the mind meld as well.

 

Some of your thoughts will be about what happened in the preceding hours or day. If you follow a person around all day as they did to me you’ll be able to guess what it is that’ll come to mind.

 

Part of the technique of mind reading requires that people sussed out what one’s exact thought on a particular event will be. This requires a sensitive reading of the story of the event, which in the Revolt was done by the collective. That is the populace would think what the exact thought to, say, a news article would be, and then disseminate this.

 

Some people are naturally more adept at figuring out what another person is thinking. Similar life experiences would give some individuals a specific insight. A network of a million minds would naturally be able to plot out rather more of a target individual’s mental life.

 

In the event they were able to piece together extreme details about my life. They pieced together private matters that I didn’t discuss with anyone, say my sex life or my mental problems, without any direct information. You get enough information on a person and you can just guess accurately. The invasion of my privacy was like an x-ray in this regard. While I’m somewhat honest in this book it doesn’t compare to the x-ray of my every part they took.

 

The mind meld took a big effort. When I asked just how are they were doing all this patterning what they’d say is, “We did our homework”. Millions and millions of citizens focused on one person daily for years and it produced this mind meld on the street. 

 

When the participants are practiced up they can just pick off the topics on a person’s mind, or apparently they can, and with ease as well.

 

Figuring me out must have been like a drug trip for the population.

 

In my experience the key to mind reading is the shortness and order of the list of things on top of your mind. And it’s fluid, responding to daily events, so you have to follow a person daily.  

 

Bingo, bango, bongo, the seeming chaos in your mind is patterned and “open” to the public.

 

In my case they had a huge effort to read my mind. I was the alpha case, where they did their most extensive experimentation and exploration. Just how general the mind patterning was I don’t know. I heard a complaint about the “sixth orifice” at one time, as opposed to sixth sense, and this would be it.

 

My description of the mind reading is not so good, is rather vague. In fact I do not have a good idea how this worked. To describe it would require another book. It would take a victim as well although that victim could be me and the book a companion to this one. It’d be a unique book, one for the ages.

 

While what I was exposed to was exactly mind patterning I also witnessed conversation patterning. Other stars that weren’t quite open minds but were well known had their conversation patterned. People tend to have an ordered short list of conversation topics just as their mind thinks about predictable topics. I was with some other stars and could hear off the street echoes of their conversation as it jumped from topic to topic. So this is an intermediate stage in the familiarity with a target star.

 

In George Orwell’s book “1984”, which is the only other literature vaguely similar to what the real 1984 was like, the government agents figured out what the hero’s evolving thoughts and philosophy were. In the actual 1984 not only could they figure out what I was thinking but the average person on the street could do so to me in real time, as I passed by. George Orwell’s conception of the intrusion into the private life of “privileged” citizens was pedestrian compared to what actually happened. However the oppression was a popular movement by the citizens rather than by a Big Brother government. Orwell’s writings were recognized as the only antecedent to the actual historical event which, oddly, happened exactly on the prescribed date, 1984.

 

Well, there is actually something of another precedent in the literature and this is the stream-of-consciousness style of writing. I didn’t even understand what stream-of-consciousness meant until I heard my overhead neighbor chirp, chirp, chirping along with my internal dialogue. The most famous stream-of-consciousness writing is by James Joyce, of course. To the extent that this style is based on psychology rather than just being fiction this is the cultural precedent. I have not read James Joyce, I found him too difficult, although I’ve seen his book Ulysses rated as the best piece of literature of all time.

 

The echoing of what’s going on in your mind is an invasion of privacy, a violation. In fact it’s bullying. There’s a choice line in Noel Coward’s play “This Happy Breed” that people “love to bully”, meaning that’s what life is like. It’s quite true. What people really like to do is to bully with a purpose, to teach you a lesson. And The Course was one great movement of purpose, including the affirmative action.

 

 

The Public’s experience of the Revolt

 

The question arises as to who all was savvy to the commotion, the participation level in society. A lot of people never heard a blessed thing. They were not savvy to the social diplomatic language and their ears tuned out the modulated voices of off stage whispering and yelling. An initiate could hear perfectly well but if you weren’t expecting anything your ears tuned everything out. In my experience it seemed like everyone was an initiate as I was never out of range of someone intent on harassing me and the population seemed to be watchful enough to be able to catch all the details of my daily routine. However, the ultimate ineffectiveness of the revolt may have to do with a low participation level. In the end big effects of all this community action didn’t materialize and this maybe because only 10% or so of the population was actually participating. On the street they scoffed at my estimates it might be lower than 10%. In Canada that’s about 2.7 million adults while in the USA it’s about 25 million adults. It’s a mad mob of millions formed into a very tight community, a subculture forming a McLuhanesque village. At 10% your own extended family and social group, workplace and especially neighborhood will be very involved. However, the 10% could not get through to the rest of their associates, the population, even with their sophisticated communication techniques and concerted seven year effort. I would guesstimate that this 10% not only knew about revolt process but were all participating in it at some level as well.

 

An upshot of the lowish participation rate and ineffectiveness of indirect communication is it’s mostly perfectly safe to speak your mind in double entendres. This is even if you are in a compromised position, say a dodgy job. There are a lot of dodgy jobs and these are what are at risk in something like the revolt at hand. I don’t have good information on just how threatening this was, but it was wide spread. Also the extreme leaking of what was private and confidential didn’t seem to have any consequences otherwise.

 

In part the level of participation was something they intentionally worked hard to deceive me at. They became highly practiced at putting words in other people’s mouth. That is they’d figure out what non-participating person talks like, for example, and reported back to me exactly what that person said. I even heard a replay of a private conversation I had with a friend and co-worker, Larry Ball, who in fact died of cancer before the theatrics started. The folk just figured out what Larry would have said, even the very words he used, and reported these conversations back to me. When the night has a million eyes things like this can be done.

 

The other question that arises in this account is what was the population doing to the other stars? I’m not a good source for this aspect as they kept me sealed from anything but what I was directly experiencing. However I did get exposed to many well known workplaces and the people I worked with tended to be minor stars. I would hear characterizations based on them during my off work hours when I was out and about the city. So the star system had to be pretty intense as it was very active from just my sampling of it.

 

On the other hand, as an index, I never stumbled across anyone else in the city in the whole six years that had an envelop of verbal abuse around them that I had. Not only was I exceptional I was an order of magnitude better known than any other star. That’s my questimate of my status as brought on by six years of stalking by an “angel” neighbor.

 

The experience of the average participant in the Course is unknown to me. It must have been intense though. The indoctrination, the stars system, the dissemination of information and the thinking through the various topics all must have been intense. In fact it must have been oppressive. I imagine that apartments and suburban neighborhoods had these nightly conversations in-the-air for many years. Certainly the workplaces I was in did. I never heard any complaint about it though.

 

In the 1980’s the entire participating population was formed into a cohesive culture. The 1980s were as magical times as the 1960s.

 

The Course was something of an alternative to a riot or general strike. It tapped into the concerns and energies of the population in a time of trouble and entirely channeled the angst of the participating public.

 

The 1984 revolt evolved some entirely new ideas and abilities and while the revolt petered out they are not a spent force yet.

 

 

Benefits of the Revolution

 

The big question that comes up next is what good was all the analysis and discussion? After all it was just talk. There was no political movement or increased donations to political causes even; there was nothing else. Eventually there were no big results. And it didn’t get through to the actual government – the leaders at least. Still, there were quite a number of uses to it. I’ll enumerate them here.

 

The participating public got an education. One was encouraged to think things through, to think critically. People were encouraged to do this for all manner of topics: love and money, human nature, technology and political-economy. They were encouraged to think through themselves, to become self aware and find their own voice. Average and also poor people without the advantage of time, money and position were improved in this manner, evolved to a sophisticated self. They were smartened up a lot, enough to make a difference, to understand what was going on around them and even the ability to watch dog the “experts”. That was the breadth and depth to the rebellion on the streets of Western countries. This education will last a life time for the initiates and maybe passed on to their children and children’s children as well. The revolt produced a “cult” of concerned, rational citizens – a vanguard of thoughtful adults, which may be more effective a second time around which is likely.  Sophisticated, it’s what you want to become – pass it on.

 

The thinking and discussions as a group of millions of people went rather well. Many topics were thought through in this form of group think and the level of discussion and information on a wide variety of topics was impressive. Typically there was a consensus view; some considered opinion on a topic or issue. This is surprising and amazing and is a discovery in fact. Usually the man on the street’s view or opinion on any matter is all over the map and is something of an oat-meal breakfast as well. Also one’s experience that it’s very difficult to explain even a single thing to the next guy evolved to a national consensus on many topics emerging. In addition the consensus was pretty much the political centre – I never actually heard dissent from the more left wing citizens or right wing. I never heard it. With better information people tended to a consensus. The in-the-air discussions got over people’s natural opinionatedness - made them change their mind. On the street they said personal psychology was one’s information. The other thing it got over was the alternative, indifference. There was a tendency towards the status quo, an affirmation of Liberal Democracy nanny state as we know it. All that is something, no?

 

Usually people do not have that great of judgment. Often there is a current trend. I think if there’s some power behind a view such as a leader then people take more of an interest. People took great interest in the revolt and probably because it was significantly people power rather than just an opinion which doesn’t matter to the world.

 

The consensus view usually made sense. It was rarely idiosyncric. Most individuals usually harbor some malformed ideas but the group think became pretty reliable. I have reported some eccentricities in the group judgment but by and large it was sound. There’s smarts out there. This is hopeful.

 

In the end it’s effective on only about 10% of the population. The other 90% could not be reached. They are just not attuned to social communication. There was this extensive training in the lingo of the revolt for the participating portion of the population but the training to listen could not be done on unsuspecting souls by and large. I mentioned that it took the whole of Toronto to train me in indirect communication originally and that might be what it takes.

 

Individuals were scolded mightily when they were doing something incompetent. On the job co-workers were freer to talk about, via the “air”, other workers. This matured young people in particular. I had one young co-worker say to me “You should have seen how they beat up my asshole at first.”

 

On the job there were discussions of efficiency all the time. This is normally the role of the suggestion box but in the revolt more delicate topics could be addressed – such as dodgy jobs and skilled workers doing unskilled tasks.

 

The workplace and education institutions came under investigation. There’s a phrase, “misguided educational and business practices”, and these are part of life. So they became topical in the revolt.

 

Another target of the community group think was values. People are largely value run but sometimes their beliefs are false faiths. These are open to analysis and change. In the nanny state there’s a tendency for people to think up things to be subsidized but you have to watch what you wish for, watch your values.   

 

Of course the government was the main topic of the social microscope. In general the community became very political, over came their apathetic nature to public issues. The revolt pidgin developed good political jargon. Apparently this interest in politics is latent in most people.

 

The labour market for skills was investigated. Eventually enough unemployed or underemployed skilled stars populated the national theatre that people concluded that many skills were in surplus situations. As stagflation had been the ruling economic fact it was of note that fields with high wage increases included fields with underemployed workers. When they came to this conclusion, which was in the second year or so, an attractive young blonde woman commented as I passed “the eyes have it”. The puns are the reference to the line in resumes “I have …” as well as the “aye” to a mutiny. That’s how I interpreted that comment. The individual case studies are an excellent index of labour markets as a single skilled worker samples the local network or market for his skills demand. Stagflation remains a social concern and this role of such anecdotal stories may be useful in the future.

 

One topic that they labored mightily on was “pseudo” skills. Skills that were not that complex or which the essence was actually simple were criticized. My own field or real time programming doesn’t have that much to it although it is considered a distinct field. (Although software programming isn’t that difficult it was generally considered to require some smarts). In any event such puffed up fields were called “bags”. All this criticism amounted to naught but I mention it under the topic of advantages as the questioning and the rationalizing of skills categories was a major theme of The Course. It has a role to play in the attitude towards wages, inflation and careers in the population.

 

The close observation of another is also a way of getting a comment through to a person; by being very sharply aware of the details of what the other person is doing and timing a comment just so. This can be simple, say making a double entendre editorial just when a person glances at a sign in a room. If someone is attracting attention to themselves this is the standard social form of how the response materializes, detailed frank attention, only now very polished up. 

 

The Course was excellent at figuring out people’s dysfunction and then expressing it as a witism. If talk therapy has merit this is it. This can be done by an entire community and it turns out to be more articulate than a single therapist. The community can manifest a pretty sober and caring personality in this regard.

 

The original idea of The Course was people were going to be straightened out and in extreme cases to make them productive citizens rather than put them on social assistance. That was going to be more effective and save money. So much of social assistance reflects individual’s sins and personality dysfunction that this is a potent idea. A psychiatrist once told me that half the problem with his clients was their personality rather than mental problems. On the street they called “it may be the entire problem”. You are socialized by people around you as time goes on and you mature. In the revolt context this therapy was by a mega-city and it’s disquieting. There’s a conflict between privacy and the new culture of the mega-village.

 

The revolt adopted the theme that proper attitude was to work for money to afford an active life. People are typically a social animal; behaviors are a group effect to some extent and all this discussion should have influenced people to behave better. This would be age reaching out to youth for one. I thought it would encourage people to do less stupid things such as criminal acts. In the event statistical evidence of this, a drop in the crime rate for example, didn’t materialize despite all the good sense around.

 

In the years long discussion of life issues in the community they talked about essences, essences of life. They were able to communicate this even to teenagers. So you have a next generation that starts out street educated by age twenty. Youth is poignant as young people face the great unknown of their future, which is something of a lottery anyway. Discussing marriage, having children and the difficult job market must have been something of a “scare” for the participating teenagers.

 

There are a lot of lessons to be learned in life, of course. I mentioned that there must be 1000 rules in an adult’s internal dialogue. So when the community examined the stars it was a chance to learn from other people’s mistakes. There’s nerdiness amongst even mature adults, as you know. You can go through you entire life in the dark about basic issues- miss the point, have the wrong emphasis or exclude yourself from an issue. It takes activities to learn the ropes, and generally that means money. This was a theme of The Course, that personal growth takes money. So the community theatre while intrusive provided wider perspective to people, but without actually costing money.

 

This is all the new culture; it should make a difference both to individuals and to society. The secular personality of a far future Western culture maybe this franker but more sophisticate one.

 

In the Course people were taught how to criticize. They were taught to be diplomatic and how to get through to others by being self-depreciating. They learned how to hold their tongue otherwise. Holding your tongue is a good tactic generally. People sometimes will remember for a life time what you say and talk like so it’s wise to watch your tongue.

 

In the think back of The Course people made a point to recall dumb things people had said, the dumb way they talked in general. There’s a general need to smarten up the way people talk so recalling what some of the stars had actually said at some point in their life was quite popular. 

 

People were encouraged to be better humans: to think about the other guy and to appreciate doing the work pays. They improved personality by moiling logic, perception and the language. It was growing up for adults.

 

The panic turned into a revolution in community communication and communication turns out to be everything. Personality, intelligence and morality can be taught with good communication. It’s human engineering.

 

 

 

Chapter III

 

 A Mega Community In Your Face

 

 

Beyond 1984

 

I will now describe my six years of public persecution. This will illustrate how the revolt went. Nothing much actually happened to me; I went to work daily all the while being the “eye” of a global storm.

 

To touch on the topic of my career in 1984 the populace investigated why I had so much trouble holding a job. One by one all the places I lost a job at reported in through the national grapevine what the scene was like there. It turned out I never had proper employment. All the jobs I lost were bad jobs; that’s what the commenting had been about. There were some nine positions at good companies in this category. So this was the explanation of what was happening to me, the social phenomenon around me, and it was a revelation to me as I was still somewhat in the dark. I had never thought there would be jobs that were just a complete waste of company money. It turns out this is just part of corporate life now but it is controversial with the workers.

 

I described how they opened the curtain on me as to what was going on in society at Spar Aerospace. After I left there in July 1985 there was three particularly intense months of 24 / 7 harassment. I wasn’t allowed a minute’s rest. This was part of their style and some sort of special rule just for me that they were trying out. I got to sleep at night with the help of tranquillizers as my dedicated neighbor yakked away at me while I was falling asleep. My impression was in the background unseen to me the investigation and dissemination of my life history proceeded like a blitzkrieg that summer. This blitzkrieg would be the historical invasion of my privacy on an unlimited scale by a vast public. This would be in addition to all the other investigations and discussions going on in the country. It was mass hysteria harnessed.

 

In that summer when they first started in on the mind reading it was like this: I would be walking down the road, say, thinking about something and I would hear an echo of my thoughts. This would go on all day. I had the thought that the mind reading was normal adult behavior which was just being revealed to me. I thought it was a secret of adulthood and it was only introduced to individuals at the appropriate time. I actually went to the local psychiatrist and told him my mind was being read. He was unmoved but latter I realized he was not a participating citizen. He probably thought I was crazy but didn’t say anything. He had me fill out a psychological test, however, which he told me came out on the form that I was, er, “a complete isolate”.

 

I have described myself as mildly depressed but I haven’t gone into any detail. In fact I’m slightly sexually dysfunctional. Since I was 12 years old I have put myself to sleep by fantasizing sexually and by masturbating, it’s like counting sheep. Fantasizing at night is typical of males but with me it was a permanent thing and uncontrollable. This was humiliating to me and I didn’t want anyone to know, ever. I was sensitive. Through my teenage years people took a long time to figure this out about me, there are signs, so I was safe. Then into my university days it was mentioned to me now and again but I was in denial that people could figure it out. Then in my early working years I found co-workers could readily pick up on it. I was mortified by this and that’s the actual reason why I quit several jobs in quick succession.

 

There’s an expression that you’re only as healthy as your secrets and this practice of mine to put me to sleep was one of mine. In my entire list of jobs that I had been harassed at on “sexuality” was one of the main edges they had to ridicule me. Problems like mine make me just the sort of idiot the workplace and the world can work with. While I had grown inured to the harassment about this it is an analog for a boring waste of time on the job, which was always the issue on the bad jobs I landed. Then when they started investigating my life and I became a case that the community was going to fix they set out to cure me of this problem. They were going to turn off my sexual fantasies one by one by investigating the details of my whole life, determining who I was still thinking about, and then having my neighbor echo them as I went to sleep such that I’d be embarrassed out of the fantasies. This was the therapy. They had the capability in the community now to set up a dragnet to locate my female friends from my entire life and get all the stories on flirtations and then to figure out my exact fantasies, as limited as they were. This mental problem of mine was the original reason for the populace to do a deep investigation into my psychology. This was their opening to conducting an experiment on me as had never been done before, to launch a probe into the deep space of the mind and imagination. They were successful at locating all the females in my life, determining what I remembered and even figuring out the sorted order I thought about them.  My neighbor would hammer away every night with the new list I dreamed up daily and I would become embarrassed and think about someone else. It was a classic tale of the new community activism to fix a problem which had been expensive to everyone.

 

I should explain my wife didn’t know what was happening as we’d got into the pattern of sleeping in different rooms because we had different sleeping patterns. I slept on the couch for many years. And she couldn’t hear the overhead neighbor. So that’s how that all worked.

 

There’s some double thinking going on by the community. They are concerned about the workplace and improving jobs but they determine I can’t find reasonable employment and they are thinking I won’t be able to either so they better fix my dysfunction.

 

The therapy sort of worked and sort of didn’t. As they pinpointed some story that came in over the national grape vine they would be successful in embarrassing me out of a particular fantasy. Then eventually they had a complete file on my sex life from all the data they had. However, ultimately the embarrassing me out of my problem didn’t work. As I ran out of live people to think about I dreamed up imaginary ones as do adolescents. One night I dreamed up a vignette where I was touching a Down’s syndrome female, that’s how good I was feeling about myself under the intense community persecution. Only the citizens of the city guessed I would be about there and spread that scene all over the city. I was at the Metro Zoo the next day, which is ten miles from my home, and I heard someone shout at me “and now it’s a retard”.

 

I had no idea what my vice was, what sort of pervert I was. Eventually I got up the nerve to ask a psychiatrist what I could do about it and he had an answer, said it was a habit. He said that anything that affects the central nervous system can become a habit. So that was what I was, habituated. Habits can have a very strong grip on you and this one certainly did on me. The psychiatrist’s only remedy was for me to have a normal sex life.

 

My problem was more or less limited to putting me to sleep and otherwise I was like a typical male sexually. In the event the community therapy didn’t take, the community eventually took to aggravating my problem rather than fixing it but I did finally grow out of it when I was about forty. Rather abruptly when I aged my mind stopped doing this fantasizing when I put myself to sleep. It happened almost over night at one point when I aged.

 

I’ve explained here that they tried to fix me by embarrassing me out of my sexual fantasies. Eventually, and this went on for years, they used to pattern me nightly and spread my  fantasy of the night all over the city as a matter of routine. It became just part of the abuse they meted out to me daily for being their alpha star as the only point. That’s what became of society’s deep penetration into my skull. I never got used to it; it always gave me the creeps.

 

 

A Deluge of Intimate Personal Harassment

 

Anyway, to get on with my account, I have a story to describe the state-of-events back in the early summer of 1985 when they first revealed to me what they had done.

 

I had a car at the time and I liked hiking in the woods so to escape the noise around me I tried driving 100 miles out from Toronto into cottage country and hiding in some reforestation woods. The harassment, the intimate harassment, followed me out of the city, it had become region wide. I drove down a secondary road and when there was no one in sight, no other cars on the road; I turned downed a forest access road and hid. I’m talking about replanted pine forest monoculture woods which are not recreational areas. However they posted some kind of volunteer near these woods and the voices I was hearing continued. Part of the style of my treatment became to always have some local volunteers planted to keep up the harassment of me when I traveled out of the city.

 

I slept in my car in the woods and the next day I got up and started to walk back and forth on the forest access road in an effort to walk off the depression the harassment was causing me. The attention was causing me embarrassment and was bumming me out. I can remember I was thinking about the economy and job creation. I would have been thinking about how job creation works in different countries in the world. I was not really knowledgeable about economics but rather more like an average person. All the while I was pondering this there’s this echoing off in the woods somewhere of my very thoughts on the matter. I couldn’t tell the difference between my thoughts and the echo. Then I completed my walk but the voices concluded “It takes 100 years to grow an olive tree.” This reference to Mediterranean economies wasn’t in my thoughts at all (and probably isn’t correct) and had to come from without. There was indeed someone actually out there in the woods somewhere having the same thoughts at the same time as I was and echoing them for me by yelling them, except for this ending. This was as patterning of someone’s thought, or my thoughts at least, and was now everywhere. It then went on for six years.

 

Back in the city I have another story to describe the communicating that was going on.

 

The summer of 1985 had very intense harassment. After about three months they reduced the level some. The citizens had the ability to regulate aspects of what they were doing as a group such as the intensity and pace of the harassment of me. I can recall going to the Royal Ontario Museum with my wife and having a snack in the cafeteria. Usually they commented off stage so intensely and distractingly that it was impossible to even think. By around the three month period I could finally hold a conversation with my still unsuspecting wife. I heard the comment in the museum cafeteria “They gave his conversation back.” and the intensity was down such that I could now have a normal conversation.

 

 

Years of 24 / 7 Intimate Personal Harassment

 

By the end of the summer of 1985 I had been out of work for over a year and had exhausted my unemployment benefits. I became concerned I was running my resume down as well as running low on the rent money. I began to consider working as general labour and to hasten things up I went down to a temporary service, Manpower, and began to work as a day laborer.

 

Manpower accepted me as employee even though they must have known I would cause a disturbance most anywhere I worked. This too was part of the deal worked out for me. I was going to be allowed to work. I worked several very short term assignments, as little as half-a-day, and one three month assignment, which they call a “long term” engagement in the temp business. All of the places I was at had heated up office politics going on. The 24 / 7 harassment of me was kept up on all of the assignments I went out on.

 

I completed the three month long term assignment at a large department store chain’s central warehouse, Woolco, and decided to find a permanent general labour job. All I could find was a job pumping gas at an independent’s gas station, a Rebel station. That’d be in the spring of 1986, one year into my constant harassment and now two years into the Counter Revolt. That gas pumping job was the same as everywhere else, constant mind games. Even small gas stations are a web of office politics as they have cross subsidies between the gas pumping side of things and the mechanics – which at the Rebel outlet were not busy. They are also an index of the auto mechanic market.

 

I said we were two years into the revolt at that time and one year into my constant harassment. As they took a year to incubate the revolt and my ordeal starts after that all the dates I give in this account have that one year offset. There’s an extra year to the duration of the revolt compared to the duration of my special abuse.

 

Anyway shortly I got an offer of a job in a wooden garage door manufacturer called Barmac. It was a dollar more an hour so I took it. It was a pretty basic general labour job, operating wood saws or assembling orders from stock. There was more of the same old harassment.

 

The all day harassment continued and they would low mouth me for several hours, tell some embarrassing story or other from their repertoire of such on me, and eventually I would start to talk back, I would just say any dumb thing that came to my head. Then a very funny thing happened, they shut up. As long as I was talking they would be quiet; this was the new arrangement. So I started to talk all the time. I began to talk all the hours I was at work and then I began to talk while I was outside on the street as well.

 

This was after a year of constant and intimate needling, minute by minute. That sort of abuse is actually torture. It’s like the Chinese water torture where they drip water on your forehead except that this is Canadian. It’s the Canadian intimate harassment torture. If they had not given me the out of talking back they would have driven off the deep end within another year. I would say I would have become crazy and violent.

 

Anyway they gave me that out so at times there’d be mimicking of my stream-of-consciousness and at other times I’d start to talk and there’d either be me in a monologue or we’d have a back and forth conversation between me and some unseen them. I still describe this as 24 / 7 harassment, however.

 

They’d respond to anything I wanted to talk about, that was the rule. If I wanted to talk about something reasonably sensible like my views of politics they’d do that and if I wanted to talk about something nonsensical, like colonizing Mars, which I thought about for quite a while, the workers, and then the city, still paid close attention.

 

I talked at work and on the street constantly for the next five years, over eight hours a day. No one ever discouraged me or said anything to me about it. The all day talking was simply tolerated at the several places I eventually worked. I talked in public as well and no one ever even looked my way. It was my defense against the harassment. Some people say this story I’m telling you was a grand psychotic delusion but my short answer is I imagined myself talking aloud all day for five years without being very mentally damaged or without it even being mentioned by the co-workers or boss?

 

The in-the-air conversations going on at small businesses like Barmac were the crucible of the revolt process. These are where the insights were discussed, the commentary spread around and private information leaks came from.

 

Working at the garage door plant brought me up to over a year in my second special role in the country. My upstairs neighbor had been stalking me as a full time vocation for about one year. One day I saw the husband in the hall and I heard “I’ll help you move.” He wasn’t happy with his wife’s volunteerism. Shortly after a bug spray smell began to permeate our apartment. My wife, who is a delicate flower, announced she could not stand the smell and that we’d have to move out. They figured out that the bug spray would force her to actually move out. This was how sophisticated the harassment by the community at large was. As it was the dedicated role of my neighbor that was the lynch pin of my status as victim I was eager to get out of the apartment.

 

There was low apartment vacancy in the city, less than one percent, as everything is rent control so moving would take some luck. I made up a flier for apartment superintendents and delivered them to conveniently located apartment buildings. My wife had found a new job and a good new career as an elementary school text book editor so I selected apartments with bus connection to her workplace. Shortly I got a call from a superintendent and then I checked out the two bedroom apartment he had available. It was fine, close to Donna’s work and not too far of a drive from my garage door factory. The move was on. Moving day came and a couple of our friends helped us shift the five miles down the road.

 

You can imagine my surprise when I started to arrange our belongings in the new apartment and I heard a young female voice from the apartment above patterning my every move. There was another dedicated stalker, a copy cat. I was free ranging, free to work and even free to change residence, but I was to be kept a hostage 24/7 of the political event in the country in my own private and invisible torture chamber for sometime still. The dedication of the public to me and to the process of the revolt was that sophisticated and that determined. This new stalker, who I refer to as stalker No. 2, could mimic my behavior and mind just as the public could. This No. 2 was impressed with the process of the revolt and volunteered for the meanwhile to lead it.

They managed to find both a new stalker and an available pair of rent control apartments, one above the other, and maneuver me into there on my own free will such that it was amazing-and-a-half.  Apartment vacancy was below one percent so finding a suitable pair of available apartments was just not on. However, it was done. And they kept up the appearance that nothing what so ever was going on. That was the rule.

 

I asked the people at the garage door factory who the new neighbor was and they told me it was a single mother with two small children. This turned out to be a ruse.

 

The new neighbor was adept at patterning me. Whether it was washing my hair or cleaning the apartment walls everything was anticipated and echoed to me from above. She and the population paid very close attention to all the details in my life, figured out what I’d be concerned with minute by minute, my micro point-of-view, and could pattern my behavior very, very closely. The neighbor, I began thinking, had actually cloned my personality.

 

I tried to go out into the hall and go upstairs and listen to her from outside her door several times. However whenever I got the urge to do that it was anticipated and they would simply pattern me as I went into the hall and then as I walked around. Then when I got upstairs there’d be quiet of course. When I was in the halls the other neighbors would take over the ghosting of my activities from inside their apartments. I would try to double back and they’d catch that as well. Apparently the double back trick is easy to predict.

 

I’d try double backing when I was outside as well. In particular at night in the ravine park where I went for walks I’d try to fool them and double back. It never worked, not even once. The neighbors around the park would pattern that and follow me around with commenting. Eventually I stopped trying to catch them at their tricks and just played along.

 

One day I went upstairs in a temper and walked in on my stalker as her door was unlocked. There was a young early twenties black girl and a young early twenties black couple. There was not much furniture. The young black guy said “that’s it” as if he was at his limit. I recognized the young couple from around the neighborhood but I had never seen the single black woman, who was my tormentor. I didn’t do anything violent, I forget if I said anything to them, and I left. That’s who it was this time, three young people, young black immigrants specifically. I would guess my stalker was on unemployment benefits and split the rent with the young couple. The comment by my co-workers that the stalker upstairs was a single mother with small children was simply misinformation, some sort of Italian construction worker in-joke.

 

I was able to put together the missing theme that people were promoting the stars careers as compensation for the intrusion of their life. Prior to this they hadn’t told me about this deal. After a year at this new apartment it was now three years since my last job as a software programmer but still people thought they were helping me land a job-for-life. I was still applying for software jobs and I did get the occasional interview. They had a term for these community initiatives such as my affirmative action. They called them “orders”.

 

Almost all of the research and development software jobs advertised in the newspaper came under a stream of heavy derision from the neighborhood when I considered applying to them. And mostly the advertised projects didn’t make sound sense to me either. This was a problem and discouraging.

 

The dedicated neighbor may have been expecting a reward of affirmative action in turn; no one ever mentioned the mob’s position on her.

 

I went upstairs one other time when my neighbor drove me into a temper. By this time the threesome kept their door locked. I kicked a big hole in their flimsy door. People didn’t forget that little incident though, as I shall shortly relate.

 

One day at the garage door manufacturer they were abusing me as usual and I started to scream at the top of my lungs. My pink slip materialized within the hour. It was okay to torture me on the job but I must not complain. The screaming was their limit.

 

The economy had been recovering for several years and there were menial jobs around. I found a job in another wood shop the main problem with which was it only paid . I was a helper on the backend of a six bladed industrial wood saw, puttied and sanded. I continued to talk eight hours a day at my new job; it was tolerated. The abuse was exactly as before, interleaving my monologues with discussion in-the-air about anything I wanted to go on about. My new employer, called FreeFormFive or FFF, was well known in the city and I would see and hear characterizations of the people I worked with around the city on my off hours.

 

FFF made stereo speaker boxes and school furniture. Speaker boxes are simple and pretty much the weakest market power product in the wood shop business.

 

One day I got to thinking how the people in the apartment I lived in probably were leery of me. I was on my way down to the laundry one time and I tried out my theory when a young blonde woman stepped out in the hall. I abruptly yelled “boo” at her. That, kind sirs and madams, was all I did but watch what happens.  The neighbor screamed and went back into her apartment. Her young husband came out and asked what the problem was. I said “the problem” and put my hand on his shoulder. I’m not sure what I would have done to him. He went back into the apartment and called the police. Within three minutes a constable was at my door saying I was under arrest. He took me down to the police station, charged me with common assault and released me.

 

When I got home our good friend Kathy Lowe had arrived and had discussed “the situation” with my wife and the two of them decided I should go down to the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry for assessment, no less. So that’s what we did. I was hospitalized for two days. In the hospital you have a conversation with the resident psychiatrist once a day and I told him I had yelled “boo” at this young woman. I did not mention anything about my real situation. The hospital was a mess of surreptitious commentary. They called the psychiatrist “Dr. Glancy”, for example. Later I found out that he decided I was “a possible schizophrenic”, based on exactly no evidence. Schizophrenia is a generic term, there is no know physical cause of it but there are five categories, and the doctors are pretty quick off the mark to label people. Anyway I was in the hospital voluntarily so I left after two days as I didn’t want to miss much work and the  remuneration I was getting.

 

When I got home from the hospital my wife told me we had been evicted by the apartment superintendent. In Ontario a landlord can’t evict you without getting a court order which takes due process but my wife said we had to move. For me it was another opportunity to get out from under a stalker. My wife also said I had to leave our apartment until we moved. So I slept in motels for a couple of days before I found a room to rent which was conveniently available for just one month. My wife also said she was thinking of leaving me. She, her whole family, is very prime and proper, they are arrogant about it in fact, and she was offended by my “assault”.

 

In the meanwhile I got out my old flier for superintendents and went around to suitable apartment buildings as before. I got a couple of calls and viewed more than one suitable apartment.

 

This is in the spring of 1987, two years into my 24 / 7 harassment. The people at work said “All I’ll say is a big one.” This is a double entendre referring to both the apartment I should get and the job they were angling for me. They are still thinking I’m going to be taken care of. Anyway I found an apartment, a big one, and my wife and I moved in. It was early summer.

 

I wasn’t so much astonished as resigned when I started cleaning the new apartment and could hear a patterning voice from above. It was like anyone receiving bad news. The new voice was another woman, this one middle aged. They had managed to maneuver me down the road to a set up with an apartment pair and a relief stalker once again. This was dedicated stalker No. 3. How effective is that for organization by an angry mob?

 

I do not know how this new woman could afford the rent for her apartment.  It was a nice building and the rent alone was more than what welfare paid. She did last up there an amazing four years. I was more or less never in the apartment that I couldn’t hear her in the next four years.

 

In a couple of months I had my day in court about my “assault”. The presiding judge, a Judge Crossland, spoke under his breath the whole time I watched him take cases, just like he was one of the ordinary folk. When it came to me he said under his breath that this was my third time, which is as I just described - walking into my stalkers apartment and kicking the door in being one and two. I was convicted of assault. I was given a suspended sentence, a criminal record and put on probation for one year. The point of probation is to make it easier to get a conviction and a stronger sentence should something further happen. So that was a further control put on me by the courts. This was after being a virtual hostage of the local and national police and tormented and tortured daily for two full years as part of a political revolt. So Judge Crossland, notwithstanding he wasn’t young, perverted the Canadian Justice System into an instrument of persecution, torture and political protest. This was in the belief I was being done a king size favour by my dedicated stalker and I was going to eventually, one year, get a good job. That’s how optimistic Judge Crossland was about the employment of a Computer Analyst in the city of Toronto in the boom of 1987. That was his prejudice. That and the fact the revolt was about people’s steadfast refusal to pay for all the goods and services they bought through the government and they had resort to political torture to make the point. He was into that mud.

 

It’s the herding instinct that people have. Later, towards the end of the book, I describe how the whole herd turned in my direction, they got behind me and rather dramatically. They did it in stages but they came out for treating me properly in the courts which would be enormously lucrative for me.

 

People wonder why I just didn’t assault my stalker or someone else but it would have cost me my marriage and as I didn’t have a career any more I’d be completely high and dry. If I was out on my own I might have a  job and the basics to survive but not tuition costs. (That’s sort of the bench mark for modern life; food, clothing and shelter but also tuition.) The courts were a problem too, a legal case can be expensive, but I had to be perfectly prim for my wife.

 

I was fired from my job for yelling, arrested for yelling boo by the police, put on probation by the courts and threatened with divorce by my wife. The standard for me while on this cross device they rigged up was near perfect behavior.

 

In any event I was now ensconced in a third bugged apartment and had a long haul before me. Life was much the same from day to day. The harassment is all very clever when it’s done but little of it sticks in the memory. Because it’s constant most of it just goes in one ear and out the other. However it was all a huge effort by the besetting population all across the city and I can describe some features and highlights of the following years.

 

My time at FFF took me into 1988, the third year of my persecution and fourth year of the revolt. The general population got even better at following me with their mind mimicking technique.  I can recall a particular evening.

 

I would go for a walk in my suburban Don Mills neighborhood every evening. I usually got out of the apartment at night because the dedicated neighbor was more intense than the voices from the residential suburban neighborhood houses. She’d chase me out of the building and I’d be the problem of the locals. I generally would walk through the residential area, into the ravine park – which was not quiet because it was bordered by houses – up through a commercial area – which was not quiet -- and back again. This would take maybe two hours and there was constant harassment all the way every time I went.

 

On the evening I’m thinking of there was a newspaper article that the federal government had undertaken to build a $400 million polar orbit radar imaging satellite. There were several radar imaging satellites in space already but it said in the newspaper this one would be able to image openings in the surface ice in the polar shipping lanes. This seems particularly useless and just the sort of abuse of public funds The Course was interested in.

 

I thought this through on my walk that evening. My thoughts developed along the lines of (1) would the satellite pass over the occupied shipping lanes at the right time, (2) how many ships are going to be actually up there at this time anyway and finally (3) wouldn’t small helicopters be cheaper and that much more timely and effective.

 

The locals guessed I’d have read the newspaper, noticed that article and would be thinking about it. It takes time to think up the simple list above but as I did so the neighborhood followed me along my walk.  I would have a thought about the use of helicopters or what ever and would hear that echoed. The neighborhood, the group think, could figure out in what order I thought these concerns up and also the exact pace I went over them with.

 

The next day when I went into work at FFF I described my evening to the workers in my usual fashion of talking out loud to no one in particular and they pooh poohed it. They went negative and adopted the attitude that they do that themselves. However, the supervisor popped out of his office when I was finished describing the scene and said he was impressed. That’s the recognition all that ever got.

 

One day at FFF I tried writing down the pidgin that the factory workers were talking in. The language of the revolt was mostly this form of broken English jive talk, typically hackneyed puns and code words. The workers responded to my note taking by inundating me with comments. In about five minutes I got some 20 expressions. I had to stop then as I wasn’t able to do any work. On inspection of the short list of 20 expressions mostly they were disparaging comments about the skilled workers, whom they called “chievers”.

 

 

The Revolt in the USA

 

In my third year of persecution I took a four day driving holiday to the nearby regions of the United States. I was keen to go as I wanted to see what was happening in the USA and if I was well know that far out. It turns out the USA was exactly the same as Canada including my role as alpha star. This is they had similar problems with government deficits and unemployment. They had imported The Course lock, stock and barrel even though we are different countries. The idea would be the two cultures and economies are very similar. They had the heated in-the-air investigations of the neighborhood everywhere. This is the Land of the Free.

 

Donna and I drove through western New York State and down into north western Pennsylvania. (These are interesting areas to visit as a tourist by the way.) As I drove into the States the talking car phenomenon followed me along the highway, the other vehicles. Then at each place I stopped everyone followed the rule of keeping the attention on me and harassing me. If I’m not mistaken the intensity of my blanket of attention waned somewhat in northern Pennsylvania. I was only there over night and I can’t report any gaps in the constant commenting per se but it did seem less rather than the same.

 

In one restaurant I went into a young person said “All I’ll say is I recognize him more than her.” The likeness of both me and of Donna had made the rounds; I’m not sure how they do this but it was active as far out as 200 miles from Toronto in the United States. That was their reaction to me showing up one day.

 

The broadcasting of people’s likeness worked very well. Not only were look-a-likes identified but distinguishing look-a-like characteristics were broadcast. A style of walk, a favorite item of clothing, hair and body shape could all communicate a person’s physical identity. These would be pointed out in a neighborhood, say of actors in a movie at a theater.

 

In a restaurant in Niagara Falls a commentator said “Bru, your neighbor”. This seemed to indicate the thinking was Canada was quite a bit further progressed in economic and social compromise by the deficits than America but if worse came to worse, the country’s economy collapsed or something; Canada would have the American economy to lean on. The double point was I had my dedicated neighbor to lean on still and that I was sure to be alright. At the three year point that’s not too clear thinking.

 

We stayed in Jamestown in New York State at one point and I recall a communication that was particularly striking. In that part of the country one of the things tourists do is visit the parks. I had read of a local bird sanctuary and was intending to go for a walk in it. Anyway at one point we went into a McDonald’s and a patron there began talking loudly and insistently about his dog. What comes to mind when you hear the word “dog” is the word “Roger” and then this progresses in your mind in a nonsensical association to the phrase “Roger Tory Peterson”, the bird expert. These are the jumps the average mind makes. However this is a pun about Ontario politics and it was a way of commenting about the mass hysteria too. The Premier of Ontario was one David Peterson but he is a Liberal, not a Conservative Tory. So put it together and it’s “Roger, Tory Peterson”. This local in Jamestown was familiar with Ontario politics and commenting how all this through-the-air communication seemed to be oriented to making the left leaning political parties into conservative parties. That was actually the manifest logic as this local saw it and that was correct. In fact historically that’s exactly what happened in the next decade. Clinton in the USA, Blair in the UK and Chrétien in Canada were all center left politicians that got the national deficits under control by cuts to government. At the time it was somewhat inconsistent sounding. The other thing Jamestown turns out to be the actual home of Roger Tory Peterson so you have this other reference in the comment. So that’s how communication worked in Counter Revolt and that’s what it was like for me to pop into a McDonald’s for a hamburger far from home in those years.

 

The American deficit was significantly the product of tax cuts. People in the USA voted for Ronald Reagan twice but his trickle down jobs creation policies basically scared the pants off of everybody, scared them into mass hysteria. The USA under Reagan took a hit on fiscal rectitude and public peace. The Republican brain trust refers to Reagan as a great leader to this day.

 

 

The Revolt’s Final Three Years

 

The following years were much the same. I can tell you some of the points of interest of my experience in the final years. My story line is thin, it’s just me in a virtual prison, but there is this wild revolt continuing around me.

 

The population continued to make case studies out of individuals and particularly out of workplaces. There was this continued investigation into how all things worked: the government, the economy and the state of the culture. A big emphases, I could make out, was on finding suitable employment for the stars. This would actually be fine tuning the local economy, placing stars workers in situations that they would be well suited. All the workplaces I ever worked at were well known and the people there had work stories to tell, stories of skills and ability that should be worth something to some strategic employer somewhere. It’s possible that I got hired where I did because these companies had on going dramas of their own and that’s how I fit in.

 

The mass event and the philosophy held for the full seven years so my role in it continued to the summer of 1991. All that happened is that the process slightly evolved. In the last year or two it began to question itself, admit not much had changed and particularly not the participants, and began to acknowledge that they had abused the stars. The contrition about the stars treatment became a theme without altering people’s enthusiasm for continuing to met out the abuse.

 

I didn’t really have anywhere to escape to although I might have been able to live with my mother in Vancouver for a summer. When I thought about this they brought up the case of my friend Kathy Lowe. She was a star too and she left town in the summers to stay at her elderly mother’s cabin in Vermont. The citizens simply waited for her to return in the fall and then they continued. That was my alternative to a divorce.

 

It’s the same if Donna had been an initiate and we moved to escape the dedicated harassment. It’s probably I would have been reduced to a regular star like Kathy. I would have escaped years of persecution this way and maybe had better luck landing a bad entry level job. That’s the theory, anyway.

 

The source of this whole record is what I remembered of the event in the following decade but also my daily journal which I kept for the last year-and-a-half. My journal was not as good as a source document as it might have been as I had a tendency to explore on paper the legality of what they were doing to me rather than the record of the event’s colorful details.

 

There was one big change in my life. My wife got a secure job as a full time teacher. She had graduated to a market of over supply in teaching but now there was some openings and she found a fit, at job as a special education teacher. This secured us financially but my “play” went on anyway. The interpretation I take is Donna was well known in her own right, a star, and they decided my case was special enough to work affirmative action for me as well. There’s an alternative interpretation and that is Donna’s employment was not secure. In fact it was but they treated if like it wasn’t for some reason or lack or reason. They did the same to a teacher friend of ours; making her a star even though she had a secure job. It’s of note they couldn’t tell the damn difference. It’s their pessimism about jobs. There was a short layoff list for teachers each year but the School Board is unionized of course and every body has an exact seniority level, a number. Donna’s was half way up the list because they gave her credit for her years as a contract supply teacher she did earlier. In any event Donna became the dominant bread winner permanently and I became even more dependent. And that’s the way my life worked out.

 

I spent years going to work as a helper in a factory and coming home and avoiding my overhead neighbor. I used to spend most evenings elsewhere. My third apartment was right across the street from a 200 store mall called Fairview. I used to go over to this mall every night and either walk around or sit in the food court. The public and store staff would harass me of course so I used to talk constantly as per the deal. The security guards at the Mall tolerated this. Only one night did I get thrown out and that was for making comments to a police office, who the security guard defended as their “right hand”.

 

While I’m on the topic of Fairview I can tell you a short story. I have an interest in the language and some nights I would take a dictionary over to the food court and look up new words. One night I was there looking up Jim Crow and about two minutes later I heard a comment from the far end of the food court about John Crow, the then Governor of the Bank of Canada. I forget the exact comment but it was loud and pointed at what eventualities for all of us might be. That’s how private reading the dictionary at the food court was for me during the revolt. That was how close a guard they kept on me.

 

If I didn’t go to the mall I would walk in the neighborhood. There is this small parkete near our apartment which is a baseball diamond and not much else. It borders right up against a super highway, the 401, which is 12 lanes at that point. I would sit on the edge of the parkete, alone in the summer night, and there would be this commotion in-the-air that’d go on. My impression is the voices I heard were from the cars passing on the super highway. I wouldn’t say anything for my part but there would be this communing with me. They could essentially run a conversation with me by anticipating my response and just filling in my side. They could actually fill in my internal response. If this was the traffic doing this it’s extra hard because the “conversation” has to be passed like a baton from vehicle to vehicle on the highway as they passed the parkete. That’d be at highway speeds or actually double highway speeds as the conversation would be passed from the passing traffic to the on coming traffic. Anyway I whiled away many evenings communing with the traffic on the super highway. It was normal for me.

 

This mind meld is wild but typical of my six years. It’s been done; it’s now fact. An average person can be trained to do it. It’s a discovery by a mob. It is beyond belief. The mind meld by the community maybe a miracle and there’s no telling just who or what is behind it ultimately, some Arch Angel maybe.

 

The population was able to disseminate a vast amount of information, carry on an anthropological study of the country and then keep me in a virtual prison of intimate harassment all through comments in the air, all undetected. They did not riot and set the cities on fire like the Blacks in America in the 1960s, scapegoat the Jews with pogroms like the Nazis or assassinate any the leaders rather they jumped to invading privacy and then this mind meld by the population with me. My mind, my stream-of-consciousness, was a battlefield for social order in Canada daily on a minute by minute basis for six years and without a break. It was a “hole” in law-and-order. The government did not respond to any of this though, just sat there.

 

I traveled out of town to cottage country a number of times each year. Donna and I would stay in motels and go to the provincial parks. In every single case our motel room was bugged. The room next door was occupied by a temporary stalker of some sort. I learned not to be intimate with my wife on such excursions. I managed to draw the line of the invasion of my privacy there. This is a little odd but they also to stole my sex life from me.

 

In the six years I was harassed I didn’t go out very much for entertainment. There was no point. I can remember going to a community level theatre production in the final years and realizing I had only been out a few times in years. As I perceived it the theatrical play I was at was fraught with commenting through emphasis of the dialog about the on going revolt. That’s all I saw and heard when I watch a theatrical production whilst the centre of a mass protest and mass persecution.

 

I tended not to apply to software jobs at this time. I wouldn’t co-operate with them. It was actually my protest. In latter years afterwards I found my file of rejection letters and I had in fact applied to a good many of the big, choice corporations, especially the big banks. As much community energy as humanly possible was being directed into my case but it was producing zero results on the application side – which people believed was the point. This is open to interpretation. My own thought is entry level positions in big corporations are of questionable use. Corporations fill positions internally before going outside so the ones that become available to outsiders are the dogs. The one thing they didn’t want was for me to get another senseless job. As the years went by my resume was becoming less and less of interest and this was what was happening as well.

 

By the latter years the original effort to embarrass me out of my sexual dysfunction had been replaced by their satisfaction in just taunting me with it. It never went away and I was nightly entreated to a mind meld with my fantasies. I could hear my neighbor patterning me and I tend to think this was not entirely possible. I think they developed a white noise that the mind fills in and they used this on me regularly. I call this a “white noise effect” or a “schizophrenic effect”.

 

As an example of this effect when I got home from work I would sometimes look over our book shelf for something to read. I could hear the neighbor upstairs patterning me eyeing the books. She’d echo a title just as my eye came to rest on it. This might have been white noise that I was filling in. The alternative explanation is that after years of being in my apartment while I was out and plotting out my behaviours it wouldn’t be too difficult to know what books stood out on the shelf or whatever else there was to see in our small apartment.

Also I think that after years of hearing people echoing my thoughts my mind developed a reflex. I then couldn’t tell the damn difference between the voices and a reflex, something that I’d fill in. The harassment was very oriented to this subtle echoing, timing the comment to just as I had the thought, so the long term effect of the ghost like harassment maybe reflexes of sorts in the mind.

 

A more distinct over reading that I did was of TV. Some shows, the weather reports for example, seemed to be couched in revolt pidgin. Only some shows were full of it and some shows had none. So there was a difference. What was most unusual was some programs taped before the revolt had the editorializing as far as I could make out. My mind became attuned to hearing a second meaning and I read this into these pre-taped shows as well. This is not much different from the over reading of a situation that everybody does some of.

 

I did this over reading with people as well. I have several acquaintances that I thought were commenting under their breath but in latter years I figured out they had no idea what so ever was going on. I would get intelligent messages from them which I later realized weren’t there.

 

One thing that explains this is that the community would make off stage comments when these people were around that would be exactly like what they’d talk like, ventriloquism. I now know they did this. It works rather well. If you are looking at someone and hear a voice you’ll think it’s them. They would think out the point-of-view of that other person and put words in their mouth.

 

People in general learned to talk under their breath without moving their lips. This is ventriloquism too and it’s a way of getting in an anonymous comment.

 

The neighborhood and the populace followed me around, mimicked my stream-of-consciousness and did so with great precision. Although what I heard was indistinct or muted a lot of the time it was at other times quite clear. It was mostly as coherent as regular conversation, actually very polished. Any close look at the comments would argue that they are intelligent and not psychosis. That’s what I can report.

 

I recall only one instance when they, any of them, called out something that wasn’t happening. This was one time when I was at home after work. I lay down briefly and then got up and the overhead neighbor missed the fact that I got up. I did only hear that one mistake in all those years. The prediction of behavior appears to be that easy once you get the hang of it. The vagueness of much of the commenting would obscure mistakes as well.

 

The imagining and over reading I did doesn’t harm my credibility much. I thought about this and I decided I did over read some but I was exposed to a horrendous amount of needling. My over reading might be less than a few percent of all that I heard.

 

 

The Maturing of the Revolt

 

In the spring of 1989 my factory, FFF, slowed down and one day I just quit rather than go in and get laid off.  I then got a job at a small company called DC Vans that serviced tradesmen vans. This company installed fixtures in vans for tradesmen: shelves, flooring and partitions. It can eke out a living in a city the size of Toronto. I was their gopher: cutting material, acting as a janitor and also doing pickups and deliveries in the company van. I was now five years out from the start of the revolt and the harassment remained continuous but the rate slowed some. At my new company I continued to talk eight hours a day and it continued to be tolerated.

 

In the last couple of years the discussions in-the-air became less acute. In fact they developed a preoccupation with the police instead. I don’t know that this was because of the police’s collusion with the illegal on going rather my own interpretation is they thought the police were paid off scale.  In Ontario you can get hired as a police constable out of high school but they are paid as well as professionals with university qualifications if you include overtime. It’s very expensive. Traditionally police work has been considered dangerous but by the 1980s police fatalities were rare. In any event there was constant grousing about them. This was to the extent that when I was in the woods in the park hiking the chirping birds seemed to be disparaging the police; I was that conditioned to the grousing about the police. When I traveled to New York State they had the same thing going on States side.

 

In the last years of the revolt the topic of immigration emerged. It had been touched on earlier but the quota was down to 89,000 a year at one time and considered “small”. However, unemployment was slow to come down and I began to wonder what role immigration had in this. I started to look into the program by going to the library and looking up the actual numbers. It turns out that Canada has a sizable immigration program but basically no one paid any close attention to it, did any competent analysis of its effect. It turned out to be an amazing situation.

 

I was wondering how one could understand the effects of the 100,000s of immigrants to the country and my supervisor at work pointed out that they were primarily moving to three cities only, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, so you could just read off the vital statistics for those cities. Later I was back in Fairview Mall looking at the totals versus the unemployment and a passer-byer, a middle aged woman, pointed out eventually the unemployment in an immigration city is just the accumulated immigrants. The extra bodies just accrue in the unemployment total by displacement. This is true except in the case of actual major shortages of skills which are rare in a modern economy.

 

This was near the last year of the revolt and eventually the inquest into immigration was inconclusive. The quota was reduced in the 1980s and so it took years for this subject to become topical. I say reduced, Canada’s immigration was still the world’s most aggressive, was concentrated in three cities and had  economic side effects other than in the official unemployment figure. The topic becomes prominent in this account latter, as many Western countries continued to immigrate after Western cities developed unemployment, low wages and poverty. What the effect of immigration was with such conditions was not understood. In Chapter V  I go over that the population sussed out exactly how this was all working out.

 

I began to write letters to the government and other authorities about my situation in the final years of the revolt. I did this surreptitiously, so that Donna didn’t know, but one day I left a letter lying around that was about my neighbor. She read it and forbid me from writing anymore letters to the authorities. Donna is a little paranoid and thought that as a teacher, a public employee, I was putting her job at risk.

 

I got not very much response to my letter writing. However the main elected official responsible for me, the Solicitor General of Ontario, who is in charge of police services, wrote to me saying he had forward instructions to the police chief of Toronto to “take action” against my dedicated stalker. The police chief forwarded the letter in turn to the local station and the local constables went straight to Donna at her place of work, knowing she is slightly paranoid, and told her I was writing threatening letters to the government. She was furious. She said if it happened again that she was going to leave me, about only the second time she threatened to do that. The police go for the family like bears to honey when they want something and that’s the case here. The Solicitor General of Ontario passed a memo to the alleged culprit, we’re talking useless imbecile here. It actually became inadvisable for me to contact the police.

 

I did get a significant offer to help from the government. I wrote a ten page indictment of the Prime Minister himself for my torture in public by the police to the Attorney General of Canada, Kim Campbell, soon to be Prime Minister Kim Campbell. She ignored my accusation, but offered assistance instead. The Attorney General almost never circumvents the regular legal process so this was an exceptional thing. However I received her offer just after my dedicated stalker moved out and the citizens ceased and desisted harassing me so I thought my troubles were over and I never wrote back to her. That was a big mistake. I should have written back to her and asked for something of an inquiry and consideration for damages. It took me a long time to articulate my story so at that time I wasn’t really ready to write back to her in a sensible fashion.

 

I might comment that while you get very little response from letters to the government you do have to write to the correct authority. The occasional random elected official will write back as well. Very occasionally you will hit a live one that will go with and issue and exactly this happens latter in this book. Communication with the government by letter is still possible in Canada. The elected officials have correspondence aids and there’s rather a lot of manpower available for letter writing. This is particularly in comparison to activist groups or what have you which operate on a shoestring.

 

In June of 1990 there was a provincial election in Ontario and the socialist left, the New Democratic Party (NDP), surprised everyone including themselves and won. So there was now an entire new government responsible for law-and-order. It never helped me though.

 

In these final years the rate of harassment was lowered gradually. The mega-city community changed their style to a slower rate of harassment.  I timed the interruption in the sixth and final year when I was outside and it went down to about a comment about every 45 seconds. That was the reduced rate and it seemed slow. By that time I was exhausted so this reduced rate was tiring.

