StephenKMackSD's Blog

The ‘radically unavailable president’ of the headline writers, Mr. Ganesh celebrates in the more sedate ‘the bolder stratagem of unavailability‘. Biden apologetics, in his telling looks away from the Blinken faux pas with the Chinese, meant to demonstrate ‘toughness’ ? Blinken is not a diplomat, but a New Cold War Ideologue. And Joe’s being goaded/manipulated  by New Democratic Loyalist Stephanopoulos into calling Putin a ‘killer’! Putin recalled the Russian Ambassador for consultations. Putin’s response, as reported in The New York Times is telling!

“When I was a child, when we argued in the courtyard, we said the following: ‘If you call someone names, that’s really your name,’” Mr. Putin said, quoting a Russian schoolyard rhyme. “When we characterize other people, or even when we characterize other states, other people, it is always as though we are looking in the mirror.”

The Ganesh View of Biden doesn’t confront the fact that the president can’t even climb the stairs to his jet, but he meets Mr. Ganesh’s ‘the bolder stratagem of unavailability‘. Mr. Ganesh needs to sharpen his skills as Biden Apologist. Perhaps a re-read of that Edward L. Bernays classic of 1928? 

Political Cynic 

https://www.ft.com/content/726a2d2b-9e29-4050-a328-e35088e72fd9

The reader just has to wonder at Mr. Luce’s tincture of Pikettyism! Not the real article but a clever pastiche? For a devotee of Neo-Liberalism to ‘think’ in a counterintuitive key? The questions ramify!

Two paragraphs stand out: 

This was a cop out. Since the 1970s, Washington has done plenty to weaken the power of trade unions, cut social insurance and allow educational costs to increase beyond the reach of ordinary Americans. Instead of cushioning such trends, successive US administrations, including Democratic ones, leaned in further. 

That the Neo-Liberal Swindle collapsed in 2008 eludes Mr. Luce’s grasp, although he articulates the shadow of the real thing.

Not forgetting the the next paragraph quoting New Labours’ ‘Golden Boy’ Tony Blair:

Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, once said: “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

Mr. Luce can’t quite let go of this enchanting Political Princeling, who like Bill Clinton were the architects of catastrophe.

Mr. Luce ends his essay with more Biden Melodrama: ‘take the sting out of US populism’ of both the Right and Left iterations? The Republicans have what? Mitch McConnell, Neo-Confederate/Originalist, the tattered remains of the Lincoln Project, or Mr. 47% Mitt Romney?What of Josh Hawley, of the raised fist? That historic opening’s chance is pregnant with possibility, that could, might be thwarted? Mr. Luce’s prognostications, indeed prescience, leaves the reader where?

Biden, in other words, has a chance to take the sting out of US populism with a game-changing economic agenda. It is a historic opening that is unlikely to come again soon. He must weigh that against the cost of preserving the Senate veto for a party that increasingly talks only about culture. As time goes on, it will seem like no choice at all.

https://www.ft.com/content/7e9c4448-21c9-4717-9944-d88f87e1a3be

Old Socialist

The headline and sub-headline only hint that The Financial Times and its reporter Benedict Mander ‘report’ on ‘midterm elections after VIP vaccines scandal’ , yet the opening paragraph features Alberto Fernández ‘speeding away to safety from stone-throwing protesters during a visit to Patagonia.’ A bit of political melodrama is never out of place, especially since the Fernández/de Kirchner ticket succeeded the failed Neo-Liberal Macri, and his J.P. Morgan wonder boy Prat-Gay, who was fired: https://www.ft.com/content/2d82da08-cb8c-11e6-864f-20dcb35cede2

Headline: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s dominance in Argentina becomes apparent

Sub-headline: VP is leading the administration’s campaign ahead of midterm elections after VIP vaccines scandal hits President Alberto Fernández

https://www.ft.com/content/b3a693c6-85b0-475e-8510-62454639ed79

The ‘report’ from Mr. Mander’s recitation of the concatenating troubles of de Kirchner, while not reaching ‘we told you so’, but veers into something like it?

