Credit cards, portable telephones and now cell phones, automatic computer updates, debit cards, video recorders with timers, governments which gleefully and unfairly tax but continue to cut social programs, natural gas heating, electricity and even the taken-for-granted hot tap water – get this, get that... smart moderns use these... when you’re finished, just throw it away... bla bla bla bla bla.
I started to wonder whose convenience ‘they’ were talking about in TV ads, chronicling in the papers, blaring conveniently from the car radio, popping onto billboards everywhere and popping up so conveniently on the computer too.
It was Christmas Eve again. I was standing in line at a grocery checkout waiting my turn with some last minute items and about a thousand other patient, cud-chewing, good folks. Everybody had a debit card instead of cash, and the networks were painfully slow because of the clog in every shop, every mall for 2000 miles in any direction. And I wished I and the 6 people in front of me had brought cash, to speed things up so I could just get the hell outta there and home to a little old Xmas cheer. How inconvenient, that we all have these cards…
Then it dawned on me. The cards in our wallets weren’t about our convenience at all, but about how much more convenient it is for a huge company to just vacuum up electronic currency from us, stroking us just right until we give up a little nectar like ants do to aphids, to bombard us all with reasons to buy buy buy, or make it easier for us to buy buy buy or issue us a bill on a monthly basis and then just watch the cash roll in like waves on the Yucatán Peninsula.
After all, it is our right as members of a free society to be able to get rich if we decide we want to, and it is on that basis we as a society not only tolerate but admire, covet and defend the ‘good fortunes’ of rich people, and epitomize their winning strategies which includes, ironically, describing them in minute detail in ghost-written books that strangely make the NY Times Best Seller List with amazing regularity.
As usual during these negative epiphanies, I started to feel like a speck of krill drifting towards the inevitable, awash this time on the unbounded Tides of Persuasion.
And then I got it. The Idea. I waited for it to turn out to be someone else’s, looked for evidence of it off and on for quite awhile but as far as I can tell nobody yet has hit on this, or at least, lived long enough to write it down. Well, admittedly I did read Atlas Shrugged in my teens, and I remember hearing about some guy down East who billed a doctor’s office for wasting his time, but this seemed to be unique somehow.
Here it is: If I can be billed monthly or taxed annually for what I have been told are 'essential services', or even for all the convenience that we seem to need to give our lives meaning in a post-post modern World, then why can't I bill back for being available for exploitation? What's good for the 'big guys' is good for the little guys, or so we’ve been told. No double standards in this, the best of all possible Worlds, ha ha!
I’ve thought for a long time that terms like consumer, campaign, protest, awareness, etc. seem to me to imply powerlessness. Sure, a movement can get up some good steam, but like a solar flare, seems always to get pulled back into the giant thing from whence it sprang. We as working schnitzels exist solely to feed the corporate mechanisms and the underlying abstract of state, of wealth generation and inequitable distribution, always have. We don't even know what it's like not to, it's been going on for so long – we were even blatantly referred to as cannon fodder in a not too distant past.
So, I have decided to stop seeing myself as an end user and progressively more and more as a provider of a real essential service, namely being available for exploitation.
In a nutshell my concept is like signing up for a credit card in reverse: there is an introductory offer to the company in question waiving the usual setup fee, and access to my services is available as long as (whichever company) continues to pay their bills. This could include access to my children's minds (for a very high monthly fee), electrical consumption, gasoline, automakers, you name it - anything that has stockholders who consider increased cashflow their right and therefore a foregone conclusion.
Is it legal? Well, is it legal to bill for a service? Of course it is. By the same token is it legal to coerce millions of people using any means necessary at your disposal barring brute force, simply to establish and justify a steady, uninterrupted flow of cash? Maybe it shouldn’t be legal, and although it is at least unethical many, many corporations have been doing it for a hundred years if not longer. So what’s wrong with fighting fire with fire?
What are you gonna do if they won’t pay? Well, I’ve already got a contract in essence, right? Years and years of a relationship where I’ve recently put up with substantial cost increases with no say or control. I’m not a piece of meat, I’m a stakeholder if there ever was one. So my thinking is if they want my business they will have to listen to me – it’s an unwritten protocol of commerce: “There have been some changes to my corporate policies and I’ve decided to break out some of the costs that have always been there so you can see where your money’s been going.” Sound familiar?
