The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Seems hizzoner thinks that those little stop signs on streetcar doors are for other people. You know, people who aren't important mayors. Today's Star  reports that Mayor Rob passed the rear door of a 505 car stopped at Dundas and McCaul, usually a very busy stop. When the driver left his seat to chew out this driver, unbeknownst to him who it was, our fearless leader phoned TTC HQ to complain.

We will miss this guy when he is gone. We will. We really will.

First Impressions on OneCity

Once again, everyone is talking about what is not happening and not talking about what is. Those who are interested in facts rather than spin might check out the website.

First, the plan does not call for an across the board rate hike. Instead it calls for existing rates to be applied to a portion of increases in property value. Specifically, if you $400 thousand condo becomes a $500 thousandone, you will be taxed on a value of $440 thousand or 40% of increased value. This is equivalent to a 1.9% rate hike. It is not a rate increase. We would hope that even the lightbulbs in the press (and the mayor's office) would be able to digest this.

The plan itself is breathtaking. It would make not only Toronto, but the GTA, a truly transit friendly urban region. This would take an enormous load off of a road system that provides what has been judged as the worst commuting experience in North America. And it would provide vastly better services to poorer neighborhoods where most are utterly dependent on transit. It is perhaps the most positive vision of the city since the glory days of the 50s and 60s.

Which brings us to the second thing not being talked about. This is that Counselor Stintz is doing what Adam Giambroni so failed to: turning the TTC chair into a springboard into the Mayor's office. As Ford looks more and more like a one term embarrassment (what were we thinking?) and to the extent that we remember the Miller regimes foibles, a smart, technocratically competent and somewhat more photogenic (less comical) mayor with extraordinary political skills and a willingness to cooperate rather than alienate is going to look extremely attractive. In short, she provides rock solid support for the argument that partisan politics in municipal administration, of whatever stripe, is counterproductive.

A combination of vision and managerial competence. And she won't show up drunk to hockey games,  physically assault opponents or scream obscenities at those who stand in her way.

RIM Death Watch

With the markets opening in a little more than two hours, we are about to see a reprise of the Northern Telecom meltdown last decade. They are now bleeding cash. The stern is in the air and it is about to slip under.

Blackberry 10, if it ever arrives, may be dead on arrival. The release of Google's Nexus, with its $200 price tag and 7" form factor and a real developer community, kills the Playbook. And if the phone that will surely follow is as good and as cheap, then there seems to be little reason for Blackberry hardware.

The seventy million plus subscribers are a selling point, as is perhaps the upcoming OS. And of course the couple of billion cash in the bank. But make no mistake, RIM is over and the impact on Kitchener Waterloo will be devastating.

Taibbi on Wall Street as Organized Crime

Matt Taibbi has an hugely entertaining and informative piece on Wall Street's manipulation of municipal bond markets in the current Rolling Stone.

His book on the banks,Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, is by far the most entertaining of the financial collapse genre and his feisty and incredibly persistent attacks on the criminal behavior of this class are a constant reminder of how lame the response has been to this theft of trillions of dollars by the teflon dons of the financial sector mafiosi.

What is Unfolding in Paraguay?

The president of Paraguay has been removed in an impeachment process that most neighbouring states are calling into question. Former bishop and noted liberation theologian Fernando Lugo has apparently has left Paraguay and it would appear that members of the opposition Colorado, backed by the military, are in control.

Paraguay was ruled for more than sixty years by the rightist Colorado party prior to Lugo's election victory in 2008 and for most of that period, from 1954-1989, by the truly odious Alfredo Stroessner, an ardent admirer of Adolph Hitler and a standout thug even by the standards of 1970s and 80s Latin America.

Paraguay is among the poorest countries in the world and the poorest in Latin America. Crippling disparities of wealth are rooted in the vast landholdings of a small elite in what is largely an agricultural export economy. Not surprisingly, Lugo's government faced stiff opposition from the start. Land reform efforts were sporadic and had limited success. Of course, they will  end altogether now that Stroessner's Colorado party has returned to power.

Canada was one of three nations who quickly announced recognition of the new government. And the Vatican apparently stopped short of condemning what very much looks like a bloodless coup. What better illustration could there be that fundamentalist belief and conservative religious reaction are not expressions of Christian faith but negations of it.

How it Works

Today's Toronto Star has a wonderful account of how government works at its most senior levels.

My graduate and doctoral work in public policy included several stints in both central agencies and policy departments and this is as accurate a reflection as I have seen on life at this altitude.

If the streamlined booking of boardrooms so clearly baffles the best and brightest in government, there would seem to be no hope for the larger issues.

Read and weep!

Where is This Economy Going

Markets are down about 2% at mid day today, which is but a single data point in an increasingly unstable market that looks very much like last summer. More worrisome is the longer term prospects for western economies reflected in market trends and in macroeconomic numbers.

