Here's how we got into this mess - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Tragedy mounted on tragedy, last week, when three young girls, aged six to nine, were stabbed at a dance class in England.
The man charged with the crime was only 17 and, as in Canada, his name wasn’t released, because he was not considered an adult. In the meantime, right-wing gangs connected with their followers via the internet and claimed a Muslim immigrant had killed the girls. Riots broke out across England as these right-wing extremists fought police and burned a police car. Outside the Prime Minister’s office in London, protesters chanted “we want our country back” and hurled beer cans and bottles.

 

Given the violence, a judge allowed the name of the accused and his birthplace: Axel Rudakubana, born in Wales. 

 

Many of the rioters had connected via X (formerly known as Twitter). Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, worth, according to the internet, $222 billion, bought Twitter in 2022. He made the situation in England worse by suggesting civil war was “inevitable”, a statement read by tens of millions of people. 

 

Musk is an example of a new breed of billionaire who controls so much in this world. He also controls Tesla and SpaceX, among other things. 
   

We should be proud that he is nominally a Canadian, immigrating to Canada at age 18 from his birthplace in South Africa and acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. However, he has often been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including promoting COVID-19 misinformation, as well as right-wing conspiracy theories.
Musk is indicative of a new group of billionaires who have prospered in this world of the internet. The second richest man in the world is Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, worth $185 billion. Third is Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook, at a mere $178 billion. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and now a philanthropist, ranks eighth in the world with a paltry $129 billion.

 

The world has changed so much from when I was young. Rich, in those days, was represented by people like Timothy Eaton, founder of the Eaton’s chain of department stores, and E.P. Taylor, chairman of a brewing empire and breeder of champion race horses.

 

At the local level, “rich” applied to local business leaders who I sometimes rubbed shoulders with when I entered this business community 60 years ago. Most of these were local merchants. Slightly further afield, and richer, were industrialists Bruce Sully of Champion Road Machinery in Goderich or George Parsons of Goderich Elevators.

 

But the world has changed. Through international business leaders, local merchants were replaced, to a large extent, by companies like Walmart, controlled by the Walton family from Arkansas. In turn, these companies were threatened by people like Bezos and the world-wide market offered online by Amazon.

 

Likewise, I’m just old enough to have worked with the locally-owned newspaper business before it changed. I worked for A. Y. McLean at The Huron Expositor in the summer of 1967. Within a couple of years, newspapers became centrally published, instead of printed on sheet-fed presses, and the centralized ownership began. I edited the Clinton News-Record in 1979 when it was owned and printed by Signal-Star Publishing in Goderich. Jill and I bought the Blyth Standard in 1971 and operated it until I became addicted to the theatre business in 1977 and sold the paper to A.Y. McLean. He operated it, along with The Brussels Post and The Expositor, as he attempted to build a company to turn over to his daughter. When she wasn’t interested, he sold the chain to The Signal-Star, which kept only The Expositor.

 

In 1985, I recovered from my theatre addiction and returned to the newspaper business with The Citizen, serving Brussels, Blyth and the surrounding area. At the time, Signal-Star owned or printed newspapers from Wiarton to Zurich and inland to Mitchell. I counted it up the other day and they had 10 people working in the editorial departments of newspapers in Goderich, Clinton, Seaforth and Mitchell.

 

But the urge to centralize continued. Signal-Star sold its chain and printing plant to another publisher, who sold to someone bigger. Soon, the Signal-Star printing plant was closed and staff reduced. I figured out the other day that there might be one editorial employee left from the 10 among all those papers along Hwy. 8.

 

We, The Citizen, the little paper, the only independent, still have a full staff as Publisher Deb Sholdice struggles to keep the newspaper alive while more people buy from the giants like Walmart or the internet and the local merchants (and advertisers) disappear. We have brought this lack of local control. We have made people like Elon Musk so powerful. We threaten our local economy.