Like their policies, if in 90 days there isn’t payment, I will have no choice but to discontinue service. That means if we are talking about a gas company, I have to call them to come and get their meter. Or if it’s an insurance company, that I cancel my policy. This may not sound workable, and admittedly may work better if you already have a wood heater and some solar panels on the roof. They’d probably think we're bluffing, until they realize we really do mean it. And, well… the customer is always right, eh?
One of the strategies of convenience for gas and electrical utility companies is the Budget Payment Plan, or Level Billing Plan. Whatever you want to call it, it is promoted as being easier on your pocketbook, featuring convenient equal monthly payments. But actually it’s about cashflow for the company during the summer, a period when home heating fuel isn’t selling very fast. It’s not a cheat exactly, but it is an exploit. A perfect example of how we are being treated like a planet full of meatheads, by, well, a planet full of corporate meatheads.
Even if you don’t own the house you are in, the gas bill is still yours to pay, Budget Payment Plan or not. Imagine May 1st and 10,000 of us are discontinuing our services (letting our natural gas providers know that we’re terminating our commercial relationship with them), on the same day, and charging them a $45 reconnect fee in October when they try to levy a similar charge on all of us for reestablishing our symbiosis of service/exploitation.
Hey, why not? It’s a free enterprise system we’re living in and as we all have come to know, anything goes.
The government/corporations can’t afford that, it’s not workable. Well, I will never forget the wild grin on the face of the Enmax spokesman reporting in the Calgary Herald about how Enmax realized an 85 million dollar profit increase in the first fiscal quarter of 2002 compared to the same period one year before, after the company introduced new billing fees in 2001, when electricity was privatized. Enmax lived without that extra $40 a month from me before ‘deregulation’, and were in a profit position already, so if I have to learn to bill like a credit card company to get it back so I can afford electricity again then I guess I’d better start to tool up.
Isn’t that fraud? How could it be? We are all just sitting there waiting to be harvested like a frigging field of barley anyway, and so that seems just a little one-sided. Difference is though, barley can’t speak up for itself. Our entire Globalized economy is predicated on one thing – confidence – and on the presumption that everyone bought into the idea that economics is a science, which it is not (it’s a humanity).
And remember, anything goes in the realms of commerce - e caveat emptor, right? So it’s obviously all set up like a con, everybody knows it, and the marks are us, the consumer class, a culture of domestication so omnipresent that when a person does snap out of the trance or is already immune to the dylectic, it can be immensely frustrating to watch other people who, still doped by the constant hypnotic barrage seem to demand to be taken advantage of.
So if some VP were to call foul, it would be an open and shut case of the skunk smelling it’s own ass first as it were, if you ask me. This isn’t a new idea, it’s just one which hasn’t been explored yet, and I’ll bet there have been board room jokes based around the line ‘what if everybody catches on some day?’
Well, what if we do? It smells like good old Capitalism to me, so the big guys can’t complain ‘cause I’m using their rules, right? ‘They’ bombed Guernica out of existence back in 1937 because some Spanish people got tired of going backwards under the watchful eye of their Capitalist overseers, got together to cooperate to the end of doing better for themselves and got squashed like bugs ‘cause that’s Commie-nism, gall-dornit.
Of course, there is the possibility this would finally bring out the big guns again. After all, like the annihilation of Guernica, none of it was ever about people or as if people really mattered – and as cynical as it sounds I still believe our existence is only about achieving a level of technology which will provide relative immortality for those who can afford it. Once there, we, the great unwashed, will no longer have a purpose. Ipso facto, at least as far as their shallow thinking is concerned God has allowed them to get rich on Earth, which in their squirming little minds just proves they deserve immortality. Oy.
But if empowerment is the only antidote to the Tactics Of The Perpetrators Of Oppression it’s bloody well gotta be done, and as ‘they’ say, there’s no holding back a good idea whose time has come.
So start designing your own application form using the templates here, and get your databases ready!