 

In the final years I would not only talk aloud all the time I would have tantrums and I had the shakes. I would flail my arms all the time. I used to arch my back and stick out my chest and tighten the muscles in my torso in reaction to the abuse. No one at work or anywhere else ever said anything about this behaviour.

 

At work there was one employee who had a good sense of humour and I told him so one day. He said “Ok, here’s you.” and started walking awkwardly and flailing his arms which was funny. Other than that no one ever mentioned my bizarre behaviors in the whole six years. For sure 100% of the people I worked with were initiates to the revolt.

 

In my apartment the abuse was always constant. Basically I didn’t hear a thing my wife said to me for six years because I was always attuned to the running commentary from upstairs. Donna even jumped on me one day and said “You’re not listening to me; you’re listening to what’s going on upstairs.” She had that much of an idea what my life was like.  

 

It was difficult to do anything in the apartment. Cook, clean, or order pizza – it was all interrupted. Typically when I cooked I’d burn things or forget to turn the heat on the stove on in the first place because I was distracted by what I was hearing. I didn’t do much cleaning either. I was completely lethargic. I didn’t do my income tax for several years, for example.

 

After five years the “question everything” aspect of the revolt began to be applied to the revolt itself. For the first four or five years there was basically no dissenting voice at all. Then after five years and nothing much happening people began to question the excesses of the process. At Fairview Mall I heard a comment about how they were treating the “store keepers”. The extra meaning to this was the skilled workers which had a store of knowledge. Another reference in the comment is how middlemen have been persecuted in past history for making “exorbitant” profits by mobs.

 

For years the intimate network had been producing detailed reports and reveling in its own analysis of the pertinent facts. Then errors in the group judgment became apparent and so there was a revision to the all-knowing character of the group investigations. The idea they then went to was the group thinking had the reliability of a newspaper and people would add “I subscribe.”

 

One of the aspects of my imprisonment was to harass me deep into the night. This is how it worked: When you sleep you usually wake up once or twice a night. In the latter years I stopped using tranquillizers but they must have woken me up purposely at about 3:00 am or 4:00 am. I say this because whenever I was up at night I could still hear either my overhead neighbor or someone outside. In all those years I never woke up to the still of the night, not once in all those years. I was basically never left alone to silence even at night in six years. To never, ever leave me alone was the style and rule. It was something.

 

At one point I was arrested again. I was walking in the ravine park one night, as was my wont, and a police car pulled up and the constable yelled “hey”. I considered this the start of some theatrics so I ran off. I was really not under self control by that time. Then I ran in a circle and the two constables got out of their cruiser and jumped me. They knocked the wind out of me by kneeling on my chest. Then they arrested me and charged me with resisting arrest and damaging police property. A few months latter I was in court with these punks and the presiding judge convicted me, or at least he ticketed me. These were my keepers.

 

However what was worse is I decided to get back at them. I decided to go down to the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry and run up a bill on the public accounts. I was going to explain to the psychiatrist I was under duress. I did run up a bill on the public ticket but I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone. The price I’ll pay was to spend the rest of my life on anti-psychotic drugs to appease my wife.

 

The Clarke Institute of Psychiatry was a ray of hope at first. The emergency ward psychiatrist, Dr. David Fraser, agreed to see me once a week. He was great; he believed my whole cockamamie story about city wide harassment of me and considered that I was a case of police negligence. He was not an initiate of the on going rather he just accepted my tale of an international revolt. So for one year I met with him once a week and told him how the harassment was going. I was distraught and he saw fit to keep me as a patient.

 

Dr. Fraser was one of only two people that treated me honestly or openly about the harassment. The other person was a co-worker at DC Vans that took to going drinking with me. This was one Danny Sharon. Danny had a lot of personal style and he decided he wasn’t going to go along with the rest of them rather he was going to relate to me as a buddy. As a co-worker he had to put up with my eight hour daily diatribe. Danny said no one listened. He would read my letters to the government at the pub that explained my situation and would comment “one or two sentences in there”.

 

I was fairly isolated in all those years. Originally I had two close friends, Kathy Lowe and John Lorenz, but both eventually moved out of the city and neither was an initiate to the communication going on anyway. So I never had anyone to lean on, be sympathetic to my plight, other than Dr. Fraser and Danny. I could have used a friend to help me think more clearly about the national situation and my personal situation. My circumstance was so unusual I couldn’t mention any of it to other people.

 

I was not able to talk with anyone about my extreme situation, the double life I lived, for all those years but when I thought about this I wondered how different is that from anyone? In particular isn’t that exactly what having kids is like? I would say we all live out life in this diplomatic existence.

 

At one point I got a glimpse of what was happening in the UK with respect to the pandemonium and it was the same as in Canada. A British missile frigate visited Toronto on a good will mission and the public were invited on board for a tour. So I went down and found that the crew was immersed in theatrics. However, they did not know about me specifically – my worst case had not traveled that far.

 

The locals signaled my arrival dock side and an officer appeared at a window and responded. He commented under his breath “I’ll say white.” This is a reference to the great whale Moby Dick that I was like, a reference to the infelicitous comment by Price Philip about the Falkland War being dangerous to whales, a comment that at sea there is little to do such that whale sightings are an event – and having just come up the St. Lawrence there was the possibility of seeing the local Belugas, and finally it was a social comment about how the a problem with jobs in the modern economy tended to be with Black immigrants,.

 

There were other comments during my tour of the frigate and some referred to the class conflict on board with light mocking of the skill of the officers by the sailors.

 

However this was late in the day pandemonium wise and the philosophy of the revolt was in dispute by then. When I went to leave I heard “Now get him out of here.” The young British sailors are career minded and they are in the navy to get training, a possibility for them is in the civilian side armaments industry. They had heard more than enough about bad jobs, were of the mind that that is the way things are and had set their sites on them as a next step in their career and life.

 

So all that’s the “Hi” I got from the Royal Navy. The Canadian social revolt had infected the UK at least.

 

It’s likely the revolt was general in the Western nations but I have no information. They did not inform me as to the situation in this regard, kept that sealed off, although it would have been common knowledge. I imagine there were protests in Europe as these countries had the same economic and political problems as we did and there’s contagion from the style of sharing individual or national problems. The story would go that there is now this new common world culture emerging in the West, no less. I would guess the effort petered out in the third world, where people are uneducated.

 

In 1990 I took another road trip to the USA. I went to Vermont to visit my friend Kathy Lowe at her mother’s cabin by a pond. The whole trip was the same as at home. Vermont is a 1000 km. drive away and I was well known there. However this might have been Kathy’s influence. Kathy and her mother were also stars. Kathy is a soul, she walks to her own drummer. She needs to pay more attention to paying the rent and that. The community was working on her, as she was in danger of being a life long welfare case. In Vermont I particularly heard about the people Kathy and I went to university with. Nevertheless the talk in the USA was about economic growth and my experience appeared to play an index role on the economy there as it did in Canada.

 

Kathy’s mother was 80 years old and lived in a senior’s apartment where the rent was geared to income. A topic was she also owned this small cabin, where she spent her summers. It was very modest, worth only about $40,000, and Kathy’s mom took the bus to get to it but it was the type of government subsidy The Course took an interest in through individual cases. An image they communicated to me was in the comment “a hard nosed businessman” which, when they called it out, I was thinking about the crayfish in the local pond, mini lobsters,  lobsters being a symbol of a bit of the alright.

 

The countryside was bugged in Vermont. I would drive through their mix of forest, farms and houses and hear a rolling conversation from the car. At one point a farmer said “by the way it’s $200 a ton”. As far as I knew that was the price of grain but it’d be a sensitive point to farmers, if it was $180 or $200. In the Course it mattered less what the actual cost was than what was the popular perception of the cost. And through my eyes it was $200 a ton. In the Course the level of understanding by the public was being interrogated rather than the actual facts.

 

While I’m on this point of the emphasis of the style of the revolt I’ll add that expert opinion was missing. The Everyman’s point-of-view was all that there was. There were no expert stars, or at least no opinion leaders. The insistence of making people think through things themselves was all that there was and the investigation was into that – popular perception. One alternative explanation of this absence is expert opinion isn’t all it’s cracked up to be outside of strictly empirical and well funded areas.

 

When I got back from Vermont in September 1990 my job at DC Vans came to an end. A new recession was nigh and the slowing economy was having an effect on the company. There wasn’t enough work to keep me or my buddy Danny busy and we were both let go.

 

I then spent nine months unemployed albeit on Unemployment Insurance benefits but as a star with my 3^rd dedicated neighbor still in place. This brought her participation in the role of stalker to four years. What she was doing still there I have no idea. In particular it was a burden for her as previously I was only at home for a couple of hours a day and now I was in the apartment all the time. She tried to keep up the around the clock harassment but eventually became exhausted and started to mumble. In the final months she went quiet now and then but the neighbors outside picked up some of the slack in the harassment of me from the apartment yard

 

One day I was leaving the apartment building to go to the close by convenience store when one, two, three and then four police cruisers passed me on the residential street. This was possible hazing and so I yelled “are you looking for me” at the fourth cruiser. The constable stopped, got out and asked me what my problem was. I gave him a piece of my mind, the main point of which was he was “incompetent”. I was being polite. Then he says “You’re under arrest under the mental health act.” I knew he could make trouble for me if he wanted, particularly as my wife was so prim and paranoid, so I was shaken. He called in support and a second cruiser arrived, this constable being a young woman. Then the two of them took me down to the neighborhood hospital which was about a mile away. When a nurse appeared the arresting officer looks at me with a big smile and says “This is nurse Ratchet”, the name of the nefarious psychological nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  While I was outside the hospital the police supervisor arrived and he came over to me and gets right in my face and says “I know who you are, you’re a celebrity”. All I need is a few official witnesses like him.

 

The medical staff strapped me in a bed and injected me with a tranquilizer. I was talking, by then I talked constantly and uncontrollably as a defence mechanism. The arresting idiot kept coming over to me, grinning and tightening my restraints. I got the point. He was in a position of power and could make trouble for me. I continued talking and the nurse said “ok” and tranquilized me a second time. I woke up six days later to a restraining order of being dangerous to society and a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. That was the official treatment of me as the alpha star. It was like being a political dissident in a communist psychiatric hospital.

 

After I woke up I spent another six days in the hospital under the restraining order. They injected me with something, they certainly didn’t ask me or tell me what exactly, and that was the start of a life long anti-psychotic prescription. As it happened the third neighbor moved out of the overhead apartment at that time, the trailing of me with commenting in public stopped and I was left to get on with my life. My lethargy lifted and I started to behave normally. To anyone unfamiliar with the on going, such as my wife, it looked like the anti-psychotic was a medical miracle, a silver bullet.

 

I had been going to see Dr. Fraser at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry for a year by then and just before the arrest I took Donna with me to our weekly meeting. I was sitting there and Dr. Fraser stretches his right arm upwards and says, out of the blue, “There’s no doubt Bruce is a schizophrenic.” He tells my long suffering wife and my means of support this. He never mentioned it to me, or asked about telling my wife rather he went straight to recruiting her cooperation. This is the same guy that accepted my whole story of persecution by the public at large both before and still actually. He’s so brilliant that he’s ascertained that I’m also just paranoid. This is after some 50 interviews. To him the populace has been stalking, persecuting, tormenting and mimicking the mind of a chronically mentally ill patient of his. It’s not good logic and judgment, eh.

 

Dr. Fraser continued the drug the psychiatrist at the hospital started me on. That and he agrees to continue to meet with me once a week to discuss nothing much as the persecution then stopped. We do this for the next five years, that’s 250 consultations on the state ticket to talk about the weather. I go because my wife insists I stay in “therapy”.

 

My wife takes the diagnosis in stride, thankfully. For six years I’ve been acting strangely and she’s said very little. One day she broke her silence and said she knows something was wrong but “She wasn’t prepared to give up on me just yet.” Once she blurted out she “Can’t bear living with me.” She complained about my tantrums. She complained about my self containedness, like I could win. She complained about my world view which was bits and pieces of The Course that I allowed myself to mention. I had been silent about my situation for six years. I thought I had done a good job of hiding the problem. I thought I had born my burden like an adult. Anyway she now has her explanation and the cure.

 

My marriage survived the mass invasion of privacy and torture. It’s likely had it been another person than my Donna that would not have been a case. I would have been “caught” in the low wage treadmill then, my life completely ruined.

 

The trick of stepping back 10’ and talking in a muted voice frankly about serious matters had now been officially diagnosed as schizophrenia. It’s very odd but the whole of the participating population would meet this problem if they mentioned to anyone that they were hearing things. They’d be considered psychotic. While direct communication doesn’t work you can’t explain indirect communication because of its resemblance to psychosis. This was enough to seal off the rest of the population from catching on to the voices, having them explained to them.

 

The third neighbor moved out sometime in July 1991. I know she physically left because another neighbor friend told my wife she was moving and a new person was expected shortly. My wife was concerned because she thought a new neighbor “might not be as quiet”.

 

The harassment didn’t just stop one day rather it faded over a period of about three weeks. I can recall the first time it was silent in six years. Donna and I went north to Algonquin Park for a weekend. This was after I got out of the hospital. We went for a long hike on one of the trails. Normally they had people posted where ever I went to keep up the stream of harassment including in the park and it started out like that on this occasion but when we got a mile into the woods a moment came when I realized I couldn’t hear anybody. There was silence. As it had been fading it was expected I suppose and I don’t recall any particular emotion rather I just noticed it. A few days latter back in the city the remnants of the harassment faded entirely and that was that. I can recall the last thing I heard. A young woman called “The last call is to evolve some.” By then the process, it’s pretence to logic and morality, were in disrepute and that’s the way they phrased it. For me it had been six years and a month. For the populace it had been a seven year long, entirely supernatural, mass event.

 

And that is my report from the front line of a social mobilization in North America in the latter part of the 20^th Century.

 

 

Chapter IV

 

 End of the Revolt After Seven Long Years

 

 

Wrap Up

 

I had been at the centre of the first modern world revolt; I had this God propelled unique role in world history. I was a first in the world in psychological analysis and affirmative action. They managed to steal the privacy of my own mind, my career, my sex life and, in the eye’s of my wife, my mental health. The public in a western democracy made a political hostage out of a free roaming citizen and tortured him daily by probing his mind for six years. It was with police collusion, was a form of police brutality. I was the living example of how far people could go to see things from another person’s point-of-view, producing an actual mind meld. I had my life broadcast in real time for six years; that’s like 36,000 hour long episodes of a TV reality show. For all these hours my mind was on open book to the populace– in some sort of science fiction like cage. The third neighbor stalker lasted four years and changed my personal history. She pretty much ditched my career as a professional software worker. The whole event around me was to include one more family in the Toronto middle class. Even though Toronto was as rich as any western city the population still wanted to torture a bunch of us.

 

They had their new techniques of community activism and making stars out of people. I was an experiment and they went all the way with me, the alpha case. They, a large section of the mega-city, were dedicated to the idea and determined to run the experiment to its conclusion. They figured out my whole life, analyzed how I thought until they could mimic it, explored my dark secrets, kept me under observation and a torrent of comments for six years and posted dedicated stalkers around my home. They educated me at the same time, constantly giving me these street tutorials. They thought they were doing me a king size favour, landing me a secure job, and that became a bust.

 

The nation had been through seven years of lawlessness without the media even peeping or the government responding.

 

The participating part of society had behaved like the Borg collective of Star Trek fame. They had their group think, common judgement, decision making and style all as one. And of course they had the phenomenal mind meld with me. This is a capability of modern societies in alarm mode. There will be crisis in the future and this could be a source of hope, although there is the irony it takes soft persecution.

 

This event turned on the rule of not communicating directly, the Prime Directive. People hold to that rule that tightly. There’s this insistence on getting one to think about his or hers own problems before communicating directly. They won’t even talk to you unless you are about ready to comment on your own role. Actually there’s no point at trying to communicate directly as people don’t listen.

 

The Course was flawed by human nature. The Course was not as logical, disciplined or honest as it made itself out to be. People said over and over and over and over “Yes, but what was your part in your problems?” without so much as ever applying their philosophy to themselves. The Course was flawed by lack of facing up to the required cuts in government spending and tax increases. They made a huge effort to walk in my shoes but managed to ruin my career and life.

 

At the same time the participating population did become more sophisticated. They polished up their personality, intelligence and morality. Certainly they had a better grip on the state-of-the-union, how the modern nanny state was working. So the revolution worked and it didn’t work.  

 

The deficit ballooned with the new recession and was monstrous. The ruling Conservative Party had a hearing problem and missed the fact that there was a tax revolt going on, had no proper plan to fix the deficit and was eventually simply dissolved for this lack of leadership. The next government was faced with a deficit such that the interest on the new borrowing was outstripping the growth revenues, creating a treadmill of cuts to stay in one place. Fortunately a star Finance Minister emerged, Paul Martin, judicious cuts were made, the economy grew and a graceful exit from the treadmill was made. It wasn’t just the star Finance Minister as all ten of the provinces got behind the eight ball simultaneously and made the required cuts and tax increases.

 

Here’s a fitting John Kenneth Galbraith quote on leadership. “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”

 

  Negligence by Governments and the Police Departments

 

I can go over the outline of the legality of my situation, as I, the affected person, see it.

 

The mass event around me was revealed to me at Spar Aerospace on July 3, 1985. It was the dedicated neighbor that was promoting my case to super play status and she should have been removed by the police and quickly too. However the local constables, the ones that were initiates, co-operated instead. They did nothing which in their important position of trust is criminally culpable. This collusion by the local constables should have been established within weeks by the senior commanding officers of the city police or eventually by the senior police departments of the province and the country. That’d be the provincial police first, the Ontario Provincial Police, and then national police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The senior police departments are usually responsible for policing the other forces. I argue the criminal culpability of the senior officers that knew was established in not very many weeks as the event around me was public, political and the responsibility of the Prime Minister.

 

I would say the criminal culpability of the senior officials that knew of the mass event could be established. The criminal infractions Breach of Trust and Obstruction of Justice are catch alls and include the phrase “not to act”. This includes the Ministers, provincially and federally, and the leaders, the Premier and the Prime Minister, but they have to know to establish criminal intent.

 

The point is more the government lost control of the police and should pay politically. The Ministers tend to treat the police at arms length but this is a dodge as the police are a government department.

 

An investigation into all the police wrong doing would be astronomically expensive but unlikely to produce a single shred of evidence. All of them would only say they were not aware of the on going. Proving anything against the police would be unlikely as they are a cohesive gang and would not testify against one another. That’s the way it is and they insist on it. In my case the complaints department at all three police departments latter declined responsibility and otherwise ignored my case despite it being a very rich one. My case represented the biggest heist in Canadian history and it was an inside job by all the police departments with jurisdiction. That’s how well self-policing works. They are a hair above the law if they want to be. Anyway it’s unreasonable to expect the complaints department to investigate the entire police population including management and the executives as well as the Chief himself. You’d have to write off the police conspiracy as responsibility was diffuse and an investigation would be futile, even unfair to any lowly constable they could finger. In the end damages, money, would have all that would have to be looked after. Money would be fine with me for my mass persecution. As the victim of a social persecution that became a mass event I’d only say I’d take the money and be done with it.

 

All of these actors, the initiates anyway, were taking the stance that is was “okay” to have this public spectacle, that all that was needed was to control me as Judge Crossland ruled, and this is how criminals all rationalize their actions.

 

The rationalization is that there was going to be affirmative action for me. What they did to me is still illegal and you can’t have the police excused from the law for some good reason. Legal damages built up while they were trying to place me in a good job. In retrospect the government should have just pensioned me off for a million dollars quite early in the event. If there was going to be tit-for-tat this should have taken months only and after that you would have to realize you had been had. In the event no one paid any attention to all the attention I got for six years.

 

In my case police divisions, police departments, police chiefs, Solicitor Generals and Attorney Generals, all plural, yawned and my life became like a Star Trek episode. The courts in Canada are lenient and it seems no one in government is particularly afraid of them including the top staff of the law enforcement.  At the very least there has to be money there for legal fees, to stimulate the lawyers. Lawyers need to get their juices running even to understand a complex case. I talked to a couple of lawyers briefly over the years and even though it’s this magnificent heist there was no interest; there was zero interest.

 

The solution to a case like mine is democracy but that too fails when the opposition is complacent and incompetent. And then, as is typical, the opposition became the government both federally and provincially and inherited responsibility for the outstanding criminal cases. The final resting place for such cases is the reelection of the offending ministers. Stupidity is not a vote getter; it’s a life sentence. In my case I’ll probably fall through the cracks of even that. After that all there is is history lessons.

 

These are my thoughts on my legal situation and an average lawyer would be not much better.

 

 

A Billion Dollar Private Legal Case

 

As soon as I got working and saved some money I consulted a lawyer. I wrote up a précis of what happened to me and had the lawyer read it. He took it in stride. However the problem was I didn’t have even one witness. Another problem was in Ontario there are no contingency work, cases paid by the law firms. I read Ontario is the only jurisdiction in North America without such an arrangement. There’s little in the way of substantial punitive damages in Canada as well. In the USA the courts take a dim view of human nature in the context of powerful institutions and suppress them with substantial punitive damages.  In Canada the courts take a more optimistic note about the efficacy of the legal system and rely on the courts to settle each case individually. It doesn’t really make sense to me because to sue city hall requires $100,000s.

 

The police tortured me, ruined my career, ran a psychological experiment with me and made my stream-of-consciousness a public event. Police protection was removed from me and everybody went for it immediately in a big way, eventually went after the government with it in fact. In the event the courts were of no use to me even though my very mind had been the scene of a mass political protest for years and years.

 

While my case maybe a phenomenon of a particular legal jurisdiction I noticed this odd thing about other jurisdictions, the USA. Whereas I was the responsibility of the police and then the government no one ever thought of this for years and that includes down in America. While police brutality is a lucrative vein for punitive damages in American jurisdictions when I was in the USA no one had actually fingered the idea that I was a legal case against the police and government. They just didn’t put it together.

 

I tried complaining to the three senior police departments involved. Boy that was optimistic. The local Toronto police wrote back saying that after thinking about it for “a long while” they decided an investigation would likely not result in disciplinary action, which is the wording of the Police Act. So they quickly filed the complaint about my six year ordeal to the garbage and were done with it. My point-of-view was a proper police investigation was necessary to find witnesses, to form the basis of a civil suit. That would be an adequate result, justice. You’re never going to get a pat legal case and this is what the complaints department standard was.

 

The provincial and national police complaints departments were even less forthcoming, if that’s possible. The provincial police said the complaint had to be laid within six months of the event as if it were a minor case, which I didn’t do, and that was that. The national police, the respected Royal Canadian Mounted Police, wrote me that there was “no wrong doing under the RCMP Act.”

 

I call what happened to me a “hole”. The local constables just turned a blind eye to it, acted like they knew nothing. The constables just have to play dumb and a mass event can ensue. It’s pretty simple. They got away with it because the techniques the population applied to me are new and unbelievable. The entire culture and institutional safeguards were extruded through this hole of playing dumb. There are other holes too.

 

I also complained to the Solicitor General of Ontario, the Attorney General of Ontario, two Canadian Justice Ministers, the Civilian Police review Board, the Civil Rights association, and the Human Rights Commission to no effect. They just swept the issue of a public hostage taking by the police for six years under the carpet. The provincial opposition critic of the Attorney General, Michael Bryant, took an interest in my case but was told by the Integrity Commissioner of the Ontario Legislature my complaint was “a private legal case” about money and thus outside the jurisdiction of a Members of the Provincial Parliament. Criminal acts are considered in law as a crime against society as well as against the individual victim, the government pays for their investigation, and the criminal behavior of the police at large is a sensitive social problem. The Integrity Commissioner had no clue or concern that a generally corrupt police force puts the government above the law. He apparently has no proper idea where ethical behavior begins or ends it turns out, not the slightest. What an intellectual. That was particularly upsetting.

 

My privacy was invaded as a mass event for six years courtesy of the federal government and privacy is protected by the law, although I read it is uncharted legal territory. I eventually realized that this was the main part of my claim to civil damages, the mind meld with the general public in three provinces and states for six years. This is as opposed to pain and suffering and loss of career. I say my case was an invisible monster but you can detect the outline of billions of dollars of effort, all complicit with criminals. You can make out there are millions of people involved and that they might be charged $1,000s of dollars each for the scientific level of intimacy cum mind meld. I add that it’s unprecedented and damages of that scale just for privacy aren’t sensible and so you’d have to invent a principle to give a bulk discount, settle for maybe a billion dollars. The local police constables didn’t care, they’ll never be caught and it’s the government’s money. The rest of the government employees, including the Ministers, are about of the same ilk.

 

Privacy maybe uncharted territory legally but when it was harnessed by the population as a political device the first thing they did create this mass event, develop scientific intimacy with a victim and torture the him with results. They then tried to run down the government of the day with it. That’s the use of privacy.

 

There’s a six year statutes of limitation on civil cases in Ontario and one night in July 1997 my billion dollar claim just went times up, poof, and disappeared. It’s a government heist, the top crooks being the Prime Minister of Canada et al.

 

 

Post Revolt

 

The Borg like collective of The Course was replaced by the deepening recession of the 1990s which affected the western world. In Canada the recession was brought on by the Central Bank which raised interest rates in response to aggressive wage settlements and an increase in inflation. Inflation was one of the targets of the community revolt but it was now back. Victims of the new recession now became the method of social control of choice. The affirmative action plan for me was over, thankfully, and it was so for all the other stars. The Course was now dead, except that 11 years later in July of 2002 it came roaring back to life in the compressed span of a few days because of a lack of proper jobs in a good economy.

 

After being a star and being the centre of attention for all those years a funny thing then happened. All evidence and remembrance of the whole event vanished. I didn’t hear one peep, was never recognized by anyone and never saw any element of the philosophy or technique. It completely disappeared. I was concerned I’d be stigmatized for years as the global village’s number one idiot but instead it completely healed over.

 

As soon as my harassment stopped I started reviving and going about my business as usual. I started to do housework again and I put in some applications to computer jobs. I thought I could get a junior programming job at a smaller company as I still remembered my methodology for programming fast and accurately. My situation was no worse than a woman returning to work after staying home with the children for some years.

 

I never did find my way back to a professional job although the industry boomed like never before and I did get fully two more years of academic training in the new computer technologies, bringing my total computer experience up to ten years. Counting the eight texts I self studied I had training in 41 different computer topics eventually. In 1991 IT computer jobs were still pretty generic and the PC revolution hadn’t taken over nor had the Internet. However, for about five years the market was soft and I got about one interview a year. Then the technology changes began to happen and I heard the software programmer industry was suddenly booming. Statistics Canada reports that the number of programmers working in Canada then doubled in the five years to 2001 to a whopping 3.2% of all the workers in the country. However despite the fact I extensively retrained this bull market entirely passed me by. Even in the robust market I got only one interview a year. My explanation for this is that while there was rapid growth in the programming field the training and maturation of the existing software workers kept pace and there never really was a hot market for junior staff, which was all that I was qualified for. Even at the height of the business cycle all the advertisements for programmers had long lists of requirements, fantasy candidates rather than ideal candidates, indicating employers could pick and choose. I also figure the hiring process is full of conventions, attitude, trends and styles and selling yourself as a quick and accurate worker may not even register on the hiring manager. Whereas one comment I heard about my resume at one time was it was the best written this particular manager had ever seen it now became the worst this other manager had ever seen. My experience is an anecdote about bull markets for skills in the modern setting. Actually probably everyone has heard a story like this.

 

The situation in the USA with respect to programmers was similar. The Washington Post listed up to 22 pages of computer jobs on a Sunday but they tended to also have long lists of qualifications to keep the riff raff at bay. I applied to the Washington DC area for contracts, the trade agreement NAFTA made it possible for me as a Computer Scientist to get into the USA temporarily without going through immigration, but I got virtually no response despite the apparently white hot market. That’s 22 pages of advertisements for programmers in one issue of a newspaper.

 

Then in 2001 the American economy went into recession and this blew away the Hi-Tech bubble and it blew away the market for software people Canada side as well. In Toronto the classified ads for programmers went from 80 a day to two or three, basically nothing, almost over night. This was while the rest of the Canadian economy was in an expansion. The programmer market never recovered. That was another story of modern labour markets. That market was gone forever for me. That was the end of my aspiration to retrain for a software job.

 

The tech bubble in the USA is exactly what I have been describing, flakey development projects by inept experts. The tech bubble was about a trillion dollar mistake, that was the excess in the American tech stock market at the time, and it was anticipated by what had been happening to me, starting 19 years earlier at Ontario Hydro. In a computer course on modern software development methodology I took latter on the author stated that 95% of software that is written in the USA is never actually used so this general problem I encountered is now in the text books. In the lingo of the revolt all that busy work is just “salary”, jobs with zero responsibility.

 

People like to “follow the money” to explain how the world works. They think what is behind odd behaviors is there’s someone making money. Something like the tech bubble is from stupidity actually. Stupidity is an alternate way of explaining just how things are working and is a basic theme of “The Course”. (On the street in the revolt the opinioned that this “follow the money” idea was over done, and they called “follow the money paranoia.)

 

Loosing my professional status will mean about a million dollars of lost income to me over a life time. That’s what their six years of affirmative action for me cost. I don’t recommend the affirmative action, please note. This should be a lesson to posterity should the revolt process be repeated.

 

In the meanwhile back in 1991 I gave up looking for another menial factory job. I would go out to a factory that advertised for people for a near  job and there’d be a line up of applicants. I became a “discouraged worker” and decided not to spend months to a year pounding the pavement every day to land a  position. Donna had her job as a teacher and I had some money I inherited from my Grandfather so I gave up. I decided to keep applying for programmer jobs only. I waited until the newspapers reported that unemployment was down to 10% in Toronto before I reapplied for a menial job but unfortunately that took six years. The recession was deep and there was what was called a jobless recovery so it was all those years before the city economy improved and I found another menial job.

 

I didn’t use my time effectively in those six years of unemployment either. I didn’t have the money to. Mostly I took long walks. Another time around I would try to be less lethargic.

 

In the next eleven years nothing much happened. I had a comfortable little life like most people. I became more interested in economics and civics. When I got working again I was less isolated and socialized after work.

 

At one point I took out an advertisement about the revolt in the Projects and Causes section of the Globe and Mail, which is a nationally distributed newspaper. I advertised not for witnesses for me, which would have required involvement from individuals, but just for witnesses to the unrest of the 1980s. I explained I was documenting the era. I got zero response. There was zero interest in documenting the mass event. There would be zero witnesses for my own legal case if I asked. (A nation wide classified advertisement in Canada is affordable, by the way, costing only $200.)

 

In 1996 unemployment, or the reported unemployment, eased to 10% so I started to apply for a menial job again. After three months I landed a job as an auto parts rush delivery driver for $8 an hour. I worked at a privately owned warehouse that sold General Motors parts. It turned out to be a very fortuitous position for me. It lasted five-and-a-half years.

 

When I got working I was less isolated. I never mentioned what had happened to me and the country to my co-workers but I would broach the subject by talking a little about the philosophy of the revolt. I always drew a complete blank. Where I worked there was high turn over and I met maybe 100 people in that one place with out ever uncovering an initiate.

 

I thought all what had happened in the 1980s would be suitable for a movie. It’s an epic and would make a watch able film. I wrote up a short description, listed the original, historical aspects of the tale, and sent it out to about 1000 movie directors whose names are all listed in the industry directories. I called it “The Next American Revolution” in my form to appeal to the American market. I explained that these mass events were innate in the Global Village and if they happened again a movie about them would change their course, change history, which no movie has yet done. I got zero response. The events of the 1980s were the greatest spontaneous collective event ever and the movie industry’s interest was zero. It’s like people have to be told what to think, say “This is interesting, pay attention.”

 

Similarly although the story of the revolt is widely known and understood no book on it emerged. This is despite the topic is very rich and Pulitzer Price territory material.

 

This lack of response made it clear that if the story of The Course was ever to be told I’d have to do it myself, to write this book. It must be the work of that Arch Angel, manipulating the world’s karma.

 

The reaction of people to this bizarre story will be varied. Some won’t blink, some won’t believe it’s non-fiction and some won’t be able to get over the fact that it sounds like schizophrenia. The government officials will almost certainly say its mental illness and do absolutely nothing. I can’t describe my situation to anyone normally as it’s far too strange but the book length treatment explains the economic context, the believable office politics roots of the revolt and provides detailed anecdotes of the intimacy. The close resemblance to mental illness of my experience subsides with enough details. Reaction will still vary between I’m mentaly ill, a genius or a space alien.

 

There’s a positive side to The Course for me as well. It matured me. It polished my personality, sharpened my philosophy and judgment and made me a better adjusted citizen. The need to reference common sense, even your own common sense, is part of the wiser me. Specifically the lessons that there are bad jobs, misguided motherhood issues and the need to think in essentials are engrained in me. It left me more informed as well.

 

Another aspect of my maturing is I’m more comfortable in my skin. As a person that’s been exposed to polished humor I’m comfortable with people who are less sophisticated. People who want to make trouble for you, say on the job, have to know you well so I have a high level of understanding as a reference point. My sensitivity to be known is gone, naturally. Well, it’s partly gone.

 

The whole way I talk now reflects my experience. I edit what I say a lot. I am mindful of how well I understand the other person when I say something. I watch what I say as people may remember what comes out for a very long time.

 

While I’m a software programmer cum factory worker my further education through all the attention I got was by whole country, by millions of people, and is something of a privileged position. I constantly had my information questioned and my view point corrected so it led to a wiser me. It was socialization by a mega-village and that’s the adult me. If you chatted with a forum of a million people daily you’d be well educated too. It was one of those priceless things. So I had a life, despite everything. I mentioned this on the street, where I had been in my life, and the answer is all the participating public was the same.

 

The Revolt was popular. It tapped into several veins of interest. It was an education, soft gore, entertainment and directed at steering the ship-of-state at once. There was technology, economics, business, humor, empowerment, good deed doing, psychology, anti-government and social and economic progress. The focusing on individual stars was like the ultimate reality show. People can’t keep their eyes off of other people’s privacy. It sells. The event around myself, near as I can come, was like a personality cult about my dedicated neighbors but with rational, economic roots. This all sustained interest for seven years. The motivation, dedication and discipline of the population was something again.

 

The 1990s was an era of right sizing by corporations and government. In the 1980s all the grousing about jobs had been met with indifference by management but the 1990s was the real McCoy; people were laid off. Executives of corporations chopped 1000s of jobs at a stroke. I would assume many of the workplace complaints of the 1980s were met by real action in the next decade.

 

So ends the tale of my second of five special roles in Canadian society. That is my record of the wit and wisdom of the times, the 1980s. I now have to hustle on with the rest of my story, my three more special roles in society, and I have some big fish to bait too.

 

 

 

Book II.

 

Chapter V 

 

I Lead a Second International Revolt

 

 

 

Introduction

 

I was an auto parts driver for five-and-a-half years as I said. Driving in the suburbs is about the easiest job in the city. Time goes fast and you can codge while you are working. In fact thinking while you’re driving is an education. This becomes part of my larger story. I worked on my memoirs, politics and economics while driving around. I’ll describe what I was able to do thinking carefully in the van as this propelled me to my third special role in society, that of world opinion leader.

 

What I did was further analysis of Canadian immigration. Immigration is a long tradition in Canada and it’s thought of as variously as proper economics, a charity or political. It’s also considered sensitive. As people believe all this at once it’s something of a complex. In fact it’s none of these things which took some straightening out.  What it is is an economic model and it’s currently backwards. I figured out economists world wide had not paid proper attention to the market effect of immigration. They didn’t actually know what it was, what the basics of immigration economics was. I found the topic is considered a backwater in the field of economics while in fact it’s a national economic strategy. It’s a national economic strategy but at times is dealt with in Politically Correct terms, which is certainly awkward. meanwhile there were cases in the world, South East Asia, of economic growth without immigration so the normal capitalistic system performance had been clearly demonstrated.

 

I was originally bothered by immigration in the face of constant unemployment and constant stimulative deficits. I got this seven year itch as to what actually was going on in these regards with respect to immigration. So I looked into the area, at the data and literature. Over time I sharpened my criticism of it into a kind of economic catechism, a set of definitive points. These were mostly in the literature but I was able to put my finger on them and sort them properly with some clear thinking done very slowly in my courier truck.

 

I found the Canadian immigration program had been larger than anyone realized. It amounted to 45% of the jobs growth over three decades and that’d be three decades of economic duress. I might add I say no one realized the size of it and this would include the Immigration Department itself which is not properly organized in regard to book keeping of such simple facts. Immigration was excessive and begetting a decline in wages at the bottom of the destination cities. The Canadian immigration program emphasized importing skills whereas training the next generation had been the standard in all other countries. Also the numbers, the quota, was increased as I was working on the problem and it began to squeeze family income to the tune of tens of billions of dollars annually. These three issues; wages at the bottom, skilled immigrants instead of training, and the impact of immigration on family income (by hidden unemployment), were horrendous problems no one was properly aware of. And there was more, I eventually polished my criticism into 50 odd points of the literature.

 

None of the above was in the immigration Canadian literature. The literature was just a shopping list of the benefits of immigration, some of which were claims of outright economic miracles by foreigners. This list of rationalizations was the intelligentsia’s reaction to the government’s aggressive immigration program and the lingua franca of the elite on the topic. I had to think out of this box on all these aspects of immigration to make any sense of the program. Immigration, the understanding of it, was an aspect of society, the elite, that just wasn’t working. With my long time reading of economics, I had read a million articles, mostly in The Economist magazine; I was able to sort out what turned out to be the standard macro economics of immigration. The basics of were in the literature, but were mostly AWOL. 

 

I will now elaborate my thesis concerning Western cities economies over some 60 pages. My thesis is the mainstream literature is in full muddle about the role of immigration in the main cities. Society is in full muddle about other things but this is one. I’ll emphasize the three main macro economic ideas mentioned above that needed to be reviewed and conclude with the key concept free market societies normally grown up, widen the middle class, but this is not what is happening in the growth cities of the West. In western cities allowing in immigration  is normal and economist explain the unemployment as short term cost for long term grown but in the fact the unemployment permanently tailors the jobs market, in fact broadens the bottom. I then add on some relevant statistics and ideas, some of them social. I add the retorts that immigration enthusiast tend respond to with, which are generally one liners. I then proceed to a technical fix, that allows you to retain immigration but at an optimal level. Finally I put my reforms in context of the big picture, the aging society; to point out they could restructure the economy of cities over 10 to 20 years, be a form of Western Perestroika. (tbd—page)

 

I found the costs to immigration were generally undiscussed; not properly dealt with anywhere. I found nine major ones in all. I had cogent logic and arithmetic that economists were worse than ever, actually confused about macro-economics, and immigration was not the panacea or free lunch the enthusiasts claimed it was.

 

When I got all my ideas simplified and written down they comprised a 32 page treatise which I titled “The Unemployment Figure and Relatives”. I sent this treatise on my findings to five only elected officials. I had been writing letters on economics intermittently for years and I had a short list of five only elected officials who had paid any attention what so ever to the unique and striking statistics base I had been collecting.

 

In the mean time angst was fermenting in public, this time about the fact it was getting difficult to find a reasonably paying job. My treatise spoke to the low wage problem and when the angst exploded my treatise became an instant hit on the street.

 

 

Kerbang, the Revolt is back

 

In the July of 2002 the mass event that I have described roared back to life almost over night. The economy had been expanding for ten years, a record, but there was a growing perception that there was a lack of jobs that were suitable for people who had families or would like to form families. Jobs, like taxes and deficits, are an incendiary political issue and the citizens began to “comment” on this jobs problem in public. In the neighborhood I lived in people in the stores would say such things as how an item for sale “was no good for family”. The local pub that I frequented was staffed by young people that developed the theme and house shtick of there being no better employment available to them than waiting tables. They would say “would you like a menu” which disparaged their alternative of office computer terminal oriented jobs or “it’s summer and were all happy and gay” which disparaged even bothering to having a normal marriage and children oriented relation. So a good job angst became manifest. The problem of bad jobs spooked the population, produced a second national angst and turned the light back on how society was functioning. This problem with good jobs is not caught very well by the common job statistics and not topical with the media but everyone was living it. People began thinking their children might wind up poor, be downwardly mobile. Middle class people began to realize the poor jobs economy affected the females in their family in particular. They were worried that children in the extended family might be poor. Families now cut across social classes and are a unifying political concern in our modern world although this idea is a bit of sleeper generally.  On the street the comment was “the elephant in the room is the job (singular)”. So the social spot light was fixed on jobs. The jobs angst then became a jobs revolt.

 

I had quit my driving job of five-and-a-half years due to too, too many complaints by the too, too many bosses and also as I planned to do some further computer training. So my perception of the restarting of the mass event in early July 2002 comes, exactly as before, from the point of a socially isolated individual.

 

Anyway, I noticed that for a period of three weeks in July 2002 or so there was this subtle commenting in the neighborhood about the lack of opportunity around, angst about poverty and family. I note this was at the 10 year point in a business expansion, at a record and peak point, where you’d normally expect labour shortages to be the issue.

 

Then one night I went to my local pub, the Tickled Toad, and it was back – the clairvoyance with my mind. It happened one night, just like that. I’ll describe that evening in detail as it’s all the information I have on the resurrection of the mass consciousness.

 

I went to the pub alone as I usually did. I occasionally took a computer text over there and squeezed in some extra study with a Guinness. I don’t recall every word but I’ve carefully reconstructed what I can of the evening and this is what I found: The young people that frequent that pub established the focus on me. They kept up constant conversation with me, which is unseen from around the corner. They were able to read my reaction, the clairvoyance, to a distinct extent. I began to talk back to their concerns. They knew I was a star previously, that I had been working at a menial job for years and that I was knowledgeable about economics. They didn’t know the extent of the previous event, which I commented to them about, and they didn’t know of my treatise. This treatise became public shortly. As young people looking to their own future they were pointedly concerned about the bad job I had been doing “in the last five years”. They asked me about economics, wages. I think it’s key that on that first night they were able to establish the focus on me, to establish a limited clairvoyance without much information and they worked the issue of job opportunity. It came naturally.

 

After that things moved extremely rapidly. The next thing I recall was hearing the woman in the overhead apartment talking to me like a stalker the following morning. This was July 10, 2002. The neighbor talked to me or rather at me for maybe half-an-hour and then, in words to the effect, commented that the actual resident up there had allowed her to move in and she was there to play the same role as the first three stalkers. There was a new event and suddenly there was a fourth dedicated stalker in a fourth apartment. I called her dedicated stalker No. 4. She lasted over nine years. (tbd—daate2)

 

We had moved to a new Toronto neighborhood some years earlier, bought an entry level condominium, so this new scene-of-the-crime was at a different building than the last stalking, making it a fourth bugged apartment for me and the wife.

 

The harassment of me on the street returned full force within days. I was in mind meld with general public again that fast. The comment on the street was “they opened the canister” which refers to movie film containers. Only this time what was key is that my essay on upward growth, the potential economic fix at hand, was being disseminated rapidly by word-of-mouth and providing an alternative raison d’etre for the panic than the moral education of the previous one. My treatise went viral without even touching the internet and electrified the city and country but did not reach the political leadership. This lead to stalemate: repeating the miracles of the revolt and the torturing of me specifically but no political action. The panic arose spontaneously in the city but as soon as it did my treatise was promulgated on the street and it exploded the angst. The angst about jobs had to come first to generate interest in economics though. It had to be apparent to most people by their personal experience that ten years into a recovery there were problems with jobs.  This had to be the case nationally, not just in Toronto, to make the panic general. On the street they later allowed as to how my essay was like “a nuclear explosion-and-a-half”. My set of clear concepts on the link between unemployment, immigration, low wages, social conditions and growth in cities caused the jobs issue to avalanche. The angst spread to America and then overseas although I’m short of information on just where. In any event it was Canada again causing a Western rebellion – or a West wide “Bruce Riot” that then went on for years. Its amazing-and-a-half as well that the population sifted the country and came up with my treatise in a matter of a few weeks. My cause then became this huge bandwagon. It was this huge bandwagon but only amongst people that were savvy to indirect communication about social issues, the 10% again. There was this anxiety contagion with them that produced mass hysteria. The other 90% remain inured to the jobs problem.

 

Everything was much the same as in the 1980s. The process and techniques were restored. The philosophy of the 1^st generation revolt came back but was modified to something more suitable. The attitude, including negativity, was restored. The star system came back big time and people were “opened”. There were adjustments, no one expected a third way this time, but it was the same event. The exaggeration of individual responsibility was dropped in favour of a more understanding attitude and good judgment. Specifically they were less convinced that “hard work” would keep you out of a dead end job and more of a mind there were too, too many dead end jobs in the economy. I call it Phase II, Revolt II or Panic II.

 

I was restored to the alpha role but promoted from village idiot to village elder. They kept the same peculiarity of blindsiding me to what else was happening, on a selective base. The reason I was the alpha case this time, though, was because I had authored this treatise and they were going to advertise it and make it an event by torturing me. Canadians were too sophisticated to scapegoat ethnics but not to torture one of their own.

 

The populace was forthright about where the public information about my treatise originated. I have explained that I sent it to five only elected officials and one of them responded to the new angst by leaking it. My neighborhood told me which of the five it was and as it happens it was my provincial level elected representative who also was the Attorney General of the province, one David Young. As Attorney General he also had on file my letter about my six year persecution by the public and the police. They had dug up me as the alpha star and apparently when the first rippling of the new panic started the Attorney General also knew I now had this treatise which spoke to the situation and which he could “install” in the growing hub-bub. It’s unlikely that my resurrection as a star simply crossed paths with the leaking of the treatise from the Attorney General’s office. It was all probably the Attorney General’s office doing. I believe he knew. We are talking impossible probabilities otherwise. I normally had a heck of a time getting anyone to read my 32 pages of economic discussion and I believe, while it was leveraged, the fact that a cabinet member was involved in leaking it made it of interest. Anything somebody like that says is inflammable and now a senior provincial cabinet minister was protesting the economic policies of the day. So he leaked it and the rest is history. David Young, as my MP, had bothered to read my 32 page letter and now championed it.

 

My treatise was an example of the saying that the flapping of the wings of a butterfly can cause chaos on the other side of the world. Actually on the street they said it was thee example. The government or governments had been caught, I caught them, and now the public was aroused and this wasn’t just in Canada.

 

When they publicized my treatise, which was a critique of economists and the economy in general, they asked “who was I?” They were immediately interested in the human side of the story - what was my authority and how talented was I. Then they established through the grapevine I was an amateur and had always been a B student at school, wasn’t especially smart or even that rigorous. They started calling me “b”. They did say I seemed to have the “knack” of analysis, though. I was considered a reliable adult, one of them. Later they changed my talent to my using my nose, simply stopping to take a wiff of the quality of the writing on immigration in the literature. It did produce results.

 

I had always been something of a clear thinker. I always thought “I knew what I was doing” compared to most people. And I didn’t indulge petty emotions like blaming others and jumping to conclusion too much. That’s about all I could do and this is what the thinking in my treatise amounted to. However in the revolt everyone smartened up and became like this. So that wasn’t much of an edge by then.

 

My third of five special roles in Canadian society then was as a world opinion leader, to actually provide the economic analysis for another revolt. The same guy that had been this alpha case for six years in the first quiet revolt more or less by accident became the guiding figure behind the second by coincidence. It was a twist of fate as there was really no connection, an “absurd coincidence” they said on the street. My life had anticipated both revolts and uniquely in all society. And they decided to cash in the absurd coincidence and restore my alpha role with a dedicated stalker, the mass gang stalking and daily torture. How’s that for a personal miracle?

 

They say timing is everything and my timing was on the money, exact in fact. I finished working out my treatise just two months before hysteria about jobs.

 

While I say their decision was to restore my role as alpha case there was also a concern as what had eventually happened to the stars of the first phase. The adult population isn’t actually criminal of course and there was an interest in what happened before as they were about to repeat it. Also there was the idea that they’d try to help these stars once again in-the-air. So I would have been noticed anyway, or was being noticed rather. They made me the target of affirmative action again although, once again, they hid their intent from me and this time for over a year-and-a-half.  It was optimistic alright, and I felt like killing someone, but these mass events do have mob logic to them and that’s about what the treatment of me was.

 

It defies logic that they’d try to go for another round of affirmative action for me. In the first panic I was a prime candidate for good employment, an experienced but still young Computer Science graduate, and it didn’t work then with the three dedicated stalkers over an amazing six years.  Now I was aging and unskilled and they were going to try again. Then they played games and delayed me another year-and-a-half before I was even allowed to apply to a menial job, or so it seemed to me.

 

I spent another seven-and-half years in mind meld, as the governments of the day didn’t react. The harassment was always stylized and they blindsided me but they informed me to what they had figured out, all as before. (tbd—daate2)  

 

The new mass event immediately, within days, jumped the border to the United States. In the United States the situation was very different from in Canada. They had a problem with low wages and immigration but they also had a renewed and now record level deficit. The United States had other chronic problems so they undertook a national soul searching again much like in the 1980s.  So the USA was mired in problems but the spark that set it off was the new revolt in Canada. In the end I heard a call “are they all in a row down there?” as the in-the-air discussions didn’t reach much of a consensus and didn’t leak into the political leadership. (tbd—daate2)

 

 

Is this Economics?

 

As my thoughts on and analysis of immigration matters propelled the new mass hysteria in Canada and were the main theme I’ll detail them here closely. I’ll elaborate on the three main problems I’ve mentioned, a key idea I found about Upward Growth and detail the rest of my more than 50 points. It’s technical, 60 pages of road work follow, but it is some common sense about labour markets that amounts to a strategic review of modern economics. It’s a purpose of this book. (tbd-pagenoreference)

 

Canada has a 400 year old tradition of immigration and is always considered a country of immigrants. Amongst the public immigrants are considered poor and vulnerable and there’s pride in the Canadian immigration program for allowing these people in. And so there should be; the immigrant success story is a great story. Poor immigrants come here, struggle and then do well, and build the country. Immigration is part of the Canadian mythic of being a First World country and the land of the free. So immigration is another one of these churches. However the pride was exploited by the politicians and the immigration quota became cavalier with respect to the actual strength of the jobs economy. That the excess could be absorbed in different negative ways was not known, not faced up to. Immigration became an economic bubble. The size of the immigration program was possible because the various relevant professional classes did little proper analysis of the underlying statistics. The economics of immigration was not known and the role of the nanny state was not properly taken into account. Professionals indulged in all manners of rationalizations and cheerleading of the government, which is generally their benefactor. That’s what they did and that is what happened. They were economists into Mother’s Milk. By the time I looked into the immigration situation it was extreme and awful in many regards. Economists are not well regarded by society and it turns out there’s very good reasons for this; they simply aren’t that good at basic economics for one.

 

I spent 12 years examining immigration and the economics of the country but had to think things out by myself. The big three essentials are unemployment and the associated hit on family income, the impact of immigration on wages at the bottom in the destination cities, the role of training but the key idea, the fourth issue, is the alternative of Upward Growth in jobs. It’s likely that the new national panic about family would have fingered immigration but unlikely that it‘d ever sort it out as completely as I did. It didn’t happen in the first event and that was seven years long. There was no world expert to turn to; I was pretty much all there was. It’s likely any anti-immigration sentiment would be mired by emotional counter arguments that such is just bigotry, scapegoating and scaremongering. The accusation that anti-immigration ideas are irrational is mired in a long world history of ethnic and racial strife and yelling about such is a standard ploy of people who, for some odd reason or other, are emotionally attached to the government’s immigration program. There’s a fair amount of belief that immigrants are criminals and poor workers around to feed this ploy. Immigration has always been suspect by much of the population, the economy is never really good, but it worked out for a long time. I question how long ago that was in reality and note how the process is open to abuse.

 

I was originally bothered by the persistence of unemployment in the face of great simulative deficits and began to investigate what role immigration was playing as I said. Then in 1990 the economy went into a deep recession followed by a slow economic recovery but the government hiked up the immigration quota to record levels as I was watching; to grow the nation and catch the immigrant vote. Toronto, my own city, became a worst case in the world.

 

The local Toronto economy would get occasional mention in the newspaper in the 1990s and the statistics hinted at bad conditions. It was just obvious the immigration program was building unemployment and costing billions upon billions in lost wages somewhere in the system. I would pencil out a cost figure different ways. I would estimate how the accrued unemployment cost out at a below average wage, for example.

 

At the same time I was becoming disenchanted with the media. Even The Economist magazine kept reporting that immigrants lowered wages by supply and demand but that this was an economic stimulant. Really, people on low wages are a stimulant of a consumer based economy? It certainly didn’t sound like economics to me. So I began to go to the source, the Statistics Canada library here in Toronto, where fortunately there is a great wealth of information. At the library everywhere I looked the statistics where amazing and compelling.

 

One year I realized that the family income figure for the city that appeared occasionally in the newspaper was away down after correcting for inflation and that this would considerably be due to immigration to the city. I began to search for the correct time series and eventually paid Statistics Canada a couple hundred dollars to run the tapes and give me per capita income for the Metro half of the greater city area for some eight years, to 1997.

 

I looked into the other figures for Metro and extremely conveniently found that all demographic trends other than immigration netted to zero. Internal migration plus net indigenous population change was net zero. Also at the 1997 point employment had just recovered in the greater area. So the drop in per family income would be due simply to immigration, period. Toronto provided this perfect data for the calculation of the cost of immigration. The cost was a drop of 15% in family income annually for the 2.4 million people of Metro according to the tapes. The annual figure was a $9.8 billion loss in family income just for city half of the greater area, the 2.4 million people. The drop would be at the seven year point, in 1997. A large part of the drop was hiding behind the fact real wages were up so the reality was of higher incomes for everyone rather than the same. There was at that time an astonishing 558,000 new immigrants to the greater city area, not just the city proper, but without there being a single new net job. Beautiful.

 

It’s interesting that this hidden tax to family income, which is what it is, of 15% was accepted. People were always very pointed that they didn’t want any tax increases and there’d be ugly gnashing of the teeth at the suggestion. But the government managed to slip that tax in until it eventually boil over as a jobs panic.

 

The 15% cost to families in the Metro Toronto area is actually a government fraud, it’s a heist. It’s not a tax as you get something for your taxes. Government immigration economists calculated the cost of immigration was only the English Language training and other settlement programs.

 

When I was all done that it occurred to me that it was only common sense that the per family income would be down the same as the per capita work force was off and this was what my figures indicated. This meant that one could pencil out a cost estimate of inappropriate immigration for any city in the world. So I calculated up the total immigration influx to the main cities in Canada in the last 19 years that were not absorbed into tight labour markets and found it was 6.4% of the national work force. The cost would be the Labour Income portion of GDP which is 50.4% of it. Also the immigration totals are reduced by the percent that return home. So the cost to family income alone of recent inappropriate immigration was running at about 3.24% of the GDP annually. I calculated the cost was $45 billion annually. It’s a second deficit. It’s actually a robbery and that would be a critical national issue if it was recognized. As Canada was absorbing some immigrants I diplomatically called this inappropriate influx simply “premature immigration”.

 

Later Statistics Canada published the 2001 Census and listed a drop in family income over ten years in the whole of the Greater Toronto Area of 4.1%. The 4.1% is similar to what I got but I used the peak-to-trough years in my Metro calculation. Statistics Canada used the census years.

 

The Canadian Immigration Department did move 558,000 immigrants into the Greater Toronto Area by 1997 without there being a single net new job in the recovery. That’s like five idle foreign army corps camped in one city awaiting the big push towards the good life. Of course immigrant specialists have always claimed immigrants don’t go on welfare; that is debunked as a base myth. The 558,000 were just sponged up by the greater city rather: by displacement of other people to welfare, to unemployment and to non-participation in the labour force. Nobody had any good idea this was going on: not the elite in Ottawa, not the Immigration Department and not Statistics Canada. This one statistic, “number” in the street talk, is very telling. That’s how well our society if functioning. The problem was, however, a hair obvious to me. The Immigration Department just didn’t do any book keeping and kept the Minister responsible busy with information on “finessing” the system, working on long term growth.

 

The statistics on the Greater Toronto Area indicated a perfect storm on immigration that no one was properly aware of. The city was been driven by Canada’s aggressive immigration and had gone from a top economic performer to having multi-dimensional economic and social problems in short order. The low wages, hidden unemployment and emphasis on immigrants taking the better jobs did boil over eventually.

