On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 9:36 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Yes, she does a great job telling us an inside story about these Animal > House guys. . .and maybe we should just give it a wink and a nod based on > that. . . >
I haven't read her book, but from her pieces in the FT, it is pretty clear that Gillian Tett is no progressive. She is an very intelligent reporter and a good writer, but that's it. Specifically she studies the world of finance with the "objectivity" of an anthropologist, like some tribe with its quaint customs and rituals, but is unable or unwilling to recognize it for the criminal culture that it is. In my mind, that makes her an enabler. Better not to expect too much from her and her kind. Just browsing around her most recent FT pieces, here's what she says about Obama's deficit commission: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3ccd0f22-f764-11df-8b42-00144feab49a.html -------------------snip Earlier this month, for example, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the two chairmen of a bipartisan tax commission in Washington, delivered a surprisingly sensible set of proposals for tackling America’s fiscal woes, which had been produced in a rare flash of pragmatic collaboration between both men. But no sooner had those proposals emerged, there were shrieks of protest from both men’s parties. “Unacceptable,” declared Nancy Pelosi, Democrat luminary, echoing the convictions on the Republican side too. All of this certainly makes US politics entertaining and dramatic: rather more exciting than UK politics, say. But it is profoundly unhelpful too. After all, when you look at the big challenges dogging America today – ranging from Afghanistan to the national debt – it is clear that the government is beset with problems of great moral complexity, which can only be solved with subtle trade-offs. What is needed now, in other words, is pragmatic collaboration – not passionate conviction. And that is difficult to foster in the current rhetorical pattern. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
