White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Bad Choices about Detroit

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The case for saving Detroit is lame. The case for letting the three domestic car companies fail is terrifying. Good choices, there are none. It is reasonable to expect a third way to be proposed, but it has not yet. It is urgently needed.

 

The nation needs a capable domestic vehicle manufacturing base for defense capability; but does it need three moribund companies that have lost their way, compared to their global rivals who are, in some cases, manufacturing competitively in the United States.

 

When a choice between two is too fraught, the need is another option. Fail or nationalize is too stark a choice. Something else is needed and the time-honored option is to appoint a commission to weigh the assets of the car companies and to decide on how they can be capitalized upon.

 

The three domestic vehicle manufacturers, which are far from being wholly domestic, do have assets, mostly overseas–especially General Motors and Ford. For decades, their operations in Europe have been prosperous. For more than 20 years, Ford has looked to Europe for its profits and GM has been enormously successful in China and Russia and with its German subsidiary.

 

 

It is one of the mysteries of the automobile world that Japanese and German manufacturers have been able to bring to America successful cars first marketed somewhere else, but the Big Three have not. Never was this more apparent than after the first oil crisis in the l970s. Detroit did try to meet the demand for smaller cars but by producing some ghastly lemons: cars with a poor power-to-weight ratio, while the Japanese and the Germans simply upped their imports of proven cars. The choice between the Ford Pinto and Volkswagen Rabbit was no choice. Remember the Chevrolet Chevette? Bet you’d rather not.

But at the time a whole crop of lemons was coming out of Detroit, the same companies were making excellent small cars in Europe: GM under the Opel name in Germany, Chrysler as Simca in France, and Ford under its own name in England. Why did these companies have to make small cars from the bottom up in America? I have asked this question many times and have received no good answer. Only guff about the American consumer being different. Put that in your Toyota and smoke it.

 

A bailout on the basis now being discussed has another problem. If Congress directly finances the Big Three, it is only a matter of time–a short time–that Congress will be designing cars. That will guarantee catastrophe.

 

If you doubt it, look what happened to the motorcycle industry in Britain. As company after company fell to the twin evils of bad management and Japanese competition, the government, under the socialist leader Wedgwood Benn, stepped in to consolidate the one proud and dominant world of British motorcycles—marques like Aerial, BSA, Matchless, Norton and Triumph were swept together to make the super British bike. The only thing missing from the mix were the customers; they bought Hondas, Suzukis and Yamahas.

 

There is an old joke about a refusenik family that resettled in Israel. They wanted to operate a shoe shop and the Jewish Agency, which handled such things, provided them with a great little emporium, complete with stock. They were delighted. A month later, the father was back at the agency. “We have a small problem,” he said. “You forgot to order our customers.”

 

The empirical evidence is not reassuring that American consumers will again want to buy from Detroit’s finest.

 

 

The Things They Say

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As the global credit crunch begins to bite, the Old Un wanted to pass on some illuminating research that will surely help us through these gloomy times. Firstly, a survey has been carried out on behalf of the Cooperative Bank shows that as the economy nosedives our bottoms are set to pay the price. According to the research, eight out of ten people have decided to ditch quilted lavatory paper in favor of the cheaper stuff. As if that’s not momentous enough, sales of colored loo rolls are predicted to fall as bog standard white paper is cheaper. Meanwhile research conducted by online bank Cahoot has revealed that one in four Britons are now less likely to split up from their partner as economic prospects worsen. This, of course, is bad news for divorce lawyers—which just goes to prove that every credit crunch has a silver lining. —The Old Un’s Diary in the British magazine The Oldie, November 2008

The way to stop financial joy-riding is to arrest the chauffeur, not the automobile. –Woodrow Wilson

These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men. –Franklin D. Roosevelt

It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours. –Harry S. Truman

Depression is when you are out of work. A recession is when your neighbor is out of work. A recovery is when Jimmy Carter is out of work. –Ronald Reagan

Recession is when the woman next door loses her job. Slump is when the woman in your house loses her job. Recovery is when the woman in No. 10 loses hers. –Len Murray, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, alluding to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 1983

Our Lord commonly giveth Riches to such gross asses, to whom he affordeth nothing else that is good. —Martin Luther, Colloquies

A man’s true wealth is the good he does in this world. –Muhammad

The Long Shadow of Clinton Falls

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Back to the future? Oh, say it ain’t so, Barack Obama. As the president-elect struggles to fill out his staff, there is concern among analysts and scholars of the presidency that the new president may be relying too much on the men and women who served Bill Clinton.