 

The training rig-a-ma-roll was also hard nut to crack but was similarly outlandish. It was hard to crack because it was a 400 year old tradition in this country and mostly everyone believed we needed skilled immigrants for long term economic growth. Also there were technical complications in the form of spot shortages and if these were in a bottleneck or critical service, and one such common one was construction, skilled immigration would be key to economic growth. So people believed in skilled immigration. I was reading The Economist magazine one day and the UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had been asked about skilled immigration for the UK’s improving economy and his answer was one word, “training”. This was reported by The Economist, bless their opinionated hearts, as a surprise answer and it certainly surprised me. I went for a long walk in the park that day and rethought skilled immigration and realized that training, in the long run, was the answer for most all shortages. Whether it’s general shortages of recent graduates or specific shortages of senior people some additional training was in order. Typically intermediate people would be trained on the job for senior positions, a promotion. This would be for everything but bottlenecks and critical services, which are both rare situations. It’s not quantum mechanics. Skilled immigration is actually just a market signal for more training of indigenous anyway. Any shortage big enough to be noticed by a national government is big enough to warrant more training by the government. And a local shortage has the implication of a national shortage as people migrate internally all the time.

 

Later I completed the picture with the realization Canada had been the only country in the world that had had a skills orientation to its basic immigration program in the 1970s through 1990s. Other countries had focused on training the next generation, tended to accept unskilled immigrants and refugees. It behooves the government to get the training right as every parent wants their son or daughter to grown up, go to college or university and have a nice life. It’s as simple as that. The concern includes the working class, the middle class and the upper class. It certainly includes the immigrant class who typically come here for their children. Canadian politicians had managed to forget about family life, eh. At the time economic immigrants were making up 55% of the annual quota and the immigration quota was 70% of the labour force growth so it was a significant distortion of the national economy. The immigrants mostly flocked to the three biggest cities in the country, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver where they were aggravating the skilled labour markets. When the immigrants wound up in menial jobs the elite began blaming employers for requiring Canadian experience and never faced the simple fact there was over supply as there were lots of indigenous not working in the field they were trained in, something that had been an issue in the first panic. The general public always thought skilled immigration was complex but it turns out to be just a misguided Canadianism, hubris.

 

Up until 2001 the Immigration Department kept a list of skills in short supply in Canada called the General Occupation List. There was not very much in the way of broad shortages to go on this list for the last three decades but they kept up the pretence that the Canadian program was skilled oriented for that long. This pretence was an internal inconsistency in the immigration program and no one mentioned it in all those decades even though it’s a major program in Canada. Then in 2001 the list of skills in demand was put on the backburner and the known “problem” of trained immigrants not getting the better jobs in the country was addressed. The points system that the immigration program was based on was overhauled to prefer people with two or three university degrees. That is Masters and PhD program graduates, no less. In Ottawa the economic problem was seen as an insatiable appetite in the economy for high paid, middle class professionals. They believe skilled immigrants pay more taxes and this builds the nation. They believed the economy was going to be driven by knowledge industries and immigrants that had university degrees were “the best and the brightest”. That’s the arguments for better qualified immigrants and the prerequisite that there be shortages is simply not addressed. It’s sound bites. As Canada was Greatness itself the economic problem here was a chronic surplus of great jobs so the immigration program was going to be jacked up to 100% of the labour force growth and streamlined for jobs that paid $60k to $80k. The conundrum that working class jobs and working class immigrants are subsidized in a nanny state was recognized and dealt with by advocating immigrants could do the professional jobs. Indigenous Canadians were going to do the laboring jobs. No one said boo. The change was made by uninformed politicians with almost no close thought as to how it would work.

 

Good skills are expensive to develop. Businesses would far rather hire a fully trained person. So business will always say skilled immigration is important to their business.

 

Immigration was begetting low wages including in the better economies, the growth cities. The effect of long term unemployment is to lower wages at the bottom, in the lower working class which is small business general labour, but there’s also growth in the number of low paying industries. Typically what happened is low paying businesses, bad entrepreneurs, sprang up and then grew rather than people taking a wage cut. This meant the basket of goods the consumer was buying was shifting to the cheap and cheerful items on sale at the worst businesses. This tended to be with the expansion of disposable family incomes of the better off through productivity. So the mechanism was a bit obscure. This happened over a period of decades. Historically the baby boomers fledged and joined the labour force, their mothers returned to work and immigrants came on top of that to create a situation of long term labour excesses that engender unemployment and low pay at the bottom. This was not popular and McLabor became a byword for the anemic national economic growth. McLabor is actually the reality of the emphasis on entrepreneurialism that has been touted as the solution to unemployment for some time.

 

The better parts of the economy, corporate jobs and skilled employment, were not affected by long term unemployment as these jobs are coddled. They are treated as long term contracts and don’t respond to unfavorable market conditions as do commodities. Skilled fields tend to close to new recruits in the face of over supply rather than adjust prices and thus demand. This is as employers are dependant on skilled labour and prefer stability.

 

 

Thee Missing Idea in Western Economics: Upward Growth in Job Quality

 

A very useful economic concept I became focused on was economic development by improving the quality of the jobs in the nation, Upward Growth. This is after the Japanese model of their post WWII development when the whole country moved up the ladder of economic opportunity and greatly increased per capita income. It’s standard economics, a matter of the old being new again.

 

When there’s growth in good jobs, skilled positions or unionized posts, the people that get promoted to them leave jobs which are then filled, typically from below, which is a pattern that is repeated and becomes a domino effect. Then the domino effect works all the way down to the bottom, in fact to the very worst companies. As long as there’s adequate training, including on-the-job, any job growth affects the companies with the worst jobs and they eventually run out of bodies. The workers do the selection, move out of the worst jobs with haste. When unemployment dries up and labour shortages develop the problem will be focused on the most marginal businesses at the bottom that won’t be able to compete for workers. The mechanism is the de facto minimum wage will increase but these worst businesses won’t be able to raise prices because of their marginal market power, the actual usefulness of their goods and services. As their people move down the street to better jobs these worst businesses will have staffing difficulties and eventually shrink or even close. Thus they’ll then “add” to the supply of labour, including their skilled and management staff, and alleviate any general labour shortage problem. The worst business are gotten rid of by the labor market, leaving behind on average a higher quality of business, of higher value added jobs. The labour market can thusly contour the mix of businesses in a county, contour the basket of goods consumed. It’s Adam Smith’s invisible hand – people looking after their self-interest increasing the national wealth.

 

People are upward aspiring so when there’s economic growth, population increases or, alternatively, population decreases, it is always impacts at the bottom by virtue of a dynamic labour market – the domino effect. (A decrease in the population, say from a low birth rate, would affect the bottom as well.) This is economics; this is capitalism at work; this is how society works but it’s absent from Western economic analysis. The Western countries have been down so long economically, three and a half decades in Canada’s case, they’ve entirely forgotten what economics at full employment means.

 

When the government enters the labour market through mass immigration it does so at the very bottom, at the worst jobs, by this fact people are upward aspiring – want to be paid better. This is so even when the government enters the market with general skilled immigration. There’s usually enough training going on in modern countries to fill the need so there’s downward displacement of skilled people with skilled immigration.

 

It took me sometime to pencil in the mechanism of upward growth as all there was in the economic literature about jobs was immigrants will take rough jobs that the indigenous do not want or changes in supply and demand just affect the price a little, not much. The major studies of immigration tended to conclude that immigration had a small net benefit or was a wash in terms of costs. In fact there is an elegant chain reaction of people moving up going on all the time connecting immigration to the bottom. The alternate to immigration is upward growth to better jobs in society at large.  It mostly applies to the main immigration cities, a focus on these is a little clearer than using national circumstance and statistics.

 

The issue becomes labour mobility. Formal schooling is heavily subsidized in modern countries and will thus tend to be over subscribed, over invested. Formal education is critical and the levels of it deserve watching, that is serious funding. However a focus should be on whether or not business is adequately doing on-the-job training. This is key to 100% labour mobility, inflationless growth. The labour mobility is what quenches shortages and inflation in better jobs. On the job training can be very expensive including as junior people learn by mistakes and this can be quite costly, quickly amounting to $1000s and $10,000s. Employers will therefore be resistant to training and have to be pressured into doing it. Also employers will not over train, they will coddle their skilled and professional staff for stabilities sake.

 

Tightening the labour market at the bottom and relying on upward growth helps the proletariat. Productivity growth has raised the standard of living for everyone else and the problem now is the bottom, not strictly productivity, although you wouldn’t know it by reading economic literature, which talks about the national productivity annual increase. At the bottom labour markets set the wage and productivity is immaterial.

 

All the universal social programs are about wage disparity but this issue seems to have been forgotten. Phew.

 

Taxes are ultimately paid out of people’s income. That’d be wages and investment income mainly. Mostly they are paid from worker’s wage income. Corporate taxes are just passed on. Workers are the actual “only one tax payer”. Only 50% of the population in any country actually works so this doubles the tax responsibility per worker. The tax burden is actually all government costs not just social program spending, of course. Taxes are high and income tax is graduated such that the subsidy at the very bottom is steep, $9,000 per worker per year I calculate. This notion that its workers that pay taxes, “carry the load”, makes the high cost of growth at the very bottom clear and is closer to reality than some economist’s calculation of the direct benefits of social programs to the poor, which is the usual approach. I go over this calculation of the subsidy at the bottom latter.

 

The Immigration Department directly sets the price of labour at the bottom and this is a moral and practical challenge it is not up to. Immigration is central planning of the economy; it is not the free market. The low wages brought upon us by immigration are exploitation by the government although economists think it’s the system, capitalism. Before any country has large scale immigration there should be family appropriate jobs at the bottom – that should be and has been the standard.

 

Japan after World War II is an exciting example of how this Upward Growth can be achieved by a whole country over time. In Japan they shifted the entire country up from second rate businesses such as cheap toy manufactures to world class ones such as Honda and Sony. In fact it’s the whole economic paradigm the Asia Pacific Tigers are following of industrializing in low technology first, then moving up the ladder of opportunity to knowledge industries and high tech on a country wide basis. It has happened in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea. This idea of upward growth in jobs is an observation of what has happened in the past, not just a theory, and it’s not up for debate really. The market is complex and its behavior is usually surprising but the dynamics of the labour market is known and it’s to inflate the worst paying, worst working conditions and least competitive enterprises out of business. There’s actually no upper limit to this growth, you could always just improve an economy rather than expand the population, get richer rather than bigger. Every economist in the world knows that Upward Growth in jobs is the tiger model of economic development but not a single one of them properly applied it specifically to immigration cities in the West where the urgency of its application is marked by the infamous McLabor camps. The idea I champion is straight forward application of the Asian Tiger industrialization strategy of the traditional Knowledge Economy to the lead cities in the West – the current immigration destinations. The missing idea in Western social and economic development is getting immigration right.

 

Upward growth to better businesses is an alternative paradigm of progress to improvements in productivity. 

 

You do loose something when the bottom is downsized. The endless choice of consumer goods, the interesting small boutiques in a major city and the catering to convenience, call it the super convenience, would all take a hit.

 

Upward growth, expanding the middle class; it’s the plan and always was. Our philosophy is actually “good jobs”; on the street they referred to it as “the lost philosophy”.

 

There has always been a lot of enthusiasm for immigration, because it was always explained as good economics. Decades ago it was good economics and a win win scenario. I question just how long ago it stopped being this simple win-win situation and started spinning off social problems such as McLabor. In the modern setting rather there has been confusion amongst economists, the extent of which is something of a miracle or rather an anti-miracle.

 

There are articles around abut how the emerging nations are going to move up the ladder of opportunity over time. There are articles specifically about how South Korea is becoming too expensive for some labour intense businesses and they could be moved to the north. This is touted as the mechanism where by the peninsula will be healed and then reunited. However, I spent years waiting to see a single mention in print of how an improving economy in North America was going to benefit the worst off workers. It was absent.

 

In the case of the Japan and the Asian tigers growth was robust and there was a general improvement in wages so some better paying business but without market power went bankrupt as well. In the modern situation growth is limited and there’s a lot of training in the state schools so there’s isn’t going to be this general chaos rather the soft economy at the bottom will be the main thing to go.

 

The upward growth scenario is intuitive. Workers know that the economy doesn’t need awful employers and that these should just go out of business. They have expressions for this: “burn the place” and “Good, the shop will close.” This rough idea was around in the first panic but didn’t catch on. I articulated upward growth as a potent idea in a strong economy and the mechanism the free market deals with low wages. When the new panic hit the time had come for this idea.

 

In prosperous times in prosperous countries there will now be these fast food outlets, McDonald’s, which are staffed by immigrant workers who are well known to be making . People go into these establishments and think something isn’t quite right, is immigration really working? Then they’ll be called bigots as after all this is capitalism providing work. A job is a job is the philosophy. In fact intuition is correct and the rising tide of an improving economy should lift all boats, actually it’ll lift the worst jobs disproportionately. The mechanism would actually enhance or replace these worst jobs.

 

Social attitudes in the West are generous. People approve of workers in general making good wages, skilled and professionals making a quite high wage, and they like the expensive nanny programs. They are not that concerned that the rich do very well either and largely leave them alone. However now middle class youth are downwardly mobile, immigrants are coming in but are poor and immigrant youth are not integrating into the middle class, which has traditionally been the plan. Women in the family are particularly affected by low wages as they still are largely devoted to bring up the children rather than developing a career. The low wage problem now bothers people and has become a focus. It’s a matter of self-interest and it is a function of loose immigration in part, the population drew the line at immigration affecting family. They blamed immigrants, but included them as victims and kept it pretty civil.

 

Immigration enthusiasts don’t see the problem with immigrants coming here and being poor, they are at least not as at risk as they are at home. The immigrants themselves aren’t so kind. They come here, are still in poverty, and that’s it baby. They don’t go back home by and large as they get health care and so on but it’s not what they came for. They don’t see that as the point, some of them think their treatment is racist.

 

In Toronto you can actually see the marginal businesses and they are an eyesore. There are all these strip malls along each arterial street in the city and each has stores that just don’t have much customer traffic. There’s fast food, restaurants and retail to excess. These neither pay properly, are very productive or particularly profitable and they are candidates for rationalization and bankruptcy. This is despite Toronto has quasi-tiger growth, a 30% increase in the number of jobs in the greater area in the 10 years to 2005. I’m willing to bet there are these eyesores throughout Western immigration countries generally. It’s a matter of “eyes and ears”. You can take one look at the streets in one these main cities and see the economic dysfunction.

 

The Canadian economy isn’t producing good average quality jobs on average either, which is the economic growth social time bomb that went off.

 

Some 23% of jobs in Canada pay $12 an hour or less (2007), are low wage, and at that rate, pretty much every one has at least one person working for low wages in the extended family. It’s generally a matter of friends, family and associates, loved ones, rather than being part of the class war now. If you look around you, rely on “eyes and ears”, your social circle will include people with job problems. The thing of it is though, people sort of turn a blind eye to this, don’t look.

 

In addition the 23% percent means there’s a lot of competition for something better, say with some minimal training. So people are finding it hard to escape the low wages.

 

In the Western economies the population is aging and immigration is being touted as a partial solution, to expand the economy and the number of workers there are to support the retired. The problem that is never mentioned is that while immigration increases the number of workers to retired ratio the immigrants bring dependant children. So the dependency ratio is only shaved.  The cost of children to the nanny state is quite high and so the mechanism of importing workers isn’t that effective. 

 

It’s difficult to determine how much of a liability to the nanny state growth in small businesses is, to do the calculations, but the labour market would naturally squeeze off the very worst, a rather elegant solution. If the labour market was left to itself there would be pressure on the bottom most and wages would rise there, slowing the weed like growth in the economy. To some extent the jobs lost at the bottom would be simply shifted to other businesses as consumer demand is preserved but one would have to believe a very high  would slow growth. This is the sustainable economy, is environmentally prudent. To some extent slowing growth would enable the Central Banks to keep interest rates down, which would in turn promote good growth, a virtuous circle. In Alberta circa 2007 there was an oil boom and it became a nationally known story that wages at the bottom, the fast food outlets, had gone up significantly, above average inflation.

 

As socially important as the idea of upward growth is the current main problem lies elsewhere. The level of the labour force actually varies widely, from place to place, but economists are mute about this. It turns out in the modern situation people will readily stop working and do other things if employment markets are soft – when it’s hard to find a better job. There is a swing work force that appears to be large and the cost to society of having these people not working is enormous. This is quite general, throughout much of the Western World. I go over this in detail later.

 

Poor wages in a rich city, McLabor, is socially abhorrent it turns out. Additional nanny programs; home care, day care, eye care, pharma-care and dental care, are no where near as popular as fixing low wages with the market. It’s actually in a league of its own as the savings would be greater than the costs due to a general tightening of the labour market that I just mentioned. It was considered by the participating population a correction to the distortions by the immigration department which largely affected women, often in the family.

 

 The explanation that upward growth in jobs was normal in capitalism turned out to be explosive; it set off one huge social reaction when it was popularized.

 

 

Missing Concepts and Statistics on Jobs

 

The topics above of unemployment, family income, low wages, upward growth and training youth are the main issues of immigration but the supporting statistics are compelling.

 

In the last 30 years Canada has been in constant jobs duress but the Immigration Department allocated 45% of the growth for itself, as I said. People had no idea that this was the size of it and neither does the Immigration Department.

 

The official unemployment statistic also hid problems and this is absolutely key. The world over economists overlooked the hidden unemployed, people that simply drop out of the labour force long term, and by the time I looked at the statistics the data was clear this is major problem. Economists know there is flexibility to the labour force, its variation is in the newspaper monthly when job growth is reported, but they didn’t pay much attention and missed the extent of the variance. It’s so large an over sight that nation’s finances are affected. 

 

The official unemployment figure is from a telephone poll called the labour force survey that doesn’t capture the hidden unemployment. There’s a second official measure, the working-age-participation-rate which is how they express the level of the labour force in the population. This participation is the percent of adults either working or officially unemployed. The telephone survey asks are you unemployed and looking for work and if you’re not looking you drop out of the official figures. (The working-age-participation is referred to simply as the labour force in the USA.)  However, the level of participation reveals the hidden work force if you know what the peak at full employment, which I found to be something of a standard in the Western countries.

 

In the modern economy many people have the support to do other things. They go to school, stay at home with the children or simply retire early. They do this long term or even permanently and government telephone surveys do not catch this. The turnover of workers in the economy is very high so there is lots of opportunity for people to be shunted out of the workforce; the self selection to hidden unemployment turns out to be efficient. This modern swing labour force is large and sensitive to the local economy, to just how bad the job market is, and its bad most places these times.

 

In the deep recession of the early 1990s every single one of the 25 major cities in Canada there’s monthly data on had more people shift to hidden unemployment than to official unemployment over the mid term, a few years. That’s 100% of the data, at the 50% rate. I calculate that over the long term 6.1 percentage points of the increase in unemployment in the major cities of a total 7.9% increase was in hidden unemployment. This was just the increase in the hidden unemployment; it does not include the pre-recession structural hidden unemployment. My data is tricked up as it adjusts for the increase in the population in the cities in question over a few years. It also calculates a different time interval for each city, the peak to trough. Economists in Canada wouldn’t do this and have no idea that this hidden unemployment is happening. On the street they called that I had a “broof”.

 

Statisticians try to survey these people with ”marginal attachment to the labour force” with the question “would they might like a job” but when people drop out they drop out and start answering “no” in a telephone conversation. It’s family politics and the question doesn’t even make sense if the prospect is there’ll be little in the way of good jobs available in the coming year. So the official statistic Canadian statistic on that, the “discouraged worker” figure, is usually a fraction of one percent even in cases of steep unemployment. This hidden unemployment is critical data, makes a big difference in the number of people that are unemployed. The economy could expand considerably with no extra costs to the government just by getting more people into the labour force. That is, you can generate considerable tax revenues just by getting more people working.

 

The working age participation rate is not as crystal clear as “scientists” would like. However it’s easy enough to make out a good interpretation. To determine the hidden unemployment level you have to know what the peak employment is. There are always some adults including stay at home mothers, retirees and disabled persons who do not have to work, about a quarter of the adult population. This is a given. A problem is there has always been unemployment in Canada or at least in recent decades during which time the normal rate of participation has been going up as the baby boom recedes. However in all the Canadian cities that experienced full employment recently the participation figure went up to a robust 72% of the adult population. There could be significant local variation but it’s unlikely as everywhere the cost of having a family is high, taxes are high and the people have to save for retirement: people have to work. So you have these good cities as an index, the observation that hidden unemployment is now thee shock absorber for unemployment plus the fact that this would all would be hard to explain away. To claim that people don’t have to work is to imply they expect a handout eventually, possibly from family. In my economic analysis I always calculate unemployment from the 72% level of adult participation and it’s entirely revealing. The discussion of the Natural Rate of Working Age Participation, call it the NRWAP, although critical, is no where in economic literature. The 72% peak participation rate, moreover, is consistent across best cities in Canada, the USA, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. It turned out to be consistent in all these countries. The above analysis was popularly accepted and basically without argument when my treatise was leaked. The population knew people have to work. The thing of it is what people say they will do in a telephone poll and what they do is different, especially given a time frame of years. The official statistic on discouraged workers, “might like a job” is not reliable. My 72% participation rate is corrected for people over 64, which is a major variation in the local data. The different nations also calculate the labour force slightly differently and I’ve corrected for this.

 

The participation rate goes up automatically with low unemployment. It’s just sensitive to the difficulty of landing a basic job. This indicates the job market is actually soft in most so called prosperous cities, something that is intuitive if you live there.

 

Other countries have also tried to pin down the “marginally attached to the labour force” with surveys. In the United States the Bureau of Labour Statistics surveys “persons who want a job” but are not looking and therefore unemployed. This is in their Table A-16. It typically gives a figure of 4% of the labour force while my reference to best cities gives a 10% figure, circa 2010.

 

The hidden unemployed are made up of mothers that stay at home with their children; students that go back to school and people that retire early. It’s not health males in their prime. Economists studying hidden unemployed would not consider these classes I mention as “technically unemployed”. However they will go back into the labour force in a robust economy. On the street they agreed with me, the families need the money and these people are actually “unemployed”.  

 

The real unemployment in Canada nationally is thus 15.3% circa 2011, not the official 7.7%. There is also some net unemployment in involuntary part-time work and in involuntary part-time self-employment, I estimate some 2.4% for a total of 17.7% unemployment. If this was brought down to 9% nationally then there would be 8.7% more to the GDP. That’s a $126 billion addition to the GDP and $40 billion more in all federal and provincial government tax revenues, without any additional costs of supporting the population. The UK and USA post similarly high percentages in this regard. Wage inflation at low levels of unemployment remains the problem and the recalculation of the real unemployment level also suggests wage inflation will accelerate at a surprisingly high level of unemployment. At this time Statistics Canada’s official unemployment figure is capturing less than half the real unemployment. (tbd—daate2)

 

There is some indication that there is hidden unemployment in the best cities I sight. There is one small city, Red Deer, that is doing better than my reference cities and participation is up there. There is only one in all of North America. Red Deer has anecdotal reports of tighter conditions for businesses. I have a drinking buddy in Toronto who was flown into Red Deer to work a menial job for a while in 2007. In addition a close look at the data indicates people will drop out of the labour force even when the unemployment level is moderate, officially 5%. The indication is when  every 15 year old, house wife and retired working class person that wants a job can actually find one then participation will improve another 2%. Interestingly, Iceland pre-recession, with its population of 317,000, posted the same level of participation as Red Deer as well. (tbd—daate2)

 

The use of best cities is a solid reference point but some people will not believe it and say it doesn’t make sense to them. Others will just offer a “No kidding!”

 

This real unemployment calculation I devised is pretty much a knockout statistic. The citizens will respond to a single statistic, focus on a single news item in the blizzard of information we live in, and this is one. On the street the people called it “a number” and said of my economic analysis in the pidgin “I numbered”.

 

Numbers is what I did, it was a change from, say, being a wordsmith.

 

This big deal about working age participation is my baby. Working age participation has not been dealt with anywhere in the world and this has been devastating. It’s a hole in the science of economics. The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) in Paris for one is sitting on the international data but has never made a proper effort to interpret it. My idea that you can determine the real unemployment from the working age participation in the cities at full employment is a pretty simple observation but it’s worth trillions dollars of additional economic output annually on a world wide basis. It’s a way of paying for government programs. When I first looked at the participation data the level was down in depressed regions so I immediately wondered how much it was depressed nationally normally. The problem was obvious to me at first glance.

 

Working age participation is actually a second stone for my sling in the fight for sensible macro economics. The other one, you’ll recall, was upward growth and the dysfunction of economic growth in low wages if fueled by immigration. In the event this pair of ideas of mine became wildly popular. The working age participation is basically a percentage calculation; it’s that hard to figure out. 

 

This idea of the variability of participation of the working age population in the labour force is of interest if look at your city. The fact that there is an apparent standard for this in the modern economy, 72% adjusting for older people, is a star statistic. The news of this probably traveled around the Western world by word-of-mouth with the revolt and became local politics in every city, particularly immigration cities. It probably has a world wide following on the street.

 

The corrected unemployment figure for the Metro half of the Greater Toronto Area in the worst year of the 1990s recession turned out to be a whopping 22% -- not the official 9.1%. This was in 1997 when jobs in the Greater Area had recovered to pre-recession levels and as Metro is fully 50% immigrant you can make out the Immigration Department induced depression levels of unemployment in Canada’s biggest city with premature immigration. I kid you not, that’s the arithmetic of it. This is in Toronto, world famous for being as well run as Switzerland. Local economists had no idea what was going on, going on outside the window of their office building. They are that knowledgeable. Unemployment can reach that level in the modern milieu without economists and elected officials looking up from their dinner plate.

 

The Central Banks have been of no help either. I have seen the Governor of the Bank of Canada on TV saying “they have the concept of participation” but there it stops. The economists at the Central Banks have never actually thought too much about what the real unemployment is. The central banks are sort of flying half blind, relying on inflation to tell them what’s tight in the markets.  I sent the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve Bank of America my statistics on participation and they wrote back to me saying my idea was new and useful but judging from statements from a former Governor of the Bank of Canada they still don’t see high hidden unemployment as their issue.

 

Another attention getting statistic was the total number of immigrants allowed into Toronto recently, the 15 years to 2010. It was a cool 1.9 million, boosting the greater area’s population to 5.6 million, major league. Unfortunately employment trailed by half-a-million. Welcome pilgrims. (tbd—daate2)

 

A further nightmare aspect of the Toronto economy was the poverty level. Toronto had always been Canada’s most prosperous city and the engine of the Canadian economy but by 1997 the United Way Charity was calculating that the child poverty in the Metro half of the greater region had reached an incredible 37%. This was double the national rate and partly through the mismanagement of the Immigration Department. The City of Toronto looks prosperous; you don’t see obviously poor people much rather you see cars and houses every where, but this high level of poverty exists at the same time. Statistics indicate the situation in high rise rent control apartments is not good.

 

The Greater Toronto Area was doing well at the end of the 1980’s expansion. By 1990 the suburbs reached full employment and record levels of labor force participation. The area could have recovered in the 1990’s expansion and reached full employment again, with a higher de facto minimum wage. Instead it was swamped with immigrants and the City of Toronto half of the area began to post monster numbers of poverty level, real unemployment and suppressed family-with-children income - just monster numbers. The other two main immigration cities in Canada, Montreal and Vancouver, were in similar situations. The only area to escape was the Canadian oil patch, Alberta, which prospered and whose economy became the talk of the country. In fact Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, the economic heartland of Canada, had strong economies, actually more jobs created than in the oil patch, and could have done as well. They could have been world leaders. Instead Ottawa made a hash of their economies’. The citizens on the street eventually figured this out. Going forward most of the 27 larger cities in Canada could come to full employment, that’d cover about half the population of the country.

 

The mismanagement of the economy might be the proper subject of a government commission, should a proper expose happen. However on the street the public said “we are the commission for the economy”. Really, you don’t need a government report after what the people have done.

 

Another aspect of immigration I figured out is just exactly how people survive when they move into cities with bad economies. There are lots of people who assume they just go on welfare. The actual answer is there’s an incredible turn over in employment in the economy, the outside hiring annually is as much as 29% of the jobs total nationally. New comers get churned into good jobs and bad while people with less need of employment get shunted out of the work force over the span of a few years. This is the mechanism by which the hidden unemployed get selected. In the case of people spending time unemployed before getting another job it’s a form of job sharing (job sharing is another hair brain idea that was floated by politicians to deal with unemployment in an immigration city).

 

The tendency of people to drop out of the labour force when the labour markets are soft is a social shock absorber. In deep recessions it is a major mechanism for dealing with unemployment. The marginally attached will drop out of the labour force making way for people in need to land a job, although it may not be a very good job. As much as 1 in 6 workers will drop out of the labour force in these modern times, 15%. It’s prudent to keep the labour force level high during recovery phase of a business cycle to facilitate this process in bad times. This would be as important as paying down the debt during the good times. In addition going forward into the 21^st Century China will be emerging and cause disruption in the West, as did Japan. It is important to keep the participation rate up to keep the shock absorbers ready for such shocks as well.

 

The Immigration Department migrated millions of people into the country and but did basically no bookkeeping or accounting. There are figures for the sundry settlement programs such as English as a Second Language but that’s all. The unemployment is ignored, possibly because the world over economists chant that immigration doesn’t mathematically correlate with unemployment. I calculate they added 6.4% of the work force of the country for whom there were no jobs without any expert noticing it. It’s like the corporate accounting scandals in the USA. In the Enron case you had accountants, consultants, stock brokers, lawyers and workers all fooled by some derivative accounting which was hard to understand and no one checked out or they just went along with. In Canada there was a similar list of citizens, politicians, social scientists, left wing socialists, economists, think tank experts and in particular your stock broker, none of who checked peer data. No economist thought to check the labour force data and immigration in 35 years of a near constant unemployment problem. People think that the modern world is well organized and well run but it may not be. (Tbd—daate2)

 

Immigration countries tend to accept a steady flow of immigrants, that is regardless of the business cycle. This is called gradualism and the idea is to foster “long term economic growth”. The rational is no country can absorb a sudden influx of people. New immigrants are absorbed into unemployment in the main destination cities during the early stages of a business cycle. It’s human inventory. The cost of the inventory is the dent in family income. Each 1% of unemployment in a city the size of Greater Toronto is one billion dollars annually in family income. There’s simply official oblivion to inventory costs of this scale in modern democratic governments. I argue cities can absorb a large influx of people anyway, Toronto does, as many as 125,000 in a year and what isn’t surge about that. The actual bottle neck in a good economy, should it ever come up, is housing – the apartment vacancy rate in particular.

 

Gradualism has aggravated unemployment in the immigrant destination cities, has suppressed wages at the bottom with supply and demand, and has been an enabler of the growth of low paying, marginal and subsidized businesses. It has lead to bad employee relations and suppresses both internal migration and the number of people willing to work, the labour force level. It has impacted negatively family income. It has worsened poverty. Economists have a one liner, that there are “short term costs” to immigration for long term growth, but they did not do much analysis. A one-liner, it appears to be the national economy policy. Gradualism has been a disaster in several countries. In most countries immigration doesn’t get much attention and analysis by the sitting government, nothing like smart immigration management occurs.

 

One of the problems with low wages is such people are supported by the nanny programs and also by family. There’s this double dependency. These dependencies are not often discussed. In the USA the low wages from immigration are viewed as a subsidy to the middle class by the proletariat but I reversed the language to a tax on family income. The Canadian statistics are that most people at low wages live in family situations that are not low income where they are subsidized. In Toronto when I said low income people were subsidized by family everyone agreed with my language. In addition the notion fair wages meant less social costs subsidies and family costs resonated and they even allowed as to how I was “fair genius” in the street pidgin. Among the participating public basic fairness issues were a serious matter and it’s of note how cohesive the community actually is in this regard.

 

After World War II immigrants to Canada did well. They were hired into plants and mills that were major industrial facilities. In the town I grew up in, Trail B.C., the entire local zinc refinery, which was world class, was largely staffed by immigrants. The immigrants had houses, families and pension plans. Productivity, wages, improved year by year as well. That national model lasted until about 1973 when unemployment went up with the world oil recession. Now the population increase is fueling the growth of the weed business sector of the economy and jobs in major facilities are hard to get. Since 1973 immigration has been largely national hubris. The country is essentially a different society than it was back then. People now began living in the past thinking it was just a matter of time until the immigrants did well. About half the population lived in this fools paradise of some nationalistic fantasy that our bush league, foreign owned, branch plant economy was going to be a world champion in the 21^st Century. They saw opening the gates as a route to a Greater Canada. On the street they called this policy “ImmiGreat” in the pidgin. As of 2011 as I write the polls are still favoring immigration and skilled immigration in particular. They somehow forget that after World War II much of the developed world was war ruins and that the USA accounted for fully 50% of the world’s economy so everyone including new immigrants had less competition and Canada was an attached economy to the USA.  (tbd—daate2)

 

Part of the immigrant mythology is the role of professional classes. After WWII engineers and that moved to Canada, found good jobs and had a nice life. After WWII only 2% of the adult population had university degrees where as it’s currently 17% and will be higher for the next generation. Still the myth persists we need all these immigrant professionals to grow the country. In the modern situation there are high levels of formal training at the state schools and the business class should be doing the proper level of on-the-job-training, the finishing step. I have heard the competition for a good job these days by students as referred to as “educational warfare”.

 

I described how there can be upward growth and I went over how the opposite happened in Toronto, downward growth to McLabor conditions. Toronto had a good job market formerly and unionized jobs, jobs for life, were available and available on short order. If immigration had been regulated properly the city would have maintained this status, become an example to the world of a city for workers. Instead it wallowed in unemployment for three decades and everything slide backwards. Productivity, taxes, social programs and job quality all went backwards. Immigration survived three and a half decades past its best-before-date on the basis of being popular in the polls.

 

Not only was there a growth in McLabor but traditional alternative employment worsened. Occupations such as taxis, delivery driving and catering used to be better paid and better employment for people ready to hustle for a living. It’s broadly reported these are marginal now.  Some further spreading of this erosion of employment is likely and may be headed your way, or to family and friends.  As employers sharpen their pencil and outsource, employ contractors and resort to part time workers to cut the wage bill this will be happening.

 

In a good economy immigrant sweat shops may become visible. In Toronto the coffee shops are now typically all fresh-off-the-boat immigrant women that can’t pronounce the coffee shop menu. Such a visible sign that immigrants are taking jobs no one else wants hides the larger problem of the general low wage. What is actually happening is that people with slightly better qualifications, better language skills and that, are out-competing these new arrivals for the slightly better jobs. Whereas immigrant sweat shops are topical they are another red herring, the issue is the general low wage. If there were less inappropriate immigrants supply and demand would improve conditions at these sweat shops. These shops do affect the discouraged worker problem as well if they become wide spread, as the coffee shops are, as people will just stay at home.

 

Low wages from immigration shape the basket of goods that the consumer enjoys. So do unionized wages and taxes. The government controls the economy broadly in these ways; it’s good to keep in mind.

 

Some of the above is original research by me and it worked out particularly well as economic research goes.  This was all on my budget; there was no supporting government grant or institution.

 

 In addition to the key idea of upward growth I found other major costs to immigration, I found nine in all that were not known or at least not properly discussed. These are major costs. So I had cogent arithmetic and logic that economists were worse than ever, actually confused about macro-economics and immigration was not the panacea or free lunch the enthusiasts claimed it was. So there are these other nine arguments I detail next.

 

 

 The Immense Cost of Canadian Immigration

 

The total system costs of inappropriate immigration are huge. There’s the following list of nine costs. They are the pointy tip of the spear of this part of my book and worth a close read. Each one of them is extreme and could topple the government for accounting mismanagement.

 

(1) Loss in family income to unemployment due to premature immigration, running at around 3.2% of GDP in Canada, circa 2005. That’s $45 billion a year. It’s a second monster deficit. In the 20 years to 2007 the cost would be at least half a trillion dollars.

 

(2) Unfunded social costs due to the additional millions of people. The population is about 6% in excess through immigration. This represents a mining of every social program in the country. Some of this cost went on the deficit.

 

(3) Growth of low wage sector and attendant dependency on government and family.

 

(4) Suppression of wages at bottom by over supply of general labour.

 

(5) With upward growth people would have moved to better jobs and which is an opportunity cost to the people of immigration.

 

(6) Displacement of indigenous from skilled jobs by skilled immigrants and the opportunity cost that represents to the affected individuals. This includes the associated over investment in training cost and years wasted at school by students.

 

 (7) Soft employment. Involuntary part-time, marginal self-employment and underemployment of skilled labour absorb large numbers of people in the Canadian work force.

 

(8) Suppression of inter-provincial and intra-provincial migration to growth cities by unemployment in the potential destinations cities. Statistics show Canadians migrating to the best cities, based on the information they have.

 

 (9) Perpetuating the have not status of some provinces which resulted in transfers of billions of dollars in equalization payments.

 

The nine costs largely apply to any immigration country. It’s all a monumental blunder by economists. The screw up is unbelievable. No one caught the government at it. I found this myself in Statistics Canada library working from their CDs. My analysis appealed to a broad coalition: to rich and to poor, to the various middle classes but also to the immigrant classes. It appealed to tired tax payers.

 

For the most part these costs were not in the literature; they are undiscussed. Economists had typically tried to explain immigration job creation with mathematical formulae and completely missed the awful arithmetic of it. What analysis there was of immigration was done without the basic facts as well, the real unemployment figure for a fine example.

 

This analysis is what I’m famous for. Well, that and being tortured in the mind meld, having millions of Canadians and Americans inside my head, as a way of promoting the ideas.

 

The elected officials had dropped the unemployment figure for their constituencies for 35 years and were and are despised for it. They were caught up in opinions and philosophies about politics. I can’t stand it.

 

In Canada people think the country has economic problems in one compartment of their brain and think we are a great immigration country in another. They think in compartments. Making the connection didn’t happen in three decades. In Canada in the 1990s they slashed interest rates, ran huge deficits and cut Health, Education and Welfare but increased immigration in the face of steep unemployment. It was thee priority, or at least an available free lunch. It’s crazy. Calling immigration “political” does not quite capture the situation. Immigration is part of macro economics but had never been properly regarded as that, typically it’s dropped out. The economic problems around were just blamed on capitalism. That divider between the compartments is a target of this book.

 

In fact what was happening is the elected officials were spending. Individually these elected officials run for office to be where the action is, they’re wannabe Big Wheels; there isn’t much genuinely left or right to them. They are mostly middle aged, mediocre men sailing under a flag of convenience to promote themselves. All they have is this people count on the left or this free market pidgin on the right. The elected officials are always puffed up publicly with values, politics and economics but in fact they spend.

 

Immigration is also handled with kid gloves because ethnicity is sensitive but I think the problem is the opposite, that people have a love affair with the immigrant story. There’s great sympathy for the immigrant story of desperate foreigners coming here, struggling and building the country then eventually making good. It’s a great win-win story; it propels the cause. It’s been that way in the New World for a very long time. The right to immigrate is also like a lottery win, actually a lottery win per member of the immigrant family, and half the Canadian population is gung-ho about that. It’s a hidden largess and that will be popular. In addition many people have become inured to an anemic job market and consider that is just the way things are; it’s capitalism. People will still say immigration is a good thing, sure it’ll work out. They have this attachment to it. These attitudes are social issues, social problems.

 

Low wages has supporters. Support for exploitive wages is as murky as support for feckless deficits. If you talk about low wages they’ll say they are necessary to the economy, that some people aren’t qualified for better or that it’s allows us to bring immigrants into the county. There’s a certain blindness to the bottom. It’s part of human nature.

 

Society actually cut the worst off workers out of the benefits of the free market with political immigration. Democracies will actually spend social and economic progress on immigration and have done so world wide. It’s very peculiar but economic and social progress has been put on the menu.

 

When people realized low wages affected family and taxes in the modern situation it changed their tone.

 

The people and elected officials are always concerned with jobs and there’re always job creation programs being run and decisions being made on the basis of job creation. Exports are subsidized, Defense Department purchases are for the jobs created, R & D programs are aimed at job creation and so on. It’s “jobitis” as in immigration countries the problem is labour shortages. This is entirely forgotten and overlooked by everyone. You do not need the politicians constantly trying to create jobs in an immigration country.

 

The interest in immigration the elected officials generally manifest is concern with the nitty-gritty details. For example in Canada they would broadened the definition of persecution, which is the basis for status as a refugee, from time to time, as an act of sensitivity. They included mistreatment of a wife by a husband in countries where women’s rights were not well protected at one point, as an example.

 

I have used lots of statistics. There are lots of contrarians in the world that have their own quirky figures but mine tend to be standard economics.

 

The high cost outlined is extreme and it has produced the social phenomenon which my personal story is about.

 

This analysis of mine made jobs something that could be controlled to some degree, by immigration, and this was key to making jobs topical. This was opposed to being just what the economy brought, capitalism. When the jobs became an issue it thus became a grand bandwagon. Jobs are critical in society, a latent interest always, and should be kept in mind by everyone.

 

Immigration can be absorbed in several backward ways. Some people will still not get it. They just won’t. In response to the idea that people need good jobs they’ll argue “What?” They’ll argue that the mutts at the bottom don’t deserve a proper wage, that working 40 hours a week isn’t working hard. Either that or they’ll just howl, howl “racist”, “anti-immigration” or more simply “retard”. They’ll accuse you of blaming immigrants. It’s runaway nationalism, immigration for the glory. It’s hubris again. That’s the competition. It has a large constituency.

 

 

Thee Lesson is from the development of Japan after WWII

 

The rise of modern Japan is several economic lessons. The basic lesson everybody knows about Japan is how a resource poor country can live by trade alone. There are others. It’s emergence as a fully developed country put the kibosh to the lingering idea that the USSR was still a developing nation. It is thee illustration of how moving up the ladder to higher quality businesses works well on a country wide basis. In addition the development of Japan as an economic powerhouse made world competition tougher and good growth harder to come by.

 

Hong Kong and Singapore are also exciting examples of the potential of upward growth. They reached western levels of income sometime ago and rather spectacularly as they are islands of prosperity in a third world ocean.

 

 

Statistics Canada’s Misinformation

 

I mentioned a list of types of experts that were baffled by immigration. I can continue in that vein.

 

In 2004 the Canadian unemployment figure went down to 7% but corrected to a high participation it was still 15%, a difference of 8%. That’s the potential of improving the country’s wealth just through people working. This 15% includes the remote regions which will never come to full employment. However Statistics Canada official estimates for “discouraged workers”, the hidden work force, was only 1% as of 2004. They’re off from my reasonable assumption people have to work by 7% of the adult population. Statistics Canada doesn’t even publicly comment about the missing 7% although they go to great lengths to determine the participation data.

 

Another angle on the same question is Statistics Canada has been reporting immigration as recently making up 70% of the increase in the labour force. The political implication is immigration is fueling the economic growth of the country. This is what the Minister is told. In fact it’s a carefully selected, isolated statistic. Not only is there still official unemployment in the main immigration cities but there is very high non-participation problems there as well. The natural expansion of the labour force is suppressed by the lack of jobs and the lack of reasonable jobs. However, I’ve seen the Immigration Minister on TV chow down on this sole misleading statistic.  That is the Minister’s information, this one statistic. It’s sort of a one statistic world.

 

In the 2000s the expanding economy produced surpluses in the government budget in Canada. The improvement in the nation’s finances from growth was somewhat dramatic, there were surpluses. The improvement in the national finances with growth comes from getting unemployment down and debt down. However it gives the appearance that growth is doing this and thus immigration makes sense. This is not so. The surpluses would be even higher if there was not the population increase with the attendant cost. (tbd—daate2)

 

Statistics Canada should know all of this. As far as I can make out the professionals at that institution don’t even use their own labour force data. The very useful participation data is barely mentioned, under the influence of the idea the technical, definition of unemployment is okay.

 

Immigration got entirely out of hand. This went on for 35 years without the professionals at the national statistics institute noticing anything, rather they yakked on about how useful, nay critical, immigration was. When I mention the corrected unemployment figure to working people, the 17%, they cut me off with “Oh, I know.” They just assume the government is telling them a pack-of-lies. They’re right, too. That is about what it is doing through Statistics Canada. It’s redefined it to half the real level. When I was thinking about Statistics Canada in the mind meld on the bus I had the thought it was another failed institute. I heard the word “another” questioned somewhere on the bus. In fact it’s thee institution that has lead us down the garden path for maybe over three decades now. Statistics Canada has actually caused a social regression first and then a popular revolt. Of course the Immigration Department is responsible too; they were complicit in cooking the books for years.

 

 

A Parameter to Control the Economy

 

Central Banks around the world have not been on the ball either. Central Banks basically try to control the whole economy with limited tools, basically interest rates. Immigration is actually another tool available for controlling growth but this has been lost in the furor that is politics. Specifically strategic skilled immigration could alleviate bottlenecks while general immigration would keep inflation at the bottom in check. In Canada we had a seventeen year economic expansion to 2008 and general skilled immigration probably kept labour markets from over heating. (tbd—daate2)

 

 

Nefarious Immigration Cheerleading

 

The professional elite totally embraced the government’s wild immigration program in Canada. They were special interest groups or disengaged professionals writing up simple reports. They were the problem. To the extent that they thought about it at all mostly they came up with rationalizations of the government pamphlet.  This is referred to as immigration cheerleading. Their rationalizations where cloaked in the language of expertise and science. The mantras were: immigrants don’t take jobs from the indigenous, immigrants create jobs, skilled immigrants are necessary to grow the country, immigration does not suppress wages, they produce a net benefit, and resentment of immigrants is just bigotry. The basic science of immigration is the economy is good which was professional myopia by the late 20^th Century. A list of rationalizations followed and propelled policy and I managed to defang this received knowledge idea by idea. Exactly none of them made any sense. Some of the bigger blubbers I go over here for completeness.

 

In addition to the immigrant cheerleading by disinterested professionals there are actually these authoritative studies that purport to capture the essential science of immigration. These all conclude everything is as it should be, the issue is just capitalism.  This is what would be presented to the actual leaders and what they go on. This is the problem.  The leaders are doing what they can, making hard decisions. There are three particularly misleading studies. (1) The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) and others report that immigration does not correlate with unemployment; (2) the National Academy of Science in America calculates that immigration depresses wages very marginally, and (3) there’s a study in the USA done by George Borjas of Harvard that concluded overall immigration was very slightly net positive on the national books, not subsidized. meanwhile the Central Banks will keep national economies growing to generate the jobs required as long as inflation is under control. The ideas that I have described in this book effectively counter these “authoritative” reports. That is (1) there’s significant hidden unemployment, (2) the suppression of the de facto minimum wage  in the immigration destination cities in 20% and (3) the alternative is upward growth from the bottom.

 

The idea that immigrants don’t take jobs from the indigenous is the basic science of the field. The argument is immigrants don’t and can’t possibly cause unemployment because of jobs dynamics, no less. They sagely and vaguely refer to “immigrant energy”. This is a bit outlandish. However the whole idea is a red herring. Generally immigrants would go to growing countries and to the growing cities in those countries in appropriate numbers at the appropriate time. Governments would arrange it that way one would assume. Most the statistics should reflect this balance. Nevertheless the immigration industry argues this no affect on unemployment is a scientific relation and an interpretation is you can actually expand immigration at will.

 

The Paris based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has argued the “immigration doesn’t cause unemployment” relation one dimensionally. Canada has one of the highest immigration levels in the world and has so for a long time, is the test case, and the OECD can’t find the Canadian data. In Canada 70% of the immigrants have gone to three only cities; Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, and these cities have been long mired in unemployment, for decades in the cases of Montreal and Vancouver. The OECD is well funded, they’re the world experts, and they said there’s no relation and that’s been all the analysis that’s been required. These are actually 50 cent studies by professional economists.

 

Immigration can cause unemployment. It’s just arithmetic, job growth versus demographics. The immigration industry has bent over backwards to disprove this.

 

The idea that immigrants create jobs is part of the idea that immigrants don’t take jobs from the indigenous. Notions that immigrants self-select, are a cut above average individuals, and are more economically dynamic than the indigenous are the core of this argument. It doesn’t make sense and had to be examined. People that decide to leave a poor, desperate country for a rich one are distinctly smarter and more economically dynamic? Economists, as I far as I can make out, do not have a good understanding of just how economic growth takes place and some of them argue economic growth is from immigration alone.

 

Statistics on immigrant job creation in Canada are good. One figure is immigrants create 1.2 jobs on average. In point of fact the statistics would be on immigrant business ownership and businesses don’t create jobs, customers do. Although job creation is part of the mystic of entrepreneurship economic growth is due to low interest rates stimulating the economies of the big cities. Entrepreneurs capture the growth. Service industries, jobs that are just yet another outlet for a common service, don’t actually create a single net new job. Instead they attract customers from the competition. That’s probably what most immigrant businesses are, service industries. To be of interest the companies have to pay at least fairly, and immigrant bosses are probably very thrifty. To create real jobs businesses have to be unique and offer products that wouldn’t otherwise be around or to deal in trade items companies. The unique items would cut into existing businesses but if the products are truly useful or just poplar I’ll call that progress. “Entrepreneurs” have a mystic about them in these days of troubled economies and also of star cases in high-tech but Business Schools have long advised if you want to open a business do it in a tried and proven field, not something new and experimental.

 

In Canada the big cities are immigrant heavy and also where the job growth is so statistically you’d expect immigrants to show up as business owners in the national aggregates. Also immigrants have less opportunity to move upwards and opening a business is their ideal so they do that, they buy a wage.

 

So that cuts down on the bizarre notion that all races and creeds of immigrants are economically more dynamic than all the races and creeds of the indigenous, that “immigrant” is a scientific category. Yet I have a letter from the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Preston Manning, which states immigrants create more jobs than they absorb. It’s would be an economic miracle that people are nonchalant about, the Canadian economic miracle. If immigrants created jobs there wouldn’t be heavy unemployment in the big cities that are immigration destinations and immigrant heavy.

 

The Canadian immigration program has other economic immigrant classes than skilled workers. These are investors, entrepreneurs and self-employed classes who are all expected to create jobs immediately on landing here. The point of immigration is there are labour shortages while accepting other economic immigrants only makes sense if the jobs they create are better than average which would typically not be the case for these micro businesses. The addition of these business classes to the immigration program was in part a reaction to the persistent unemployment in the country and the direction the immigration program took rather than curtailing it.

 

Similarly it was argued that immigrants inject money into the economy which also creates jobs. This was argued in the 1980s by the Royal Commission on the Economy, no less. It was reported in that august document that this was the consensus view of economists on immigration. That’s how they worded it. It isn’t even a completed thought. To spend money you obviously have to be employed and the topic was and is what of immigration when there’s unemployment. That is an example of the level of discussion in Canadian economic circles but it took me time, years, to pin down that there’s nothing behind the phrase. It’s an empty phrase. The idea apparent is the government just orders some economic growth with a quota and the restraint on how much is people don’t really like immigrants. This book has the ideas that the Royal Commission on the Economy should have come up with.

 

The Linqua Franca of economists and the elite on immigration became immigrants are miraculous. They create jobs and inject money into the economy. These are panaceas and they’d solve any economic problem. There’s two new panacea the specialists are tooting as well. One is that we are moving into a knowledge economy and importing the best and the brightest will drive the economy. Anybody with a university graduate degree turns out to be what they mean by the “best and the brightest”, gawwd. The other, and this is from the U.K., is immigration increases per capita income. I didn’t actually read the government report on this but I assume it’s the standard for economists, that there’s this isolated statistic but no clear explanation of the mechanism of how this could possibly work.

                                                                                                

Immigrants tend to be working so this is called “contributing to society”. The argument runs if they have jobs they are needed. There is substantial hidden unemployment in many immigrant destinations, the goods and services produced at the bottom are heavily subsidized and many of these subsidized products are not really necessary, are of marginal utility. The alternative is upward growth as I’ve said, cutting the bottom. 

 

The idea that the annual immigrant influx was good because there are unfilled jobs is around as well. This is another idea that isn’t a completed thought. There’s no reason why next year’s immigrants should match the open jobs any better than the very much larger existing labour force. This is specifically true as the list of shortages the Canadian Immigrant Department kept was not very effective. Skilled immigrants that are not part of a shortage obviously displace someone if they get a good job. They can supplant a recent graduate and if their numbers are high enough they can discourage youth from training in a field. This discouraging youth from training is part and parcel of the panic of 2002. Of course corporations want foreign talent to fill specialized jobs and this should be a feature of every country’s immigration program. However it needs watch dogging.

 

I am a skilled person who was potentially displaced from a rapidly growing field by a foreign influx of good people. However, I was probably displaced by the training of 100,000s of people in software programming so I don’t actually think in my mind that is what happened to me.

 

Entrepreneurs are important. I’ve seen statistics that put all net job growth in the USA in the last 15 years as by young companies. However immigrant entrepreneurialism is probably in services in established industries, not cutting edge.

 

I went over how training in general is the alternative to skilled immigration. There are various university professors in Canada that advocate skilled immigration. These are the very people that spend their lives training the next generation and they’ve never had the happy thought the student customers that sit in front of them year in and year out are actually interested in a better job. Socially inept personalities must be a root problem in these cases. This turns out to be fairly typical. People disparage computer geeks personality but it seems professional economists aren’t any better. Professors, they’re bureaucrats, that may be missing a minutes thought about issues and life. Gawwd almighty.

 

(You’ll agree that a lot of people need their personality adjusted. The situation, the state-of-the art of personality, is that many leaders, managers, experts and just people need to get their brain connected to their personality. I had this thought in the mind meld and the immediate echo was “correct”. It’s even just logic that they have to work out. That’s the state-of-the-art of personality.)

 

The study of the economy tends to be done by national aggregates such as the unemployment figure. This is ridiculous in view of the fact that Statistics Canada goes to great length to produce good data on the 27 only large and largish cities in the country. The economic activity in these 27 represents most the growth in Canada and is also where immigration impacts. Economists consider the national aggregates mainly and this is bureaucratic or something.

 

One noted immigrant study on the lack of impact of immigration on employment I read about actually had zero data. It was about the movement of Cubans to Miami by President Carter in 1981 and the sole datum was Miami. The report details how the population was increased by 7% in one year by this movement of Cubans to the city but the unemployment figure was unaffected. It correlated the figure to several other American cities which is to say Miami was the only one with data. The correlation exercise was bogus, there was only one data point.  The study didn’t offer a hypothesis of what was going on physically, people surviving, either. Economists don’t do this at the 50 cent study level. The report just offered Miami’s official unemployment figure. Obviously something was going on and it would be the data was bad, probably the city experienced absorption of the unemployed into hidden unemployed just as every single Canadian city does currently. So there was probably actually not even a single datum in that quoted study. Nevertheless the very broad and damaging conclusion immigrants don’t ever create unemployment was drawn by the authors and by the field of economists.

 

I originally assumed immigration economics would be substantially mathematical and wondered about taking the required math courses. In fact the math that there is is lame and one doozie smoke screen.  

 

I was thinking about how economists say immigration does not create unemployment and the case of Miami and had the thought “it’s a miracle then”. I had this thought while in the mind meld with my associates in the Toronto traffic and I heard an echo, “miracle, ‘nuff said”.

 

There is actually not much good data in economics, not like there is in the physical sciences. Often all there is is few surveys and forms and there’s underlying human behavior so the parameters of concern may be dynamic anyway. On the street they concluded economists maintain “a façade of empiricism”, they individually get recruited and buy into it. And they will jump to conclusion from a single isolated statistic to be printable, making talking points. Sometimes economists go so far as to drop out the law of supply and demand. The Economist magazine, for example, says migrant agriculture workers are good because people will not do farm work at any price. Is that so – it’s not a matter of a high cost of getting people to leave their home for months to do stoop labour? As a Social Science Economics presently is an opinion free-for-all. In the area of immigration it’s out and out amateurish. If you are thinking there must be critical peer review in economics you would be mistaken.  .

 

In the event, the revolt, people developed an interest and awareness of economics. So much of what economists write is so stilted that it can be vetted with the common sense.

 

One cheerleader refrain is immigrants built Canada, which is true. However in the last 35 years the country has been backsliding economically and socially and immigration was part of it. So that’s where that went.

 

The refrain heard when criticizing immigration that this is scapegoating is similar. There’s a tendency to simply excuse immigration, poor and vulnerable immigrants. It’s the government that is being blamed anyway, one should note. Having a government above criticism has proved disastrous.

