09 January 10, 2009 - ObserverXtra

More documents

Recommendations

Info

10 | COMMENT & OPINION Published Saturdays since 1996 by Cathedral Communications Inc. Publications Mail Agreement No | 1004840 WOOLWICH OBSERVER 20-B Arthur Street North, Elmira, Ontario, Canada N3B 1Z9 Phone: 519.669.5790 Toll Free: 1.888.966.5942 Fax: 519.669.5753 ASSOCIATIONS The Observer is a member of the Ontario Community Newspaper Association [OCNA], Canadian Community Newspaper Association [CCNA], Ontario Press Council, and The Greater KW Chamber of Commerce. LETTER POLICY The Observer welcomes letters to the editor on topics of interest to our readers. Letters may be edited for brevity, grammar, and legal considerations. All letters must be signed and contain the writer’s full name and telephone number for verification purposes. Unsigned or anonymous letters will not be considered for publication. If you have a legitimate concern and cannot sign your name to a letter, please contact the editor to discuss alternative means of resolving the issue. This newspaper declines announcements, poetry and thank-you letters in the opinion section. Maximum suggested length is 500 words. PRESS COMPLAINTS General Inquiry | EXT 100 info@woolwichobserver.com Joe Merlihan, Publisher | EXT 107 jmerlihan@woolwichobserver.com Steve Kannon, Editor | EXT 103 skannon@woolwichobserver.com Joni Miltenburg, Reporter | EXT 101 jmiltenburg@woolwichobserver.com Marc Miquel Helsen, Reporter | EXT 102 mmhelsen@woolwichobserver.com Donna Rudy, Sales Manager | EXT 104 drudy@woolwichobserver.com Pat Merlihan, Production Mgr | EXT 105 pmerlihan@woolwichobserver.com Matthew French, Production | EXT 108 mfrench@woolwichobserver.com Lindsay Lehman, Production | EXT 109 llehman@woolwichobserver.com www.ObserverXtra.com CIRCULATION The Observer is an audited controlled circulation publication. Canadian Media Circulation Audit calculates and prepares The Observer circulation reports | 14,942. DELIVERY Delivery concerns can be addressed by contacting our office during office hours or by visiting www.ObserverXtra.com and send us a message. SUBSCRIPTIONS Annual subscriptions are available at a rate of $37.10 (includes GST) for delivery within Canada. Contact the office or email sales@woolwichobserver.com for further details. All issues from 2006 on are available online free of charge. The Observer is a member of the Ontario Press Council which considers complaints against member newspapers. For more information about the Press Council contact www.ontpress.com. COPYRIGHT The entire contents of The Observer and online edition are protected by copyright. No portion thereof is to be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the specific permission of the publisher. Reproduction rights can be obtained from AC- CESS Copyright located at 1 Yonge St., 1900, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5 FAX: 416.868.1621 »CARTOON »EDITORIAL »VERBATIM »THE MONITOR THE OBSERVER | Saturday, January 10, 2009 Shantz leaves a remarkable legacy From the comments that followed the news of his death this week, Milo Shantz has left behind an assortment of legacies. Some cited his entrepreneurial acumen, some his philanthropy. Still others pointed to his support for faith-based organizations. His list of accomplishments was long. He certainly put St. Jacobs on the map. He was instrumental in bringing Habitat for Humanity to Canada. And helped many small businesses flourish, just to name a few. The most visible of Shantz’s many achievements was the reshaping of St. Jacobs. It’s no exaggeration to say the village is what he made it. The restaurants and shops of the downtown have his fingerprints all over them. The influence is seen even more clearly a little bit further south on King Street, where his Mercedes Corp. owns the St. Jacobs and Waterloo Farmers’ Markets, the Ontario Livestock Exchange and the St. Jacobs Outlet Mall. Together, the package that helps showcase what has become known as St. Jacobs Country and the rural, Mennonite- “The UN is suspending its aid operations in Gaza until we can get safety and security guarantees for our staff. We’ve been co-ordinating with them (Israeli forces) and yet our staff continue to be hit and killed.” UN spokesman Chris Gunness after Israeli fire killed an aid worker influenced lifestyle has made the area an international tourist destination. While some may chafe at the thought Shantz saved a dying village – preferring instead that St. Jacobs had remained a quiet, bucolic location – there can be no doubt the community risked going the way of so many small, rural settlements: fading away. Yes, there were more visitors and more traffic, and that meant change for the longtime residents. But the downtown was revitalized, and there were jobs for the people who lived there, including many students who passed through one or more of the Mercedes businesses. Today, St. Jacobs is cited as a model for other small communities to follow. St. Jacobs is a good example of what Fred Dahms, a retired University of Guelph geography professor who’s spent more than three decades researching the changing function of rural centres, calls a resort, retirement, amenity community. To be successful in this category, a town must be able to offer a combination of nice features and interesting heritage, such as local architecture or culture. And the community must be readily accessible to people from urban areas. Throw in some dynamic entrepreneurs who are willing to make the place a destination and you have a recipe for prosperity. “What really killed many towns was the motorcar in the ‘30s – farmers could bypass their local service centre and go to a bigger town. They’d skip St. Jacobs and go to Elmira, go to Kitchener-Waterloo,” he said following the release of a book about Ontario towns. “Many of these places that were bypassed were left with all kinds of wonderful housing stocks-big, old houses-as well as really good downtown buildings, nice old hotels, beautiful churches and so on,” he said. “Settlements that have some combination of heritage architecture, entrepreneurs such as Milo Shantz in St. Jacobs, access, rural ambiance or amenities have done well.” Channeling his entrepreneurial talents into ventures with a community benefit, Shantz is remembered as someone who was driven by a desire to see his successes translate into a greater good. A fitting legacy. Civilian displacements, violence, and unmet medical needs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, and Pakistan, along with neglected medical emergencies in Myanmar and Zimbabwe, are some of the worst humanitarian emergencies in the world, according to the MSF list of “Top Ten” humanitarian crises. Médecins Sans Frontières
