Tip The Executioner!
Freedom of Choice: How Much Would You Like to Be Ripped Off?
The Vancouver Sun is one of the two major mainstream rags in British Columbia, an oracle for the official narrative, so one might not expect a lot from it. Of course, I don’t read this journalistic miracle (it’s a miracle that people are paying for it), but I got tipped off about one of its recent articles that might serve as a sign for what’s coming. The author of the article is probably not posing as the Great Prognosticator, but sometimes little stories give away unpublicized plans for the future. Something similar happened during the truckers’ protest, when the rulers showed that the non-compliant would have no access to their own bank account. Considering all this, the next report might generate a moment of epiphany without the slightest intent by the author, Josh Freed:
So, according to the article, you are extorted in stores and by services to “tip” the worker for something that had never required a tip before. Your money will support whoever (where do the “tips” end up?), while paying the employees would still be the employer’s responsibility. Consider garages and plumbers, who have ripped you off, anyway, with no guarantee that their work would be worth a penny and they wouldn’t cheat you. How about the used car salesman, who sells you a piece of crap with no warranty, but graciously extorting at least a 15% “tip”?
IN a grocery store, the writer was given the option of “tipping” at 15, 20, or 25%, forcing him into a lose-lose double bind. I was somewhat sorry for him, because he elected to pay 15% only because he didn’t have his reader’s glasses at hand and did not want to keep the line waiting. In his stead, I would have loudly announced the ruse to everyone, demanded a “no tip” option and, if that not granted, walked out of the store. He complied as someone, who must have been used to wearing a muzzle for well over a year, allowed a poker in his nose twice a month and received at least one, if not two “boosters.”
Notice that the whole scam is based on cash not being accepted, which is the next chapter in the globalists’ book.
So, when it comes to the freedom of choice, George Carlin is becoming more right than ever:
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* Could it be that this way, inflation might slow down to a less spectacular level? After all, more money is in circulation, but more money is used, too.
I've appreciated some of George Carlin's political satire, but I've also been suspicious of him, or perhaps rather the way he proved useful to the same powers he seemed to mock. Just like I'm suspicious of any public figure or celebrity who's promoted as anti-establishment by the establishment, like corporate media, manufacturing mock freedom of speech in which the exception proves the rule. Even as s/he, too, like any other upper class collaborator, gets richer at our expense, laughing all the way to the bank by getting us to laugh, cynically, powerlessly, at what becomes taken for granted as the way things are. Comedy Central represents the corporate consolidation of such self-defeating, self-destructive humor. Carlin's occasional if not frequent contempt for working class people, caricatured in Archie Bunker or Joe Sixpack terms, and women in particular, reduced to misogynist stereotypes, only served to underscore this cooptation by controlled opposition.
I can't recall exactly when tip jars and their like started showing up more in the exchange relations of the unfree market. I'd wager that roughly coincided with galloping de-industrialization of the manufacturing base for the economy from automation and layoffs, outsourcing and offshoring, etc. and corresponding reduction of labor to service industries. By now, with endemic stagnation and decline of wages (as productivity has increased and the resulting lionshare of wealth has been stolen by upper classes), the precarious conditions of labor in the gig economy, and every atomized individual a self-entrpreneur desperately selling themselves and scraping together what crumbs they can in an 'informal' if not underground economy, tipping has become (ab)normalized as one means of survival, even while popular perceptions persist that it's lagniappe.
The great masses of us here in the U$, Inc. and across the world are working class commoners to kleptocrats who all the more profit and are empowered by our compliance with their divide-and-rule ruses. A primary one, too often forgotten as the (enforced) status quo of the market uber alles, is the basic buyer-selller division personalized in relations between employees and customers, whereby the employee serves as a front, and target, onto which customers may (mis)direct inevitable dissatisfactions from their own exploitation, as by inflation, price gouging, bait-and-switch wheeling and dealing, and generally shoddy merchandise as well as service following upon downsized, 'streamlined' bizzness operations. Employers, especially within corporate chains of command beyond what little remains of small businesses, remain unaccountably indifferent behind telemarketing scripts, online algorithms, and the typical 80/20 rule of all such bureaucratic buffers and runarounds.
In short, we can get entrapped in assigned market roles across 'service' counters and exchange relations which are antagonistic, forgetting our common oppression and interchangeability of positions, and how this is largely determined by control from owners of the economy. It too often proves easier to make an enemy of another across from us to the advantage of the generals behind the front lines of c(r)apitalism's class war.
We can be led as customers to forget, for instance, that tips cover for substandard, nonliving wages of wage slaves desperately driven to depend on tips, which in turn are also stolen like wages by employers deploying exploitative schemes like pooled tips off which they skim. And in turn we can grow ever more resentful in our commodification as labor of customers who embody the same indifference, if not contempt, of employers to our plight. This and more by design of such Taylorized or scientific management as industrial psychology.
What remains imperative, as always, is to build the class consciousness, resistance and solidarity which is necessary to escape any and all of our respective prison cells within the unfree market.