Den of Thieves: Yesterday, The Friends of Jake sent me to this little essay on the current financial crisis by Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite. On the present consequences of what supply siders now piously call moral hazard, Thistlethwaite quotes James K. Galbraith.
Deregulation has been the public faith of the financial sector since Reagan. Under Bush II, waves of predatory finance in housing were aggressively promoted by Alan Greenspan, by McCain’s closest economic adviser Phil Gramm, and by so-called regulators who systematically subvert the public interest.
Phil Gramm has recently been in the news with a claim that Americans are a nation of whiners. He was referring to folks like me who didn’t think the economy was booming, having seen their property values and retirement accounts deteriorate and having noticed a steady increase in the cost of goods and services while wages remained flat and jobs were lost forever. With regard to Gramm and others whose faith in the sovereignty of markets knows no bounds, Thistlethwaite adds:
Markets are not ethical instruments; they are not “self-regulating.” Markets are driven by the drive for acquisition. Regulations are designed to limit destruction wrought by greed, while not stifling the productivity of markets.
The moral failure here is that those who were charged with protecting the public interest from runaway greed and unfair lending practices instead have shown that they are the ringleaders of the Den of Thieves.
The Public Interest, what a quaint, old-fashioned phrase! Now the public interest must apparently be served by adding another half trillion dollars to the federal deficit, already bloated with the present cost of the president’s ill-fated wars (this says nothing about what Bush’s adventures will ultimately cost). Still, it’s nice to see the president and his lieutenants return to pragmatism and consultation with congress instead of strutting and proclaiming their patriotism on every hand.
Jezus es kufarok (Jesus and the traders): I have to digress now and say that thinking of the biblical background of Thistlewaite’s essay (the story of Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple, told variously in three canonical gospels and the Gopspel of Thomas)* has reminded me of singing Kodály’s great motet based on the New Testament accounts when I was in high school. Here’s just a fragment, part of the central fugue lifted from a performance by The Danish National Radio Choir. You can hear a performance in English here, though it drags a bit for my taste and it’s an abridgement. Of course, we sang the piece in English in my high-school choir.
Memorials: Today’s New York Times carries a review of last Thursday’s Metropolitan Opera performance of the Verdi Requiem as a memorial to Luciano Pavarotti. The reviewer points to Pavarotti’s long-ago recording of the Requiem with Georg Solti as particularly excellent. Here’s a very young Pavarotti singing the Ingemisco with Herbert von Karajan, whom you have to watch a little, unfortunately, but it’s beautifully sung.
The reviewer for last Thursday’s Requiem was Times chief music critic, Anthony Tommasini. Six years or so ago, Tommasini urged Pavarotti to retire, in print. It’s nice that Tommasini’s review of this present concert gives those of us who loved Luciano when he was young an opportunity to remember him at his best.
*I like John Dominic Crossan’s reading of the various accounts. See Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, (New York: 1994), pp. 130ff.