 

A troublesome type of immigration refrain is the notion “The children don’t seem to want to train.” This is a common statement. The next generation wants to work for low wages apparently. It doesn’t begin to make any sense. People will actually victimize their own children. Youth, people, take years to get sorted out and one of the problems the current generation faces is that training may not lead to a job as there is oversupply everywhere. It’s difficult.

 

Articles are appearing in the Canadian press as to how immigrants are now being absorbed into below average incomes, the working class. Canadians are offended. Imagine skilled people not finding a good job. That is uncivilized. This analysis is decades old and in the early 1990s a book called “Diminishing Returns” detailed the trend. Immigrants are thought to contribute more in taxes if they get good jobs. Some times experts blame the lack of success of new immigrants on racism and the problem there has been a lack of robust skilled job market for years doesn’t come into the discussion somehow.

 

Immigration is often thought of as doing the right thing: a kind of charity, a moral issue and part of proper values. The churches are always taking in refugees and that. As Canada does need some immigrants there’s room for a humanitarian class movement. Perhaps that should be a priority. However immigration on a large scale is an economic program and when you have inappropriate immigration you are taking someone’s job, pushing someone down into McLabor or depressing wages at the bottom. You may be putting them on a treadmill of all of these problems. In some cases it would be interfering with someone’s ability to afford having a family. Stealing someone’s job, robbing someone’s of their lively hood, donating it to a political party perhaps, and covering it glibly with the line “immigrants take people’s job is a myth” is the morality out there, is socially sanctioned. People should keep their charity to pinching pennies for a private donation rather than have government cut people into the pie at $1 or $2 million a slice. That’d be reality, never mind morality. So isn’t their something moral about immigration? If morality was absolute there’d be no problems in the world in the first place and immigration isn’t the place to start to fix that.

 

The Canadian government dealt with the fact that our immigration levels were higher than elsewhere by saying the program was “generous”. The point seemed to be our nanny programs were generous, the unemployment insurance, higher education and pensions were, so this was the Canadian way. That one word, “generous”, was substituted for analysis and stealing jobs became Canada’s economic policy. All it took was one word, “generous”, to rationalize the spending and away they politicians went. The Canadian nanny programs are expensive, not generous; you get what you pay for.

 

All this mindless cheerleading was the language of the elite on immigration and because of government policy. The observation that new immigrants were not making it to average wage over time led to the tailoring immigration to independent class applicants with post graduate degrees in Canada. Having immigrants corner the professions in the big cities was the government’s solution to the short comings in the economy. As well the Liberal Party election committee picked a figure for a target for the quota out of thin air, 1% of the population annually. There was not a single political party in Canada that didn’t sign up for that power grab.

 

There were all these rationalizations of immigration. They were as logical as incomplete sentences, were half thoughts and made as much sense as children’s rhymes but were government policy. They are slogans sold as economic theory. They are “empty thoughts” in the street pidgin. These rationalizations were just listed in the government literature. The professional elite would read these one liners and that’d be their understanding of the issue of immigration. They’d then parrot them in the belief the government was an authority. There’s money in being able to do that. It’s amazing how a little bit of government propaganda became the understanding of the intelligentsia for decades. They thought everything was taken care of and it all made sense. The elite dropped out the data, any analysis and peer review in favor of shibboleths: the population is aging, the birth rate is declining, immigrants create jobs and they built the country.

 

The behavior of government is interpreted on the street as “parroting” and “monkey see monkey do”. Basically it’s thought there is a tendency for governments to do what has come before. This is to imitate the opposition rather than oppose it. In the pidgin code it was the call “monkey”.

 

An instance of this parroting was the idea came up in Canada and elsewhere that new immigrants shouldn’t just move to the main cities as they always do rather they should go to smaller towns and the regions. In Canada it was well know that the main cities were becoming crowded and jobs there were a problem. The Immigration Department itself knew this and the suggestion there was lots of room for the immigrants in the regions is how they handled it politically. Of course small towns and the regions don’t have the boom economy of the centre and they have no jobs. Nevertheless this idea new immigrants should move to the smaller centers became popular. People couldn’t believe that there were just more new immigrants than jobs. It just didn’t make sense to them. All the Immigrant Department had to do is say immigrants don’t typically move to the out lying areas and people parroted it back. 

 

Immigration was thus thought to be enlightened policy by most folks. On analysis I was able to connect immigration to unemployment to McLabor to family to taxes to the vote to civil unrest and finally to inept, amateur political leaders. It’s all very connected.

 

 

The Existing Immigration Critics

 

The negative criticism of the Canadian immigration program that there was mainly beside the main point as well. There were seven books on the topic of immigration including three negative ones in Canada. None of them mentioned unemployment rather they focused on technical details. They were concerned about the refugee admission process or the corporate candidate rules. Other critics were nativist and complained about immigrant crime, immigrant welfare abuse and even low wages as if low wages were the fault of the immigrants themselves. The nativists played into the hands of the politicians that said such concerns were prejudice. They were actually a hindrance to a proper discussion.

 

There are some immigrant specialists in Canada. There’s an anti-immigrant organization called Canada First Immigration Reform Committee, the seven books on the topic I mentioned and several professors with an interest in the issues. There’s a specific government supported research group called the Metropolis Project and of course the Immigration Department maintains a research capability. There are considerable business interests in the form of lawyers and consultants that help with immigrant applications. I wrote many of the interested parties and while I did receive a smattering of polite response mostly I was ignored. Certainly no one took interest in what I had to say. This was ditto for my letters to American interests including their main anti-immigrant councils, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Centre for Immigration Studies (CIS). FAIR is more concerned about the eventual size of the American population and had nothing to say about the monster immigration problems of hidden unemployment and upward growth by the traditional Knowledge Economy. Mostly these people are too busy. On the street they commented on their lack of funding with the word play, “There’s no response-ability”. I caused a popular revolt but couldn’t get through to the experts or even the other activists. If I can’t get a letter with new data through to the concerned experts no average citizen is going to be heard on an involved topic by anyone. That may be what happened to the citizen panic and citizen activism. So while it became common knowledge politicalized immigration was macro economic folly you could not communicate the details on this to any expert.

 

 

Attitudes towards Immigration

 

The understanding of immigrants and the immigrant vote is out of whack as well. There’s a tendency in political circles to consider the immigrant vote has to do with the quota for new immigrants. That’s how politicians approach the immigrant vote, the annual quota, some government spending on the immigrant community which has no book costs.  Immigrants want a good job basically, that’s what they want, and are going to vote on the economy like everyone else. Generally immigrant concerns are just like every one else in the entire West world: the kids, the rent or mortgage, a good job or career, the car, a pension and health care. They are us. New immigrants are especially known for living for their children and they all want to see their children get trained and enter the middle class. This big deal seems to be forgotten by our political amateurs. Immigrants are less established and secure than the indigenous so they will tend to vote centre left. I got near universal support from the immigrant class in Toronto for pointing out immigrants will vote for the economy, social justice and especially a fair deal for people at the bottom. Politicians don’t know the immigrant community what so ever.

 

On the street they jibed the confusion about immigrant issues politically was “the word immigrant” which they progressed in the mind meld to, “it was The Word.”

 

The general idea is that the left leaning parties are more amenable to immigration, which strikes me as exactly backward, but the politicians buy into it and parrot the sentiment. The idea that a left leaning political party could find a hidden reserve of good jobs in the country and then hand them out is outstandingly bad thinking. Well, it’s outstandingly bad. They appear to be insensitive to the low wage problem, despite being officially left wing and concerned. The immigrants themselves want it all of course and sometimes figure it’s is racism that keeps them in bad jobs. The left’s usual idea that capitalism is a problem turns into capitalism is great when it comes to immigration. It becomes “the economy is over heating – let’s let in a million immigrants right away”. Their information is a bit terrible and their morality about the same.

 

The public’s expectation is the whizzes in the political parties have some political calculus going on as befits their job but in fact major promises are made without cursory thought. They are made by applying tired formulas. There’s a tendency in modern societies to rely on the media, work as a mediaocracies, where the tired formulas circulate. In Canada immigration is actually oriented towards economic classes, not family reunion, so there is little immigrant family vote for the quota. A cut in it is actually victimless politically.

 

This is all crazy-and-a-half but it has a constituency.

 

Immigration is a cause; it’s so much Mother’s Milk. A voice on the street I heard about that was a cry from a teenager I heard in a mall “They are going to hang Mom!”

 

Immigration is never discussed outright because it’s considered a touchy issue. At least it’s never discussed clearly in the media or political circles. However this is Canada and we are never going to send them back, as they in fact want to in Switzerland, so this is over done.

 

Over the history of the country immigration has always been suspect. The economy is rarely really good so people always wondered what the role of immigration in that was. Also there has always been a certain amount of blaming immigrants, for welfare abuse, crime and taking jobs and these are called the immigration myths and scare mongering. People that say immigrants are lazy, backward or crime prone, which are common enough attitudes, are quickly put down as racists. I tend to think immigration isn’t sensitive, people are comfortable enough talking about it, and rather racism is a bread and butter topic of journalists and academics. Racism is trotted out as a simple explanation of national problems habitually in the media, even in Canada. Immigrants themselves don’t mind talking about the economy. They tend not to think of themselves as immigrants. They tend to think about themselves, their government pension and government health benefits. All my talk comes across as about jobs. Actually my talk about jobs sent people including immigrants off the deep end. This knee jerk reaction to put down criticism of immigration as Politically Incorrect is not particularly sensitive.

 

Much is made, many words are wasted, on differences in culture of immigrants. I’ve talked to a lot of immigrants and they are just like you and me. They have concerns about the job, the family and tend to follow some religion – basically adult concerns. Immigrants take an interest in modern life, their new country, as its part of the personal growth they signed up for. They are interested in social issues. They are free to keep their cultural traits alive, as best they can, but it makes little difference to the other citizens in the most part.  Their children tend to lose their cultural identity anyway. You don’t want to import peasants for fear of building a backward underclass and in Canada the point system keeps them out. You are always going to have immigrants that won’t learn the language and that but this can be tolerated if it’s in limited numbers. I talked to a lot of immigrants in the many places I worked and they assimilate to our expectations immediately upon arriving here. There’s the idea that third world immigration into low wage situations is good enough for them overlooks the reality that immigrants expectation is the good life. They do not consider their poor paying jobs “the real world” and can become bitter about it.  And despite being from dysfunctional lands where malnutrition is a problem they are concerned about poverty in Canada. They are part of the cohesiveness of our culture all right, they are “Us”. I mention these things because there is so much huffing about them. 

 

There was some pidgin around that caught the supposed virtue of letting immigrants into the country. They called them “hymnigrants”.

 

My own voting strategy, I might just add, has been to go to the effort to go to the polling station but to spoil my ballot. I couldn’t actually bring myself to vote for anyone that was damaging the country so grievously.

 

 

Appropriate Immigration as a National Economic Strategy

 

I have come up with the economically and politically optimum plan for immigration, that being my job. Not only is it optimized but it deals with the points that getting most people on board cutting immigration would take some selling and also a policy of cutting economic growth which is suggested is a scare. The idea is quite simple.

 

The big cities in Canada and most countries have a life of their own economically; do better than the nation at large. So these should be the focus of economic analysis. When there’s an economic expansion these cities should lead the way in social improvement. When I considered this I decided that appropriate immigration could be on a city-by-city basis as well.

 

My idea is there could be a lower background rate for immigration nationally; humanitarian, corporate classes, family class and bilateral exchanges of citizens but when there was labour shortages in one of the main cities there could be a limited movement just to that city just for the coming year – a special movement. When unemployment goes down businesses usually start complaining about labour shortages and the government typically responds by developing a list of fields in which immigrants are needed. You could offer permanent work visas to employers with such needs. In fact most countries already issue visas for foreign talent and this could be accentuated to target specific cities. That’s the idea. The main problem would seem to be in limiting the numbers, the requests from business, and the government might be forced to prioritize skills to bottlenecks and that. The new immigrants should come permanently and bring their families, who are additional workers. The actual top up would be in limited numbers, 1000s of families only per city, so it would not be hard to administer. Businesses would do most the leg work searching for applicants. The candidates’ application would have to be vetted for fraud and suitability, the ability to speak the language in particular. Getting businesses to hire people they need from overseas would be an improvement on trying to rely on a clerk at the Immigration Department to determine if there was a shortage somewhere out there in the country that the government could actually fix. All this is Just-In-Time immigration. The resultant low unemployment would pare billions off the costs to family income of current immigration systems and would be a social tonic.

 

People say there’s a problem getting immigrant to move to the preferred target city. If they got a job offer, a good one, they’d move – for sure. Also there are already provincial nominee immigrants and other streams that select immigrants for specific jobs in specific locals and my Just-In-Time by city immigration just expands on this.

 

With such a plan immigration would be a local issue. Suddenly the local labour markets in a city would work again. The city-by-city quota would react to all dynamics in the local economy. You could experiment with, test, the adult participation rate, internal migration, local de facto minimum wage and inflation at once. You could squeeze as many immigrants as possible into a city, down to the last few 1000 available jobs and that’s as pro-immigrant as a realist can get. It’d thusly quash most arguments as to there’s too many immigrants, too few or there’s prejudices. The benefits of a tightening the quota would be felt in cities quickly, within one year. The key would be to top up immigration with limited but properly funded and administered special programs. The idea of testing the local economy with Just-In-Time movements makes sense and would sell to the voting public. The citizens could enjoy a city that is working, both economically and socially. The idea is feasible, popular and political.

 

There’s good evidence that the world wide connections of immigrants and of businesses is all that you‘d need to get Just-In-Time immigration to work. In the late 1990’s articles began to appear in the Toronto newspaper that there was a shortage of construction workers. Nothing specifically was done about it but in a few years more articles began to appear that there were now some 10,000 illegal construction workers in Toronto. The workers and construction unions were interviewed by the media and they were of the opinion there was work, wages were high and these illegals were necessary. So without the government doing a thing the problem was solved informally, by business connections. The story is illustrative because Toronto does not generally have illegal immigrants, as does the USA and the EU.

 

Immigration is popular and has many masters. There’s business class, treaty refugees, family class and provincial or state requests. Cutting the totals to a background level would actually take a concerted effort by the Minister. The issue is it’s people’s jobs, so the government should be attentive.

 

The idea is simple, Just-In-Time immigration to cities at full employment, and would have some problems, but it’s actually more manageable than current immigration strategies around the world. It would have a problem with fraud as all immigration programs do. It is resistant to government indifference and bungling as it’s pretty straight forward. It’s an anti-inflation mechanism also, although admittedly a blunt instrument in regard to controlling inflation. Just-In-Time immigration is basically pro-immigrant.

 

One could go further to enhance the social performance of the high growth cities by having a separate  for dynamo cities. The growth cities would have a legislated  higher than the region in general.  is currently low everywhere and is only just a low fence to the most marginal, weed like entrepreneurs. In growth cities you could make it “aggressive”. If you are going to have immigration you should also protect the worst off worker with an aggressive minimum wage . Basically you should legislate an aggressive  minimum wage to protect the worst off workers from the suppression of wages at the bottom by immigration. That would be a proper fence, like a white-picket fence around the house to keep the weed businesses out. You should actually do both, legislate  a minimum wage in a city and have Just-In-Time movements of immigrants to protect the conditions at the bottom.

 

The inflation from increased wages at the very bottom would be minimal because of the low base. You could actually increase the city  minimum wage gradually early on in the business cycle so you spread the inflation over a couple of years. The Central Banks are focused on inflation and the city-by-city  and city-by-city immigration movement would be additional tools for controlling that problem. A higher  minimum wage in the immigrant cities in Canada might cause ½% inflation nationally.

 

 Minimum wage increases do cost jobs and the argument is it’ll cut jobs at the bottom, of people that are most vulnerable. There is an understanding that the people at the bottom have very little skills and are only suited to worst jobs.  In fact there is a variety of people at the bottom while at the same time the untrained general labour component of the labour force is about 50% of all jobs. There is no one to one correspondence of low skilled people for the worst jobs. In addition people will largely continue to spend on the inflated goods and services and the cut comes out of other income spending, which translates into average jobs that are cut. The impact on the troubled people at the bottom would be minimal.

 

Entry level jobs for young people are a different kettle of fish. You would want to continue to pay youth less than adults. Youth in general are less competent than adults and need to get used to the work place so employers should be encouraged to hire them because of lower cost. Some young people are fine and are natural workers but in general you would have to price youth below adults. On the street they pointed out that with the subsidies on low wages an elevated minimum wage is quite expensive and it doesn’t make sense to start a 15 year old at this level. Part of transaction of paying youth lower wages is that management would train them how to work and how to deal with the work place. That would be part of management’s job.

           

Economic growth is concentrated in the main cities. Businesses like to locate in these. It allows them to be close to their customers, their suppliers and to a quality work force at once. If you raised wages at the very bottom economic growth would be more difficult and thus there can be a trade off between higher growth and higher wages. Toronto and other North American star cities are actually quasi-tigers. The advantage these key cities have is like a brand; it’s a public resource like the fish in the sea, and allocation, who gets the benefit, has to be policed. A higher  minimum wage costs jobs in the sense it makes growth more difficult but in the growth cities that are fueled by immigration anyway this is not a problem.

 

To improve wages and conditions at the bottom requires pressure. There’d be screaming from employers but also from the media. Journalists would be reporting labour shortages as “the dark side of capitalism”. A legislated  minimum wage would spread the pain and the howling out.

While my legislated minimum wage strategy seems plausible I might add that there’s an alternative scheme to improving wages at the bottom. It’s natural but the explanation is tricky. There’s a drag to hidden unemployment. People are slow to return to the labour force after being shunted out and to the extent that it’s inflationary. Wages at the bottom go up at quite high levels of hidden unemployment. So this shaves the spike of inflation that occurs at full employment, which is a problem. I know this definitely happens as wages at the bottom in Toronto had to increase when there was still very high hidden unemployment in the 1990s. At about 15% real unemployment the de facto  minimum wage was $8 or so.

 

The city-by-city immigration and legislated minimum wage scheme would improve the economy optimally. What you might get is encouraging and as follows: In Toronto the de facto , the wage for reliable help that bother to show up every day, is above the legislated level and is about $8- $10 circa the revolt. If the labour market tightened the de facto minimum wage would improve to maybe $10 -$12 an hour. If unemployment was low both sides of a lower working class couple would be assured full time employment, they might work a 40 hours a week, which is a lot for both partners in a couple, and also they might get $1 premium for staying with one company for a year. That’d be the $12, about 55% of the median wage in the city. So the joint income of a couple at the bottom; bingo, bango, bongo, would be $50,000 a year. That’d be a worst case. That should be the minimum remuneration for working class couple in the harness in an expensive city; it’s not that much but it’s less oppressive than the current situation. It’d be an easier life for the poor, for recent immigrants and for Canadians wanting to move to a growth city from the poorer regions. It’d be easier for woman and young people with issues as well. That should be the target and it’s not too much to ask for. In 2006- 2008 there was an economic boom in the whole province of Alberta, the Canadian oil patch, and reports were that this was the case there. So, if fact, Alberta like economics is the model and target. Alberta is the West’s example of what happens at full employment, when growth outstrips immigration.

 

The situation is actually somewhat better than the above because of the Canadian nanny state subsidies. I discuss later that it is workers that pay taxes, carry the load, so you can do a quick calculation of the tax load one carries from an hourly wage. My calculation indicates that the subsidy at $12 an hour is $3.40 an hour. This would make the subsidy for a working couple both at $12 some $14,000 a year and so there net life style is $64,000 a year. That is because their health benefits, government pensions and their portion of government responsibilities such as the army are subsidized.

 

Alberta, the Canadian oil patch, is actually an instance of the economy out growing the population and immigration. The de facto  went up to $10 to $!2 an hour and this was news all over Canada. So the de facto minimum wage went up from $8 to $10 to $10 to $12, which is a 25% increase, although still not much.

 

The improvement in  minimum wage from full employment became very popular on the street and in fact was expanded on. The participating population became advocates of legislating a slightly higher , $12.50 an hour. This is more of a way of correcting for the side effect of stalling upward growth in jobs caused by immigration than a social program. It’s not a social program per se. That would be a proper fence for the economy. Many sectors of the labour market protect their workers from the vagaries of the free market, including skilled and professionals with the market power to make them like long term investments. Also, there is a list of benefits to a higher minimum wage including skewing average job growth to better jobs. So it’s actually a way of dealing with the social order aspect of the quality of jobs. The issue was expressed as a women’s issue by the participating public as women are still largely about raising the children and then face a hostile labour market when they are done with that.  

 

A high  is important to women in particular, as they still are at home with the kids rather than looking after careers and they wind up in service industry jobs. It’s important to family income, getting the second or even third family worker into the labour force. While $12.50 is not much the pay check for the usual , $8 or so, is so thin you can spend it in a single trip to the grocery store.

 

And a higher minimum wage shaves the heavy government subsidy for the bottom class of workers. If you have economic growth it makes sense to grow towards jobs that pay for themselves as jobs that pay  minimum wage are subsidized in effect by the nanny state.

 

An ancillary idea that came up in my examination of immigration is that governments should have major bilateral exchanges of citizens. They do this now but when the EU allowed free movement of people immigration enthusiasts pointed out that a million people emigrated from the UK. Exchanges of citizens could be arranged between various countries, especially the English speaking countries, without affecting net migration. This should include corporate transfers of their people as well, as this is part of business these days. The freedom to move from country to country is popular.  It’s part of freedom to the citizens.    

 

The idea of raising the level of the labour force by tightening unemployment, which would produce tax revenues, and also legislating an aggressive , which could be paid for the increase in tax revenues, was called the “BruPackage”.

 

These are politically popular issues.

 

An idea that came up on the street was that an economic Czar could be appointed for a city or a region that would control the top up of immigrants. He would be like an Auditor and would have some better information than a politicalized Immigration Department bureaucrat. That is he would consider labour, social and businesses issues at once. He would have to vet and prioritize the many demands from businesses and government for immigrants. These would be various: bottlenecks such as construction, world class skills, corporate demand to move employees, critical services such a medical personal and chronic shortages. He would be at the center of any public discussions in a city to immigrate more, inflate wages instead and whether or not to slow urban sprawl. A city or province could actually have a vote on its economic plan with a Czar able to implement them. The social plan to improve the jobs market with controlling immigration,  and even wage restraint would be advocated and promoted by a very public Czar. A key is he would be properly funded so the program was based on better data and analysis and functioned effectively. A Czar would change immigration from a program that barely gets attention from the leader to a finessed package of best practices.

 

The 17 year business expansion in Canada to 2008 is an example to the world. Our modern, diversified economy managed to avoid inflation that long and the people prospered as a result. It was barely mentioned in Canada while it was happening, and was probably only notice by economists outside of the country. Unions, which represent 30% of the work force in Canada, moderated their wage demands for all those years.

 

It’s interesting to work up some numbers on how much a $12  would cost the nation in inflation. In the first place unemployment from immigration has been depressing the de facto. In cases where the local economy outgrew immigration and the economy came to full employment the number of adults earning below $12 went down to 7%. If you gave these people earning $10 to $12 an average of $1 an hour raise the cost is very low. Of that $1 some 30 cent comes back to the common good in federal and provincial taxes. In addition there’s some savings from the reduction of the number of small businesses that would occur.  Also a minimum wage increase is a transfer within families, from inflation on the better off to the wages of the lowest earner. Actually that transfer would be most the cost but I’ll call it 10 cents on the dollar as the effect is not even. So we are left with a cost of 60 cents. The $1 for 7% of adults is only 0.35% of the total wage bill in society if the average wage is $20. The total wage bill would be $20 average times 100%. Then the wage bill is only half, 50.4%, of the economy so we correct for that. Finally the plan would be to increase  minimum wage to $12 in the growth cities half of the country. So the arithmetic is $1 X .60 X 0.35 X 0.504 X 0.5 for .35% of the nation for 0.053% of the GDP, that’s 1/20 of 1%. That’s $700 million annually in Canada. You get an entire list of social and economic benefits. The tax revenues from tightening the labour markets far exceed this. Different scenarios give you different numbers.

 

Currently in Canada the legislated  minimum wage is low everywhere and raising it is not very popular with politicians. In Canada the average wage is $20 an hour, skilled, unionized and professional workers are doing well and the rich are doing very well but raising minimum wage is fingered as bad economics and thee job killer.

 

Not only would city-by-city immigration improve the big urban centers but it would have an effect on the national economy as well. With the minimum family income at $50,000 and more skilled opportunity you’d encourage internal migration. In recent decades people in Canada have moved on net to the province the headlines said had the brighter economy. People actually moved out of the rich provinces on net at times in the last 35 years because of the unemployment. Net inter-provincial migration toggled from central Ontario, to oil patch Alberta, to British Columbia and back to Ontario.  You can look at the migration figures and see the people flowing to the better economies. Internal migration is sensitive to conditions in the destination cities and has been only in limited numbers in recent decades as opportunity in most destinations cities was compromised by unemployment for a very long time, decades. If you had good conditions most of the time in all the main cities people could just get up and move somewhere. Thirty years ago as much as 1½ % of the national population changed provinces on net every five years so the potential to fix regional disparity by moving to the jobs is there. More openings in skilled labour would increase internal migration as moving for a good job is a strong magnet to move, thee magnet. Internal migration could be large, relocate a lot of people to better locals, but it has been over looked by the policy makers for a long while.

 

Intra-provincial migration is also important and the numbers are even higher than inter-provincial. In particular youths in the hinterland would move to the centers. They do this anyway, for the excitement.

 

In the French speaking province of Quebec you have a case where people’s options to move are limited by the language they speak and the generally soft economy of Quebec. Over looking intra-provincial migration in Quebec has been an extra insensitive government blunder. A main political issue in the French speaking province of Quebec is to be able to work and live in French, this is clear, but has been ignored and forgotten by all political parties in the province including the Parti Quebecois separatists who’s issue is the language. This is as Quebec controls it’s own immigration and it has kept the inflow to it’s main growth city, Montreal, high for decades. The separatist governments in Quebec may thus have the distinction of being particularly out of touch. They took living and working in French, their core value, for granted. This is what politicalizing language has garnered Quebecers so far. That’s something, no.

 

All you ever hear about migration from politicians is the opposite: people should have the opportunity to work where they grew up. What you need to get people to move is some hope, somewhere there’s opportunity. In fact people love to move around. Actually youth are foot loose and move around for the adventure. And in Canada people like to move to the West Coast for the climate, although the government hasn’t exploited this opportunity.

 

I can really get worked up about inter-provincial migration. Circa 2005 Canadians moved to the oil patch in large numbers but otherwise net inter-provincial migration went down to near zero, some 1500 families a year. Zero. People even stopped moving to Vancouver, with its Lotus Land climate all the while the city received 10,000 of foreign immigrants a year. Vancouver has been rated the best city to live in for something like 10 years in a row. In addition poverty in the BC hinterland is higher than the national average. I know that people didn’t move there to improve their lot because it was known that the economy was lack luster, not like the oil patch, so why bother. It did have substantial job growth all along but this was overwhelmed by the foreign immigration. So the potential of jobs was mishandled by Ottawa in the case of Vancouver rather badly. These government people, they should be given 300 year jail sentences for crimes against the national economy.

 

Another aspect of city wise upward growth is low wage businesses would relocate elsewhere. They could relocate to low wage regions. Moving jobs out of expensive, growth cities is a bonnie idea. This includes services as well as manufacturing. At the present the depressed regions have to compete with the low wage immigration labour of the dynamic cities and don’t have much of a chance.

 

A variation on the idea of moving low wage businesses would be to relocate such overseas, to poor countries. The transfer of labour intense businesses to poor countries has been going on for a long time, of course. Sometimes it’s regarded as a job killer but in fact if you are a growth city it’s a solution not a problem. It gives export potential to poor countries where a perpetual bottleneck is imports. The developing countries have to import just about everything and thus are prime candidates for trade growth. Thus an alternative to immigration is trade and this will be more prominent going forward in the 21^st Century. Exporting jobs to the homes of foreigners rather than dragging them to a far off land for bad jobs makes sense. Moving jobs from rich cities to poor countries is a win/win situation. 

 

Productivity at the bottom of industry is not good and forcing wages up would be a discipline for improving it just as high union wages are. At the bottom any entrepreneur that can pay  is in business currently. If wages were $12 or so you’d also have to be efficient and be in demand to be in business. Increases in productivity would partially offset the inflationary aspect of higher wages. A main mechanism here is consolidation. Many small business sectors are characterized by too, too many small shops. Consolidating them would help make them more efficient of capital, rent, taxes and inventory, as well as labour. They’d be busier basically. This has somehow been forgotten. Wal-Mart is a famous example of staying profitable by staying busy. Excess competition is not a good idea.  In big business only the top three or four organizations in a field are considered prime investments but small business is very fragmented at this time. Consolidation of small business would make the remaining establishments more profitable and better able to pay a basic wage at once. This is technically mergers and acquisitions.

 

There are other advantages to better wages at the bottom. Low wages have contoured the entire way business is done in this country and reversing this mechanism could be exploited for social advantages. Marginally useful items, items people want only at a low price, would simply be done without. The frivolous goods and services on offer and endless choice available would undergo some refinement. Low unemployment and rising wages at the bottom would test the real adult participation level, put less pressure on youth to warehouse themselves in school, improve labour relations (which are sliding backwards these days) and in particular encourage sweet heart flexible employment deals with employers, and improve the market for the disabled.  There would be a tendency for more small businesses to offer benefits. It’d lead to higher wages at the next level up from the bottom. This would be semi-skilled jobs, supervisors and the rough jobs at small businesses. The new corporate method of out sourcing, franchising and using part time workers would be reduced. People with issues, say women with a common law relation gone bad, would have more options. You could have the Bank of Canada encourage growth, growth in good jobs by low interest rates, while the local Czar would edge the legislated minimum wage up to cut the bottom and create a little unemployment. It would all be an experiment; I don’t know how far you could go. Better wages at the bottom would be popular because of all of this.

 

People will insist the logic of immigration must actually work and will point to the past and to specific successful areas. One such area is agricultural workers. Agricultural workers may be the main exception to the problems with immigrant workers. To get people to leave their homes for a seasonal job requires a high wage and this is out of the league of small family farms. Cheap food and the rural culture and economy will be the benefits of third world workers for who it pays to fly in for the season. This is difficult to argue against. It’s actually segregating the labour force – by the mechanism of the awkwardness of leaving your urban home to work on a farm.

 

Here’s how economic growth without immigration would save the government money, although it’s not a lot. Growth without immigration puts pressure on the worst businesses and these eventually contract or go bankrupt, as I said. The average wage at these worst businesses becomes the “average cut”. When there’s economic growth there’s a range of jobs created which compensate for the jobs losses so there’d be a wage you could term “average growth”. The entire market change would be a price increase at the bottom and a corresponding reduction in demand. The savings to the government side of growth without immigration is the subsidy to average cut jobs minus the subsidy to average growth positions, which might be tax neutral anyway. That’s the opportunity cost of immigration to the government; it’s not net taxes of immigrant workers minus net social benefits.

 

The birth rate is now below replacement and in the future western countries economies could shrink. (The exception is the USA where birth rates are higher.) If you had upward growth in jobs and productivity increases you could have increasing per capita income and full employment but a shrinking economy. There’d be more contracting sectors than there is now. Rich investors might have to look overseas for the real growth opportunities. Economists are saying a shrinking country will be a big challenge but it may be simpler than dealing with unemployment has been. This is typically what people are talking about when they say “a sustainable economy”, although they don’t actually know it.

 

The alternative to immigration is just to inflate, inflate to a high price economy which would stop economic growth. The alternate to immigration is more frequent business cycles. This is not in the literature, not generally mentioned in immigration reform circles. France is an example of a high cost jurisdiction that doesn’t have much growth as a result. This idea of inflating to slow growth was considered by the participating public, but they eventually embraced immigration at a more judicious pace.

 

In the 1950s the political emphasis was on developing the nanny programs in Canada. In the 1960s Trudeau got into office and social progress became equated with deficit spending and society went backwards for 20 years. People then became inured to the backward running of the economy. As we go forward its make sense that the focus return to real social issues such as more widely available benefits and private pensions. Right now proper pensions are a taboo subject socially as so many people don’t have them.

 

I describe myself as pro-immigration in spirit. A city could always just grow upward as Hong Kong has but if there are fair wages around you could have some immigration.  I personally don’t insist that, and wouldn’t know if, zero population growth would work well in Western tiger cities. If there’s reasonable jobs going unfilled at the bottom that is the signal for immigration. Having people come here from dirt poor countries and integrate into our middle class is something to be proud of. Toronto’s high growth rate means there is some room for limited international migration. In conversation people quickly dismiss me as “anti-immigrant” but I’m not, I’m pro-immigrant but my bias is there should be good jobs. I am, however, anti-politician.

 

The city-by-city economic progress plan is my finesse point on the idea of upward growth and the policy I champion. It would allow experimentation with all demographic and variation in growth at once. The city-by-city policy is gradual and would sell. You have to get the public, the elected officials and the Bank of Canada on board. The city-by-city program allows growth to continue and specifically outside the lead cities in the regions. It’d allow for the continuation of immigration to the main cities. It’d eventually synchronize all the cities in the country economically.  The idea of improving low wages with the business cycle alone may not even work because of inflation spikes. Just-In-Time Immigration: It’s practical, synergetic and political. Every city could actual vote on what they should do. They call the city-by-city idea the Bruce Trick on the street. (It’s a pun, it also refers to No. 4’s support for me.)

 

A constant social attitude I find is resentment of people on welfare. Welfare is partly due to unemployment but there’s a broad concern about the indolent. I argue running low unemployment would put the squeeze on the welfare program. It would produce better opportunity at the bottom and encourage people in difficult circumstances to take the work option. At the same time it’d make employers more tolerant of and interested in people with some disability, which typically welfare recipients have. In fact small businesses will cater to people with problems because they will stay with the business. There’s really not much else you can do about welfare; you can’t really legislate the indolent back to work without scapegoating the disadvantaged. In Ontario statistics show welfare goes a way down at the business cycle peak. This even includes single mothers on welfare as they actually prefer an entry level job generally to a very mean welfare existence. So you have the possibility of reducing the whole welfare program to something affordable to the country by managing the labour force. In the deep recession of the 1990s welfare went from $1.5 billion to $6 billion in Ontario and was a major cause of the awful provincial deficit. However aggressive immigration kept it up at a high level for years. People with troubles became trapped there. It’s enough to make you to “cry the beloved country.”

 

Prosperous cities should lead the country in social conditions, growth is translatable into higher wages and an alternative to immigration is trade with the Third World. Improved conditions at the bottom would cause wages, profits, productivity, government costs and taxes all to head in the right direction at once. The cost in inflation would be mitigated, actually completely covered if you got more people in the labor force. To get society to be civil and act rationally you have to have prosperity but this seems to be forgotten.

 

 

The Old Model of Economic Growth

 

Immigration to Canada was always thought to be a growth strategy for a small country. The idea of growth was to produce economies of scale and self sufficiency but many small countries have reached high standards of living without these. This would include the Scandinavia countries, Switzerland, the four Asian tigers and Israel. However in recent decades Canada played a relatively diminishing role in the world economy and good growth was more and more difficult to come by due to ever tougher international competition. Moreover with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with America and Mexico and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) reducing trade barriers world wide the small domestic market of Canada is simply no longer an issue. Growth has always been the target of governments and originally this did mean to better industries. Thirty-five years of unemployment later this was forgotten. Instead of higher per capita incomes growth was now anemic and in particular skewed to jobs without a pension plan. This is actually an erosion of social order, that’s what growth has been doing. However, economists, governments and Central Banks remain focused on growth even in immigration run countries. It’s actually backward thinking, or lack of thinking.

 

 

Labour Shortages Reports

 

There is always someone complaining of labour shortages. These complaints have to be  vetted as they maybe about price, training or simple bureaucratic. There is always background unemployment, explained away as people between jobs, so similarly there’ll be some background level of unfilled positions, employers between workers, possibly 3% of jobs. Worker shortages is thus a grey area to begin with. Employers will spend time shopping for the right person at the right price as well and especially as ideal candidates are always hard to find. Some small, marginal employers will not be able to pay the going rate. Business men have become spoiled by decades of unemployment and are used to having the competition custom train staff for them so will say there’s a shortage. There is a constant churn in the labour force so any mismatch is in fact not just between the idle workers and the available positions but the entire local work force. Still, in small towns and the regions a specific skill may be extremely hard to find.

 

There are these reports of labour shortages. Even in deep recessions there’ll be this reported mismatch between workers and available jobs. In a deep recession the media will be cautioning with the bright spot that there are still labour shortages, mismatches. However the figures are always reported as an isolated statistics and described as a serious problem where as in fact there are some ins and outs to it. The surveys of shortages are funded by government and by business themselves so they will be sympathetic to employers. Obviously business owners and business managers will complain how hard done by they are. When business people tell smalltime politicians they are facing labour shortages these politicians will be amazed, simply thinking “how could there be jobs going unfilled”. In addition these reports appear in the newspaper and some of the public will jump to the conclusion there is a general shortage of skilled workers for good paying jobs. This is common enough. It’s all more “jobitis”.

 

Shortages and the resultant price increase are actually a signal to train; they are indications of a properly functioning labour market. It’s supply and demand, something that is rarely mentioned. Any shortage large enough to be noticed by a central government is large enough to mean more training is necessary somewhere.

 

Shortages are more of a problem if they are in areas that are bottlenecks to the economy, such as construction.

 

I noticed the surveys of employers are actually quite sensitive and reports of shortages appear in the newspaper before reports of inflation of wages. This should be useful.       

 

 

Free Movement of Labour

 

The Canadian immigration scene contains a specific lesson for free marketers. And that’s what an open border would look like. This observation was pointed out to me on the street.

 

The idea of an open border is that it would enhance the efficiency of world labour markets. It has some advocates including the editors at the Wall Street Journal and it’s implicit in the EU’s common market. Now, the Canadian immigration stream is relatively large and significantly professional people. However immigrants arrive in Canada, there’s no real shortage for their skills, and they can’t compete with the indigenous as their language skills, specific technical backgrounds and business experience and standards are all considered suspect. The skilled immigrants wind up taking menial jobs, driving taxi. This floods the labour market at the bottom which is already soft. The third world immigrants don’t return home because of the bad situations there. That’s what happens. So in Canada you have this example of what an actual open border would function like.

 

On the street in the mind meld they commented on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial position on this and pointed out it was probably editor, singular.

 

Also on the street they pointed out free labour movements have nothing to do with labour productivity. Labour productivity comes from skills and mechanization; the extra bodies from free movement just adjust the price. Free labour market advocates are gung-ho about that, eh. Keeping a country’s skilled market in higher value jobs should always be part of policy.

 

Very early on in Revolt I they decided the nation state was dominant, that was part of the folk economics of the time. Within the nation the following are shared in common: currency, interest rates, the labour market, free migration, the nanny programs including simulative deficits, history – which is the summary of the level of development of a county – and even the army. The free market operates within these boundaries, the nation state, and the arguments that the whole world is one big free market are bizarre. How the free market operates in the nation state alone is basically unknowable, is too complex to be predictable. The international freedom of movement arguments go like this: Free markets, harrrrumphhh. Entrepreneurs, ahem.

 

 

Dependency in the Nanny State

 

The status quo of the nanny state isn’t very controversial with the public. Basically it’s Group insurance. It’s comprehensive these days and it’s high quality insurance so it’s expensive.  For the most part the middle class insures family. Family is only close family as well. Close family is pretty extensive in a life time if you think about it: the parents, the grandparents, the spouse, the children, the grandchildren, the siblings and sometimes the sibling’s children and ditto to all this on the in-laws side. That’s not quite the nuclear family. The nanny state insures family and it insures oneself, as something can happen to you at any time. It insures you not only from the free market but from the vagaries of life in general, the government and even history. The nanny state is insurance and as with insurance you don’t really every want to collect. The better off are asked to pay for the worst off however, they are asked to tithe. The rich pay for the whole system, from which they profit handsomely. The taxes to pay for all the social programs are accepted, they are intrusive but not theft for the most part. This is what people think and why change would be difficult. It’s enlightened self-interest. The idea “smaller government” that is bandied about sometimes has to compete with all that.

 

Using the “accounting device” that wage earners are responsible for the taxes, “the load”, you can do some calculations about the tax burden. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a left wing Ottawa based think tank, has some estimates of total taxes so data is available. Average wage in Canada is $20.50 an hour and taxes are 36% in the middle for a $7.38 an hour tax charge. De facto minimum wage in Canada is about $9 an hour and taxes are 32% for $2.88 an hour tax load. The difference from the tax on the average wage is $4.50 an hour and this is essentially the subsidy as average wage is presumably a wash tax and benefit wise. That’s $9,360 a year state subsidy for the worst off worker. That’s the status quo at this time. To be creative some well off professional, somewhere, is paying $4.50 an hour for a low wage worker. A $9,360 subsidy per worker is rather progressive already. The standard of living of a $9 an hour worker is actually $13.50 an hour when you add in the nanny state benefits. It turns out that cheap labour is not cheap. In Canada, in most the Western countries, the fix is already in, people have voted heavily for subsidies for the worst off. This means that a wage increase at the bottom would have the effect of making wages not so inequitable. As I calculated before a $12 minimum wage for a two income family would have a de facto life style of $64,000.

 

At that rate it behoves you to look at what you are getting. You don’t want the economy just to be producing cheap and cheerful goods for $64,000. And jobs are the other side to proper social order so it also behoves you to look at the jobs market as well. It’s already part of the system; you just have to manage it.

 

(The Canadian Centre for Policies Alternatives tax data is “family income for economic families” but serves as a proxy for hourly wages because taxes are nearly flat anyway. Wages are about 75% of income so interest, pension and government transfers make up 25%. This means my calculations based on wages are not so accurate but they do give an indication of the subsidy of . The calculation of the tax load on wages gives a very simple and clear indication of the problem. It’s not good enough for economists but people can do it themselves with a calculator.)

 

America figures would be similar. America’s total taxes are similar to Canada’s. Their total tax load as a percent of the GDP is 36% while ours is 40%.  

 

Economists are generally unclear about the tax load. Sometimes economists do calculations of the cost of the nanny programs for immigrants but this leaves out the fact

the calculations of the subsidy of the bottom earners have to include benefits from the non-nanny government spending including such responsibilities as the police, the army and the interest payments on the national debt. This idea of using worker wages as the reference comes from the expression “the tax load”, responsibility for government spending, which came up in the first revolt. The subsidy of  workers is rarely mentioned and calculation of this requires assumptions and averages by economists and so will be necessarily somewhat cooked. So my back-of-the-envelop calculations are actually not bad figuring.

 

The subsidy to the jobs created at the bottom being $9,360 is something like welfare. Once the population attuned to the large subsidy at the very bottom in Revolt II the tax antipathy infected these jobs.

 

Aggressive immigration suppresses wages at the bottom $2 an hour, we can see from the cities at full employment, say the province of Alberta, and this amounts to a “tax”. Added to the other taxes you’ll find workers at the very bottom are the most heavily taxed workers in the system. Add the take home portion of the $2 to the 32% tax of workers making $9 an hour and you get their total tax is 47%. Immigration is only said to have “short term costs” by economists but in fact people on  wind up as the most heavily taxed by the process. It took a downsized Computer Analyst to figure this out, pay a little attention to the arithmetic of the nanny state tax.  

 

On the street in the revolt they changed my language of the suppression of  as an onerous tax to a theft, a heist. It’s like a $4,000 annual heist from the worst off workers. This is from people that often have disabilities, health issues or lack human capital. It’s from the women in the family, who are not pleased. That’s the morality out there.

 

It’s interesting to calculate the life time subsidy of a low wage job. Economists typically argue immigrants and poor people tend to earn more the longer they have been working rather than focusing on the low wage jobs. When a McLabor job is created in the economy would tend stay there permanently in one form or another without upward growth actually happening to get rid of it. So the faces may change but the jobs remains. Using this idea and the idea that the tax load is carried by workers you can compute the subsidy for the worst jobs over the span of a life time, which at the bottom would be 40 years. The arithmetic is 40 years times the $9,360 for $374,400.

 

In the hamburger trade itself it’s interesting what the $374,400 pays for. It’s the freedom of choice between McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King which are look-a-like products. Every neighborhood has many fast food outlets these days as the sector is over invested, not busy and inefficient. With higher wages and thus fewer outlets you’d still have your fast food burger.

 

There’s an old saying that a lot of people that got rich did so on someone’s back, by paying their workers poorly. In the nanny state they get rich by avoiding taxes by employing tax dependants. Something like Wal-Mart, while efficient, has 100,000s of low wage employees and is one major mining project carting off untold riches in tax responsibilities for the owners.  I haven’t done any back-of-the-envelope arithmetic for Wal Mart operations but it’d be something. The calculation, to be fair, would be on Wal Mart’s average wage rather than entry level wage.

 

It’s of interest and a social problem that the nanny state is taken by granted by people, economists and politicians alike, and there is scant attention paid to the fact low wage jobs are heavily subsidized. Very unfortunately economists have not provided anybody with good figures. The ideas that taxes are a load on workers, and that upward growth would eliminate  jobs is clearer thinking on the issue.

 

The subsidy at the bottom is large and if you contracted the bottom the staff from worst businesses that are lost move down the street to average growth jobs. The savings is average-cut to average-growth. In Canada the bottom is visibly awful and large cuts could be made but this would get more difficult as the bottom improved. There are some 3.2 million Canadians earning $12 an hour or less (2007) so eliminating three hundred thousand of these would seem a possibility. You might cut a billion dollars in annual government subsidy, the savings are not that large.

 

Upward growth is thee pat idea for fixing the labour markets however it is not the most lucrative one. There are actually more savings in reducing official unemployment, getting the hidden unemployed back into the labour force, and getting internal migration back on the front burner.

 

 

The Economic Instability all around Us

 

Capitalism is a creative destructive process. There are always declining sectors and expanding sectors. Recently there’s been a lot of down sizing of large corporations and then people getting jobs elsewhere. Markets are changing: big businesses are outsourcing to avoid high wages, small businesses are moving in on generic unionized product lines and foreign competition is growing. The rise of the Japan and the third world has produced economic change, a maelstrom, and this will double as China emerges. Mostly everyone is threatened directly or indirectly. In the modern situation half society has post secondary training, there is an oversupply of formally educated people, many people’s jobs are only soft skills and you can become obsolete suddenly. Times are changing and good paying, secure jobs, jobs for life, are hard to come by. “The job worry” is everywhere. However with unskilled and skilled immigrants flooding into the big cities the problem of losing a job has been aggravated. The tailoring of the Canadian immigration system to people with post-graduate degrees is a broadside at a stressed out Canadian middle class. At this time broad economic progress has been missing for 35 years in this country, taking a back seat to simply coming to full employment. It’s considerably political backwardness as immigration dominated the Canadian economy for decades.

 

 

The USA and Immigration

 

It’s always been obvious to anyone with their feet on the ground that the immigration affected wages at the bottom in the USA. This is as immigration is largely family class and typically unskilled. However, setting the wage level for the poorest hasn’t ever been treated as a responsibility of government. In the USA Congress has been cavalier about this and bashed the proletariat and specifically Blacks for decades. It’s not racism; it’s exploitation –which is human.  This was encouraged by the world’s foremost economists, most of them who are residents of the USA, who sniffed at resentment of immigration by workers. Their slogans about the workings of capitalism and society were comprehensive: It’s freedom, economics and humanitarianism. The USA is proud of its democratic tradition and greatness but it has second rate social programs and improving them is too costly because of  the 10’s of millions of people earning $6, $7 and $8 an hour; it has is just too many mouths to feed. It has a population problem. It’s a mind altering situation that affects thinking. It tends to produce self-righteousness and the demand the poor take responsibility, responsibility for capitalism. In the USA they rely on the free market, have less in the way of social programs than the rest of the West but bombed the worst off’s markets with immigration. Low wages, unemployment and hidden unemployment are so pervasive in the USA that almost every family must be touched directly.  Central planning the American economy with immigration by Congress has had perverse effects, including keeping the poor Blacks down.

 

In April of 2007 President George Bush Jr. introduced legislation to control illegal immigration in the USA. This is something that is going to have to be done. To date Congress has turned a blind eye to illegals and this makes them their baby, quasi-illegal in fact. Congress has supported illegals for decades, who are you going to call? The figure being mentioned was there were maybe 12 million illegal immigrants in the US, 7 million workers, so there were lots of discussions in the media. There was pro-illegal immigrant slogans circulating that made no more sense than the other slogans I went over. The basic one was there was a supply of jobs that Americans didn’t want. That was the economics of it they said, a supply. The actual economics of supply and demand is the price at the bottom would go up in the absence of illegal immigrants. This calling the low paying employers a “supply” is semantics, befuddling the situation with a word. On the street in Toronto they said “the supply” is the 10’s of millions earning low wages. There’s the notion that you can have a neatly segregated work force based on the language skills and qualifications of illegal immigrants. In fact the illegals, the legals and the indigenous co-mingle. At the bottom there are the weak and the disabled, the American under-classes and actually family now days. A segregated business would have a cost advantage and out-compete a non-segregated one, logic dictates. It wouldn’t be socially acceptable to exploit an immigration class either. Not withstanding all that unions, leftists and churches took to the streets to support the illegal immigrants. There was a movement in Congress to grant an amnesty to the 12 million without mention of the astronomical cost to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security this would entail. So in the end it was a muddle as usual, zero proper thought, arithmetic and logic, in my lingo.

 

In the USA they have chain migration of family class immigrants which lets in people without much education or economic profile. And they have substantial illegal immigration which may eventually get an amnesty but is also rather uneducated including in English. The concern is they are building a third underclass of Hispanics the same as there is very persistent backwardness with Blacks and aboriginals. The standard in society is high school education and by law you have to stay in school until age 16 so requiring minimal education of immigrants is perfectly normal. The role of under-classes is to be the working class in society, do the basic jobs, but it is a sad situation.

 

The politicians all think they are finessing the running of the economy with immigration, using the most recent studies as guides. They then finesse the vote. The National Academy of Sciences in America, no less, did a study of immigration that acknowledged immigration suppressed wages but calculated it was only 3% nationally, not that significantly. So immigration remained political. My own figuring was immigration affected  in the main destination cities and Canadian data was the de facto minimum wage would go up $2 an hour in a tight economy. That works out as a surtax of 25% on the worst off workers.  So the National Academy of Science itself eventually help lead to the “white riots” I report. It’s a modern story. On the street in Canada the voices said “NAS was destroyed”.

 

In the United States there was the idea that illegals are future Democrat voters. So there are votes in granting them amnesty. Of course illegals are a problem for legal immigrants who want to get family members in.  However votes are hard to come by so the political pie can be divided and then re-divided in Congress. 

 

Here’s some figures on how the USA could benefit from getting it’s labour force tightened.

 

____________Financial Benefits of Fuller Employment in USA

 

_____________Labour Force Level in Best USA Cities: 2005 Benchmarks

 

City­­_______________Official_________Adults in_______Estimated_______Age

________________Unemployment____Labour Force__Real Unemployment__65+

__________________Percent__________Percent_________Percent____Unemployment

____________________________________________________________Adjustment

 

Madison_____________3.6____________74.9___________(same)_____(-2.9)

Des Moines­­­­__________4.2____________74.3___________(same)______(-1.9) Minneapolis__________5.3____________74.6___________(same)______(-3.1)

 

Weighted average age adjusted participation is 71.67% *

 

 

 Real Unemployment Based on 71.7% in Labour Force of Best Cities 2005

­­­­­_______________________USA May 2009

 

___________________Official_________Adults in_______Estimated

________________Unemployment____Labour Force__Real Unemployment

 

USA_________________9.7%______________65.0%________20.0%  

 

Just to repeat a little the issue is the gray area of people marginally attached to the economy. These are people who are not currently working but might like a job. They are not considered unemployed by statisticians as they say they are not looking for work during the government survey. The American Bureau of Labor Statistics tries to measure this group with a telephone survey and comes up with the figure of 4% nationally. This is in contrast to my estimate from the actual track record of cities at full employment, an alternate analytical device, which puts it at 10.3% in 2010. The government surveys are a telephone interview which is to say the answers are spur of the moment. People drop out of the labour force and answer the poll that they are fine for now but over a period of years, long term, they will return to work if possible. The do this directly with an improving economy and labour market, it happens automatically. The telephone surveys are not adequate to guide national economic policy by. My 71.7% benchmark participation rate is consistent in best cities across the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which is unusual and useful statistical result. (tbd—daate2)

 

In addition the official unemployment can be corrected for involuntary part time workers (1.7% equivalent) and involuntary part time self employed (0.7%). These are from the Canadian situation which is similar but has better statistics. The real unemployment in USA as of 2010 is thus 22.4%. The unemployment might be reduced from that high figure to 10.0%, the inflation point (NAIRU) with the different real unemployment numbers. The aging population is going to take another hit of 5% by the time this could happen so the increase in people working would be 7.4%. In an economy of $14.3 trillion this is $1.06 trillion, the federal and state tax share of which would be $297 billion a year.

 

If people became public spirited, embraced economic growth over aggressive wage increases such that inflation is cooled and the real national unemployment then went down to 5.0% the tax windfall would be $496 billion a year. In Canada you have such a public spirit and the economic expansion went on 17 years to 2008. American is in crisis, there’s wage restraint already, and some community cohesiveness could glide the country back to economic stability.

 

*These benchmark cities have slightly fewer people age 65 and over so the labour force level has to be adjusted downward to 72% from their nominal 74%.

 

Over the long haul and throughout the Western immigration countries getting disgruntled workers back into the labour force instead of immigrating would be a $5 trillion proposition. That’s what bubbled up when I drilled down into politician and economist’s ineptitude about people working in a soft labour market. It’s about half the cost that’d it’d take the Western world to convert to green energy. The politicians are about to heist that amount by increasing immigration to meet the labour shortages from the aging population, to make a multi-terra buck heist. With the 2008 great recession in the world immigration is down but if and when there’s a recovery the population will be aging and there will be a clamor for immigration. Governments will go back to immigrating and the result is that the hidden unemployment will remain the same. This is a heist and would be co-sponsored by economists.

 

The $5 trillion figure of mine dwarfs Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway or Bill Gates’ Microsoft, they said I should mention.

 

The USA has real unemployment of over 20% and maybe 20% of the jobs are very low wages. On the street they characterized the American elite as thinking the USA had “a Great Economy”. It’s a fantasy, pretty much. It’s embraced by both the political left wing and right wing.  It’s a historical force, this idea of “a Great Economy”.

 

 

And the World

 

Thirty years ago Germany had a strong economy with labour shortages and so they imported 2.5 million Turkish guest workers. Then the world economy slowed, unemployment built up in Germany, and they cut out immigration. In Germany they didn’t send the guest workers back to Turkey although they didn’t offer them citizenship either. More recently the Chancellor of that era has been in the news as saying letting in the Turks was all a big mistake. Then there was the formation of the EU, which allowed any one to move to another member country, the reunion with East Germany, an aggressive program of accepting persons of Germany ancestry from East Europe and finally an eastward expansion of the EU. In Germany there’ll be this five way squeeze on job creation at the bottom. The vaunted German order was spent by a gang of guys at the top. Yet the world press calls the German people’s negative reaction to immigration xenophobia.

 

The EU has expanded eastward to include some poor countries which will now produce emigrants as people are free to move. On the street they mention to me the problem will be mitigated by the fact there is little economic growth in western Europe to attract these foreigners. The rich EU countries will have to restrict social benefits, welfare, from foreigners as the mechanism to protect themselves. The rich EU countries have been rotten with unemployment and hidden unemployment for a long time.

 

Journalists are all yakking about the fact that European birth rate is below replacement but at this time there’s unemployment. There’s low birth rate in Europe and the population will decline in the future, however there’s been a generation of bad unemployment in the EU which meant difficulties for young people forming families and the low birth rate would reflect this, be economic in part. The demographic figures I read is the EU population will decline and possibly you’ll have to import some labour. Europe is already partly immigrant so that would not be a change. In the non-English and non-French countries you’ll have the problem of finding people who speak the language. However in one of these other language speaking countries you’ll always have businesses at the bottom that can tolerate very limited language skills. Immigrants will work there at first, learn the language, and then move to better jobs. It’d be simple.

