StephenKMackSD's Blog

Macron, who hungers for The World Stage, is interviewed by a not just friendly   newspaper :  He ‘warned of the collapse of the EU as a ‘political project’ unless it supports stricken economies’ ! Neo-Liberalism in all its guises, from Monnet’s Cartel to Macron’s ‘Reforms’ will be/are the victims of The Pandemic! Is my rhetoric too hyperbolic?  

The Post-Industrial/Globalist Economies will make way for the resurgence of The Nation State, in its Welfare State iteration, as the means by which to save ‘ourselves’ from both the ravages of a collapsing , misbegotten Utopianism and The Pandemic? The shared fate of Humanity and all Biological Life, via the crisis quickened by The Pandemic, is bringing the benighted Neo-Liberal Age to its dead end, with breathtaking celerity.  Macron’s newest political ‘evolution’ is his advocacy for a joint virus recovery fund, that sounds like Socialism. How will Macron overcome the long held prejudice, about the Malingering Southern Tier, seems an obvious , indeed pressing, question?     

Old Socialist 

https://www.ft.com/content/d19dc7a6-c33b-4931-9a7e-4a74674da29a

The reader must agree that Mr. Ganesh has, not just a talent for hyperbole, but is a Master of that rhetorical style:

It feels rude to point out how little was expected of Harry Truman when he became US president 75 Aprils ago. He was “just” a Missouri haberdasher. He is still the last non-graduate to attain the office. After Franklin Roosevelt, who matched Albert Einstein as the man of the 20th century, snobs viewed his instalment as an act of bathos.

Truman would end up curating the second half of that century. Nato was his doing, as was Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan and the nuclear age. Perhaps a Napoleonic gift for command always lurked underneath that Everyman bonhomie. More likely, though, the world happened to be at its most pliable in 1945. Circumstances counted for more than the individual.

Harry Truman hasn’t had this kind of good press,well!, since the Convention of 1948? but then there is this:

…

Truman, a failed haberdasher turned politician, had the appearance of a meek bookkeeper. In fact, he was feisty and prone to occasional angry outbursts. His upper-South twang did not resonate with much of the country. His many detractors wrote him off as a “little man” who had been unable to deal with difficult post-World War II issues—inflation and consumer shortages, civil rights for African-Americans and a developing cold war with the Soviet Union.

In the off-year elections of 1946, Republicans had gained firm control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928. Few Democrats believed Truman could lead them to victory in the presidential race. A large group of cold war liberals—many of them organized in the new Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)—joined with other Democratic leaders in an attempt to draft America’s greatest living hero, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as their candidate. The general seemed momentarily persuadable, then quickly backed away.

…

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1948-democratic-convention-878284/

Mr. Ganesh recons the rise of Truman provoked the  ‘snobs viewed his instalment as an act of bathos.’ and ‘Circumstances counted for more than the individual.’ What is absent from Mr. Ganesh’s historical precise of Truman’s accomplishments, here referred to as ‘the nuclear age’ was Truman’s dropping of two Nuclear weapons on Hiroshima  and Nagasaki  in successive weeks. Some essential background: 

Headline: Did We Need to Drop It

By Michael R. Beschloss

Not to get lost in a history of Truman, as some kind of political touchstone for the political present, when in fact Joe Biden is, in Mr. Ganesh’s telling, that virtuous Leader born out of Circumstance. Truman was that man, even though the ADA faction of  ‘snobs’ Schlesinger, Niebuhr and Eleanor Roosevelt did some ‘window shopping’, and Ike was their choice.

Biden is most assuredly not just ‘a horse-tranquilisingly dull candidate, at once verbose and content-free,’ he is a man suffering from a completely obvious cognitive impairment. He is also the representative of the Neo-Liberal politics of the Clinton’s, that is being abandoned with an arresting celerity, driven by The Pandemic. As the death toll mounts and Capital collapses, being almost unconditionally  bailed out, by a bought and paid for Political Class.

Not to fear Mr. Ganesh abandons hyperbole, in his last paragraph, for a strategically exercised political kitsch, as he dons the guise of an oracle. 

So it could be with Mr Biden. This pandemic is not the cold war, much less a hot one, but it is the largest disruption for a generation. Next January, if the worst of it has passed, the world could go in one of two directions. The early decisions of the US will determine which. As such Mr Biden’s plans must widen from the merely curative — fumigate America of Trumpism, make bruised allies good — to the creative work of crafting a post-virus world. Perhaps it is too much to hope that an unremarkable leader can make the planet safe for globalism. But it would not be the first time. 