“We no longer have any doubt as to who is in control; it is Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Uncertainty is never good for investors, but neither is this realisation,” said Jimena Blanco, an analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, a risk consultancy, of the Peronist politician who clashed with investors during her two-term presidency in 2007-2015.

And who better to bring the bad news than ‘Jimena Blanco, an analyst at Verisk Maplecroft’? Their pitch to possible customers: ‘We help multinational organisations understand where, how and why their global operations, investments and supply chains are at risk, and provide the solutions and advice they need to build resilience and sustainability.’ https://www.maplecroft.com/

______________

Three days later, Fernández de Kirchner lashed out at Argentina’s justice system and “lawfare”, or the use of the courts to attack political enemies, when she gave testimony in one of the nine corruption cases she faces. She accused judges of persecuting her, being “rotten and perverse”, and of systematic political interference, as she angrily jabbed her index finger at the camera.

Just reading de Kirchner’s Wikipedia page, this reader wonders why she should not be serving a life sentence, such is her list of crimes!

____________

Roberto Saba, an Argentine lawyer, said that Fernández de Kirchner is using the weaker cases against her, the so-called “future dollars” case that accuses her government of defrauding the central bank, to attack the courts and elites. But the notion of lawfare “erodes the legitimacy of courts, which is extremely dangerous”, he warned.

Note Roberto Saba’s impeccable credentials:

https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/roberto-saba-95-llm-11-jsd-elected-kettering-foundation-board

____________

Fernández de Kirchner’s crusade against the judiciary intensified after Lázaro Báez, a close associate of the Kirchner family, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for laundering $55m of dirty money. This has direct implications for Fernández de Kirchner, as the money is alleged to have originated from corrupt schemes with the Kirchner family, claims that are being determined in a parallel case in which she is the main defendant. She denies all charges.

A bit of guilt by association ?

_________________

The president insists nothing has changed in his relationship with his deputy. “I may have differences with Cristina . . . But I arrived with Cristina, and I will leave with Cristina [too],” he said in a recent interview.

__________________

But Graciela Römer, a political analyst, said that the importance of winning the approaching midterm legislative elections in October has put the government “in a very delicate situation”.

An attempt to keep supporters onside also explains why the government looks likely to postpone the renegotiation of a $44bn loan from the IMF granted in 2018, she said, as a deal with the Washington institution could anger the “kirchneristas”.

“It’s increasingly clear that the person who is leading the campaign right now — if not the government itself — is Cristina Fernández de Kirchner,” said Römer.

Here are Graciela Römer’s qualifications, translated from the Spanish:

Graciela Römer has a degree in Sociology from the University of Buenos Aires, director from 1988 to the present of Graciela Römer & Asoc., A study dedicated to social research, public opinion and political consulting in Argentina and different Latin American countries. She has more than twenty years of professional experience in the institutional and corporate image field in both the private and public sectors.

https://gracielaromer.com/biografia/

Graciela Römer, like so many others has something to sell , her ‘expertise’. Walter Lippmann’s faith in ‘experts’ as a hedge against too much Democracy, is toxic in the political present!

Sceptical Reporter

Anti-Chinese propaganda has become ubiquitous in the Corporate Media:

Headline; Australia can teach the UK a lesson in Chinese wrath

Sub-headline: London may have to learn the hard way that it cannot have its cake and eat it with Beijing

The author is a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute 

An internet search on the Lowy Institute yields this revelatory essay of October 2013 essay by Antony Loewenstein:

…
The Lowy Institute sees itself as Australia’s leading foreign affairs thinktank. Its fellows and staff routinely appear in the media pontificating about global affairs, including a push for greater defence spending that would allow countless contractors to earn billions of dollars. Its head Michael Fullilove, who’s also a non-resident senior fellow in foreign affairs at the Brookings Institution, writes longingly about former US national security advisor Henry Kissinger as a “realist”, despite there being questions over Kissinger’s record of foreign policy. Kissinger endorsed Fullilove’s recent book, a love letter to Franklin D Roosevelt. Fullilove has also been an outspoken critic of the release of the Wikileaks cables.
…
I asked the Lowy Institute a range of questions about Campbell’s possible conflicts of interest. They sent me a statement that ignored these issues:

Dr Campbell has long been one of the United States’ foremost policymakers on Asia. As assistant secretary of state for east Asian and Pacific affairs, he played a leading role on issues such at the US “rebalance” towards Asia, US-China relations, and efforts to promote democratic change in Burma. This fellowship will provide the international policy community in Australia with an opportunity to draw upon Dr Campbell’s experience and insights on the defining political, economic and strategic issues in Asia at a time of great change in the region. It will also be an opportunity to expose Dr Campbell to Australian perspectives on these issues.

Business and politics rarely mix without controversy; the media needs to be careful not to be seduced by smooth thinktank talkers.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/18/thinktanks-kurt-campbell-lowy-institute

The reader just might ask Mr. McGregor about the sanctions that America has placed on Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela and an embargo on Cuba. As America’s staunch ally, Britain follows the policy that America sets. In sum, Britain lives in the long shadow of the American Imperium. But on the question of China and America there is a vexing question: should America take any precipitous action against a country that hold so much of its debt? 

Here is Mr. McGregor on Britain’s defense review, yet he elides the fact that Britain is now just America’s political lap dog. With the Tory buffoon Boris in charge  

Britain’s defence review was remarkably blunt, calling China “a systemic challenge” to British values and prosperity and “the biggest state-based threat” to the country’s economic security. But the UK may be about to find out what Australia already knows, that it is no easy thing to change China policy, and, given Beijing’s sensitivities, there is a steep price to be paid in doing so. 

Mr. McGregor follows with a long potted history of how China conducted itself ,within the parameters of Trade. Yet the closing two paragraphs are demonstrative of the Lowy Institute’s hardline on the not just emerging World Power , but a Power that has supplanted a Hegemon, in an advanced state of political collapse. Given this World Historical frame Boris and Britain look to be what?

The next, harder step is economic co-operation among democracies such as the US, the UK and Australia to help nations singled out by Beijing for punishment. Kurt Campbell, who heads Indo-Pacific policy in the US National Security Council, said this month that Washington had told Beijing there would no improvement in ties while an ally is under “economic coercion”.

Beijing rails at such co-ordination. A party paper lashed out at the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, calling it an “axis of white supremacy”. But China’s behaviour is pushing friends and allies together, as the US made clear in a diplomatic confrontation in Alaska on Friday. Australia values their support. So too, soon, might the UK.  

https://ft.com/content/b3b77c27-329e-41ac-be6b-f7cc1436177d

Political Cynic

Headline: Joe Biden’s quietly revolutionary first 100 days

Sub-headline: US president’s opening spell has been the most productive and ego-free in recent memory

The headline writers looked to Mr. Luce’s ‘opening spell’ comedy, for the sub-headline. Nothing said by Luce about Biden’s ‘quietly revolutionary first 100 days’. Luce’s opening paragraph renders the ‘quietly revolutionary’ in it’s proper category of headline hyperbole.

It took about 50 days for US president Joe Biden to fulfil his 100-day vow of 100m vaccinations. The trick is as simple as it is old: under-promise and over-deliver. Yet after four years of Donald Trump doing the opposite, it feels strangely novel. The same applies to Biden’s $1.9tn recovery package. In one bill, he has provided the financial relief that Trump kept telling middle-class Americans they already had. Might America dare to hope that its days of politics as a branch of the entertainment industry are over? 

Mr. Luce can’t resist proving that he can focus on one of the most vexing problem that Biden faces, that echoes Trump’s toxic xenophobia. In which Napoleon plays the leading role:

All kinds of things can and will go wrong — starting with the growing migrant surge on America’s southern border. But Biden has three key advantages. His most important is what Napoleon Bonaparte sought in his generals: luck. The best recipe for success in a new job is to follow an underperformer. Biden also inherited a pandemic that was ripe for fixing. 

Next in Luce’s positive evaluation of Trump’s ‘Operation Warp Speed’. Biden is the political beneficiary of Trump’s one expression of his prescience?

The most effective thing Trump did as president was to fund Operation Warp Speed. Biden took office just as America’s vaccines were coming online and infections were peaking. This offered him a once-in-a-century chance to demonstrate the power of public service. If the virus peters out in the US by the summer, the resulting economic boom will give Biden a springboard to do all kinds of things that would previously have been unthinkable.

Then, Luce emphasises Bidens ‘experience’ and presents Biden’s choices as indicative of the value of that ‘experience’ . Note the reliance on ‘knowing the key players’ : Janet Yellen and Ron Klain. Neera Tanden’s nomination for the Office of Management and Budget didn’t qualify as a ‘key player’? This Luce sentence should garner a laugh:’Biden thus said little in the campaign about his storied history.’!

History is now featured with walk-ons by Carter and Obama as not quite connected, or lack that ‘key player’ status, that put them in a deficit position, to advance their political agendas.

US history is littered with new presidents sweeping in with out-of-town teams and then tripping up. Think of Jimmy Carter’s Georgians, Clinton’s Arkansans and Barack Obama’s Chicagoans. It takes at least two years for them to gain a footing, if they ever do. Biden has so far bypassed that hurdle. Having taken almost every position on every issue during his long career, Biden is seen by the left as devoid of principle. But that can also be an asset. Republicans cannot paint Biden as a radical. The left has nowhere else to go.

What Mr. Luce misses is that the ‘Left’ seems to be growing within the New Democratic Party. Nina Turner is just the latest ‘Leftist’ to run for congress.What follows, in the last two paragraphs of Luce’s essay, is a not very convincing argument in defense of mediocrity: Biden was and is the apotheosis of mediocrity, his political opportunism, that mediocrity, not forgetting his Corporate Media advocates, help to explain his narrow win in 2020. Not to speak of Trump’s advancing self-delusion.

But good oratory can be overrated — ask Germany’s Angela Merkel. Biden delegates a lot of his White House communication and day-to-day decisions to others. Here is his third attribute. By the standards of most US presidents, Biden’s ego is modest. That is an admittedly low bar. But at 78, it is hard to claim you personify the wave of the future. The best kind of politics is to govern, rather than fret about your brand. This sets Biden apart from Obama as well as Trump. Not everything needs to be about him.

Through a mix of luck and experience, Biden’s opening spell has been the most accident-free of any US president in recent memory. At some point Biden will get into difficulty and may well mess up. In the meantime, he is proving that you do not need to be a superstar to govern America. Indeed, it helps to be free of any obligation to play that role.

https://www.ft.com/content/22b39e9b-9b21-4d82-ba5b-8cc427c13cd8

American Writer

Does the present ‘Brave New World’, in the hands of Ugly Duckling Zuckerberg, and the Larry Summer’s trained ‘Lean In’ guru Sandberg make the reader a bit uneasy, or an even more extreme emotion? ‘The Tradition of The New’ described more than the Art World of 1959, but describes the ‘manufactured need’ for the latest electronic gadget, in the 21st Century?

In this historical moment, its about the promise of the latest toy to enhance the hum-drum lives of the easily bored consumer. The Fix for this ennui is the latest, and most up-to-date ‘thing’ produced in those Sweat-Shops of China, and other Asian countries, that are the manufacturing hubs that keep Western Consumers happy. ‘More’ is the promise of these electronic enhancements to consumers who long for what?

Changing a soiled diaper, calming an upset customer, currying favor with a client, getting ahead, a world explained in the 1955 fiction of Sloan Wilson’s ‘The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit’, plus ça change! These are nullified by that thing, that will rescue the consumer from that hum-drum, the jejune of daily life under a Capitalism, that produces nothing, but continually replicates itself : it has ‘evolved’ into a Casino that can’t control its actors’ greed.The Radiant Future, in the ever evolving ‘Now’!

