StephenKMackSD's Blog

The Financial Times on the jailing of Alexei Navalny:

Headline: Russia jails opposition activist Alexei Navalny for 30 days

Sub-headline: Two EU countries call for bloc to impose sanctions if Putin critic is not released

Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny has been sentenced to 30 days in jail a day after returning to the country, following threats from EU member states to impose new sanctions against Moscow if he was not released.

Mr Navalny was detained by police at Moscow’s main airport on Sunday evening after returning from Germany where he had recovered from an assassination attempt involving use of a nerve agent from the novichok group.

The attempt on his life in August last year was blamed on the Kremlin and sparked widespread condemnation from western governments. Moscow denied any involvement and has suggested Mr Navalny could have been poisoned outside Russia.

The anti-corruption campaigner, who has emerged as president Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic, was found guilty of breaching the terms of a suspended sentence on Monday by a hastily assembled makeshift court set up in the police station where he was held overnight, according to his lawyer.

… https://www.ft.com/content/9c42f190-5ec2-4ad7-8bc6-f9e449200a9f

The designation of ‘a nerve agent from the novichok group.’ helps avoid the vexing issues that Novichok, itself, is immediately toxic. The Heroes and Villains, here are Duchamp’s Ready Mades, in rhetorical guise. The disappeared Skipals , now long forgotten, here is a reminder:

The latest example of alleged Russian perfidy – the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia – is yet another case of faith-based attribution. In accusing Russia of some heinous crime – in this instance, the murder of a former double agent working for MI6 – one needn’t present any real evidence: it’s only necessary to point the finger at the Kremlin. And of course we haven’t had any real evidence proffered by the British government: Prime Minister Theresa May simply declared that Russia is the culprit and gave a midnight deadline for the Kremlin to explain how “its nerve weapon” – as NBC reported it – was used to attacked Skripal on British soil. She has since announced the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats. The absurdity of this was inadvertently underscored by the comments of Vil Mirzayanov, the Russian-born chemist who first revealed the existence of “Novichok,” the nerve agent developed by the Russians. Mirzayanov came to the United States in 1995: in 2007, he published a book, State Secrets, which tells his story as a chemist working in Russia’s secret chemical weapons facilities. Now 83, he gives the following explanation for the attack on Skripal:

… https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2018/03/14/russian-to-judgment-who-poisoned-sergei-skripal/

The reader wonders as to who wrote the final version of this ‘news story’: Henry Foy in Moscow, Michael Peel in Brussels, Guy Chazan in Berlin, James Shotter in Warsaw?

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Ben Hall on the arrest of Alexei Navalny in Moscow, under the rubric of ‘Opinion’.

Headline: Alexei Navalny is Russian for ‘domestic enemy number one’

Sub-headline: Arrest of opposition activist has only elevated his status as a symbol of repression

In 1976, a year after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for being “spokesman for the conscience of mankind”, Andrei Sakharov was classified by the KGB as “domestic enemy number one”.

Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition activist arrested on his return to Moscow on Sunday, may not possess the same righteousness as Sakharov, the most famous of Soviet dissidents. But there is no doubting his courage. Or that today’s Kremlin regards him as its greatest domestic enemy. As with the nuclear scientist half a century ago, Mr Navalny’s treatment by the Russian government has only elevated his status as a symbol of repression.

The cruel suppression of Sakharov came to symbolise the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet system and helped galvanise western, especially European, opinion against it. It would be naive to think Mr Navalny’s treatment will have a similar effect. The cold war is long over and most western capitals have other interests beyond countering Russian aggression.

But just as the KGB fretted about Sakharov’s impact, so Russian president Vladimir Putin fears that Mr Navalny can mobilise opinion against his increasingly autocratic regime. Russia is due to hold parliamentary elections in September and Mr Navalny and his fellow activists have been organising surprisingly successful campaigns in local elections. They are rallying support for any candidate able to beat incumbents from Mr Putin’s ruling party, which has suffered a fall in popularity ratings to record lows in recent months.

…

The Kremlin’s high-visibility persecution risks turning Mr Navalny into a rallying point for domestic opposition. He must be effective if Mr Putin fears him so much. The Russian leader does not seem to care that dispensing with due process makes Mr Navalny a symbol of the abuses of an authoritarian regime. But the west must.

https://www.ft.com/content/015bfcb2-1a75-4325-b1c3-76a26ccb6b49

Ben Hall focuses his History Made To Measure on Sakharov, yet forgetting Alexander Litvinenko, and the long-ago assassination of Soviet Dissident Georgi Markov, and the Skripals are again absent. The Heroes and Villains of The New Cold War narrative are the constants of the Financial Times’ writers.

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Here is Gideon Rachman making his contribution to the ‘Yellow Peril’ variant of The New Cold War, couched is a self-serving political nostalgia, in sum, more of the same History Made to Measure, the sine qua non of political fiction writers.

He watches the Kennedy 1961 Inaugural Address, focused on the American Political Present, in the waning days of Trump and Trumpism. And the looming threat of China, as America’s self-obsessions gives opportunity to its enemy. At least as Rachman presents them. Does this even make any kind of political sense? The reader need only think of the careers of James Clapper and John Brennan, and their long service to the American National Security State. The operatives of this Security Sate never sleep! Mr. Rachman relies on a serviceable rhetorical naivete, as to the how and why of American Intelligence Operations. Mr. Rachman insults his readers, with such a pastiche of dull-witted naivete, passed off as informed comment.