American Writer 

https://www.ft.com/content/cb3085e2-7ef9-11ea-82f6-150830b3b99a

Mr. Zevin’s history of the Economist offers insights on every page, but this from pages 206 and 207 is so very worthy of thinking about:

And its footnote 115: 

Political Observer

Read two of the earlier letters from William to Henry last night. The subject, art and artists recently viewed, and lividly recalled, very impressive. While William was taking the cure in Germany. When I first got the book, I made the mistake of skipping ahead, to the later letters, between the brothers, in these letters their focus was their mutual constipation problems :

American Writer

Headline: Coronavirus and the threat to US supremacy

Sub-headline: Two questions serve as a reality check on excessive American declinism

It has reached such a point that Mr. Rachman feels compelled to link to his January 3, 2011 essay at Foreign Policy titled ‘Think Again: American Decline This time it’s for real.’
Along with his collection of the other political hysterics… American Hegemony is evaporating like smoke in the face of The Pandemic!
Why not look to Political Nihilism’s Prophet in Residence Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The Decay of American Political Institutions’ from 2013?

The Decay of American Political Institutions

The de-industrialization of America was about the myth that ‘we’ were ‘Post Industrial’ & represented an ‘evolution’ in our development. Which was just a way of decimating powerful Unions, and Capital finding sources of cheap labor. The Supply Chain was/is our undoing!

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/2e8c8f76-7cbd-11ea-8fdb-7ec06edeef84

Niall Ferguson, in his Sunday Times essay of April 12 , 2020 , features John  Maynard Keynes as its main protagonist.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/dont-bet-on-a-quick-global-resurrection-z553527tx

Keynes appears first an a negotiator of the Treaty of Versailles, who collapses from overwork or The Spanish Flu. Yet Ferguson’s animus to Keynes dates from this 1995 essay in The Spectator:

Click to access let-germany-keep-its-nerve.pdf

Mr. Ferguson makes the charge that Keynes’ sexual attraction to German negotiator Carl Melchior of the Versailles Treaty was determinative:

Even before he arrived as a Treasury representative at Versailles, Keynes believed that any reparations imposed on Germany should be on the low side. There is, however, no question that a series of meetings with Carl Melchior, one of the German representatives at the armistice and peace negotiations, added a vital emo- tional dimension to his position.

Melchior was a partner in the Hamburg bank M.M. Warburg & Co. — ‘a very small man,’ as Keynes described him, `exquisitely clean, very well and neatly dressed, with a high stiff collar . . . The line where his hair ended bound his face and forehead in a very sharply defined and rather noble curve. His eyes gleam. . . , with extraordinary sorrow.’

Ferguson repeats Keynes’ sexual partners year by year, and a confession made by Keynes to Virginia Woolf :

It is not too much to infer from these emotive phrases some kind of sexual attraction. After all, this was a time in Keynes’s life of considerable homosexual activity: a bizarrely meticulous list of sexual encounters from 1915 suggests that he had at least eight male partners in 1911 (including liftboy of Vauxhall’), four in 1912, nine in 1913, five in 1914 and seven in 1915. In the immediate post-war years, he had at least two homosexual relation- ships. This explains Virginia Woolf s amused but not incredulous reaction when, recalling his ‘curious intimacy’ with Melchior some years later, Keynes declared openly that ‘in a sort of way, I was in love with him’.

Homosexual promiscuity and a confession of an ‘unrequited love’ ? by Keynes frames , the remainder of Ferguson’s essay, while his 1995 essay is devoted to portraying Keynes as a collabo of the Germans, in thrall to a disingenuous Melchior. 

Brad DeLong supplies the PDF of the essay, above . And here is the link to the original article, behind a pay wall: 

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/22nd-april-1995/21/let-germany-keep-its-nerve

After this clear demonstration of Mr. Ferguson’s sexual prejudice and his adaptation of the less salacious aspects of Keynes’ life, career and his Economics, his essay becomes a defense of Conservative Economists via this question, adapting the title of Keynes’ most infamous/famous work:

Who among today’s great economists will write The Economic Consequences of the Plague?  

Next in order of appearance in his essay: the US Congress, the arch-liberal Paul Krugman, Kenneth Rogoff — one of Harvard’s few conservative professors —,Larry Summers, who lies somewhere between those two ideologically, followed by this declaration:

I am with Rogoff and Summers. This is a disaster, the economic consequences of which cannot be offset by even the biggest monetary and fiscal splurge. Over the past three weeks 16.8 million Americans — slightly over 10% of the workforce — have filed for unemployment benefits. According to our best estimates at my macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm Greenmantle, GDP has declined by even more and is currently running at 75%-82% of its level in the last quarter of last year.  

What follows is the protracted Doom-Saying of an Economic Historian, framed by his fealty to the economic wisdom, of his newly minted alliance between Rogoff and Summers,  followed by this return to the kitsch of his opening sentence.

Opening sentence: 

‘Easter never felt more Eastery.’