The problem is that they are perceived as yesterday’s people and, worse, that Obama was elected on a clarion call of change. The stalwarts of the Democratic administration of the ’90s have about them the ghostly tinge of another time. In a parliamentary system of government, you know the likely players after an election. There is in place a shadow cabinet, ready to seize the reins if the electorate favors a change. In a presidential system you hope for new faces.

We look not only for fresh ideas in a new administration, but also for fresh faces to carry the policies forward. The need for the new has been elevated by the George W. Bush administration, staffed as it has been by his father’s placemen, especially in the first term. Alas, it was old wine in new bottles. Sometimes the wine was bitter: men who came back to Washington to finish that which had been unfinished. While the new president might not have had an agenda, the staff he appointed did–and they sold it to the president, particularly after the emboldening that 9/11 conveyed.

That is one lesson for the Obama crowd. Another is do not tear up everything that the previous administration has done, even if you don’t like it. That just sets up a policy seesaw of the kind that debilitates. The new Bush administration reversed treaties, including the Kyoto agreement, and encouraged a kind of belligerence. It gave the back of its hand to all sorts of people and undermined, rather than reformed, the United Nations.

The early signs are that Obama is relying heavily on Clinton worthies. First there is Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), who is known for his arrogance, effectiveness and profanity. Obama has chosen Emanuel to fill the position of chief of staff. He is an odd choice. It is a position best occupied by self-effacing professionals who can control an egotistical staff. It is a job best performed by those who can mollify without conceding. Ronald Reagan, after difficulties, found the right person in Howard Baker. George H.W. Bush had difficulties with John Sununu, fewer with Sam Skinner and found the perfect person in that Man for All Reasons, James Baker. Clinton had three chiefs of staff, but Leon Panetta stood out. Andy Card and Josh Bolten have both served George W. Bush well–not an easy assignment, given the intrusive influence of Vice President Cheney and the pre-emptive role of strategist Karl Rove.

Washington’s foreign policy establishment is particularly concerned about the names circulating for national security adviser and secretary of state. For national security adviser, these include Susan Rice, who was Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs. She is liked and respected, but her gravitas is questioned, as is her role in the Rwanda civil war. And for secretary of state, these include Richard Holbrooke, Clinton’s man in the Bosnian crisis and architect of the Dayton peace accords. If Emanuel has an ego, the brilliant Holbrooke is his equal. Then there is the perennial office-seeker Bill Richardson, Clinton’s secretary of energy and United Nations ambassador. A man of derring-do, he longs to move back to Washington and leave his gubernatorial duties in New Mexico. He likes worlds to conquer and supported Obama after his own presidential bid collapsed.

Their hopes may be dashed by the ambitions of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who is pressuring Obama for the top State Department job and by the friends of Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), who would like to see the minority leader on the Foreign Relations Committee go out in a blaze of bipartisan glory. The joke in the Capitol is that if you walk into any urinal and say, “Mr. Secretary,” 10 men will reply, “Yes?”

And so it goes. What is lacking so far are the new faces of “change.” Things look a little less Clintonesque over at the Justice Department, where a variety of names, some with Clinton ties and some without, are circulating. The wisdom about the other two critical appointments is less informed. This gives the Treasury either to former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker or to the quintessential Clinton man, Robert Rubin. Defense aficionados hope Obama will keep Robert Gates as long as he wants to serve, and then will slip in the much-loved but wayward Republican, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

Letter to the Editor

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Your article this morning (“Requiem for U.S. newspapers,” Commentary by Llewellyn King, Nov. 1, 2008, The Providence Journal) rang a bell here! Your article should be compulsory reading for all sentient humans. Opinions are worthless if there
is nothing real to base them upon.
Well done.

CHARLES ANDREWS
East Greenwich, RI
The writer is chairman of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations

The Placemen Cometh

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After the deluge, the deluge. That is right. The upheaval in Washington that follows every presidential campaign where the incumbent, or his vice president, is not reelected is massive and affects the routine governance of every aspect of the nation.