Headline: America’s disarray is China’s opportunity

Sub-headline: China’s economy is growing strongly while the US is mired in a political crisis

On January 20 1961, John F Kennedy, America’s youngest ever elected president, gave his inaugural address from the steps of the Capitol. Exactly 60 years later Joe Biden, America’s oldest ever president, will be sworn in at the same place — just days after it was stormed by a riotous mob.

Kennedy used the magisterial backdrop of Congress to proclaim that the “torch has passed to a new generation”. Mr Biden is the representative of an older generation — one that now fears the torch of liberty is in danger of being extinguished, even in the US itself.

Watching Kennedy’s address again, it is striking how much of it was addressed not to the American people, but to the leaders of the Soviet Union. JFK was speaking at the height of the cold war. Much of the American elite now believes that the US is on the brink of a second cold war — this time with China. But, unlike Kennedy, Mr Biden cannot promise to “pay any price, bear any burden” to ensure the “survival and success of liberty” around the world.

…

Mr. Rachman’s political/historic despair, flirting with nihilism, doesn’t quite match the Manchurian Candidate variant of 1962?

…

America’s disarray is China’s opportunity. As part of a planned pushback against China, Mr Biden had planned to call a summit of the world’s democracies. But, after an attempted coup d’état by a sitting president, America may lack the credibility to act as convener of the free world. Mr Biden’s democracy summit is likely to be quietly shelved in favour of a D10 meeting of 10 democracies, brought together by the UK.

A large part of America’s emerging struggle with China will be a battle for economic influence around the world. When 2019 ended, 128 of 190 countries in the world already traded more with China than with the US. China’s centrality to the global trading system will increase this year — with the World Bank projecting the Chinese economy to grow at around 8 per cent compared to 3.5 per cent for the US.

The Americans are also in a struggle with China to shape the technical standards and regulations that govern the world economy. The US needs new tools that go beyond the coercive power of sanctions.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/5e63ea74-633f-4073-b9c2-90236b336a5b

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As presented by the Financial Times’ writers ‘we’ face the implacable enemies: Putin and China! Mr. Rachman expresses a deep pessimism:

…
America’s disarray is China’s opportunity. As part of a planned pushback against China, Mr Biden had planned to call a summit of the world’s democracies. But, after an attempted coup d’état by a sitting president, America may lack the credibility to act as convener of the free world. Mr Biden’s democracy summit is likely to be quietly shelved in favour of a D10 meeting of 10 democracies, brought together by the UK.

…

American Skeptic

Niall Ferguson in his search for historical analogies to the events of January 6, 2021, and the political phenomenon of Trump and Trumpism leads to – his rambling essay is chock-a-block with these examples: Plague and political irrationalism are twin political phenomenon

“History of the Peloponnesian War,” by Thucydides and the plague of 430 and 426 & the Oligarchy in 411

The Black Death in 1340 , Cross-Bearers, Flagellant Brethren or Brethren of the Cross,

The Spanish Influenza of 1918-1919, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks, (with walk-on by Winston Churchill and Herbert Hoover) explicitly referred to the “plague of Bolshevism.”

The plague metaphor still remains but ‘evolves’ into the biological .

Adolf Hitler — used similar biological metaphors (“racial tuberculosis”) 

Hitler had “saved all Europe from the red plague of Bolshevism,” in the words of the German-American poet George Sylvester Viereck.

This search for analogies is interrupted by three paragraphs of his own observations on the events of January 6, 2021. To speak bluntly, nothing like what might be considered insightful. Ferguson returns to the subject of historical analogies:

 Cromwell’s dissolution of England’s Long Parliament in 1653?

The dissolution of the French National Assembly by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in 1851? 

How about Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922?

Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923

My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Smith draws a parallel with Japan in the 1930s,

Something similar goes for the Tejerazo, the storming of the Spanish parliament by 200 Civil Guard officers led by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero in 1981.

Mr. Ferguson appears to have found his rhetorical footing?

There is another reason none of these analogies works: They all omit the peculiar conditions created by a pandemic. It is not coincidental that the nadir of modern American politics was plumbed last week just as the third wave of Covid-19 seemed to near its crest. 

A quotation that hints that Ferguson has given up his search for that ‘perfect historical analogy’? Or a rhetorical feint?

Pandemics, remember, are associated with religious and political extremism. The fear of illness, mutual suspicion, quack theories, hypochondria, hyper-skepticism and general mental dislocation caused by social distancing, lockdowns and unemployment — taken together, these things tend to generate outlandish behavior.

Ferguson is a pedagogue, by nature, so he instructs his readers, constitutive of ‘students’ , who must be shaped, molded by his superior grasp of History. That ‘History’ of the Peloponnesian War, The Black Death, the Spanish Influenza are the most instructive, and in terms of propaganda, more serviceable to his History Made To Measure. Yet there are 979 words left of his polemic, in which he explores, the ‘Left-Wing Mob’s‘ destructive record. While ignoring, that the modes of The American National Security State, in its Wars of Empire, has infected American Police with its toxic Colonial Mentality. That Ferguson is a Neo-Conservative, or at the least a fellow traveler, this stance is not a surprise.

