StephenKMackSD's Blog

The Posh Boys & Girls @TheEconomist  now find it necessary to address the vexing question of ‘inequality’ ? In this  very narrow political/historical context:

Headline: The Mittelstand’s corporate success comes at a cost

Sub-headline: Germany’s rising current-account surplus has been accompanied by wider income inequality

…

The imf has long wrung its hands at the savings glut. Last month, in its annual report on global imbalances, it repeated a warning that Germany’s current-account surplus was “substantially” stronger than warranted by economic fundamentals. In a separate paper it presented evidence that the growing current-account surplus was accompanied by increasing inequality (see chart). The link, it says, is high corporate profitability.

Around the turn of the millennium Germany’s exports took off, as rapidly growing emerging economies started to buy its high-value-added manufacturing goods in bulk. That, together with stingier welfare benefits and government policies encouraging wage restraint, helped push up profits. But corporate success did nothing for poorer households because of a highly unequal distribution of wealth.

…

To localize the political phenomenon of ‘inequality’ is to denature its global effects!

But note that it isn’t The Economist’s Posh Boys and Girls making the claim of ‘increased inequality,‘ but the IMF! In sum its  Germany’s  ‘stingier welfare benefits and government policies encouraging wage restraint, helped push up profits.’, Austerity  is the culprit? The Virtuous Northern Tier Mythology of 2014 is kaput!

…

Germany’s corporate wealth tends to be kept in the family. The country has relatively few listed firms: 60% of corporate assets belong to privately owned firms. Many are family-run. Even among the publicly listed ones two-thirds are family-controlled, and controlling shareholders hold larger stakes than those in, say, Britain or Sweden. This leaves less equity for outsiders.

…

The rich tend to spend a smaller share of their incomes than the poor. German tycoons are also thriftier than their peers elsewhere. Though Germany’s authorities tend to blame an ageing society for its high savings rate, the true culprits appear to be the moguls of the Mittelstand.

But the ‘solution’ to this problem is framed in the notion of an ‘economic model is in need of repair.’ 

…

Government officials say that some of these trends are reversing. The labour market has tightened, allowing wages to rise and profits to fall. But the imf reckons that in order for disposable household incomes to regain their 2005 share of gdp, wage growth would have to outstrip nominal gdpgrowth by 1.5 percentage points for the next decade—a tall order.

Policy could speed things along: tax relief for low-income households to reduce the concentration of income, and property and inheritance-tax reform to reduce the concentration of wealth. But that would mean recognising that a much-vaunted economic model is in need of repair.

…

Looking back to 2014  a short review, that appeared in The Economist, was Anti-Piketty Propaganda, in service to a denial that ‘inequality’ was problem in need of being addressed. It was both Occupy Wall Street and Piketty that focused on the vexing question of inequality. Not the IMF nor The Economist!

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2014/05/04/thomas-pikettys-capital-summarised-in-four-paragraphs

As rebuttal to this short essay, look to the first of a set of essays considering Piketty’s Capital, titled ‘Reading “Capital”: Introduction, that is less framed in political hysteria- the fact that these essays were, to say the least, more considered, written by R.A. , at least at the time of my reading, proves that sometimes honesty trumps ideological fixations? The links below are from 2014.

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/02/27/reading-capital-introduction

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/03/06/reading-capital-introduction-continued

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/03/13/reading-capital-chapter-1

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/03/20/reading-capital-chapter-2

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/03/27/reading-capital-chapters-3-and-4

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/04/04/reading-capital-chapters-5-and-6

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/04/11/reading-capital-chapters-7-8-and-9

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/04/17/reading-capital-chapters-10-11-and-12

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/04/25/reading-capital-part-4-conclusion-and-recap

Old Socialist

P.S. Also, consider  John Cassidy’s  New Yorker essay titled ‘Piketty’s Inequality Story in Six Charts’ :

https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequality-story-in-six-charts

 

Headline: America is failing the Hong Kong test

Sub-headline: Indifference to pro-democracy protests highlights degeneration of US foreign policy

Mr. Luce frames his lament, maladroitly, in the deeply held notion of American Exceptionalism. Except that this version of exceptionalism renders the execrable facts offered by Hiroshima Nagasaki ,carpet bombing and Agent Orange in Indochina, the betrayal of the Kurds by Bush The Elder, the use of white phosphorus in Fallujah, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and the ‘War on Terror’ that has metastasized to at least eight fronts, that we know about: in sum, Mr. Luce lives and works in The United States of Amnesia, so the record that Mr. Luce finds politically irresistible, is one of self-willed  forgetfulness.