 

Essentially, it is a period during which much of the federal government is rudderless. Scholars, like John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute, say it is also a period during which the United States is more than usually vulnerable to its enemies and to crises.

 

Although the framework for transition is put in place before elections, it is immediately afterwards that everything begins to roll. The very first appointments the new president makes are not to the Cabinet but to his transition team, which bears the brunt of seeing that a new government takes over without chaos or endangerment of the country.

 

Think of General Electric. It is a large, diversified company with interests in locomotives, jet engines, nuclear power plants, consumer goods, finance and broadcasting. Now, think of what would happen if all of the company’s executives, from the chairman down to the shop-floor supervisors, were to leave within days of each other. You would expect decision-making to be frozen, and GE franchises to be under attack from competitors. Yet, on a grander scale, that is what will happen in Washington in the weeks ahead.

 

In a hypothetical remaking of GE, the stockholders and their new chief executive officer are free to hire whomever they wish, and to shuffle them without the media blowing a fuse. The president of the United States does not have that luxury. His key managers–all 1,100–have to be confirmed by the Senate. But first, they have to be vetted by the newly installed White House staff. Assuming they will take the jobs, the candidates are cleared informally with their home state senators. Then it is on to confirmation, and all that that has come to entail.

 

For critical Cabinet posts, such as defense, state, treasury and the Office of Management and Budget, the Senate likes to give the president his choice of executive. But in contentious political times, nothing is guaranteed in the confirmation process.

 

Some 7,000 government jobs change hands with a new administration, and the process among the president’s inner circle can be bloody. Those who labored in the campaign believe they are entitled to first dibs. The best thing a new president can do is identify his chief of staff early on, and let this appointee shield him from contention among those who helped elect the candidate.

 

An administration is inevitably shaped by the people a president knew before he was elected. Ronald Reagan had a major advantage. As the former governor of California, and an established national figure, Reagan’s Rolodex was bulging. Jimmy Carter’s Rolodex was not bulging, nor was Bill Clinton’s. George W. Bush had a fat Rolodex, but it was stuffed with the names of his father’s operatives.

 

Each appointment tends to initiate the next one. Caspar Weinberger and George Schultz both worked for the Bechtel Corporation, as did others who served in the Reagan Administration, including Kenneth Davis, deputy secretary of energy.

 

Many ambitious people with institutional backgrounds are poised to serve in government, and they have been advising the campaigns in the hope that this will buy them favor. These potential placemen are poised n their institutions to take up high office in Washington, whether they are at Harvard University, the Rand Corporation, The Brookings Institution, or one of the plethora of new think tanks around the city.

 

The poet Lord Byron said of sex, which he knew a thing or two about, that the pleasure was momentary, the position ridiculous and the scandal damnable. Of politically appointed service, it might be said that the pay is meager, the scrutiny intolerable and the damage considerable. Consider Colin Powell, Scooter Libby, Paul O’Neill and Paul Wolfowitz. Yet still they want to come to Washington, and a huge new crop has to be harvested under pressure between now and Jan. 20, 2009.

 

Presidents do not manage very much, but they do appoint talent and validate the decisions and policies of those they appoint. They also must guard against rogue appointees, like Ollie North and Bob Haldeman, who can hurt and embarrass an administration.

 

 

Requiem for Reporting

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The newspaper of the Newspaper Guild tells the terrible truth: traditional newspaper journalism is dying faster than anyone thought. Almost every major newspaper is making drastic cuts in staffing, from The Washington Post to The Chicago Sun-Times, from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch to The Philadelphia Inquirer, and from The Dallas Morning News to The Modesto Bee. Forty percent of the Newark Star-Ledger’s newsroom staff will depart in a buyout wave. Jim Wilse, editor of The Star-Ledger, said 151 buyout offers were accepted in a newsroom of about 330 people.

Here in Washington, the all-important bureaus which make up most of the Washington press corps are being decimated; and I mean that in the current usage of cut by 90 percent, not the original usage of cut by 10 percent. Colleagues and friends abound who are writing books, trying public relations or seeking government jobs.