To the historian, it was not altogether surprising back in the summer to see hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mostly white protesters take to the streets in processions of expiation for the sin of racism. The left-wing violence that turned parts of Portland, Seattle and Kenosha, Wisconsin, into no-go zones was more destructive than the right-wing invasion of the Capitol, even if the latter’s political significance was greater. 

Look, if you want evidence of pandemic madness, at the people who ran amok among the legislature last week. The idea that this was a false-flag operation by far-left Antifa in disguise is obviously absurd. Although the mob seems to have included a few retired military members or off-duty police who had the training and the tools for a serious terrorist attack, this was mostly the lunatic fringe of the American far right in an unholy alliance with the QAnon conspiracy cult. 

Mr. Ferguson can’t let go his pedagogic self, and the thickets that constitute the remainder of his polemic, still awash in those ubiquitous analogies. He tries the patience of this reader, he misses the imperative of propaganda, the exercise of succinctness is its sine qua non. The last two paragraphs of his essay are instructive about Ferguson’s one imperative, the care and maintenance, of a carefully cultivated bourgeoise political respectability.

This, at least, is my earnest hope: That, having once been infected by the virus of antidemocratic politics, Americans have now acquired some resistance to it. The optimistic view of the pandemic is that natural infection plus mass vaccination will get the U.S. to herd immunity by around May. The optimistic view of politics is that we can achieve herd immunity against Trumpism in a roughly similar timeframe. 

Shorn of power, assailed by litigation, his finances tottering and his access to social media abruptly curtailed, Trump may fade as quickly as a virus with a reproduction number below 1 — to become no more than a seasonal malady, threatening only to those with the intellectual equivalent of comorbidities. The lesson of history is that pandemics eventually end — and so do political manias of the sort that briefly seized the Capitol last week. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-10/niall-ferguson-america-will-achieve-herd-immunity-to-trumpism?sref=uN6cur8D

Publius

Why it unsurprising to read a Capitalist warning, in this newspaper, about the danger of the Right and Left Extremes, as the threats to the business of profit taking! The fact of the Shoah frames this polemic, it is meant to evoke fear and revulsion, that features, at the least, one faction of those extreme political actors. The reader should consult Victor Klemperer’s ‘I Will Bear Witness‘ volumes I & II , he remained in the Eastern Sector of Germany, after the War.

In American the ‘Political Center’ is now defined as the Alliance of New Democrats, in sum Neo-Liberals, Neo-Conservative, and the now disappeared Lincoln Project. That toxic alliance evolved and produced the 2008 Depression, via the Free Market delusion: the wholesale destruction of the Welfare State and the rise of Robber Capital – all this is ignored in Mr. Moretz’s Morality Play. The watershed of 2008 was Occupy Wall Street, decimated by Oligarch Michael Bloomberg and President Obama, yet Piketty appeared as the vindication of that band of dissenters, in the heart of Wall Street Temples!

What did Obama offer to that 2008 Depression? ‘Let’s put it behind us’ and Simpson/Bowles, the apotheosis of an utterly failed Austerity. Is this what Mr. Moritz might opine as the sine qua non of his garlanded ‘Centrism’ ?

So, now, it’s up to all of us in the world of business to play our part and make sure the extremism of both left and right in America is seen for what it is: a menace to our future together. We are all culpable.

Some of us were ineffective with our warnings. Some provided support to forces of darkness. But all of us are guilty of not listening closely enough to the arguments of our opponents.

Mr. Moritz then self-reports:

Almost five years ago, I tried, in vain, to highlight for the business community Mr Trump’s past as a conman, bully, racist, failed entrepreneur and authoritarian. I also wrote about the differences between him and the people who start Silicon Valley companies, noting: “They are not nationalists who stir up dark memories of purges, pogroms, the 1930s, Latin-American strongmen or central African dictators.”

Those ‘Silicone Valley Companies’ : Google, Twitter, Facebook now determine who can use, and speak on their apps, as if the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are/were null and void. This does not register with Mr. Moritz. His penultimate paragraph is an instruction as to when ‘self-interest’ must yield to a moral imperative, which is hard to argue against. Except to the diehard followers of Mises, Hayek and Friedman, in which ‘The Market’ is the sine qua non of Human Knowledge.

The past four years have demonstrated there are times when it is best to set self-interest aside. Given the choice between appealing polices and a dark character, and objectionable policies and a respectable character, it is always safer to pick the latter. 

https://www.ft.com/content/143c7577-5e6a-4804-92ce-4b58f25a59cb

Political Reporter

Charters have increased the number of ‘extra days’ of instruction. That is all. The ‘values’ of ‘The Market’ has no place in Education ! This Charter School movement, has been corrupt from the beginning. 3 Billion lost to fraud. Charters are about destroying very powerful Teachers Unions. Charters are the product of the mendacious Neo-Liberals, and Mr. Chait is their advocate/apologist!

‘The increasing focus on charters’ financial effects inevitably leads to the question of their academic effects. But, much the same as charter schools throughout the country, California’s sector has yielded mixed results.

“The charter sector in California looks like a microcosm of the charter sector nationally,” said Martin West, an education professor at Harvard. “That’s not too surprising, since California charter schools make up a non-trivial segment of the national charter data.”

