StephenKMackSD's Blog

Sen.Harris was too eager to play the respectability game with sclerotic Biden, at least until she could deliver the ‘I was that girl’ coup de grace about ‘busing’! Who can forget this Harris nonpareil:

‘Sitting onstage during the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference last March, Sen. Kamala Harris dropped an anecdote about her own unlikely brush with Zionism as a Jamaican-Indian American girl growing up in Oakland. “As a child, I never sold Girl Scout cookies,” the California senator told the audience, according to a participant who tweeted about it. “I went around with a [Jewish National Fund] box collecting funds to plant trees in Israel.”

https://www.ozy.com/politics-and-power/how-the-debate-over-israel-could-separate-2020-contenders/91844

The Senator from OneWest Bank, AIPAC and Attorney General of California who threatened poor people with jail time for the truancy of their children:

Headline:Kamala Harris: resurfaced video on truancy prosecutions sparks backlash

Sub-headline: Critics responding to 2010 speech said they disapproved of her willingness to use law enforcement tactics on parents of truant children

…

Harris’s anecdote about the homeless mother captures “the disaster of American social policy”, James Forman Jr, a scholar and critic of mass incarceration, wrote on Twitter in response to the clip. “That’s the American way: what little help we offer poor people comes under threat of prison.”

The people prosecuted for the “crime” of having their children miss school are overwhelmingly poor, black and brown, Forman, the author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment Black America, wrote. “Poor parents don’t need the threat of jail to get their kids to school. They need what the wealthy take for granted: good schools, lead-free water, safe parks, healthy food, well-stocked libraries, etc.”

One widely shared tweet compared Harris’s remarks on truancy to Hillary Clinton’s racist 1996 comment about juvenile “super-predators”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/30/kamala-harris-truant-children-parents-prosecutions-clip

Harris is THE wrong person to lecture Clinton Surrogate Biden! After all, she too is a Clinton Surrogate.

Old Socialist

Mr. Ganesh frames his essay on Joe Biden with the Shakespeare tragedy Romeo and Juliet and the ‘“ancient grudge” between the Montagues and the Capulets.’ Garnished with his jejune observations, masquerading as telling insights on ‘the human condition’.

Posh Boy education collides with an utterly provincial American politician. If one can define Joe by means of the greatest playwright and poet in the  English language – his play  deserves more that its hollowing out, by the political desperation/opportunism of a writer, on American politics, suffering from an advanced case of historical/political ignorance.

As for Joe’s ‘nostalgia’  for the notion of an absent political comity see this Nation essay:

Headline: When Joe Biden Collaborated With Segregationists

Sub-headline: The candidate’s years as an anti-busing crusader cannot be forgotten—or readily forgiven.

…

In an education-policy proposal released by his campaign on May 28, Biden briefly spoke of encouraging diversity by giving grants and guidance to districts that are willing to pursue it. But he said nothing to disown his long history as a fierce opponent of school busing and a scathing critic of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

“We’ve lost our bearings since the 1954 Brown v. School Board desegregation case,” Biden said in 1975, in an interview that he gave to a newspaper in Delaware that was recently unearthed by The Washington Post. “To ‘desegregate’ is different than to ‘integrate.’”

…

Crucially, Biden didn’t just talk the anti-busing talk. He also took a leading role in fighting what he called “unnecessary busing” by pushing bills that would have forced the federal government to consider other ways of equalizing education—ways that would not have required what old-fashioned bigots used to call race mixing. In a series of letters, recently released by CNN, that he wrote to Dixiecrat Senator James Eastland in 1977, Biden expressed thanks to Eastland for supporting anti-busing legislation that Biden introduced.

“I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help…in attempting to bring my anti-busing legislation to a vote,” he wrote the Mississippi Democrat, a virulent opponent of civil rights who frequently referred to black people as “an inferior race.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/joe-biden-education-busing-opposition/

Is the political comity that is the subject of Joe’s nostalgia, and subject to Mr. Ganesh’s self-satisfied critique- the reader, with patience, makes her way though the thickets of Mr. Ganesh’s arguments to this concluding paragraph:

Anyone who has fallen out with friends over politics in recent years, having once associated such behaviour with bores and fanatics, has learnt something. Some beliefs, it turns out, really are irreconcilable. The job of politics is to contain them, lest they spill into civil disorder. It cannot aspire to do much more. It cannot always even finesse them into constructive legislation that splits the difference. The promise of bipartisanship is always and everywhere rousing to hear. That does not make it any less of a fool’s errand.

https://www.ft.com/content/0b13f31e-9752-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36

Isaiah Berlin,  long ago, considered the vexing question of incommensurables:

One of the knottiest dimensions of Berlin’s pluralism is the idea of incommensurability, which has been open to diverging interpretations. One can make a three-way distinction, between weak incommensurability, moderate incommensurability and radical incommensurability. Berlin goes beyond weak incommensurability, which holds that values cannot be ranked quantitatively, but can be arranged in a qualitative hierarchy that applies consistently in all cases. It is not, however, clear whether he presents a moderate or a radical vision of incommensurability. The former holds that there is no single, ultimate scale or principle with which to measure values—no ‘moral slide-rule’ or universal unit of normative measurement. This view is certainly consistent with all that Berlin wrote from 1931 onwards. Such a view does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that it is impossible to make judgements between values on a case-by-case basis, or that values, just because they can’t be compared or ranked in terms of one master-value or formula, can’t be compared or deliberated between at all.

Berlin does sometimes offer more starkly dramatic accounts of incommensurability, which make it hard to rule out a more radical interpretation of the concept, according to which incommensurability is more or less synonymous with incomparability. The latter states that values cannot be compared at all, since there is no ‘common currency’ in terms of which to compare them: each value, being sui generis, cannot be judged in relation to any other value, because there is nothing in relation to which both can be judged or measured. As a result, choices among values cannot be based on (objectively valid) evaluative comparisons, but only on personal preference, or on an act of radical, arbitrary choice. If this view is adopted, it is difficult to see how pluralism’s practical consequences would differ from those of relativism, although some scholars—most notably John Gray—have attempted to work out a version of pluralism that will both accommodate this more radical interpretation of incommensurability, and yet be differentiated from relativism.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/#BerlDefiValuPlur

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/0b13f31e-9752-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36

Headline: Brexit is an idea for a bygone era

Sub-headline: Global Britain assumes a world that is moving towards free trade, rather than against it

Look around the world. What appear to be the biggest potential threats?

Strategists worry about the rise of an authoritarian China, a lawless Russia and the threats of new wars in the Middle East or North Korea. Economists highlight the dangers of a trade war. Lawyers point to the Trump administration’s “America First” rejection of international treaties. Environmentalists and a growing number of voters insist on the paramount importance of climate change.

How quickly the Common Market, a coal and steel cartel, became the economic bulwark against the Soviet Union, imagined and brought into being by technocrat supreme Jean Monnet, has been erased from historical memory by the Stalinist Cult of the EU! The Common Market even published its own magazine, I was a subscriber.

The Myth of Europe in service to Mr. Rachman’s collection of  rhetorical demons:   ‘authoritarian China’, ‘lawless Russia‘, ‘the threats of new wars in the Middle East or North Korea’ , ‘ the dangers of a trade war’, ‘“America First” ‘, ‘rejection of international treaties’, ‘the paramount importance of climate change’ : More of the same nearly modulated political hysterics, not about the actual failure of that ‘Federalism’ . As window dressing for Monnet’s Cartel, steeped in a nostalgia for an etiolated Hegelian pseudo-mystical vision of a European Super-State, is an idea for a bygone era!

In the Greek Crisis the EU showed its true colors, as reported in these pages by Gillian Tett:

Headline: A debt to history?

Sub-Headline: To some, Germany faces a moral duty to help Greece, given the aid that it has previously enjoyed

…

Last summer I found myself in that spot for a conference, having dinner with a collection of central bank governors. It was a gracious, majestic affair, peppered with high-minded conversation. And as coffee was served, in bone-china crockery (of course), Benjamin Friedman, the esteemed economic historian, stood up to give an after-dinner address.

The mandarins settled comfortably into their chairs, expecting a soothing intellectual discourse on esoteric monetary policy. But Friedman lobbed a grenade.

“We meet at an unsettled time in the economic and political trajectory of many parts of the world, Europe certainly included,” he began in a strikingly flat monotone (I quote from the version of his speech that is now posted online, since I wasn’t allowed to take notes then.) Carefully, he explained that he intended to read his speech from a script, verbatim, to ensure that he got every single word correct. Uneasily, the audience sat up.

For a couple of minutes Friedman then offered a brief review of western financial history, highlighting the unprecedented nature of Europe’s single currency experiment, and offering a description of sovereign and local government defaults in the 20th century. Then, with an edge to his voice, Friedman pointed out that one of the great beneficiaries of debt forgiveness throughout the last century was Germany: on multiple occasions (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953), the western allies had restructured German debt.

So why couldn’t Germany do the same for others? “There is ample precedent within Europe for both debt relief and debt restructuring . . . There is no economic ground for Germany to be the only European country in modern times to be granted official debt relief on a massive scale and certainly no moral ground either.

