Middle class disappearing … in multi-culti Toronto

Toronto's Globe and Mail said it.

Toronto is becoming a city of stark economic extremes as its middle class is hollowed out and replaced by a bipolar city of the rich and poor – one whose lines are drawn neighbourhood by neighbourhood. 

New numbers indicate a 35-year trend toward economic polarization is growing more pronounced: The country’s economic engine, which has long claimed to be one of the most diverse cities in the world, is increasingly comprised of downtown-centred high-income residents – most living near subway lines – and a concentration of low-income families in less dense, service- and transit-starved inner suburbs. 

 Who are these low-income families?

Those in the lowest-income areas are also more likely to be immigrants and visible minorities.

… If the trend continues … Toronto in 2025 will have a concentration of high-earners along the lakefront and the city’s subway lines surrounded by low-income areas – with almost nothing in between.

Haven't Canada's bien-pensants been telling us in season and out that diversity is the key to the country's strength? That its comatose white population is a real drag, and only the cultural and economic enrichment of immigration from the world's far corners (plus the Eskimos, or whatever their politically correct name is) offers salvation?

That continuing trend risks creating pockets of the city that become “no-go zones,” said Carol Wilding, president of the Toronto Board of Trade. She added the information isn’t surprising, but it “starts to put more of a crisis tone” on the need for the city to fix a growing problem that’s as economic as it is social. 

“It does make it more challenging for businesses to want to get in there to invest in those neighbourhoods,” she said. “It’s a greater call to action. … We aren’t moving fast enough.”

Ms. Wilding, why do you say the situation isn't surprising? It's not surprising to you that all those immigrants are getting behind in their re-vitalizing of Canada? Do you mean Toronto isn't welcoming enough, with its TV programs in 30 languages?

The city should be moving faster toward what? Oh, yes, "for the city to fix a growing problem that's as economic as it is social." How should the city fix the problem? Create Section 8 vouchers for the immigrants and visible minorities to live in the lakeshore high-rises? Bus the kids of the high-income residents out to the low-income, service- and transit-starved 'burbs?

To people like Ms. Wilding — and I'm sure she represents all respectable opinion in Toronto — the problems never have anything to do with the immigrants themselves. It's those beastly high earners. It's middle class folks who don't want to live in the inner city with all the Third Worlders they assure you are the very essence of what Canada stands for.

It also seems to contradict Toronto’s most prized mottos – “Diversity our strength” and “The city that works.” Neither of those rings true any more: Toronto’s diversity is becoming balkanized, turning it into a weakness where it could otherwise act to the city’s advantage. The creation of economically polarized pockets of high- and low-income residents means Toronto simply won’t “work” as a municipal entity

If diversity has become a disadvantage, a balkanizing force (as it invariably does, in Toronto or anywhere), how could it "otherwise act to the city's advantage"? Faced with the reality of the effects of mass immigration, the multi-cultural cheerleaders can only fall back on a hard-line insistence that it should work! It shouldn't be a problem!

In Toronto, the idea of neighbourhood-specific poverty came to the fore several years ago. Among city-sponsored and independent community initiatives, it spawned a “priority neighbourhoods” program, in which the city targeted several particularly troubled areas. Despite the flood of money and services, however, things aren’t improving on a broader scale. 

So it is in the fantasy land of multi-culturalism, ever and ever, world without end. Despite government initiatives and programs "targeting" under-served visible minorities, pasting money over the problems, things don't improve. They keep going the way they're going. When you can't acknowledge the truth, that a middle-class society and population replacement from tribal societies are incompatible, then all you can do is weep about "challenges" not being met. And issue yet another call to action, and warn that the action isn't coming fast enough.

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This is a posting to say that there will be no posting today (unless something changes). I have nothing to say that would be of interest to anyone else, or even me. Thank you.

Gingrich wants states to be able to declare bankruptcy

You and I can declare bankruptcy if we need to. Municipalities can. For some reason, states can't. Newt Gingrich wants federal law to let them in on the game. (Tip of the hat: Zero Hedge.)