Indeed, a comprehensive 2014 study from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that students who attended California charters performed a bit better in reading, and a bit worse in math, than their peers attending traditional public schools. That nuanced picture dovetails with charter performance nationally, which is roughly as good, on average, as the public schools run by local school districts.

But tucked beneath the topline results, the data show that charters perform better for the state’s least advantaged citizens. Specifically, CREDO found that poor black students at charters gained an average of 36 extra days of learning in literacy, and 43 extra days of learning in math, than those in traditional public schools; poor Latino students gained 22 extra days of literacy and 29 extra days of math. In general, charter schools in urban areas, where many of those students are clustered, were measured as much stronger than those in suburban and rural areas.’
…
http://laschoolreport.com/research-shows-that-charter-schools-do-best-for-californias-low-income-and-minority-students-now-state-officials-are-considering-slowing-their-expansion/

StephenKMackSD

Bret Stephens January 6, 2021  

These paragraphs of Mr. Stephens’ essay of January 6, 2021 exemplify his Anti-Trump polemic. Neo-Conservatism shares an equal toxic politics, but achieved by a stealth attack on American Institutions , by political actors, that cultivate a scrupulous, if utterly mendacious adherence, to the ‘norms‘ of bourgeoise political respectability.  The reader need only look the Fukuyama’s The Decay of American Political Institutions .

Headline: Impeach and Convict. Right Now. 

Sub-headline: Trump is too dangerous to leave in office for even another minute. 

It wasn’t hard to see, when it began, that it would end exactly the way it has. Donald Trump is America’s willful arsonist, the man who lit the match under the fabric of our constitutional republic. 

The duty of the House of Representatives and the Senate is to reconvene immediately to impeach the president and then remove him from office and bar him from ever holding office again. 

To allow Trump to serve out his term, however brief it may be, puts the nation’s safety at risk, leaves our reputation as a democracy in tatters and evades the inescapable truth that the assault on Congress was an act of violent sedition aided and abetted by a lawless, immoral and terrifying president. 

From the moment Trump became the G.O.P. front-runner in 2015, it was obvious who he was and where, if given the chance, he would take America. He was a malignant narcissist in his person. A fraudster in his businesses. A bully in his relationships. And a demagogue in his politics. 

He did not have ideas. He had bigotries. He did not have a coalition. He had crowds. He did not have character. He had a quality of confident shamelessness, the kind that offered his followers permission to be shameless, too. 

Mr. Stephens’ essay begins with the self-serving assumption that Trump appeared out the unknown depths of American political irrationalism. Instead of being the monster, that forty years of the ascent and victory, of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, and its toxic effects on the Middle and Working Classes. Mr. Stephens being one of peddlers of that political/economic snake oil.Reading all of Mr. Stephens’ essay, or more appropriately a riff on The Bill of Attainder, as he adds to his cast of mendacious actors, and the politically virtuous, that veers into Political Melodrama. Tinged with echoes of Saints and Sinners: Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, the precursors of American Moralizing. With the bit between his teeth, Stephens is at full gallop! 

Andrew Sullivan January 8, 2021 

Headline: This Is The Face Of The GOP Now 

Sub-headline: The descent from conservatism to nihilism is now complete. 

For anyone with eyes not blinded by tribalism or ears deafened by denial, what happened in Washington this week was always going to happen.  

Trump’s character and profound psychological deformation always, always meant he would not relinquish power without an almighty struggle. We elected an instinctual tyrant, preternaturally incapable of understanding the give and take of democratic politics, for whom losing in any contest threatens the core of his very being, and who has no effective control over the roiling emotions that course through his thickened arteries. 

Some of us were ridiculed for saying from the very beginning that there would have to be some kind of violence to remove him, if he were to lose the next election. We still are. We’re called victims of TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome, as if this were not the only sane position when a delusional, malignant, tyrant-wannabe has an entire political party in his grip, aided and abetted by tribal media tools. For myself, from the very beginning, having examined Trump’s past and observed his plain-as-day pathology, I just couldn’t envision how this figure could psychologically, voluntarily ever leave the Oval Office. Every single day of his presidency has confirmed this. He has blown through every guardrail against presidential abuse that exists. 

Trump is now and always has been delusional. He lives in an imaginary world. His insistence that he won the last election in a “landslide” is psychologically indistinguishable from his declaration on his first day that his Inaugural crowd was larger than his predecessor’s. For four years, the actual evidence did not matter. It still doesn’t. Any rumor that helps him, however ludicrous, is true; every cold fact that hurts him, however trivial or banal, doesn’t exist. For four years as president, any advisor who told him the truth, rather than perpetuating his delusions, had an immediate expiration date. For four years, an army of volunteer propagandists knowingly disseminated his insane, cascading torrent of lies. 

… 

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/this-the-face-of-the-gop-now

Unlike Mr. Stephens, Mr. Sullivan is at immediate full gallop,  as if the reader were a rider on a runaway horse, such is Sullivan’s polemical screech, at full celerity. Note that further on in his essay, he presents himself as the victim of doubters, it is, and has been a nearly formulaic rhetorical stance!  