The cause of the hollowing out of newspapers is well known: the Internet is getting the information out faster, it is mostly free and the reader can access it selectively. The trouble is that the information on the Web is, if it is any good, first appeared in a newspaper somewhere.

Newspapers still keep the record, but they are woefully behind the times. Today’s newspaper makes no concessions to the passage of time. It is produced in a factory in the middle of the night, transported through the traffic, and entrusted to a child for delivery.

 

Worse, the business model is hopelessly outmoded. It relies on a healthy stream of advertising revenue to make up for the poor income from actual sales of the product.

 

The story is the same in all advanced countries. Newspapers are in trouble, serious, mortal trouble. Only in emerging markets are newspaper sales growing, and that often reflects poor penetration of personal computers and government control of broadcasting.

 

Newspapers have suffered electronic competition in the past and survived. They were portable and kept a tangible record of events. You cannot hook up a printer to a radio or a television set, but you can to a computer. Advertisers can even distribute coupons via the Web.

 

H.L. Mencken, America’s greatest journalist, feared for the morning newspapers in his day because all the circulation and wealth was in the evening papers. Television put paid to that.

 

In Washington, until the 1960s, the dominant paper was The Evening Star. After its purchase and merger with The Times Herald (a weak morning paper owned out of Chicago) in 1954, The Washington Post became the most important political newspaper in the country and a cash generator for its owners. The 40-year golden age of the morning newspaper was dawning. Now it is fading.

 

The mighty New York Times lost money in one quarter this year and may repeat the sorry event. The Washington Post is being subsidized by a test-cramming company, Kaplan, Inc. Two once-proud titles, The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, are at the mercy of a man who, in newspaper terms, is a Philistine—loud-mouthed, vulgar and insensitive to the journalistic craft.

 

There are those who would take pleasure in the agony, and what might be the death throes, of the mainstream media, but they would be ill advised. With the death of newspapers goes the health of the Republic. Democracy only works with a vigorous, disrespectful press, demanding and providing transparency in every aspect of life. The press may be disreputable and eccentric, but it is the indispensable partner of the ballot box.

 

Freedom of the press is the freedom to comment and to criticize. But more important, it is the freedom to investigate. Without investigation, government, corporations and even science goes about its business in the corrupting dark.

 

Already, reflecting the collapse of the Washington reporter corps, there has been a falloff in the number of Freedom of Information Act requests. There are fewer newspapers which can afford to have correspondents travel with the president. Newspapers are not detaching reporters for investigative work of the kind undertaken by The Washington Post on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Foreign bureaus, in critical places like Baghdad and Kabul, are not being staffed, let alone Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo.

 

No entity in the blogosphere has the resources to take up the newspaper role.

Opinion is cheap. Reporting costs money–a lot of money. The unintended consequence of this collapse is that the Associated Press will become more important politically and socially than is good for any organization in the news business. The shafts of light will be fewer in the long winter for news ahead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crocodile Tears for Small Business

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There has been a death in my neighborhood. I speak of another independent, small business killed by an influx of chain retailers. In this case a grocery store, which opened its doors in 1875, has expired.

No more will I stop there to buy meat, talk to the butcher about the various merits of New Zealand and American lamb. No more will I ask the manager

to see if he can get yellow corn rather than the white corn favored in Northern Virginia.

One could shrug off another small business going to the wall as a sign of life in the age of chain retailing, if it were not for the relentless rhetoric from politicians about the need for and virtue of small business. John McCain lauds it. Barack Obama genuflects to it. And all 535 members of Congress get weepy about it.

Their argument for small business is that it creates jobs. To me, the job creation is a given. My argument is that entrepreneurism and small business define who we are as a nation and how satisfied millions of Americans are with their lives.

Yet small business is under relentless attack, mostly lacking the basic tools to defend itself. Credit is an important ingredient, but it can be overrated. Startup small businesses have never been able to look to banks for seed money. Banks do not do that kind of lending, which is why so many small businesses are started with credit cards, family loans, or out of the earnings of a working spouse.