 

The EU has expanded to include quite poor countries. The free movement of people is argued as a market mechanism but there’s no expert understanding of how this would work. It’s swaggering by the leaders whom concern for the worst off in their own country is an abstraction at best. The swaggering is pseudo deep thinking, which is common enough. (Perhaps you know someone that is prone to that.) How the EU will work out is unknown, it’s an experiment. The interpretation on the street in Canada was the popularity of the European Union had to do with becoming a world power rather than any actual economics.  

 

In Australia the immigration ghettoes, the McLabor establishments, were the target of anti-immigrant types we hear but these critics were denounced as blaming hard working immigrants, racism. Australia has a lot of hidden unemployment. The immigrant discussion in Australia will be on going, I can tell that from here in Canada.

 

The USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand; the English speaking immigration countries, all have national participation rates at the same level as Canada, which is to say low compared to the best cities. So my formula of first improving the cities, then encouraging migration to cities and finally contracting the bottom of the economy at the expense of aggressive immigration applies to them all. They all have the supporting the aging population problem as well and, except for the USA, a declining population expectation. All these countries have been immigrating at the expense of social and economic progress, of clearing up the bottom.

 

Economists have always used the official unemployment figure as thee measure of the labour markets as I say. Below is the tabulation of the second official figure, the employment rate, for the entire Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – the developed countries. The employment rate varies radically. The world over economists are mute on this. Little Iceland is the best performer by far and has 18% more adults working than the USA. Iceland has about the same number of older people as the USA, some 11% are 65 or older – older people being the major adjustment to these figures.

 

OECD Employment Rates 2006

Percentage of people working

of age 15 to 64

 

Country		Country		Country
Australia	72.2	Hungary	57.3	Norway	75.2
Austria	70.2	Iceland	85.3	Poland	54.5
Belgium	60.4	Ireland	68.1	Portugal	67.7
Canada	72.9	Italy	58.4	Slovak Rep.	59.4
Czech Rep.	65.3	Japan	70	Spain	65.7
Denmark	76.9	Korea	63.8	Sweden	74.5
Finland	68.9	Luxembour	--	Switzerland	77.9
France	62.3	Mexico	61	Turkey	45.9
Germany	67.2	Netherlands	72.4	UK	72.5
Greece	61.0	New Zealand	75.2	USA	72
				Israel	50.9

 

 

 

Going forward 10 or 20 years the unemployment and hidden unemployment could clear up in the Western world in general if the governments don’t insist people don’t want to work and immigrate heavily.

 

 

Absolute Size of the Canadian Immigration Program

 

The life income, including pension benefits, of an average Canadian worker these days is maybe a million and a half dollars. As the average immigrant’s age is 30 and immigration has been skewed to professionals and skilled workers the million and a half dollars would be about right for immigrants. The description of securing the right to immigrate as a lottery win is apt. There are currently 255,000 immigrants annually to Canada and as they eventually nearly all have to work you are looking at a government program who’s life cycle expectation is a $382 billion per year, that’s the annual commitment the government makes. This is more than the federal government’s entire annual budget of $240 billion. The Canadian immigration program has nothing to do with economics, nothing to do with the political vote; it has nothing to do with anything Canada is about but it has reached this scale. It’s popular, off book spending. Let’s be generous. It’s sanctimony and pidgin economics. In Canada changing the quota is an administrative chore as there’s no politically sensitive extended family reunification yet it seems to be an insurmountable problem. On the street there was a diminutive voice in the mind meld when I thought about all this: “They are a little bit political.”

 

 

The $382 billion has a constituency. The citizens like government, they like power and they like spending other people’s money. Canada’s immigration was expanded to include people from every country of the world and this is touted as an achievement. On the street they characterized the sentiment as “saving” people. 

 

In one of my letters to the Immigration Department they thanked me for my opinions but stated their program is not that big anyway; only a fraction of a percent of the national population per year so immigration is not changing Canada.

 

In Parliament this immigrant spending is referred to in revered tones as “non-partisan”. That’s at trillions of dollars. Pray, “let us spend”.

 

The Immigration Minister has typically been some near non-entity plucked from a small law practice or a seat on some city council somewhere and thrust into the position of running the Canadian economy, being the Generalissimo of the Canadian economy. As Generalissimo the Immigration Minister is actually dominant over the Bank of Canada, which has been maximizing growth, and the Finance Department, which has been running stimulative deficits generally. And they are guided by such sage wisdom as public polls typically showing Canadians believe immigration benefits the country socially, economically and culturally, although none of that has any meaning to anyone. So the program becomes a free lunch and 100,000; 200,000; 250,000 are admitted annually. All the Immigration Minister has to do is set a quota and he/she considers that industrial clusters will materialize on the ground. On the street they commented “Canada was going to out compete the USA and the world with a form.”

 

Canada’s main contribution to the less well off of the world has been to absorb some millions in immigration, for what that is worth. This has been extremely expensive. The USA’s main contribution, by contrast, has been to maintain a military to keep world peace, also at astronomical cost.

 

 

Those Awful Deficits and Immigration

 

In recessions in Canada but also in the USA the governments stimulate the economy with deficit spending, as per Keynesian economic theory, but they also keep immigration up. I call it Keynesian immigration. Technically they accelerate the economic growth to absorb immigrants. When I had this thought in the mind meld I heard back “that is half of macro economics” as aggregate spending is a central part of macro economics. It’s actually a national economic strategy and in Canada and the USA has been so for about four decades. (tbd—daate2)

 

I might also mention that government stimulation of the economy doesn’t produce jobs efficiently. I looked up the record and found that after the 1990-91 recession was over the government spending per job created averaged $168,000 for several years. It doesn’t make sense and economists are entirely mute on the issue.

 

When there is deficit spending the people actually get something for their money. I thought about this and thought informally you could say the cost of deficit job creation is the interest on the borrowed money. As the sums are huge and the money won’t be paid back for ages this becomes another monster cost to immigration, a tenth monster cost to add to my list of nine. The need to keep deficits up to deal with the unemployment becomes an eleventh cost to immigration, then. It’s hard to keep track.

 

 

Immigrant Lawyers and the Awful Deficits

 

The case of immigrant consultant lawyers and the deficit is pretty extreme and worth mentioning. For 19 years the average deficit cost of every single job was $168,000. You can multiply this for immigrants as they take the jobs on top of natural growth and multiply it again as they come in two workers families.  And how many immigrant families would a lawyer get through the gate a year? What’s a single immigrant lawyer working with in terms of subsidies over the nineteen year deficit period? Yet immigrant lawyers are the experts of choice by the media to consult and quote when the immigration program is being discussed. Probably no immigrant lawyer in the country has any good idea of the depth of subsidy required by his clients. This is what has been going on too.

 

 

Review

.

Mass immigration is an exceptional thing, to have a large surplus of good jobs -- at the bottom. It really requires the country or at least a city being head and shoulders above the world competition. The immigration countries did have this for a long while, the English speaking New World countries, but have mistakenly thought their economic superiority was a birth right for a some time now. It’s just been considered a given. Inappropriate immigration has been absorbed in low wages and a list of other dysfunctional ways including affecting nearly every government assistance program available. The popular and official enthusiasm for immigration requires obliviousness to social order: nanny state costs, unemployment, wages at the bottom, family and youth opportunity. One of the principles of the nanny state is to give aid to the proletariat but the elite have entirely lost sight of this, of what the state is trying to do with the universal social programs and the nation. Modern immigration has nothing to do with nation building, which is social and economic progress. At this time growth in good jobs is difficult and growth in Canada is below average jobs so economic growth by immigration is socially backwards. Canada and all the Western nations have had trouble funding the existing nanny state and this difficulty has lead to deficits and mass protests already. Going forward the Western countries will out grow their declining population and the politicians will jump on the immigration bandwagon before the labour markets improve. There is no world expert articulating all of this.

 

People are concerned about themselves, family and also about friends. The issue is sharpened by taking the concern to overtime, the long run. That’s enlightened self-interest. This point-of-view on enlightened self-interest took over from the idea of a hierarchy of economic classes in society on the street in the 2000s. So the constituency for fairness and a fair wage at the bottom is broad, pretty much everyone. The standard in society should be working people should be able to afford children; that’s been the case historically in Canada and it’s a moral reference point. It’s one of our values that society should be able to reproduce itself. On the street they commented on this standard by saying “That’s us”. People rather resented that being able to afford family was becoming a lottery. An issue is the inability of the worst off working families to afford food because of the poverty caused by excessive immigration; society drew the line there.

 

There are vast costs in Canada of inappropriate immigration. World wide, one can make out, there’s more of the same. It’s a world scam. It’s the perfect scam as the victims don’t even know they’ve been had. They’ve been told it’s “nation building”.

 

Millions of people have gone over my analysis carefully. They, about 99% of the audience, pretty much accepted it; they did help me polish it up. Years and years with the elite with their head in the sand had lead mass hysteria over immigration, of national soul searching. There has been this social chaos, in part it squeezed in a hole in the system from the third world, the hole being “values”. That’s how important and how confused values can be and that’s how important the integrity of the border is. On the street they called my analysis “my speech” and they didn’t ever quite get over it.

 

As a hobbyist I was able to do a critique of professional economists. I isolated three macro economic effects that were ignored: that participation in the labour force is highly volatile, that the traditional Knowledge Economy connects growth to the bottom, and in modern times growth was anemic and dysfunctional socially. The implications this were four fold: growth should raise , normally the middle class expands at the expense of the bottom, Western countries should slow growth and, finally, raising participation in the Western economies is a multi-trillion dollar idea.  

 

 

Canadian Perestroika

 

It’s possible to capture the economic growth in a city as benefits for the local citizens rather than business. This would be done by having a tighter labour market. It turns out most Canadian cities, most Western cities, have significant hidden unemployment with people doing other things because of a lack of half decent job opportunities. This hidden unemployment goes down with a tighter labour market. This can be arranged by appropriate, timely immigration. That’s all it takes, we know it goes up but we don’t know the limit at this time.

 

In the case of a tighter labour market not only is there more people working, unemployment goes down, but the bottom in particular runs out of bodies and becomes firmer. The de facto minimum wage rises. At that point it’d be possible to legislate a slightly aggressive, a $1.50 extra for $12.50 minimum wage in the Canadian or US context. This is fair as it compensates for the suppression of upward growth from the unemployment from gradual immigration. The immigration and the labour market can be finessed to a city-by-city program, possible with a city economic auditor Czar.

 

An aggressive legislated minimum wage does cost and the cost is some inflation. However the potential increase in the number of people working produces more than enough tax revenues to cover this increase in costs. It’s paid for in a way. And the inflation just compensates immigration anyway, reimburses the people for the suppression of the de facto minimum wage. It’s not quiet a social program. The deal that became popular is to go with the legislated minimum wage costs because low wages are exploitive and now affect family while the various benefits of improving the bottom of the labour market affect everyone. It’s strategic, cost effective.

 

The effect of a tight labour market and legislated  minimum wage would be to cut off the very bottom. A higher minimum wage would stop growth at the bottom which has the happy effect of skewing job growth to a better average. A better labour market would skew the average job being created up a notch and a marker to watch for is more private sector jobs with pension plans. In addition higher wages at the bottom would cause that entire part of the economy to downsize. In particular mechanisms at work would be citizens simply doing without the cheap and cheerful goods and services produced at the bottom and the rag tag businesses at the bottom consolidating into bigger, busier and more effective outlets. Most Western cities have a bottom heavy economy and this is plan addresses that.

 

The advantages of a tighter labour market and a legislated  minimum wage are several. Tax revenues go up with more people working. Family income goes up as a family member re-enters the labour force. The average job in the city becomes slightly better. Slower growth is ecologically desirable but more realistically it could restraint mega-cities from becoming too large and very expensive. This could be done on a city-by-city basis. A better city labour market would encourage people on welfare to take the work option, provide a place for citizens in the poor regions to move to, be a social net for the loss of a job – including in recessions. A better economy at the bottom would help reduce number of the working poor and ease the problem that low wage earners are heavily subsidized in the nanny state. Individuals in compromised personal situations would have more chance of getting out of their situation. Individual cities could vote on the future of the local economy if it was controlled by a Czar.

 

A tighter labour market and a legislated  minimum wage in your home city is a defense against a turbulent world economy. Going forward in the 21^st Century the emerging economies, China, will be jumping to high tech and there will be a world economic maelstrom. The West should be braced with tight labour markets and economies that are performing well.

 

My plan isn’t a panacea of course but would definitely make a difference. Going forward you could have some good years. I can pencil in some numbers. You could cut the bottom 2% of worst employers, get about 6% more people working in Canada and raise wages at the bottom for 12% of the labour force, maybe a 20% raise. You could get 2% or more of the nation’s population to relocate, move to the jobs. Going forward in Canada there will be one million skilled and professional baby boomers retiring and this will open opportunity for youth. There will be unionized jobs becoming available similarly. There will be more good growth. The Immigration Department could refocus on importing 3^rd world people for working class positions instead of cherry picking the professional jobs, taking them from Canadians. The regions might come to full employment as their labour markets shrink with the aging population. The increase in the number of people working would increase government revenues, enough to pay for the aging society. All in all it’s a comprehensive plan, a restructuring of the Canadian economy. It’s a package. It’s a Canadian Perestroika. It applies to other Western countries as well. It’s my plan, and of course I’m a diagnosed schizophrenic so what you are looking at is a Canadian Rasputin to much of the West.

 

Canadians are living the problem of labour market issues, it’s the elephant in the room in every family and social group, but the Nabobs at the top stand ready to let it fester if left to their own devices.

 

The hysteria over jobs I created isn’t irrational populist anger rather the numbers involved are large and significant and the governments on the wrong side of progress.

 

One of the purposes of this book is to move the discussion of immigration and democracy world wide down the field. So this keeps me hustling. I write my message in plain and simple language, which should sell. I’ll now go on to continue my description of what it’s like when all hell breaks loose in a modern democracy.

 

.

Chapter VI   

 

The New International Revolt

 

 

The start of a New Panic

 

In the beginning of the new panic the city reopened, I reopened and my treatise opened. All this happened not quickly but abruptly.

 

No. 4 volunteered, they located my apartment and convinced my overhead neighbor that she should allow No. 4 to take up residency in her home all in a New York minute. The two of them, No. 4 and the real overhead neighbor, were exposed to my treatise immediately. Instead of blinking and looking away they realized the leverage of it and decided to take action. No. 4 essentially moved in as soon as the panic started and my harassment reignited. I then had a second coming. No. 4 could pattern me from the apartment above after only days of reopening. It’s most likely that she was expert in my case from Revolt I. No. 4 committed herself to years of labour in a quick decision and what ensued was a steely act of will of one person. My status was different now and No. 4 was celebrity stalking from the get go. No. 4 turned the ideas in the treatise into a hit, an illegal mass event. She’s a hero of the revolt and cultural revolution.

 

The second revolt was a second phase really and my treatment picked up where it left off, however for an entirely different reason.  It’s rather amazing that conditions were just so, the logistics, that another stalking of me was possible. As everything was a repeat people knew the score this time including the criminal responsibility of the government. The possibilities ran the gamete from a quick shewing away of No. 4 by the police, a repeat of the 1980s grand event where little actually happened, to even the fall of the government. I assume everybody wanted a different outcome from the first event which was mostly talk. However No. 4 was doing something criminal and unless the theatrics panned out something like before she was taking a chance at doing time in jail. Like those that went before her No. 4 was not in a position of power rather she gained her authority by the co-operation of the population. There was the possibility of No. 4’s stalking of me would be a bust in that the population would take no interest in her. In the event she was wildly popular as the other three stalkers had been. The peculiarity of no witness again was implicit somehow. I point out that the new event was just a continuation of the old process. In particular this was my case as the extensive information the public had on me was brought forward again. This meant my billion dollar legal case came back. 

 

No. 4 turned my treatise on economic policy into contraband which may not have been the thing to do. No. 4 seems to have ignored the fact that this time I started taking notes on a daily basis for a future book, that I could be a whistle blower. I was already very unique and the possibility of a readable book was distinct. She moved in thinking there’d be public enthusiasm for her stalking role as before, police collusion again, a change in government policy but no witnesses and retribution for herself. That’d be a little like all the planets aligning.

 

There was this shift in the purpose of making me a superstar from the first panic. In the first panic I was an experiment and soul of the event. They went all the way with me, as it was new and they probed what would happen. They were all determination. This time the ill treatment of me advertised the economic ideas I championed, which is sort of backhanded. It lent seriousness to the situation and an insistence to pay close attention.  The sadistic abuse of me everywhere in the community would have deflected reflex reaction of criticism of new ideas that people normally have. I was also a co-event in a revolt against the government and a strategic reserve that could topple it politically or legally.

 

The same guy that they persecuted, tormented and experimented on for six years as the symbol of the first revolt came back with a trillion dollar economic strategy for the country so they saw fit to repeat the process. No. 4’s own idea was to dedicate herself to promoting a world revolt by causing the public to persecute the opinion leader. In the event she was extremely successful and shaped the whole revolt. If it wasn’t the same guy as in the stalking of Revolt I the treatise would not have garnered a stalker. If it were published by a professor it certainly would not have. 

 

While the population was pleased to tell me it was the provincial Attorney General David Young that was responsible for leaking my treatise and thus politically vulnerable as he shouldn’t have taken the liberty I don’t think his office’s action was threatening to me. There was nothing personal and confidential in my treatise, getting it popularized was okay by me of course, what was the problem was No. 4 and she came after wards. At most he saw the panic had restarted, that they were opening the old stars, specifically me, and he realized my treatise spoke to the angst so he stepped in at that point. I imagine he knew who I was from the letters from my previous ordeal he had on file. However, on the street they insist his actions were damaging. In fact he actually blew the country “open” and he’s credited for doing so. As a cabinet minister he was in a position to influence the government’s reaction to the panic and also to do something about my situation. In the event the government didn’t do anything but this Attorney General did send one memo about me to the Solicitor General, the offending minister in my police case, but there was no response. He did take a run at his own colleagues with leaks but that is part of the system.

 

 

A New Revolt

 

The new mass process was a continuation of the 1980s one. Most of the philosophy came back holus bolus. This time it was a common sense revolt against the powers that be. It was not a repeat of the all ambitious anthropological study of society intent on producing a third way. All the same they repeated a widespread analysis of how different aspects of government, business and culture were working. The big difference was the change in understanding that youth should get a training in order to do better, to the understanding that there was just a lack of good jobs around. The star system, with its affirmative action, was brought back as a means of case studies. Specifically this time there was a concern with the bottom of the heap. There was a deep concern about better employment opportunities.

 

The first few months were intense and then it cooled and ran on to the 15 month point. It was intense ferment for about 15 months. It went quiescent for a full 12 months, then reactivated and went on, and on – for another 6 ½ years. (Tbd—daate2)

 

 

Constant Harassment in the Mega Village

I will tell my story in some detail. It’s a lesson in how the national theatrics works and how it worked out. It’s a leaf in history and a world record in the mind meld technique. The social conditions for developing a broad mind meld amongst the population with one citizen may not present themselves again for a very long time. I lived in another world for years and this is my report. I remain in the dark as to how the processes worked exactly but the witness aspect of my tale is necessary to confirm the event happened. It should make interesting reading of modern history and is a guide for the next popular revolt.

 

My abuse in the first event was on the pretense I was a bad citizen but in an ambiguous situation so they were going to help. This second time around I simply inherited my former role but with a different rationale. They opened my life and mind and kept a constant stream of derision and harassment on me because of another dedicated stalker. My situation had other similarities to the first time. I was unemployed and at home and this isolated me again. Also they drove me around the bend when I went to sleep as before. I had obtained sleeping pills because I had insomnia, probably because I was exhausted from computer school, but now the deal was I had to drug myself to go to sleep. They insisted on this and would step up the harassment if I wasn’t tranquilized.

 

They communicated back and forth what I had been doing in recent years. They didn’t harass me quite as constantly as the first event. They changed the style of harassment of me some. Mostly I would hear the extremes of what they knew about me. Particularly crosses of two or more incidents. I refer to these extreme bits of harassment as “long calls”. They still harassed me enough to drive me out of my mind at times.

 

An example of these “long calls” is the following story about one day in one of my college computer courses. I was taking a Java programming language course and one time I was asked to describe a feature to the class. I went to the front of the room and did my description, the teaching master thanked me and then I hesitated just a second before I returned to my seat. I was thinking of saying the double use of a specific word in the course material was a “red herring”, it was just a coincidence. And I was going to add one of my little jokes that I had worked up about this being Canada and there was a creel limit for herring. Anyway I didn’t say that but in the panic they noticed and figured out that my little hesitation was about the double use of the one word and also I was going to use one of my jokes. They could catch these bits of behavior of mine, x-ray them. I got reports back on such sightings from my dedicated neighbor for one who would go over the x-ray in some detail.

 

At the two week point in the new outbreak I took a trip downtown on the subway just to sample the noise level. My preoccupation at the time was that the police were colluding with this new, awful persecution of me. I recall getting off the subway and hearing an echo about the police chief. His name was Julian Fantino but in my head I was calling him Dough Fattie. Some how they picked this out and during my walk through the down town they echoed “Dough Fattie” continuously. There did seem to be a general concern at the two week point about where the police where in all of this, possibly because people everywhere were being harassed and the public was uncomfortable with it.

 

When No. 4 moved in and the community wide harassment restarted I anticipated a replay of the 1980s fiasco. My expectation was No. 4’s presence would lead to my further persecution and the police would acquiesce just as before. I immediately wrote letters to the top of all the various government departments concerned and to the tip top of the government as well. I wrote to the chiefs of the three big police departments that had jurisdiction, to all the cabinet members of both the provincial and the federal governments including the police chief’s superior – the Solicitor Generals at both levels of government, also the Attorney General of Ontario, the Justice Minister of Canada, the Mayor, the Premier of the Province and the Prime Minister. I wrote a separate letter to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada detailing the general problem with corruption of the constables across the land as well as the above list of negligent police and government officials that it’d take to further persecute me. I did this all by day five of my new period of virtual incarceration.

 

I got some response. The Supreme Court, who have an interest but who’s jurisdiction is limited to appeals, wrote back immediately to say “they got my letter”, which is a good point. A federal cabinet minister wrote me saying the Justice Minister of Canada had been asked to reply. Within a few weeks the Justice Minister in fact wrote me but bizarrely stated that there was a constitutional problem with my case in that he was also the government’s chief lawyer, the Attorney General, and he would not comment as I might sue the government. At the three week point the problem of being sued was a moot point so the federal government signed on to responsibility to my further persecution early on through the Justice Minister of Canada. The Justice Minister opened the door to a repeat of the widespread abuse and corruption, when the cats away the mice will play.

 

The other reply I got was in response to my letter to the provincial cabinet. This took the form of a brief phone call from a health bureaucrat asking if I had contacted my psychiatrist.

 

That was about it. These are all children I was dealing with, you understand.

 

The thing of it is the Justice Minister’s collusion with my criminal torture forces responsibility up, to the Prime Minister. It takes some doing to incriminate a Prime Minister but a willing cabinet is one way. The Prime Minister apparently wouldn’t listen to the problem of a revolt on the street and his cabinet turned on him.

 

I had been unemployed since early April and was looking to continue my computer studies. I was also thinking of trying to learn some regular office skills as my programming career seemed to have no chance. I thought I might get hired as a bookkeeper and work my way to being an accounting technician. I applied for other menial jobs but would be discouraged by the commentary on the street and from No. 4 when I went for an interview. Essentially they prevented me from working all together. That was the new deal for me. I was going to be reserved for “play”. My wife had no idea what was going on but didn’t complain either. I had some savings and my wife was now a senior level teacher so we were okay financially. Also we took out a six thousand dollar line of credit for me. After a few months what they told me was I was a discouraged worker, that I didn’t need to work like the klatches of middle class wives in the local coffee shops. In any event I didn’t get a menial job for two years.

 

 

Dedicated Stalkers No. 5 and No. 6

 

My wife and I now lived on the seventh floor of an eleven story condominium building in the suburbs or Toronto. I lived on the backside of the building which faces the parking lot which in turn adjoins a high school.  I had been hearing comments from outside since the start of the panic. There was construction work going on on our building and the construction workers took the job of assistant guards of mine. Also the condo residents would comment as they came and went from their cars in the back parking lot. These people that were coming and going always seemed to be able to comment on my stream-of-consciousness as I sat in my apartment as if there were conversations going on both throughout the building and on the street in the traffic that kept everyone attuned to me. That’d be how it worked. Finally there were comments including from young voices from the school yard.

 

One day I heard some particular voices from the school yard. It was a young male and a young female. They went through some introductory theatrics for me. I could also hear them bouncing a basket ball at the same time so that’s how well sounds were carrying. The theatrics was in the usual pidgin, phrases that one had to think about to get the picture. Their topic was themselves and specifically their main concerns as teenagers. This was different than the analysis-in-the-air which was all politics and the economy. This young pair was detailing how the concern of teenagers was attracting nice dates and buying a first car. These two then converged their theatrics to a repetition of the word “spirit” and the phrase “amazing spirit” which I couldn’t quite figure out, it maybe a description of youth or maybe the public revolt.

 

Anyway that was their introduction to me. Shortly this pair was there in the school yard everyday, all day. These, then, were dedicated stalkers No. 5 and No. 6, two teenagers. I referred to them as Le Guy and Le Girl. They both lasted a year – with the cooperation of the school authorities as they seemed to eventually be based inside the high school, out of the elements. So now I had three 24 / 7 stalkers posted around my apartment. No. 4 had these two as disciples. No. 4 was something of a charismatic, although she was probably actually funded by government Employment Insurance.

 

Le Guy and Le Girl were quickly brought up to speed on the invasion of my privacy. They became intense in their study of the minutiae of my daily life and could pattern me precisely from their school building post. What was of great assistance to them was that the condo management gave them the spare key to my apartment and they appeared to make a daily reconnaissance of my place while I was out. To mind meld with me while in the apartment they pretty much had to be able to get into the place to suss out my living terrain. One thing they did early on for sure was to get at my economic notes and verify them. Another thing they did was get hold of all my private diaries. I had about a dozen of these and they were a window on my thoughts and the specific language I used and so were very useful in opening my mind.

 

 

The New 24 / 7 Harassment is Different

 

The intensity of the harassment of me in this new phase was less than in the 1980s as I said. Nevertheless it was still constant and very disturbing. No. 4 could shortly run mind meld sequences with me of some length. She could do a half-an-hour stretch or so on her head, the psychic beast that she was. She could really get up my nose with her close patterning.  For the first three or four months she, and her two helpers outside the building, would say something at least every few minutes. And they were extremely accurate; they were never off target. I never heard them run a mind pattern sequence that was not accurate.

 

This second time around the patterning outside on the street was relatively restrained. It was limited to polished crosses or multi-entendres with occasional sequences of close patterning. However, in the first panic they drove me out of my apartment nightly but this second time they did the opposite. The intensity and negativity outside was still worse than inside so they drove me in to No.4. That was the deal they had with her it appeared. The public was willing to cooperate as long as No. 4 did all the heavy lifting. She was up there always when I was in my apartment – as per the rules they developed in Revolt I.

 

When Donna was out I would talk to No. 4. She would answer me when I spoke to her. I’d just talk loud and she could hear me through the concrete ceiling as I could hear her. Heck, actually when Donna was in I’d talk to her and Donna just thought I was mumbling to myself as per schizophrenics.

 

As soon as they restarted the patterning and cat calls on the street I restarted my old role of talking constantly in public as well. They went silent when I did so and this was part of the new package of mistreatment.

 

Our condominium building must have been completely “wired”. A lot of the residents were participating and they formed a conduit. News of what I did during the day, outside, was communicated to No. 4 very quickly and in detail. There’d be a coming and going of the participants in the building and much talking through the floors and walls. No. 4’s immediate neighbors must have been a communication hub.

 

One of my main activities in that time was going to cyber cafes. I still didn’t have a home computer despite my education in Computer Science. Rather I used the college’s and from time to time the cyber cafes’. When Revolt II broke out I was not enrolled in any college courses but was doing self-study in the cyber cafes. I had installed a Java compiler at my local café and was working my way through a book on something called Java Beans. The cyber cafes were low wage employers and the staff began protesting.  All the workers at low wage enterprises were protesting. Service fell off, the attendants at the cafes, and I visited quite a few of them, began to say they couldn’t help with anything, they didn’t know stuff. Formerly they were quite useful. The systems software was tweaked so nothing quite worked. For example the text box on the new folder name was set down to one letter at my local café so I couldn’t create a temporary folder which I needed to store files for everything I did. At my local café I kept getting the error message at sign on time “no Java compiler installed” which was sort of personal. In addition the other customers at the cafes, the kids playing cyber games, were all versed in my computer interests and would pattern me closely as I worked. So I stopped going.

 

The population checked out all of my economic statistics and they passed. I’d work them over a bit from time to time in my apartment and there was always this echo from outside as to each bit of arithmetic.

 

They also checked out my supply of letters to all the officials I mentioned I had contacted about my legal situation from Revolt I. So they had the details on the bureaucratic and ministerial reaction to my original persecution. All that went to the court of public opinion.

 

I was under attack. However the harassment wasn’t as hard as I was immobilized. I could still function. So I spent my time applying to menial jobs and continuing my computer text self study. By then the computer industry had collapsed in the face of the America Tech Bubble, there were then more jobs for dispatchers in the newspaper than for software programmers, but I thought I could be an office clerk and make some use of my computer skills. So I was working my way through Microsoft Office, which I didn’t know well. I read the Excel text, the spreadsheet, first. I’m one of those people that approached a subject by reading the text front to back as a discipline. They left me alone substantially to do this. While I was reading that text No. 4 would echo a sentence I was on every page or so. No. 4 could time my reading and study habits precisely. They must have put a stopwatch to my reading ability and worked from there. When I finished the book I went to the cyber café to practice.  So I got that done. Eventually I got several texts read and qualified myself for an office clerk position. This self-study would make it the third time I had trained.

 

The timing of my reading was precise and hard to explain but latter it became generalized. Latter the public could do it when I read my notes on the transit bus. It’s the type of finesse effort they make to keep the harassment unbelievable and invisible at once.

 

 

A National Privacy Dragnet

 

I can give some example of the extent of the dragnet of personal details around me and others, I would think.

 

I was always a backward youth to tell you something about myself. I did my homework for school so I was okay. As a teenager my mind wasn’t engaged in figuring life out. I was guilty of not taking an interest in others. I didn’t understand personality. Kids are like this but my backwardness was distinct. In high school I volunteered for the school play and was matched up with the role of lost young soul character.

 

An example of the dragnet is one day a three year old threw a rock at me when I was on my motorcycle. This was after my first job as a programmer when I bought an old motorcycle. I stopped to tell her it was bad to do that. Only I didn’t quite know what to say to a three year old and what came out is “if you do that again I’ll beat you up”. I was wearing a leather jacket.

 

I was one hundred miles from home and in the middle of nowhere when I verbally accosted that three year old. I was overheard, however, and in the national theatrics they were able to determine that it was me. What they said though is “They covered you.” Parents regularly threaten to spank their three old and that’s what they covered me with. Also when I visited the public galleries in the provincial parliament the MPPs called that they behaved at the same level sometimes, saying stupid things, just playing the partisan role.

 

After that incident, that specific incident, I decided that there was something abnormal about the way I talked. Eventually I decided one should pause for a second before you open your mouth and quickly edit what you’re going to say. In fact this pausing works. You have to be in control, it’s not a joke. If you want to appear witty, intelligent, and responsive I recommend such pausing. Editing works on intensity and even attitude as well, which lots of people have as part of their personality.  Edit, it’s recommended.

 

 

The Problem of Nerds

 

I’ll insert a comment about nerdism in the community here. While I was an awkward youth when the topic came up in the mind meld I said to them “Maybe you have some one nerdy that is close to you.” And there was this outburst “Maybe!?” Similarly I was going over how the problem seemed to be that a great many of modern families are dysfunctional and I heard an exasperated “That’s us!” The community was all about me all the time but when I hit these hot buttons there was these heated, personal reactions.

 

My role of nerd was useful in analyzing personality and competence, which they deconstructed me as learning rule by rule. It’s effect is to teach with other people’s mistakes rather than by pointing to some upstanding person or behavior. Famous movie stars, rich people and other high achievers write autobiographies but for a good tell ‘em how to grow up you’d be better off starting with a local nerd’s difficulties.

 

In latter days they changed my role to an awkward youth that grew up to have an idea to change the world because of a basically strong up bringing. This resonated with the Moms.

 

 

What the New Revolt Was Like For Others

 

The experience of all the participating public must have been intense as well. I have no idea what it was like for the average participating citizen of course but judging from the “play back” I encountered it was awful. Government practices and business practice were broadly under the microscope again. The star system was back, there were a lot of these, and the effort to support these would be considerable. All low wage situations were topical now so locally each neighborhood, rather each corner, had the potential to be a hot spot. People were once again encouraged to think things through and read up more, and there were endless topics in-the-air. As I say this was all done accurately and with wit so the effort, the total lift, was heavy. There was a mass of contraband information on me alone that was committed to memory and kept on the tip of the tongue of half-a-million locals to effect the mind meld discussion on the streets. The first three or so months were extreme and the quantity of information on the street must have been horrendous.

 

 

The Demise of the Prime Minister of Canada

 

Very oddly while my ideas and all the analysis of the revolt was very widely known none of it made the leap to the main stream culture. The entire process of this new revolt was hermetically sealed. No mention of it or even its contents every leaked into the media or the academic world. That said there was a remarkable political event because of it. The governing MPs, the Liberals, abruptly started calling for the Prime Minister’s resignation and within seven weeks of the start of the revolt got him to announce a retirement date. They then forced him into the most peculiar stance for his retirement gig.

 

Prime Minister Chrétien’s situation was he was doing very well. He had dealt with a huge deficit, won three majorities in a row – actually increasing the seats held the third time out just 20 months earlier -- and had no other outstanding issue the public wanted fixed in particular. The government had been reasonable and competent and there was only a short list of mismanagement and scandals. The ones that circulated in the popular press amounted to a few billions of dollars. The other known stain on the government was only criticism from its own watch dog, the Auditor General. 

 

Oh, there was a virulent scandal called Adscam around but in the summer of 2002 it was not in the news. It involved payment for no particular work with kick backs to the Liberal Party coffers. The program that it involved was $350 million of advertising the Confederation’s benefits in the separatist leaning province of Quebec, no less. There eventually emerged $45 million of stolen funds which is a classic crime and a record heist all done by politicians. The scandal later became big news, the opposition started saying the people had to know they were being governed by something better than criminals. However, it was small potatoes relative to the scandal I was at the center of.

 

It was everyone’s perception at the time, including the Prime Minister’s, that it was really Finance Minister Paul Martin that had conquered the deficit. Further Finance Minister Martin had been given a free hand in setting the budget as well and it was him that was really running the country. He was a national hero and unchallengeable as heir apparent because he dealt with the deficit. In fact there was a leadership review by the whole Party membership scheduled in three months (knock, knock. hello – three months) and there was the distinct possibility that there would be a coup. In my own limited political experience and opinion I thought the softness of the economy was intuitive enough and the resultant need for change popular enough that I was just waiting for our hero Finance Minister Martin to float off a sitting, successful Prime Minister.

 

However there was this abrupt and sharp call for the immediate resignation of the Prime Minister by most the MPs at the start of August 2002. The leadership review was only three month off but the MPs couldn’t wait or take the risk of letting the Party membership decide. This would be the result of the panic, which is to say myself. People followed my logic and put the cost of the jobs deficit as comparable to the cost of the fiscal deficit and they let the MPs know they wanted action.

 

What appears to have happened is the panic spread all across the country in a few weeks and then in through the windows of all the holidaying MPs. It wasn’t the MPs themselves rather it was the angry mob that got them going, please note. Prime Minister Chrétien didn’t catch on ever but his goose may have been cooked anyway by the scale of the immigration waste. Within about four weeks of the outbreak of the panic individual backbench MPs began publicly calling for the Prime Minister’s immediate resignation. At the seven week point there was the annual summer meeting of the Liberal Party at which senior Liberals were saying that, “Basically, nobody wanted the Prime Minister to stay on.” This is fair damning from senior party staff.

 

In the event they had the summer meeting and there was back room discussions aimed at getting Chrétien to resign. This was the seven week point of the family panic by which time the party executive had the political clout and moral authority to demand the Prime Minister simply resign on the spot. Then an amazing but human thing happened. Chrétien, who had gotten to where he was by always speaking to the issue and making a great deal of good sense, decided he was indispensable and it was democracy that’d have to go. As special as a democratic Prime Ministership was the Old Monster decided it was an entitlement for him. The very basis of a Parliamentary government is confidence of a majority of the sitting MPs and Chrétien forgot that. All that he had learned in 40 years in Parliament was overcome by his ego. He then dug in his heals for some more time at the helm. He did  argee to his retirement, but in 18 months.

 

Chrétien didn’t have the support of the caucus and he had no agenda but he decided to sit there for a year-and-a-half. The November leadership review by the Party was dropped as a moot point. When Chrétien made the announcement on TV he actually almost cried on the podium, at the thought he was now old and ready for retirement. His announcement was in the afternoon when I was knapping but the construction worker guard outside my apartment woke me up so I could see the event on TV. So crazy Jean Chrétien usurped democracy, became our third failed leader in a row and the first Canadian strongman. He could have been senile, but there was and has been no suggestion since that this was the case. And in the time since he has never realized what he did to Parliament and publicly acknowledged it, apologized. It’s unfathomable.

 

The Canadian Alliance opposition leader, Mr. Stephan Harper, didn’t get it period. He didn’t hear any of the commotion, had no idea what was happening economically, didn’t respond to the fact that Chrétien didn’t have support of his own caucus and said only that the arrangement to retire in 18 months was “unconventional and problematic”. No! Unconventional! What a friend you have in Harper! Christians for welfare cuts! Amen and all that. Thanks but no thanks. The nation self mobilized and history marched on but the Leader of the Opposition was indisposed. He was so sharp politically that he became public enemy Number 2. Later I sent him my treatise and he writes me that he read it, some homework that an Opposition Leader would typically do in Canada, but he still didn’t “gettit”.

 

The Liberal Party, whose position was they had been running a virtual one party state since the reduction of the opposition to two seats, was now the opposition to itself. It’s another history story.

 

The Finance Minister and heir apparent didn’t get what was going on either. I go over his reaction latter.

 

This is in a country where usually nothing much dramatically happens politically to punctuate daily life.

 

The media and the academic community didn’t respond to any of this either. There was no commenting as to what was actually wrong with PM Chrétien. The party was about to suddenly and dramatically ousts him and there wasn’t a single comment from a single pundit as to exactly why. Journalists, those out of the loop, witnessed this historic sacking of a Prime Minister without ever questioning it. All they said is there was a “democratic deficit” which was close but there weren’t any specifics. There was a democratic deficit alright but it wasn’t because the inexperienced Liberal back bench political hacks had a secret agenda rather it had to do with the general will, the jobs deficit.

 

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s position was rather strong. He had won three elections, dealt with a huge deficit and done nothing particularly wrong. He had no outstanding issue he had mishandled. He wasn’t in fact a one man show with a “democratic deficit” as they began to say as he had delegated most responsibility to his Finance Minister, who ran a tight ship for years because of the threatening deficit.  Finally there was a surplus in the budget, he had money to spend and was shopping for suggestions. The call to retire him immediately came out of the blue.  

 

In fact past historic events have gone on without much clear commenting. The vast American nuclear deterrent, the Vietnam War, inflation and the fiscal deficits were all pretty much an official and media muddle.

 

There’s a political context, or half-a-context, that was happening. Late in the spring the aging Prime Minister had tried to order his cabinet members to not campaign for leadership. Finance Minister Paul Martin, who was a national hero for fixing the deficit, said out right that this was undemocratic and not acceptable to him. He was fired for this to which he essentially responded, “No, I quit”. This was strategic as it allowed him to run as an outsider, put a fresh face on the government. Pundits were commenting it’s a very wise move as the Liberal Party had historically voted for an outsider in order to renew itself. The majority of people thought this was the event that was happening during the summer. Martin went on to create a real mess for himself, because of all the shoving and pushing. He became leader but lost the majority first and then the government entirely.

 

The reaction of the public was crucial. Some 57% thought Prime Minister Chrétien should resign so there was this public sentiment to retire him. This would be largely separate from the panic and what the non-participating were thinking. He had been there nine years, and while he got the job done, he some how got the reputation as not really providing leadership. Although he was elected as leader of the Party on his reputation of always “talking from the heart” he no longer connected with the masses. It’s an irony.

 

The former Finance Minister Paul Martin was mute about the panic, the riot of civil disobedience, and I though he was missing the opportunity of a life time.

 

In the event Paul Martin had no inkling of the revolt and couldn’t be told the simple arithmetic of bad jobs and unemployment. The panic went on and they informed people on the street of this problem with him.

 

The main event that was transpiring politically in the country was that the majority of the population was not savvy with the panic and saw the Liberal Party machinations as a competition between two egos, which they eschewed. Chrétien had been a good enough leader and the majority didn’t see Martin as sufficiently better in policy or judgment to rush the change of leadership. The polls indicated they didn’t approve of Martin’s apparent coup. In fact the double coup ruined Martin’s reputation as a hero and he became regarded as an unbearable narcissist and the big cheese, which is a correct perception it turns out anyway. He went from hero to unelectable in about one year.

 

In the mean time Prime Minister Chrétien awakened from his nine year hands off rule and started looking around for a rational for staying on. After a decade of restraint he began to sound off about spending initiatives to which the new Finance Minister warned the money had already been spent. Chrétien had run the first financially responsible government in decades but when challenged by the left leaning opposition in a debate as to what he had accomplished he was at a loss for words, very oddly. He apparently forgot that being fiscally responsible government was a relatively huge achievement, as strange as that is. So when heir apparent Martin, who is right leaning, began to push him out he leapt about for spending initiatives, which the press in their wisdom, forgetting his successful fight with the $40 billion deficit, referred to as “his legacy”.

 

Later I describe how the government as its own opposition unfolded. What followed in the fall of 2002 was bizarre history but you won’t be reading any reasonable interpretation of it outside of this book.

 

 

Stampeding Workers Down the street

 

The new panic actually went away overboard with the idea that a tightened labour market would raise wages at the bottom. The following was the manifest reaction on the street.

 

In my local mall, for instance, the entire place was under close scrutiny. The analysis for commercial viability was store by store and even item by item. If the labour market tightens there’d be wage inflation and a shakeout of the most marginal businesses and this was the topic.

 

In my mall it was like this: Whenever I’d go over there there’d be in-the-air comments that would point out specific stores and circumstances. Some of the ladies luxury stores were simply not busy. There were corporate stores, most the cell phone companies were represented, that would be staffed the same regardless of wages or low business traffic. Quite a few of the small stores duplicated wares and competed directly for the same small market. Also the big Loblaws grocery store, with its many diverse departments, competed directly with half-a-dozen of the small shops. The analysis went down to individual items in stores. If I bought an item I might hear a comment, the story of that item. A typical thought was if the store closed the popular items would still be available at an alternate outlet. That’s what shopping was like in my neighborhood in the summer of 2002. The whole mall is low wage and highly subsidized.

 

The mall had kiosks in the isles; you’ve probably seen these things, where workers eke out a living with a cart load of inventory, like third world hawkers. These kiosks were and are an index of the softness of the economy and of the level of productivity of labour at the bottom of the economy. They’re competitive because labour is so unproductive at the bottom. They called them “Dickenesque” in-the-air.

 

All the small businesses in the city were being scrutinized for viability. When I was outside I’d pass a shop or factory and the local traffic would call out some comment about that business, typically a pun on the name of the company. The population contemplated consolidating all of them to achieve efficiencies. The participating population was into this like they could will it to happen right away. They wanted to stampede all the bad job workers down the street to better companies at once. If you had tight labour markets and rising wages and prices there’d be a fall out of the least efficient and most marginal businesses over time but there was still substantial unemployment around so it didn’t make any sense. I thought it was crazy. They were into this for four or five months. And the whole bottom of the retail trade is low wage and subsidized so this gave them a lot to talk over. It was like a cult had taken over middle class society. It was like a cult of the knowledge society.

 

This was all due to me articulating the idea of Upward Growth. When I wrote the above paragraph much later and silently while I was on the bus in mind meld and they breathed “It sounds like a bow.”

 

What’s more the populace was crazy once again about underemployed corporate workers. They were calling them “salary” as they did before. There’s rather a lot of it and when people sharpen their pencil they become intolerant. So there was this second stampede attempt. They wanted all the salary to move down the street at once as well. Such improvements take time, even when there’s strong growth. It didn’t make sense again but the enthusiasm for it was wild-and-a-half. This bashing of people’s jobs, salary, is the dangerous part of the revolt process. People were insistent on this as they drew the line at bad jobs.  This is as productivity was considered the Canadian Way  Probably management didn’t participate generally so these victims were safe for the time being.

 

By February 2003, the eight month point, they had corrected the theatrics. By then it was clear there wasn’t going to be any such thing as a spontaneous consolidation and people should be thankful of the employment small business offered. Then I’d go into the mall and it was quiet.

 

There were attacks on “salary” in the revolt of the 1980s, downsizing by management in the 1990s and more attacks in the panic of the 2000s. That’s a lot of “salary” attacks. It maybe these bad jobs are chronic in modern corporations as well. And outsiders look at them as a way to get “in” to a better company or field, to get the foot on the training ladder. However, there’s sure to be more bashing of bad jobs down the road.

 

 

Micro Effects of the New Protest

 

That’s the macro revolt picture. I’ll return to my own situation and describe the micro picture. I was being tortured by the ruling political party as a protest to their leader’s morphing into something of a dictator. There are many interesting facets to this “quiet” revolt and I’ll detail these as they were manifest to me in the summer of 2002. Then I’ll move on to events of the fall, both political and personal.

 

 

I Become Despondent from the Constant Harassment

 

Some intimate personal harassment is not that hard to take and particularly if you’re used to it. However, what they did to me was to be disturbing. The way to do that is to be constantly intimate with one’s steam of consciousness and constantly bringing up one’s social peccadilloes including sexual ones. A million people getting on your case about any faux pas in your past would rather get under your skin and they liked to do that. Particularly your awkwardness in youth was is a good target.  And by threatening. The threatening part is financial. The main financial damage I suffered was two-and-a-half more years of unemployment. I could have had a  job but they seem to have the power to interfere with the low wage employment and chose to have me not working at a bottom wrung job. When I signed up for my new line-of-credit from the bank they intercepted the card in the condominium mail and stole $2000, which the bank covered without a question, fortunately. They also figured out and publicized my bank card  PIN.

 

During the five and a half years I spent driving auto parts delivery I took quick notes during the day and convert them into a set of diaries in the evening. I had about ten small binders of notes, one for each topic. When the new stalkers got into my apartment they had free access to all this private material and it was a good window on my thoughts and the language I thought in. The situation was so extreme that if I took one of these diaries over to the Tickled Toad pub they’d call out line by line what was in it as I reviewed it. Just how they did that would take some explaining. This was upsetting and one day I concluded the diaries were a key to my persecution and I became frantic and rushed them all out to the garbage.

 

I also threw out all my collection of articles, notes and statistics on economics. I thought that it had brought me persecution so I dumped them in the garbage. I vowed never again to take interest in society.

 

They broke into my apartment and inspected me physically closely at night in. They knew when I’d notice a new scratch or that my finger nails were long again. No detail was too small. I was tranquillized nightly so it would have been safe for them to break in. One morning I woke up with an intact cracker, a Triscuit, in my mouth. It was still whole, intact and dry. I would think they came in and shoved it in my mouth in the morning.

 

I couldn’t hold a job, do house work or self study very well. I had no quiet time. They intruded fully into my mind and harassed me all the waking hours of the day. They threatened me financially. It was all very disruptive and disturbing. That’s unlimited invasion of privacy. It was a wildly popular reality show.

 

The level of detail of the mind meld is tiring and discouraging. It eventually wears you down from doing anything. I looked into buying a gun to shoot someone. I phoned around town to the gun shops.

 

 

Under Guard in My Apartment

 

My time in my apartment was awful. Their plan was to pattern whatever I did. I was free to do what ever I wanted and they would pattern it in minute detail. This was still the thing to do, they thought, in a McLuhanesque protest.

 

At the beginning of the out break I read computer books. They patterned my study habits closely and echoed whatever I was doing. It was depressing. I then began to write about my experience. Writing about what was happening was something of an escape as it kept the attention off my mind and on others. I wrote in meter and called my writings “poes”. Typically Le Guy outside the apartment would be able to mind meld with my writing from his post in the school. He could pattern my writing of the “poe” line-byline from outside. This sounds hard to believe but it got worse later on, much worse.  

 

 

Other stars of the Revolt

 

I was socially isolated in Revolt II which allowed them to keep me in the dark substantially. However several of the people I knew were stars and had theatrics going on around them. In particular all my in-laws became well known and I can describe how that went.

 

My in-town brother-in-law is Ron Sankee. He’s my age but a work-a-day newspaper delivery person for the country’s largest newspaper, The Toronto Star. He was something of the symbol for that exploitive industry. The newspaper deliver persons get up at 3 AM everyday of the year except Christmas to work a part-time job that requires a car. There’s no one to take over the route if they are sick or want a day off. The pay is a little better, The Toronto star says the average is $13 an hour, but this is just the premium they have to pay to get anyone to do that job. In my brother-in-law’s case the job works for him because there is no supervisor to bother him and it’s more healthful than some inside industrial jobs, he being extremely fussy about this that and another thing. Ron works other delivery jobs to get 40 hours of work a week. Basically he’s had two or three part time jobs and worked seven days a week for 15 years.

 

The whole newspaper industry is carried on the backs of battalions of low paid, and over worked delivery persons. That’s what keeps the business profitable and their advertising space affordable. The citizens carefully looked into this industry through the life of Ron (and others for all I know) to see what conditions were at the bottom were like. One odd thing is that Ron was unaware of the ongoing. Although I can make out the intent was to play by the rules and make him a candidate for affirmative action nothing ever came of it.

 

I had considerable social activities with Ron over the course of the panic and got to witness the attention the city was subjecting him to. He was known everywhere in Toronto and people were aware of the details of his work life. I got up at 3 AM a couple of times to help him deliver the papers and they could pattern his delivery route and his quirky personality traits from the mostly empty streets in the very early morning.

 

Brother-in-Law Ron is a life time bachelor and when asked he’ll complain that no one really knows the real him. In fact maybe a million people became intimate with him in the on going, although he might not agree with their interpretation of him.

 

The other in-laws that I have are my sister-in-law, Maureen Sankee, and my mother-in-law, Dot Sankee. Maureen is a university librarian and a spinster but she has a government pension plan with her job and that. However they broadcast her story anyway although I don’t know why or to what extent. While I didn’t encounter detailed discussion and knowledge of her on the streets they seemed to know her essentials. She had a bad boss for one and some of the stupid things her boss said to her became expressions on the street.

 

They did about the same to my mother-in-law, Dot. While she is a good person, she has a very charming, easy laugh; they had a characterization of her on the street which was a dizzy headed housewife. If I was wondering just how to cook a meatloaf Dot’s dizzy persona would drift in through the air with instructions. That was her role in the theatrics and it was negative.

 

As friends of mine my in-laws were popularized for the role they played in my thoughts, my thoughts in the mind meld. If I was in public thinking about them, say their employment situation, I’d typically get patterned. When they haunted my mind with the detailed analysis they had to get hold of what people near to me said what was memorable. They were also able to extrapolate what these people would have said based on their interests. I found they tended to be very accurate in this conjecturing. As Ron, Maureen, and Dot were not initiates they had to use this extrapolation as well as rely on second hand reporting of our conversations. This works well enough it seems. 

 

 During the early, intense part of the revolt I was convinced my in-laws were participants. They would frequently make under-the-breath, topical comments. This must have been putting words in their mouth, the ventriloquism, of off stage commentators.   Anyway I figured out later that they did not actually know what was going on, could not relate to my pidgin philosophy. I was under this illusion they were participating for over a year.

 

 

Condo Management that’s Key

 

The condo I lived in was rules oriented. There are rules against children playing ball on the grounds, children are not allowed on the premises at Halloween, and they installed a video camera right inside the elevator; typical old folks’ rules stuff. There is a night security guard. However, that was the rules for the residents but the rules for the condo management, the volunteer Board of Directors, was anything they felt like and they felt like persecuting me as a national event. A criminal stalker wants in at one of the residents, go right ahead.

 

The condo board president, one Don Higgins, had a play of his own. The condo has several employees who are either low paid or not too busy so they played. Also the condo directors had contracted a quarter-a-million dollar fix to some crumbling bricks on the exterior of the building. The building was 28 years old and patching a few bricks isn’t going to save it. No changes to the operation of the condo were ever introduced. Condo president Higgins was all for persecuting me but when he was at the receiving end of the neighborhood messages he was non-responsive. They began to call him Mr. Hey-gins.

 

There are four volunteer directors of the condo. In fact the owner of the upstairs unit where No. 4 was is the condo secretary. Her name was Audrey Roman. The condo management is responsible for such things as the security guards and they should have nipped No. 4’s activities even before anyone had to be arrested. In the event the condo directors volunteered all the residents, or all the participating residents at any rate, to be the main conduit for the passing of information to and from No. 4 about what was going on in my nation wide guard. They were told it would help me get an office job and was a national protest. When I saw the directors around the building they would smile at me pleasantly and say hello just as if they weren’t doing anything wrong. While they were key to my being tortured daily I was supposed to give them a pleasant “Good day” in the halls of the condo. They said that they had “an order” from the community and that was all they had to worry about. They were going to torture me by a national event but the condo management just shrugged and went along, cooperating extensively.

 

One of the problems with being a star is that sometime, some place, someone can decide to take a run at you. In the first panic it was the local police constables who arrested me three times illegally and got me diagnosed as insane. This time the condo president had a go at me in the same vein. I had stopped writing letters to officials as they had cut off their mail bag but I continued to write up my situation. I’d then send off these letters to No. 4 at the above apartment. No. 4 got hold of the condo president and had him phone my poor wife. They had him say I was having a schizophrenic episode and scaring the woman upstairs with threatening letters. He told Donna I believed the woman upstairs was talking to me through the floor. This is exactly what my wife thought happened to me in the 1980s and she said the revelation “really knocked her for a loop”. I somehow admitted to not taking my anti-psychotic medicine and she insisted that I go back on it. She also began shopping for a psychiatrist that would give her the diagnosis that she want to hear, which is to say I was mentally ill but curable by a drug. She was otherwise supportive and took it in stride but I’ll be on anti-psychotics’, tranquilizers, for the rest of my life. That’s the consequence of Hey-gins little letter play. It was community initiated.

 

 

End of Chapter VI.

 

 

Chapter VII

 

Some General Features of a Modern Revolt

 

 

 

“Open” Media

 

The word they used for the stars and for the inquisitions into government boondoggles was “open”. However using that word slightly differently the media was “open”. This is particularly the print media. I’d often go to over to the local mall, buy a newspaper, and read it in the Food Court there. The mall patrons would pattern my reading page by page and headline by headline. I’d be there reading the paper for several minutes and they could still keep track of what page and headline I was on and echo it. Apparently this is all patternable. They had the daily news memorized in some sense and this is the way in which the print media was “open”. It seems extreme and may have involved the white noise effect but it was my daily routine for a while. They did this with the big daily newspapers but also with the satirical magazine “Frank”, which I mentioned, and which was not well known but more acidic in its criticism of the government.

 

The how and who of this technique remain a mystery to me. It’d take homework by the population to memorize the standout articles in the daily news and there’d have to be lots of other targets than me on which to work this exercise to make it of interest. In all the months of Phase II I never encountered anyone that was getting that level of attention although I did run across a couple of stars that were being watched closely. It does make sense that there was heightened interest in political reporting in the newspapers during the panic.

 

 

Unionized Teachers as stars

 

My wife was now a grade four teacher and had a set of close associates from work, of course. Teachers generally and these associates specifically became “well known” in Revolt II. Wherever I encountered these associates of hers in the neighborhood they were being harassed, although it went over the heads of most of them. The strategy of harassing teachers didn’t make sense. In Revolt I they had focused on the police as over paid and in Revolt II this concern turned to teachers.