The reader is presented with a mere 1830 words, for the subscriber to his blog. The succinct is utterly foreign territory to this writer.  I’ll just quote his two concluding paragraphs stepped, if not marinated in the moralizing rhetoric of Johnathan Edwards, as it has evolved in American political/religious discourse, carefully manicured for the political present. 

I can’t see this happening without a split, or an open internecine struggle. If the result is a deeper commitment to an ideology of stab-in-the-back neo-fascism inspired by a seditionist president-in-exile, then the GOP needs to be burned to the ground. But if someone can emerge who can marshal the ideas that helped the GOP make gains in the House last year, and excommunicate the seditionists and bigots and fanatics, then we have something to build on.

Joe Biden has a massive task ahead of him, but this week may help him find common ground with those Republican Senators who have begun to understand that the forces they have unleashed and enabled are deeply dangerous to the entire project of self-government in America. Since his election victory, Biden has struck the right note every time the country has needed him to. Steer us back toward a sane center, Mr President-elect. Save the soul of this teetering, torn remnant of a republic, before we lose it for good.

Rod Dreher January 8, 2021

Headline: The Left’s Reichstag Fire

In 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler took power, a Dutch communist allegedly started a fire in the German Reichstag building. Hitler used this act as a pretext to begin seizing dictatorial powers. The term “Reichstag fire” in popular culture refers to an event, possibly a false flag (historians can’t agree on whether or not the Reichstag fire was started by a lone communist, a communist acting with others, or was a false flag by the Nazis) that serves as a pretext for repression.

If you are only just now coming to this blog via social media, you should know that I have been a sharp critic of the Stop The Steal movement from the beginning — you can look it up on this site — and that I am disgusted and appalled by what happened on Capitol Hill yesterday. Yesterday, I predicted that the Left and the liberal Establishment would use the failed Beer Belly Putsch as an opportunity to begin to implement the rudiments of a social credit system, and to otherwise marginalize and suppress right-of-center discourse and people.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/left-reichstag-fire-soft-totalitarianism-social-credit-system-live-not-by-lies/

Mr. Dreher resorts to the Reichstag Fire, Oliver D’Arcy, BLM, Glenn Greenwald and other cast members, that swells into an even longer essay, than Sullivan’s with ‘updates’ that exhausts the hyperbolic, and the readers patience !

Political Cynic

On January 03, 2021 Mr. Luce issued a stern warning about the Fed, and its toxic effects, the exacerbation ‘inequality’, a la Piketty?

https://www.ft.com/content/bcb8d4d9-ca6d-45b7-aafc-9e9ecf672a5b

Late yesterday Mr. Luce faced the grim reality of that ‘inequality’ , and its toxic effects, on large segment of an American population? Anarchy abetted by the D.C. Police, as the video on Social Media makes abundantly clear. Where were the Armed Troops of the BLM demonstrations in D.C. ? Even Mr. Luce manages to make that same inquiry.

Mr. Luce’s scolding of these ‘deplorables’, and its leader Trump, in which he conveniently elides the transgenerational effects of the Neo-Liberalism, he and his newspaper have championed, since the rise of Thatcher/Reagan. The rhetorical strategy that Luce adopts is to focus on the ‘Evils of Trump’ as the root cause, attempting to confront the effects of a more than forty year attachment, to the Hayek/Mises/Friedman amalgam of Neo-Liberalism, is simply an impossible thought, to even entertain. The immerseration of both the Working Class and the Middle Class is the result of this forty year Social/Political Engineering. The ‘as if ‘: Trump just appeared out of the American Political Swamp sui generis , instead being a product of this economic/political collapse.

The Whole of America’s Political Class birthed Trump, with the help of political scribblers like Mr. Luce and his newspaper.

The patient reader, will confront, at the end of Mr. Luce’s essay, Mitt Romney, Mr. 47% , as the paradigmatic Political Hero, made by Mattel.

As senators were being hurried to safety by Capitol Hill police, Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, who has been a rare Republican voice warning of Mr Trump’s authoritarianism, yelled to GOP colleagues: “This is what you’ve gotten.” He was right.

Agree with him or not, Mr Romney speaks for the party that used to care about the US constitution, law and order, America’s standing in the world, and civility in politics. Those who have thrown their lot in with Mr Trump are now tied to his mob. They may not have expected events to turn quite so dark. But that was the gamble they took. As John F Kennedy said in his own inaugural address: “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”

https://www.ft.com/content/e40c82d5-491c-40a9-9b85-5060becdba26

Political Skeptic

How can the reader resist Mr. Ganesh’s adoration of the literary capon, and American Dandy, as conceived by Walt Disney, Tom Wolfe? I received a copy of ‘A Man in Full’ from a friend, who missed sending in her reply card to The Book of the Month Club. This book had the page count and heft of my copy of ‘War and Peace’ .
It was a better sleep inducer than Lunesta or Kubrick’s ‘2001’! Yet Mr. Ganesh thinks it a document about Mr. Wolfe’s prescience, his narration of Wolfe as seer, or perhaps Prophet?

A Man in Full considered the city, and the state that it anchors, as America’s potential future. Some 23 years on, Georgia continues to grow in population as several other states shrink. Once uncompetitively Republican, it is now the nation’s political schism in miniature.