Hong Kong’s political position , has since its June 30/July 1, 1997 reversion to Chinese sovereignty, and the mass exodus before and after this ‘reversion’, establishes in the thought of the reader, a conflict conceived in terms of a political melodrama, at least according to Corporate Media.

The long democratic tradition of Hong Kong as a ‘Crown Colony‘: the demonstrators have every reason to openly rebel against a dictatorial Beijing:  the long tradition of Hong Kong is democratic, and its citizens will not be bullied! What  role do Western NGO’s  have in exacerbating this crisis, is an absolutely valid question. Where are, what could only be called ‘mediators’, in what China might call an internal political matter?  This melodrama is being played out in full view of the world, by way of Smart Phones produced in the sweatshops of Asia/China. I’m conflicted about the protests, as portrayed in Corporate Media, as a political melodrama that features Chinese thugs beating protesters, that evolves, in its telling, into a political morality play.

Trump is not the betrayer of the toxic myth of American Exceptionalism, nor is he  its fulfillment, but one of its many denouements !

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/1d76126a-bedc-11e9-b350-db00d509634e

______________________________________________________________

@naoyb @StephenKMackSD

Thank you Bea sam for your comment: on the ‘Democratic Tradition’ as viewed by the demonstrators, which is what is central to this political crisis, as viewed by Luce :‘Hong Kong would continue its capitalist system and way of life for 50 years after 1997.’ To Thatcher Capitalism and Democracy were synonymous.

…

The Basic Law was drafted on the basis of the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed between the Chinese and British governments on 19 December 1984, represented by Premier Zhao Ziyang and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher respectively. The Basic Law stipulates the basic policies of China regarding the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. As stipulated in the Joint Declaration and following the “one country, two systems” principle, socialism practised in mainland China would not be extended to Hong Kong. Instead, Hong Kong would continue its capitalist system and way of life for 50 years after 1997.^[4]

The Hong Kong Basic Law sets out the sources of law, the relationship between the Hong Kong SAR and the Central Government, the fundamental rights and freedoms of Hong Kong residents, and the structure and functions of the branches of local government, and it provides for the amendment and interpretation of the Basic Law. The courts of Hong Kong are given the power to review acts of the executive or legislature and declare them invalid if they are inconsistent with the Basic Law.

The source of authority for the Basic Law is disputed. Chinese legal scholar Rao Geping argues that the Basic Law is a purely domestic legislation deriving its authority from the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China,^[5] while some legal scholars arguing that the Basic Law derives its authority directly from the Sino-British Joint Declaration.^{[citation needed]} The argument is relevant in that it affects the level of authority that the PRC has in making any changes to the Basic Law. It is also essential in determining the Hong Kong courts’ jurisdiction in issues related to the PRC domestic legislations.

…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Basic_Law

On the vexing question of (Did Beijing hand down a dictate to HK)? The demonstrators view themselves as the victims of Beijing, so the point provides the ‘why’ of Luce’s lamentations about an ebbing Pax Americana! These demonstrations provide the fertile ground for his polemic against Trump as betrayer of a hallowed American Tradition.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

Mr.  Torres’ essay doesn’t even begin to offer something like a diagnosis, for the failure of Macri’s failed ‘Austerity Lite’. Awash in Econo-Speak , a stand-in for obfuscation.  Or is this offered in lieu of an actual diagnosis. In sum, this is how it ‘should’ have happened?

…
It is important to note that the fund considers Argentina’s debt to be “sustainable but without a high probability”. In IMF jargon, this implies the possibility of restructuring public debt (or “reprofiling” it: a kind of “light” restructuring). To avoid this happening, the government needs to count on the private investor’s willingness to refinance all their claims at maturity.
…

In the stuttering comic jargon of the Technocrat: ‘“reprofiling” it: a kind of “light” restructuring’.

