StephenKMackSD's Blog

Why should it surprise the reader that David Brooks would resort to the economist Mancur Olson, and his ‘ interest groups’ as the bad political/economic actors, holding back innovation and excellence, two concepts that marked the Reagan Era Free Market propaganda.

In 1982, the economist Mancur Olson set out to explain a paradox. West Germany and Japan endured widespread devastation during World War II, yet in the years after the war both countries experienced miraculous economic growth. Britain, on the other hand, emerged victorious from the war, with its institutions more intact, and yet it immediately entered a period of slow economic growth that left it lagging other European democracies. What happened?

In his book “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” Olson concluded that Germany and Japan enjoyed explosive growth precisely because their old arrangements had been disrupted. The devastation itself, and the forces of American occupation and reconstruction, dislodged the interest groups that had held back innovation. The old patterns that stifled experimentation were swept away. The disruption opened space for something new.

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/opinion/covid-economic-boom.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

The Economist of May 5, 1998, offers a more honest appraisal of Mancur Olson’s economic thought, in their obituary. Mr. Brooks writes a ‘History Made To Measure’ in service to ideological ends!

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The conclusion was striking. Narrow, self-serving groups had an inherent, though not insuperable, advantage over broad ones that worry about the well-being of society as a whole. How might that insight explain the fate of nations? In 1982, in “The Rise and Decline of Nations”, he offered an answer. 

In any human society, he said, parochial cartels and lobbies tend to accumulate over time, until they begin to sap a country’s economic vitality. A war or some other catastrophe sweeps away the choking undergrowth of pressure groups. This had happened in Germany and Japan, but not in Britain, which, although physically damaged in the war, had retained many of its old institutions. Surely there was some less cataclysmic route to renewal? Yes, said Mr Olson, a nation’s people could beat back the armies of parochialism, but only if the danger were recognised and reforms embraced. Make these points to a student of economics or politics today and he or she will say, “Of course.” But the ideas were obvious only after Mr Olson made them.

…

https://www.economist.com/obituary/1998/03/05/mancur-olson

Note that Mr. Olson’s negative economic actors, is a larger field, and more descriptive than Mr. Brooks’: Narrow, self-serving groups, parochial cartels, ! Even Mr. Olson fails the mention the favorite target of Conservative Thinkers, and propagandists: Unions are these un-mentioned negative economic actors, who placing themselves as advocates for a fair wage and working conditions, hold in abeyance the desired excellence and innovation that an unfettered Capital can produce?

All this to frame the Covid-19 Melodrama as the impetus for an American Revival under the leadership of Joe Biden and his pastiche of the New Deal?

Here is a sample of the Brooks’ cliched boosterism;

Millions of Americans endured grievous loss and anxiety during this pandemic, but many also used this time as a preparation period, so they could burst out of the gate when things opened up.

The last three paragraphs of his essay are testimony to his iteration of that ‘cliched boosterism’:

In 1910 the educator Henry Van Dyke wrote, “The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities — energy.” That energy seemed to be fading away in recent years, as Americans came to move less and start new businesses less frequently. But the challenge of Covid-19 has summoned forth great dynamism, movement and innovation. Labor productivity rates have surged upward recently.

Americans are searching for ways to make more money while living more connected lives. Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban studies at Chapman University, points out that as the U.S. population disperses, economic and cultural gaps between coastal cities and inland communities will most likely shrink. And, he says, as more and more immigrants settle in rural areas and small towns, their presence might reduce nativism and increase economic competitiveness.

People are shifting their personal lives to address common problems — loneliness and loss of community. Nobody knows where this national journey of discovery will take us, but the voyage has begun.

Is it the ineluctable fate of Americans, to own a business, and make more money? Commerce is the lifeblood of this once Republic? What of the Teachers, Social Workers, Nurses, Doctors and whole of the Helping Professions. Or the Gardeners, Bus Boys, Dish Washers, Waiters & Waitresses, Hotel Maids, Trash Collectors, Street Maintenance, Flood Control, Fire Fighters etc. etc.? Where do these valuable citizens of this nation figure in this Brooks pronouncement on the American Fate?

Almost Marx

Patrick M. Cronin is a member of The Hudson Inst. :

The Hudson Institute is a politically conservative American think tank based in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1961 in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, by futurist, military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation

https://www.hudson.org/

Herman Kahn was the man who thought the un-thinkable. Here are the first three paragraphs of Louis Menand’s 2005 book review ,essay about this monster. A Kissinger, before the ascent of Kissinger.

Herman Kahn was the heavyweight of the Megadeath Intellectuals, the men who, in the early years of the Cold War, made it their business to think about the unthinkable, and to design the game plan for nuclear war—how to prevent it, or, if it could not be prevented, how to win it, or, if it could not be won, how to survive it. The collective combat experience of these men was close to nil; their diplomatic experience was smaller. Their training was in physics, engineering, political science, mathematics, and logic, and they worked with the latest in assessment technologies: operational research, computer science, systems analysis, and game theory. The type of war they contemplated was, of course, never waged, but whether this was because of their work or in spite of it has always been a matter of dispute. Exhibit A in the case against them is a book by Kahn, published in 1960, “On Thermonuclear War.”

Kahn was a creature of the rand Corporation, and rand was a creature of the Air Force. In 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man on Japan, the Air Force was still a branch of the Army. The bomb changed that. An independent Department of the Air Force was created in 1947; the nation’s nuclear arsenal was put under its command; and the Air Force displaced the Army as the prima donna of national defense. Whatever it wanted, it mostly got. One of the things it wanted was a research arm, and rand was the result. (rand stands for Research ANd Development.) rand was a line item in the Air Force budget; its offices were on a beach in Santa Monica. Kahn joined in 1947.

In his day, Kahn was the subject of many magazine stories, and most of them found it important to mention his girth—he was built, one journalist recorded, “like a prize-winning pear”—and his volubility. He was a marathon spielmeister, whose preferred format was the twelve-hour lecture, split into three parts over two days, with no text but with plenty of charts and slides. He was a jocular, gregarious giant who chattered on about fallout shelters, megaton bombs, and the incineration of millions. Observers were charmed or repelled, sometimes charmed and repelled. Reporters referred to him as “a roly-poly, second-strike Santa Claus” and “a thermonuclear Zero Mostel.” He is supposed to have had the highest I.Q. on record.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/27/fat-man

Guilt by association! Patrick M. Cronin is a Neo-Con, and as such he shares in the mendacity of Leo Strauss’s rewrite of the History of Philosophy. And the leaders of that Political Sect led by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz , of the notorious self-advertisement ‘Making It’. Two important books help to establish what and who the Neo-Cons are, and represent politically.

See Murray Friedman’s book ‘The Neoconservative Revolution :Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy’

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/american-history-after-1945/neoconservative-revolution-jewish-intellectuals-and-shaping-public-policy?format=PB

Also ‘Cloaked in Virtue :Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy’, by Nicholas Xenos

https://www.routledge.com/Cloaked-in-Virtue-Unveiling-Leo-Strauss-and-the-Rhetoric-of-American-Foreign/Xenos/p/book/9780415950909

In sum, Neo-Conservatism is a bellicose Ultra-Nationalism, in which Strauss acts as the philosophical veneer . Mr. Cronin essay is expressive of the Trump Era’s political rehabilitation of the Neo-Cons, and their embrace by the New Democrats, as partners in the shared goal, of a political rehabilitation the mythical ‘the rules based international order’. That ‘order’ is about American Hegemony, by way of the maladroit sloganeering of ‘building back better’

In pursuing cooperation from strength, there are at least five significant differences between Biden and Trump policies as both parties focus increasingly on China. 

The first two differences were on display in Europe: Biden is adamantly and thoroughly committed to working closely with allies and negotiating multilaterally.

The third difference in approaches between Trump and Biden is the latter’s genuine concern about improving the plight of the common man or woman.

Fourthly, the Biden administration seeks to differentiate threats from competition that can be managed by improving US capabilities.

The fifth and final area is that the Biden administration will, at the appropriate time and focused selectively on issues of mutual importance, seek to engage China in strategic dialogue..

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/joe-biden%E2%80%99s-transatlantic-bridge-indo-pacific-region-187781

To consider just the ‘third difference’ of ‘genuine concern about improving the plight of the common man or woman.’ With a sometime Economic advisor like Larry Summers, who equivocates, just enough to cover his ass, in this interview with Martin Wolf:

Headline: Larry Summers: ‘I’m concerned that what is being done is substantially excessive’

Sub-headline: Former treasury secretary criticises the scale of Biden’s fiscal policy and warns it could lead to overheating and wasted resources

…

Larry Summers: I’m going to focus on the American policy path and not talk about where responsibility lies for that path. I think, in important respects, it lies with the Republicans and with those on the more extreme left of the Democratic party.

If you look at the economy at the beginning of this year, prevailing forecasts were that Covid would reduce wages and salaries to American households by $20bn-$30bn a month, with that figure declining over the year. So, that would be a $250bn-$300bn hole in wages and salaries over the course of the year.

So, I look at this hole and then I see $900bn of stimulus in the December package, $1.9tn of stimulus in the recently passed package and $2tn in the savings overhang, which is also likely to be spent. I see the Fed with its foot on the accelerator as hard as any Fed has ever done.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/380ea811-e927-4fe1-aa5b-d213816e9073

Considering that Joe Mansion , not a Conservative Democrat, but a Dixiecrat, opposes Biden:

Headline: Joe Manchin is opposing big parts of Biden’s agenda as the Koch network pressures him

• The Koch network has been actively pressuring Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to oppose key legislative items linked to Biden’s agenda, including filibuster reform and voting rights legislation.
• The lobbying effort appears to be paying off. Manchin, in a recent op-ed, wrote that he opposed eliminating the filibuster and that he would not vote for the For the People Act.
• The Koch network specifically calls on its grassroots supporters to push Manchin, a conservative Democrat, to be against some of his party’s legislative priorities.https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/joe-manchin-is-opposing-big-parts-of-bidens-agenda-as-the-koch-network-pressures-him.html

Biden’s political pastiche of the New Deal, and a the reinvigoration of the mythical ‘the rules based international order’ ,the cliché that acts as a cover for American Hegemony: that leaves Medicare For All, Student debt relief, the $15 minimum wage, Police Reform, and Federal Protections for Voting, Rights, and eliminating of all ‘Aid’ to the Zionist Faschist State, are left outside, the last acts of Biden’s inauspicious political career.

Political Realist

If ‘Social Science’ is ‘sovereign’ then ‘The Bell Curve’ partakes of that sovereignty? When one of its underpinnings is ‘Mankind Quarterly’?

The Tainted Sources of ‘The Bell Curve’

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What sort of “stuff” could Murray mean? Surely the most curious of the sources he and Herrnstein consulted is Mankind Quarterly—a journal of anthropology founded in Edinburgh in 1960. Five articles from the journal are actually cited in The Bell Curve’s bibliography (pp. 775, 807, and 828). But the influence on the book of scholars linked to Mankind Quarterly is more significant. No fewer than seventeen researchers cited in the bibliography of The Bell Curve have contributed to Mankind Quarterly. Ten are present or former editors, or members of its editorial advisory board. This is interesting because Mankind Quarterly is a notorious journal of “racial history” founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race. Mankind Quarterly was established during decolonization and the US civil rights movement. Defenders of the old order were eager to brush a patina of science on their efforts. Thus Mankind Quarterly’s avowed purpose was to counter the “Communist” and “egalitarian” influences that were allegedly causing anthropology to neglect the fact of racial differences. “The crimes of the Nazis,” wrote Robert Gayre, Mankind Quarterly’s founder and editor-in-chief until 1978, “did not, however, justify the enthronement of a doctrine of a-racialism as fact, nor of egalitarianism as ethnically and ethically demonstrable.” Gayre was a champion of apartheid in South Africa, and belonged to the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia. In 1968, he testified for the defense at the hate speech trial of five members of the British Racial Preservation Society, offering his expert opinion that blacks are “worthless.” The founders of Mankind Quarterly also included Henry E. Garrett of Columbia University, a one-time pamphleteer for the White Citizens’ Councils who provided expert testimony for the defense in Brown v. Board of Education; and Corrado Gini, leader of fascist Italy’s eugenics movement and author of a 1927 Mussolini apologia called “The Scientific Basis of Fascism.”

…
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1994/12/01/the-tainted-sources-of-the-bell-curve/

As Peterson expatiates about the dangers posed by the tribe and tribalism of the ‘Left’, as a failure attributed to a dogmatism , a tribalist Mr. Shapiro, nods in excited approval! What is the difference between the ‘tribalism’ of the ‘Left’, and Mr. Shapiro’s belief in his own tribalism? Each are attachments to a closely held ‘belief’, not to statistically testable data. Nor Peterson’s fixation about women being the bearers of ‘chaos’.

Queer Atheist

Reading Mr. Colvile’s most recent essay, on the G7, conjured, in my political imagination, Mr. Puff from the Sheridan play, comic silliness, as cover for a self-serving manipulative cynicism. The reader might wonder at an utterly humorless Thatcherite resorting to ‘satire’ as his weapon of choice.  Read the first two paragraphs of his essay and wonder at his targets: ‘G7’, ‘those strange things that exists because it exists’, ‘the leaders of a slightly miscellaneous group of countries’, ‘not quite the richest or the largest or the most democratic, but pretty close on all three counts’,  and in the second paragraph ‘the royal family’, ‘Labour Party’    

The G7 is one of those strange things that exists because it exists. Every year, pandemics permitting, the leaders of a slightly miscellaneous group of countries — not quite the richest or the largest or the most democratic, but pretty close on all three counts — get together to solve the world’s problems. Their wives (and nowadays even some husbands) get a separate little outing, the modern equivalent of leaving the menfolk to chew the fat over port and cigars. There is plenty of awkward small talk and a profusion of awkward photo ops. If the press is lucky, there may be a fight.

All of which makes Britain a perfect host for this year’s summit. We lead the world in things that exist because they exist — institutions that you’d never invent today but that stick around because they’re already here. Like the royal family. And the Labour Party. And, you might say, our status as a global power.

In the following paragraph Mr. Colvile attributes this collection of toxic thoughts to ‘the two lines of attack made by the Brexit sceptics.’ Are they the villians in his collection of surmises? With the bit between his teeth, he is at full gallop! In an instant my Mr. Puff becomes Don Quixote, or should it be The Grand Inquisitor? Have I reached to point of rhetorical fracture? Our writer reaches deep for the ‘actors’ in his melodrama, a collection, at random, of Mr. Colvie’s telling one-liners.

“global Britain” as a blustering exercise in imperialist nostalgia, the diplomatic equivalent of the middle-aged man who buys a sports car after splitting up with his wife but loses the house.

 In the old days you might hang out with the same friends every day, a rigidly defined group that dressed the same, talked the same and listened to the same bands

Britain can stand with Nato on security and with the “D10” (the G7 plus Australia, India and South Korea) on containing China.

the freewheeling Boris Johnson. His vision of Brexit is not about bringing it all back home.

 On the economy as well as diplomacy, the Brexit gamble is that we can position ourselves to take maximum advantage of future opportunities; that we are better off dining à la carte than from the set menu. 

As The Economist recently pointed out, of the 43 firms worth more than $100 billion established in the past half-century, only one is from mainland Europe.

The great challenge of Brexit Britain to the EU is therefore not so much financial as philosophical — or even theological. 

What if it is better to be a solo act in small stadiums than part of the chorus — especially when no one can agree on what they’re meant to be singing?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/freewheeling-boris-johnson-spoil-g7-summit-afterglow-brexit-britain-trust-5cmjrc6qx

Don’t miss Mr. Colvile’s comments on Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken and the Northern Ireland protocol. 1,075 words that never approaches the succinct!

Political Reporter  

Headline: The US needs a little nudge theory to boost its jab campaign

Sub-headline: Biden’s administration wants not medical, management or data science, but social science instead

Cass Sunstein, a leading behavioural scientist who helped to popularise the concept of the “nudge”, a policy technique that steers people towards certain actions, has written that Biden’s plan to embrace evidence-based policymaking incorporates “an explicit endorsement of behavioural science — and it calls for much more of it”. Sunstein himself has been hired by the Department of Homeland Security.

https://www.ft.com/content/7d3cac49-6d2a-4770-86f2-3e80797c528c

Because Mr. Sunstein is the founder of the ‘Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School, this does not confer the honorific of ‘a leading behavioral scientist’ upon him.

Here is the web site of ‘Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy‘

https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty-research/research-programs-and-centers/program-on-behavioral-economics-and-public-policy/

Sunstein is part of a faculty that are listed as lawyers, not behavioral scientist! I checked, all were lawyers, except for the designation of ‘Clinical Professor of Law’? 138 faculty of this Program, not one behavioral scientist! Ms. Tett is usually a more careful reporter! All this to comment upon ‘to boost its jab campaign’ !

Here are Mr. Sunstein areas of academic responsibilities at Harvard , he is now on leave:

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He serves as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10871/Sunstein

On his book ‘Nudge’ :

‘It’s All for Your Own Good’ by Jeremy Waldron of October 9, 2014 issue:

Mr. Waldron reviews two books:

Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism by Cass R. Sunstein & Richard Thaler

Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas by Cass R. Sunstein

These two paragraphs, of the review, help the reader to understand the Sunstein/Thaler Soft-Core Authoritarianism:

…

Nudging is about the self-conscious design of choice architecture. Put a certain choice architecture together with a certain heuristic and you will get a certain outcome. That’s the basic equation. So, if you want a person to reach a desirable outcome and you can’t change the heuristic she’s following, then you have to meddle with the choice architecture, setting up one that when matched with the given heuristic delivers the desirable outcome. That’s what we do when we nudge.

All of this sounds like a marketer’s dream, and I will say something about its abusive possibilities later. But Sunstein and Thaler have in mind that governments might do this in a way that promotes the interests of their citizens. Governments might also encourage businesses and employers to use it in the interests of their customers and employees. The result would be a sort of soft paternalism: paternalism without the constraint; a nudge rather than a shove; doing for people what they would do for themselves if they had more time or greater ability to pick out the better choice.

…

Political Skeptic

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 In reply to critical mass

Let me say that Ms. Tett’s ‘A debt to history?’ is one of the most important examples of journalism to appear in this newspaper! Read it again. I used it many times during the Greek Crisis to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the Germans.   
https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0
 Regards.
StephenKMackSD 

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In reply to everyday paper

I read Mr. Harford’s essay and found it awash in the manufactured Russophobia allied to Putin hysterical paranoia. The ‘as if’ is that the American National Security State hasn’t been busy, since the First Cold War, with ‘Radio Free Europe’ and ‘Radio Liberty‘ , NATO and the ubiquitous, and a unceasing war against any manifestation of ‘The Left’, or even ‘Moderate Reform’. An example, the Iranian Coup of 1953! And its ‘blowback’ in the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Sunstein & Thaler are Soft-Core Authoritarians! ‘We’ need to be Managed by benevolent Masters? Kant offered, in the 18th Century, his self-emancipation from tutelage. Yet the ‘experts’, favored by Walter Lippmann, now morphed into Think Tank Technocrats, in there propaganda guise, pioneered by Edward Bernays: offer not a faith in the American Experiment, and its expressions of faith in the good will, of committed civic actors, who view each other as equal partners in the flourishing of ‘our’ shared endeavor!

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

Some selective quotation from Mr. Rachman’s essay, with my comments. This paragraph makes clear that The New Cold War is the business of America. Lets include in The Enemies List Iran, North Korea, not forgetting Political Islam in all its iterations/permutations. Nor the burgeoning Left Wing governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba etc. The Global South is the perpetual enemy of ‘Uncle Sam’ ! Recall ‘Pentagonism: A Substitute for Imperialism’ by Juan Bosch of 1969?      

For Joe Biden, on his first trip overseas as US president, it is an opportunity to demonstrate that America is back. Biden has made it clear that he intends to rally the world’s democracies in pushing back against Russia and China.

The political sloganeering of ‘America is back’ is about that ‘New Cold War’. The ‘Biden Team’:  Harris ,Blinken, Nuland, Rice, and Power represent the return of the Neo-Cons and R2P Zealot Power.     

The ‘rallying cry’ of the Biden Foreign Policy is reiterated as ‘pushing back against Russia and China’. That New Cold War takes shape as a defensive maneuver against Global Bad Actors.   

For Joe Biden, on his first trip overseas as US president, it is an opportunity to demonstrate that America is back. Biden has made it clear that he intends to rally the world’s democracies in pushing back against Russia and China.

This reader has to wonder were Mr. Rachman has been, concerning the vexing question of America’s ‘inexorable decline’. Two American, and one British writer on the decadence question!

December 8, 2013 : 

Headline: The Decay of American Political Institutions

Sub-headline: We have a problem, but we can’t see it clearly because our focus too often discounts history.

The Decay of American Political Institutions

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June 24, 2014

Niall Ferguson

The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/313194/the-great-degeneration-by-niall-ferguson/

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February 25, 2020

The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic

Ross Douthat 

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Decadent-Society/Ross-Douthat/9781476785257

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The G7 summit will also send an indirect message to China. The propaganda line pumped out from Beijing is that the west is in inexorable decline. 