Closing paragraph:

In short, I can’t honestly wish my readers a happy Easter. In the Bible, Christ’s resurrection happens in just three days. The resurrection of the world economy will take far longer. I only wish Keynes could rise from his eternal rest to tell us exactly how long.

Note that Keynes, from 1995 to the political present, is transmogrified, by Ferguson imaginings, from a promiscuous homosexual, given to reporting his sexual liaisons in his Diaries, to a German callabo, to a modern day Tiresias. The reader should call this by its name Political/Economic Fabulism !

Political Observer

Toro1963

Thank you for your comment.

Why have I posted these  examples of the  Financial Times reportage on the the Argentine Question? Macri’s ‘Austerity Lite’ was a dismal failure, as have all other instances of this Neo-Liberal economic sadism! Although Macri’s was the Soft-Core version. The Greeks are the most glaring example of this. Don’t lecture me using ‘they got what they deserved’ or that ‘Lazy  Southern Tier’ Economic Calvinism, where only The Elect will find salvation!

What were the factors that led to the near free fall of the peso? Framed not in the patios of Economic Technocrats’ rhetoric of obfuscation, via graphic expressions, instead of the clear language of sound argument.   

The reader can only marvel at the denial that the defenders of Macri’s political/economic intervention express,while de Kirchner and Fernández are now in office. If one takes Macri as an heroic actor fighting the dragon of Peronism – the melodrama collapses, Macri was just an usher, to the de Kirchner and Fernández spendthrifts.  

On the question of Mr. Mander’s reporting: where does he fall short? If he is a Journalist, rather than the author of kind of carefully massaged propaganda, where were/are the opposition voices, even just a mention of these otherwise absent voices, would have added to a necessary verisimilitude to his reportage. As well as establishing the Financial Times as publication almost worthy of their trust. 

Headline: Argentine peso falls sharply for a second day

Sub-headline:Turmoil continues to rock currency after strong showing by populist candidate in primary vote

Colby Smith in New York and Benedict Mander in Buenos Aires AUGUST 13 2019

https://www.ft.com/content/c3813244-bdd2-11e9-89e2-41e555e96722

The above news story re-worked:

Headline: Argentine peso falls sharply for a second day

Sub-headline: Turmoil continues to rock currency after strong showing by populist candidate in primary vote

Colby Smith in New York and Benedict Mander in Buenos Aires AUGUST 13 2019

https://www.ft.com/content/56fca4e0-be96-11e9-b350-db00d509634e

The political trajectory of Prat-Gay, ‘the former JPMorgan currency strategist’:

Headline: Finance chief Prat-Gay asked to rework his magic

Sub-headline: Fathoming depths of Argentina’s economic woes is added challenge

Benedict Mander in Buenos Aires NOVEMBER 29 2015

https://www.ft.com/content/70bcba74-9685-11e5-9228-87e603d47bdc

*****

Headline: Argentina finance minister axed on economic uncertainty

Sub-headline: President requests resignation of Prat-Gay due to ‘differences’ in
department

Benedict Mander in Buenos Aires DECEMBER 26 2016

https://www.ft.com/content/2d82da08-cb8c-11e6-864f-20dcb35cede2

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/2fab03a5-ed35-489e-8f24-980c488d1ec6?commentID=ff6272ec-3d1a-469b-af3b-2141e27e5b6f

Should the regular reader of The Financial Times remind Mr. Mander and his employer of his September 1, 2019 essay, co-authored with Michael Stott ?

Headline: Argentina: how IMF’s biggest ever bailout crumbled under Macri

Sub-headline: With the Peronists waiting in the wings, the country is struggling to avoid a ninth sovereign default

https://www.ft.com/content/5cfe7c34-ca48-11e9-a1f4-3669401ba76f

What reader can forget the supplied characterizations, and the words, from convicted criminal Christine Legarde ?

Its decision on the bailout’s future will be taken without the person who was instrumental in winning approval for the rescue: Christine Lagarde, who has stepped down from the IMF’s top job to lead the European Central Bank.

Ms Lagarde is unapologetic about her leading role in lending to Argentina. “We were the only game in town,” she told the Financial Times in July. “There was nobody else at the time to invest in the recovery process through which the government had decided to engage, and given the size of the challenge, we had to go big.”

Or this paragraph about the mendacious spendthrift who now shares power with Alberto Fernández. With all of her crimes, why isn’t Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in jail? According to the Party Line on de Kirchner, she was guilty, at the least, of gross malfeasance.   

The last 70 years of Argentina’s history have been punctuated with regular economic crises, and Mr Macri’s inauguration in December 2015 was no different. His Peronist predecessor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, had emptied the government coffers, signing decrees to increase spending by an extra $27bn in her final days in power. Inflation was running close to 25 per cent, foreign exchange reserves were dangerously low and generous subsidies for utilities and transport were draining the budget.  