If the market dips this summer, as it did last, this will represent the third turn back in three years from post-recession highs. And each of these peaks was fueled by dumping vast amounts of cash into the financial sector, primarily via the U.S. Fed. Despite these historical infusions, inflation remains near zero, suggesting that absent such intervention we would be in a period of long-term deflation.

Normally, as U.S. election year would see an uptick in markets and this may well happen later in the summer. And Bernanke does not want to determine the election either by sitting tight or being overly aggressive. So we might yet see a modest QE 3 as the election nears. But the economic numbers out of Canada and the U.S. as well as the BRICS are not inspiring. And Europe dances along the edge of the abyss month after month and year after year.

My own guess is that the most likely outcome moving forward is more of the same. Like the Japanese, we might be entering an extended period of perhaps decades of economic malaise -- a sort of lost generation or generations. This will be driven by unprecedented concentrations of wealth that both limit purchasing power and created vast pools of investment capital that have no place to go because demand, limited by that purchasing power, remains flat.

Welcome to the root canal economy -- a sort of permanent condition of chronic pain that is not serious enough to demand immediate alleviation but sufficient to make life more or less permanently miserable.

The Church for Whom?

Over the weekend, at the suggestion of a friend who has a very mixed view of all things 'church', I dug into the work of Gretta Vosper. Vosper's message is very similar to that of John Shelby Spong and others in its attempt to carve out a space separate from both an increasingly tepid and irrelevant liberal Christianity and an increasingly muscular fundamentalism that certainly scares me and probably should scare you too.

For her, this space is one in which we can become entirely at ease with, and even supportive of, a secular world view and focus instead and shared ethics and values -- on building a better world "with or without God." In North America at least, the question of who ultimately occupies this very contested space may well emerge as the key question regarding the future of the church. It is where almost all that is interesting for us is happening right now. And in this context, her argument is compelling. But, for me at least, it is not ultimately persuasive.

It is compelling because she like so many others makes such a strong case both for setting aside rigid strictures on belief so beloved of the fundamentalist crowd and many others as well and of centering the church and its work on the building of community instead. Indeed, this accords with much of what we can know of the early message of the Jesus community. So far, so good.

Why is this unpersuasive? In a passage on the work of the Jesus Seminar in recovering evidence of the historical Jesus, she insists that the message of this itinerant prophet that emerges is utterly impractical in 21st century North America. Yet this is to miss the point. It was pretty impractical in 1st century Roman occupied Palestine too.  It got people dispossessed and killed. And it did so because it rejected the dominant norms, even the progressive and inclusive dominant norms, of the day. It was meant to be, and was, a faith by and for losers. And just as with Forrest Gump, belief was as belief did. It was a liberation of the dispossessed and it scared the Romans because it should have.

So in a sense, Vosper is right. All of the dogma and ritual and power and money (and not just for the Catholics) are accretion. Using the social scientific, historical and literary tools now available to us, we can now dig back much further, to at least the very early church. And our inability to relate to that early church, I would suggest, arises not from our modernity but from our power and wealth. This helps to explain why when the urban and rural poor in Latin America, most nominal church members, began to form communities of faith autonomous from the Roman hierarchy the message of this early church was clearly evident in their reading of scripture. And it was here in the second half of the last century that a theology of liberation arose.

Yet this is not very evident in North America, particularly from our upper-middle class perch. Here what we see on the one hand is the religion of empire in the suburban megachurches catering to the Chevy Tahoe crowd and on the other, empire lite (less filling but tastes great) in the dying liberal churches catering primarily to the soon to be departed. And of course an attempt, of which Vosper is a part, to carve out a new space which might attract  those members of our class rightly disaffected with both. This is not a perspective that encourages great hope.


Yet in urban slums and rural backwaters throughout the world, the church is growing explosively. And here the church is again a church of the dispossessed -- of the losers. Here as well, however, the religion of empire can be found both in an evangelical movement that is a thinly disguised prosperity gospel and in a conservative catholicism and protestantism that has all too often served the forces of reaction. But it is here as well that the message that Vosper and others reject as impractical is also gaining a toehold, however tenuous.

Deje Vu All Over Again

A blog entry today by Paul Krugman reminds us of bigger picture that should be far more obvious to policy makers and pundits than it is.

In the face of declining employment numbers and wobbly markets in the U.S. and impending doom in the Euro zone, the increasingly dominant policy prescription is retrenchment. Neo-hooverism is alive and well, and inexplicably, we seem determined to repeat the mistakes of 1937 and push the world economy off the cliff again.

This zombie recession that just won't die seems to be gathering life once again. Andrew Mellon, Hoover's treasury secretary, lives! And a seemingly progressive president, like Roosevelt then, seems determined to place political expediency and fear of an intransigent right ahead of economic common sense.