In my mind, after credit, habitat is the great burden of small business. By habitat, I mean a place to work out of at a rent that is not exorbitant. If there is a new shopping center in your neighborhood, look and see if there is any new small business there. Probably not. It will be as bland and homogeneous as the last shopping center you visited. It will be as dead, as lifeless, as predictable, and as antithetical to small business as its developers could make it. All right, they let in a sandwich franchise. Those are not really small businesses: they are big businesses that have laid off their risk on the unsuspecting franchisee. Franchisees, in my experience, are the most unhappy and exploited people in business, the victims of a pernicious system of sharecropping.

If you want to feel the life and vitality of small business doing its thing, you must seek out the older strip malls–often awaiting demolition–or the crumbling warehouse district. The lucky new entrepreneur is the one who can operate from the kitchen table, the basement, or the garage.

The next great burden comes with the hiring of staff. It is the high cost of health insurance. This should not involve employers, but it does–and it involves the small as brutally as the large.

For 33 years I operated a small publishing company, which I founded. It was a success, but we were sorely tried by insurers who charged a lot and would not fill all of their obligations (a cancer patient had the care paid for, but not the pain killers.) Rents also escalated, based more on our ability to pay. I hope there is a special enclosure in hell for property company managers and health insurers.

Where then are the politicians, those who weep so copiously for small business? They are mostly between the sheets with big business facilitating the destruction of the small entrepreneur. Mom-and-pop operations do not have lobbyists, cannot afford white shoe law firms and do not run political action committees. The ability, upheld by the courts, of local authorities to use eminent domain to condemn areas of low economic activity in favor of new developments is an example of the war by the big against the small. It would be biblical, except in this case, David looses and Goliath triumphs.

The damage to who we are as a people is hard to calculate, but it is there. Who would rather not run their own restaurant than manage a chain outlet? Ditto a bookstore. Ditto a hardware store. Ditto an auto-repair shop. Ditto every line of endeavor from exporting to consulting. I have yet to meet one individual who preferred being employed in a behemoth to being self-employed.

For me, the latest outrage is learning that airlines are charging $25 for tickets bought through travel agents. The airlines, in good times and bad, have had it in for travel agents: the quintessential small business. Shed a tear for the travel agencies, along with every courageous individual who wants to have the real promise of the American Dream: a business of one’s own. With that comes a dignity, a sense of worth that is good both for the nation and the individual. And,yes, small businesses make life richer for the consumer while creating jobs.

Newt Gingrich And The End Of Ideology

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Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House and espouser of big ideas, has discovered two old political verities: our education system is broken and the nation’s infrastructure needs an overhaul. Both have been true for decades. They were true when Gingrich was forcing his tribal doctrines on Congress and when, later, he described George W. Bush as a “transformational” president.

 

For Gingrich, the trouble is he did nothing for education when he had power and he was opposed to funding infrastructural repair. While Gingrich was trumpeting Bush’s ability to change the nation, the president was bringing about change at home through neglect and change abroad through interventionist war.

 

Now, the price is to be paid–the astronomically high price. Get out your wallets, your children’s wallets and your grandchildren’s wallets.

 

Gingrich’s Republican Revolution is a tattered thing now. His “Contract with America” is never mentioned. His term limits idea is no more viable than Esperanto. The man who believes that private enterprise and the free market are the balm of hurt countries is observing the nationalization of a large chunk of the finance sector. It is hardly the kind of transformation Gingrich expected from the Bush administration.

 

Despite this litany of events that has turned Gingrich’s dreams to nightmares, we need thinkers more than ever. If Gingrich had been less wedded to the Republican orthodoxies (now crumbling) and given his ideas free rein, he might have had more enduring successes. Real ideas are more enduring than party fealty expressed though party-speak.

 

Whoever wins in November–now hard upon us–has to approach the business of government in the immediate future as a new paradigm: pragmatism first and ideology second.

 

The problem with ideology is that it inhibits ideas and produces rigidities that inhibit the natural immune systems of countries from functioning. If the Democrats had not been so ideologically wedded to the purposes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they would have sided with conservatives to control these monsters before things went hopelessly wrong. Likewise, if conservatives had not developed a pathological hatred of regulation (oversight, really), some alarms over the house of cards on Wall Street may have been noticed. As a prophylactic, regulation can only be measured in its absence. There are no bonuses for good regulation.