What is unsurprising is the clutch of quotations from the ‘Economic Technocrats’ in the April 12, 2020 article by Mr. Mander and Mr. Smith: 

Carlos Abadi of Decision Boundaries, a financial advisory firm, 

Patrick Esteruelas, head of research at Emso Asset Management.

Gordon Bowers, an emerging markets research analyst at Columbia Threadneedle

Eduardo Levy Yeyati, a local economist, ( A Senior Fellow at Brookings )

From a collection of Capitalist hirelings, and a Brookings ‘Senior Fellow’ the reader obtains respectable bourgeois analysis, riffing on the Chicago Boys?  Under the leadership of both Neo-Liberals and ‘Center Leftists’ Argentina can’t seem to pay its creditors. To frame it paternalistically, should Argentina be treated like a spendthrift relative, that needs to be rescued from their own carelessness? Or is the International System of Capitalism, IMF, World Bank etc. and its  structures the root cause of these ‘Defaults’?

Political Observer

P. S. I have forgotten a very important point I wanted to make, that Macri was the first to ‘Default’, or should I use the preferred descriptor of the Financial Times ‘crumbled’ ?   

https://www.ft.com/content/2fab03a5-ed35-489e-8f24-980c488d1ec6

You might want to give that Helen Lewis Corbyn Anti-Semitism essay/defamation another ‘editorial look’!

Headline: Labour antisemitism investigation will not be sent to equality commission

Sub-headline: A report found factional hostility towards Jeremy Corbyn amongst former senior officials contributed to “a litany of mistakes”.

An extensive internal investigation into the way Labour handled antisemitism complaints will not be submitted to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, after an intervention by party lawyers.

The 860-page report, seen by Sky News, concluded factional hostility towards Jeremy Corbyn amongst former senior officials contributed to “a litany of mistakes” that hindered the effective handling of the issue.

…

https://news.sky.com/story/labour-antisemitism-investigation-will-not-be-sent-to-equality-commission-11972071

StephenKMackSD

Dr Ian Wellens letter is just a bit too polite. It lacks something like a necessary combativeness ! I am an uncouth American. On the rise of Keir Starmer, a look at part of an American context, might offer insights into British politics, via Helen Lewis’ carefully massaged essay in The Atlantic ?

Headline: Healing the Rift With Britain’s Jews

Sub-headline: The U.K. Labour Party’s new leader wants to disown Jeremy Corbyn’s toxic legacy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/04/uk-labour-keir-starmer-jeremy-corbyn-anti-semitism/609685/

Lewis is ‘ the former deputy editor of the New Statesman’ and ‘a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic’.

Also see The New Statesman essay by Patrick Maguire:

Headline: Keir Starmer: The sensible radical

Sub-headline: The former human rights lawyer aspires to unite not only the troubled Labour Party but the country. But who is he? And what does he really want?

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/03/keir-starmer-sensible-radical

Its telling that the Anti-Corbyn propaganda, that has been the business of Margaret Hodge, Jonathan Freedland,The Economist and The Financial Times etc. will now be imported via Helen Lewis’ essay in The Atlantic.  To bring this advocacy/apologetic for Kier Starmer, to an American audience. Note too, that Lewis advertises herself as a Feminist, which will help sell the notion that she is on ‘the right side’ , as she embroiders on her theme of Corbyn’s Anti-Semitism. Tailored for an American audience, used to the hysterics of Rachael Maddow, Mika and Joe and the rest of MSNBC & CNN coterie of News Readers.

The central problem with both the Helen Lewis and Patrick Maguire,  and their concept/practice of Corbyn’s Anti-Semitism, is that it ignores its roots in advocacy for Palestinian Rights, and it weapon of choice BDS.  Much too inconvenient, to the campaign of defamation based upon the construction of a self-interested fiction. An ongoing investigation into Corbyn, leads Lewis to speculate, laced with hope, that Corbyn might well be expelled from the Party!

Mr. Maguire’s essay is more adroitly focused on Starmer’s political rise,  with the Anti-Semitism issue seamlessly woven into his personal and political life, and there twin  evolution’s . This essay tailored to a British audience.  Helen Lewis’s essay is the purest kind of propaganda, for those familiar with Corbyn’s rise and fall, it is crude and lacks the journalistic style, the political/literary sophistication of Maguire.

Keir Starmer’s rise is simply the reassertion of New Labour, and its Neo-Liberal imperatives. The fight against Anti-Semitism, in the Party, is in fact about purging the Corbyn faction from the party. As reported by Maguire the numbers at Starmer’s appearances are not the numbers that Corbyn attracted.

Political Observer