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/9a698a68-18e2-43df-aeab-557b8723dc8d

P. S. How might ‘consumers’, in a Mass Culture, seek to address their deminisment, in such a Culture? One way would, and is, about acquiring the latest Status Object. So the acquisition of the latest I Phone ,or other coveted object, provides a temporary solution to that anonymity. So ‘The Market’ offers only a temporary analgesic, to the consumer’s aspiration for a self-emancipation project linked to acquisition alone.

From the same people that brought ‘you’ George Deukmejian , Pete Wilson of Prop 187 infamy, ‘Hollywood Republicans’ who advanced the political career of another washed-up ‘actor’ Arnold. Newsom, a NeoLiberal and of Old Money with the wrong pedigree! Howard Jarvis’ Prop 13 invigorated the Recall as the instrument of political reaction, followed by Prop 187 and Prop 22.

Ronald Reagan & his collection of racist whites, who, like Reagan, hated student ‘radicals’ like Mario Savio, who call themselves ‘natives’. And the daughters, sons and grand, great-grandchildren of the Oakies and Arkies, that came West during the Depression. And became integral parts of the Cold War munitions industries, and announced themselves as ‘Entrepreneurs’ instead of cogs in the ‘Defense Industries‘. 

Now the Trump coterie and its even more radical political agenda, steeped in nihilism, now profit from the lessons taught to them by their more politically respectable precursors. All those respectable Bush Republicans, and the Neo-Cons, now wonder at the ‘why’ of Trump and Trumpism. Unable to face reality that the Party has slipped out of their control. Mitt Romney and his allies are mere befuddled onlookers. 

After the successful recall of Newsom, who might be the candidate be? 

Political Observer 

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/17/gavin-newsom-california-recall-legacy-476618

The opening paragraph of Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay is suffused with humility, of a very special kind , only realized in hindsight. This followed by his announcing that his eyes have been opened by his realization, and in this political moment his vision is unimpeded.  

It is possible that something similar is going on with President Joe Biden and his $1.9tn fiscal relief bill. For anyone willing to see, America’s social democratic turn has been in the works for decades now. The one Republican to win the popular vote in a White House race since 1988, George W Bush in 2004, had widened Medicare the year before. Quietly, voters have grown to like Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Public surveys disclose a culture that is no longer one of masochistic self-reliance, if it ever was.

But then nor is today’s progressive moment quite as resounding as currently billed. The test is not whether voters like cash that is time-limited, crisis-enforced and financed by the awesome borrowing power of the US government. Of course they do. The test is whether they will accept higher taxes to make it sustainable in the long term. The Biden administration has not even begun to confront them with the choice.

All of this analysis as the in-order-too of demonstrating his current ‘political wokeness’, on the Biden Question: whether he is an actual ‘Progressive’ or not. I’ve not yet arrived in my reading to witness Ganesh’s confronting the devastation of The Pandemic. That like the 2008 Crash called for extraordinary measures: A Bail-Out for all those Crony Capitalists, while the lives of millions collapsed in foreclosures and bankruptcy courts. Obama put ‘the past behind us’ and offered the Austerity of Simpson-Bowles.

On the appointment of Gene Sperling:

Sperling, 62, is well known to Biden. He was a close adviser to Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, and then served as director of the National Economic Council at a time of tense negotiations with Republicans in Congress on budgetary issues, including the raising of the US debt limit. Sperling was also NEC director under Bill Clinton.

In between his two stints at the White House, Sperling worked as an advocate for universal education and a consultant for the West Wing television series.

https://www.ft.com/content/775032a9-bf0a-4655-a8e5-eb5ebeaaa01d

Note that Erskine Bowles, Henry M. Paulson, share leadership at the Economic Strategy Group, while Mr. Sperling is a member. Should the reader take these ‘clues’ that Biden is in no sense a ‘Progressive’?