“The supposed ability of today’s most heavily indebted European countries to reduce their obligations over time, even in relation to the scale of their economies, is likely yet another fiction,” he continued, warning of political unrest if this situation continued.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0

Find the demons that Mr. Rachman is on the hunt for, not in the dull-witted Posh Boy Trinity of Brexteers, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Michael Gove, who are the current representatives of the utterly collapsed Neo-Liberal Swindle, and the Common Market and its successor the EU, but in the Technocrats and their propagandists, like Rachman, whose enthusiasm for the myth of The Free Market, and the EU as its point of political arrival, has defined their journalistic careers!.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/afe5695a-9657-11e9-8cfb-30c211dcd229

Headline: Save me from the tyranny of choice

Sub-headline:In a world of cacophonous information, the absence of it is life-improving

Here is the key paragraph of Mr. Ganesh latest feuilleton:

Good. If they went yet further, and did not tell us what we were eating, either verbally or via a paper menu, all the better. In a world of endless choice, expert curation is precious. In a world of cacophonous information, the absence of it is life-improving.

His essay resembles not the cloyingly sweet Pavlova but,  the ‘wildly over the top’, Spanische Windtorte: the recipe :

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/spanische_windtorte_64745

The last paragraph is so larded with overwrought  descriptors e.g. : ‘the Cartesian order of Washington’  that its a pastiche of a pastiche!

Outside Mãos, having made no decisions for three hours, I brave the coiled entrails of the London street system, or anti-system, with its myriad permutations, so unlike the Cartesian order of Washington or the numbered right angles of New York. Complexity can be designed out of our lives, as those places show. When it comes to the built environment, as much is lost as is gained. When it comes to the humdrum consumption that takes place within it, I see no cost, just a kind of emancipation. I want to be led so I can be free.

Best regards,

The Ghost of Joris-Karl Huysmans

https://www.ft.com/content/f45e6c8c-9277-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271

I’ll bypass the first two installments of the Mr. Divine’s encyclical of June 21, 2019:

The Next Step for Gay Pride

The Trump Code

I’ll just read this next segment of moral shaming with which Andy confronts his readers:

The Totalitarian Nightmare the World Is Ignoring

I don’t want a new Cold War with China. But it is, in my view, an evil regime, and we should have no illusions about that. Twitter has been having a great time this past week parsing whether detention camps for illegal immigrants in the United States should be called “concentration camps.” In China, this debate might seem somewhat beside the point. Over a million Muslims who have crossed no border and committed no crimes are being taken from their homes en masse and subjected to brainwashing in vast camps and compounds from which there is no escape. Watch this excellent new BBC piece on these “thought transformation camps” — and feel the fear everywhere. The BBC was given access to a show camp, which is creepy enough. We can only imagine what goes on in the hidden ones.

Somehow Andy has become an expert on ‘concentration camps’: now Andy isn’t very adroit about his attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her very welcome plain speaking on the concentration camps used by ICE to hold the Mestizo Hordes ,that are invading the land of Anglo-Protestant virtue, as articulated by that American political hysteric Samuel P. Huntington: in his Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. The separation of children/infants from their parents , not to speak of caging these human beings, is an action used by Trump and his minions: ‘Give me your tired,your poor ,your huddled masses…’! An utter betrayal of ‘American Values’ ?

Andy likes to engage in the time honored tradition of One-up-man-ship pioneered by Stephen Potter. Virtue signalling is the current term of abuse, but Potter’s old stand-by fully describes Andy’s dull-witted practice . His argument:  You’ve averted your eyes from the ‘Evil Chinese Regime‘  for too long -its Human Rights abuses! In sum, the Concentration Camps used by ICE are by comparison to the Chinese Regime’s forms of oppression/re-education are evil, while the human rights abuses practiced by ICE are subject to a kind of pseudo- apologetic! In sum,  the crimes of ICE are minimized in comparison to the Chinese.

  …

On the left, we worry about Islamophobia, or we expend our energies protesting the oppression of Palestinians by Israel’s occupation. On the right, we talk of religious freedom too often as if it only applies to Christians or Jews.

…

Yet, here is a man and writer whose moral/political enthusiasms for ‘The Bell Curve’ and the War in Iraq are facts that Andy can’t overcome. At least with his readers whose memories reach back to Andy’s reprehensible political past.  Andy achieves his ends by means of hectoring moralizing, in service to Andy’s pathological egotism, wedded to his political nihilism.