 

It is up to creative people, like Gingrich, to introduce House Republicans and the party’s base to this big idea: things have changed. All of those robust slogans of the 1990s are obsolete. So is the idea that good results in government will axiomatically flow from personal rectitude, including faith, family, patriotism, a love of small government, and a belief that our institutions of government are irresistible to the rest of the world.

 

In many ways, Republicans are better equipped to prepare themselves for the future than Democrats. Republicans do have leaders, like Gingrich and Rep. Roy Blunt, who are equipped to mold a new party philosophy. They also have a corps of literate thinkers on the op-ed pages, including George Will, David Brooks, Bill Kristol, Kathleen Parker and Charles Krauthammer.

 

These days the Democrats have no living heroes. The Clintons are contentious and Jimmy Carter is a liability. In both the House and the Senate

Democratic leadership is weak. Neither Nancy Pelosi nor Harry Reid can stir the emotions.

 

Most of the print liberals lag their conservative counterparts. Harold Meyerson is the most articulate; but outside of the liberal circle, he is unknown. Maureen Dowd writes well but is too shrill to be taken seriously. And Richard Cohen is read for pleasure, not ideology. Hence, the ridiculous expectations Democrats have for Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC talkmeistress.

 

But one commentator cannot turn back the dominance of broadcast commentary enjoyed by conservatives. Gingrich had a lot to do with that, too. He welcomed right-wing radio-talkers into Congress and gave them workspace.

 

They will not like what, I believe, they will hear from Newt and others next year. The page is turned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Peer Pressure Took the Hand of Greed

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I once asked the chairman of Wells Fargo how his bank had gotten sucked into dubious Third World loans. “Greed,” he responded. “Just greed.”

 

He might have added another motive: peer pressure. We think of peer pressure as the force that gets kids into trouble, but business is as subject to it as teenagers are.

 

When a lot of states deregulated their electric utilities in the 1990s, these formerly conservative companies went on an international binge. They started buying up utilities around the world with a passion—a passion often fed by the fear that they were being left out of the great global bonanza. Some believed that they would not be able to hold up their heads at the meetings of the Edison Electric Institute unless they could discuss their latest acquisition in a faraway land. From Brazil to Indonesia, American electric utilities were into globalizing and loving it.

 

Of course, most of these investments went sour. The expected profits were as often as not consumed by currency variations, confiscatory local taxes and dishonest politicians, who sought to extract bribes from the operators as soon as the ink was dry on the contracts. Many American executives did not know anything about local conditions. For example they were unaware that in much of Latin America, and parts of Asia, up to 50 percent of the electricity is stolen. Governments are powerless to stop the theft for fear of social upheaval.

 

Helping the electric utilities make their mistakes were the investment banks. Mergers and acquisitions, are the mother’s milk of investment banking. The banks often found the deals, researched them and took them to the American companies. Their reward: giant fees.

 

One of these investment houses was the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers. At the height of the madness, as the publisher of The Energy Daily, I was invited to give a lecture to Lehman clients. The audience was half Lehman executives and half newly-minted internationalists. I told them the truth about investing in other people’s infrastructure: It looks good on paper, but it does not work in practice because you will be resented as an absentee landlord. Populist politicians will run against you.

 

On the face of it, this was not what they wanted to hear. They wanted wilder music and stronger drink. One major utility executive who was also something of a king-maker in the Democratic Party told me I did not know what I was talking about. He was invested in Pakistan, and thought it was a great place to do business,

 

Yet privately, the Lehman executives were glad I had called for a reality check. One managing director told me: “We should take their passports away.”

 

As investment after investment went south, many of the utility travelers came to wish they had stayed at home. Lehman, other investment banks and their lawyers knew better, but those lovely fees were irresistible.

 

The utility madness was not earth-shaking, but it was symptomatic of how investment banks regarded money itself as the client not the fee-payers.

 

About this time the world became aware that an obscure and arcane branch of finance, derivatives, was growing and attracting not financiers, but mathematicians and physicists to slice and dice away from prying regulators, troublesome politicians and curious journalists. The linkage between collateral and loans was obscured. A change in the regulations in 2004 enabled investment banks to borrow or leverage their assets by 30-to-1 when it had been 12-to-1. No worries. The market would discipline itself, said the players.