Macri is a failure. This ‘stunning declaration’ in the pages of The Financial Times: the home of Macri advocacy/apologetics.    

His reformist political campaign emphasized the fight against corruption, public investment, and Argentina’s new “integration into the world”. But the electorate felt more closely touched by the vivid arguments coming from their pockets.

https://www.ft.com/content/18fe4dfe-bdb7-11e9-9381-78bab8a70848

Political Observer

The Greek Chorus in this latest installment of The Argentine Political Crisis, 2019 Edition is made up of Economic Technocrats, representing those Investment Houses, left high and dry with the election of  Néstor Kirchner and his successor Cristina and their ‘Economic Populism’. Nothing spooks these ‘experts’ like any possible return of a De Kirchner to power! The membership of the chorus does not evoke surprise

‘said Greg Lesko, a portfolio manager at Deltec Asset Management.

‘Eddy Sternberg, a portfolio manager for emerging markets debt at Boston-based asset manager’

‘said Paul McNamara, a fund manager focused on emerging markets at GAM.Bloomberg data show’

‘said Tiago Severo, economist at Goldman Sachs.’

‘warned Yerlan Syzdykov, the global head of emerging markets at Amundi Asset Management.’

What grabs the readers attention is the graphic of the Argentine Century Bond losing its value!

What can the reader make of the fact that the Argentine peso went into near free fall, less that a year and a half after Macri election? Or that Pratt-Gay was fired in December of 2016.

Headline:Argentina finance minister axed on economic uncertainty 

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

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

That Macri’s Austerity Lite didn’t work is a thought that will never occur to this newspaper’s editors  nor its ‘reporters’ .

If the reader is looking for a bit more doom and gloom she need only look to this Andrés Oppenheimer essay from July 31, 2019:

Headline:Argentina will become a hopeless country if Cristina Fernandez wins

Argentina’s populist former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner — who is nominally running for vice-president, but is the indisputable No. 1 on her ticket — is leading in most polls for the Aug. 11 primaries, and for the October presidential elections.

If her ticket wins and ousts the current president, Maurcio Macri, Argentina will sink into an even deeper economic crisis.

That’s my conclusion after getting internal statistics from international financial institutions. They confirm what some independent Argentine economists have been saying for a long time.

The figures show that Argentina is an unviable country — a nation that spends much more than it produces. They also show that the bulk of the country’s current economic hardship is a legacy of the governments of late President Nestor Kirchner (2003-2007) and, his widow, Cristina Fernandez (2007-2015.)

…

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/andres-oppenheimer/article233335402.html

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/e135af72-bcf1-11e9-89e2-41e555e96722

Headline:Business must prepare for aggression by states

Sub-headline: Companies should consider participating in military exercises

A hireling from  RUSI (https://rusi.org/) Elisabeth Braw advocates what is ,in sum, Fascism: the vital connection between National Security States and their suppliers of weapons of war, and the technologies to wage that war/wars against ‘The Enemy’. First in order of priority is Russia and then China: the future of humanity is to wage war against our enemies. Huntington, in his manifesto, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ provides the paranoid template, that looks upon the capacious category of The Other as the enemy!
Major General Mats Engman provides a neutral  sounding rhetorical stand-in for the American military power of NATO. But the readers patience is rewarded with this appearance of those ‘Russians’ by implication:

In Ukraine, Russian military activities have been mixed with disinformation campaigns and cyber attacks. They have brought down banks, media outlets and government agencies.

Ms. Braw follows this with an admonition:

Governments thus need the private sector to prepare for national security contingencies with their armed forces. Given that they would face devastating consequences if caught unprepared in a national security crisis, companies would benefit from participating.

Think of a conventional attack in combination with a range of hacks against companies, combined with seizures of commercial freighters, which would both disrupt vital supply chains. As Britain is currently discovering, supply chains are the lifeblood of the just-in-time economy: shuttling food, fuel, medicines and industrial components to where they are needed. Britain, for example, imports half of the food the country consumes. If one link in the chain goes down, it no longer functions.

