Credit crisis

These two articles from Mother Jones helped me understand. Maybe they'll help you too.

Where Credit Is Due: A Timeline of the Mortgage Crisis. By Nomi Prins

Subprime 1-2-3. By Casey Miner

Spanish crosswinds

Surprisingly after last March's national elections it was the winners -- the Partido socialista (PSOE)-- who appeared to be in disarray, while the losers -- the Partido popular (PP)-- were finally gaining strength. For the first time ever in his political career, PP president Mariano Rajoy got a higher public approval rating than José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, PSOE party leader and president of the government. But the parties' relative positions continue to shift, in interesting ways. For the next four years I expect to see a much more plural politics, where the governing PSOE will need more tactical alliances with other parties, including possibly the PP, in order to get any legislation through.

During the last legislature (2004-2008), the economy was booming and the PSOE government introduced reforms that had wide popular support. (Gay marriage, gender parity in business and government, benefits for families taking care of disabled members, etc.) Meanwhile, the opposition PP was making itself obnoxious and even frightening, taking extreme right-wing positions based on a rhetoric of obvious falsehoods (wild conspiracy theories to explain their 2004 loss). Thus the other parties (Izquierda Unida and the generally left-leaning regionalists and nationalists) almost always voted with the PSOE, giving it an effective majority.

Now the economy is in what the government has finally admitted is a "crisis": the collapse of housing construction and sales has caused record unemployment and business failures, at the same time that rocketing petroleum prices are bankrupting truckers and making everything more costly, and the two forces together are diminishing government revenue (tax collection) and increasing expenses (to cover the unemployed, etc.) The government had a nice surplus in March, but was unprepared for a recession of this magnitude and for months seemed to have no answer except to counsel patience, that things would get better -- but now it doesn't look like they will any time soon, and the "kitty" is fast emptying. Thus, the PSOE needs the support of the other parties more than ever, and has to work harder and make more concessions to keep its alliances.

Meanwhile PP leader Mariano Rajoy surprised everybody by using his defeat to clean house and move to the center, making the PP a much less frightening alternative. Most commentators expected Rajoy to be much weakened after his defeat in March, and possibly even to be replaced. Instead, at the recent party congress in Valencia he not only got himself re-elected, but also replaced the hard-liners (Acebes and Zaplana, most notably) with a new cast of attractive and skillful younger women, and declared over and over again that his was a party of the "center", even distancing himself from his predecessor and former patron, the truly scary and cynical José María Aznar.

But in the PP the "center" is precarious; the right-wingers are still powerful in Madrid and other regions and will keep pushing to defend what Aznar calls the party's "principles" -- a collection of prejudices including alignment with the Catholic Church hierarchy, hostility to immigrants, and defense of private profit over public welfare (e.g., money and other breaks for private hospitals and schools while the public ones are starved for funds).

Meanwhile, at the PSOE's own party congress, the leadership has been forced by their own militants to edge backwards, resisting every step, toward the left. The main issues are women's rights, especially a uniform abortion law, and real separation of Church and State -- which is what the Constitution proclaims, but in fact Spanish taxpayers are still paying the Bishops' Conference €153,100,000 for salaries of Catholic bishops and priests, plus the salaries of the Church's own religion teachers in public schools, Catholic chaplains in the Armed Forces, and much more -- all as a result of Church-State accords signed in 1979. The PSOE leadership now says that they will try to get rid of the crucifixes in state ceremonies, but at least for now won't seek to revise those 1979 accords. But they may be forced by their own party members and other parties to move farther.

Where the PSOE is taking anything but a progressive stance is on immigration. The government is going along with the new European Union rules, permitting detention of undocumented immigrants for up to 18 months, even if they have committed no infraction other than illegal entry. The government is facing a lot of criticism for this from its own partisans and from its usual allies on the left, but the international pressures (Sarkozy et al.) for the moment seem to be stronger.

Image: Two PP women, Madrid region president Esperanza Aguirre and María Dolores Cospedal, Rajoy's pick as General Secretary of the party, in a 2007 photo; as representatives of opposing tendencies, they may not be so cozy now. Photo from Stralunato.

Post-imperial irony

Farrell, J. G. The Siege of Krishnapur. 1973. 2nd ed. New York: New York Review Books, 2004.

During the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-58, several hundred British subjects in a fortified compound of the East India company (attended by their anonymous Eurasian servants and Sikh loyalist cavalrymen) fight for their lives, their possessions and their beliefs with increasing desperation until, after all looks lost, a smartly-outfitted rescue party find the few foul-smelling and emaciated survivors in this very funny, ironic and violent vision of the British imperial project.

From the first signs of mutiny, the Collector (chief local official of the Company) takes command (after the fortunate deaths of, first, a senile and incompetent general and then an equally incompetent major), young Lieutenant Harry Dunstaple very skillfully manages the compound’s two cannons, a dreamy young idler (Fleury) acts with comical fearlessness, several young women – Harry’s sister Louise, Fleury’s sister Miriam, and the “fallen woman” Lucy – evolve from their various styles of coquetry to more mature responsibility.

Farrell has great fun with stubborn and irreconcilable 19th-century beliefs that various characters consider more important than their very lives. The Padre (as they call the Church of England priest) pursues first Fleury, then the Collector with his absurd proofs of the existence of God (based on the complexities of nature, which he insists could only be the work of Intelligent Design), the Collector keeps making speeches, sometimes to himself, about the wonders of progress as seen in the inventions at the Great Exhibition (London, 1851), even as the siege forces him to reflect on the wondrous destructiveness of modern inventions and the resistance of India to what he sees as Progress. The one declared atheist in the group, the Magistrate, is ironic and sensible on most topics but is an absolute nut about phrenology, which he thinks explains all behavior. Dr. Dunstaple (Harry and Louise’s father) is so convinced of his theory that “an invisible cloud” (not bad water) is the cause of cholera, and so furious with the younger Dr. McNab who disagrees with him, that he publicly swallows “rice water” from a sick patient – and of course dies, quite unnecessarily, because he refuses McNab’s intelligent treatment. Many eccentric and interesting characters die in violent ways that nonetheless raise a smile because, like Dunstaple's, they are so counter to heroic tradition. One of the funniest scenes is also one of the most violent, in which Fleury is pursued through the destroyed Banquet Hall by a giant, saber-wielding Sepoy while he, Fleury, is unable to extricate any of his many weapons (daggers, pistols) from his cummerbund – until finally he gets an extremely heavy, multi-barreled pistol to fire all its barrels at once, disintegrating the upper half of his assailant.

There are no Indian characters with dialogue except Hari, Anglophile son of a local rajah, whose twisted Anglicisms further suggest the misguidedness of British imperial policy. Farrell also makes the point that a mainstay of the imperial enterprise is opium production in India for export to China.

Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra has written a helpful introduction, contrasting Farrell’s version (the 1973 Booker Prize-winner) to the many 19th century British novels about the mutiny, which (according to Mishra) celebrated the heroism and enlightenment of the British in contrast to the brutish savagery of the Indians. In Farrell’s version, the Brits are no more rational than the zamindars (rural landlords), who try to control monsoon flooding by having a Brahmin sacrifice a black goat. It's a view that became possible (and could find a reading public) only a hundred years after the events.

Image source