Old Socialist

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/andrew-sullivan-the-next-step-for-gay-pride.html

In the first five paragraphs of his essay Mr. Ganesh reminds me of almost any James Pinkerton column I read, when he was a columnist on the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times! Complete with Mr. Pinkerton’s hysterical obsession with McGovern. Quite a while ago: it only makes it utterly plain that Ganesh is a greenhorn in terms of American Political History and its internecine ideological conflicts.
The Nixon/McCarthy/Mundt /McCarran clique repeated the charge against the New Deal, after the War, of A Generation of Treason against that New Deal, even though Truman dropped the Bomb twice on Japanese Civilians.

I’ll skip to the last two revelatory paragraphs of the Ganesh essay:

Mr Trump’s failure to enact that mandate has given his enemies an opening they are refusing to take. Perhaps, outside the anti-American fringe left, Democrats still cherish the idea of America as a redemptive force in the world, which somehow muddled along in the void before 1776. Even if they were not scarred by past elections, they would regard quietism as simply beneath the nation’s dignity.

The candidates for the 2020 election are facing the future on almost every subject. On the one that counts most, they are stranded in time.

The real question is this: will the New Democrats finally emancipate themselves, from ‘Wilsonian Idealism’, another name for violent American Paternalism, from a leader who segregated Washington D. C. ,in the year of my mother’s birth 1912? Add to this  Mr. Ganesh’s dismissal of  ‘the anti-American fringe left’, his not so sub rosa attack on Sen. Sanders. In the Blarite, Neo-Liberal World View, the ‘Left’ always plays the role of the reviled Other: the perpetually unworthy outsider.  Ganesh unknowingly re-inhabits the journalistic ghost of Pinkerton Past.

Old Socialist writing as ‘Fringe Leftist’

https://www.ft.com/content/9f0c9ff8-9275-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271

It is way past time to purge from the Democratic Party the ‘New Democrats’ i.e. the Neo -Liberals who brought us Welfare Reform, Prison Reform, awash in political euphemisms, and the ultimate expressions their Reaganite Agenda Gramm-Leach-Bliley, that repealed Glass-Steagall! It took 9 years from Gramm’s passage to the 2008 Depression and its watershed the ‘Gig Economy’ : the institutionalization of Randian hack Alan Greenspan’s ideal of ‘worker insecurity’ !
The Clintons and their coterie will insure that Trump is re-elected, because, again, they will engage in a campaign of defamation of Sen. Sanders and his actual Reform Agenda.
To defeat the Neo-Liberals will take a transgenerational commitment to actual Reform: The New Deal, in its present incarnation, the Green New Deal is not an inevitability. Too late for anything but plain speaking. Long ago The Republic was swallowed whole by the imperatives of the National Security State: but perhaps we can, at the least, reclaim our allegiance to that plain speaking, as one of the most important tools of actual reform?

Best regards,

StephenKMackSD

When this essay first appeared it’s headline offered Trump as a political Svengali, an evil creature of his own making. But the editors of this magazine have toned down the political hysterics, in the interest of political verisimilitude?
‘The Apprentice’ starring Trump lasted fourteen seasons. A concept by Television Garbage Man, Mark Burnett. This ‘Reality Television’ established in the public mind Trump as a decisive leader,via his tag-line ‘You’re Fired’ . Trump was sold like toilet paper and hemorrhoid creme, that is the function of Television.

The rest of Andy’s  essay is devoted to the jejune political/historical  speculations, of a self-infatuated scribbler, whose ‘credibility , for those with a long enough political memory, is  expressed only in the negative! The last two paragraphs are indicative of the return of that Svengali, once subject to the erasure of editors, looking to secure their respectable bourgeois political respectability! Nor can Andy resist the mention of another Svengali Putin! Hysterical Melodrama is Andy’s specialty, its as if Aaron Spelling , that other Television Garbage Man, who relied on scripts, were still here among the living! The beauty is that Andy writes his own scripts!

He will do anything, we have to understand, to protect his psychic attachment to his own self-interest. Anything. I’ll repeat what I believe: He will not leave his office if he narrowly loses in 2020. He’ll fight — and rally his supporters to fight with him. He’s not Nixon. He’s Erdoğan. When, since becoming president, has Trump conceded anything?

A tyrant’s path to power is not a straight line, it’s dynamic. Each concession is instantly banked, past vices are turned into virtues, and then the ante is upped once again. The threat rises exponentially with time. If we can’t see this in front of our own eyes, and impeach this man now, even if he will not be convicted, we are flirting with the very stability of our political system. It is not impregnable. Why is Putin the only person who seems to grasp this?