In steps Rear Admiral Sverre Nordahl Engeness of the Norwegian Navy who planned the ‘Trident Juncture’ 

TRIDENT JUNCTURE WILL SHOW THE WORLD THAT NATO IS RELEVANT, UNITED AND READY TO DEFEND ITSELF IN THIS ARTICLE 5 SCENARIO, TESTING OUR COLLECTIVE DEFENCE. – Admiral James G. Foggo, Commander of Allied Joint Force Command Naples

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/157833.htm

The last walk-on features Andrew Cuomo, speaking about a ‘power outage’ that any objective source would attribute to an infrastructure, in dire need of a massive amount of both money, and time to match the needs of the 21st Century!

“We were lucky,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo said last month after engineers restored power to 72,000 New Yorkers hit by a power cut. By joining the armed forces in exercising contingencies, companies would not have to rely on luck.

The imperatives of a New Cold War is the animating force behind Ms. Braw’s polemic, and her publishers at The Financial Times.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/f05b9be2-b922-11e9-8a88-aa6628ac896c

In Andy Divine’s latest essay he puts rhetorical distance between himself as political scribbler, and these political actors: *some, others, many, we, ours, they, one. 

Andy’s political desperation expresses itself in the second part of his essay by resorting to Gore Vidal, Patrick Buchanan’s  A Republic, Not an Empire  and  Cullen Murphy’s Are We Rome?’ But note the publication date of Mr. Murphy’s polemic of 2007!

Tom Holland attempts to answer Andy’s burning question with his essay:

Headline: America Is Not Rome. It Just Thinks It Is

…

The conviction that Trump is single-handedly tipping the United States into a crisis worthy of the Roman Empire at its most decadent has been a staple of jeremiads ever since his election, but fretting whether it is the fate of the United States in the twenty-first century to ape Rome by subsiding into terminal decay did not begin with his presidency. A year before Trump’s election, the distinguished Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye was already glancing nervously over his shoulder at the vanished empire of the Caesars: “Rome rotted from within when people lost confidence in their culture and institutions, elites battled for control, corruption increased and the economy failed to grow adequately.” Doom-laden prophecies such as these, of decline and fall, are the somber counterpoint to the optimism of the American Dream.

And so they have always been. At various points in American history, various reasons have been advanced to explain why the United States is bound to join the Roman Empire in oblivion. In 1919, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, The New York Times warned that the Huns and the Vandals were massing again. “The Roman Empire and its civilization were destroyed by barbarian hordes coming from the East—and it is from the east that comes the wind.” Thirty years earlier, visiting the abandoned Roman city at Baalbek in Lebanon, Brooks Adams—the great-grandson of John Adams—had been inspired by the spectacle of shattered greatness to dread that his own country’s gilded age was bound to end in similar ruin. In the decades before the Civil War, opponents of slavery repeatedly cited the fall of Rome as a warning of what might happen to a slave-owning society. In the 1830s, opponents of Andrew Jackson cast him as a dictator and a demagogue whose tyranny would inevitably bring the infant republic to share in the fate of the ancient empire. Present anxieties that Trump’s presidency portends America’s decline and fall are the contemporary expression of a tradition quite as venerable as the United States itself.

…

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/08/06/america-is-not-rome-it-just-thinks-it-is/

The links provided by Holland are revelatory!  Andy’s essay is defined by an unslakable verbosity. My patience…

Political Observer

Added August 11, 2019 8:27 AM PDT

*Here are some examples of Mr. Divine’s use of definite/indefinite pronouns that constitutes the dramatis personae of the first part of essay, with a bit more context : this strategy allows Andy to  frame these comments outside Andy’s personal agency, and places these thoughts, beliefs within the realm of nebulous others. Or that places these thought as products of a another rhetorical phantom of ‘we’.  

Upon his election, some panicked, Others saw merely, Many contended ,  so we cast around, we now have a solid record,  like ours,  It practiced, It became,its territory, It won

Political Observer

‘He has faced continued questions over his handling of anti-Semitism complaints within the party.’

