StephenKMackSD's Blog

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Reform, awash in political euphemisms, and the ultimate expressions their Reaganite Agenda Gramm-Leach-Bliley, that repealed Glass-Steagall!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

Thank you for your thought provoking comment.

Here is a are some thoughts : the Republicans welcomed, with open arms, the Dixiecrats in 64 & 65 , with the passage of the Civil Rights & Voting Rights Acts. These men became the backbone of Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ and ‘Silent Majority’ sloganeering political kitsch. Look to Reagan’s ‘I believe in States Rights’ declaration at the Neshoba County Fair speech, that opened his 1980 campaign.

Look to Newt Gingrich’s ‘Contract with America’ and then the rise of the ‘Tea Party’ Jacobins: recall that Eric Cantor was supplanted by the even more hysterical radicalism of Dave Brat? That Tea Party coterie became the Republican Party. But Trump takes the cake, the Republicans simply surrendered, in the slow stages of political cowardice, one by one: McConnell’s wife got an appointment to a Cabinet level post, while still maintaining her corporate ties! While Mitch opined about ‘mule piss’ , celebrated in the pages of this newspaper by Janan Ganesh? This a record of absolute surrender , exercised in halting stages, to political irrationalism. One question: where are the Eisenhower Republicans? Colin Powell come to mind, he voted for New Democrat Obama.

StephenKMackSD

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

______________________________________________________________

https://www.ft.com/content/64817db2-8961-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2?hubRefSrc=email&utm_source=lfemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=lfnotification#lf-content=243654657:837641179

A well educated, white male immigrant to America, Andy Divine declares
‘What Democrats Can Learn From Steve Bannon’ in his latest encyclical. ‘Those Immigrants’ were/are the products of US Wars of Empire in the Eastern Hemisphere , Afghanistan, Iraq. In sum, at least 8 Fronts on The War On Terror, that we know of!  And  the active subversion , even wars, against the ‘Reform Movements’ in the  Western Hemisphere, in the many states south of America’s porous border. Don’t mention Andy’s enthusiastic support for these wars, expressed in this collection of his rhetorical interventions, on behalf of American murderous political adventurism based upon lies!

Click to access andrew-sullivan-i-was-wrong.pdf

What is America’s record on treating the Braceros, Mexican Migrant Workers that picked fruit and vegetables from  1942 to 1964, as guest workers during WWII, and after? America still owes these workers $500 million, the debt to these workers has increased since the original claims were filed. America has yet to pay them, hoping that time eliminates their claims, as the workers who brought those claims are dying from old age, still waiting for American fair play!

http://braceroarchive.org/about

Andy cultivates his historical ignorance of the plight of these workers, while he wrestles with the insights, that racist Steve Bannon can offer the Democrats. This ,sure to be welcome to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, whose animus to the lesser beings of the planet are well documented?

Here is the core political wisdom of Bannon, as presented by Andy as a conjecture, with the added garnish, in the following paragraph, with his perpetual hysterical Anti-Leftism:’stridently leftist cultural stances’ :

Think of how popular Trump would be now if he had done what Bannon advised: raised taxes on the superrich, lowered them for the middle classes, started the wall, ended mass immigration, and fought a trade war with China.

All of this framed by Andy’s political moralizing chatter,  about the coming apocalypse of the Nation State, in sum, the destiny of the American Nation State? His rhetoric steeped in Huntington’s Anti- Mestizo hysterics of  ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ , while  ‘we’ are  mired in the good intentions, of the less enlightened, but well meaning of an ‘honorable’ citizenry.

Andy presents himself as the representative of the Vital Center of the political spectrum, while Europe is engulphed in  the surge of the Populist Right. It escapes Andy’s attention that we are fully engulphed politically, in that toxic Populism. While the front runner of the New Democrats Joe Biden is the leading candidate, whose racism was codified in his notorious Crime Bill.

Old Socialist

*Blairite Ms. Cavendish in her assessment of The Trump Effect on British life and politics can’t resist the temptation to defame Mr. Corbyn with the charge of ‘whose core philosophy is anti-Americanism.’ Anti-Imperialism is and has been one of  the cornerstone of Corbyn’s politics. 

The president’s flaws are a gift to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose core philosophy is anti-Americanism.

Some further quotation from Posh Girl’s political observations on British politics are instructive, that never strays far from the Blairite Party Line. She simply engages in  a rhetorical  embroidery of same:

…
It suits extremists on both left and right to wilfully overestimate the UK’s clout in the world. That’s not defeatist, it’s just realpolitik — something the British used to be good at.

The Conservatives, once the party of business and common sense, are in the grip of an ideological virus.

…

A similar gambit in 1649 didn’t work too well for Charles I. But you say tomato, I say tomato. You say mount a coup against the legislature, I say “prorogue” — which sounds so much more quaint, ceremonial, nostalgic.

…

To prorogue parliament would be illegal, unconstitutional and undemocratic. But the new Tory party is as unpredictable and mercurial as the current White House.

…

Messrs Trump and Johnson have both flirted with Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, and both have borrowed techniques from the Bannon playbook — positioning themselves as honest straight talkers by making remarks calculated to provoke an outcry, then garnering support from the people outraged by the outcry.

…

For Mr Corbyn, it was just too tempting to shun this particular leader of the free world — and much easier than it might have been for him to have dismissed Barack Obama. Leaders who aspire to rule usually appreciate that in dealing with allies, it is the office which commands respect, not just the person.

