They were meticulously opening the garbage bags that we had just dumped in the alley, in order to separate the electronics, the damaged clothes, the treasures that only they could still magnify. Some were triage enthusiasts, others real pros, with panniers on their bikes and gloves. There was the hope of hitting the jackpot, like a lotto ticket that keeps us in suspense.
The gleaners were busy before the passage of the City’s dumpsters. Manna fell to them from the sky with these floods. The mattress took less than ten minutes to find a buyer. “It’s to send to Africa!” explained the young black man who quickly disappeared with his loot weighed down by the humidity.
These residents of HoMa, who were once called the destitute and destitute, still exist, especially during election campaigns, when they suddenly re-emerge, wielding the power of a vote they are unlikely to exercise, knowing that they have been abandoned for so long by the meritocrats. The poor are most of the time invisible or camouflaged behind a number; they are ashamed.
According to the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS), one in five people will live below the threshold of a viable income in 2022 in Quebec, or between $25,128 and $34,814 per year.
In 2017, the 85 richest billionaires in the world owned as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest people in the world
And it cries out when Quebec solidaire targets the 5% of the richest to try to redistribute the gains. Revolutions are born of inequalities, when it is not a much more violent society, at gunpoint.
I don’t speak unicorns, but I have read economist Thomas Piketty a few times. He has been fighting this subject for years (bit.ly/3E8RgCe). If the poorest 20% in Quebec have median net assets of $2,600, while the richest 20% can rest easy with their median nest egg of 1.3 million, there seems to be a slight leeway to reduce these inequalities without the middle class running out of poutine on Friday nights.
And the winner is…
Hey, they called me recently, the ultra-rich, the 0.1%, those who display their turnover as billionaires with their corporate mission. They make even more money since the pandemic. You will re-read my colleague Jean-François Nadeau on this subject that he loves (bit.ly/3fr1WlE).
The winners (because they earn a lot) offered me a column paid 30% less than five years ago under their banner. It was already poorly paid at the time… I reminded the young researcher they hired to do their dirty work that inflation had been 7.6% since 2021. Negotiations adjourned. sorry ! Call Guillaume Lemay-Thivierge, he seems more desperate than me.
I prefer not to pay my Hydro bills, collect 10% royalties on my books ($2 per copy for the last) or listen to the actor Gilles Renaud read me the fable The Wolf and the Dog, like Sunday, at the cabaret Oh wolfby the suave Loui Mauffette, at the International Literature Festival.
“The Wolf continued: What shall I do?
Almost nothing, said the Dog: chasing people
Staff-bearers, and beggars;
To flatter those of the house, to please his master;
For what your salary
Will force reliefs in all ways:
Chicken bones, pigeon bones,
Not to mention many caresses. »
Luckily, there are still struggling artists to remind us of what enslavement entails: losing a lot of humanity along the way by dint of playing the king of the mountain. Selling your soul has a cost: you have to fitter.
The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, because it was properly done
I was discussing it with playwright Pierre Lefebvre, whose latest essay, The virus and the prey, raised my blood pressure. The wolf does not only split the soul of the night, he can also bite:
“To succeed, sir, do you mean it?” How sad. […] The state of the world, its lamentable misery, its grotesque puffiness, the devastation wrought every day by industry, any industry — oil, mining, pornography, culture — where do you think that stems from if not is the success of those who succeed? »
Only one episode of the series Before the crash enough to guess. They are sickening, but their villainy is legal. I still prefer The Bougons ; at least they had understood that to poke the system is only to give it back its coin. Cash.
The elephant in the room
Because it’s a bit like that, gamecrossing or being crossed, by multinationals, politicians, bosses, friends, ex-wives or husbands, colleagues, enough to become paranoid.
Pierre Lefebvre, in this letter from a literate loser to a man of power, in this impossibility of dialogue (because these people never meet, except in philanthropic activities), goes from one: “They would like to tell us how unthinkable it is to get out of it together, that there are just individual escapes to ensure our happiness, a single way of living, each for himself – with in the background, as instructions, that to be wary of others, who are pretty much all of them, it goes without saying, a pure nuisance — that we couldn’t do better. We are told that with our taxes, with our taxes. Simonac. »
I’d rather be fucked than exhaust myself distrusting the world
Pierre Lefebvre, 59, author of Confessions of a broken, earns between $17,000 and $22,000 a year, does not own a cell phone and lives in La Petite-Patrie. He calls himself a “little patriot” and votes “by atavistic reflex”. “I listen to how politicians talk to us, he tells me, but we never name the elephant in the room: capitalism. No one questions this framework. It terrifies me. The astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau would answer him that capitalism is only a symptom of a larger problem. I’m betting on madness, the oversized egos of demigods atop Olympus.
“I observe in my neighborhood retirees who have lived according to the rules of capitalism make the green bins to pick up empty cans, notes Pierre. My generation grew up with the promises of progress. Today, I am incapable of looking at a child or a teenager and saying to him: you are going to have a better life than mine. »