Archived Writing

<< back to the search results

President's precedents, across the water

Thursday, February 26, 2009

IT TAKES AN OCEAN sometimes, to raise an issue fully. Transatlantic reaction after Barack Obama’s pitch to Congress and the nation has been muted and nuanced compared with what's overtaken America's largely awe-struck journalists.

However low the markets may have slumped, US media assessments have been admiringly fulsome (“Carefully crafted … reassuring” - Washington Post.  “Bold action and big ideas” - New York Times) and so have Americans in general, as gauged by the media.

 

CBS News’ instant poll, for instance, recorded approval ratings that zoomed from 63% before the presidential broadcast (above left) to 80% immediately afterward. But by contrast Europe's media were almost universally tepid. There is “hope against the crisis”, said Le Monde in Paris, adding in a verbal balancing act that there’s also a crisis working against hope. And in London The Times said Obama’s “extraordinarily ambitious agenda” is seen by many experts to be “unattainable”. [The repetitive Rupert Murdoch-owned Times will probably say the same tomorrow about today's proposed budget from the White House, entailing a newly calculated $1.75 trillion deficit.]

 

My own bi-continental background has me comparing this incoming administration’s plan (albeit for a reputedly unprecedented pile-up of problems) with that of another set of newbies twelve years ago in Britain. Then the freshly elected Labour Party was out to overturn the wretched legacy of its conservative predecessors, who had held onto power for a full seventeen years - which makes Bush the Second's grim era of eight years almost seem brief in comparison.

 

Under Tony Blair and his Finance Secretary Gordon Brown (above right) Labour got off to a gloriously lionized start, with both the media and the markets. The new government’s very first action – which jolted long-standing preconceptions about the Labour Party not being business-friendly – was to decouple the country’s currency from government control – an announcement that Brown, who had been seen as decidedly socialist in background, took evident delight in making.

 

Now Prime Minister himself (at long-suffering last) Brown this week made his own pitch to his own nation, and drew on those long, deep socialist roots of his when writing - a medium that’s always been more congenial for him than face-to-face conversation - in London’s The Observer.  He set out his program of economic and financial measures for achieving a major (and to The Times again probably “unattainable”) turn-around, and approved a populist headline for the Op-Ed piece proclaiming: “We'll Put People First, Not Bankers”. This prefigured by a couple of days, of course, Obama’s own pretty slick sloganeering:  “It's not about helping banks, it's about helping people”.

 

By the way, it was obvious that Obama couldn’t resist piling in with the banker-bashing that has become a new national pastime, proclaiming that they “won't be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks or buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet. Those days are over.”  And everyone else is getting in on this game.  TMZ.com, the gossip website more noted for its target list of celebrities that runs from A-Rod to Zac Efron, gleefully exposed a bankers’ binge. this week. Chicago-based Northern Trust, which received $1.6 billion in federal funds was pilloried on the site for lavishly partying in Los Angeles, around a golf tournament it sponsors.

 

TMZ’s coverage prompted House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank to demand the bank pays the money back.

  

    

 

** EVERY WEEK CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.

  

    

 

THE FIRMEST SMACK OF DISCIPLINE for banks, in the view of dyed-in-the-wool socialists from any country, is predictably enough to nationalize them.

 

It’s been odd, and oddly entertaining too, for this British reporter to hear that word bandied about so much in the American media. Not least of all to witness the Wall Street Journal reacting excitedly to one of capitalism’s latter-day saints, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan embracing the word, in that other leading organ of the “free” marketplace,  Britain's Financial Times.

 

Greenspan told the FT: “It may be necessary to temporarily [just how temporarily, we have to wonder] nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring.”

 

I recall in the late 1980s and early ‘90s seeing plenty of hearts and reputations being broken, as the Labour Party’s “modernizing” wing fought to remove the traditional socialist Clause Four from the party's constitution. This had enshrined the intention of nationalizing what Lenin once called the “commanding heights” of the economy (in the Clause’s actual phrasing, crafted by legendary socialist Sidney Webb, the goal was defined as “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”).

 

Tony Blair and his "New Labour" supporters achieved the Clause’s removal in 1995, in what was regarded as a necessary prequel to winning an election in the country at large, which ironically enough happened on the socialist red-letter date of May Day …  May 1st of 1997.

 

In today's Britain, Gordon Brown has overseen the Royal Bank of Scotland being effectively nationalized, with the public’s stake in it growing to nearly 70%, and therefore a large measure of managerial control. And here in the US, it looks like Citigroup will go the same way, with an increasing, eventually controlling, interest being held by the US taxpayer.  Whatever separation the two leaders on either side of the Atlantic may have drawn in their rhetoric, pitting people against banks, we may in both countries be getting - of all things - what some of my Labour friends used to call “People’s Banks”.

 

As the moves go forward, Obama's Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has wanted to avoid the word nationalization. Adam Davidson of National Public Radio interviewed him by remote audio connection yesterday, and he stayed on-message by reading from talking-point notes passed to him by his staff, referring vaguely to "that broad strategy", never by name to what Davidson himself rather tip-toeingly called "the N-word". In debriefing Davidson afterwards, NPR's afternoon host Melissa Block chuckled over "the policy that dare not speak its name".

 

Oh incidentally, it's only another six days before the next chief executive addresses the combined chambers of the US Congress. It will be that same former scourge of bankers, then friend of bankers, and now overall boss of bankers, Gordon Brown. He’s expected to expound upon the virtues of firm, though understanding, control of financial institutions by government.

 

A former Editor of Britain’s Daily Mail, the gruff William Hardcastle - who had the good fortune long ago to meet Sidney Webb, and who later became the almost immovable anchor of BBC Radio’s “The World at One” news-program - told me once: “If you stick around, you’ll see the same ideas come round again. There are truly no new ideas.”
 

 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -