Browsing PBH By Articles

Another Turn Of The Screw

Posted on September 4, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Another Turn of the Screw by Susan Watkins in The New Left Review.

The Text: Not long ago depicted as a paragon of international virtues, the European Union has become synonymous with never-ending financial instability, the words ‘euro’ and ‘crisis’ now automatically conjoined. Anglo-Saxons are impatient: the US and UK have succeeded in shoring up their broken banks and rolling over their debts through state recapitalizations, bond purchases, money printing and devaluation; why can’t Europe do the same? Merkel’s government has been accused of failing to grasp that this is a banking crisis, not just one of sovereign debt. Headlines clamour for the adoption of the latest trans-Atlantic palliative: first bail-out loan funds, ECB bond purchases, quantitative easing; now direct lending to banks, deposit insurance, regional regulation and eurobonds, or issuance of collective debt. Germany, given leave in crisis conditions to assume an open leadership role in Europe—a position the Maastricht Treaty was designed to neutralize—has naturally asserted its own interests in the process of exercising its hegemony. Loth to become the guarantor of other states’ bank and sovereign debt, it is determined to get as much as possible in exchange.

But the new hegemon has been a lame one, as Perry Anderson has argued. [1] Berlin begrudges having to underwrite stop-gap measures to prop up the Eurozone’s over-leveraged banks, and thereby British and US ones, via its debt-burdened states; but it is incapable of implementing a decisive alternative programme to restructure the unsustainable banking sector, rather than patch it up. The flawed design of the euro, a currency without an accountable sovereign state, is coming under intolerable pressure, as Michel Aglietta describes below. [2] But Europe’s oligarchies baulk at the genuine political union—a true democratic federation—that NLR and others have historically championed. Germany’s strategic aims in the crisis are more limited. It has fought for decades to safeguard its manufacturing base, battered (as was Japan’s) by US exchange rates in the 1980s and now challenged by the rise of China. The geo-political dimension of European monetary union, as a prospective reserve currency to rival the dollar, will not be abandoned lightly; it was one reason for opening the Eurozone to so many peripheral economies, despite the core states’ determination to avoid the federal social responsibilities that political union would bring. Berlin now aims to tighten the Eurozone system, to defend the gains it represents for Germany and to squeeze the bloc into a more competitive position vis-à-vis its rivals to the east and west. Beneath the hubbub of the headlines, this new European integration project is well underway. What political forms is it taking—and what opposition is it likely to meet?

Gore Vidal On Mencken

Posted on September 3, 2012 in Articles

The Article: H. L. Mencken by Gore Vidal from the 1991 book The Impossible H.L. Mencken.

The Text: After politics, journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater. American exceptions to mediocrity’s leaden mean: From column A, there was Franklin D. Roosevelt. From column B, H. L. Mencken.

Although Henry Louis Mencken was a magazine editor (The Smart Set, The American Mercury), a literary critic, an expositor of Nietzsche, and a school of Samuel Johnson compiler of The American Language, he never ceased to be a journalist for the Sunpapers in his hometown of Baltimore, where he was born in 1880 and where he died in 1956. From 1906 to 1948, he was connected with the Baltimore Sun, as a columnist, feature writer, editor. He was the most influential journalist of his day; he was also the wittiest.

As a working journalist, Mencken took as his lifelong subject nothing less than Freedom’s land and Bravery’s home, the (not so very) United States, where flourished such gorgeous clowns as Calvin Coolidge; “The Great Croon of Croons,” Franklin D. Roosevelt; the not-so-great Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan; and many, many others. But if only God could have invented such a cast, it was Mencken who proved to be God’s most attentive and appreciative drama critic. It was Mencken who described the show. He reveled in absurdity; found no bonnet entirely bee-less. He loved the national bores for their own sweet sake.

Why LIBOR Is The Crime Of The Century

Posted on September 2, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Libor: The Crime of the Century by Robert Scheer in the Nation.

The Text: Forget Bernie Madoff and Enron’s Ken Lay—they were mere amateurs in financial crime. The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.

Modern international bankers form a class of thieves the likes of which the world has never before seen. Or, indeed, imagined. The scandal over Libor—short for London interbank offered rate—has resulted in a huge fine for Barclays Bank and threatens to ensnare some of the world’s top financers. It reveals that behind the world’s financial edifice lies a reeking cesspool of unprecedented corruption. The modern-day robber barons pillage with a destructive abandon totally unfettered by law or conscience and on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.

How to explain a $450 million settlement for one bank whose defense, in a plea bargain worked out with regulators in London and Washington, is that every institution in their elite financial circle was doing it? Not just Barclays but JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and others are now being investigated on suspicion of manipulating the Libor rate, so critical to a $700 trillion derivatives market.

Theodore Roosevelt: The All-American Sissy

Posted on September 1, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy by Gore Vidal via Random House.

The Text: In Washington, D.C., there is–or was–a place where Rock Creek crosses the main road and makes a ford which horses and, later, cars could cross if the creek was not in flood. Half a hundred years ago, I lived with my grandparents on a wooded hill not far from the ford. On summer days, my grandmother and I would walk down to the creek, careful to avoid the poison ivy that grew so luxuriously amid the crowded laurel. We would then walk beside the creek, looking out for crayfish and salamanders. When we came to the ford, I would ask her to tell me, yet again, what happened when the old President Roosevelt– not the current President Roosevelt–had come riding out of the woods on a huge horse just as two ladies on slow nags had begun a slow crossing of the ford.

“Well, suddenly, Mr. Roosevelt screamed at them, ‘Out of my way!'” My grandmother imitated the president’s harsh falsetto. “Stand to one side, women. I am the President.” What happened next? I’d ask, delighted “Oh, they were both soaked to the skin by his horse’s splashing all over them. But then, the very next year,” she would say with some satisfaction, “nice Mr. Taft was the president.” Plainly, there was a link in her mind between the Event at the Ford and the change in the presidency. Perhaps there was. In those stately pre-personal days you did not call ladies women.

The attic of the Rock Creek house was filled with thousands of books on undusted shelves while newspapers, clippings, copies of the Congressional Record were strewn about the floor. My grandmother was not a zealous housekeeper. There was never a time when rolled-up Persian rugs did not lie at the edge of the drawing room, like crocodiles dozing. In 1907, the last year but one of Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, my grandfather came to the Senate. I don’t think that they had much to do with each other. I found only one reference to TR–as he was always known–on the attic floor. In 1908, when Senator Gore nominated William Jennings Bryan for president, he made an alliterative aside, “I much prefer the strenuosity of Roosevelt to the sinuosity of Taft.”