The Great Lie of Corbyn’s mythical antisemitism, has been the hysterical accusation made by the New Labour faction, since Mr. Freedland’s Guardian column . With the help of Labour Friends of Israel and Ms Hodge, among the bad political actors selling this lie.  The Blairites refuse to see that their Thatcherism Lite is an abject failure . But this faction is greedy and self-serving, although Neo-Liberalism as a ideology and political system has collapsed.

Any lie might do, but Antisemitism offers so much as a functional lie in service to maintaining the political viability of New Labour, as  being on the ‘right side of history’ in its support for the Zionist State, and the lie of the EU as the savoir of ‘Europe’ . That myth began with Monnet’s Coal and Steel Cartel now weighted down with the ersatz trapping of Federalism.

From the sneeringly arrogant Posh Boy Cameron,to the always dyspeptic May , to the buffoonery of Johnson resembles a combination of ‘Beyond The Fringe’ ,‘Benny Hill’ and ‘Monty Python‘ : to pass through three generations!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/fc7b26d2-b9e4-11e9-8a88-aa6628ac896c

In one sentence Mr. Ganesh sums up his utter ignorance of ‘Race’ in America!

A feeling of racial dispossession animated at least the fringes of the Tea Party movement a decade ago.

The existence of slavery, named The Peculiar Institution by Kenneth M. Stamp as a form of academic pseudo-apologetics, has escaped Mr. Ganesh’s moral/political attention! A partial list of America’s record on a political culture steeped in racism.

1. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393
2. Reconstruction’s de facto end with the murder of Lincoln
3. The Rise of the KKK terror, and Jim Crow Laws
4. KKK membership once 3 million
5. D. W. Griffith’s ‘Birth of a Nation’ based on ‘The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan’ a novel published in 1905.
6. Brown v. Board I & II
7. The birth of the Federalist Society & its ‘Originalism’
8. The mass migration of ‘Dixiecrats’ into the Republican Party in ’64-’65 in response of the passage of the Civil Rights & Voting Right Acts
9. The Southern Strategy of Nixon
10. Reagan’s ’76 campaign against ‘Welfare Queens driving Cadillacs’
11. Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair speech: ‘I believe in States Rights’
12. Bush The Elder & Lee Atwater’s ‘Willie Horton’
13. The Republican attack on Obama as ‘not one of us’
14. Tea Party and its Permanent Revolution :Brat defeats Cantor.

——————————————————————————————————-

Headline: Trump calls for nationwide ‘stop-and-frisk’ policy

…

“I would do stop-and-frisk. I think you have to. We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive and, you know, you really help people sort of change their mind automatically,” Trump told the questioner. “You understand, you have to have, in my opinion, I see what’s going on here, I see what’s going on in Chicago, I think stop-and-frisk. In New York City it was so incredible, the way it worked. Now, we had a very good mayor, but New York City was incredible, the way that worked, so I think that could be one step you could do.”

The practice, carried out most famously in New York but also by other police departments, is frequently criticized as an avenue for officers commit acts of racial profiling. Others tout it as responsible for a dramatic drop in New York City’s crime rate, although former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said in 2015 that the practice is “not a significant factor in the crime rate of this city.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/donald-trump-stop-and-frisk-228486

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Headline:Departing Judge Offers Blunt Defense of Ruling in Stop-and-Frisk Case

…

In the interviews, Judge Scheindlin defended her handling of the stop-and-frisk case and cited the drop in the number of recorded street stops, to about 24,000 last year from 685,000 in 2011.

“Think of the lives that that has changed, the lives that that has touched,” she said, “the lives of people who were stopped for no good reason and how intrusive that is.” The policy had “bred nothing but distrust,” she added.

Judge Scheindlin said that, in her view, Mr. Bloomberg was “one of our best mayors,” but he “really never appreciated what was wrong with stopping 700,000 overwhelmingly innocent people as they went about their daily lives.”

