What I'm Reading
February 7: Five reads that piqued my interest this week
NOTE: Due to news-related posts on Friday and Saturday this week’s edition of What I’m Reading was delayed until Sunday to avoid spamming you too much on a single day. I hope you don’t mind.
Hitler’s oligarchs
This is a fantastic essay examining the oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler.
Historian Timothy Ryback, who studies how Hitler dismantled democracy with his takeover of the German state, begins by outlining the relationship between Hitler and Alfred Hugenberg, an industrialist who became rich a second time as a media mogul.
Hugenberg assisted Hitler’s rise to power, first financially and then with his media companies that he created to form an information bulwark against the liberal, pro-democracy media.
He not only deliberately created polarising information, but he also published misinformation, intended to confuse and divide the public in the belief that hollowing out the political centre would collapse political consensus and then democracy itself.
Hugenberg leveraged this power into political fortune, becoming leader of the German National People’s Party which held the votes Hitler needed to become Chancellor. In the deal to make Hitler Chancellor, Hugenberg became head of the ministry in charge of economics, agriculture and nutrition.
As one Hitler associate explained the Hitler-Hugenberg dynamic: ‘Hugenberg had everything but the masses; Hitler had everything but the money.’
…
Once in the cabinet, Hugenberg didn’t hesitate to meddle in foreign relations when it suited him. Reinhold Quaatz, a close Hugenberg associate, distilled Hugenberg’s calculus as follows: ‘Hitler will sit in the saddle but Hugenberg holds the whip.’
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As self-proclaimed ‘economic dictator,’ Hugenberg kept pace with Hitler in outraging political opponents and much of the public. He purged ministries. He dismantled workers’ rights. He lowered the wages of his own employees by 10 per cent.
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Hugenberg didn’t care about bad press. He was accustomed to being one of the most unpopular personalities in the country. Vorwärts, the socialist newspaper, depicted him as a puffed-up frog with spectacles. Hitler called him a Wauwau, or ‘woof woof.’
Even his close associates referred to him as ‘the Hamster.’
But Hugenberg lived by the golden rule: He who had the gold ruled.
Earlier, when disagreements had arisen over the rightward turn of the German National Party, Hugenberg simply expelled the dissenters and financed the party’s entire budget from his own resources. Hitler could aspire to be dictator of the Third Reich, but Hugenberg was already dictator of the economy.
It’s still the economy, stupid
This is a really interesting post from Jared Bernstein who chaired Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.
He latches onto what I think will become the start of the Democratic fightback against Trump and MAGAism, and that is the notable absence of economic measures to improve the lives of heartland voters who opted for Trump because of high inflation.
The first thing to look at here, which sets the stage for all that follows, is this NY Times tracker of all the administration’s ‘major moves.’ Hit the ’economy’ filter and take five minutes to go through what comes up. There is simply nothing—zilch, nada, zero—there to improve the living standards of mid/low-income families, and a lot of entries that go the other way. (To be clear, I’m counting ‘directed federal agencies deliver “emergency price relief”’ as the obvious nothing-burger it is.)
Tariffs dominate the list, and while the non-China ones and the ‘de-minimis’ have been suspended (‘Trump pauses de minimis repeal as packages pile up at US customs’), it is widely recognised—another key point that I’ll get back to in a sec—that tariffs raise consumer prices.
Speaking of consumers, I can unequivocally assert that shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will also hurt economically vulnerable households and help financial services firms like the one led by the banker who named his yacht Overdraft. (The CFPB passed a rule to significantly lower such fees.)
Some of what’s on the list is inside baseball but with potentially highly negative impacts for the middle class. For example, as Daniel Hornung and I will show in a forthcoming piece, privatising Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the way former Trumpies have advocated for will make an already stressed housing market even further out-of-reach for most homebuyers, along with putting upward pressure on the 30-year mortgage rate, which currently stands at 7 per cent.
Mandelson tells journalist to ‘fuck off’ when asked about Epstein link
As I wrote a fortnight ago, Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as the UK’s Ambassador to the United States may be one he rues.
Mandelson, who stopped responding once I began asking him about his Chinese associations as publicised on the Chinese internet, has posed for photos for the FT of himself exchanging his ceremonial university robes as he prepares to take up the posting.
He declares himself the ‘eternal comeback kid’ and then says, apparently without any irony: ‘My job is to stay below the radar, not on the radar.’