 

The teachers in Ontario are well paid and secure so their harassment was without thought to the intrusion and the customary promise of tit-for-tat. They were considered high paid and in a strong, well organized government union and therefore an inflation threat. The notion on the street was the union was an inflationary threat. The logic seemed to be if they harassed these people, who are in a privileged position with their government jobs, they’d accept a more moderate wage increase. It’s more likely that they’d expect to be compensated for their troubles. So I call it mob logic again. That’s all I could make out of the focus on teachers.

 

More generally the population thought this type of “suasion” would produce an inflation free period and the economy would continue to expand. This idea is similar to the inflation free growth-due-to-the-Internet that experts were calling the “New Economy” in the 1990s and particularly in the USA. Moreover the preceding decade had low inflation in Canada as there was over investment by business in most fields and people had tempered their wage demands in face of the Bank of Canada’s new policy of targeting inflation. People were happy with the new Bank of Canada policy because it led to lower mortgage rates and more employment through a prolonged expansion. (The expansion eventually became 17 years long.) So the harassment of the income leaders was ambitious and redundant at once.

 

Another aspect to the teaching profession was “salary” again. In Ontario all teachers have to have undergraduate degrees and are paid as professionals accordingly but it can be any degree and it doesn’t have to do with what’s one’s teaching. In summer 2002 I’d run across my wife’s teaching associates from time to time and they’d always be attracting comments from the public. However this was stylized. The complaint about over qualification was directed to the worst cases only. A particular neighborhood hot spot was my wife’s friend Carol Knight. Her situation was she actually has a Masters degree in music and is paid a premium for it but wasn’t currently teaching in that area so she was treated like salary. That’s all I could make of her play that I encountered in the neighborhood.

 

 

Pharmaceuticals on the street

 

One thing that was new in Panic II is they started tainting restaurant and private food. They drugged it. I would go out to a restaurant and when I was finished I’d feel some vertigo. When I was outside the passing traffic would call out comments on my condition. I’d hear something like “now he feels wobbly” or “he’s going to sit there” as I went to sit on the curb due to my unsteadiness.

 

There’s a variety of ill conditions that I got. I would feel slight dizziness, headachy, a lack of taste, a lack of appetite, sneezing or combinations of these. I would blame anything odd that I felt on a new drug. I would guess these ill effects are side effects of standard and safe pharmaceuticals which were being circulated as contraband.  I felt all these effects daily for about a year after which they completely stopped.

 

I don’t know how they did this drugging of course but I became suspicious of everything I ate or drank. I suspected the restaurant staff were doping the food as a protest to the low wages for which they had to work. You know if wage disparity gets too large there’ll always be a protest. The workers will always find an outlet for agitation, whether or not it’s legal. I also figured when my neighbors got into my apartment they tainted items in the fridge. They’d have to figure out which items I was going to consume as opposed to Donna, who had no complaints. This would require just more of their close analysis of our behavior.

 

The drugging of food and drink came up right away with the new panic so it must have been something practiced in Phase I that I wasn’t aware of.

 

I kept daily notes of my suspicions of drugging. I was free of symptoms only by July 9, 2003, a year-less-a-day into my ordeal.

 

 

The Late Show with David Letterman

 

The Late Show with David Letterman from New York City took up the cause of Revolt II and had this nightly ghosting of the event. I watched the show every night as it was a window on what was happening elsewhere and it was most interesting.

 

The Late Show had this disguised commentary nightly about the on going during the panic. I saw a rerun from the first week in July 2002, before my first night of renewed mind meld at the Tickled Toad pub, and the commentary was missing. It appeared shortly thereafter and was there nightly until the US national elections in the fall and intermittently after that until the following summer. It confirmed for me that the event in the USA was the same as that in Canada. I’ll be explaining here my interpretation of some of the lines on the show. As I over read I’ll be going out on a limb with some of my stories. However, I have very good explanations for some of the lines. Some of them were almost direct, where direct. Over on the Jay Leno Late Nights show there was no such commenting. It was a blank.

 

A funny thing about Letterman’s commentary is it was satirical, yes, but it also explained. The audience was treated as needing explanation and reporting of the mass event going on. I was kept in the dark as a matter of style but it appears the participating public in general wasn’t all knowing as they let on to me as being. This was the theory apparent behind Letterman’s shtick anyway.

 

The show comes on at 11:35 P.M. and I’d take my tranquilizers at that time and watch the show while the pills took effect.

 

One of the first comments I heard on Letterman that seemed like an echo of the new panic was “Where is that guy now?” This was while they were discussing some former TV star. It’s struck me that the first thing people thought of when the new panic came along is what ever happened to the old stars they’d abused in the first place. This would be natural as they had abandoned these cases but also because they were about to repeat the pattern of promising affirmative action for an intrusion into privacy.

 

Another short comment Letterman had early on was “Is this a tax revolt?” The first panic was a tax revolt but the comment seems to question that that what was happening in Phase II and this would be specifically in the USA. The United States had a record deficit and this would seem to be what the populace was panicked over but it was perhaps not a tax revolt. This would be because their economy was approaching a deflationary situation they said and fiscal stimulation was widely prescribed and widely popular.

 

One night Letterman commented about the tainting of the coffee in restaurants. I have detailed how restaurant food and drink were tainted with drugs. Letterman explained how he enjoyed a morning coffee at the shop across the street from his studio but then added that recently it tasted like they were “pissing in it”. He said that’s all the shows legal department would allow him to say. The coffee in his neighborhood shop was off? I know it was in Toronto.

 

Another time, and this was a bit latter on, he explained how staff on the show, people that had been there for years he says, became unhappy and left. He continued that their replacements didn’t hang around long either.  This is pretty much exactly what was happening generally, the harassment of positions that were not very useful, salary, and explains that there’d be tension at the studio nightly. It’s the corporate situation.

 

Letterman also went through a period of complaining bitterly about his job. He would say he can’t take it any more and made angry faces. One night he said he just didn’t want to come into work anymore and that he wanted to quit. My distinct impression was he and his staff were being treated as stars of the panic, something like I was. That is he’d be harassed daily.

 

I got the feeling they commented on local stars on the show but I couldn’t make out any of the references. Technically this would be illegal so an outfit as large as the Late Show would have to be circumspect about being sued. I further got the feeling that I played a foremost role in the New York City theatrics and I was being ghosted on the show. My role and situation was the flagship of the entire revolt process and was broadcast in detail as far out as New York City I believe.

 

Another time Letterman was interviewing people in the audience and one person said he worked for the Attorney General of the United States. Letterman says “you wouldn’t arrest us, we haven’t done anything wrong” with a big smirk.

 

Some of the above stories are pretty clear while others depend on my interpretation.

 

Latter on, around the time of the 2002 national elections in the US, the theatrics cooled, it hadn’t come to any clear decisions through the in-the-air group think and was ineffective at affirmative action again. Letterman dropped the daily commenting on the event. The last thing he said was “Oh sure, remain at the scene of the crime.”

 

 

Examples of In-the-Air Discussions

 

There is any number of topics that were thought through and then communicated to me by key phrases. These are an achievement of the technique of city wide group think and I’ll cover the best ones to illustrate the perspicacity of this. In some cases there is the opposite, the lack of good judgment, it seems. In general the “received view” was most interesting. The discussions were generally expressed in essential points and tended to be better than the talking points of the media. The public conversation is rational political discussion raised to a cultural activity.

 

The hottest topic in Toronto, other than jobs, was public transit. The point was bus ticket costs were already $1.90 each and the Transit Commission was giving dire warnings of stiff wage, maintenance and capital cost increases in the works and the possibility of a $3.00 ticket. This would be onerous on transit users, who are the less well off. The $1.90 cost translates into a $1000 a year just for the commute to work. For all the short funding in government programs it was transit and transit alone that was featured as a priority in the in-the-air discussions.

 

They queued up the topic of transit in their guess-me fashion. There was a new subway in the city, the Sheppard East line, and this was an unfortunate white elephant by universal acclaim. It was so far from ever being busy that the new stations were only four train cars long rather than the standard six. So that new subway was nearly a billion dollars wasted on an average density route. It’s an example of government spending without a single number, it was a cartoon. However they had me go over the record of transit in general and it was a mess.

 

There’s also a light rapid rail line in the suburb of Scarborough and it as at capacity so there’s discussions on replacing it with a subway. However the whole area would be better served by a multiplicity of express bus routes in the mean time, which would connect a much wider area and be inexpensive

 

Finally, Toronto has street cars, the only other city to be so silly is San Francisco, and they are all around expensive. They are not much of an improvement on electric buses. They require expensive custom made cars, eight times the cost of a bus; the tracks are expensive and need repair from time to time. The ride given by the steel wheels is better but this is a very marginal improvement especially since transit is economy class.

 

The transit investigation wasn’t just about the big white elephants. I rode the Yonge St. bus and found that it was under extreme scrutiny. Yonge St. is the main north/south street in the city and is served by a subway such that there are very few passengers on the bus. When I rode that bus there’d be comments about each elderly person who got on or off. I’d hear “this is her stop” and extremely detailed comments like that. The population was concerned about the usage on this route but as Yonge St. is the main commercial avenue in the city and the subway stops are a mile apart the Transit Commission is hardly free to eliminate or reduce that bus route. So I didn’t really get that bit of agitation and probably because it didn’t make sense. As I experienced it attention was detailed and intense.  

 

Any in-the-air “discussion” of the transit system was detailed; numbers of riders, minutes to be saved by new subways. Normal discussion amongst people about transits is complaints or, alternatively, wild ideas about more major facilities, new subway lines. Subway lines have become fantastically expensive but people drop this out when chatting them up.

 

So these are the type of problems the panic concerned itself with and it’s about time. In the event the new Liberal governments, federally and provincially, in the province came through with the sought after funds for Toronto’s transit. It was successfully argued that the Toronto Transit carried most of the transit rider ship in the whole province and needed special consideration.

 

In 2002 the USA was winding up to an invasion of Iraq of course. The neighborhood seemed clear on this issue and communicated their feeling to me by pointing out key facts. In particular they repeatedly pointed to a retired couple on my floor in the apartment who, the in-the-air story goes, were Indian descent refugees from Iran. I had forgotten the Iran/Iraq war and thinking about my neighbor brought this back. The war reportedly had one million dead and was described as a replay of WW I. So Saddam Hussein had that to his credit which was forgotten. At the time of that war no one mentioned that it was an oil grab, both ways. So the neighborhood had me realizing how Saddam Hussein had tried twice to corner the world’s oil supply, not just once.  Also they brought up the matter of Colonel Gadaffi of Libya who the USA was embargoing for international terrorist acts. Saddam was that much worse than Gadaffi and was simply beyond what the world should have to put up with. This is even before his big role of nuclear renegade, a potential haven for anti-US terrorists, a distinct threat to Israel and thus to world peace and plus he was destroying the Iraqi economy because of his causing US economic sanctions. So the in-the-air discussion was clear on all that and the media was not.

 

In the event the Canadian polls were 80% for helping the Americans in Iraq with UN support but only 20% without the UN. The issue was moot, though, as Canada has only about 7000 deployable soldiers and there were already on rotation in Afghanistan. However there’s a dichotomy between what the discussion in-the-air was and the polls. In the Canadian print media after the war the USA, President Bush, took an awful lot of flack for starting an unnecessary war. The idea that Hussein was a way beyond the pale was never really articulated in the Canadian press. President Bush won a second USA election indicating it was understood by most the population in the USA.

 

Another investigation was the people’s analysis of the company I had been working at, Avenue Motor Works. Avenue was a privately owned warehouse for GM auto parts, it’s called a jobber. It employs 50 or so people and as such is similar in size to a typical GM dealership. It services the greater city area. The bottom rung of workers are paid the de facto minimum wage . However the competition is located only one mile away. The two competitors offer the exact same parts and services to the exact same customers, there’s no niche. The problem is the rent, the inventory costs and taxes at the two places are duplicates and a consolidated company could offer substantial efficiencies while remaining price conscious because they are part of the GM empire. All the five years I worked there these observations never occurred to me but in the panic this company became a perfect example of the excess investment of duplication.

 

Still another topic that was in-the-air was Toronto’s taxis. Taxi driving had once been reasonable employment but it was becoming squeezed. This was not so much a topic in-the-air as a bit of theatrics the taxi drivers went through for me. I found at one point there was an unusual number of cabs on the major streets by my apartment. For several days there were always two or three taxis in sight whenever I went outside. Normally one would come along maybe every five minutes. So I thought about their situation. It seems taxis have a lot of idle time as each taxi cab company keeps extra vehicles in the area so they can offer 5 - 10 minute service. The cabs are licensed by the government and have their fares set by the government so they are next to being a government run aspect of the economy. The next step would be to turn them into a natural monopoly and rationalize the driver waiting time. Later I did hear through the air the comment “Another government business?” Enthusiasm for rationalizing the taxis business with government is not there. The implied wage increase for a government monopoly keeps that unpopular.

 

Another interesting topic was the future car and truck. As oil is going to run dry within a life time this is rather important. There’s not really a good battery to be had and resources for such will be pressed in a planet with 9 billion people anyway. There are synthetic fuels such as the methanol economy with it being made from biomass or even air and water. The electricity for the synthesis from air and water could come from wind turbines on a massive scale or breeder nuclear reactors also on a massive scale. A totally different alternative that was popularized was to electrify the existing arterial roads and highways. There would be a set of tracks laid down in the roadway with sunken conductors. Vehicles would connect via a smart trailer that they pulled that was computer controlled and could find the track and connect automatically. Vehicles would be hybrid with a running gas or diesel engine that would cut in as the electrical connection was broken. Most of the technology already exists. The big advantage of this is the internal combustion engine is only 25% efficient at best while the electric engine is 98% efficient, so the massive energy infrastructure would be cut down by that much, a factor of four. The big savings are for trucks with their high mileage. Small cars might get by on synthetic fuels. That’s the tour of the energy scene by the participating public which thought it was practical and cheaper. It was ahead of the media.  

 

Another topic they ran me around over was the United States. I would pick up on the echoes in the US news but also they’d cue up topics for me on the street. It turns out the US had a list of outstanding problems, I could make out about 20 or so, that Canada didn’t have or were less severe here. The aroused public in the states would have been discussing these through-the-air. My list of problems in the US that I could figure out here in Canada was long. My list is: Economically there were the recession/ the deficit/ low wages/ regional unemployment/ corporate accounting abuses/ the stock market melt down. Politically there were the burgeoning defense budget/ the war on terrorism/ Palestine generally/ the nuclear rogues/.  Socially there were immigration/ the lack of social programs/ the future financing of Social Security and Medicare and last but not least Blacks.

 

These are some of the topics they went over. Very oddly, while a main thrust of the Revolt II inquisition was poverty I didn’t hear a peep about the life style of the poor, specific cases or generalities about who and what poverty involved. The emphasis was the advantages to the everyman, his family, of the economic reforms.

 

I might comment that every neighborhood had stars, target businesses and issues that were discussed broadly daily, particularly by the people in their vehicles. My understanding this was pretty intense, that there would be this street theatre all across the nation. This is not just in Canada. They would call this “optics”, after the ideas of putting on a show about a problem. It’s impossible to police and on the national level far, far beyond the damages done to privacy with just me. Some times in the courier truck, as an example, I would drop into a donut shop that wasn’t quite doing it right and the talking about it in the traffic would follow me down the road for five or even ten minutes, miles away eventually.

 

I was not privy to all the discussions that went on. Events around me were Bruce-centric so the discussions I heard tended to be about what I had information on and could relate too. If I got off on to an entirely new topic I would typically immediately hear some of their pre-canned cracks on that issue. Their repertoire of lines was extensive. The general public must have been having very broad discussions.

 

It maybe that people normally have an alternate analysis for their situation. Certainly office politics goes on all the time and people are always making criticisms. I’m told that in Italy it’s always been a national sport discussing what is wrong with politicians, the country and society in coffee bars. There’s sort of a perpetual witch hunt. This may be in the culture. In the revolt at hand the discussions were by very large numbers of people and scrutinized so they should be more reliable than a witch hunt.

 

This detail reporting of the finesse analysis going on the street I’m doing has been called by one of my drinking buddy wags “the zen of gonzo journalism”.

 

 

About No. 4 Stalker

 

No. 4 never talked much about herself. She mentioned her “husband” rarely. She said it was a second marriage or relation. There was a female teenage voice up there at one time which I assume was a daughter. No. 4 did occasionally complain of her life style while upstairs. That’d be her thrift and constrained circumstance. She did mention repeatedly she was diabetic. She said she was Jewish now and again. She was always offended when I went over her finances to determine what sort of debt she was running up. She did repeatedly mention she was unskilled and her post event employment prospects were not good. And that’s about it. She was self effacing about the size of the protest she had engendered. Once or twice she commented “We’re important.”

 

 

Young Ladies as the Political Symbol of the Country

 

After the intensity wore off the panic the commenting tended to be particular and on the young ladies around for one. This would be around the winter of 2003, the eight month point. There was continued attention to the more beautiful young ladies which everyone notices anyway. On the street and on transit there’d be comments trailing these young ladies. Young women play the double role of bread winner and of mother in the modern culture and they have even more problems with entering the work force because they normally don’t undertake lengthy training programs. Their promise, a good life for the next generation, is the issue. So these young women became the political symbol for the panic.

 

Later they revised the philosophy of the revolt and became concerned that low wages were significantly a working mother problem. They became apologetic about the previous general criticism of them in Revolt I as unmotivated workers, as “ass”. They were contrite about their previous idea that women, that is Mom, should be ‘chievers. They focused on the issue that exploitive wages were a political issue as it was impacted by immigration and women were a prime victim of that. This became the essential point and symbol of the mass movement for political reforms. They characterized the downward effect on wages of politicalized immigration as a heist from the women. The concern became about the women in your life: Your Mom, wife or wives and daughters and also a concern for ditto for the siblings or on the in-law side. On the street when I was thinking about this I heard the comment, “Is that me?” from a male. Another social comment in-the-air was “The women of Canada are married.” They began to refer to the young women as “Bums”, trying to be a little ironic about their previous emphasis on formal achievement. They began to comment more about “love” than “working hard”.  

 

 

Tasty Food as a Modern Social Symbol

 

There was another symbol of the economic situation and that was food that tastes. It was considered the standard not that people should have enough to eat but rather they have something good to eat at times. This actually works for everyone as people in general treat themselves with something nice to eat, so being able to do so is an index. These concerns for a taste-worthy diet manifest itself all the time, even just in a barely audible “mmmmm” in the mall Food Court.

 

 

Dentistry as a Modern Symbol

 

One other symbol of modern times became dental work. This is because it’s expensive although necessary. It’s expensive for families and retired people a like. Typically retired people do not have group insurance for dental work but tend to require root canals which are $2000 each. So the household budget can be crunched by a little dental work. These days fewer and fewer people have dentures. There was a fear of dental work. And, of course, people tend to spend a little unwisely, on extras, and neglect their cavities.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter VIII

 

The New Revolt Goes on for over a Year

 

 

That First Autumn, 2002

 

The new revolt was intense for one year. I will explain what the government did next about itself and their loose cannon leader and then go over what the people did to me.

 

 

The Government Party’s Next Machinations

 

Liberal MPs in Ottawa didn’t take kindly to their being regulated to de facto opposition level and the prospect of being bounced by the electorate. They continued to agitate. Most infamously they voted against their own government at one point, on Nov. 5, 2002. The only MPs that voted with the government on that occasion were the ones with position in the government – the cabinet ministers, parliamentary secretaries and committee chairmen. I believe, if I have the story exactly right, the vote was precisely split by this division of parliamentary positions. In the party there were 59 votes for the government, 89 against it and 20 odd abstentions. While it was a non-binding vote, a vote on an opposition motion, which isn’t too serious, in a parliamentary system it never, ever happens. The newspapers had to go back a 100 years to find precedents. It was a de facto vote of No Confidence in their government by the Liberals, designed not to bring down the government while crazy Jean Chrétien was in charge. I like to point out to people who don’t believe this interpretation that Prime Minister Chrétien had already agreed to retire and would be gone shortly.  The issue of his leadership was already solved, he was officially gone, what remained was the democratic revolt on the street that had to be addressed properly. Prime Minister Chrétien became outwardly bizarre at the rebellion in his ranks. He threatened his own party with a snap election like he was managing a minority government. He was thinking he could run against his own party. People believed he was crazy enough now to do it too and the result would be a horrendous national mess. While all this was happening the cabinet remained loyal. There was not one of them who quit, declaring he wouldn’t be party to the ongoing. There wasn’t one cabinet leadership hopeful that saw a quiet exit as a strategic career move either. It must have been very unpleasant for them.

 

The inside story on how all this internal maneuvering went would be interesting and might emerge someday. Not all the Liberal MPs were savvy to the Quiet Revolt and the bashing of their Party was unprecedented and turned out to be quite damaging, as the populace could only make out it was about egos’ of the leaders.

 

The state of mind of Chrétien remains a mystery as well. His running of the government continued to be good enough, he didn’t otherwise appear odd in public appearances and no senility or mentally illness emerged in latter years. He was simply bizarre. No one can fathom it.  

 

While the government took on this Strongman hue it was a little too subtle for the media. They did manage to identify a “democratic deficit” which was polite in view of the fact the Liberals had outright voted to fire their leader. The satirical press, Frank Magazine, which takes no advertising and is freer to comment, had a field day. They began to call Chrétien “Crout”. They pointed out that work-a-day journalists face access to government party sources and potential future government gigs and are actually loath to criticize the government party. There was a case where a newspaper had a journalist take the Prime Minister to task but it turns out the tycoon that owned the paper was a friend of the Prime Minister and that journalist was simply fired for his effort. The Prime Minister has controls beyond the constitution. That was the media’s reaction to a renegade Prime Minister in a Western democracy.

 

Unfortunately the former Finance Minister Paul Martin and heir apparent didn’t have a clue what was happening on the street either. While the party was enraged no one could communicate to him that there was a panic in the nation about jobs. The participating population was able to establish via the national informal grapevine that Martin wasn’t being diplomatic rather he wasn’t listening to the MPs and was sanguine about jobs.  The whole panic was in effect a national mobilization over Martin’s ear and ego. He could have harnessed it if he had been awake. History was made for lack of a single honest conversation with a respected and trusted assistant.

 

I’ll describe how this intimate grapevine around heir apparent Martin worked as I experienced it. I had been writing letters to officials as usual and I had contacted Paul Martin’s local leadership campaign office for their address. I happened to also be planning a weekend in Algonquin Park in the near north to see the fall leaves at that time and when I spoke to a woman at the Martin campaign office, who knew me as Bruce, she said she wouldn’t actually give me the address but suggested I call back “after the weekend”. She wouldn’t give me the office address. I did go to Algonquin and the park was alive with comments as to how awful and non-responsive Martin was. They were getting that message through. By the start of the new week I couldn’t make out the point of sending one of my letters to his people and never phoned his office back for their address. That was what the office had anticipated, if I got that message correct.

 

There’s a telepathic joke that conveys the situation that they “transmitted” to me. The cue is the line “there’s emotion” and the image one gets is a man getting into a limousine that’s already occupied and there’s some words. That’s the situation, no?

 

The panic continued and the Liberal Party maneuvered and planned an earlier rather than latter convention to pick the successor to the retiring Prime Minister. No street savvy contender emerged and our fallen hero Paul Martin did steam roll his way to victory. All but one other candidates simply dropped out of the race. There was one centre left woman named Sheila Copps that hung in there on the principle that the centre-left should be represented. Paul Martin didn’t have the support of the Liberal MPs but this did not translate into a lack of support in the grass roots political party.

 

Eventually Mr. Martin was asked what his plans for immigration where and he said it’d be increased in accordance with the long standing Liberal promise to do so. And Mr. Martin did become Prime Minister before Chrétien’s 18 month retirement gig was up as Chrétien finally relented and allowed him to take over.  Martin immediately started dismissing the old cabinet members and dictating what essentials each new cabinet member was to follow. This included immigration where the operative was to find niches where by even more immigrants could be allowed in. The theory behind firing everyone was he was running as an outsider and putting a new look on cabinet but the public received his actions as overbearing, heavy handed and clumsy. People scoffed at the optics of it as the new Prime Minister had no new agenda to go along with his big broom. They scoffed at the silly notion that he was now an outsider because he had been fired by Chrétien as he virtually ran the government for nine years. Mr. Martin’s response to a democratic deficit in the caucus was to further centralize decision making around him. That’s how that history lesson went.

 

Shortly a national election was called, for June 28, 2003. The national hero was now despised. However the opposition was newly minted amalgam of two rag tag parties and had not much of a platform and few experienced people. Nevertheless in the election they caused the government to be reduced to a minority albeit still in control. The Liberal Party had done themselves in. Although their problems had not been solved they had gone as far as they could go as their own opposition.

 

It was all a good effort by the Liberal MPs but they could not direct the leadership’s attention to the issue, a soft labour economy. Immigration was dominating the sad economy of the major cities and Prime Minister Martin could not be hinted, told or arrested.

 

One observation is that most the backbenchers were on side in the alarm about the economy this time around it would appear and this was from the get go in the first weeks. In the 1980s panic generally no one thought it through as simply a tax revolt for some years and the ruling Conservative MPs never did. So basically the Liberal MPs did well and recommended themselves. This is particularly so as the participation amongst the population turned out to be not that high again, maybe the same 10% as in the first phase. In addition the Liberal backbench MPs were ahead of the media, academia and the country’s think tanks in picking up the new information. That’s the appearances of it anyway.

 

The caucus revolt on democratic principles did make the Liberal Party popular with the participating population. It helped maintain their reputation as the Natural Ruling Party of Canada as the opposition Conservatives never said “boo”. The Liberals were credited for this for a long time. The gutted their own party in a crisis; the people would remember it.

 

When Martin became Prime Minister he ran everything from his office. Martin considered himself thee policy wonk and corrupted the whole system. People figured this out, even if they weren’t political, and kept him to a minority in the election. That was the best possible electoral outcome for the times and the voters landed it.

 

The reversal of Mr. Martin’s reputation was dramatic. After 16 years of high deficits Mr. Martin arrived and eliminated a $40 billion shortfall in two budgets and then went further to run serial surpluses, cut the debt to GDP ratio, from 68% to 44%, and he improved the under funded Canadian Pension Plan with a robust national investment fund. So he was highly achieved as a national leader by historical standards even as Finance Minister. He then went on to be a ham-fisted and completely backwards in regard to macro economics, basic statistics on employment. He responded to a caucus revolt by making the Party a one man show. He went from national savior to public enemy No. 1 in about one year. It’s a dramatic reversal, a history story and not properly told in Canada yet. His successful battle with the deficit did leave Canada in good financial shape for years and years.

 

 

My Circumstance in the autumn of 2002

 

I will now detail what was happening to me as the soul of the new national protest and also whipping boy of a Strongman leader in a western democracy.

 

 

 A Window on the Work World

 

I continued to apply for a general labour position and in early November I got a call from a small company I had interviewed earlier. This company was “open” and hiring me was a set up. It was a small service company which I’ll call Bob’s Overhead Door that repaired overhead garage doors. I was glad to get the job even though the wage was low but I was warned on the street that I was asking for “half-a-sandwich up the ass”.

 

Anyway I ignored this and reported for duty Nov. 11. This was still in 2002. This job was my first opportunity to see how the new panic was working out in the actual workplace. As part of my duties was pick ups and deliveries in the company truck I also got a daily tour of the city and was exposed to the communication between vehicles as well as in other workplaces.

 

Repairing garage doors in a city the size of Toronto is a solid business but the industry is fragmented into too many, small independent hang-up-a-shingle entrepreneurs. Anyway I got started at Bob’s Overhead Door and they had me driving around, material handling and tiding up. There was a full complement of office workers, an owner manager – who took the harassment going on more-or-less cheerfully – a secretary, a salesperson, and etc. for maybe eight of them as well as a fleet of radio dispatched repair trucks. Or at least I assumed there was a fleet of trucks but I just didn’t see them as they were radio dispatched. About the third day I was there, I’m getting quicker as I get experienced, I twigged on the fact that there was no fleet of trucks, rather only about four young kids in trucks doing any billable work.

 

This company was exactly the type of business that the panic was concerned about, a fragmented sector that paid poorly and was marginally profitable because of high overhead. Bob’s Overhead Door was intimately known on the street but instead of being a candidate for going out of business, that being the general idea, the community was actually trying to improve it and save it. This is the direct opposite of the theory. The community awareness of its precarious situation, the negative advertising about its cost structure, hadn’t hurt business. In the event it did survive and it exits to this day.

 

When I, or we, a repair person and I, drove around in the service truck the traffic commentary would follow us. At one point a service person and I pulled into a gas station for a fill up for which there was a company debit card. We were several miles from the shop but when the service person paid for the gas at the automatic terminal another customer standing nearby called out the company PIN. Random customers at a local gas station had the PIN for the debit card. Bob’s Overhead Door was that well known.

 

At one warehouse I went to I was standing outside in the parking lot waiting for my truck to be loaded and a young female voice from a neighboring building called, “Bru, do you even know who you are?”. This was the second week in November, four months into the panic, and while I knew my treatise was the issue I had not really clearly thought through that it had been the catalyst of the whole panic. I never thought it and they never mentioned it. They kept it cloaked. That’s how that went. And it still took me sometime to put it all in proper perspective and wording in my mind.

 

In fact it wasn’t until two years latter that I reworded “family panic” into the more direct “immigration panic”. That’s how long it takes an average person like me to articulate.

 

Anyway the “job” I had at Bob’s Overhead Door only kept me busy a few hours a day. Otherwise they just had me doing busy work. That’s the half-a-sandwich. They had me tidy up some shelves of inventory and the staff in the front office patterned my “work” step-by-step which was usual for me. Some odd ball parts were left over as I tidied and they knew I’d find them and commented on them as I moved them back and forth. Apparently the same tiding had been done before.

 

So this job of mine was not too acceptable to the company workers. The community was of the same opinion and they then obstructed it. On the fourth day on the job I made this particular delivery. I stopped in the customer’s parking lot and went inside to find the receiver and someone stole a pricy door lift motor right off the pickup truck while I was inside.  The owner of my company, the target, wasn’t concerned about my and the other employees idle time but he was most upset at the loss of the lift motor. That’s the “up-the-ass” part. So that particular “job” was going, going, gone. I just phoned in my resignation after the first full week. My understanding was at that time targeted vandalism like this was fairly common.

 

When I told Donna I had quit she swore loudly as she was tired of paying all the bills. However I explained that it perhaps wasn’t even a job. I heard her re-explain the situation to a friend on the telephone and she had the picture. I heard her say I might have been costing the little company more than I was contributing which was the case.

 

 

Dedicated Stalker No. 7

 

For that first summer of 2002 No. 4 was upstairs alone with the condo owner. I never heard the actual resident, the owner. Then a male voice made an occasional appearance in the early fall. This was, I’m told, No. 4’s common law husband, a second husband in fact, and her support and benefactor. Then in the second week in November he moved in outright and began to harass me and pattern me as per the standard. He stayed for five months. He was dedicated stalker No. 7 in my life and the fourth stalker in position around my apartment 24 / 7. He too was able to run long mind meld sequences with me.

 

He told me just a little bit about himself. He mentioned he had a teenage son from a previous marriage that didn’t talk to him. He said in so many words that he didn’t necessarily agree with his common law wife’s undertaking but he was willing to stand by her. His time off from work he described as “policy”, whatever that’d be. While he was up there for five months in the last three or so months he was mostly quiet.

 

That’s four dedicated criminal stalkers promoting a treatise I wrote. There’s never been anything like it.

 

 

The Pace of the 24 / 7 Harassment

 

The pace of the panic was reduced as time went on. At December 2002, the six month point, the pace slackened greatly. Downtown Toronto became distinctly quiet, even for me. No. 4 then got into filibusters rather than bugging me with up-the-nose close patterning. The drugging of the food at the local shops stopped mostly.  In January they got off my case enough that I could use my time effectively again. I had been panicking and scheming how I could leave the country, perhaps as a political refugee to the USA, but they relented and let me do things again. I still found applying for a legitimate menial job too theatric and stopped doing so, becoming a stay at home hostage for nine more months. Low level harassment is 10 or 20 sharp cat calls for a half-an-hour shopping visit to my local mall.

 

In February 2003 the echoing of my thoughts was reduced from constantly to a single word of what I was thinking. This new style I called “pinging”. It’s much less irritating.

 

By spring 2003 the tracking of me around the city went down to what I called an “outline” which was just the occasional comment on what I was doing during the day. However as I went through my day and moving around the city they kept track of that. The surveillance just sort of submerged. I was still talking aloud constantly when I was outside as of March. I have a note that at times they’d switch back into close harassment on the street with “white outs”.

 

I was still out of my mind, I was worn down, and this continued until they hospitalized me for six weeks on September 17, 2003, fifteen months into the panic.

 

 

An Elderly Stalker

 

In March an older woman took up a post down the hall from my apartment and stalked me as per the standard for about a month. She tended to interject the occasional punch line in the stream-of-consciousness mind meld with me in the apartment building. I don’t call her a full time stalker rather I just think of her as the woman down the hall. She was in somebody else’s apartment as there is no elderly person on the floor normally. So there was another arrangement made for her.

 

I can tell you one funny story about her harassment of me. I was writing a poem about the socialist opposition leader, or should I say the useless to one and all socialist opposition leader, Jack Layton, and the metaphor for him in the poem was a baseball slugger stepping up to the plate. I was just thinking “plate”, the metaphor being the meal ticket these elected officials derive from their public position, and this woman yells from down the hall “quaking plate”, which made my metaphor. That was the mind meld at work as I wrote a poem in my Toronto area apartment in 2003.

 

 

The Noisy Provincial Legislature Building

 

I occasionally went down to the neighborhood of the provincial legislature building here in Toronto as it was interesting to just to do so in the middle of Revolt II. I went down to the place early on in the panic and sat outside the building on a park bench just to see if I could pick up on any intelligence. There wasn’t much at the time but there was one voice coming out of the building. I recall the voice saying “He passed?” This refers to several things. The past governments had deficits and these, as pay down time had arrived, were being referred to as costs that had been passed along. Also it would have been mentioned while I was outside because I had written letters about the hysteria to the Premier which he merely shuffled on. Of course it means a passing grade as well and in particular law school comes to mind in my case. In the Legislature sometimes questionable bills are passed. So it’s a utility mulit-entendre with sharp meanings about politics.

 

They can spend by “passing” as in several ways. Not only can politicians run deficits, they can immigrate without good jobs and make contractual commitments for future governments. They all do it, leverage their power.

 

In the spring of 2003 I went back down to the legislature and sat in the public gallery in the Legislature while the politicians were sitting to see what the elected MPPs would say to me. I went in and sat down and they were conducting mundane business, speeches about particular citizens from the individual MPPs constituency. Then after about half-an-hour of this they turned their attention to me and talked at me for about ten minutes. The Legislature Speaker folded his arms and glared at me as it was something of a disturbance of proceedings which is strictly not allowed. A school kid in the gallery yelled “is that Brucie”, the MPPs had a couple of lines from my treatise and also some code words. I heard “what is your advice” which was a phrase I was hearing when the elected officials were having trouble with their leader. Members of all three parties in the Legislature went through the theatrics for me.

 

I went down to the legislature a third time after about a year of the panic. I could make out the legislature building was the scene of pandemonium from outside the building. By that time there’d be many hot topics in-the-air and an election was approaching but neither Premier Eves nor the opposition leader, Dalton McGuinty, where catching on. This is incredible in itself as when I went down there you could hear noise coming from inside the legislature building at 200 paces. The voices, a cacophony of them, carried from the legislature across the bordering park to College Street. So the staff was at their wits end trying to communicate and probably about all manner of topics.

 

 

Where’s the Police Chief?

 

The official in charge of my second persecution was Toronto Police Chief Juliano Fantino. He was very carefully selected for the position of Police Chief as it’s an extremely sensitive position. The Toronto Police Chief commands almost one tenth of the police in the country. I wrote him the first few days of my renewed troubles and he ignored my letter. The Justice Minister of Canada and the Supreme Court found it in them to write to me but not the man responsible. So I gave up for the time being. Later I wrote to the Police complaints Bureau that the Commander of the local police station, Division 32, had been negligent and, in accordance with the current law, the complaint was reviewed by the Police Chief Fantino. He sent a letter to me stating that my accusation was “vexing” and such do not have to be looked into according to the wording of the Police Act. This is how bureaucrats work; they simple dig through their manual, land on a sentence or even a word, and discharge the issue to the garbage can. Police Chief Fantino also sent a memo to 32 Division asking them to look into my situation. On information there was serious corruption in 32 Division he sent them a memo. The idea that I was a virtual political prisoner of 32 Division and that they were shooting upwards at political bosses didn’t seem to enter into it, I mean into his mind. This is a guy that is in charge of a budget of over half-a-billion annually. This is a guy who earned his stripes as an officer in homicide investigations which would pretty much tend to be bizarre stories. What a top cop! What a citizen! What a finger at law and order, a finger at the thin black line of judges who maintain order and also a finger at democracy! What can I say, the police chief of Toronto is guilty of being “unsuspecting”. For some reason his memo to 32 Division did get through and I got a phone call from some constable who suggested over the phone that I change the locks on my apartment door. I was thankful they didn’t come and pay me a visit while my wife was in, or otherwise upset my marital applecart.

 

 

Across the continent in Vancouver

 

In early August of 2003, thirteen months into the revolt, Donna and I took a trip to Vancouver to visit my elderly mother. Vancouver is the other big immigration city in Canada so I got to listen to what the reaction there was. It was pretty amazing actually.

 

On the airplane trip out to Vancouver the theatrics by the crew and passengers was basically off. There was intermittent comments, and accurately, but that was all.

 

My Mother picked up my wife and me at the Vancouver Airport and the hour long drive back to her house in West Vancouver was, however, totally “open”. As we worked our way through the maze of Vancouver streets the three way conversation between my Mom, my wife and me was echoed on the road.

 

Things like this are even more extreme than my usual circumstance and I try to find alternative explanations than skilled mind patterning. Perhaps it’s white noise again. Perhaps it’s a whole new style of conversation patterning based on a broader list of what people will talk about when left to themselves. Anyway the effect was our very meandering conversation was patterned by the people on the street as we drove through Vancouver as far as I could make out.

 

Vancouver, as it turns out, had been in full theatrics mode but by August 2003, they were winding down. My family; my mother, brother and niece were well known but I couldn’t ascertain as to how well known as the level was down by them. However they had done a full investigation into me and my mind, despite me being 2078 miles from home, was opened up on and off while I was there.

 

They did a ventriloquism effect with my brother so I thought he was an initiate. I heard him speak under his breath but the voice was really from elsewhere. A year latter I saw him again and he had no information and no idea what had transpired. My mother and niece also had no inkling of what was going on.

 

We did the tourist attraction bit while we were in Vancouver. People left me alone mostly. At restaurants there was typically note of my appearance and some limited commenting about the young worker’s situation.

 

In particular there were comments going on in Vancouver about women including about their pension arrangements. Women’s bust size would be commented on as if that was there actual income retirement figure. I would hear things like “you look about 42” couched as if they were talking about the person’s age. It’s not like you can tell anyone what the codes mean.

 

The main feature of the theatrics still on in Vancouver that I was exposed to was comments from the highway below my mother’s house. My mother has an architect designed bungalow on the mountain in West Vancouver. It has a swimming pool out back and a panoramic view of the ocean. Down hill about 400 meters runs a highway. When I was out on the patio around the pool the highway traffic ran a stream of mind meld commentary with me on and off. At times I’d be talking to Donna and my Mother and it’d entirely stop. Other times it’d be the usual, perfectly audible and perfectly timed mind meld commentary. They could calculate my thoughts with precision in the traffic across the continent in Vancouver. My Vancouver trip means I had personally been in mind meld from Vermont in America to the East to Vancouver on the West.

 

What they said on the street was down to the essentials. They were surprised and pleased to see me in Vancouver, of course, and expressed this as “Hurray, it’s here.” “It’s here” was the expression making the rounds about where the jobs were or where to stay put once you got a better job. They were even sharper about my theme of investigation of low paid workers conditions. They called “You’re shit shine.” The frank code word they were using to refer to the problem of the cost of food to the poor was their shit. They summarized the political situation in a sentence or two as well. The west of Canada is the domain of the right wing opposition at that time but in Vancouver they disparaged the depth of experience of this opposition. They called from the highway “Who would be the Speaker, Stan?” Stan was my mother’s elderly companion and who had been active in politics earlier in his life. In the end they concluded it was “straight ahead, and down” which is the submarine motif and the group think to go with the ruling party, the Liberals, but with a hidden agenda.

 

 

  The National Theatrics Crescendo: The Mind Meld Goes Continental

 

The situation in Vancouver, 2078 miles from home, pretty much made the mind meld with me continental. It is the product of society co-evolving with the theory that “doing the work and caring about people” is what matters most and it’s pretty much a monument to that. That is “The Work” a roscoe and “Caring” a louie, if you will. It’s was achieved with me circa 2002 AD. I was joined at the mind with a continent of associates. The effort it required by society is daunting but it happened. It required extensive civil disobedience, was persecution, but did mark an advance in level of functioning of society, which is one of those ironies. The citizens set out to address social dysfunction and arrived at a Continental Mind Meld.

 

The Continental Mind Meld is an expression of the human personality, the ability to relate, and it evolved on the savannahs of Africa. It harnessed community communication which became competent enough to be a precise instrument. I’m the test case of people’s new abilities: where they practiced their logical thinking, new awareness and new abilities at human psychology. It’s the genius of average intelligence applied.

 

The Continental Mind Meld reached with me is the zenith of the new Borg Consciousness, the interconnected thinking as one.  

 

This continental mass effort is also a tribute to my thinking through economics while driving a delivery van and coming up with basically two overlooked ideas in macro-economics, the working age participation rate question and the upward movement in jobs in the traditional Knowledge Economy. At the same rate it’s also the prize for modern social dysfunction: the malfunction of economists, the police and politicians at once.  

 

The Continental Mind Meld is also the new sociology of irresponsible democratic leadership.

 

This is all a lesson for posterity. The Continental Mind Meld with me could be a beacon for a very long time. It’s an exploration of human potential: what lies beyond a lazy mind, how closely people can relate and how cohesive society can be. It’s something people can tell your children and grandchildren about.   

 

 

A New World Meta-Culture Emerges

 

In the revolt an enhanced adult personality emerged that was the genius of average intelligence harnessed.  It was more refined and disciplined than what had been common before. It was manifest in the Continental Mind Meld. It emphasized work, caring and being diplomatic, as I say. I had the thought these are the unsung virtues. In the mind meld the riposte to that thought while driving my truck was “They’re the bedrock of philosophy.” Culture is thought to be the movies or the media but really it’s your daily, reliable and lovable self and this has come to the forefront. It’s a new, unifying world meta-culture. In the revolt of the early 21^st Century all this became a rational cult. In the coming economic maelstroms of the 21^st Century this may go universal, get spread around world including to the less developed countries, which are going to be in an awful way. It could be the actual 3^rd way of a future world; they call it “opening the world” on the street. This would be based on community communication. The world culture is the New Frontier for a troubled world.  It requires an abusive intrusion and frankness about people’s lives which can become persecution but that may be the price.

 

 

The End of Dedicated Stalkers No. 5 and No. 6

 

This trip out to Vancouver was in early August 2003, the 13 month point of Revolt II. Le Girl, that is No. 6, faded away just before my trip and was never heard from again. Le Guy, No. 5, was still at his post by the time we came back but was mostly quiet. Shortly he departed too. The pair of them had lasted for one year. They had taken a year off their studies to promote the panic.

 

Other voices then took over from them in the school yard but none that were identifiable as anymore than passer buyers. I recall sports teams in the playing fields adjacent to the school began calling mind meld patterns as they ran around. The harassment was down but I was exhausted and felt like killing them all.

 

 

Donna and My Body Language

 

I had this secret life going on for years where I was the centre of protest of social conditions in the country but my wife had no idea. I had to completely contain myself around her. However my wife had complaints nonetheless. She kept this to herself in turn mostly but one day she described her point-of-view. She said my body language was all tension and that was “a silent complaint”. Now I’m responsible for silent complaints. She said it wasn’t just my tension rather also I gapped, kept my mouth open like a crocodile sunning itself, my eyes darted around all the time and I was always shaking my arms, which is what I did when I had tantrums. She said I was always humming, which I did to block out the muted voices. She added she knew I wasn’t quite right because my general agitation and even my breathing. Then she did a little imitation of me and did all these things at once and it didn’t look too good.

 

I lived through years of social mayhem across North America, was the centre of an associated mass conspiracy for all that time, but thought I did well to survive. I stayed with my wife as my alternative was a life of , which is what the social topic was and which they called “It”. (Socially “It” pertained to women whose main interest was child rearing rather than a skilled job and independance.) Donna actually triggered the international play around me, and they allowed she was a limiter on government abuse of power, including in the USA – thinking my case should surface at some time and sober up the politicians. I would never in a life time be able to explain to Donna the mass conspiracy.  We continued to get on quite well other wise. If the social upheaval surfaces eventually and I am compensated by the government for my role I will become the bread winner for the entire family, which in Donna’s case means to financially look after her siblings. I was able to hold my tongue about the virulent persecution of me from all friends, family and associates for 30 years eventually – dating from the start at Ontario Hydro in 1981. (tbd—daate2)

 

 

They Hospitalize Me Again

 

Donna came home at 10 PM Sept. 16, 2003 and announced that a friend, whose name she protected, had said I was so enraged I was becoming dangerous to the public. She said I had to go right then and there to the mental hospital and that another friend, Rob White, was coming over to drive us there. So I grabbed my tooth brush and my diary and off we went to the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, the major psychiatric institute in Toronto. There an emergency room doctor interviewed me and I stated I was very angry at being stalked. She asked if I was “broadcasting”, which is exactly what was happening to the stars. So she admitted me as a dangerous person and I was there for six weeks during which the populace powered down the theatrics around me, but not completely off. They actually just submerged them, unbeknownst to me.

 

At the Clarke there was close harassment for the first couple of days by the other patients, the better off patients, and then they went quiet. It tailed off inside and out, as the population had decided to give me a rest. I had the shakes by then but after a few days of quiet at the hospital my shakes and my anger healed over.

 

My visit to the Clarke was my second opportunity to see a workplace in the midst of the panic, Bob’s Overhead Door being the only other one. It was pretty amazing. Even after the intense harassment trailed off there was intermittent “white” noise. However, none of the doctors or nurses I had official dealings with seemed to be initiates. So the situation was people were at close quarters, crowded into the hospital ward, with no opportunity that there could have been any talking and yelling through the floor and walls. Yet I could hear lots of comments and this was intelligent and informative as usual. In particular when I went to sleep they’d close pattern my slumber time and also during the day there were always comments in the washroom. The logistics of this in a crowded hospital seemed impossible.

 

Some of the staff were initiates of course and there were comments as to what was actually going on. They said “Berthing me was nothing?” which is a comment of the decision and cost to hospitalize me, a nod to me, my Mother’s son, for suffering for all of the people Christ like, and a nod to the analogy of my role to a capital war ship. They indicated by a visual imitation, posing a male nurse just so, who the friend was that had told Donna I was becoming dangerous, not that that was likely to remain secret. It was Rob, of course. The nurses called out the term, “skit-zophrenia”. There was a variety of commenting like this.

 

Some but not most of the patients were initiates as well. They called they could well keep up the intimate patterning in the hospital but did so in fact only just the first night.

 

The care at the General Psychology Unit (GPU) that I was in is intensive. There are nurses 24 / 7 and each nurse looks after about six patients. The actual psychiatrists have about six patients each as well and they see each one daily. When I was in the GPU only two patients were there that didn’t have much hope of any function what so ever and would have to be cared for all their life. Other patients had afflictions such as mumbling, chronic rocking back and forth or chronic insomnia. In short it’s an interesting place. The patients are all on a regime of drugs. The psychiatrist said half the people through the general ward are put on disability forever and the other half go on to work-a-day lives.

 

For myself I kept busy reading computer texts and exercising, walking around the hall. I completed two computer texts in the six weeks I was there, everyone approved of my level of concentration, and I lost weight due to my constant walking around the hall. I also asked after all the patients and took interest in the dramas.

 

In the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry I was the patient of one Dr. Shugar. He was a bona fide psychiatrist, a medical doctor with post doctorate training in psychiatry. He was older and had 40 years of experience in the field. He called me his favorite patient but he was not an initiate.

 

Dr. Shugar interviewed me once a day and his style was to put you at ease by talking casually and then going over issues more or less briefly. He had an absolutely impressive ability to sort out and articulate the essence of a complex personal situation in a few sentences. However he and a supporting panel of psychiatrist at the hospital diagnosed me as completely crazy. I go over this in detail here as chronic schizophrenia is the alternative interpretation to this whole book, the reason why the government feels safe in ignoring me and it’s an example of how direct communication works in my case. It’s also another tale of expertise gone wrong in the modern world.

 

When I first was admitted to the hospital Dr. Shugar had me hold up my hand and it was twitching. He put his own hand against mine for comparison and mine had the shakes. The nerves firing would twitch my fingers about a millimeter constantly. Dr. Shugar had me stick out my tongue and he said it was trembling as well. That’s the effect constant mind patterning has; people getting up your nose about the thoughts you are having.

 

My diagnosis didn’t go well. I told Dr. Shugar I was hearing voices and voices are a hall mark of any of the five types of schizophrenia. I said that I was being persecuted by the citizens of the city. That was paranoia. I said, wait a minute, that the voices were doing an anthropological study of modern society and competently so. That was the working of the subconscious mind.  Apparently the great doctor is under the impression the subconscious mind is not in a dream state; it can do complex and detailed analysis. My own subconscious was working on socio-economics. I told him there was a revolt in society associated with an economic and social analysis I had done and I went over it with him saying there is a second deficit, a jobs deficit. He did read my 32 page treatise, recognized it as an actual alternative economic paradigm, was out and out enthusiastic about my ideas on change for the nation, but he says “be that as it may” and then referred to the movie and clinical story of John Nash in the movie Beautiful Mind where a polymath was also a schizophrenic. John Nash worked with secret encryption codes and nobody could penetrate his story of being a national security issue, not unlike my case which involved a police conspiracy. The psychiatrists also had a word for the dichotomy of my normal behavior regardless of mental problems. These things are “subtle” to a psychiatrist. Apparently some mental patients are pretty much normal but have some quirk that gets out of hand. Dr. Shugar figured out my problem is in a court case I’d have not a single witness. Also the doctors have a category of schizophrenics that believe they are at the centre of revolutions which includes the minute by minute harassment on the street exactly as it was happening to me. These psychiatrists say the revolutionary ideas make sense and it’s the people who are crazy. (I figure they make limited sense, like communists.) So my diagnosis was a combination of two clinical cases: that of John Nash of the Beautiful Mind and revolutionary schizophrenics.

 

The psychiatrists polished their diagnosis further, actually. I told them the second week at the hospital the harassment outside on the street, I was allowed out for a walk daily, abruptly stopped. I said after 15 months of constant attention by the neighborhood it was like banging into a wall of silence.  They knew about that too they said, the exact feeling of the bang, which they say is typical of their revolutionary schizophrenic experience. They attribute the abrupt silence to the anti-psychotic drug they put me on. I had a text book case of schizophrenia in their opinion and experience. I also explained I pick intelligence up on the street and the psychiatrists had an answer there too. Schizophrenics are more sensitive than others and do pick things up from people on the street. Now brain damaged people are sensitive.

 

A panel of psychiatrists at the Clarke concluded that my story didn’t make sense. The country was back sliding on two fronts, jobs and fiscal deficits, and I happened to be the living symbol for both problems. In addition a Prime Minister had seized the government from his party and was something of Strongman and as I was the cause the public was torturing me for this to make it a legal case. Dr. Shugar was entirely enthusiastic about my treatise but couldn’t see that it’d actually have social leverage. The psychiatrists had conflicting information, medical analysis is complex, but this all didn’t make sense to them. History walked in the door and they diagnosed it. Classic. They diagnosed a key Canadian political figure as mentally ill. They diagnosed I had extensive brain damage; the symptoms of which were: being more socially concerned, analytical and sensitive. They said I had schizophrenia all my life and would have it for the rest of my days. They said it could be controlled, however, with an inexpensive injection in the rear end once a month. Beautiful.

 

The psychiatrists couldn’t see any sense in my story what so ever; rather their training and position corrupted the logic of their minds. My life has been wild and unique in history but the psychiatrists saw it as symptoms of schizophrenia in elegant detail. It is professional hypochondria.  This is the expertise problem up close.  Psychiatrists are a muddle of sympathies, subtleties, finesse and ego.

 

In the case of psychiatrists they are asked by the government and society to work miracles and they simply rise to the occasion. They apply what other people have told me is “the medical model”.  They firmly believe that their set of pills will cure mental illness. That’s what 14 years of university will do to your ability to rationalize; it’s a form of self-absorption.

 

So that’s how my conversations went with the communication experts, PhDs in psychiatry. That’s the chance direct communication has. They could not be interested in the break through in psychology the mind patterning of me represents. I just added psychiatrists to the list of elites that I found dysfunctional in my life.

 

Donna took it in stride. She doesn’t seem to be concerned about being married to a disabled person rather she seems to think the drug will cure it. All she says is she wants me to have a social worker as it’s “inappropriate” to out relation that she be the care giver for my mental illness. Of course it helps that I have no symptoms, never mention the things that happen to me and that I can hold a job, even a good one.

 

A serious ramification of the good doctors is what officialdom will think if and when this book is published or my story otherwise emerges. Almost for certain the government will pick and choose professional reactions and take Dr. Shugar’s diagnosis of mental illness as all that needs to be said and done. It limited my capacity for writing to officials to explain events. If I could append to my letters about the revolt the statement the psychiatrists at the hospital say this is not mental illness my missives would have more bite, some real teeth. So there you go, that’s the role these experts play and will continue to play. They may have changed history. Too bad I can’t call the police; actually they are the police.

 

One reaction to this book is that it’s a schizophrenic episode. The whole complex, original and convoluted tale will be explained away as the chattering of some brain damaged part of the subconscious by some people.

 

 

  A Provincial Election

 

While I was in the hospital there was a provincial election. The choice was between the incumbent Conservative, Ernie Eves, who had unwisely aggravated a new, large deficit with wild spending promises, the new deficit being $5 billion, and a Liberal, Dalton McGuinty, who had some 255 promises despite the new deficit. That was the choice. In the event the Conservative Eves was turfed out as it was clear to the public he was bizarre and overbearing as a leader.

 

The level of participation in the panic was probably not high enough to single handedly determine the outcome of individual races. As a result there were some ironies. The provincial Attorney General, David Young, who had triggered the panic by leaking my treatise and was a national hero, was voted out. It had appeared to me the local neighbour hood was grooming him for leadership of the party but in fact he couldn’t hold on to his legislature seat. He was about the only take charge provincial politician on the horizon and he was voted out and never heard from again. The Solicitor General, Robert Runicman, who was in charge of the provincial police and thus my keeper, and was some corrupt and useless at once, was reelected. He had been asked by the Attorney General by letter to do something about my situation but the request went dead in his mailbox.

 

After the election the former cabinet members from the losing Conservatives explained that Premier Eves had rarely called a cabinet meeting, that he was running the government himself. This was their excuse at any rate, another self possessed Big Cheese. He stepped down after the election and a leadership race was called. There were three sundry candidates but nothing like a cabinet favorite or anyone that appeared to have any idea as to what was going on economically or on in the street. In the event a cable TV executive won the leadership. This was one John Tory. I immediately wrote him about Upward Growth and he favored me with a reply, albeit negative, which referred to his own economics. I could make out this was ideology. He’s another well heeled “Liberal” at best. That’s how politics is going in the once well run province of Ontario.

 

 

A Year of Submerged Theatrics

 

So that was the end of my ordeal. The larger event had been trailing off or had trailed off. However, they continued to work on the affirmative action for me in a submerged mode. I’d hear just a few muted phrases a week about my situation, just the slightest hint that they were still working on my case. Then after a full year of that another quite amazing event occurred; they restarted the whole mass event. In October 2004 the city became alive with street theatrics again. And the populace also decided that I was so special, that my role on society was so key, that I had been taken advantage of by so many for so long, that they restarted the whole city wide affirmative action but just for me. They weren’t going to run the general star system, as that was a bust, but they were still going to work on my case – my employment. They wouldn’t witness the city wide event so that I would have my case referred to the courts but they insisted on running this huge regional production just for me. They called that I always was an interesting play to explain their motivation. They became intimate once again and ran more mind meld but not as aggressively as previously so it was not as hard to take. So that was my special role number four in society, a personal mass event. In the intervening year I had some difficulties finding a menial job of any sort and ran into the submerged theatrics here and there. I can relate how this went and summarize larger events as well. The new phase then went on for over six years, had some troubles and took some turns. Phase II of the Western revolt was originally 15 months, subsided for a year and then came back for six more years. (tbd—daate2)

 

 

Going Back to Work and the Submerged Theatrics

 

When I got out of the hospital I set about looking for a factory job and I also studied more office skill texts.