As everybody knows by now, the states are strangling on pensions and benefits owed to their employees. Like the bigger Union of which they are components, they have felt immensely generous in the past. They've made golden handshakes standard operating procedure, and are wracked with remorse because they are sunk in the new economic battlefield. 

Mr. Gingrich discussed the proposal in a Nov. 11 speech before the Institute for Policy Innovation, an anti-big-government group based in Lewisville, Texas. According to a transcript of the speech on Mr. Gingrich's website, www.newt.org, he said: 

“I ... hope the House Republicans are going to move a bill in the first month or so of their tenure to create a venue for state bankruptcy, so that states like California and New York and Illinois that think they're going to come to Washington for money can be told, you know, you need to sit down with all your government employee unions and look at their health plans and their pension plans and, frankly, if they don't want to change, our recommendation is you go into bankruptcy court and let the bankruptcy judge change it, and I would make the federal bankruptcy law prohibit tax increases as part of the solution, so no bankruptcy judge could impose a tax increase on the people of the states.”

That's quite a sentence, 128 words not including whatever was omitted in the ellipsis. I don't think even the late Laurence Olivier could have spoken it without pausing for breath. When I was writing for radio, one of my rules was never to have a sentence longer than you could speak without an intake of air — it sounds terrible when you have to pause in mid-sentence.

Anyway, back to our sheep, as the French say. Our pseudo-conservative, pseudo-intellectual Gingrich wants to give states the nuclear option. Probably many non-government employees would be entirely dry-eyed at the possibility of pod farmers not getting their promised dosh. But hang on.

What happens when the states kneecap their employees and it's all jolly legal? Does Newt actually believe that will be the end of it? Never mind the lawsuits; those take too long to work their way up the great chain of judicial being. No, the jilted beneficiaries will then take their turn at bat, demanding a fat pitch from Congress.

If the states can't cough up those nifty pensions and benefits, why then … it's time for a federal bailout!

What, you say the federal government is broke and no mistake? When did that ever stop a bailout? Hey, China, want to buy some more bonds? No? Be reasonable! You won't sell no more Wal-Mart furniture to the California low riders and plastic toys to the anchor babies if we don't keep the state in business!

I suppose prostitutes in the streets of Washington get busted sometimes. Those in the Capitol, never.

Senseless acts of verbal violence

Oh, my God. In Tucson, of all places. 

I remember the Safeway where Saturday's shooting happened. It was where I turned on my commute home from the junky commercial Oracle Road onto Ina, beginning a drive across the luxury-territory foothills and downhill to home on the east side. I don't remember ever going in the Safeway, but my wife reminded me that when we were in Tucson again last year she had a prescription filled at a pharmacy next to it.

Several other subjects were in the queue for posting, but this has to take precedence. Why? What can I possibly say that matters? But I can't not say anything, I just can't.

My belief in an afterlife doesn't detract from the horror of this killing and maiming. No one should have to depart this life so abruptly and capriciously, leaving an ocean of grief among relatives and friends.

That said, maybe the only important comment now is to urge that we stop drawing immediate inferences and blame. Maybe the killer was pure and simply a nutter; if he had accomplices, maybe they were too; more will come out in the days ahead. But for heaven's sake, and our country's sake, let's not view this through a political or ideological lens.

Fat chance. Of course it's already in high gear.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik did not ascribe a motive to the shooting but lashed out at what he called a climate of "vitriol that has permeated the political scene and left elected officials facing constant threats.

"And unfortunately Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capital," he said. "We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

He went on to point a finger at the media. "I think it's time as a country that we do a little soul-searching. Because I think it's the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out, from people in the radio business, and some people in the TV business … that this has not become the nice United States of America that most of us grew up in," Dupnik said.

Referring to the increasing vitriol, he said, "that may be free speech, but it may not be without consequences."

Who loaded the gun? Fox News, of course. Here we go:

Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., a New Jersey Democrat, blamed the Fox News Channel for today’s shooting spree that left Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords critically wounded and four others slain. He told a local New Jersey paper shortly after the incident, "There's an aura of hate and elected politicians feed it, certain people on Fox News feed it.”

He continued: "I'm sitting here talking to you and my Blackberry's sending alerts that say 'take caution.' Take caution? I'm in the United States of America!"