…

The success of the G20 in organising international action to avert a global depression seemed to confirm that the G7’s moment had passed. 

…

It is the Biden administration’s renewed determination to push back against Moscow and Beijing that has provided the G7 with a renewed reason to exist.

…

File this under the rubric of ‘understatement’ :

But the fact that the G7 no longer represents most of the global economy — and is skewed towards the Euro-Atlantic region — remains a problem.

On the question Chatham House, these two paragraphs begins answering vital questions, unexplored by Mr. Rachman’s reference this Think Tank, and its historical/political ideologies.

It never really achieved its stated goals, remaining wedded to imperial-internationalism, elitist in character in ‘educating’ newly-awakened ‘public opinion’, and supportive of a racialised world view wedded to Anglo-Saxonism. At the core of the Chatham House project lay the aim of an alliance with the United States as Britain’s imperial power declined. Such attitudes were on full display at the Paris Peace Conferences in 1919-20, where Chatham House was conceived as the British branch of an Anglo-American institute of international affairs.

Saturated with a haughty attitude to inferior colonials considered incapable of self-government, Chatham House elites looked down on an increasingly assertive organised working class, galvanised by the experience of bloody trench warfare, and inspired by the dramatic effects of the Russian revolution, and Lenin’s calls for workers to get out of the war and overthrow ‘their’ governments.

https://thewire.in/world/chatham-house-100-years

…

As Renata Dwan of Chatham House, a UK think-tank, points out, in the 1970s the G7 nations accounted for some 80 per cent of world gross domestic product. That is now down to about 40 per cent.

The G7 are political actors who now seek , from within their decline, to build bridges to Asia:

To compensate, the group have invited four guests to the summit: Australia, India, South Africa and South Korea. The fact that three of these guests are Asian countries underlines the group’s role in pushing back against Beijing.

The ‘West’s Last Chance to Lead‘ is steeped in the shared arrogance, of American and European Technocrats: who still think its 1843, to borrow the date, when The Economist began its life as the voice of a ‘Liberalism’, based on racial superiority, and the notions of social class as the predictor of moral/political worth.

Political Skeptic

https://www.ft.com/content/5cdd1ad4-d7ed-4a91-acef-8ae7ff8873cc

How long do ‘we’ console ‘ourselves’ with some portion of the toxic Kennedy Myth? His opposition to Vietnam War was always one critical comment, followed by an ignominious retreat, in the guise of ‘clarification’!
Mort Sahl had a great routine, using his blackboard, describing Bobby’s mercurial Politics: from Right-Wing Social Democrat to a Left-Wing version, to the Right-Wing version, or just his ‘hover’ over the whole, that disguised his political opportunism. Or should it be characterized as an ambition, unrelated to an actual ability to govern, if such exists?
In ’68 Wallace got 9 million votes, some of these voters were former Bobby supporters : does that astound?
I say this with all due respect, to what you have stood for over the years!

RFK was assassinated and died 53 years ago. He reflected some of our best aspirations. https://t.co/ZuazIM4DhC

— Katrina vandenHeuvel (@KatrinaNation) June 7, 2021

Regards,
StephenKMackSD

The reader just has to read this first sentence of Luce’s latest Biden apologetic, as not just comic, but resembling a Jerry Lewis comedy, post Dean, tinctured in The Marx Bros. ? Another choice might be a Corporate Political Melodrama, that rehabilitates the black and white screen of 1952, featuring a carefully edited version of ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’?      

Unsurprisingly , the reader notes that Luce continues to trade in clichés, the next sentences:

Conflict was always destined between Joe Biden the healer and Joe Biden the agent of change.

To govern is to choose. 

In the coming days, Biden will have to decide which of his two personas matters more. 

It is a measure of the tension between the two Bidens that we still cannot be sure which way he will turn.

The sense of emotional release after Donald Trump left office produced many overwrought — and premature — verdicts on the nature of Biden’s presidency. 

 

To break the monotony, Luce then appeals to authorities: Francis Fukuyama being one of a number. Note that Fukuyama is an acolyte of Leo Strauss, author of a mendacious re-write of vast portions of Western Philosophy. Fukuyama wrote a tract declaiming:

The Decay of American Political Institutions

We have a problem, but we can’t see it clearly because our focus too often discounts history.

