After Nazi Germany attacked the USSR, Winston Churchill had no qualms about entering into an alliance with Stalin, whose regime he understood all too well: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
Similar thinking does much to explain the enlistment of former (and not so former) Nazis by the Western allies in intelligence work against the Soviets after 1945…
Read MoreIt was hard to read Scott Reynolds Nelson’s original and intriguing “Oceans of Grain” without thinking of Woody Allen’s “Love and Death”: “The crops, the grains. Fields of rippling wheat. Wheat. All there is in life is wheat.” Karl Marx looked at history and found class. Mr. Nelson tends to find wheat. Thus, in the 19th century, he writes, “the rise of Germany and Italy, the decline of Austria and Turkey, and the European struggle for empire all [had] more to do with the injection of cheap foreign grain into Europe than most historians have recognized.”
Read MoreWe live in an age when the Left is increasingly focused on the supposed evils of business concentration, from the “big is bad” ideology of the new antitrust enforcers at the FTC to the attempts to blame inflation on Big Grocery, Big Oil, or any of the other “bigs” allegedly exploiting the beleaguered consumer. And yet the concentration of corporate ownership positions held by a relatively small number of massive investment funds, particularly (but not only) the indexers, has drawn comparatively little criticism from the same quarters. Perhaps their managers’ role in helping create our emerging corporatist state through an ever tighter embrace of “socially responsible” investment and larcenous stakeholder capitalism has acted as a shield of sorts.
Nevertheless, the degree of that concentration has been something to see….
Read MoreOn Monday, the Financial Times ran an article by Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever (a company that, as he mentions, was recently in the news over its pursuit of objectives seemingly unconnected to its bottom line). A forceful, if unpersuasive, argument for stakeholder capitalism, it is an interesting and unintentionally revealing read. Above all, it demonstrates how, whatever BlackRock’s Larry Fink may claim, stakeholder capitalism is intrinsically political. Indeed, as it is an expression of corporatism, that is — or ought to be — a statement of the obvious. Corporatism, regardless of the form it takes, is an ideology revolving around an idea of how society should be organized. That is the very essence of politics…
Read MoreThe buck may have stopped at Harry Truman’s desk, but today’s eroding dollar is having trouble finding a berth in Joe Biden’s Oval Office.
For much of last year, the president insisted that inflation was temporary. (To be fair, the Federal Reserve claimed something similar.) But with prices likely to continue rising at a brisk pace for some time — in December, inflation reached levels not seen for 40 years — Team Biden is changing its tune, and, as administrations in a political mess tend to do, it’s looking for someone to blame.
Read MoreIt’s the time of year when Larry Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, comes out with his annual letter to CEOs, a letter in which he tells CEOs what he expects of them. As BlackRock marked the end of 2021 by passing the benchmark of $10 trillion under management, an impressive figure however you look at it, many CEOs will treat Fink’s thoughts with rather more respect than their shareholders or our democracy deserve — $10 trillion will do that.
Read MoreThere are quite a few underlying reasons — political, personal, and ideological — why British prime minister Boris Johnson may now be forced out of office, but that the trigger for his potential downfall has been a series of “parties” (what constitutes a party is now a contentious topic) appears to have surprised some on this side of the Atlantic. To them, it seems, well, a touch weird that a prime minister with a healthy majority could lose his job because his staffers occasionally enjoyed drinks at their workplace (or in the garden outside) — and that he had attended, albeit briefly, one of these get-togethers — even if it was at a time when tough Covid lockdown controls had heavily restricted social gatherings. That Johnson might not have been entirely accurate in his evolving statements about what had occurred, what he knew, and so on, well . . . #ShouldersShrugged.
Read More“Eight Days in May,” a gripping, immaculately researched retelling of the Nazi Götterdämmerung, is the story of an intermission, a phase, as the German author Erich Kästner wrote in his diary, between the “no longer” and “not yet.” But during this intermission the action rarely paused. Written by Volker Ullrich, a German journalist and historian perhaps best known for his impressive two-volume biography of Hitler, this book is structured as the day-by-day chronicle implied by its title. That said, Mr. Ullrich also looks further backward and forward in time to add the context that a study confined to eight days alone could not provide.
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