Nowhere was closer-fought in the US presidential election two months ago. If the Democrats take both of its Senate seats on Tuesday, to go with Joe Biden’s win there, imagine the symbolism. Here is a party going with the grain of the nation’s evolution.

This ‘evolution’ is in fact a question of demographics, not of an imagined or fictional state of ‘going with the grain’ . One of the facts of American life is that regions of the country experience the boom and bust of growth and decline, that are dependent on economic factors: Manufacturing was once ascendant, now its is Silicone Valley, Georgia has become the home of Movie Studios :

https://euescreengems.com/five-georgia-movie-television-studios-partner-form-georgia-studio-alliance/

This provides mere backdrop to Mr. Ganesh political insight on a ‘divided politics‘. The ‘as if’ here, is that it were not the case in an inconvenient ‘past’, as viewed in the political present!

But not, it is worth saying, a party with a suddenly free hand. A split Senate, with the vice-president casting decisive votes, does not assure Mr Biden a radical presidency. His chances of that waned when the “blue wave” of Congressional gains failed to materialise in November. His subsequent nominations to the executive — their mildness, their familiarity — admit as much. His flirtations with the left are just a few months old but feel a century ago. 

The usual Ganesh ‘maps of misreading’s’ topped with the political fiction of Biden’s ‘flirtations with the left’. As yet the ‘Progressive Wing of the Party’ is not represented in any of the Biden choices!

I was wrong about the ‘flirtations with the left’ ? but note this is contingent on whether the Democrats win in Georgia!

Headline: Joe Biden Was Against $2,000 Checks. After Enormous Pressure, He’s Reluctantly Changing His Tune.

Sub-headline: Joe Biden is no friend to progressive politics of any kind. But after constant pressure, the president-elect has changed his stance on $2,000 survival checks if Georgia Democrats win.

After weeks of progressive pressure, President-elect Joe Biden on Monday promised to immediately deliver $2,000 survival checks to millions of Americans if Georgia Democratic senate candidates Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff win their races this week. The comments come a month after Biden reportedly told congressional Democrats to accept stimulus legislation that included no checks.

“One state can chart the course — not just for the next four years, but for the next generation,” Biden said in a speech in Atlanta on Monday night. “By electing Jon and the Reverend you can make an immediate difference in your own lives, the lives of people all across this country because their election will put an end to the block in Washington on that $2,000 stimulus check, that money that will go out the door immediately to people who are in real trouble.”

Biden’s shift comes only a month after he helped convince congressional Democrats to support stimulus legislation that did not include the checks, according to the New York Times. At the time, Biden suggested he did not oppose checks, but he pushed Democrats to accept a deal without them, raising concerns that he may revert to his past support for budget austerity.

…

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/joe-biden-survival-checks-covid-19-georgia-elections

What follows in the next 642 words is nothing akin to Mr. Ganesh’s literary hero Mr. Wolfe- no Pop Fizz! The recitation of political possibilities, impediments to action, time, and the persons, and political factions that might impede the Biden Politics of Redemption, rather than Mr. Ganesh’s ‘Mr. Biden a radical presidency’, in the wake of the overheated actions and rhetoric of the 2020 election campaigns. The reader can’t deny Mr. Ganesh talent as an evocative stylist, but note the final two paragraphs of his essay are striking both in argument and style. Perhaps he is riffing on the good grey Walter Lippmann?

America’s bifurcation, once it feeds into legislative numbers and conduct, puts paid to grand schemes. Voters in the middle find themselves in the oddest of predicaments: scandalised by the viciousness of politics and yet served by its results.

“Moderate”, to be clear, is not a synonym for “good”. This time last year, immoderate measures against the coronavirus pandemic would have saved lives. Splitting the difference on Mr Trump’s attempt to stay in office would be a nonsense. Equidistance from opposing arguments is no guarantor of sound policy. It is with surprise, then, not elation, that we should record this oddity of modern politics. Our era is one of extreme sentiments and loyalties. It is not always one of extreme outcomes.

https://www.ft.com/content/d12d2c97-4afa-485b-8fe1-0f2383985160

Political Reporter

‘Its the Fed stupid’ complete with a ‘Formula’, a la Piketty? Mr. Luce lives in the Financial Times bubble, in which the earthquake and devastation of the Crash of 2008 didn’t even register. His appointed task, being one of the barkers selling the ‘snake oil’ of Neo-Liberalism. 

The History that Mr. Luce attempts to white wash the rise of Thatcher/Reagan and their successors New Labour and New Democrats: the harbingers of a disaster that continues in waves of political/cultural despair that produced the Populists, that is at the root of Mr. Luce’s exercise in self-serving misdirection. The reader will recall that the Randian Fundamentalist Greenspan ran the Fed, wreathed in laurel.

So Mr. Luce pointing to the Fed as the culprit is misdirection employed by the salesmen whose ‘product’ turned to shit! 

Sincerely,

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/bcb8d4d9-ca6d-45b7-aafc-9e9ecf672a5b

(Added January 4, 2021)

Mr. Luce’s sudden concern for ‘wealth inequality’ is here linked to threat to ‘American political stability’ : more of the shadow of Piketty ?

