Be careful what you wish for

(NB, It's me, the P-G)

Following from Steve McIntyre's excellent smackdown of the "out-of-context" defence of the now infamous "hide the decline" climategate mail, we are delighted to bring you yet more "be careful what you wish for" scrumptiousness.

This time it is our favourite, ever competent and playing-at-the-top-of-her-game esteemed Minister of His, Her or Its Majesty's [ed - can we find a less obviously class loaded term for this? No? Oh - never mind] Governpeoplet, Harriet Harperson in a master[derogatory and loaded term for adult-in-waiting]ful perforpersonce at Prime Minister's Questions.

Compeopleting on Tory - on their face, largely sensible - proposals that our representatives ought to be resident for tax purposes - and studiously failing actually to answer the question put to his/her/it, s/he/it came up with the hilariously original idea of "no representation without taxation".

How we roared with laughter! Especially because we know exactly how that phrase is normally used. It's not original, and it's not normally associated with the Harperson's normal associates.

Harperson? Meet B'Stard.
Fascinating, not least because it shows what a radical feminist socialist type turns into when there's a sniff of money to be had...

Admiring dictators

In criticising Hannan's expressed admiration of Enoch Powell, it seems that Sunny Hundal has been hoist by his own petard, as my impecunious yet peripatetic Greek friend notes.

Ignoring what must be the mother and father of all straw men here, one can't help noticing the lack of such outrage when Southall MP Virendra Sharma praised the pro-independence Indian leader, Subhas Chandra Bose. Indeed, Sunny leapt to his defence against the "misrepresentations" of Iain Dale:

Bose was never a fascist, though he did want to work with the Japanese and/or Germans to get rid of the British.

This is a little like saying that Enoch Powell was never a racist, though he did want to get rid of all the darkies. So I went to visit Bose's Wikipedia page, which Sunny linked to in his post, and which paints quite a vivid portrait:

Bose's correspondence (prior to 1939) reflects his deep disapproval of the racist practices of, and annulment of democratic institutions in Nazi Germany. However, he expressed admiration for the authoritarian methods (though not the racial ideologies) which he saw in Italy and Germany during the 1930s, and thought they could be used in building an independent India.

Bose had clearly expressed his belief that democracy was the best option for India. [...] However, during the war (and possibly as early as the 1930s) Bose seems to have decided that no democratic system could be adequate to overcome India's poverty and social inequalities, and he wrote that an authoritarian state, similar to that of Soviet Russia (which he had also seen and admired) would be needed for the process of national re-building.

It seems clear to me, from the little I know of him, that had Bose lived (he died in 1945) and achieved the prominence he sought, he would have done far more harm to Indians than Powell and his acolytes ever did. One is tempted to ask whether a man who can simultaneously express admiration for both fascism and Stalinism is the sort of person who Sunny would "invite round for tea", but that's not really the point.

Nor should we forget, at this point, to remind readers of Harriet Harman, Sunny's "second choice" for Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, who last year described Fidel Castro as a "hero". That caused a marked lack of offence on the Left—some might even have described it as a "dog whistle"—but I suppose that's not really the point, either.

My point is, rather, that while one would hardly expect the editor of [the ever-readable] Pickled Politics to hold warm childhood memories of Enoch Powell, you can't have it both ways. If it's OK for a Labour politician to cite the influence of a controversial figure from the past, while trying to ignore their darker side, then it's OK for a Tory, too.

Quite.

Your humble Devil would like to make absolutely clear that I am not saying that Sunny is an admirer of dictators, authoritarians and other sundry nasty people. And the fact that he is so swift to publish expressions of support for those that are does not, of course, mean that Sunny Hundal is a nasty, hypocritical, authoritarian little shit who loves dictators as long as they are his kind of dictator.

I would never suggest anything of the kind. Definitely not.