THE OBSERVER | Saturday, January 10, 2009 COMMENT & OPINION | 11 »HARD TALK | RAFE MAIR There were plenty of warnings along the road to a depression I watch the automobile giants lurch towards bankruptcy, slowed – but only slowed – by government handouts. I see the economy continuing its slide into depression. And I can’t help asking this question: If my wife and I had had enough of the bull market in 2003 and sense to get out accordingly, how come the seven-figure prognosticators in New York and Toronto didn’t know? I’m not trying to toot my own horn in times of such pain for so many people. I simply ask why the signs we saw weren’t seen by those who make markets go? (I’m bound to tell you that when people say how lucky we were, I emphatically reply that luck had nothing to do with it.) When we started to get scared, we knew no more than anyone else, indeed much less than the “experts.” We’d had the savings and loan scandal, bailed out by the U.S. Congress and the Enron stench. We could see that the U.S. trade deficit was $750 billion, mostly to China, which held most of the outstanding U.S. dollars. We knew that unlike Japan in former times, China wasn’t a benign creditor and it would use its leverage to best advantage. To us, the U.S. economy looked like a big glass ball with a jillion little cracks in it. You knew that a relatively slight blow would smash it. We knew that the U.S. was running »INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS | GWYNNE DYER U.S. offer of friendship could finally lead to change in Cuba I have learned one thing from my various visits to Cuba over the years, and that is not to predict the demise of the regime. I did that sometimes in the past, if only to offer a bit of hope to various despairing individuals who thought that a visiting foreigner might know more about their future than they did themselves. But the brothers Castro are still there, ever more moth-eaten (in Raul’s case, almost mummified), and they have just celebrated the 50th anniversary of their revolution. Nevertheless, change may be lurking around the corner at last, for Barack Obama represents the greatest danger that the regime has faced since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of its subsidies 17 years ago. The survival of the regime is due in large part to the unremitting hostility of the United States, which lets it appeal to Cubans’ patriotism, and to the trade embargo that gives it an excuse for its economic failures. Obama is clever enough to understand that the best way to kill the Communist regime in Cuba is with kindness, and he has no domestic political debts that would keep him from acting on that insight. In par- a massive annual deficit and was nearly eight trillion dollars in debt. That’s as if Canada’s national debt was $800 billion. The U.S debt is now more than $10.5 trillion and climbing. The U.S. debt and deficit had, since Reagan’s time, for the most part financed a false prosperity. This was no secret. Anyone who looked could see that far from reducing the debt and deficit, the American economy was adding to it with ever more cheaper and cheaper money being loaned out while the politicians and the man in charge of money, Alan Greenspan, acted as if everything was peachy. The housing market was red hot and you had to know that it was riding for a fall. I would look at all those real estate ads and ask: How many people are there with credit ratings of a million dollars or even several million dollars? We were to learn that there were not nearly as many as the market thought there were, with foreseeable consequences. What happened? It probably started when “junk bonds” passed muster in the moneyraising business. Then we had derivatives and hedge funds and a host of other “investments” that weren’t really investments at all but wagers. It was gambling with all the certainty and speed of a floating crap game. In 2003, it was obvious that the war in Iraq was a hugely expensive and ongoing mistake. In short, in 2003 when Wendy and I made our move out of the market, all signs pointed ticular, he owes nothing to the Cuban exile establishment in Florida, which mostly voted for Bush. He could start right away by ending the rule that allows Cuban-Americans to visit their families on the island only once every three years, and limits their remittances to $300 every four months. Even within the Cuban exile community in the United States those restrictions are controversial, as it is hard to see how they hurt the Cuban regime. Once the question of where to send the remaining Guantanamo detainees has been resolved, Obama could close the base down entirely. Indeed, he could give the land back to Cuba as a free gesture, since it has no economic or strategic value to the United States. That would seriously undermine the Communist regime’s argument that the United States is an implacable enemy that Cubans must confront with discipline and solidarity. Then he could get to work on the ridiculous embargo on trade and travel to Cuba. The sanctions have been written into law in recent years, so he would need Congress’s assent to remove them. But if he got it, all the