Note this howler from Mr. Ganesh: ‘Roosevelt’s universal pension scheme is the one that exists today.’ Universal Pension Scheme, another name for Social Security, the most successful and completely necessary legacy of the New Deal. It is the object of scorn for Conservatives and the ubiquitous Neo-Liberals. A quote from Dickens is appropriate: ‘Are there no Work-Houses’ is descriptive of this Mentality,this World -View, in its historical context ‘The World According to the Economist’ by Alexander Zevin.

More ‘history made to measure’ follows, until the reader reaches the final two paragraphs of his essay :

Yet weirder is the idea that Biden has closed an age of craven Democratic submission to something called “neo-liberalism”. This travesty of the recent past is worth correcting now. The healthcare model for which Biden has increased subsidies had to be created. Obama did it. The child tax credit that Biden has enhanced temporarily had to be introduced in the first place. That was the work of Bill Clinton, who also passed the last sweeping round of federal tax increases in 1993. These alleged sell-outs did a lot for Americans caught up in what Johnson’s father called, with a flourish not given to his son, the “tentacles of circumstance”.

No doubt, they have the scars on their backs to show for it. But then so will Biden if he tries to entrench what is for now a fleeting munificence. A proper welfare state must be paid for. Such is the political Everest that should daunt the Democrats, and the opening that awaits the Republicans.

https://www.ft.com/content/2b3e2c2d-6547-4884-aeb3-199560ba4bf7

Recall the Clinton of : Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Joe Biden drafted the Senate version of this bill.

What reader believes that Biden is a ‘Progressive’ rather than a Neo-Liberal? Call this notion an expression of ‘Counter-History‘, although there are more apt and pointed descriptors. The collection of Clinton and Obama loyalists, that have been appointed by Biden demonstrates his fealty to this- Biden is not an ideologue, but an opportunist and political conformist of a certain generation of American pols. Yet in an Emergency, like Bush The Younger, Biden has taken extraordinary measures.

Political Observer

Never fear the Technocrats praised, in fact enshrined, by Walter Lippmann are now in control of the whole of politics, as practiced around the world.
For reference see the opening page of Karen Horn’s review of ‘The Walter Lippmann Colloquium: The Birth of Neoliberalism’ by Jurgen Reinhoudt and Serge Audier. And note its defensive tone:

This book fills a gap. Jurgen Reinhoudt and Serge Audier provide a fine translation of the transcript of the discussions that took place in the summer of 1938 at the famous“Colloque Walter Lippmann”(CWL) in Paris. The French original of this“essential document in the history of neoliberalism”(Reinhoudt and Audier 2018, p. 4), as the authors quite appropriately advertise, has been around for a long while. But access to this new and timely English language version, together with the authors’ excellent exhaustive introduction and rich, well-researched and fair background information,is likely to give scholarship on the origins of neoliberalism a fresh impulse, both in the history of economic thought and in political history.Such a boost is much needed and more than welcome at a time when the term“neoliberalism”is commonly being used as a derogatory word not only in much of the public debate, but also in the academic sphere. Neglecting almost everything about its historical roots and its proponents ’major concern with establishing a strong state standing above rent-seeking private interest groups, critics falsely associate neoliber-alism with mere policies of deregulation, privatization and the withdrawal of the state.Scholarly objectivity thus seems wont in much of the new SAGE Handbook on Neoliber-alism (2018), for example, where the editors Damien Cahill, Melinda Cooper, Martijn Konings and David Primrose explain that since neoliberalism’s“persistent contradictions and crises have, at least, re-opened an opportunity for diverse movements to work collectively to delegitimize neoliberalism”, they hope that their volume of almost700pages“will productively contribute to such struggles”(Cahill et al. 2018, p.xxxii).Unlike them, Reinhoudt (Hoover Institution, Stanford University) and Audier(University of Paris-Sorbonne) nowhere give the impression that they aim to wield anew weapon in their hands for a crusade against neoliberalism. One may perhaps guess their political leanings, but these never seem to bias their account. Their aim isto“furnish elements for research and discussion”(Reinhoudt and Audier 2018, p. 36),not to“settle which interpretation is the best”(Reinhoudt and Audier 2018, p.35).Everybody is invited to form their own opinions. And the authors very pertinently state that,“as historians, political theorists, and philosophers continue to debate the history of the term‘neo-liberalism’and the term’s meaning, it is useful to devote attention to the 1938 colloquium where the movement was formally born.”(Reinhoudt