 

No. 4 seemed to have moved out but I did hear an occasional phrase or word from overhead. I began to think I had been mislead all along and there was really only one person upstairs all along. I thought that might be the owner and condo board member Audrey Roman who had stalked me this last 15 months. I couldn’t believe No. 4 would still be living upstairs even though there wasn’t anything going on. In fact No. 4 was still there, quiet, and playing the same role as before with her volunteerism begetting the co-operation of the populace. They didn’t let me in on this silent running rather they kept it secret from me as per usual.

 

I turned my attention to getting a job. I applied to all varieties of small businesses. As Christmas approached I applied for and got hired for three weeks of seasonal work as a laborer at an interior features company called Elite Cornice. This company made the wood borders that go around the top of a wall in a room analogous to baseboards; that’s a cornice. That product supports a small business in a city the size of Toronto. The three weeks of employment was very welcome as it gave me the $1000 I needed for a regular Christmas. So far my finances were still okay and I had a life.

 

There was no theatrics going on at Elite Cornice. The panic had gone off and had completely disappeared just as it did after the 1980s. My co-workers were friendly and I immediately brought up the topic of wages, which one typically does on a new job. There wasn’t a hint of the topics of the panic to be had. The two young guys I worked with were concerned with wages and conditions at the bottom and we talked about that. They liked my idea about a higher  for the city area.

 

While it was quiet at Elite Cornice No. 4 had inside information on the place and piped up occasionally. Most memorably she called is that a “white mare”? As this is perfect pidgin for the place I’ll explain it. It’s a quadruple entendre. In the first place my immediate supervisor at Elite was a black Jamaican immigrant with a young family. He was married to a nurse so his pension would be through her. She’s the family work horse in that regard. So that’s reference one. Reference two is the factory is small and it buys the molding and then adds the finishing touches, the main part of which is spraying them with white primer. So that’s the job day after day and the place is white from primer. That’s reference two. Then there’s the owner. His name was Marino and when I was there he was trying to make the company work in cramped quarters and there was this rig-a-ma-roll of moving material from one spot to another, then back and also other economizing jobs. I actually had a nightmare about this rig-a-ma-roll. That’s reference three and is somewhat subtle. The final reference is Elite Cornice is a small business that doesn’t provide family suitable employment and is staffed by immigrants. Roll it all together and it’s a “white mare”. When I heard this pun I realized that Elite Cornice was, or had been, fully investigated and that this intelligence was still making its way to No. 4 via the grapevine on the street.

 

After that I was back to faxing and phoning for jobs. The economy had 7% unemployment and a like amount of hidden unemployment so there were jobs available but it took some applying. I came across a six week temporary post as a driver for a fur storage company called Gennie International. I took that as Donna wanted us to fly back to Vancouver to visit my mother again immediately after the job. So I drove around downtown Toronto picking up minks from rich and not so rich clients for summer cold storage for six weeks in May and June. I was paid the usual low wage.

 

The submerged theatrics was almost off. A couple times a day, while I was in the truck, I would hear a call in muted voices that sounded like theatrics. At one down town department store where I picked up furs I heard “We’re loaded for secretary?” This pun emphasized that they weren’t looking to place me in just any office job. In the Gennie International office there were no comments what so ever, not one.

 

 

Back Across the Continent in Vancouver the Next Year

 

At the end of June I finished with the mink business and took the opportunity of the time off to fly out to Vancouver to visit my aging mother again. We had been planning this all year as my mother was turning 80 and there was going to be a small family gathering. This would be approaching the two year point since the start of the panic.

 

When we got to Vancouver it was 99% quiet. There was no theatrics on the plane, on the street and my mother’s house was not bugged. One morning I was out in my mother’s yard and a neighbor went through a routine in-the-air style about my older brother being “taller” than me. That was about all I heard in the whole two weeks.

 

I did notice one very interesting fact, though. The traffic on the streets had a different sound to it. In Toronto there seemed to be a buzz coming off the local traffic that I couldn’t make out. I didn’t know whether or not it was there. In Vancouver it was distinctly not there. That was different and interesting. In Toronto the roads were still being used as a communication forum.

 

 

Chapter IX

 

The New Revolt Becomes a Eight Year Ordeal (Tbd—daate2)

 

 

The New Revolt Reactivates –  and features me

 

In September of 2004, after a year of quiescence, the population decided through the air to restart the active revolt process. They again modified the style, intent and philosophy to suit but actually returned the event to full force. Sure enough No. 4 was still at her post in the apartment above mine promoting my case and so they started back on me. She had just stayed up there quietly for a year awaiting something to happen. They put me in the mind meld again, but were gentler this time and careful not to drive me out of my proper mind. The city and the country were still headed backward and so the public went back to work. This went on for several years during which time the revolt process matured and the government dug itself deeper into a historic hole by doing nothing. The revolt became contagious again and active internationally, at least in the USA and the UK, my information is. (tbd—daate2)

 

To describe how it went I will go back to my own story. I was applying for regular employment and at the end of September I did finally get a basic job. It was the same as my old auto parts delivery post. I was hired by the competition, Berco Automotive, as an auto parts driver and this was even in the same neighborhood as before.  Some of the customers were the same. It was a good job for me at the time as it turned out. The pay was only $10 an hour but it was driving so I could think all day, which would be about my activism and this book. However the day I reported for duty the citizens or Toronto once again turned on the theatrics around me city wide, country wide.

 

I started at Berco Automotive on September 27, 2004 and was driving throughout the whole west end on the greater city area. I immediately began to hear comments as I drove. At one warehouse I picked up at in the suburbs I distinctly heard “We’re getting messages.” They began to follow me around in my delivery truck and cat call me as per usual. In a few days the in-the-air process was back and they returned to their constant commenting at me, this time while I was in a pickup truck on delivery in the West end of the greater city area.

 

They decided not to run the general star system with affirmative action promises, which was a bust, but to keep me in my super star role and continue to work on the affirmative action for just me, for some sort of office job. They thought the submerged running had run down my importance, my “batteries” they called it, and that they’d bring me back up to the surface. The cost to me for this was more close attention, they insisted on more mind meld, but it was to be no where near as painful as previously. What they did previously was very disturbing and could be called torture but now they backed off some. They’d keep up the dialogue with my stream-of-consciousness and it was just normal for me. Importantly this reduced level of harassment meant that I was not upset enough to disturb my wife and interfere with my marriage. They were much more positive this time, were empathetic, and agreed with me all the time as a matter of their amended style. They knew my mind well including my excitable internal chatter but they would ignore this in deference to my better side. They backed off the teasing about social and sexual peccadilloes, which is particularly irritating. The population would run discussions with me, always introducing key words rather than explaining anything to me – hinting. However, I was still entrapped and some sort of virtual hostage. Despite causing maybe half-a-million people to pay close attention to everything I did or said on a daily basis not one comment in a thousand pooh poohed the effort. They did feel responsible for me and were determined to do something.  They remained adamant about not witnessing anything of the event, allowing my situation to become a legal case, as they insisted on protecting the seven stalkers and other volunteers. The volunteers, and especially No.4, “owned” a major aspect of the revolt and they were not going to turn on them – which was not on legally anyway because of the government’s responsibility so it was not logical. So this was all different, very odd. No. 4 started to comment daily again. The style remained everything had to look like nothing was happening. Continued government incompetence and inaction was assumed.

 

One time while I was grocery shopping and after ranting aloud about putting No. 4 on trial and paying me my damages I called “try the turkey” as I was by the poultry section of the meat counter. The other shoppers laughed “Is that Bruce?” I preferred the help to nothing. It was more activism and protesting and it made me feel like something was still happening. I became thee lightening rod of the Canadian vanguard for economic progress in the Western World. It opened the horizon on which “something could happen” politically.  Finally it extended the length-of-time of the crime against me and therefore the horizon on which there could be a law suit paid by contingency fees, the statute of limitations for that in the province in the new legislation on that being only two years and the chances of a quick response by the government were slim.

 

On the street when I’d commented on this status of mine as the lightening rod of the vanguard of economic progress they’d counter, “That’s us”, meaning they thought of it as themselves being the vanguard. And they put years of effort into the process, a heroic effort. It was a heroic effort by the people.

 

What No. 4 was doing was stalking a delinquent Prime Minister. What she was doing is akin to a tribesman hunting a mastodon with a spear. You have to get right under the beast and ram your spear in its nether regions as hard as you can. So no one in the tribe was going to turn No. 4 in for doing that for the community.

 

So all this was the messages in-the-air people were getting; the city had really decided to continue the mass protest and keeping me as the focus. It wasn’t going to be easy; it went on for over six years. This brought the attention of the mega-village to me as the alpha star of, to the micro details of my life and mind, up to 13 years, dating back 27 years now. As No. 4 was undoubtedly an initiate in the first phase of the revolt, that’s how long she has been in scientific intimacy with me.  (tbd—daate2)

 

The modified style of mind meld was not too discomforting. As strange as it may seem being in mind meld across the large parts of the continent is not that disconcerting after awhile.  A lot of your thinking is mundane for one and for two, in my case, was socially purposeful. You get used to the teasing, people being frank about you. As a result I did not do my previous constant talking on the street as a defense to the verbal harassment. Being in mind meld across the continent with millions of people is certainly better than being one of these Siamese twins that are joined at the head.

 

The population then continued the public discussions for years. Everyone just “obeyed”. The odd “refusnik” I encountered was quickly disparaged by the crowd. The governments remained out of touch, quite lost.

 

A point on the my mass event, not that small, is that the owner of the condo above me who was co-habiting with No. 4,  Audrey Roman,  moved out eventually and was not heard from again. However, No. 4 arranged to remain at that post, maybe took over the place as a rental unit. It got done, as in the 1980’s arrangements about the domicile above me were made.

 

 

A Major Twist to the National Situation and My Status

 

Notice the, erm, turn of events. The citizens outright decided to run a mass event that turned on my job prospects, such as they were. The citizens insisted on close following me but I was now on the road all day so that meant the general population of the city, on the road, would be my guard. They had revealed to me my actual status, which I wasn’t clear on, that I was not only the biggest show in town I was terribly unique and important to them. Actually it was both No. 4 and me. With this peculiar status came the possibility, once again, that I had the leverage to sue the government for being experimented upon by the nation if only the no witness problem could be solved. They encouraged me in this topic by reasoning it out with me that I was exactly the only case in the whole continental mess that could effectively blame the government for the intrusion of privacy, through the power of my dedicated stalkers. (My associates who were part of my show could do so in a class action as well, blame No. 4, but it would be complex and expensive.) They allowed that the catch was really they we’re just protecting the volunteer stalkers who were folk heroes. They called “They didn’t know how to proceed” but my case was a citizen’s attack on the government and they now dug in.  So this is all extreme and extremely unusual. They took my case to the court of public opinion and rather spectacularly.

 

The witness problem was legally solvable, there could always be a wide amnesty, and eventually the citizens also got around to saying they just might drop the conspiracy of official silence. The insistence on protecting No. 4 and the other stalkers was the key to these events it seems. It’s odd because the police and government weren’t going to arrest her after all those years of their collusion with the process. It’d be unpopular, denial of the political issue of macro economics and blaming one person. Arresting No. 4 would be the height of irresponsibility. The government would be blamed. The no witness scenario was like instinct amongst the population. Something was wrong; the whole flock had this internal compass that they followed, like birds on migration. They proceeded in the direction of continuing running the event.

 

My fall back alternative to them going public is this book, to be the whistle blower on the whole mass civil disobedience.

 

No. 4 had remained upstairs and had actually triggered the community to stay on my case for a year of submerged running and now triggered the population to conduct another spectacle. She had the power, through her steely will, to cause this mass event around me. The population remained dedicated to her for years.  This No. 4 stalker had been responsible for my torture and was personally committed to me seeing a better ending for me. The dedication of  No. 4 and the wide effort by the community to do all this was amazing although the massive costs that I had uncovered did make the whole event sensible. That and the fact the government was still responsible for me and if it wasn’t deaf and stonewalling it’d fall because of the protest and the citizens macro economics would be reviewed. So they continued the mass effort with the attitude something should happen. Despite the fact that the direction of Canada and a number of other countries was the issue the priority remained to protect No. 4, who was in no danger anyway.

 

The mind meld they now began to run was more remarkable than ever. I have described how in the first panic I could sit by the superhighway, the 401, and they’d pattern my thoughts in their vehicles and have a “conversation” with my mind. They now did this while I drove around a 500 square mile delivery area in a pick-up truck. The population in this area kept tuned to my thinking all day and ran the mind meld comments on the fly as I drove by. There was a traveling wave of mind meld in the traffic. Mostly it was people in vehicles that did this; so there would be this running conversation in the traffic all over the city as to where I was and what I was doing and thinking just now. Typically the vehicles coming in the opposing direction would call out a line about what I was thinking just then as they passed me, a drive-by-shot. It sounds improbable and impossible but in practice it worked well. The participating population did this without complaint, they simply supported my role. It now went on all day long for some six more years without a break. (tbd—daate2)

 

The discussions between vehicles on the roads and highway became the main forum of the revolt process in later years. They got the inter-vehicle commenting down pat. It was actually a horrible racket although you had to have your ear tuned to it to capture what was being said. People have time while driving their vehicles and the highways became a Borg forum. In their vehicles they analyzed endless topics.

 

More invasion of privacy of minor stars went on in this highway forum and it’s completely beyond control by the police or state. It’s an unbelievable technique and it’s not like any bureaucrat is going to investigate that. Across the continent there must have been a lot of local stars, I have no idea, being discussed in this way. There was this new star system in Phase II which was milder but didn’t promise affirmative action.

 

The mind meld entailed constantly patterning my mind in the city, being in contact with my evolving thoughts. When they called out some smart, essential point that was on my mind I would call these bull’s eyes. There was a lot of them.

 

Some times during the day they turned the mind meld down. They still had the ability to catch me in mid-thought though. They’d go quite for ten or fifteen minutes or so, I could drive another 10 kilometers out into the suburbs,  I’d thrash out an angle on my situation and then a voice would comment on it accurately; it’d be bull’s eye. Perhaps after all these years they knew how to foreshorten the meld to the exciting bits.

 

To score the bull’s eyes on my thoughts they must have run setups in the Toronto traffic. These would be like the Russian hockey teams box play where the offensive pass, pass, pass the puck and then shoot on the goal at the critical moment.

 

They began to bend over backwards to make the mind meld constructive rather than just abusive. They rather had extreme details on me after the many years of my starring role and they could follow rather a lot of the many topics in my head. They would instruct me on the topics in my head as I thought about them. They did this without me even saying anything back from the truck or on the street to give queues as to what my thought was. This is quite different from constantly being frank and embarrassing. They would emphasize points, correct me on ideas, and provide insights and pat phrases. It was an education for me and enhanced my information and common sense judgment. I was actually very engaged by this and I expected it. It was entirely Bruce-centric but it brought me up to the standards of opinion of the Borg group think on many topics. They pointed out to me this was helpful and not abuse so their violating me was thusly tempered. It was a huge community effort. The original style of the revolt was to talk in double entendres, to mention problems in self-depreciating manner, but now all these years latter they did this tutorial in the mind meld as the style. I found it rewarding to think about political problems, my legal situation and this book. It was certainly the world’s strangest tutorial ever. It was like an all day session with an Oracle.

 

I had this daily tutorial with the 500,000 citizens of the city but it was entirely Bruce-centric and different from the broad ferment that was going on in the city and country. They tended to keep to topics that were of interest to me or where more essential to the public conversations and they, society, had the ability to hide much of what was going on from me. There was intense local theatrics going on in every neighborhood that I was blinded, to for example. I didn’t hear about family issues either, although this was the heart and soul of the concern. I did not hear much about the redundant professional jobs and that scare although this was a theme of the process. Similarly I didn’t hear much about the actual poverty in our midst, although this was the topic. (In Toronto the poverty statistics are astronomical but you do not actually see it or even encounter it –it’s hidden. You see cars and houses. However, poverty at a high level threatens family and is as popular as mud.) They masked the process and extreme detail that they were going over my mind with. And they did not let me know what all was going on in the rest of the continent and world, although this would be common knowledge in the city. The whole dialogue between me and whole rest of society was thusly highly stylized.

 

 

I could commune all day with them about anything I wanted one of which was the writing of this book. They proceeded to edit it through-the-air for me. I’d work on it daily on my commute to work on the bus and they trained the co-commuters to pattern me while doing so. The commuters could pick off individual inappropriate words. I could read through my manuscript and they’d time my arrival at a specific inappropriate word on the bus, just as No. 4 had been able to do when I studied computer texts in my apartment. This was not a reflex in my mind as nearly 100% of the time the word turned out to be a bad choice. I could do this throughout the city to an extent. So this book has this unique history to it, being edited by 500,000 people going about their own business but in mind meld in a mega city. That’s 500,000 anonymous co-writers. It’s a little hard to understand. However, it has that as an authority.

 

While the writing of the book was followed that closely by that many there were basically zero hits on the Web version of the book I kept. That was the discipline of the public process and that was the interest in my book without the public process.

 

The timing of my reading on the bus by the passengers is amazing. Just how that could be done escapes me. It’s an example of the process of harassment and patterning that is so difficult it’s a mystery.  Quite a bit of the process was like that. It’s part of the technique of focusing on the other person, on what they are doing or their “point-of-view” as I call it, that they polished up to communicate. It’s hard to believe. 

 

The lecturing, hinting and riddling were an all day choir by a tight, know-it-all population with this he-doesn’t-understand-again tone. Being right is popular of course and this went on for years and years without them growing tired of it, of themselves.  

 

They were keeping track of what was going on in my life daily and they would comment on my current concern, provide the community’s considered input on any issue I might be troubled with: idea, decision or personal relation. So actually I had a very well polished personal life by the end of every day. I became used to being well thought through – although it wasn’t me alone. They armed me with lines about my work associates, for one. I’m something of a crone now instead of a computer nerd. Not that I get much credit for it, but it makes me more comfortable.

 

My role of community activist was practiced and polished in the mind meld. When I wrote a letter to a politician, say, it had the authority of the community as it’d be edited by them. They groomed my manner which would be helpful if I was to get media attention. It was to never be negative, stick to plain speak about main points and remember we will pooh pooh you individually so don’t puff up. This is all you can do in a public forum to get people to listen, to listen in the long run.

 

It must have been an enormous effort. I have no real sense of the vastness of the effort or even the seriousness of the issues. To me it’s just information. They mocked this by saying at night I just forgot the whole thing and went quietly off to sleep as nothing was happening.  They had a comment about this, calling me the “Snore King” on the street. (This was in the later phase, when I did not use tranquilizers to go to sleep.)

 

My “other job” was to work with the mob genius daily, what they called was to “play in traffic”. My truck is a light pickup, a Ford Ranger, which I took to referring to as “The Ranger” as it were some Star Trek starship on a mission. They said the truck should be put in a museum. I spent some six years in the truck in the mind meld.

 

Quite a bit of the mind meld technique is concerned with mundane topics. I would plan what I was going to do in the evening, say, and there’d be a key word in my thoughts that I’d come to and I thought I could hear that word from somewhere. This would be premeditated by the community.  There’s was constant commenting about the looks of the passing by females for another one. At other times I would hear the constant echoes of what I was thinking but it would be trivial and mundane so I would not even notice it; I’d forget that it was intense attention by the community. The harassing public would grind over  these mundane details of my behavior daily and it took a huge effort to do so and then to keep at the tip of their tongue should they drive by me while in the mind meld. That’s what an acute invasion of privacy takes.

 

You might be thinking that it had to be my echo reflex, I certainly was. The mind meld I was experiencing was, after all, well beyond Star Trek Vulcan capabilities. However frequently they corrected my thinking rather than simply echo it and that’s the evidence for me.

 

Sometimes I would have a thought, that’d be featuring a single word, and they’d call out that word as a code or hint for an entire tutorial. Then I would think it through. They had all these discussions going on and this is how they introduced them to me, when my mind alighted on a key word. Typically I had to have a thought with a key word in it before they’d reveal to me their discussion, though. This is even if my thoughts at the time were on an entirely different topic. It’s all very awkward. They didn’t directly lecture much, that’s not how to communicate, they only hinted. Being told directly about anything would get my ire up, still being very sensitive despite my life experience and age. A good term for these significant hints is “signal words”. I recall hearing some code words for months before I actually thought the referred to topic through.

 

I would also hear the signal words in public forums such as coffee shops. People would raise their voice a little in public and become audible when they made a point this would be noticeable. For example one time I was in a restaurant and I heard “just one roll”, which was a comment that people are not just part of a social class rather they play several roles in society at once – worker, spouse and parent typically. The uninitiated, those not savvy to the diplomatic communication, might notice these key signal words are around.

 

There must have been more or less endless discussions in the city and country about issues small and great, just endless discussion. When I would come to a topic in the mind meld they would often have a pre-canned line on the tip of their tongue ready to go that was an editorial. Sometimes it would be one of their psychic images that caught the situation and they could conjure that readily.  This was typically in the traffic in my delivery truck. It was something else.

 

The people at Berco Automotive thought I was doing pickup and delivery of auto parts but in fact I was the centre of this vast Western social reform storm daily.

 

The communication process became polished and would have been impossible for the average person to detect. I would hear a few coded comments per half hour when it slowed down. At least that was on the bus, on the street as a pedestrian and in the malls. In the delivery truck in the traffic people were talking back and forth freely all day long. The average person couldn’t detect these muted between vehicles voices but in fact the whole co-education and co-evolution continued for years in this fashion.

 

 

There’s a change in Government

 

Back in Ottawa Prime Minister Paul Martin’s new minority didn’t last long. He had a variety of savvy policy changes that did not affect the majority of people and then ran into a problem with the minority position he was in. The leader of the small socialist party that was propping up the government, the NDP’s Jack Layton, declared a line in the sand over an initiative in health care and Mr. Martin balked. So there was a confidence vote in Parliament and the government lost triggering a national election.

 

Meanwhile the virulent corruption scandal, Adscam, had been investigated and reported on and the media and opposition were making all this noise about it. It was criminal, a record heist in Canada and by politicians but it didn’t impact any major government spending program so I didn’t see the point myself. In the ensuing polls showed the people were not so much bothered by this corruption but rather wanted a change, to toss the rascals out. The corruption and the other waste the Liberal government had posted then came into roost, which was healthy politically.

 

The Conservative Party of Canada, which was a new consolidation of the old conservatives and a more vital entrepreneurial party called the Canadian Alliance, won a minority in the January 23, 2006 election. Liberal leader Paul Martin resigned and a leadership race started, to my relief. I waited a couple of weeks and sent letters to the new Prime Minister, one Stephan Harper, and all the other 307 Members of Parliament detailing that the mass hysteria continued in Toronto and the Prime Minister was politically and potentially criminally responsible. I had the manuscript of this book on the web by then and which would explain it all to non-initiates. Although the Conservative Party of Canada had campaigned on an anti-corruption and anti-crime platform they did not respond to my letters and turned a blind eye to the whole magnificent national legal quagmire, which is what I expected. The Conservative Party of Canada caucus majority didn’t seem to know about the pandemonium on the street as the competing Liberals did. They seem shallow and inept by comparison to the Liberals, the natural ruling party of Canada. On the street they were rather pointed that some of the Conservative caucus did knew all about us but were content to sit there, embrace government corruption and incompetence from day one, for the position and prestige of being a MP of the ruling party. The Cabinet was reduced to the level of a social club, they said the word was a “coterie” on the street. This is not good, people were going to remember that.

 

 

The Revolt then Drags on for Years (tbd—daate2)

 

I described how Revolt II cooled in 2003 for a year and then revived itself in October 2004. It then went on for another six years, to the time of this writing in the summer of 2011 as it’s still on going in here in Canada. That was pretty incredible, but not unlike the original seven year event in the 1980s. The problem was, of course, the government of the day could not be notified of the national family angst, the cost of immigration and the revolt. The country lost eight years of potential progress on the labour force to this. The new Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, was another one of these one man shows and isolated from his own elected members. The people reacted by sticking to their guns and conducting intense street theatrics in their local neighborhood daily. The country was hurting, especially the central cities were hurting, and the people dug in. Only very occasionally did resentment at continuing the process boil over. The philosophy on the street evolved, turned slowly, and eventually frustration brought the people to the idea of going public with the national theatrics. There was no clear idea of just how they would do this, possibly the participating 10% of adults could mildly infect the 90% majority with the local soft persecutions, which would topple the government and landslide the Liberal opposition into power. (tbd—daate2)

 

In the mean years the Liberal opposition went through three leaders; to not much effect. They went from our fallen hero former finance Minister Paul Martin who lost the government on a second election, to the French speaking Political Science professor from Quebec Stephan Dion who lost an election because he tried to make world

climate change the main platform, to an import from Harvard University, Canadian born Michael Ignatieff, who was described as one of the top 100 Liberal intellectuals in the world.

 

The government of Canada then became not only a minority but a minority neither of the small two parties would prop up. So the opposition Liberals had to abstain from voting in Parliament so the country had a government. It was a deadlocked Parliament, an unworkable situation, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper managed to hang on for five years, to his credit. (Tbd—daate2)

 

The new opposition leader Michael Ignatieff himself remained isolated from his duly elected staff and was another strongman want-a-be, yet another one. On the street they waited a year before they passed judgment on him but then concluded he was just an academic “bird”. He was all around ineffective and would not last but then an interesting thing happened. The heir apparent to him, former Ontario Premier Bob Rae, was fingered by the public as savvy to the national communication hysterics and ready to rock with the mass protest. Bob Rae was not popular as he had badly mishandled a huge deficit when Premier of Ontario, but now had the wind of a national revolt at his back. On the street the understanding was he was the only one of stature available on national scene to get the job done, which was a sobering though. If the revolt surfaced with Bob Rae the white hot street politics might flash across the rest of the Western world. The Conservative government in Canada would take the blame for sitting there for five years. Their leader, the pious Stephan Harper, had been in charge of the Party throughout the whole eight years, eight years mind, of virtual rioting. In terms of office politics the movement behind Bob Rae was one big “submarine”. It was a huge idea. This Bob Rae could become a noted world leader. (Tbd-daate2)

 

The idea on the street was to surface the revolt. This would have to feature me: my ideas and my treatment. They coined a name for this possible dramatic event around me, “Brucegate”. That was a combination of President Nixon’s political scandal Watergate, the popular TV show Spacegate that featured a “portal” to strange worlds in outer space which is what my story would be and the central idea of being more careful with immigration – watching the gate properly.  This would be my fifth of five special roles in society, it has yet to come. Potentially it would lead to a rich legal settlement for me; I have this “Royal Lottery”. So as I write in the summer of 2011 I await my fate. (tbd—daate2)

 

Liberal Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff didn’t catch on either; he did not listen to his own elected MPs. It was interesting as Prime Minister Stephen Harper got the reputation for not listening, was widely report as to not allowing discussion with his Ministers, and people generally believed it. Michael Ignatieff himself said publically the Prime Minister didn’t listen to his own Ministers, then turned right around and promptly pulled the same stunt himself. It was obvious on the street as news of the Revolt did not get through to either of them. Even the monster numbers on the economic decay of Toronto, the engine of the Canadian economy, did not appear to get through to the political leaders. There was a chronic inability at the top to manage - from former Finance Minister Martin through Dion to Ignatieff on the Liberal side and over on the government side, Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Michael Ignaetieff was imported from Harvard as one of the top 100 Liberal intellectuals in the world and he overlooked an economic mismanagement and poverty problem, including in his own Toronto riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore.

 

In Canada the police constabulary was in the conspiracy and the police chiefs could not be notified. The Commissioners of the RCMP, there was two of them in turn, effectively propped up the Conservative government in Ottawa for five years despite a government caused problem with the economy, a break down of civility across the nation and the malfunction of the democracy and constitution. The leaders of the opposition, three of them in turn on the Liberal side alone let this go on. And people, the non-participating, couldn’t be told this was going on.

 

My economics ideas had very wide appeal: to urban Canadians earning less than $12 an hour, in fact general labour at large which can loose their job at any time, women – as they are all sympathetic to the challenge of child raising, the tired taxpayer, the main cities which would be the benefactors of the economic plan and even the regions which would be affected through migration, tax relief and fairness issues. The break down of civility and lack of constitutionality of the revolt would mightily offend most voters as well. But in Ottawa the Leaders just sat through all this and the back bench kept their head down, afraid to damage their own party. There was no political instincts apparent, missing critical data and a lack of thinking through at the top. I’ve said my story is well beyond reason, the continental mind meld surely is, but this is as the leaders were fucked beyond reasonableness themselves.

 

No. 4 remained at her post in the apartment above mine on her 365 watch of me. Somehow she and her partner found the money, wherewithal and energy to continue without a break, now for some 8 ½ years. No. 4 remained dedicated to her task energetically and entirely effectively. She kept clear, articulate and rarely complained. So I remained in the mind meld and star of the show. I stayed at Berco as an auto parts courier and tied up the Toronto traffic daily with their exercise to mind pattern me from their vehicles. No. 7, the common-law husband and No. 4’s support, would show up upstairs and make a comment about their dedication every few months or so. (tbd—daate2)

 

The Canadian population was threatened by the damage the Immigration Depart had done and was going to continue to do and had reason to stay the course. They saw the jobs deficit caused by the immigration program like the fiscal deficit and debt and commented that the numbers, the cost, went up everyday similarly. Certainly Toronto was hurting and the citizens were determined to see recognition of the issue and change. They remained dedicated to my plan for the economy, the Canadian Perestroika, and from time to time straightened my ideas. The public became determined that the government was going to take the hit. This was all too much like Revolt I, where the government never caught on that there was a tax revolt, didn’t get the job done and was reduced to two seats in Parliament. Moving the crooks in Ottawa off a free lunch is that difficult and is happening again.

 

My information is the street theatrics continued in other Western countries as well, although they blindsided me to what was happening mostly. There was the Great Recession around the world from the American bank mortgage fiasco in 2008 and in particular the theatrics went on in the United States because of the new challenge to policy that the damaged economy represented. (Economists turned out to be about as savvy on mortgages as on immigration.) Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats developed plans to deal with the new $1.5 trillion dollar deficit, rather they continued to spend. The Republicans supporting the military spending while the Democrats introduced health care and tried to bolster spending with the Dream Act for illegal immigrants etc.

 

In Canada the government believed that the Great Recession would mostly give us  a miss and that shortly there would be labour shortages, so immigration was kept up to the standard quarter million a year.

 

In other Western countries the Great Recession hardened attitudes to immigration, and some countries trimmed their programs. However in the long run, a world economic recovery permitting, the issue would be back as economists would clamor about the aging population causing labour shortages, these countries would continue to have soft labour markets and the impact of immigration which was the concern here did not surface.

 

Nowhere did the revolt get official recognition, all the Western governments remained out of touch at once. Even though there were now huge deficits in many countries and some help on the government revenue side could be had from eventually getting more of the population working the ideas of the Revolt did not surface anywhere. There was an emergency situation, uncontrollable deficits generally, but my timely idea of eventually getting more people working did not appear – despite the world wide recognition of it in the populations.

 

One thing in my life that happened is my Mother died after a long illness and I inherited her house. This completely my financial security and gave me the money to travel, should I become topical to the media in the future. I did not move apartments to escape No. 4 as to explain a move to my wife I would have to spend most my pension provisions.

 

The other thing that happened to me was I was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer at the beginning of 2011. The doctor said I had not long to live, although I assume these predictions are not too accurate. I handled it well, mostly shrugged it off. I cried a couple of times, mostly about my wife, but then made my peace with my fate. It seems to me that people do in the end. I wound up quitting my driving job at Berco in January 2011 because of the 10 to 20 aches and pains I had and then spent my days more or less comfortably in my apartment. Donna became my part time care giver, and never complained despite the dual diagnosis of schizophrenia and cancer.

 

No. 4 remained dedicated to the style of constant surveillance of me and now had to stay at her post almost all day. In the neighborhood they kept up the watch on me but reduced their commenting to a low level when I left the apartment. However, I was warned that this meant I lost touch with the consensus the mob was working with, as they remained active on the streets. I also didn’t get the usual stream of information I had been getting in the truck.

 

Even though I was dying the population kept up the mind patterning to an extent and also needled me with my circumstance. They would mention the calendar date now and again, which emphasized how little time I had and was depressing. They argued they needled everyone: the low wage workers who were trapped there, the women who could only expect a government pension and older people – who are all facing short life expectations. They said “the barb was everywhere”, that was their style.

 

At the same time a federal election was called for May 2, 2011 and it looked like it would result in a hung Parliament so a shakeup was possible. So this would open a crack for the revolt to surface, presumably with Bob Rae and the Liberal caucus. Unfortunately the people voted to shake Parliament up and returned the Conservatives with a majority by reducing the Liberals to 34 seats, a rump. This was a spanner in the works of the idea of going public with the revolt.

 

A problem for me is even if the revolt goes public; I am featured and turned over to the courts I may not have time to collect. I say that the government should do something for me after all the years of negligence, do the right thing, even show some style, and settle. I actually say they should do the right thing for No.4 and not only include her as a general amnesty but help her collect, possible on the rights to her story.

 

The national theatrics continued intensely for years, as I said. The community consensus slowly turned on some topics. They upgrade my own situation to a block buster legal case against the government, which was a little clearer thinking by the mob than promoting me to office clerk. Also they decided they could in fact go public with the revolts on goings, take on the government as I’ve been explaining. This would be dramatic enough. And they revised their ideas about skills and professions as well. They started to deemphasize the prime importance of skilled jobs, which I’ll explain shortly. In addition they became thoughtful about the long term future of the planet; the fact there was going to be oil and non-renewable resource shortage just as the world population both mushroomed and industrialized. It’s a note to posterity that the consensus moved slowly. This is understandable as after all this was a world movement. The style held, the eschewing direct communications, and this kept the participation level at the standard 10% or so of the population. The multi-entendres on the street became ever more complex and subtle.

 

As the anthropological analysis on the street evolved they became more focused on the burgeoning world population and diminishing non-renewable resources. It became clear that by the end of a new-born’s life the planet would be broadly troubled by this. The idea that one child family as in China should be the world standard emerged. It would take generations, plural; to get the population down because of human’s longevity so the idea was to start now with fewer babies. They telegraphed this by repeating the numeral three in strategic places, meaning families of three. It was a signal word and I figured it out after a few conspicuous repeats. If you want a good life for your children and grandchildren you were going to have to start thinking like this. A double-entendre I heard on the bus about this was that kids “are exhausting”. That is the kids will be exhausting the worlds supply of resources. The idea was “dominant” but enthusiasm was lacking, and it slid away.

 

In a similar vein they commented that the oil shortages might cause a world economic crash, that the real crunch might not be oil but the exhaustion of potash fertilizer deposits, and that the emergence of China as a world industrial super power will be 10 Japans – ten times the problem fitting Japan in was. The population saw breeder reactors as the likely source of cost effective clean energy, at least after coal ran short.

 

 

“Salary”

 

In Revolt I they had emphasized the issue of “doing the work”, training to get a better job, and supported our meritocracy’s way of paying better trained people well. Now they actually re-thought this, came to consider that most skilled and professional jobs were routine, narrow, and to use the pidgin, “mechanical”.  This is they could be done by anyone that got the training. Most people are hard working, many were getting the education needed, and the problem was to land a job where you could get the on-the-job training needed to secure you with an employer. And without that you couldn’t really afford to have a family in today’s labour market, so having babies had become a lottery rather than taken for granted, it seemed to many people. Canadians support that society is a meritocracy but they became more critical and started to draw lines.

 

Originally in Revolt I they had the idea some jobs were really puffed up, not that difficult, and they called them “bags”. Now they generalized most corporate jobs were pretty narrow in scope. They had a word for this from earlier, “salary”. Now “salary” was all the jobs that were “mechanical” or otherwise overdone, such as being cross-subsidized. The idea was actually popular because when asked most everyone has complaints about their job. Everything became “salary”. Salary this, salary that, everything salary. I heard on the street “kids are salary”, meaning that unless you had a puffed up job you couldn’t afford family. No. 4 and the theatrics she caused around me also became salary as the issues were properly the job of the government and the opposition, not us two. My job delivering auto parts at Berco was also salary, as the delivery is nominally free and thus cross subsidized. Mismanagement was another form of salary. Actual skilled people were the likes of medical doctors and dentists who did know their stuff and could command better wages.

 

The constant explanation that everything was salary was irritating to listen to. However this shift in focus from the people with bad jobs to everyman was the change in style of the Revolt. The hunting out of people with bad jobs by the public was threatening, especially as it’s part of our values, of productivity. “Salary” expressed sympathy for the workers, the less well off, and even implied you should be content with your lot rather than wage-inflate. It was exaggerated but became part of the consensus of the revolt. People would just shrug, “I’m salary”. They also said they were “clubby” at work, which is a double entendre that cuts both ways.

 

This broadening the problem with jobs to average jobs that were mechanical took the edge off of the threat to people in really bad jobs, redundant jobs. However the participating public remained adamant about bad jobs, still considered that they should be eliminated. At least that was on the street but I rather suspect people in these bad jobs still chose to hold on to them.

 

If the participating citizens went public to attack the governments of the day they might mildly infect the neighborhood with the local soft persecutions, as I said. This would probably feature the issue of salary, fair wages. That and also the “Beast” that is in all of us including politicians, is what they said.

 

 

The Space Jet Fleet

 

I’ve explained how the activist population could communicate a psychic image at will, even in the traffic. One evening in the twilight an image they worked up was their passing speeding car in the oncoming traffic on a super highway as being like science fiction “space jet fighters”, as befit their advanced communication capabilities. They triggered the image for me of the whole stream of approaching traffic on the super highway as these speeding “space jets”. That was “the fleet”. This fleet is in some sort of hyperspace, cloaked like ships in Star Trek, but the threat was they would drop out of hyperspace and make their presence felt on the ground around the entire West. The world wide fleet actually has the capability to attack the West, to teach the world a lesson. The stream of space jets on the super highway was a pretty exciting sight; the whole fleet has their brains working at an advanced level.

 

 

 

Chapter X

 

Some Major Aspects of the Mass Revolt

 

 

Toot my own Horn

 

They called my work on immigration “a little analysis”. And that’s about what it was. The basics are simple enough. It was a general systems analysis rather than some econometrics based on isolated data. I did finger the essentials, ideas and statistics, and this is the formula for common sense. Jobs were my interest and cause and it’s something of a fluke that they were so problematic and I became renowned world wide for my thinking. I do like to toot my own horn and say after all I was a trained and experienced Computer Analyst. I did treat unemployment, taxes, low wages, training, internal migration, low participation, family, trade and productivity as a system that was all linked together. They’re linked by Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, of people pursuing their own self-interest. One wag called all my ideas my “unifying” theory. This free form systems analysis and the informal accounting are my niche in economics. Informal accounting like this has a role to play in understanding the world. The time I spent in my courier van codging about immigration and jobs turned me into an opinion leader that out did the university professors. I call it an economic systems analysis by a computer geek.

 

To further put my little analysis in context, however, I’d like to mention the other efforts on immigration around.

 

In the decade-and-a-half to 2002 there were fully seven books on Canadian immigration.  I read five of them. I don’t know who other than me buys these books. None of them addressed the essential, unemployment. Also in the 1980s there had been a Royal Commission on the Canadian economy and it concluded, as per existing government policy, immigration is a panacea and would drive the economy. They said immigrants inject money into the system; just out of the blue they inject money into the economy.

 

There was a Canada First Immigration Reform Committee around but they had a fatal association with the neo-Nazi web site which they linked to. A Vancouver based Immigration Watch Canada eventually emerged but when I talked to them they were not enthusiastic about my main ideas and numbers. And finally an Ottawa based Centre for Immigration Policy came up that had some academic backing but whose main papers were exactly the backward logic I complain about here. So that left the popular movement.

 

In Canada the excess in immigration was wild but no expert in the field noticed the extent of the mismanagement. This is ditto for the associated fields such as Social Science. There are 8,000 PhDs in the Social Sciences in Canada, that’s the size of that field, but apparently that immigration was affecting social conditions hadn’t really been explored. It’s like the 8,000 Social Scientists all thought that the science of immigration had been taken care of so you can drop it out from consideration.

 

In the city of Toronto there is a $100 million private trust dedicated to the research of the issues of the poor, the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, and a government funded agency for research into social issues in the city, the Community Social Council, but they returned brief, polite responses to my letters. These two organizations are funded by well intentioned people to keep an eye on poverty. In practice they’re going to be the last to figure out people want a good job. My data inflamed the world but the specialists shrugged it off.

 

Toronto is the engine of the Canadian economy but child poverty arched up to 37% in 1997, at the end of a “jobless recovery”. The city is immigrant driven, 43% immigrant, but even at 37% child poverty professional people were not fingering immigration as a cause of any problems. It was just the system, capitalism. The talk was how immigrants themselves were not doing well, were being short changed by insensitive Canadian hiring managers who demanded Canadian experience.

 

There’s an entire federal government department responsible for worker issues in Canada, the Human Resources Department. They manage the billions and billions of dollars that goes into Employment Insurance and retraining. Originally immigration was their responsibility as it was thought to be an adjunct to the work force. Then it was separated out as it was too large a program, too much for the Minister.  Comprehensive thinking about the function of the labour markets, or any thinking at all, is absent from the entire vast department empire as far as we can tell.   

 

I read two books critical of American immigration, one, Heaven’s Gate, by George Borjas and another, Alien Nation, by Peter Brimelow, and they missed  pretty much all of my nine costs of immigration. No one in the great United States of America was articulating the alternative of Upward Growth in jobs regardless of the facts this is the world’s economics, and American cities are an open eyesore, something of a war zone I’m told.

 

I wrote many letters to the anti-immigration associations and authors including the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies, both in the USA, Harvard and Oxford university and got limited, polite response. You can’t tell a college boy anything; it’s a truism. All you’ll ever get from a professor is a lecture. Communication to these groups is all but impossible. For one they are simply too busy, and too specialized. That’s the way it is. So the economic ideas in this book are wildly popular on the street but have never been properly reviewed by experts. This lack of response from these accredited immigration critics, think tanks and governments are one of the series of holes this book is going to thread through if it gets publicized.

 

On the other hand people in general understood immigration had all these down sides. The citizens could make out it was causing poverty and squeezing better opportunities. To myself the main themes of upward growth, the poor were a dependant class and unemployment was a cost-to-family were obvious to me and I wondered why these were never mentioned in the literature. In part what I did was just to articulate the popular sentiments well enough to have an impact on reading. They called to me on the street “That’s the theory.” The immigration experts themselves lived in something of a haze of wishful thinking and this is for all their professional lives.

 

Typically activists tout ideas that’d cost the government a billion or perhaps a percent of the GDP. I found vast waste and a way to increase government revenues significantly in my spare time. It became a hair noted. I became a bandwagon. However I’m unable to have a proper discussion about it with friends and associates. Zzzzzzzz. That’s how that went. I articulated a multi-trillion dollar idea and that did not generate much interest outside of the popular movement. That’s how good at making judgment calls people are if left to themselves, including experts. They don’t “signify”, to use the street term. The jobs issue needed an activist to bring it to life, even as the problems affected family and even as it should be a prime political issue – especially to the left wing.

 

The experts and the government did not prove to be overly useful. And this book is a story of how individuals made a contribution. The whole revolt would have been very different without the contribution of my local MPP, the Attorney General of Ontario David Young, who leaked my treatise against the wishes of his party and also this stalker No. 4 who orchestrated the mass event for years and years on a shoestring. They are individuals who made a difference, or potentially. Sometimes that’s what it takes.

 

There’s an expression “Be good at one thing and the world is your oyster.” My personal story is an instance of this and an example of how it can apply to amateurs as well as experts in our modern world. My single handed efforts, alone and isolated, made the West sit up. You can make a difference in this world be being good at something and this applies to social activists with little resources.

 

 

My Voice

 

My story is something else for an average citizen. I was the opinion leader, symbol and main victim of a revolt in the West. Although I worked as an auto parts courier I came up with an alternate economic strategy for the Western world, I was the point position on a cultural revolution across several countries and I may be able yet to cash in big time on the event. My ideas had the support of ten’s of millions of activist citizens across the West in general, making my role very unique. That was through the devotion of a dedicated stalker that focused a mass investigation of the science-of-the-mind on me for seven years. (tbd—daate2)

 

The authority of my voice is I report a consensus reached amongst the population. Also I have been carefully groomed by the population so I should be able to speak effectively in plain language; this book should sound like common sense largely although the story is like schizophrenia.

 

I do feel the irony of talking about and orchestrating the discussion about poverty and family as I come from a Double Income No Kids (DINK) situation and am fair clueless about those realities. Most people have family responsibilities, which they kept quiet about when talking at me and simply alluded to as “the load”.  They went so far as to call me “babe” one afternoon, intimating that the women in one’s family were a worry – especially the future of young daughters. That’s all they said to me.

 

 

Mass Hysteria as a Medium of Promulgation

 

Modern mass hysteria is an effective medium for the popularizing of new ideas but unevenly so.

 

In my case No. 4 moved in above me and criminalized the dissemination of my treatise. The treatise must have already been active anyway so it was an odd tack to take. However, No. 4 added an insistence to pay close attention to the treatise and it appears to have been a wildly successful ploy.

 

The broad interest in economics and the hysteria was limited to the people who could pick up on the indirect communication. Community communication was required to activate and then develop interest in the jobs problem. Everyone lived the insecurity of difficult job markets but it required socialization to sharpen it into an issue. It helps if there’s some powers-that-be behind an idea to generate interest. In this case it would be people power. Also there’s a theory if you want attention about an issue do something illegal. In No. 4’s case this seemed to be at work. People who were not initiates to the communication that read my treatise or read a précis I had about the national revolt had not much of a reaction.

 

My essay was written two months before the employment panic and then it jetted to thee national issue within weeks of being leaked. There’s never been anything quite like it by a hobbyist in my life and probably never in history.

 

 

Political Score Card World Wide

 

There’s a political score card for the panics, and this is world wide.

 

In the 1980s Prime Minister Mulroney missed the point of Panic I at the time which was there was a tax revolt. Then later Prime Minister Martin missed the point there’s mass hysteria about jobs. The ten provincial Premiers didn’t do any better on a revolt about political-economy either. Good going.

 

In the USA President Bush Sr. sat through the deficit revolt as well. Then, later, his Presidential son – George W. Bush, sat through a family panic.

 

World wide you can see the same pattern. While the public hysterics over Canadian government spending economic progress on immigration undoubtedly carried overseas there’s been no communication to the top about this hole.

 

It’s very odd but communication to the top banana maybe a world wide problem in the democracies, a huge problem, and they are all pretty much one man shows as a result.  They are mainly guided by an inner circle and don’t’ actually communicate much with their legally elected associates. That’s out-of-touch government, a form of such. It’s interesting, very interesting, that the wild mob of millions located my treatise in the city and disseminated it in the first three weeks of “rioting” back in 2002 but this could not be communicated to the number one in the country in many years, even with virulent protests going on in the nation and it being well know to many elected officials. And this was anywhere in the world. In Canada the issue was to stop the head-of-state from “spending” without proper arithmetic by years of discussions in the community, myriad persecutions of individuals, police cooperation with this and with detailed knowledge of events by many elected caucus members – all put down as  “The Try” in the pidgin. In Canada the head honcho’s ignoring a complex revolt on the street corrupted 14 or governments in a row - circumvented the Constitution in the case of the illegal mass protest around my own self. The news of the break out of a revolt hasn’t reached the top anywhere in the Western world in 27 years. You can make out this is how history is made, one of the ways, the isolation at the top – socially inept leaders. On the street in the pidgin they said “The Western leaders are a nerd coffee.” It’s not all that hard to believe, as communication to the boss in most businesses is problematic. (tbd—daate2)

 

The TV series The West Wing was about the US President and was very popular. One episode they dropped the show and had a documentary on politics.  They discussed the problems and issues with governing a democracy.  They interviewed all the living former American Presidents. The commentators had some very good lines including that a problem was the leaders “not being personally engaged with the facts”. In the case at hand, the decline of the Canadian economy, you have a situation where the economic statistics are fairly simple but the leaders don’t know the first thing and apparently have no interest. This is a state that comes from being comfortable. On the street when I was thinking this over they bull’s eyed that thought as I walked along and called “In fat they are incompetenter.” This comfortable business is like a disease.

 

The political top is all about expertise and as a result about cutting edge points, finesses points. What’s odd is the political discussion around does not cover the basics: the nanny state is insurance for the family, people with jobs carry the tax load and the subsidy at the bottom is a tithe for the better off. There’s a straying from the basics and a need for rational political discourse in modern democracies but the leaders are not really up to fostering it. At this time the participating population is more intellectually integrated than the actual leaders, the street ideology has breadth and depth, and this could be used to guide decisions at the overloaded top. That’s the state of democratic politics in the West, from my view on point position in the revolt anyway.

 

There’s an expression about the democratic process, “Throw the rascals out!” It should be “Throw the amateurs out!”

 

 

Expertitis

 

The story I tell reads like the modern wrinkles on the timeless problem of human nature, expertitis.  It details media missing the main news events of the era, politicians not interested in politics, judges not interested in law and order, economists not interested in economics, psychologists not interested in psychology, social scientists not interested in society and historians not interested in history. In this story there are specialists who habitually talk about things they know little about, police constables that act like the big bosses in town, ministers that just sit, and a Western Prime Ministers that has a problem with the idea of democracy. My case alone touched nine delinquent federal government departments: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Statistics Canada, the National Research Council, the Immigration Department, Human Resources Canada, the Bank of Canada, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Justice Department and the Finance Department. Phew. And that was just the Canadian side of a Western World event. Double phew.  It was once explained to me that bureaucracies are social institutions and can have people problems. I’ll say. These experts I mention were cruising-for-a-bruising and it came in the form of a revolution in the culture.

 

There’s a myth of the best and the brightest. The alternative is the sensibilities of the majority are a reliable guide that keeps democracy on track. There’s a deep well of rationality in the broad public and it’s now enhanced; I’ll say it myself. The expertitis is in contrast to the Borg like consciousness I describe which strived for good judgment. Competence had gone off the track and experts were being policed by the public. You have to vet expert opinion with some common sense. (Some young kid told me people don’t take experts seriously, the stuff you read in the newspapers, so that has always been there, I suppose.)

 

One of the reasons countries muddle through politically is because the experts are so bad. If you read the newspapers the experts are always full of themselves. The only chance of proper policy by government is if the leader and a few key aids figure things out from themselves. It’s disturbing how much is left for the actual leader.

 

Experts tend to be enthralled with the details and importance of their specialty. They offer increasingly sharp and refined points and lose sight of the big picture. The pidgin on the street that caught this was is was “self-interest”. People often will respond to an expert opinion by pointing to the expert’s self-interest, that is they follow the money, but you also have to consider that they are simply self-absorbed. On the street the said the general problem was the elite’s “A”, as in their school grade. It’s not so much just their ego but their “A”, expertise, which they won’t relent on. That’s a double entendre on the street lingo, eh. Expertitis, it’s like a human jungle – it seems to be characterized by the need to be “right” if not exactly ego.

 

Managers and professionals are part of the problem as well, as I have experienced in depth. There is actually a problem with managers and professionals with what I call “zero arithmetic and logic”. You can’t communicate to these guys. They can be dangerous to your livelihood. That was, as I said, what the Tech Bubble was about.

 

It appears, oddly, that not too many experts have good sensibility. There seems to be a general lack of experts who speak in essentials and good sense. Experts think their money is finesse details whereas in the revolt the population thought in the Big Picture. The saying “can’t see the forest for the trees” seems to be particularly apt and catches the whole situation. The term “no sense” is usually applied to wayward teenagers but it is a good description of these wayward experts. There’s a market for savvy professionals.

 

I was able to make a lot of observations because of an interest in jobs. My spy hole of very limited data actually provided me with a grand view of the experts. One day I was in the local park and this problem with the experts was in-the-air. I heard a female teenage voice call that I could out think them “on my head” which, hey, wasn’t negative.

 

One day at work in my truck I made a turn at a traffic light and wound up behind a van. I looked at it and noticed it was a GM Safari, which is what I used to drive earlier and where I did my original economic analysis. I just happened to notice the truck in front of me at that time and right  away the vehicles beside me caught that and echoed “Oh, that Safari”, referring to my intellectual trip through the human jungle of expertitis.  It was a little bull’s eye. They just caught me noticing the truck in front of me and let go with one of their pre-canned lines while on their way to work.

 

 

The Hermetical Seal on the Revolt

 

The hermetical seal of the public theatrics is remarkable, it’s a miracle. The entire cultural revolution unfolded in a surreptitious, sealed manner. The jobs theme to immigration issues never made an appearance in the media any where in the world, judging from the news. This is despite the participation of the ruling party of Canada in the panic. The Liberal caucus, who ousted a Prime Minister, never breathed a word, even diplomatically. Perhaps it takes something more than an idea or statistic which is to say a proper elaboration such as my treatise. In any event the ideas traveled around the world by word-of-mouth without them ever being picked up by experts, media or politicians. The simple, clear data on the unreliability of the labour force level measurement was impossible to communicate to professional economists, even immigration reform specialists, anywhere it appears.

 

The revolt arithmetic never got through to or did but was never mentioned by politicians all across Canada, the USA and further abroad. That’d be a lot of Mayors, Premiers and state Governors, some of which were savvy. Instead the public disrupted neighborhoods and came after me for years and years.

 

I note that the popular immigration discussion did not emerge in the US Congress either. The point is that in the America the elected officials, unlike in the Parliamentary system of the rest of the world, do not have to keep to the Party line and were free to make a speech about the statistics. Immigration issues were constantly being voted on in Congress as well. There would have been some members of Congress aware of the public discussions but they could not inform their fellow members of the simple content of the discussion. There is actually an immigration reform committee in Congress and very interestingly it didn’t deal with the new information and unrest effectively. The US Constitution was a reaction against the problems with the British Parliamentary system but over time it has proved to have similar problems.

 

The lay of the land for economic reform is thus the population is ahead on the issue and had communicated this to some of the elected officials informally but had not got through to the actual leaders. There is no support from individual experts, the think tanks or media. The broad popular movement is attempting to move forward without proper expert endorsement. I would think the issues were simple enough and the media sufficiently sycophantic that a political leader could direct the attention of nation to the jobs issue with a simple campaign.

 

There’s not a single witness for me either: not one honest citizen, not even one socially concerned citizen or, alternatively one anti-social person such as a long term criminal that got in contact with me. There was not one religious person in Canada; Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Buddhist or what have you that considered the torturing me for a political cause as unacceptable in a modern Western society.

 

The surreptitious communication process was limited to the savvy ten percent of adult society. There is no point in harping at the other 90% that they should do their listening homework so that’s where that went.

 

 

The Borg Consciousness

 

The participating community formed this one consciousness; it’s quite amazing so I want to go over it. Pretty much the whole participating 10% did the same thing. They took an interest, became concerned and caring, developed this encyclopedic information base and worked on their common sense judgment. They enhanced their awareness and perception. They polished their personality. They took an interest in people, something that not everyone does usually. Interestingly, when they got all the personal information on other people in the city they didn’t become inflamed by the problems people have or cause rather they were tolerant. They were frank all the time but kept it in control, probably by being disciplined to think of their own dysfunction. People everywhere got their comments stylized and spoke in ironies, self-depreciating double entendres or self-depreciating philosophical double entendres. Although I was jabbed with comments 100 times a day it was never just a raw insult - well hardly ever. Also, everyone headed for the political centre and I never heard from actual socialist or libertarians – apparently the family budget problem made them a tight group. And they kept it up, kept an interest in it, society and politics, for years. Even more interestingly to me is they kept on target with my ideas on economics for years.  They were able to achieve the one voice mind meld with me on a continent wide base. It was the Borg Community, a new philosophy and consciousness. (tbd—daate2)

 

At the same time the other 90% remained unreachable. This would be family, co-workers and friends. You could hint all you wanted to your boss that there was something wrong with your job but it didn’t work. So, shrug. This approach to problems had a limit.