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/nyregion/departing-judge-offers-blunt-defense-of-ruling-that-ended-stop-and-frisk.html

Mr . Ganesh’s historical ignorance, as expressed in his rhetoric, serves the purpose of not offending this publication’s Conservative readership. The term pentimento: ‘a visible trace of earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas’ is much too highfalutin a term, for what, in vulgar parlance, might be called a maladroit attempt at ‘whitewash’ ?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/a6f54234-b8e9-11e9-96bd-8e884d3ea203

Given his impressive CV, as a Doctor of Philosophy and other impressive academic accomplishes, Mr. Ferguson has, what can only be described, as dubious political standards:

Academic career[edit]

In 1989, Ferguson worked as a research fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge. From 1990 to 1992 he was an official fellow and lecturer at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He then became a fellow and tutor in modern history at Jesus College, Oxford, where in 2000 he was named a professor of political and financial history. In 2002 Ferguson became the John Herzog Professor in Financial History at New York University Stern School of Business, and since 2004 he became the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. From 2010 to 2011, Ferguson held the Philippe Roman Chair in history and international affairs at the London School of Economics.^[18] In 2016 Ferguson left Harvard ^[19] to become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he had been an adjunct fellow since 2005.

Ferguson has received honorary degrees from the University of Buckingham (UK), Macquarie University (Australia), and the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile). In May 2010, Michael Gove, education secretary, asked Ferguson to advise on the development of a new history syllabus, to be entitled “history as a connected narrative”, for schools in England and Wales.^[20][21] In June 2011, he joined other academics to set up the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.^[22]

…

In 2018, Ferguson apologized after fellow historians criticized him for only inviting white men as speakers to a Stanford conference on applied history.^[23]

Also in 2018, emails documenting Ferguson’s attempts to discredit a progressive activist student at Stanford University who had been critical of Ferguson’s choices of speakers invited to the Cardinal Conversations free speech initiative were released to the public and University administrators.^[24] He teamed with a Republican student group to find information that might discredit the student. Ferguson resigned from leadership of the program once university administrators became aware of his actions.^[24][25] Ferguson responded in his column^[26] saying, “Re-reading my emails now, I am struck by their juvenile, jocular tone. “A famous victory,” I wrote the morning after the Murray event. “Now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” Then I added: “Some opposition research on Mr O might also be worthwhile” — a reference to the leader of the protests. None of this happened. The meetings of the student committee were repeatedly postponed. No one ever did any digging on “Mr O”. The spring vacation arrived. The only thing that came of the emails was that their circulation led to my stepping down.”

…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niall_Ferguson

Given Ferguson’s record of political dishonesty, manipulation and maladroit attempted cover up, the reader can only approach Mr. Ferguson’s latest essay on Trump as crazy-fox ,with the critical spirit as it confronts propaganda.

Given that America’s economy is still growing at a reasonable 2.1% and has the lowest unemployment rate since December 1969, the decision took a bit of explaining.

The American government’s measures of the economy is so steeped in self-serving mendacity, that if Ferguson, if he were given to the exercise of honesty, might engage in unmasking.

Here is the paragraph where Ferguson begins his attack on his fellow Posh Boys employing his straw-man of ‘ Ivy League types’.

…

New York and Washington are full of commentators who went to Harvard, Yale and Princeton (which Powell attended) and consider themselves much smarter than Trump. They snigger when he calls himself a “stable genius”. But this president is crazy like a fox — an old American phrase that I never fully understood until last week. His behaviour may seem nuts or just plain dumb, but it is in fact calculated to outsmart the Ivy League types.

…

How is it possible that a self-proclaimed billionaire and Game Show Host can ‘outsmart’ those technocrats? The most apt descriptor of Ferguson’s ‘methodology‘ is a strategic deployment of anti-intellectualism, as a instance of a self-serving but carefully circumscribed pragmatism.

The question of what could or might be a break in the ‘populist trend’ : ‘a large-scale war’. Ferguson follows this with a warning that the fate of  Neo-Conservative ‘eggheads’  as cautionary: the ‘as if’ here is that Ferguson stood apart from this  ‘another set of eggheads’, instead of his actual part, as enthusiastic fellow traveler.

…

Could anything break this trend, whereby falling interest rates and painless deficits help populists stay in power? One answer I can think of is a large-scale war, which has tended to be the thing, historically, that drives inflation expectations and interest rates upwards. But that, too, is something the populists have pretty much ruled out. They saw what became of another set of eggheads — the neoconservatives — when they decided to revive war as an instrument of policy after September 11.

