The One Percent

It is a cold dreary day in Toronto this Sunday, October 16, 2011. All the cool kids are heading out to the protest, all ninety nine percent of them. This past summer I hung out with the one percent, the market capitalists, the M.C. Being only one percent of the population, they are hard to find. The first one I caught up with was making a few bucks selling stuff at one of those festivals so popular in rural Ontario. It was eight o'clock in the morning. He had three tables in front of him; he was selling kitsch. The fair closes at ten pm; his thirteen hour day was just beginning.



I watched the ninety nine percent walk by. Maybe one in ten, one in twenty, would look at the goods. This was a festival in the heart of the Toronto bedroom belt. The oppressed working class was walking by in their leather jackets, wearing the sort of sneakers that gangbangers shoot each other in the head for. They had cell phones, Ipods, and watches. One couple (squares: a biological man and a biological woman) got into an argument because their wrist watches did not have the same time as their cell phones. They stood in front of the booth and blocked traffic. The market capitalist, the M.C. shrugged; sighed; and went to the back of his patch of grass to have a smoke.

During the breaks between sales, I conversed with the M.C. You must make a lot of money, I told him when the thirteen hour day was over. The ninety nine percent said so, I said. He pulled out his cash out of his pocket and counted out the twenties, tens, and fives. He started with eighty bucks, now he was up two hundred. I nodded. Two hundred dollars a day, that is way more than the average worker makes. The M.C then told me his expenses: gas to drive the two hundred miles to the festival, the rent on the booth, a motel if he wanted to sleep with a roof over his head. That sort of stuff. Then there are the cost of sales: buying the inventory, fetching the inventory (it arrives in Toronto, only a hours drive from where the M.C lives), and displaying the inventory. Just cutting open a box of product and throwing it up on the shelves and waiting for the public to buy it is not an option, like it is for the Ontario liquor monopoly. The M.C had some signage made, and it was not free like going to see the doctor in emergency when you have a runny nose. All in all that day, the M.C made less per hour than a server in a restaurant; and he gets no tips.

The ninety nine percent, they steal. Three times that day I saw the children of the oppressed take the kitsch that M.C had for sale. It is OK to steal * , I observed, you are a pig in the pig empire.
The last kid to steal from us, his mommy brought him back to apologize. His mommy was a school superintendent, her older kid, a daughter, was wearing equestrian gear (she was entered one of the equestrian events going on at the fair). The daughter looked embarassed; the thieving kid looked like one of those N-people that piss on seats on the subway, even though he wasn't an N-person. He is just pissed off at the lingering effects of colonialism in Africa, I observed. The other two thieves never came back to apologize. The M.C. told he does not do any fairs or flea markets close to Toronto. You get robbed there; and the police do nothing. He gave me a string of details and names and contacts if I wanted to prove this to myself. I nodded. Interesting data, but I could get into trouble, would get into trouble, with the Human Rights Gestapo if I put it down. We live in a country without free speech, and the nature of the criminal subspecies imported in to create jobs for socialists and votes for socialism is something best left for word of mouth, whispered in darkness; rather than for me to get fined over. No, I was just here to find facts to support socialism, one ignores facts critical of socialism. The M.C. nodded. It was quiet: we had a smoke. We talked about how to be successful in Canada *, and the black market was mentioned * .

All summer, as I hung out with the M.C. I only saw one queer couple. I thought queers were ten percent of the population. For the record, queers are ten percent of the population. Disagreement with that is thought crime, ain't it? My grammar teacher taught me that in high school. But the queers do not go to flea markets. I guess they are too poor, ground down under the jackboot of pig capitalism. Maybe they are hiding out in their bedbug infested hovels, afraid to show their faces because they will get lynched. The M.C. wanted to take their money, not put a rope around their neck. The lynch mob must be the other members of the one percent. These one percenters must be pretty fearsome, being able to intimidate a community that outnumbers them ten to one.

I had a great summer. I got a tan. Saw the province. Drank beer, watched the sun set over every great lake but Ontario, and hung out with the Straight Satans of Capitalism, the one perchttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifent. I did not make much money; to do that I need to take the risk of choosing and buying the product myself, plus buy some equipment and take the risk on choosing which market to sell at. The risk; I got an earful about risk. The socialists, they never talk about risk; or expenses, or regulations, or accounting methods to determine after tax profit. I have seen them steal, though.

I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this.
xpd Mitchieville