The response to critics is the same today as it was after the 2008 crisis: that the Fed is doing whatever it takes to prevent a depression. But the risk is that each new chapter tightens a doom loop in which the US sovereign must eventually reckon with the ever-widening class of risk it is underwriting. America’s national debt is already past 100 per cent of gross domestic product for the first time since the second world war. It nearly doubled after 2008 and is rising sharply again. As Japan has shown, high indebtedness need not trigger a crisis. Its national debt is well over 200 per cent cent of GDP. But as the issuer of the world’s reserve currency, the US must guard its role carefully.

The most visible threat, however, is to US political stability. The Fed’s quantitative easing boosts wealth inequality by increasing the net worth of those who own financial assets, chiefly of stocks and bonds. The top 10 per cent of Americans own 84 per cent of the country’s shares. The top 1 per cent own about half. The bottom half of Americans — the ones who have chiefly been on the frontline during the pandemic — say they own almost no stocks at all.

The final two paragraphs, completed, by his numerical rhetoric of a ‘Formula’, that equals ‘Populism‘, is representative of a particular kind of maladroit reductivism. Yet within his essay, it reads as a kind of desperation to demonstrate his expertise. It is comic, at best!

Here are the potential seeds of America’s next populist crisis. The Fed is pledging to do what it takes, while America’s elected officials seem unlikely to agree on fiscal policy. The right emphasis, as Mr Powell keeps reminding Congress, would be the other way round. Monetary policy is a blunt tool. Spending by contrast can be targeted at those who need it and help lift America’s growth potential.

Alas, the chances are that the Fed will remain “the only game in town”. This would be both a missed opportunity and pose a severe danger. The opportunity is for the US government to borrow long term funds at near zero rates and invest it in productive capacity. The danger of not doing that can be expressed in a simple equation: QE — F = P. Quantitative easing minus fiscal action equals populism.

https://www.ft.com/content/bcb8d4d9-ca6d-45b7-aafc-9e9ecf672a5b

Almost Marx

Mr. Frum, in this political instance, has discarded, for the moment, his pose as Wise Republican Elder, to embrace the garb of the Conspiracy Theorist, embraced by such luminaries as Hillary Clinton, her New Democratic allies, the Corporate News Media and its reporters, editors and its long-winded pundits. Not forgetting Television and the Internet, as the point of confluence of these Media Giants. The reader is confronted with a Frum not seen, or perhaps even remembered, by his current readership?

Mr. Frum was once the man behind the ‘Axis of Evil’ catch phrase that was the cornerstone of the Public Relations sales pitch of Bush The Younger’s ‘War on Terror’ (not to forget Cheney, Rumsfeld and ‘The Architect’ Karl Rove!) That ‘War’ has metastasized into a political cancer, that has rendered the once Republic null and void.

In Frum’s narrative the presidential power of The Pardon, has now been perverted as a tool of Trump’s political nihilism. Yet compare and contrast the pardons of Trump with those of George W. Bush:

Donald Trump:

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-donald-trump

George W. Bush:

https://www.justice.gov/pardon/gwbush-pardons

Trump’s term of office is almost at its end, and the pardons that have gained attention are:

Joseph M. Arpaio

Lewis Libby, aka Scooter Libby,

Dinesh D’Souza

Michael Robert Milken

Bernard Bailey Kerik

Michael T. Flynn

George Papadopoulos

Roger Joseph Stone Jr.

Paul J. Manafort

Charles Kushner

The power of the pardon is at the president’s discretion, according to Article 72.

Mr. Frum has forgotten about George H.W. Bush’s notorious pardons:

December 25, 1992

Headline: Bush Pardons 6 in Iran Affair, Aborting a Weinberger Trial; Prosecutor Assails ‘Cover-Up’

Lawrence E. Walsh’s Statement on the Pardons

Six years after the arms-for-hostages scandal began to cast a shadow that would darken two Administrations, President Bush today granted full pardons to six former officials in Ronald Reagan’s Administration, including former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.

Six years after the arms-for-hostages scandal began to cast a shadow that would darken two Administrations, President Bush today granted full pardons to six former officials in Ronald Reagan’s Administration, including former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger.

Mr. Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 5 on charges that he lied to Congress about his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran and efforts by other countries to help underwrite the Nicaraguan rebels, a case that was expected to focus on Mr. Weinberger’s private notes that contain references to Mr. Bush’s endorsement of the secret shipments to Iran.

In one remaining facet of the inquiry, the independent prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh, plans to review a 1986 campaign diary kept by Mr. Bush. Mr. Walsh has characterized the President’s failure to turn over the diary until now as misconduct.

Decapitated Walsh Efforts

But in a single stroke, Mr. Bush swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of Mr. Walsh’s effort, which began in 1986. Mr. Bush’s decision was announced by the White House in a printed statement after the President left for Camp David, where he will spend the Christmas holiday.

Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that “the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.”

Mr. Walsh directed his heaviest fire at Mr. Bush over the pardon of Mr. Weinberger, whose trial would have given the prosecutor a last chance to explore the role in the affair of senior Reagan officials, including Mr. Bush’s actions as Vice President.