 

Mortgages were the new financial manna. You could package them and sell them around the world. But Wall Street was not satisfied with the volume of mortgages being written in the old-fashioned way and thousands of mortgage brokers started loosening the criteria, until there was really no threshold for getting a mortgage.

 

Now the party is over and the administration of George W. Bush, a conservative, is nationalizing a large chunk of the financial markets. He is also tying the hands of the next president, and there is still no transparency. The only thing that is clear is that the taxpayer will pay.

Remembering the Last of the British Empire

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The black Humber Super Snipe, a British luxury car with a soft, American-type suspension, pulled in front of a teenager wearing a coat and tie. The boy dodged around the front of the car and got in next to the driver.

The driver needed a large car because he was a very large man, over 300 pounds. He had a big face to go with his big body and even bigger eyebrows. It seemed that the only exercise the man got was changing gear in the car.

Not only was he a big man in a big car, but he also had a big job. A very big job. His job was so big he could have had a police escort, bodyguards and a chauffeur.

He could have traded up the car to a Rolls or a Bentley, but he liked driving this particular car to work in the bright sunshine. There was nearly always bright sunshine, so no weather forecasts were issued for six months of the year.

The man and the boy were talking animatedly as the car stopped to pick up another passenger: a shoe-less African laborer. After exchanging a few words in the man’s native language, the driver and the boy went back to talking politics.

The driver was well qualified to talk politics. He was the prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, comprising the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia and the British Protectorates of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, now respectively Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi.

He was Sir Roy Welensky, reviled in much of the world’s press as the last great colonialist: a scoundrel who stood between the legitimate aspirations of the indigenous people of Africa and their white overlords.

The critics missed the substantial difference between the struggle by men like Welensky and the growing evil on the southern bank of the Limpopo River: apartheid in South Africa.

The uncouth boy, who had the temerity to argue with the prime minister, was myself. And the barefoot laborer was part of the great silent majority about whom the white minority was always arguing, including my daily exchange with the prime minister.

I was in my second year as a journalist and Welensky was still giving me a lift, as he had done when I was in school. Sometimes he would chide me on articles that had appeared in English newspapers, but always with good humor.

The prime minister’s office was on the edge of Salisbury, now Harare, but close enough to everything so that a ride to his office was a ride into town.

This day was in 1957. I remember it because I was about to move out of my parents’ house and to lose my daily briefing from the prime minister.

I also remember it because Welensky was being castigated in the British press as a racist, a monster, a white supremacist and a tin-pot dictator, elected only by the white minority. He was none of the former, but the latter was true.

Ever since then, in my travels around the world, I have been asked, “What was it like in Rhodesia then?” The answer is, it was like the weather — a bit unbelievable. There was this small number of Britons trying to recreate the best of the British Isles in the middle of Africa. The impediment was that another people were already in residence: the Africans.

Twenty years before Welensky became my chauffeur, Evelyn Waugh, the English writer, had described the white Rhodesians as having a “morbid lack of curiosity” about the indigenous people. He was right. If the Africans behaved like black Englishmen, well and good — otherwise they were better off as subsistence farmers. The administration of Africans was to be fair, kind and, above all, paternal. The whites were in the intellectual sway of Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill, convinced of an innate moral and cultural superiority.

All this only really applied to Southern Rhodesia. Despite the “federation,” Southern Rhodesia was where the British had chosen to live a special existence as a “self-governing” colony. Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland were protectorates, their future independence assured. Another way of saying “protectorate” would be “not suitable for white settlement.”

What the British had wrought was a paternal masterpiece, where all the indigenous people in Southern Rhodesia were in a kind of welfare state. A servant class, people who knew their place.

The state of people in Cuba today is reminiscent: no rights but survival services. Employers had to provide each servant with 15 pounds of cornmeal a week, some meat three times a week and, if the employee was in domestic service, accommodation.

Medicine and schooling was available, as resources allowed, and both were spotty in delivery. Segregation was enforced.

The British withdrawal from India in 1947 signaled the beginning of the end of that way of life in Southern Rhodesia and Kenya.

It also was the end of innocence and 50 years of peace under a system that had developed in an eddy of the once-mighty British Empire