Prejudice and bigotry. Fox News. Gun culture. The Tea Party. Too-free speech. Talk radio. Immigration restriction. The Evil Eye. Probably before long somebody will claim the murders were down to blogging, and plead that bloggers should have to be licensed.

We will read again and again in the liberal media about the killer's "anti-government messages," overtly or covertly implying that anyone who wants to contract the scope of the federal government is by definition a shooter-in-training.

By the same token, if it turns out that Jared Lee Loughner ever said a good word for Karl Marx, right-wing commenters will load the blame on Marxists.

Come on, people. This is a severely divided country and the last thing we need is to ascribe collective blame for what the media will inevitably describe as a "senseless tragedy" (so unlike sensible tragedies), just before making sense of it by finding its causation in "hate speech" or opposition to open borders. It seems pretty clear the assassin was a sickbag loony, whatever confused political ideas he may have had. We don't need to indict a whole culture or any part of it. Please.

Only 3,650 shopping days till the Apocalypse

The financial media are chock full of "Repent, for the end is nigh" warnings. I usually agree with their catalog of economic sins this country, and others, have committed: artificial "wealth" through credit madness at every level from individuals to the government; over-taxation and over-spending; submerging small businesses and entrepreneurs in a La Brea Tar Pit of regulation; conversely, using the people's money to rescue big companies from the consequences of their folly.

No porcine lipstick can conceal the nature of the beast anymore. Don't we all know, even if it's half-consciously, that the economic morass isn't part of the normal business cycle or a common or garden variety recession? That the system has come unglued?

It's mourning in America, with Robert Shiller, Peter Schiff, Martin D. Weiss, James Turk, Robert Prechter, David Wiedemer, Gonzalo Lira, Tyler Durden, Marc Faber, and others I can't remember at the moment assuring us the American economy, if not the world financial nexus, is at death's door. Even in such a crowded field, however, Paul B. Farrell stands out.

Farrell, a regular columnist for MarketWatch, can match the bets of all the other doomsters and raise them. He's a combination of Savonarola, Huey Long, Jesus in the temple with the money changers, Nostradamus, and Karl Marx. I like him, sort of in the way I like Gore Vidal: unhinged but colorfully argumentative, with a dream logic that's persuasive until you finish reading and wake up. It's refreshing to find an economic guru who isn't hedged in every direction and who doesn't seem to have the slightest concern about being thought mental; and once in a while he makes unconventional sense.

His latest opus is a look back from the year 2020 at the magnum collapse, with a new chapter of the debacle each year starting in this one.

2011. Wall Street’s super-rich spend billions to control Washington

Thanks to the conservative takeover of America’s so-called democracy the past three decades, from Reagan to Obama, our activist Supreme Court delivered the coup de grace into America’s psyche in 2010, overturning long-established precedent and giving rich owners of zombie corporations absolute rights of live humans, a decision that would have gotten a failing grade in my constitutional law class at the University of Virginia.

Obama part of the conservative takeover?  Deliver me. Still, after the Supremes' Kelo decision, it's not that far-fetched to imagine the Court "overturning long-established precedent and giving rich owners of zombie corporations absolute rights of live humans." 

Washington now feels called on to rescue big corporations, as though they are humans in need of a hot meal and a brush-up. But corporations lack one important attribute of people. Baron Thurlow, an 18th century English jurist, said: "Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked?" Quite.

2013. Pentagon’s WWIII global commodity wars accelerate for 2020 peak

Back during the Bush II presidency, Fortune analyzed a classified Pentagon report that predicted “climate could change radically and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.” Billions more people will increase unrest across the world, creating “massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes.”

No decent Twilight of the Gods scenario is complete without a good helping of climate change. If the Pentagon says so, well, that caps it.

But … 

2014. Global population bubble accelerating, wasting commodities

By now it had become clear that America’s Conspiracy of the Super-Rich was draining trillions from middle-class taxpayers. They see global population growth (exploding more than 100 million annually) not as a drain on scarce resources but only as a way to get richer through their obsession with free-market “globalization.” 