…

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ordo-2019-0040/html

Prof. Horn’s bio here: https://econjwatch.org/authors/karen-horn

For a revelatory collection of essays- to a more objective analysis of one of Neo-Liberalism’s collection of Messiahs, Hayek:

The above just a preamble to this news story in The Financial Times:

Headline: Joe Biden taps Gene Sperling to implement $1.9tn stimulus package

Sub-headline: Economic adviser to Clinton and Obama hired to manage efficient rollout of Covid-19 aid plan

The ecomiums of praise for Sterling are unsurprising.

“Gene will work with the heads of the White House policy councils and key leaders at federal agencies so we can get funds out the door quickly, maximise its impact and accelerate the work the administration is doing to crush Covid-19 and rescue our economy,” the Biden administration official said.

“There’s no one who knows how the federal government works better than Gene Sperling.”

Mr. Sperling’s qualifications are carefully presented:

Sperling, 62, is well known to Biden. He was a close adviser to Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, and then served as director of the National Economic Council at a time of tense negotiations with Republicans in Congress on budgetary issues, including the raising of the US debt limit. Sperling was also NEC director under Bill Clinton.

In between his two stints at the White House, Sperling worked as an advocate for universal education and a consultant for the West Wing television series.

https://www.ft.com/content/775032a9-bf0a-4655-a8e5-eb5ebeaaa01d

Mr. Sperling was available for speaking through:

https://www.wsb.com/speakers/gene-sperling/

And here : https://www.economicstrategygroup.org/members/gene-sperling/

Erskine Bowles, Henry M. Paulson, share leadership at the Economic Strategy Group, while Mr. Sperling is a member. The failed Neo-Liberals are the leaders of the Biden Administration’s Economic resuscitation campaign. Perhaps Larry Summers was thought to be too divisine a figure, for the Biden reiteration of the New Deal, in its 2021 guise?

Old Socialist

Robert Irwin ‘reviews’ Timothy Brennan’s book ‘Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said’

Title :Flawed secular saint

Subtitle: The errors of Edward Said

Timothy Brennan evidently knew Edward Said very well and has conducted numerous interviews with others who knew him well, and he has had access to such fascinating unpublished documents as Said’s unfinished novel. In Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, while providing evidence of Said’s many admirable qualities, such as his courage in speaking and writing for the Palestinian cause, his promotion of Arabic novelists in translation, his enthusiasm for engaging with challenging intellectual theories and his remarkable skill as a musician, Brennan repeatedly takes note of his failings. These include his vanity, his resistance to criticism, his impatience with students and his polemical rages. Yet Said’s proneness to anger does not prevent Brennan from presenting him as a secular saint. (Saint Jerome, who was notoriously ill-tempered, might furnish a precedent.) It is interesting to note that Said had a particular detestation of two other secular saints, George Orwell and Albert Camus.

…

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/places-of-mind-a-life-of-edward-said-timothy-brennan-review-robert-irwin/

The Critics of Said are many:

Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism by Ibn Warraq

The lowest cost at Alibris $77.00 US dollars

____________________________________ 

Some Critiques of Edward Said’s Orientalism:

That provides this source, ‘Irwin, Robert. 2008. “Edward Said’s Shadowy Legacy,” Times Literary Supplement, 7 May 2008.’

http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2016/01/some-critiques-of-edward-saids.html

(I searched the TLS data base for the May 7, 2008 article resulted in this: ‘Your search for ”Irwin, Robert. 2008. “Edward Said’s Shadowy Legacy,” ‘ returned 0 articles’ )

_______________________________________

Edward Said: Critic decries his “shadowy legacy”

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/50389.html

This provides a link to Mr. Irwin’s May 7, 2008 essay. The reader is taken to the current edition of the TLS.

