20 Sep 2008
Hypocrisies
A delicious
feeling of schadenfreud crept over me when the US government announced that it was bailing out the
mortgage institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not because I want to see the
melt-down of the US mortgage market, but because it was done on Bush’s watch.
It’s gratifying to see the proponents of non-interventionist market capitalism
looking the scarier side of their policies in the face. Britain’s New Labour
may sound like Tories, but you wouldn’t be so surprised at them bailing out
Northern Rock last year: back in their statist day they were all for state
intervention to cushion people against the more devastating blows of the free
market.
Bush’s government
is not intervening in the Lehman’s bank failure – the collapse of a big
corporate bank may rock the economy (and its effects will be devastating, all
over the world) but the Republicans would have been dead in the water at the
next election if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had gone under.
The ideological
hypocrisy of the US government is also mirrored in the response to the 16 year
old Belarusian girl Tanya Kazyra, who is refusing to return to Belarus after
the last of her summer visits on the Chernobyl children programme. She’s
decided to stay in the States with her host family; this seems a bit hard on
the grandmother who brought her up, but Tanya’s probably old enough to know her
own mind. But isn’t it strange that there seems to be no problem about this
girl being allowed to stay, when US frontiers are otherwise policed like the
Berlin Wall? Gay couples can’t get visas for their long term partners, couples
go through hoops adopting foreign children and many Mexicans risk their lives
to get into the States for work, but the spin around Tanya means that she’ll be
welcomed as if the free movement of peoples was not just a nineteenth century
dream.