The Decay of American Political Institutions

In his essay Fukuyama attacks the whole of the meliorist politics of the American 20th Century. What possible interest can Fukuyama have, in or about, American Democracy? The possibility of being considered an historian of the caliber of Henry Adams ?

After some some current Political History Made to Measure, Luce returns to the more serviceable cliché:

Biden’s second barrier is himself. Great presidents of both parties — from Roosevelt to Reagan — personify the country’s change of era.

Half of Biden is stuck in romantic attachment to a bipartisan era that no longer exists.

There are no deals to be struck on preserving US democracy. 

For things to remain the same — Biden’s dearest wish — everything must change.

https://www.ft.com/content/0f67e08f-92bb-4e24-b390-55f3f09a1ada

The reader marvels at the ‘fact’ that Luce enjoys access to the inner-self of Joe Biden.

I heard on the news today, that the Corporate Tax increase, in the Biden legislation is now ‘off the table’!

Political Skeptic

Title this: Larry Summers finds an ally in Wolfgang Schäuble?

…

A promising approach for Brussels to take would be a eurozone debt redemption pact, similar to the sinking funds devised by Robert Walpole and Alexander Hamilton. As the first Treasury secretary, Hamilton obliged the new US states in 1792 to deposit good collateral, practise budgetary discipline and reduce their debts.  That was the crux of the oft-cited “Hamilton moment”, not the mutualisation of debts sometimes recommended for the EU.

The debt redemption plan worked and could work again today. It provides a mixed strategy of “carrots and sticks” like that pursued by the IMF — another legacy of Keynes. I am confident that Europe will be wise enough to also follow the British economist in this aspect of his doctrine.

https://www.ft.com/content/640d084b-7b13-4555-ba00-734f6daed078

Robert Walpole , Alexander Hamilton and just a ‘soupçon of Keynes’. Who could cavil at such a stellar casting for Mr. Schäuble’s political/economic melodrama. This reader is reminded of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s ‘The Critic: or, a Tragedy Rehearsed is a satire’.

Political Observer

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My reply to FDDB:

The apologetics for the ‘Free Market’, that inconveniently Crashed in 2008 from Greed exercised exponentially: should that be placed under the rubric of ‘doing no wrong’. Or does my comment fall under ‘public vitriol’ ? 
What is interesting about the Cult of Smith is that his intention with his ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ and ‘Wealth’ was to construct a ‘Science of Man’ with the aid of Hume. And that Marx, no matter his ‘failed project’ , not to speak of his writing for Capitalist Newspapers that employed him, all this a mere sketch. That eventuated in  Keynes and his project to save Capitalism, while he played ‘The Market’ from his bed. And published The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The utter complexity of Economics, from its Political Economy to the Science, held afloat by data and models, that simply acts as reinforcement of that Political Economy. And its particular metaphysical constructs like ‘The Free Market’ which has proven to be based on acts of faith of Hayek/Mises/Friedman and its College of Cardinals, The Mont Pelerin Society.

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/640d084b-7b13-4555-ba00-734f6daed078?commentID=368d6955-7cf4-4013-bd77-015ce84aa73b

Like most Americans of certain generations ‘we’ received our inoculations in Public Schools. In a time when Public Health was a prime consideration. That in a time that sees ‘our’ infant mortality rate, that now ranks 33 out of 36 countries.

According to this year’s America’s Health Ranking Annual Report, the U.S. infant mortality rate is 5.9 deaths per 1,000 live infant births, while the average rate of infant mortality among the OECD countries is 3.9 deaths per 1,000 live births. Compared with other OECD countries, the U.S. ranks No. 33 out of 36 countries

https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2018-annual-report/findings-international-comparison

The American Infant Mortality Rate is not a scandal, it is a crime!

https://everymothercounts.org/

The direct result of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, that places Profit and the worship of the Market above the imperative of Public Health!  ‘Governability’ is the straw, that this commentator reaches for, out of desperation, to make a connection between politics and the actual trust that American’s place in their Public Institutions.

Not everyone is a Rand Paul nor Janan Ganesh! His essays, of late,  seem more out of touch with the Political Present. Regrettably, even his epigrams are absent, that were the rhetorical gems, that the reader could once depend upon to break the monotony of his misbegotten political chatter.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/dcd44dbf-925a-4575-9840-e0be7a41383c