______________________________________

Here is a link to a collection of essays titled ‘Debating Orientalism’, and Mr. Irwin’s essay ‘Flaubert’s Camel: Said’s Animus’

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137341112_3

This essay is available for $29.95, US currency.

__________________________________________

Campus Watch publishes the whole of the May 7, 2008 TLS essay. No way of checking this.

Edward Said’s Shadowy Legacy [incl. Daniel Martin Varisco, Bernard Lewis, et al.]

Tricky with argument, weak in languages, careless of facts: but, thirty years on, Said still dominates debate Edward Said’s Shadowy Legacy [incl. Daniel Martin Varisco, Bernard Lewis, et al.]

(The link to the TLS essay again sends the reader to the current edition!)

https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/12819/edward-said-shadowy-legacy-incl-daniel-martin

Mr. Irwin needs to cultivate new Academic Enemies! Steven Salaita and his ‘Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine‘ a partial review of this book by Alex Lubin provides … The only problem is that Prof. Salaita is now a school bus driver:

‘Ousted’ From Academe, Steven Salaita Says He’s Driving a School Bus to Make Ends Meet

https://www.chronicle.com/article/ousted-from-academe-steven-salaita-says-hes-driving-a-school-bus-to-make-ends-meet/?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in

That is how the Resectable Bourgeois Academy handles political dissidents! Said had tenure, but he was the target of rhetorical attacks. But times have changed:

Headline: Harvard Hillel Executive Director Accuses Cornel West, Supporters of Furthering ‘Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory’ In Tenure Controversy

Responding to vigorous campus support for Professor Cornel R. West ’74 — who said last month Harvard declined to consider him for tenure in part due to his outspoken criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians — Rabbi Jonah C. Steinberg, executive director of Harvard Hillel, criticized West for having “egged students on” in “scapegoating and demonizing” Jewish people.

In an email to Hillel affiliates Friday, Steinberg wrote he believes a student petition condemning Harvard’s alleged decision to not consider West for tenure is based on “an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory.”

The petition cites West’s belief that he was denied tenure consideration due to his opposition to “the settler colonial violence of Israel’s occupation of Palestine” and references Zionism in a list of ideologies it says West has critiqued, alongside “white supremacy, racial capitalism,” and “the military-industrial complex.”

…

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/3/11/hillel-director-cornel-west/

The specious charge of ‘Anti-Semitism’ is the newest, and most effective solvent, for academic careers of dissidents like Steven Salaita and Cornel West ?

American Writer

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Added March 14, 2021

For added perspective on Said, and Mr. Irwin’s animus, for want of a better descriptor, toward Said. And a valid concern about Orientalism, and its evolution in Western Discourse, read Maya Jasanoff’s June 2006 essay titled ‘Before and After Said’ in the London Review of Books. Here is her concluding paragraph, which offers the reader a ‘middle way’ of understanding ,on the question of Orientalism, in both Said and Irwin.

Surely Said’s most enduring legacy has been to embed in a rising generation of Western scholars, many of whom are now contemporaries of Orientalism itself, the awareness that their work has political substance and ramifications, whether or not it might appear to be political a priori. Said wanted to break down what he saw as a false ‘distinction between pure and political knowledge’. Does that mean facts do not exist, or that evidence does not matter? Certainly not. But it does mean that scholars ought to be aware of the circumstances governing the kind of knowledge they produce and circulate. An American tourist of average means can visit the library of Tamegroute, scrutinise the manuscripts and come home with stories and snapshots, while the custodians of such repositories can almost certainly not afford trips abroad, are even less likely to be able to obtain Western visas, and could not under any plausible circumstances participate in Western scholarly discourse. So thank goodness for Orientalists like those profiled by Irwin, who have sought to reach across cultural divides and understand languages, histories and faiths other than their own. But thank goodness too for Orientalism, which has helped make scholars more conscious of the sources of their own perspectives and privileges in the first place.

A. W.