 

 

The Legal Status of Mind Melding

 

The legal issues with respect to me were the same in the second phase as in the first. The police department can be all but above the law. The legal mechanism to control the responsible Minister is that corruption by the police is their responsibility as the police are direct employees of the state. The elected officials I contacted tended to set themselves up as the Supreme Court and sent me memos stating my case was outside their constitutional responsibilities.

 

In the second panic the government allowed an attacked on me a second time. In the second attack, eleven years after the first, they had to repeat and then expand the deconstruction of my psychology, personality and life. The resultant legal fiasco around me is a jungle of inept experts, political corruption and police collusion. The number of governments responsible for my mass ordeal doubled in the second phase, the list of delinquent cabinet ministers grew and I notched up a second, third and fourth Prime Minister who could have been, should have been, criminally responsible for me.  On the street they called me Bruce the IV because of this list of Prime Ministers. They called “That’s a play?” when I went over that in the mind meld. They did get rid of one. I actually lost track of who all was responsible for me, in terms of the changing Cabinet Ministers.

 

There are all these governments responsible for me legally and ignorant of the revolt but the case is general as well. All police departments in Canada should have been concerned that the government and Prime Minister were under attack. The situation is the same for all the Premiers of the provinces and in fact also the opposition leaders in the provinces. They should have known, some undoubtedly did.

 

The police, the government and the opposition spent about one dime on me. While my letters to them were weird there’s always the possibility that it was true. They could have interviewed me to see if I was a wild psychotic. They all responded to a multi-billion dollar scientific experiment and police public torture case with a letter at most. I’ve been a public political hostage for 13 years of my life. So far I’ve encounter 27 years of buck passing in the police departments and 14 irresponsible governments. (tbd—daate2)

 

I might add that despite the police politically propping up a wayward government the constables otherwise remained reliable. They propped up a government though.

 

When they started back up on me in for the third time in Sept. 2004 they redoubled their effort to get me securely employed, if that was possible. After two months more of this mass event I complained to the federal and provincial governments about the persecution. I also complained to the federal opposition. The only two responses I got were from the provincial Attorney General, Michael Bryant, and the provincial Community Safety Minister (formerly called the Solicitor General). That was one Monte Kwinter. Both of these Ministers said the case was out of their constitutional jurisdiction. The new federal Attorney General, Liberal Irwin Colter, and the new federal Solicitor General, federal Liberal old doll Anne McClellan, ignored my letters altogether.

 

My entire legal problem is and always has been the no witness syndrome. In the second phase the public continued their determination to protect my stalkers. In the mind meld when I thought about this no witness problem I heard a call “and that includes the whole country”. Of course there are no police to locate suitable witnesses. Any police officer investigating my situation would potentially be up against brother police officers and the police executive at large.

 

My wife Donna has a line about human nature, “everyone knows but no one is telling”. She got this from her study of history, I don’t know where, but it is the situation here. The community can keep a secret, even a nation. I wondered about this in the mind meld and got an immediate heated response, “its a little eh-hole bust”. That was the street understanding, that it was the communication problem.

 

In the revolt they circulated sensitive information. It turns out the community can act like some sort of “secret police”. I don’t know how they drew they line, say on criminal wrong doing for individuals and confidentiality for businesses. There frankness somehow skirted blackmail in the event it seems. I’m told in China there are no personal secrets, everyone is crowed into one house and they all know your business. So that’s where the McLuhanesque culture headed.

 

The revolt went on and on and it changed and matured. They relented on my treatment and became agreeable to letting my case go to court if a way could be found. Then they became determined to have a political effect and take out the government of the day, as I have described.

 

They gave up on the idea of finding me a better job as an office worker and decided they should just let me sue the government which was rather cleared thinking about what they had done to me. The dedicated stalkers were safe as no government was going to blame them alone. The co-operation of the public, the collusion of the police and the negligence of several governments excused her from responsibility, they finally squared with.  Over time they talked up the actual size of my event that abused me and what a proper settlement would be. It took them some getting used to the idea but they eventually came around it would be a massive government legal bill. In all it took the mob about 10 years in the mind meld to face up to what they had done to me collectively and come to this point. And even then it was contingent on me, the process anyway, delivering government policy economic changes that would save them money. They had acknowledged I was a wild legal case in about the sixth year of Phase I but it took them some five years into Phase II before they became responsive to actually letting my case go to court. However, they then became determined about the idea, No. 4 especially, as she remained at her post.

 

I’d argue in my case there are maybe 13 millions of conspirators with a scientific intimacy with me, including in the nearby states in America, which should be ticketed like a speeding traffic violation, $75. It comes out to a target figure that was in-the-air, a round billion dollars. The ideas I came up with were worth multi-trillions of dollars world wide so the population could see paying me that much. The billion is largely because of the American participation in my persecution, to be blamed on and paid for by the Canadian governments.

 

They eventually hinted that the event around me was even larger than I knew. They so much as told me that the United States was still active and I continued to play my role down their still. They were mute about the rest of the West, although I know the general event was on in Australia. They would not tell me much, although it’d be common knowledge. They said to drop the shield (around me) “would be expensive”. They were ready to deal but weren’t about to pay my real damages, it’d dent the federal budget. The deal they agreed to was pretty wild, a billion dollars, so I would go with that as a plea bargain. In plea bargaining you get a cut and they were generously offering me a billion. If my personal play was virulent in America for all those years the billion legal case comes out to a pennies a day for each person with scientific intimacy of me.  They get further deductions on that because of the taxes I’d pay, the savings that would be had from not doing a proper government investigation, they weren’t going to catch anyone of size so they should just resort to this book instead, and also the probability my fortune would eventually go to a public charity trust. (My notes for this book are the only daily record of the mass event available; as the entire story dates back to 1984 reconstructing it from memory for a government report would be challenging.) So the cost of me and family became nothing, was made up in savings – which the public liked. The billion would be the beacon in the history books as to the extent of the cultural revolution and Western democratic government protest. So, the billion is affordable, just and strategic.

 

The Liberal, Conservative and socialist NDP have damaged the country and the economy and are set to continue to do so; my legal case is a result of this. That and the problem there have been serial Strongmen in leadership more recently. A national protest about all that is going to cost. The $75 cost to each participating citizen for the intimacy is pretty much the alternative to the privilege of assaulting the Prime Minister cum Strongman. Normally that’d cost you a stiff jail term. Actually it’s like assaulting thusly several of the G7 heads of government. It’s something they could do from the comfort of their car, apartment or house and so was pretty popular, wildly popular. So $75, they were agreeable to paying that. That would be the individual’s cost of participating in the international political protest and attempt to improve the nation’s finances.

 

There’s no well like the government well and the deal they worked up would be very rich for me. The charge for achieving and sustaining mind meld for years with an individual should be much higher per individual but people won’t pay it and I need the millions of co-conspirators to all co-operate as witnesses, which I’d collect with polls. The real legal situation might be more like a mad scientist took a hostage, experimented with his psychology for 13 years and developed the scientific ability to mind meld with him. In the event he then used his subject to attack the government, actually serial dysfunctional governments. This would cost him or her, maybe 5 to 10 years in jail at least. Only there were a million or millions of mad scientists, all capable of the mind meld, and some millions of associates with a lesser level of “scientific intimacy” with me. I didn’t calculate out any cost charge. (tbd—daate2)

 

With millions of Canadians and millions more Americans with scientific intimacy with me over the many years of the two phases of the revolt the arithmetic about the commenting about me becomes a staggering. There would be billions of comments in the participating population, probably billions a year, in the telling and rehashing the stories around my life and mind, ugh. The daily jolts to my privacy world wide could be astronomical. Comments about the government with respect to me would be by the million, though. 

 

As my second coming was because of my role as an activist I stand to be a social activist that became rich pursing social change. I stand to make a billion from being the lead in international political street theatrics. In part I was the symbol of the revolts, both phases, and people take symbols seriously. In the end that was the personal benefit of being this social symbol in a crisis.

 

If I was to go to court and be compensated richly for being this device against serial strongmen as Prime Minister and effort at macro-economic reform it would be because of the dedication of this No. 4 stalker overhead my apartment. It was suggested to me on the street that I pay her in the end and I decided that was a good idea. The idea was very popular with my public; they wanted to include her in any eventual largess. My legal case is based on her criminality but if it was settled I’d then turn around after the fact and pay her. On the street they said, “It’s legal”. It’s all part of a vast world wide “play” to improve people, the economy and democratic governments so it makes good, aesthetic sense. They mentioned a settlement figure, $30 million. No. 4 commented to me, while events were deeply submerged and dragging on, that it had become a matter of “our” fate.

 

(No. 4’s role was an epic effort. She was dedicated, skilled and disciplined. Her discipline over the nine years was amazing. She never broke from the style; never took a vacation break. She lasted nine years in her little prison of advocacy; it was a major personal sacrifice. She lead the persecution of me, got power from the participation of the public but ironically both supported my ideas and made my case illegal which means I could cash in on. Legally it’s the governments fault as much as her and the people. The comment on the street was she and her husband were “gutsy and how”. No. 4 was saintly, gutsy and a genius; just like the people want for a leader. She’s an international worker’s hero. There’s been nothing like her as a spontaneous leader since Lech Walesa or maybe Lawrence of Arabia. Her story would be worth something to the media, I assume. That’s the other way she could get paid for her efforts.) (Tbd—daate2)

 

As there are more intimates in the United States as Canada my case is also an American legal case, to be paid for by Canadians. I’ve actually become thee whipping boy for American economic and social problems I am thinking so facing the revolt would also be a black eye to American politicians, for a democratic deficit there. I have no idea how that would work out; it’s very murky; probably it’d be very disturbing. My own legal case would be a documented, official treatment of the situation. The Canadian taxpayer at large would end up paying $75 each for my treatment in America. (To calculate costs to each other carefully is part of how Canadians and Americans relate.)

 

This book, of course, would be submitted as the affidavit for my legal case.

 

One of the principles the Supreme Court conducts itself by is that the legal system should not do anything that would put the justice system in disrepute. Now in my case you have the courts eyes and ears, the Police, running up a billion dollars of damages on one person. You have a list of fourteen negligent governments including an entire list of ministers, Solicitor Generals, Attorney General and various First Ministers who were glad to be negligent. You have a major police department holding a political hostage twice for years and daily torturing him in full public view. This is in a G7 country. You have Toronto Police Chief Fantino giving the finger to a billion dollar crime by one word in the Police Act, “vexing”. I have to say it seems to me that the legal system is in disrepute with its chief practitioners. They aren’t afraid of it one iota. The MPs, MPPs and citizens are pretty fast and easy with it as well. (tbd—daate2)

 

All these officials’ wrong doing would have to be written off. Actually convicting them would be difficult because they apparently knew nothing. So there will be no heavy jail term for any Attorney General or Police Chief. The Prime Minister will be the fall guy, he will have to go. That and the voters will have their say. I, personally, have zero interest in sending a Police Chief  boob to jail. The conspirators on the street said the Police Chief had to go as well, however. They phrased it “they insist”.  

 

The elements that went into my legal case were the economic ineptitude of the world’s politicians, the steely resolve of No. 4 and the continuing revolt. In the end they decided to switch my role from what they called a “scape-god” to purposely creating a rich person because of government malfeasance. While they persecuted me intensely for a long time, the other fact is they worked their ass off for my ideas and also for me individually. My legal case might better be called a “peace treaty” with a revolting general public. The legal case is connected to changing government economic policies. For thirteen and half years – not thirteen and a half days - my stream of consciousness was a battlefield for a dysfunctional Canada and USA, an alternative to rioting, and a billion dollar cost is well within reason. And that is my PR for an attempt to get a settlement out of the government. I don’t work out more detailed costs; I leave it at a PR effort. I argue the government should do the right thing, do the detailed polls, and I would try to keep the time and price down. That would be more acceptable to the participants and thus politically acceptable too. Perhaps that $75 charge could be whittled down. (A higher charge would be a better precedent for other cases including future cases but my case could be treated as unique.)

 

 I lost my job as a computer programmer, then my career and finally was subject to a mass persecution by a modern Western society. I was left as a  delivery person where I was able to evolve a multi-trillion dollar idea. This attracted a following and I spearheaded a cultural revolt for 8 years and arrived at a billion dollar legal case because of it. However, as I write nothing is happening and I seem to have missed this billion dollar legal case twice. (tbd—daate2)

 

 

BruceStalk

 

The 13 years I spent in mind meld with the public in and outside of Toronto is worth recording and remembering. Call it BruceStalk. It’s suitable to be put to music as it deals with moving issues as social justice. (tbd—daate2)

 

The 20^th Century saw two World Wars, the popularization of fascism, communism and, at the extreme, Nazism. These were bizarre and truly unbelievable. The years of mind meld with me by the continent is an amazing story but was not extreme in comparison to these other history events, especially to Hitler. The 12 million people patterning my thoughts is just a tiddler of a story compared to Adolf Hitler. The continental mind meld with me is another 20^th Century history story, though.

 

BruceStalk, actually the two phased political revolt in the West, is extremely strange but perhaps not any stranger than some of the other modern mass events. The Tech Bubble of 2001 and the American Mortgage meltdown of 2008 are also unbelievable in retrospect. Both of these other events were characterized by excesses that people knew about – but somehow never surfaced properly. In Canada in the Tech Bubble a single internet company, Nortel, had a stock evaluation of nearly 1/3 of the Canadian GDP. However this outlandish fact never came up in conversations about Nortel stock people were having. The American Mortgage melt down was in the bread and butter of banks, a very well understood area. The immigration excesses of the West are more economic folly of scale as well. The conspiracy of silence around BruceStalk is maybe no stranger, nor may be the insistence of millions to continue persecuting me while remaining silent. One wonders what possibly could be next.

 

 

The Human Mind Meld Revisited

 

When they started up on me the third time I got a better handle on how the human mind meld worked, particularly in the daily drive in the delivery truck. I explained my take on this in an earlier section but as the process is nigh on a miracle I’ll go over it again with more detail. The mind meld is apparently not as difficult as one would think. While I’m not savvy as to how they how they decoded people’s personality and mind I am the principle witness as to how far they were able to go. The mind patterning I was subject to was by a large community, had the support of my friends and associates, and was by far the most extreme effort around. It may be next to impossible to repeat. It was a historic high water point and also a lesson for posterity.

 

In October 2004 they started patterning again me closely but not as embarrassingly as before. They would comment anywhere in the west end of the city that I covered in my delivery truck route. In fact they were pretty good at it in the north, south and east end of the city as well.

 

In part the mind is always involved with the present. Not the here and now exactly rather it’s always working on a list of one’s current concerns. It’d pay attention to the details of driving and other aspects of the job then go to a priority list of preoccupations such as one’s financial budget, what’s to do on the weekend or what was to eat latter. There’s a list of very mundane behaviors one thinks about, brushing one’s teeth and even itches. The mind will also think about major issues such as, in my case, my future employment. There’s also major topics: my legal situation, the political situation or the economic problems around. There’s always aesthetic response happening. There’s stand by topics the mind thinks about such as what one should have said to that pretty girl long ago, or to that awful boss. There’s also internal dialog about the people in one’s immediate life. Very typically there’s a topic of the day that you will be into. These are all patterns and predictable. They’re even in a predictable order, there tends to be a thought currently “on top” of the stack. That’s about it. That’s the basis of mind patterning.

 

There was sometimes a high intensity level to the close patterning. I could zigzag down the city streets on a delivery and there’d be this mercurial following of my thoughts by the people in other vehicles. Even though one’s mind jumps around a lot the people in the vehicle traffic in the industrial neighborhood could knock off my thoughts one by one. An analogy for this would be a chef at a busy restaurant. He would have several orders cooking at once and he has to pull them off the stove just as they are done. The mind also does odd things like worry about the world problems but then abruptly switch over to thinking about what’s for dinner. My mind would have all these topics going and the public generally could keep in touch with the patterns so well that they could comment just as they were coming to my mind and just as I drove by. The timing was always immaculate; there were never much in the way of mistakes. They, the 500,000 participating citizens in the city, would track what I read, heard and even had simply thought in the mind meld all day and then they could collectively sort out what would be coming to mind next. That was my guard in my “prison”.

 

Haunting my mind with precise echoes on what I was thinking was a major emphasis of the mind meld technique and style and made it like paranoid schizophrenia. This was a thrust of my treatment and it had even me wondering just what I was hearing. They even exaggerated their ability to do this with vague references that I’d not be sure on the exact meaning or exact patterning. They’d talk vaguely, a few words, and it leaves the impression they know all about what you are thinking. Another technique they had is to make the sound of the beginning of a word which then sounds like patterning. In the new flare up they constantly said “there”, as if they were agreeing with a thought I had just had. They eventually called about me “His name is ‘There’.”

 

A significant amount of what you think in a day is new material and the public had no problem guessing when I got to a new idea or new phrase. This went on all day on all the roads. All this may involve the “white noise” that I complain about but it was always spiced by these louder comments that had a twist or were helpful.

 

I have an example of how they caught me having a new thought. In the spring of 2004 in the federal election our riding had got a new Member of Parliament. This was one Ken Dryden, an all time national hockey great, who had gone on to become a lawyer, a social activist, and then a businessman. He played hockey with the Canadiens in Montreal, Quebec, when they were at the top of their game and he was the goalie of six Stanley Cup winning teams, phenomenal. One night I went for a long walk in my neighborhood and I started to think about politics. It occurred to me for the first time that after a very few years in cabinet our Ken Dryden could become Prime Minister. As a local hero in French speaking Quebec he had the prospect of capturing the flighty block vote in that province which was necessary to prevail in the election nationally. They echoed the thought that Ken Dryden could become Prime Minister just as I had it for the first time.

 

So following new thoughts is the mind meld. It was the style of the mind meld at its pinnacle really. It turns out that your evolving thoughts tend to be associative similar to how your mind will have associative thoughts about a memory that forms branching patterns I described. They could follow my evolving thoughts on a topic with apparent ease without much in the way of mistakes or of coaching from me. They can absolutely do it in on the street and in the traffic; it’s a discovery.  They must actually set up the ideas in their own mind and follow the thought process in their own mind. It’s synchro-mesh or something. I captured this one instance about Ken Dryden on paper but in fact in the mind meld it was constant, all day. It was a public event for years and years, a classic story, one for the history books.

 

This close following seems impossible pie but I’ll give you four quick examples of clear calls in the middle of the traffic that I did record.

 

As an instance when I was thinking about what the populace  was now doing and what was the point, the action should be on the economy, I had the thought couldn’t all these people inundate the Prime Minister with letters? I was in the parking lot of an industrial complex and was just driving off when I had that thought and immediately I heard “inundate him with children”. Well. As I drove away the street began calling out other “inundate” lines which they had pre-canned. (The idea that people, the participating millions, should have inundated their elected officials with look-alike letters on immigration is the alternative to persecuting me and a good point. Letter campaigns work on politicians and as the whole quiet protest stalled it may have been barking up the wrong tree.)

 

One other time I was reviewing the impact of the last 30 years of inappropriate immigration as I drove along. The commentary was in quiescence at that moment, I wasn’t hearing anything. I had the thought that our wild immigration must have aggravated the cost of every single social program in the country. Just as I came to that line in my mind I heard an angry “Write on.” The population was upset about this fact and they caught me thinking about it.

 

Another time I was thinking about how the immigration spending got so out of hand without the professionals noticing it. Specifically I was thinking about the mandarin David Dodge who had earned his stripes at the Immigration Department itself, then became the Deputy Finance Minister when they did the surgical cuts in the federal budget because of the huge deficits and then he was promoted to Governor of the Bank of Canada, helmsman for the whole economy. Unfortunately he and all other well placed officials hadn’t kept track of adult participation in the major cities and hidden unemployment arched up to recession levels under heavy immigration. Immigration is basically to two cities in Anglo Canada so this is an entirely sloppy over sight for an ex-Immigration Dept. employee and I have a resentment of officials of this ilk. One day I got worked up about this problem while in my truck and I had the thought I’d just like to knee David Dodge. Immediately as I had that thought I heard “knee him in the b”. This “b” was an expression they were working various interpretations of one of which is the school grading. They gave the Bank of Canada Governor a “B” rating. They had no problem on the street knowing exactly what I was thinking as I drove past.

 

Another small example is how one day on the walk into work from the bus stop I was thinking about my old age. I thought my thinking really assumes I’ll have good health to an old age. So I said to myself  “I’m planning on good health” and voices from passing vehicles muttered “Who doesn’t?”

 

My daily drive through out the West end of the mega city was all in the mind meld and the population could absolutely keep in touch with my changing and evolving thoughts. The traffic in the city could actually pattern my evolving thoughts on the fly, which is something else again.

 

For a good example, they could write a letter to an important politician with me, through its several rough drafts I jotted down while driving. They would edit it for me. They could actually follow me from my generating the thoughts for a letter in point form and then organizing them through a series of revisions over the period of several hours in the truck. I had a clip board and I would jot quick notes down at stop lights. They could actually guess the ideas I would have and even the exact word I’d use. If I had a thought and jotted it down they, the mob in their cars, would check it out for logic and get back to me in another part of the city shortly. The real time mob could actually think clearly across the city in this way. If I even just over stated the case they would hint and harass me and I would make a point of taking their advice thusly offered. So when I wrote a letter to an important politician about the situation the final product would be quite polished up. It’s interesting they could figure out what my first thoughts on a topic would be, even if they weren’t quite right. They would then coach me to a better idea.  That’s how closely they could mimic my mind after many years of being in the city mind meld. I guesstimate that it took at least 100,000 citizens to be fully engaged in this on a daily basis to follow me thusly in the truck. That’s an army corps of activists. Hard to believe? I lived this daily for several years. I wrote many polished letters in this way. (tbd—daate2)

 

The low level of audibility of some comments makes them hard to discern. In the delivery truck I’ll be listening to the voices and there’ll be sometimes when I think I’ve heard something but am not sure. Then the mind does some signal processing on the sound and it’ll come up with something that makes sense. As this went on all the time I’m convinced this signal processing works, catches the phrases, and this is a polished part of their muted voice. If you didn’t know to listen for barely audible comments you certainly wouldn’t catch on.

 

To invade a person’s mind like they did to me they have to keep track of what happens to you hourly, actually minute by minute. They must have broadcast this all over the city in real time to keep the data base current. They ran my patterning all day in the traffic such that wherever I drove the participating vehicles were right up to the minute on my musings. I’d hear a comment and then hours latter my mind would return to that comment and it’d be caught in a mind meld echo on the street. So in fact it would be like a “One Conversation”, with me on one side and 500,000 people holding up the other side. That’s how they kept my mind open. Basically in the truck there was this all day conversation with me about the situation with the population doing mind patterning. It was region wide daily theatrics.  On the street they commented I didn’t hear voices so much as “The Voice”. My daily life became this on going story to the public, on going for years, but interest was sustained as it was the story of the rebellion – the feature anyway.

 

The original 1000 stories on me circulating in public eventually became 10,000 in this way. That’s a fairly virulent invasion of privacy, eh. I guesstimate the 500,000 kept the top stories alive so that they were on the tip of people’s tongue, which was necessary to affect the mind meld cat calls at me. That is to say the memory of 500,000 people was engaged in keeping the mind meld in effect; it wasn’t just individual’s brain.

 

People I encountered knew a comment to me would be broadcast into this One Conversation. This made my appearance somewhere a part of city wide political theatrics that a passerby could participate in. So if I appeared somewhere what it was to the locals was a cue to comment on what was current that day or to add something new to me. There was never any surprise at my random appearance somewhere in the city. All there was was this controlled, intelligent role playing by the people. Mostly people were very circumspect with what they said and added to the One Conversation. Typically these comments would be on topical ideas and they called these comments “plays”, like moves in sports. Occasionally a comment would be off, be wrongheaded, and I’d hear back about that as well. All I had to do was be quiet and be the medium for the event. I did pay attention to all the comments, play my role.  They were armed with a thousand lines, probably thousands of lines, so they could do this just so. That meant it appeared like manic wit to me. That’s what a modern, national riot looks like in the McLuhanesque village.

 

The One Conservation works partly because people would be circumspect about the comments they would make to me and also because I wouldn’t act up and interrupt. In addition the One Conversation is edited for a dominant comment; there will be one comment no matter how brief that will stick all day. I might hear a short phrase in the afternoon but it would come back hours latter and this would be caught by the mob editing of my day.   

 

The forum in the city to keep my mind open was vastly more complex than something like the Internet. There would be some 500,000 people connected all day. That’s the finesse in the networking possible by word-of-mouth in the Global Village. It would largely be the networking going on in the traffic.

 

While the logistics of keeping track of me in the truck in the traffic for years and years was awesome the alternative would be that I worked in some office or factory and a very few savvy people would have to guard me. This is what they did previously, in the first phase in the 1980’s, but then I was just an individual case. Now I was this international cause, a hit man. At Berco I was available to and accessible by the national theatrics for six years. (tbd—daate2)

 

I suppose this networking around me is similar to the way they ran discussions on a topic of the day in the city, as one big forum. With myself or with some topic of discussion they would keep the conversation “in-the-air”. People would add comments, even just key code words, and it’d be theatrical and educational.  

 

Sometimes, not often, I’d talk back to them from the truck. The stream of participating traffic can hear me just a talking a loud in the truck. I could change the topic at will. I did this rarely.

 

They patterned what my mind was thinking about and would input as I had a thought on a topic. This is when I had thought a bit they would communicate some essential idea to me with a phrase or witism. So it takes rather a lot of effort to communicate. Unless I got interested in a topic it would generally not come up.

 

Slowness to figure things out was typical of me. They never mentioned their ideas to me rather they regularly caught me having new ideas for the first time myself routinely. They’d call “I had had a clot” when this happened. They could pattern that as well.

 

Sometimes they would they’d crack their best lines and inform me a little and in particular as to what the general thinking was. They would call out from the road a word that’d get me thinking on a topic and they’d go over that with me. Typically they would lead me into a thought rather than explain anything. It’s like putting thoughts in your head, as per schizophrenics.

 

I noticed their pestering of me would get me thinking about the situation that they preferred. They thus kept me thinking about the revolt and my predicament for weeks on end. This was more energetic than me just wool gathering in the truck. It’s also made it easier for them to keep track of what I was thinking.

 

A person almost always has a topic of the day going on depending on what’s happened in the previous 24 hours. You’ll be into this. It might be thinking about what some one said or something you read. I might be thinking about a person I knew, some political news or I’d be reviewing my economics. This current thought might be a preoccupation for several hours. In my case they’d keep such a close watch on me they could always figure out what in the last 24 hours caught my attention, was the emotion of the day. In part this was No. 4’s role, keeping a sharp eye on what I read at night when I was at home. I’d help them out occasionally by calling out what I was bothering me and they’d fill in the whole topic. 

 

In the mind meld they follow your emotions as well as one’s thoughts. In particular they knew how to gage how upset I’d get at specific taunting. And if I had emotional reactions to daily events they would pace my recovery.

 

Another part of mind reading is the words and phrases a person uses. You’ll be thinking about something and an idiom will come to mind. They’d catch that. Phrases and idioms are part of a person’s personality.

 

Also, one will think of a topic, a more significant one, but be tired of it or not have the energy to think about it and so you’ll change topics. They followed these delays as well. They called out to me once “now there’s going to be a delay” when I didn’t have the energy to think about some topic. There’s this ebb and follow of mental energy that you have that they pinned down.

 

To mind meld you have to pay attention to details in an extreme fashion. This would include mundane items such as aches and pains, bodily functions and thirst and hunger. It is not that disquieting to have everyone paying attention to these little things. In fact it’s like attention. I actually considered it my revenge for my treatment as when I was hungry or something I would think “Now where’s my guard in regard to my lunch.” I was used to tying up the traffic with this order to mind meld with me all day. This kept the participating public in their cars busy for years and I though “Fine, they deserve it”.

 

That was my revenge. That and my idea I would go to heaven for my suffering for the masses. I’ve got 10’s of millions of citizens whipping my privacy for the purpose of addressing social problems, especially jobs. I’ll go to heaven, I cry. If I was Catholic they would probably canonize me.

 

The public never complained. One time in the truck I found an irritating pimple developing on my face and I heard a very enthusiastic “No way, a pimple!” from a passing car.

 

The participating population of the Greater Toronto Area was focused on my mind for years. They were actually absorbed by the details of what I was thinking or going to think. They must of gone off to bed at night with me on their mind and otherwise meditated carefully on my thoughts of the day. They all just dutifully paid attention to all the things I did or thought about. They “obeyed” the social order to do so. That was their word for it.

 

Some of the details of the mind meld were more than a little obscure. For example you will think unclearly a lot of the time and in the delivery truck I would think of my route to the next stop only I’d refer to streets by the wrong name. I’d use an associated name that was similar but more familiar. One does this all the time. In the pidgin they called these mistakes the “mind mumble” and they used to pattern the mind mumble regularly as well. Gawwwd.

 

In general the participating population had to keep a sharp watch on what hit my eye or ear during the day to effect the 24 hour mind meld. If I stopped at a garage to deliver an auto part, for a small example, there might be some conversation going on there or a mechanic might be doing something different that I’d noticed and they would examined it for that which would stick out in my mind. They would edit the scene for my exact point-of-view on what was going on. This would be reported back to the real time mind meld net in the city. So if my mind went back to that scene an hour later they would catch my exact thought. They called this effect “my eye”.  My eye was like this roving camera that the city paid attention to all day. I was aware of it and lived with it daily but did not try to aim it or anything. So my actual “eye” was this theatrical device for years and years. It’s some human magical device.

 

They pointed out No. 4’s work in the apartment above was something “eye” as well. From upstairs she meditated on what I would be working on at my desk, doing in the apartment and thinking about and sort it for that which would stick in my mind. Her ability to do this was highly polished and quite reliable. Of course she was in my apartment daily and could get some exact details. I believe she had my secure computer wireless signal intercepted and would actually follow my reading of news on the internet line by line on a computer of her own.  However she could also follow me reading my personal notes without technical aids with her close attention to the way I thought and worked. She was entirely masterful at predicting what I’d be working at in my apartment, which was typically at my computer terminal. She would then report back to the participating city through some assistants in the apartment building what was current in my mind. She was remarkably skilled at this close following, which is homo sapiens science, and they said that was her “eye”.  Possibly she didn’t do this alone but the network sifted what would be important to me and come back to my mind latter. She was this Borg Queen and her skill at homo sapiens science was honored daily by the a million citizens.

 

I mentioned in Book One that they could transmit psychic images with something as obscure as an intonation in the traffic discussions. I said these became detailed, nuanced and copious. It’s all rather amazing although I imagine it’s psychology rather than psychic energy. It’s the mind “calculating the probabilities”. The mind is remarkable at this. So I captured an instance in my notes, although it the description is a bit long.

 

I wrote a letter to the Liberal Leader of the Opposition’s right hand man, the Chief of Staff. I was blunt about the Opposition’s situation. They kept track of such letters in the city for official response. In the mind meld they flashed me an image of the Chief of Staff opening the envelope and dumping out the contents. The image was of a small object falling out with the letter. The image I got was just this unidentified small object falling out. So I thought about it and my mind transposed the object into a poker chip. This is actually my situation, as I had a huge financial stake in official response to the situation. The subconscious actually calculates this. While this story sounds a little far fetched and sounds like over reading the psychic images tended to be reliable and as time went on they became copious, just part of the daily routine of communicating messages. One would have to think about the images, let them settle, to catch the nuanced meaning.

 

All that said, there’s a certain mercurial aspect to the mind meld that I can’t describe or explain. In the Berco delivery truck the whole neighborhood-and-a-half, the west end of the city, kept my mind open. They followed the associations, rhythms, and my incubated thoughts as a group without mistakes as my truck twisted back and forth on the local streets. There’s a jumping around to familiar topics in the mind that they mastered. While the mind appears to the individual to be fairly chaotic it is in fact all patternable. 

 

Although I had seven dedicated stalkers over the years all the participating public out to who knows how far across the continent patterned me closely. In terms of what could be called criminal stalking there must have been millions of such after me. My case alone, just me alone, would have doubled the number of criminal incidences in Canada per year I calculate, the number of criminal acts recorded in the country being just over two million annually. That’s the part of No. 4’s corruption haul. And every neighbourhood across the province had local stars with plays that involved an invasion of privacy. Ironically, a main plank in the platform of the Conservative government of the day was Law and Order, harsher treatment for criminals. It excluded themselves, or one might say it excluded themselves of course.  

 

The total load of the invasion of privacy going on by two or three million participants in

Canada would have been priceless. That was the cost to improving human nature. However, it’s not as bad as some major natural disaster.

 

I had millions of virtual stalkers including down in the USA and you could call this mega-play mass-gang-stalking. However they were all supporting me politically at the same time and were my own personal activist army. It was mine. On the street the rude reference was “crack divisions”, which is a rude reference. 

 

As time went on the mind meld became less abusive but ever sharper. It paid attention to smaller or obscure details, was even more personal and had more complex logistics. The white noise and ventriloquism were tightened. The accurate timing and brevity were enhanced. They got more and more of the topics of my life and mental life pin down and tightened the pattern. The tutorials became a more accurate reflection of my opinion base. This is after thirteen years in mind meld with the population in general within a mega city. It’s peak performance by the populace in face of macro economic folly by the government and a breakdown in democracy. (tbd—daate2)

 

The mind meld was like being the insides of a fusion engine tokamak where the magnetic flux is so intense it causes nuclear reactions and changes matter into energy, only in human affairs it produces mind patterning.

 

I kept notes daily on what they said to me and have a diary of the revolt which maybe unique in the world.

 

It may have taken 500,000 citizens of Toronto to affect the mind meld with me daily and that was for years. The details circulating about me may have number 10,000 by the time it was all said and done. At the same time the population across Canada and America were working on themselves, their local stars and on national issues daily with similar intensity. They addressed all manners of problems and in the end many problems were resistant. For example it was still hard to get people, say the children, straightened out. That turns out to be the level of effort required, is what community activism becomes about, and this is what they meant by “The Try” as I have mentioned. They remained determined, dedicated, for years and would only question “Give up?”  They certainly wouldn’t give up on their children.

 

 

 

Part XI

 

  Details of the Revolt Theatrics

 

I’ll wind up my account with some details of the revolt. As this book appears to be the only journal of the first modern Western Revolt I describe I have included detail for posterity.

 

 

 

Long Calls

 

In the second panic they didn’t harass me as intently as they did in the first episode. They had a surfeit of material but they kept it in reserve. What they did instead was harass me with what I call long calls. This would be obscure but complex references that they worked up. Typically they took to taking two or even three stories about me and crossed them. There were a lot of these carefully crafted comments. I called them “scrimshaw” after the political theme of the whale like ministerial appetite for little guys.

 

I have an example of these long calls. A young woman called to me that I was a “light ton”. I can explain this. My analysis that upward growth was normal shed light on all the bad jobs and bad employers around. There was a ton of analysis on the street as what could happen to individual businesses to improve these over time. That was the light ton. However, it had personal meanings as well. One was my interest in science and wanting to be able to do calculations of the physics of energy. I always wanted to be able to calculate how much energy was involved in every day physical events. A ton of photons, a ton of light, would be an interesting reference. Then, when I was delivering auto parts at one point they moved me from a small pickup truck to what they call a full size or one ton vehicle. The smaller truck could be called a “light ton”. As full size trucks are harder to maneuver in parking lots I had a little indulgent internal cry when I was reassigned which was noticed latter and reported in the panic. They routinely caught embarrassing moments like this in the national privacy net as a matter of their style. Of course the phrase “light ton” makes literal sense as there is an imperial ton and a heavier metric ton. To me these all came to mind when I heard the phrase but you’d have to be an initiate to follow all the meanings. So that was one tricky long call that they worked on.

 

 

Precision in the Mind Meld

 

The million people watching me in the Mind Meld in later years did so with great precision, patients and care. I have a story in this regard.

 

In the delivery truck I keep drinks with me all the time. I kept bottled water and diet pop in the truck but I would also stop for a coffee as a change up. Having something to drink became part of the mind meld of me and they keep track of such in detail. Boy do they keep track. One day I was deciding what to drink and I though I’d change up and stop briefly for a coffee as I was approaching a coffee shop. Then I thought no, I’ll have a bottled water now and a coffee later. I heard, from the vehicular traffic, “A coffee a bit later”. That was exactly so, they followed me that closely in the traffic on a routine delivery.

 

You know if you want to relate to someone, make them love you forever, you can develop a close empathy with them including their mundane self and anticipate their reaction in that detail. It’s what a relation looks like with a lot of elbow grease applied to it. For me the mob in the traffic could do it reliably on a constant basis, which is a lesson. That is how relating looked in the Quiet Revolt. 

 

 

Over Reading and Ventriloquism

 

One of the problems with this account is my tendency to over read. This is such a problem that I’ll describe it a bit.

 

When the second phase of the panic broke out I got the impression that my in-laws were talking under their breath like everyone else. My wife, her two siblings, her mother and I socialized on weekends. We would go on these Sunday excursions to the local parks in my brother-in-laws car and I believed they had quite a bit to say about the ongoing and, yes, talked directly to my stream-of-consciousness, my open mind. Anyway when the panic subsided and I found time to talk to them about the economy and the philosophy related to the panic it was simply absent. While I was completely sure they had been talking to me in code and under their breath and in some detail this turned out to be incorrect. This went on for over a year.

 

There are two things going on here and one is the natural human tendency to over read and the other is the ventriloquism technique that was part of the panic that they perfected. They had done this in the first phase and now they did it again. With my in-laws they bugged my brother-in-laws car on the highway and they bugged my mother-in-laws town house through the walls such that they could create this ventriloquism effect. They would drift in a comment from off stage in a modulated voice. This ventriloquism included friends and relatives in the appearance of the universality of the persecution of me. This was as I described in Phase I but with the case of my in-laws it was a very extensive deception.

 

I over read, plain and simple, as well. A number of things my in-laws clearly said were innocent comments and I attributed more complex meaning to them.

 

In general when you are swimming in commentary as much as I was there’s a tendency to read significance into everything. In fact there were understandings, clues and voices that all made sense in my case but were not there. This is part of normal miscommunication but in an aggravated situation such as mine it becomes more frequent.

 

 

If it’s an issue, it’s called a “Coffee”

 

In the public panic “coffee” was the code for the discussions about serious issues. When you had something to think about and discuss it was a “coffee”; it’s a symbol of the revolt process. One day I made a turn while driving deliveries and wondered momentarily if I was “on the right road” and I heard off the street “on the right coffee”. Then latter in the day I stepped into a coffee shop and I heard the call “how do you like your hockey?” referring to their technique of harassing people by lampooning themselves, “scoring”. Another time I dropped into a coffee shop and heard the echo “for a small jesus”, a reference to the suffering of worst off workers for all the people they serve. They flogged that term “coffee”. They just flogged it.

 

The term “coffee” was very useful. One never had “a problem”, they just had “a coffee”. They referred to any social issue as a coffee, for example there was an “economic growth coffee”, a “Chinese aging population coffee” and troublesome bosses were “a social coffee”. So they really gave the reference to “coffee” an all around work out. It’s diplomatic.

 

The term “coffee” has it’s origins in the fact that those ubiquitous coffee shops are worst employers and became a symbol of the problem of low wages. The coffee shops are too many, low wage businesses and not an essential product. So the term was a flexible symbol. 

 

This term “coffee” is an instance of the street pidgin they discussed things in. The lingo is “in” references, some of them very obscure. It became an entire lingo and made good sense to the initiates but sounds like gibberish to most people if you try to explain it.

 

 

A Cacophony of Comments

 

I might also mention I didn’t always understand what they are talking about. As I am blind sided a certain amount of the pidgin is always too obscure to figure out. Also at times they carried on constantly and made as much noise as birds chirping in the forest and made as much sense.

 

 

My Guard in the Middle of the Night

 

I related that in Panic II never got up at night in the six years to the sound of silence. My various neighbors were always awake somehow when I got up in the middle of the night, probably because they woke me up as a routine. My new dedicated neighbor honoured this aspect of the grand style as well. Only now it wasn’t every time, and the tranquillizers had to wear off first, but it was generally or routinely. As far as I could make out I could hear No. 4 make a few comments most times I got up. This must have been very difficult for her to do, having to wake up constantly in the night to keep the harassment up. Some times it was quiet.

 

No. 4’s dedication to the social form was extreme. She never left me alone, took a few days off or made an off comment to me. And this went on for eight years plus the year of quiescence. A documentation of her effort would be an interesting story.

 

 

Causing you to make a Mistake

 

One bit of harassment they polished up and practiced was causing people to make mistakes. I imagine they played this on stars everywhere. They did this in Phase I as well. If a person is busy doing something but you make an intrusive comment you can get him or her distracted and cause them to make a mistake. Actually any interruption while you are doing something will cause you to error but what they’d do to me is call out a key word that had a reference in my memory and I’d be thinking, searching my past to solve the riddle. So this riddling takes only a minimum of commenting to be effective.

 

I have an example of this. At one point I was in the kitchen making whip cream, I was free to do that, with a hand held electric beater. When I was just about done one of my stalkers interrupted me, got me searching my memory, and I lifted the beater out of the bowl without turning it off. I spattered the entire kitchen with whip cream, very funny. So I wasn’t entirely free to do that.

 

 

The Revolt in Washington, D.C.

 

I have a story about how wide spread my play was. I got to thinking I should send a copy of my treatise to some American politician so anyone that was interested in it could say they went through proper channels to get the information. So I phoned the American Senate. A black woman at the switch board answered “Capital”, which has four meanings. Then right away she turned to her co-workers and says “Guess who I’ve got on the line?” She’d have call identification so she’d be able to see who it was. Her co-workers ask “Who?” and the black operator says it’s “brrrrrrr” which is what they had been calling me for some days, although it is vague. Her co-workers then added “What did you say?” and she laughs and says “Capital”, like the phone operators were practicing their typing, a skill. Then I said I wanted to get a letter in the mail and could I have the mailroom address. The operator then laughs to the other workers “He wants the mail room”. The mind association is male lions which brings to mind how they come and go in a pride and have orgies with the lionesses to establish social cohesion, an analogy to the US Senate. So I have that information about what was happening in Washington D.C., in fact inside the Senate building.

 

 

The Feel of Scientific Intimacy

 

I would like to comment on the feel of being in the mind meld.

 

The role of the impersonality is important. No. 4 is responsible for my suffering and I talked with her daily but have never seen her. She almost never talks about herself. Her focus on me is very disciplined, extremely disciplined. She is always on the job of watching me while I am in the apartment and never does things like go to the kitchen, shower or even use the bathroom. There’s little information on the street about her, she is rarely mentioned, and there are little theatrics based on her performance. There’s nothing. As a result I’m not actually aware of her in a sense. I rarely think about her and I never have any tantrums about her specifically. I don’t know her; have a relation with her. They know this on the street and don’t mention her often. That’s the effect of impersonal harassment. It’s that effective. Keep this in mind if you want to get somebody. The people I actually can’t stand are the government leaders. Their Nabob role gets to me.

 

The harassment in the city is a similar deal. Although the commenting may be as much as every minute all my time outside it’s always muted, impersonal, disembodied voices and it just washes over me. So the disembodied voices are strangely impersonal.

 

The focus on me was very intense all across the city but it was always, always stylized. I’d be off some where and I’d step inside a building I had never been in before, perhaps a store, and they’d start commenting to me as if I’d been there all along. Maybe a handful of times did anyone break from this style and say as much as “Is that Bruce?” And when they did it jarred me. The commenting was always familiar. It wasn’t like being a celebrity. They had this nerd star, me, and people just talked to me in a familiar fashion when I passed by.

 

The intimate harassment is sobering. It represents a lot of attention and a horrendous amount of work in the background. The comments that I’d hear are just the outward show of a very large event. Thus when they’d start up on me, as in the morning, I’d take it seriously and even respectfully. I would not talk back to it glibly. Typically if I as much as gave a little gesture with my hand the passer byers would immediately suss out what I meant just then and call “and that” or something. Then this would be broadcast and treated seriously. This kept me from acting up.

 

That’s what happened to perception. The mob became adept at figuring out my thought of the minute or reaction to something. People can be as sensitive as the ships counselor Deanna Troi of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame. They actually can hone their perception into a super power. It’s in us.

 

The sensitivity was general as well. All though my perception was from my unique point-of-view I could see how small comments were being treated as editorials generally. Something like an employee squeaking his chair back and forth would be all the comment needed to say his job is not going well. So people were attuned to the editorials and the communication was pretty subtle.

 

While the attention was on me constantly and they’d answer my every comment on the street it somehow doesn’t feel like friendship; I still had this urge to tell people what was happening to me. This never went well either; didn’t generate much interest in actual fact.

 

 

Little Helpful Things

 

In their harassment of me they helped with little things. They corrected me on small details in the apartment that they figured out for one. I have examples:

 

They spotted an overloaded electrical circuit in our apartment, that the second freezer we had wasn’t being used, that I continually left my sneakers in the living room – which was particularly untidy, that buying slightly green tomatoes has the advantage that they last for days longer while not really tasting that bad, that my nose kept running and needed treatment from an aerosol, that the utensils I stored on top of the kitchen counter could be separated into shiny and non-shiny categories – which would be more sanitary as our budgie was attracted to the shiny ones, and they caught me up in the insanitariness of the budgie in the kitchen in general – something I wasn’t adequately watchful of. They did this all through hints through the concrete floor.

 

There was a range of theatrics to the hints. The tendency for me to leave my sneakers out in the living room they just pointed out to me until I stopped doing it. They’d do that by calling “there” when I was in the living room, looking around and would be naturally noticing my running shoes sticking out. Even that little correction by was something of a production. A really big, city wide production was the way they dealt with my runny sinuses. I’ll describe that as it was elaborate, city wide theatrics.

 

A year before Phase II my sinuses had become infected and I had gone to the doctor and got some antibiotics. This cleared up the infection but my sinuses remained inflamed and runny. Doctors have a second treatment for such which is an aerosol or puffer. I needed one of these again. As my nose was runny I used to count out exactly six Kleenexes to put in my pocket whenever I went out. It was a routine and I always counted out exactly six. Then the whole city would keep a running account of how many Kleenexes I had used when I was outside. They did this on the street in real time. This was made extra tricky as they also had to keep track of how many Kleenexes I had left in my pocket from the last time I was out. I realized they were doing this bit of micro observation and communicating it up and down the street because they always knew exactly when I ran out of Kleenexes. Then I’d have to find a convenience store to buy one of those small package of tissues. They always knew when I was at this point. They’d call out “Now it’s across the street.” as I headed for the nearest convenience store. They liked to keep my mind open like that. The mind meld requires that level of attention to someone’s “point-of-view”.

 

Eventually I thought there might be a specific reason they are going to all this trouble and I concluded they determined I needed another puffer. So I went to the doctor again, got a puffer and with time my sinuses cleared up.

 

While this story is extreme it’s an example of the effort that sometimes has to go into communicating to people or getting them to change.

 

 

Smash Hits in the Mind Meld

 

I have stories about how life in the Mind Meld was kept interesting for the public.

 

During the late summer of 2003 I was practicing my typing during the day. I was outside at one point and mentally going over the keys I was having trouble with. As I was thinking about this I heard “they had to watch their Ps and Qs” in-the-air, which were the exact two keys I was having trouble with and was mentally practicing just then. It was definitely not a reflex rather it was street theatrics, a timed pun. There’s no sense getting mad about such intrusions, they went on all day. In the background there were a million people thinking up these lines.

 

One time I heard a double entendre about naïve politicians. I was shopping at the local Mall and when I headed home they caught this thought I had about eating something. They keep track of not only what I have in the kitchen to eat but what I ate already that day and when my thoughts would turn to eating something further. So as I headed home from the Mall I decided I was hungry and thought I would have a bite of turnip, which is good for you so I keep it on hand in the fridge. As I thought that I heard the bull’s eye, “I’ll chew the turnip.” This is comment about how we all deal with naïve people, people that have “just fallen off the turnip truck”, including naïve politicians. You have to laugh.

 

 

Personal Ironies

 

Life is about ironies and mine has some distinctive ones. I have mentioned a few in the course of this narrative but there are some other good ones and I want to include them.

 

I spent most my work life at the bottom in small factories and warehouses. I had almost no responsibility in my work life. My broader life has been characterized by lack of responsibility as well. After I got married and ran into problems on the job I never so much as paid the rent, ever. Parental worries are a mystery to me. Nevertheless I routinely worry about big issues and did come up with a plan for the country and the Western world. At the same time I have no good plan for myself.

 

One more is my growth into adulthood. As a teenager I was most oblivious to adult pressures. I was worse than most kids who are universally bad at this. Once, as a teenager, I over heard a conversation with a house owner, some adult at my summer job, getting an estimate on renovations on his house. The conversation I overheard went along the lines the contractor’s price estimate indicated that he “wasn’t hungry”. I had no idea what “wasn’t hungry” meant but was curious and asked my family who explained the contractor didn’t need the business at the moment. I still didn’t get it. Then as an adult I grew into this representative for fairness issues. Ah, youngsters.

 

My objective is to reform the handling of immigration because of the way it affects the labour market. I reached world prominence with my ideas. An irony is I haven’t actually read the introductory Labour Market text.

 

 

Borg Aesthetics in Regards to Architecture

 

I can tell a story about aesthetics in terms of the mind meld. The point is that beauty seems to be universal rather than individual, in the eye of the beholder as they say. There was a good demonstration of this.

 

I’m not all that interested in art but when you drive all day as a courier what you do with your time is look at the architecture of the buildings in the city. As you do this you have a conversation with yourself as to how specific buildings that do catch your eye look. Naturally they figured this bit of my internal behavior out and would follow along while I was in the mind meld. I’d notice a building and they’d catch they exact word I’d be using to describe its look.  A few buildings are actually art and I’d think and then hear that one is “beautiful” outright. Modern commercial buildings aren’t art but they are all architect designed and I’d say they “have design”. More modest buildings would “have line”. Ordinary buildings are “plain” and there’s a type of design that is “gaudy”. This was my limited vocabulary and this echoing my exact word happened 100 times and is very universal.

 

 

A 2300 Mile March

 

I had my own epic march in the mind meld. In 2006 I took to getting up early and walking 2.5 miles for the exercise. I also walked some more on the weekends so I logged about 1000 miles in one year, the first year, and about 800 miles in subsequent years. Eventually I marched 2300 miles, all in the mind meld with the neighboring houses and passing traffic. And that’s just a leaf in this story of a New World I’m describing.

 

 

 

 

Chapter XII

 

Conclusions

 

 

The Next Revolt

 

Government and elite ineptness and corruption will always be with us. Governments have always tended to screw up the economy and the people should police them. Over a lifetime you’ll get an education watching them do it. It’s phenomenal but many democratic political leaders don’t have the moxy to know politics is economics - the political volatility of high taxes, low wages, deficits, debt and unemployment. And going forward into the 21^st Century there are going to be monster economic problems from resource and population pressures. The quiet revolts are latent in the Global Village, as I described, but will evolve from one to another. This book will be a written record of the first two and could affect what comes next. The process has occurred twice now, in a very similar fashion. And it has worked on individuals if not the government at this stage. There’s no telling how bizarre the next revolt will be, or will have to be.  

 

The mild persecutions with affirmative action was a bust and a community decision as what to do next time will have to be made. My alpha experience should foster this, it is to be hoped. The case study of individuals, the putting a face to problems, was part and parcel of the intensity and depth of the first two revolts so changing this would be a major difference. This star system was an alternative protest as well. The mind meld with me was not gentle and while it was amazing it was not too purposeful. The fact that it’s known this mind meld can be done will be ambiguous in the future. The mind meld was a huge effort and not that useful but on the street they sagely questioned “never again?”

 

When they reignited the second revolt it was a third phase and they changed the style to something more acceptable to me. They reduced the harassment to a tolerable level. In fact they bent over backwards to be helpful to me. They concentrated on educating me and enhancing my efforts as an activist in all day conversations with me. The whole mega city did this. And they became less judgmental, the emphasizing your role in your problems was replaced by tolerance of people. They broadened the problem of bad jobs to the idea many better paid jobs are mechanical and puffed up. This took the edge of the threat of focusing society on people stuck in bad jobs. These are the changes in style they made the third time out to make the process more reasonable. A more cautious mob of millions in the future might concentrate on individual dramas with more plausible positive outcomes

 

 

Possible Reaction to this book

 

Reaction to this book will be as varied as the number of people that actually read it, of course. Expert opinion will be some of the worst. If this book gets published it could become noticed by the world. The book is a wake up call to potentially half the world, a human eh-bomb. Politicians generally and the media have no idea what has been going on. It has the potential of making even a larger “spectac” out of the West World leaders than they already are. I don’ know what would happen to all these leaders with this scandal, it’s too murky for me to speculate on from here in Canada.

 

In addition there’s a fair amount of corruption in Canada because of my case alone. Corruption is a flash point politically and events around me have to do with millions of actors rather than being an isolated case of graft. Moralists, people without the attachment to the conspiracy of the panic, and particularly know-it-all journalists may take issue with what the various Ministers and First Ministers have done and not done. The police have been on a spree, they’ve tainted 14 governments over twenty six years in Canada alone, and all of the relevant political and bureaucratic executives proved incompetent or outright corrupt. (tbd—daate2)

 

The current Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is not effective and this book gives gory details as to exactly what the problems with him are, his lack of respectful communication. There’s been daily “riots” across the nation for his entire time in office. He’s engendered political and police corruption all across the nation on the issue of long term economic policy. If the popular revolt and police coup unfolding here in Canada is successful and the Prime Minister is removed I’ll treat it as information and think “That makes sense.” (tbd—daate2)

 

If this book doesn’t get widely noticed my hope is it gets published and finds a niche in academia such that the history, discoveries and lessons here in, are known to posterity. It’d be possible for the story of a popular revolt to become an underground myth and this book would be the reference material. The track record of the revolt of getting the unwashed masses to be more competent, moral, and sophisticated; then to out think the elite and finally mount a sophisticated conspiracy capable of disposing of a democratic leader cum Strongman may haunt the popular imagination. The story is about control in society, the people versus the powerful, good versus evil in effect.

 

 

Final Remarks

 

This book records what society has been through in Canada and parts of the rest of the Western world at the end of the 20^th century and start of the 21^st Century. It provides essential history, political and cultural, for large parts of the world that you won’t be reading anywhere else.

 

As I write this in the summer of 2011 No. 4 remains at her post upstairs, I am home with my illness but still watched by the public and the three responsible levels of Canadian government remain unreachable. At this point it’s 30 years since I became a social phenomenon on the street because of troubles on the job, the nationwide movement started some 27 years ago and I have been in the continental mind meld for a total of 13 years. No. 4 has been on station for over 9 years and the cost to her and her common law husband, No. 7, is mounting. Not only that but No. 4 has been stuck to her post 365 days of the year for that length of time, it’s like a prison or house arrest for her as well. (tbd—daate2)

 

At one point the population discussed continuing the event and what I heard is they left it up to No. 4. So she would actually be responsible for continuing the whole national process, not just me, according to what I heard. This is what her idea to promulgate my treatise illegally evolved into, orchestrating a many years long national event. They called it her “idea” and she could actually change the world, change the world by a dedicated life – as a criminal master mind.

 

Going forward the Western world’s economies should recover, the population will be aging and eventually labour shortages will develop. Maximizing growth will remain the economic paradigm of choice and immigration the source of the needed workers. This will have the effect of repurposing the West from social and economic progress, per capita income, to being an economic refugee camp for the third world countries, as the low wage problems won’t be addressed. Regardless, it will have a constituency, be popular. The Western world’s leaders tend to be puffed up posers always ready for some world class spending and immigration costs are off book so this could be the future.

 

Alternatively the problem of the leaders’ lack of a proper conversation with a trusted, informed aid could resolve it self at any time. Or the popular revolt could suddenly surface and make times interesting. (tbd—daate2)

 

There’s a new wrinkle to the human condition, the people have armed themselves with hyper-community-communications across a nation. The citizens have networked informal communications clear across entire countries, achieved a continental mind meld in North America, produced an intelligent collective of tens of millions and improved themselves all to the end of addressing social and individual problems. We can make out that our planet is going to be  much more troubled later on in the 21^st century than currently and in the 22^nd century and beyond even worse, unbelievably worse. This story has just begun.