‘Evidence of Conspiracy’

Mr. Walsh hinted that Mr. Bush’s pardon of Mr. Weinberger and the President’s own role in the affair could be related. For the first time, he

charged that Mr. Weinberger’s notes about the secret decision to sell arms to Iran, a central piece of evidence in the case against the former Pentagon chief, included “evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”

The prosecutor charged that Mr. Weinberger’s efforts to hide his notes may have “forestalled impeachment proceedings against President Reagan” and formed part of a pattern of “deception and obstruction.” On Dec. 11, Mr. Walsh said he discovered “misconduct” in Mr. Bush’s failure to turn over what the prosecutor said were the President’s own “highly relevant contemporaneous notes, despite repeated requests for such documents.”

The notes, in the form of a campaign diary that Mr. Bush compiled after the elections in November 1986, are in the process of being turned over to Mr. Walsh, who said, “In light of President Bush’s own misconduct, we are gravely concerned about his decision to pardon others who lied to Congress and obstructed official investigations.”

In an interview on the “McNeil-Lehrer Newshour” tonight, Mr. Walsh said for the first time that Mr. Bush was a subject of his investigation. The term “subject,” as it has been used by Mr. Walsh’s prosecutors, is broadly defined as someone involved in events under scrutiny, but who falls short of being a target, or a person likely to be charged with a crime. In the inquiry into the entire Iran-contra affair, a number of Government officials have been identified as subjects who were never charged with wrongdoing.

…

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/29/reviews/iran-pardon.html#1

Mr. Frum prides himself on his veracity and political uprightness, yet his essay of December 24, 2020 treats the Mueller Report as ‘Gospel’, even as Frum asks a series of what he considers to be the most pertinent questions.

The Mueller Report can take its place beside The Warren Commission, as a demonstration of the utter failure of the FBI, to do anything but engage in mythmaking fantasies, about its mastery over the forces of lawlessness. Frum acts the part that Edward Jay Epstein played in the defense of the Warren Report : his book ‘Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth’ was an apologetic, that was answered by Mark Lane’s ‘Rush to Judgement’, and signaled the demise of Arlen Specter’s preposterous ‘Magic Bullet Theory’ !

Mueller and Comey resemble characters in a Max Senate comedy, at the wrong shutter speed. Mr. Frum’s attempts to mitigate the mendacity of Trump, via Mueller, whose performance in front of the camera only emphasized that he was just a figurehead, a front man for an investigation, that had/has been eroded by its own incompetence.

Both Clinton and Trump share a delusion: Clinton, that she lost in 2016 because of ‘Russian Interference’ in the election. Trump, that he lost in 2020 due to massive voter fraud, and the destruction of ballots, by poll workers, and other nefarious actors. Note that both of these candidates are ego maniacs on a scale that is hard to imagine for we ordinary mortals. Mr. Frum’s essay helps to explain to his readers…

Political Reporter

A collection of Mr. Rachman’s geo-political speculations are instructive:

In different ways China, the US and the EU have all treated Covid-19 as a very public test of their rival approaches to governance — and as part of an international contest for prestige and influence. 

…

The obvious preliminary conclusion is that the pandemic will turn out to be an overall geopolitical win for the People’s Republic of China.

…

But politics moves in unexpected ways. Paradoxically, there is a strong case to be made that both the US and the EU may also end up being politically strengthened by Covid-19.

…

But politics moves in unexpected ways. Paradoxically, there is a strong case to be made that both the US and the EU may also end up being politically strengthened by Covid-19. And by helping to remove an erratic isolationist from the White House, the pandemic has also given the US a much better chance of preserving its status as the world’s most powerful nation.

… 

Covid-19 has also taken a terrible human and economic toll in Europe. But, in political terms, the EU followed a similar arc to the US — with near disaster giving way to an unexpected upside.

…

These paragraphs act as mere preamble to Mr. Rachman’s manufacture of a weak set of arguments , accomplished by the use of a self-serving history. With its stars, the EU and China, President Xi Jinping, assisted by walk-ons by other minor players, who add dimension to his narrative, at least that is Mr. Rachman’s hope!

Note that China is the Bad Actor in Rachman’s ‘history made to measure’ that is in fact a New Cold War Melodrama. The reader of this ‘essay’ is thought, by Rachman, not to be cognizant, of the flood of Yellow Peril propaganda, that the Corporate Press never tires of printing. These two paragraphs describe the effects of Corporate Media saturation of Yellow Peril propaganda ,and an injudicious speculation of how Chinese Geopolitical Strategists might seek comfort in Western incompetence, in its various iterations: dehumanizing these technocrats is a more sophisticated version of that Yellow Peril toxin.

…

This slump in Chinese soft power suggests that people in the countries polled are more impressed by the fact that the virus originated in China, than by Beijing’s subsequent success in stopping its spread. China’s aggressive response to any hint of international criticism — through its so-called “wolf warrior” diplomacy — has also probably been counter-productive.

Geopolitical strategists in Beijing may comfort themselves with the thought that, whatever the collateral damage Covid-19 has inflicted on China, the damage to western standing has been worse. But if the US and the EU now roll out vaccine programmes with reasonable speed and efficiency, they will begin to repair some of the economic and reputational damage they have suffered because of their handling of Covid-19.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/af3258af-651d-4ad8-9d11-21ff3498ae7f

Rachman’s final thoughts/speculations are more of the same Geostrategic chatter, with Biden as his central actor. Is this essay, in lieu, of the usual Year’s End pundit’s summation of 2020?

American Writer