The foreshortened evolution of Financial Times propaganda:  The Rebellion Against the Elites to the Populist Menace frames Mr. Rachman latest essay,  intervention,  as Corporatist advocate/apologists, that continues to exploit the seemingly endless political irrationalism of Trump. Yet Trump, like his mentor Roy Cohn, practices a form of ‘politics’ that keeps the opposition in a continuous and exploitable state of indignant fluster and confusion. Its the kind of ‘politics’ that Peron used to practice , except that Trump doesn’t need his minions to provoke discontent, anger and other forms of political emotion, he quite adroitly uses twitter to cultivate that necessary discord.

In his opening paragraph Mr. Rachman almost gives the game away:

The “global rules-based order” is a yawn-inducing phrase but it means something important. All countries in the world, bar a few rogue states, deal with each other according to an agreed set of legal, economic and military rules. Ignore or overturn them and confusion and conflict break out. Some non-western countries have long believed that the phrase is little more than a cloak for US global domination. Since America effectively wrote the rules, it was assumed that the whole system must be biased in favour of the US.

But Mr. Rachman places these speculations within the rhetoric of conjecture, a kind of political caricature of oratio obliqua. That “global rules-based order” is indeed a product of American Imperialism, and that ‘rule based order’ is now in the hands of  of NGO’s like the WTO and its ‘Court’, and the Corporatist schemes like NAFTA, the TPP and TTIP. This, while the failure to appear, as one of cornerstones of  the Neo-Liberal Mythology, The Self-Correcting Market  remains unrealized. An utter desecration of the Mt. Pelerin Olympus!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/b6001f76-0295-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5