mechanisms of control built up by Fidel Castro over the past 50 years would probably begin to crumble. The real question is: what happens then? The last time the fall of the Cas- to very bad economic news ahead. The answer as to what happened has I think, two levels. First off, the monetary system around the world is a nest of optimism. Every banker and financier must loan money or he’s not in the game. When money is not “tight,” that is, the prime lending rate is low, financiers have more money available. Because times seem to be so good, optimistic lenders find optimistic borrowers and the race is on to see who can loan the most money at the lowest rate. If the people and businesses see nothing but big profits ahead, the sky’s the limit and it’s not long before a sturdy economy becomes a house of cards. The crash of 1929 ought to have taught us that if moneylenders on the stock exchange allow too much margin or leverage, which is to say they require “investors” to put up less and less money, sooner or later it all hits the fan. Stockbrokers never tell any but the most sophisticated of their clients to “sell short.” Selling short means selling what you don’t have and buying the shares later when they have dropped in price. This transaction acts as a brake on the market. One has to wonder why a broker will advise you to bet on stocks going up even when the better bet is that they’ll go down? Secondly, because everything seemed to be so perfect, RRSP portfolios swelling, and the price of homes going up 30 per cent a year, what was there to worry about? Why, nothing much happened to tro regime seemed likely, a couple of years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, I went to Cuba in the guise of a tourist (there’s nothing like having a baby along to make you look innocent) and talked to a great many people informally. Most of them expected the regime to fall soon, and a majority (though not an overwhelming majority) welcomed the prospect. However, they were all frightened of what might come next, for two reasons. One was the fact that at least 10 per cent of the Cuban people – more than a million – were true Communist believers, and they were armed to the teeth. Would they let their dream die without fighting to save it? The other was that the exiles would come back from Miami and take over. Their money would let them buy up everything of value, and those who had endured decades of poverty under Castro would stay poor and marginalized. Even the few good things about “socialist” Cuba, like the health care system, would be destroyed. Well, my last trip to Cuba was less than two years ago, and things had changed. The poverty, the oppression and the despair were the same, but the true believers who would kill and die to save the revolution were noticeably scarcer. This visit was part of a project in which various Western embassies, these good things when the U.S. government bailed out the savings and loans corporations, did it? The Enron scandal didn’t seem to hurt the economy much, did it? Why worry? The “dot com” collapse only really hit the high rollers, didn’t it? If the markets and the players all said that they could police themselves and that if the government poked its nose in it that would ruin everything, why not believe them? What could go wrong with companies like Merrill Lynch and Lehman Bros. looking after things under the watchful eye of Alan Greenspan. He was a financial genius, wasn’t he? Lastly, we were convinced and let ourselves be convinced that things were much different than in 1929. There were safeguards in place – though no one seemed to know what these were. In fact, 2008 isn’t much different than 1929. Over optimism bred careless credit controls and in due course the bubble burst. The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s all governed, of course, by Mair’s Axiom I, which is, in case you’ve forgotten: “You make a very serious mistake thinking that people in charge know what the hell they’re doing.” We will have a depression. We’ve felt the earthquake, but the tsunami has yet to arrive. In the agony, we’ll tighten our rules so it will never happen again. And, as sure as God made little green apples, it will happen again. It always has and it always will. thinking that Fidel Castro’s illness might mean that big changes were on the way, brought in “experts” to talk to the Cuban elite about how things were done in democratic countries. It was pretty pointless work, frankly, but it did offer unusual access to the apparatchiks who really run the show in Cuba. Most of the officials were about what you’d expect: loyal, fully institutionalized servants of the regime. But very few of them were passionate ideologues who would launch and fight a civil war to save it. Generational turnover had done its work, and these were just people who were glad to have their jobs and the few privileges that came with them. Generational turnover has been at work in Miami, too. Fifty years on, the original generation of Cuban refugees is gradually giving way to an American-born generation that still cares about the country, of course, but are much less interested in going back and re-creating the Cuba of the 1950s. So change is a lot less dangerous for Cubans than it would have been if the regime had collapsed in the early 1990s. If Obama sets out to destabilize the Communist regime with offers of help and friendship, it might well work. And even if it doesn’t work right away, it would make the lives of Cubans a lot easier.
Page 1 and 2: Shootout loss lets Kings salvage a
Page 3 and 4: THE OBSERVER | Saturday, January 10
Page 7: THE OBSERVER | Saturday, January 10
Page 12 and 13: 12 | COMMENT & OPINION THE OBSERVER
Page 14: 14 | BUSINESS »FOOD FOR THOUGHT |
Page 25 and 26: 2007 THE OBSERVER | Saturday, Janua
Page 29 and 30: » THE OBSERVER | Saturday, January

09 January 10, 2009 - ObserverXtra

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?