The icing on the cake comes when the journalist asks him about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Sir Simon Fraser, former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, argues that Mandelson, who made millions after co-founding Global Counsel, a political and strategic advisory firm, in 2010, is well equipped to work with the plutocrats in the Trump team, noting wryly in a BBC interview: ‘He’s not averse to working with very rich people, as we know.’
This easy association with the super-wealthy has been Mandelson’s Achilles heel. In 2008, when he was EU trade commissioner, he was criticised when it was revealed that he had stayed on Russian aluminium tycoon Oleg Deripaska’s 73-metre yacht off the coast of Corfu. At the time, Mandelson described the reports as ‘muckraking’.
Then there was his association with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and sex offender who died in 2019. An internal JPMorgan report from 2019, filed to a New York court in 2023, said that ‘Jeffrey Epstein appears to maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew the Duke of York and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government’.
We are on our way north, on a high-speed Avanti train, when I ask Mandelson about his relationship with Epstein.
‘I regret ever meeting him or being introduced to him by his partner Ghislaine Maxwell,’ he says. ‘I regret even more the hurt he caused to many young women.’ An icy chill descends in Carriage J.
‘I’m not going to go into this. It’s an FT obsession and frankly you can all fuck off. OK?’
Baltics switch off from Russia
The Baltic states, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, officially switched from Russia’s energy grid to the European Union’s this weekend, marking another step away from Russia and their former Soviet occupiers.
This has been 20 years in the making and at a huge cost but comes at a very pertinent time geopolitically.
Already there has been propaganda spread across the three countries claiming that switching to the EU grid will increase electricity prices. This spread of misinformation has been linked to Russia.
‘We've reached the goal we for strived for, for so long. We are now in control,’
Lithuanian Energy Minister Zygimantas Vaiciunas told a news conference.
Immediately after disconnecting, Latvian workers used a crane to reach the high-voltage wires in Vilaka, 100 meters from the Russian border, and cut them. They handed out chopped wire as keepsakes to cheering observers.
‘We will never use it again. We are moving on,’ Latvian Energy Minister Kaspars Melnis said.
Plans for the Baltics to decouple from the IPS/UPS transmission grid had been debated for decades but gained momentum following Moscow's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The grid was the final remaining link to Russia for the three countries, which reemerged as independent nations in the early 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union and joined the European Union and NATO in 2004.
Some 1.6 billion euros have been invested in the project to synchronise the power systems of the Baltic countries and Poland.
Unicorn, a play about…
A throuple! Yes really! I went to see this on Friday night and found it extremely entertaining.
There’s a fair bit of gratuitous confected generation-clashing between Kate, the younger ‘unicorn’ / lover and Polly and Nick — the much older married couple whose marriage she is invited to enter, but it’s not massively offputting.
The play’s strength is not just its rarely-discussed topic spoken out loud but the blockbuster cast of Nicola Walker, Stephen Mangan and Erin Doherty who plays Princess Anne in The Crown.
It’s great fun and much more thought-provoking than provocative but getting to see such a stellar cast was its shining star — the chemistry between all three on stage was perfect and you could not choose who was the best actor.
Such quality casts are one of London life’s unrivalled theatre joys.
One difference with Polly and Nick – and it’s a crucial element in Unicorn – is that they are still deeply in love after all these years. For them, polyamory is not a sticking plaster but rather a pleasure-seeking mission, as well as an insurance policy against future stasis.
The hazards of embarking on their sexual adventure with Kate are weighed up endlessly by the couple, but Unicorn is clear that there can be just as much danger in staying put, closing off options, risking stagnation.
‘The play isn’t saying that the way forward necessarily lies in three people,’ Mangan explains. ‘But sometimes, if it’s the right three people, it can work.’
Perhaps there will be a quantifiable Unicorn effect on the audience, with relationships branching out, or breaking up, after exposure to all the ideas in the play. ‘I’m curious about the reaction,’ says Mangan. ‘It’s not the usual boy meets girl story.’ He looks around the empty bar. ‘I expect this will be quite a lively place in the interval. People will have strong opinions about what they’ve seen.’
And that’s my list for this week.
On Tuesday I joined Andrew Mueller for The Monocle Daily and reviewed the week in British politics on Times Radio this morning.
You can watch here.
Please do send me anything that’s caught your eye, I enjoy knowing what you’ve been reading.
Some of you have started to offer me copies of your books etc. Please email me at latika@latikambourke.com for a forwarding address for hard copies.