As long-time readers will know, I am a fervent admirer of Sunny Hundal and all his works and do not, in any way, think that he is a nasty, hypocritical, authoritarian little shit who loves dictators as long as they are his kind of dictator.

That would be to credit the man with some powers of thought.

Harriet Harperson—bigoted and wrong

A few days ago, Harridan Harperson—the Worst Person on the Planet™—decided that the whole banking crisis had been caused by too many men in the banking system.

Asked whether the financial crisis would have arisen if more women had been in senior positions, Ms Harman referred to the US bank that collapsed and prompted international turmoil.

"Somebody did say... that if it had been Lehman sisters rather than Lehman Brothers then there may not have been as much," she told GMTV.

Riiiight. So, can I look forward to this fucking evil little witch eating her own words?

"What?" I hear you cry.

As you may know, one of the very dodgy financial instruments that brought the whole banking system crashing down was the Credit Default Swap (and these have made it particularly difficult for the banks to assess precisely how much debt they are holding, and the quality of that debt).

And now, via @gareth_e_clark, it seems that it was a woman who invented these jolly little bundles of fun.

You won't find her on Fortune's list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business but Blythe Masters may go down in history as the woman who is responsible for the 2008 collapse of global financial markets. You can't get more powerful than that.

When I started researching credit default swaps --the financial vehicle that Blythe Masters is credited/blamed for inventing and which Warren Buffet described in 2003 in his annual letter to shareholders as "financial weapons of mass destruction", my image of its originator was definitely not pink.

So sure was I that the culprits were testosterone-driven venture capital types that before I had the facts I had already begun my mental argument of why a woman would never have come up with a scheme that could bring global markets to their knees.

So much for fact-less based arguments.
...

As recently as September, Ms. Masters was defending the credit default swaps in an email exchange with The Guardian.

"I do believe CDSs [credit default swaps] have been miscast, much as poor workmen tend to blame their tools."

NC Painter has a short article written by Blythe Masters in 1997 where she describes how the credit default swaps will revolutionize banking. NC Painter added the bold italics.

By enhancing liquidity, credit derivatives achieve the financial equivalent of a free lunch, whereby both buyers and sellers of risk benefit from the associated efficiency gains."

Ms. Masters obviously isn't a devotee of TANSTAAL—"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch,"—an acronym made popular in the 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which, according to Wikipedia, discusses the problems caused by not considering the eventual outcome of an unbalanced economy.

Oh dear. It looks like Harridan Harperson needs to shut the fuck up and crawl under a rock somewhere and die. I mean, obviously I thought that was the case before I stumbled across this little gem, but this has merely strengthened that feeling.

Bugger off, Harperson, you bigoted, sodding loon.

P.S. HowStuffWorks has a rather interesting way of describing how Credit Default Swaps work. Or, rather, what happens when they don't.

Imagine that you could purchase your friend Jimmy's health insurance policy from the company that issued it. Everything's going smoothly; you're raking in the dough as Jimmy makes his monthly payments. But things take a sudden turn for the worse after Jimmy's legs are crushed in a car wreck. Jimmy can't afford the healthcare costs, but luckily he's insured—by you.

You find nothing but cobwebs in your savings account and realize that you can't pay for Jimmy's health care. Jimmy's still insured (he's faithfully made his premium payments), so who pays the hospital bills? The insurance company sold the policy to you, and you owned it when Jimmy's accident happened. You were caught with the hot potato.

Jimmy's hospital realizes his insurer won't cover his costs and releases him, but he still requires care. So Jimmy sues you to pay up, but you just blew all of your money completing your collection of Pat Boone albums, which suddenly doesn't seem like such a good investment. Even worse, a trove of Boone's albums was discovered in the estates of some recently deceased collectors, and the market value of your collection plummets. You sell the collection for half of what you paid for it and put it toward Jimmy's health care costs, but it's a drop in the bucket. Ultimately, you're forced to declare bankruptcy.

Yup, that's as clear an explanation as I've seen.