Another game-changer would be an election surprise. Markets seem to love a right-wing government unconstrained by monetary and fiscal rules. They may feel differently if a left-wing government inherits this lack of constraint. The difference between technocracy and democracy is that there’s always more than one game in town. And not all crazy foxes are on the right.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/donald-trumps-crazy-tariffs-have-outfoxed-the-federal-reserve-3h23xwsbl

Note that the specter of ‘a left-wing government’ : Corbyn in Great Britain or Bernie Sanders in America are of equal danger. Note that ‘Crazy foxes’ is rhetorically transmogrified into a descriptor, that now expresses an equal danger, or at least broadly hints at that concept , if I’m reading Ferguson with complete comprehension? The thought occurs, in terms of another ‘as if’: is Ferguson a sub rosa Deconstructionist?

Old Socialist

@Paul A. Myers

Thank you for your well presented,  not to speak of  politically sophisticated arguments. In reply I would offer this: The collapse of the Neo-Liberal swindle in 2008 and its issue ‘The Gig Economy’ made Trump, or someone like him possible. Not to speak of the Republican Party as the captive of American Jacobins: The Tea Party. Peggy Noonan, in the WSJ, looks elsewhere for that Beast, she is ideologically blind to the Radicals in the Party of her beloved Reagan. How did Our Peggy react to the recent leak of Ronny’s conversation with Nixon? The political present seems to be brimming with digressions! Yet the political crisis in America is described by these seeming digressions. The collapse of the legitimacy of America’s Class is verified by the rise and victory of Trump.

Obama was an almost believable ‘Progressive’, an appellation favored by one of his early enthusiasts Arianna Huffington, yet he was and is Neo-Liberal, to his core. His unstinting support for the TTP, even as his term ended, and look at the defeat of Merrick Garland due to McConnell’s utterly dishonest maneuvering. Yet Obama looked politically passive, like Gore, he was not even capable of a bit of political fisticuffs. Too much Harvard?

Concerning the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, he let NATO,the EU, FDD, Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland run the show. His was a politics steeped in the cultivation of bourgeois political respectability.
One need only look to Hillary Clinton, and a Party fully in control of her mendacious political operatives, the machinery that got Obama elected, to see that for all your praise for Pelosi, as some kind of legislative master, makes this observer of the American political scene grateful, that she might be ending her career, as servant to the Free Market Myth, depending on the 2020 election results. Her attacks on AOC, Omar, Pressley, Tlaib demonstrate, without doubt, that Pelosi is a political dinosaur, in the era that in which Left-Wing Social Democrats are in the ascent.

A more than interesting occurrence, after the debate, is the defensiveness of the New Democrats on the question of the Obama’s Legacy. Read this from Politico essay by Noland D. MCCaskell and Marc Caputo:

Headline: ‘Stay away from Barack’: Dems seethe over criticism of Obama

Sub-headline: Party officials are frustrated that the former president’s record was collateral damage in the debate attacks on Joe Biden. 

The disparagement of aspects of Obama’s record led to stern warnings that the tactic could backfire on the presidential candidates themselves — and perhaps arm Republicans with ammunition to attack the eventual Democratic nominee next fall.

“Stay away from Barack Obama,” advised Steve Elmendorf, a well-known Democratic lobbyist who worked on John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.

“I don’t know why you would attack Barack Obama or his record or any part of him when he’s the most popular person in the party,” he added. “And I don’t think it helps for the general election voters, either. I don’t know what they’re thinking.”

Republicans have already seized on the division. Donald Trump Jr., President Donald Trump’s eldest son, tweeted Thursday morning how nice it was “to see Democrats finally go after Obama’s failed policies very aggressively.”

“The Democrats spent more time attacking Barack Obama than they did attacking me, practically,” he said. “This morning, that’s all the fake news was talking about.“

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/01/democratic-debate-obama-biden-1444825

Note the extensive quotation of ‘ Steve Elmendorf, a well-known Democratic lobbyist’ that opens the essay. This is why Politico is America’s favorite Political Gossip Sheet, it presents political partisans, as if they are nearly ‘objective sources’ .

Regards

StephenKMackSD

https://on.ft.com/2Kfsm7N