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/andrew-sullivan-donald-trump-and-the-art-of-the-lie.html

Political Observer

The Posh Boys & Girls @TheEconomist have not forgotten about ‘The Right Nation’ by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. Here is the first excerpt posted at The National Review:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2004/06/right-nation-john-micklethwait-adrian-wooldridge/

But, for whatever reason, the editors of National Review  have decided that the other excerpts are no longer worthy of being read.
The collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, made this pseudo apologetic for Free Market dogmas offered by Bush The Younger. And his confederates, until Henry Paulson’s exercise in Keynesian interventionism, in the face of a economic crisis, not seen since 1929. All carefully managed by a Congress populated by Free Market dogmatists.

Followed by Obama’s etiolated version of the same, with Larry Summers as his initial political operative, were the first and second act of an American Political Melodrama, that produced the Carnival Barker Trump, that has made the careers on the dreaded ‘Left’, in the political imaginations of the bumptious Economist hirelings/fellow travelers:

Headline: Donald Trump’s presidency has moved America left

Sub-headline: The Right Nation was last this enthusiastic about left-wing policies in 1961

‘The Right Nation’ becomes an integral part of the latest Anti-Left hysteria of  the Posh Menage :

…

Public opinion is contradictory: many more Americans describe themselves as conservative than as liberal; yet Americans prefer left-leaning policies to right-leaning ones, even when these are accompanied by the promise of higher taxes.

…

It pains this conservative collective to even entertain the idea/fact/notion that the Neo-Liberal Collapse and its ‘Gig Economy’ has inaugurated a Leftward political migration,  in an argued ‘Conservative Electorate’ ! What is offered is almost comically mechanistic:

The American public’s preferences on policy have long shown an allergy to whatever the occupant of the White House is trying to do. In this respect public opinion is like a thermostat: when policy gets too hot, Americans turn the temperature down. When the government drifts too far right, Americans want to move back to the left, as happened in the 2018 mid-term elections.

In terms of temperature, to follow the lead of these writers, the Free Market Mythology is not just stone cold dead, but utterly bankrupt: while the policies of Sanders, Omar,Ocasio-Cortez, Gabbard, Tlaib and The Green New Deal are the alternatives to Republican political irrationalism. Led by Trump and his minion, ‘Mule Piss’ Mitch McConnell. Not to mention the utterly sclerotic New Democrats under the tutelage of the rapacious, nihilistic  Clinton coterie. 

Old Socialist

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/06/15/donald-trumps-presidency-has-moved-america-left?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/donaldtrumpspresidencyhasmovedamericaleftpoliticalideology

The ‘Gig Economy’ is the child of the Neo-Liberal collapse of 2008, rooted in the greed of unscrupulous ‘Entrepreneurs’: who thought they could, at will, subvert laws governing the carriage of passengers for money,with the dull-witted notion of ‘ride-hailing service’, as somehow different than a Taxi Service ! The very notion of law, as the exercise of pro bono publico, is antithetical to the Neo-Liberal dogmatists, and their allies, the a fore mentioned ‘Entrepreneurs’.
A close friend of mine had a daughter who was identified as an ‘independent contractor’ by her Temp Agency , yet when it came to the IRS they ruled that she was an employee.
This whole issue is about money, and the ability of ‘Entrepreneurs’ to exploit the desperation of workers, to earn some kind of living, in the watershed of 2008! And The Financial Times ‘coverage’ of the issue is, as always, with the Plutocrats, identified by the shopworn Neo-Liberal Hero the rapacious Entrepreneur ! Some selective quotation from this ‘news story’ is revelatory:

Classifying workers as contractors has kept labour costs down for Uber and Lyft, but the practice has drawn legal claims from workers who want better terms and invited scrutiny from regulators around the world. Both companies listed a change in driver classification as risks in their registration documents ahead of their recent initial public offerings.
“It’s also no secret that a change to the employment classification of ride-share drivers would pose a risk to our businesses,” the companies wrote in Wednesday’s opinion piece.
…
“Any widescale reclassification of drivers to employees would be a material negative for ride-hailing and further put into question the long term profitability of the industry,” they wrote in a note to clients this week.
…

Daniel Ives, equity analyst at Wedbush Securities, said he had been fielding questions from investors about the risks of the proposed California law.

“The biggest risk to the Uber story is the contractor to employee issue . . . It’s gone from background noise to a real issue which is why they need to step up publicly” with the joint proposal, he said. “California is a precedent setter and other states may follow. It could have a ripple effect.”

…

https://www.ft.com/content/ecafd04c-8d46-11e9-a1c1-51bf8f989972

The challenge to the Gig Economy, and its panicking practitioners ,based on the mythical model of independent contractors, will come from a revitalized Union Movement: that will spend a generation organizing  for these workers, or they will become utterly irrelevant.

Old Socialist