Browsing PBH By Articles

The Heroes And Zeros Of Summer 2011

Loser of the Summer, Runner Up: The Man Diving For Osama Bin Laden’s Body

He knows the corpse must be down there somewhere. The water-logged, bullet-riddled corpse of the world’s most wanted man surely lies anchored somewhere to the Indian Ocean seafloor.

It’s why diver Bill Warren will spend up to $1 million combing the depths for Osama Bin Laden. “There is still a $25 million reward that no one has collected, and the reward says dead or alive,” Warren reasoned. “Well, if—in fact—he is dead, then I could collect the $25 million reward. Why not?”

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Cleaning Up The Dirtiest Sport in America

Steroids in baseball? Weak. Doped up Olympians? Yawn. Colluding NBA superstars taking their talents to South Beach? Not even close. The dirtiest, most egregiously corrupt sport in the United States is college football.

Of course, it’s easy to say right now. Miami was recently smashed upside the head by Yahoo! Sports’ investigative team, laying out allegations made by former booster Nevin Shapiro. Using funds from a near billion dollar Ponzi scheme to fuel his over-the-top rock star lifestyle, Shapiro allegedly provided illegal benefits to what seems like every relevant University of Miami Hurricanes football player from the past decade.

Let’s not forget some of the other schools to get in trouble to various degrees recently: Alabama, West Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, LSU, Georgia, Tennessee, Boise State, North Carolina, Auburn, Ohio State and the school that started this latest series of crackdowns, University of Southern California (USC).

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Is Another Financial Crisis Imminent?

The Article: Out of Control: The Destructive Power of the Financial Markets in Der Spiegel.

The Text: Speculators are betting against the euro, banks are taking incalculable risks and the markets are in turmoil. Three years after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the financial industry has become a threat to the global economy again. Governments missed the chance to regulate the industry, and another crash is just a matter of time.

The enemy looks friendly and unpretentious. With his scuffed shoes and thinning gray hair, John Taylor resembles an elderly sociology professor. Books line the dark, floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves in his office in Manhattan, alongside a bust of Theodore Roosevelt and an antique telescope.

Taylor is the chairman and CEO of FX Concepts, a hedge fund that specializes in currency speculation. It’s the largest hedge fund of its kind worldwide, which is why Taylor is held partly responsible for the crash of the euro. Critics accuse Taylor and others like him of having exacerbated the government crisis in Greece and accelerated the collapse in Ireland.

People like Taylor are “like a pack of wolves” that seeks to tear entire countries to pieces, said Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg. For that reason, they should be fought “without mercy,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy raged. Andrew Cuomo, the former attorney general and current governor of New York, once likened short-sellers to “looters after a hurricane.”

The German tabloid newspaper Bild sharply criticized Taylor on its website, writing: “This man is betting against the euro.” If that is what he is doing, he is certainly successful. While Greece is threatened with bankruptcy, Taylor is listed among the world’s 25 highest-paid hedge fund managers.

A well-read man, Taylor likes to philosophize about the Congress of Vienna and the Treaties of Rome. But is this man really out to speculate the euro to death? And does he have Greece on his conscience?

Taylor grimaces and sighs. He was expecting these questions. “The big problem is that in some cases these politicians are looking for the easy way out and want to blame somebody else and say speculators are taking Europe apart, taking the euro down and ruining the prosperity of our country,” he says, characterizing such charges against hedge fund managers as “nonsense.” “My capital isn’t the capital of the Rothschilds,” he says, insisting that he is working with the “capital of the people,” and that his goal is to protect and increase this capital. Taylor points out that no one from any of the German pension funds that invest their money with him has ever called him on the phone to tell him not to bet against the euro.

Markets Control Politicians

Taylor’s arguments echo those of everyone in the financial industry — the executives, the bankers and the big fund managers. They all insist that they are not responsible for the crisis in the euro zone and the turbulence in the financial markets, and that their actions are purely rational and in the interest of their investors.

The truth is that the financial markets are controlling the politicians. If Sarkozy interrupts his vacation, the markets interpret his sudden return as a sign that the situation there is worse than they thought — and promptly set their sights on the country. And if there is an argument between Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti, then the markets target Italy, because they doubt that the Italian government is serious about introducing austerity measures. The markets take advantage of every weakness and every rumor to speculate against one country after the next.

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Why Obama Is The Big Loser Of The Summer

“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else,” quipped Winston Churchill, who did not live long enough to witness the rise of the Tea Party.

Congress got ’er done eventually. The debt ceiling was raised. The U.S. did not default. But the damage was done. Faith in Washington spent. The S&P downgraded the lone superpower’s sterling credit rating from AAA to AA+ for the first time. Our sense of humor along with it:

– “Yo momma so poor she raised her debt ceiling and the S&P STILL downgraded her.”

– “Caught a just downgraded AA+ 11-inch Maine bass. Gotta cross to Canada across lake for AAA fish.” Economist Nouriel “Dr. Doom” Roubini’s tweet from a Maine fishing trip.

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A Political Spectrum Empty Of Economic Reflection

The Text: The Twilight of Meaning by John Michael Greer at The Archdruid Report.

The Article: This is not going to be an easy post to write, and I’m not at all sure it will be any easier to understand; I trust my readers will bear with me. I could begin it in any number of places, but the one that seems most important just now is the vestibule of the little public library six blocks away from my house. It’s a solid if unimaginative brick rectangle of Eighties vintage, one room not quite so full of books as it ought to be, another room in back for the librarians to work, a meeting space, restrooms, and a vestibule where books that are being discarded from the collection are shelved for sale.

That’s standard practice in most public libraries these days. If a book hasn’t been checked out for three years, or if it needs repairs and there isn’t a huge demand for it, it goes onto the sale shelf. Prices range from cheap to absurdly cheap; the sale doesn’t bring in a huge amount, but at a time of sparse and faltering budgets, every bit helps. The exception is children’s books, which aren’t for sale at all. They’re in a cart marked FREE, and if they don’t get taken in a month or so, they go into the trash, because there simply isn’t any demand for them. That was where, a few months ago, I spotted a copy of Kate Seredy’s 1938 Newberry Award winner The White Stag.

The vast majority of my readers will no doubt find the reference opaque. Still, back when I was a child—no, dinosaurs didn’t quite walk the earth back then, though it sometimes feels that way—winners of the Newberry Award, one of the two most prestigious US awards for children’s literature, still counted for quite a bit. Most libraries with a children’s collection of any size had the whole set, and most children’s librarians were enthusiastic about getting them into the hands of young readers. That’s not how I found The White Stag—I needed nobody’s encouragement to read, and Seredy’s compelling illustrations of galloping horsemen and magical beasts were well aimed to catch my eye—but find it I did, and that’s how medieval Hungarian legends about the coming of Attila the Hun wove their way permanently into the crawlspaces of my imagination.

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