Bull's-eye. In all the wailing about various kinds of bubbles, why does no one ever mention the population bubble (i.e., unsustainable population growth)? If anything, our funeral directors for Western civilization are more likely to complain that folks aren't reproducing enough. Good on Farrell for going out on a limb with a sensible observation that few want to hear.

2017. Middle-class revolution: Buffett’s rich class loses, overthrown

By 2017 it had exploded into a new Civil War as all hell broke loose after the 2016 presidential election. The growing income gap popped Wall Street’s bubble for the third time in the 21st century, the economy collapsed, riots spread against another bailout of too-greedy-to-fail Wall Street banks. A class rebellion ignited. 

As if. We need a right old shake-up for sure, but I can't picture any serious revolution. The fight has been bred out of us. Like the English, we've become a nation of grumblers.

We complain, but when the cost of civil disobedience is an IRS audit or an indictment on one of an endless supply of potential charges — as is frequently pointed out, there are now so many laws and regulations that we can't help violating a few every day — we buckle at the knees. I'm not directing this at you. I accuse myself, because I'm another griper via this blog who won't do anything more radical than joining a demo in Washington with a hundred thousand others.

We do what we can; can't do more. With some common sense, sensible reform, and more good luck than we've earned, maybe we'll muddle through.

True Grit

 

True Grit has gotten a big hunk o'love from people who watch movies and write about them for a living, and I think it's been much inflated because it comes from the writing and directing team of Ethan and Joel Coen. The Coens have managed to make themselves larger than life in the film-crit world, although they usually leave me unsatisfied (see my take on their No Country for Old Men here).

Nevertheless, I watched True Grit in a real movie theater, rare for me (I much prefer DVDs in my home theater). For one thing, I had the week off from work, so I didn't begrudge the time wasted on previews and ads before the feature. For another, I'm still dead keen on Jeff Bridges, even though I was distressed by his over-the-top characterization in Crazy Heart. 

Actually, his Rooster Cogburn in True Grit is somewhat along the lines of his cowboy singer in Crazy Heart — aging, dissipated, ornery. He's dialed down the mannerisms somewhat this time along, and the role, which never strays far from cliché, is at least genuinely inhabited. Plus, there are a few of those moments when Jeff Bridges does what Jeff Bridges does and it's hard to imagine them issuing from anyone else. 

Don't ask me to compare this True Grit with the original starring John Wayne, which I've not seen. There's too much comparison shopping among the cognoscenti who review movies anyway. I am writing about the 2010 movie on its own terms.

Of the other actors, the highlight is Hailee Steinfeld, as the 14-year-old Mattie Ross who enlists Rooster in her quest to bring to justice the villain who killed her father. Having a young girl speak every line like a lawyer or orator palls quickly, but Steinfeld is lively while suggesting intelligence and understanding beyond her years. Matt Damon, a Texas Ranger on the make who is an on-and-off companion to Rooster and Mattie in tracking down the killer, was quite unrecognizable as the star of The Bourne Ultimatum and The Bourne Identity, which I guess is an accomplishment. But, getting no help from the Coens's script, he occupies negative space. In contrast, a character actor who plays a defense lawyer in a brief trial scene shows how to make something out of nothing.

I found True Grit reasonably entertaining. Why can't I summon up much enthusiasm for it? My impression is that the Coens didn't bring much ambition to the project, which shows. For every scene that lights up, two or three others slog along routinely. They indulge in some hackneyed shots, like a horse and rider silhouetted against a sundown sky. The exterior shots of Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the 19th century are oddly unconvincing. I gather from the credit roll at the end that they were filmed at the old-west lot near Santa Fe, but since Santa Fe doesn't look like Arkansas, the background had to be re-created with computer graphic imagery. Not very well, though — it resembles the painted backdrop to a sound stage set in a '50s movie.

That kind of symbolizes what bothers me about the Coens: they are "concept" men making Big Idea movies, and can't be bothered with shadings and details.

Incidentally, the print shown at the technically advanced theater where I saw it still had those glitches in the corner of the screen to tell the projectionist to switch projectors at the end of a reel. I thought all theaters now use continuous spools, not multiple reels.