But Labour’s politics are those of the sixth form.

…

I love the US more than any other country outside my own. It pains me to witness the stumbles of the presidential caravan. But Americans who dislike Mr Trump can take comfort in knowing that he will eventually be gone. Brexit, the greatest act of national self-harm since Suez, is irreversible.

As British soft power drains away, jobs vanish and investor confidence dwindles, I hope the special relationship with the US will endure. But on current showing, this little island looks likely to play a bigger part in America’s nostalgic past than its dynamic future.

https://www.ft.com/content/977318c2-887e-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2

I have been selective in my quotation, as has Blairite Ms. Cavendish in her presentation: her unslakable Anti-Corbynism, her Anti-Brexitism (The EU, born of Monnet’s coal and steel cartel, named the Common Market tarted up with the trappings of Federation.)  comparing it to Suez, that was the death knell of British colonial power, that reified the fact of the power of the American Empire.

This polemic all  wrapped up in a supposed ‘love’ for both America and Britain, name it political kitsch! And ‘As British soft power drains away, jobs vanish…’  name this the watershed of a collapsed Neo-Liberalism, engineered by Thatcher and her epigone Tony Blair, of New Labour infamy.

*Mea culpa: I have misidentified Ms. Cavendish as a Blairite, she is or was a supporter of Cameron.

StephenKMackSD

Old Socialist

Who can resist the particular ‘brand’ of commentary that Mr. Ganesh offers, awash in a cynicism, that is his trade mark? In the present essay, the cast of characters is wide, within the very narrow spectrum of Pop Culture: he riffs on a Tradition inaugurated by American Dandy Tom Wolfe. But he extends this cast, in order to lend a much needed verisimilitude to his essay, with the inclusion of actual  philosophers Pinker and Dennett.

Peter Cook, Deepak Chopra, Oprah Winfrey , Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris Daniel Dennett. With the addition of Gwyneth Paltrow and America’s Dr. Pangloss Steven Pinker, even his hair gets an honorable mention!

Mr. Ganesh, like his mentor Wolfe is fascinated with surfaces, so his polemic features, for the most part, Pop Culture Gurus or their epigones and fellow travelers.  And their penchant  for producing analgesic aphorisms. These rhetorical exercises are about the business of producing endorphins in the brains of its readers,  but produces in the brain of  Mr. Ganesh a withering contempt.

But note that in Wolfe’s 2016 book ‘The Kingdom of Speech’ , he takes aim at both Darwin and Chomsky. He doesn’t waste time with the note takers, and popularizes of these theorists, but confronts them with the misplaced gusto of a ‘thinker’ utterly out of his intellectual depth. Two reviews of Wolfe’s  ‘Kingdom’ are revelatory:

Headline: His white suit unsullied by research, Tom Wolfe tries to take down Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/his-white-suit-unsullied-by-research-tom-wolfe-tries-to-take-down-charles-darwin/2016/08/31/8ee6d4ee-4936-11e6-90a8-fb84201e0645_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.71ee20f858ae

Mr. Ganesh is a gifted polemicist of the Sunday Supplement variety, in the Europe of the 19th and the early 20th Century he would  be called a feuilletonist.

One final thought: it doesn’t occur to Mr. Ganesh, that these Pop Culture Gurus might just be very distantly related to Kant’s compelling notion of self-emancipation from tutelage?

American Skeptic

https://www.ft.com/content/3cb9f0b0-8787-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2

Headline: US liberal over-reach on gender identity risks benefiting Trump

Sub-headline: Democrats’ embrace of transgender rights burnishes president’s everyman appeal

Never fear the Neo-Liberal Collapse of 2008, and its issue ‘The Gig Economy’ has precipitated an American Political/Moral De-Evolution. A bit hyperbolic, but none the less true. I like the Posh Boys, at @FT, am not above a bit of self-congratulation!
The reader could reply that the Civil Rights Era, and its various beneficiaries, has come to a close, or has slammed shut, in the political watershed of the post 2008 Crash World! While factoring into the political equation, the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, that removed the ‘pre-clearance clause’ from the Voting Rights Act. In sum, the rebirth of ‘The Solid South’. This decision codified the passing of that’ Era’!
Posh Boy Luce offers a warning to the New Democrats, who en masse abandoned ‘Liberalism’ for ‘Neo-Liberalism’,  about the issue of transgendered children. The reader can see that this issue will resonate with the Fundamentalist wing of the electorate, but it was the White Middle Class voter who put Trump in office, allied to the lazy, or should I say ‘overconfident’, Hillary Clinton? Who failed to actively campaign in three key states , that went to Trump in the Electoral College.
Luce’s fretting over this issue will prove to be a small ripple, as compared to the New Democrats and their growing talk of impeachment.
Trump honed his propaganda skills on fifteen seasons of ‘The Apprentice‘ , not to speak of establishing himself as ‘Leader’ in the frame of Mark Bennett’s crude Television Kitsch .
To somehow place Mr Biden on The Left is on its face preposterous! Joe is a New Democrat who authored the draconian Crime Bill using the notion of the ‘irredeemable predator’ that could not be checked by political amelioration, so implacable was his criminality.

While Mrs. Clinton preferred the use of Super-Predator:

The New Democrats will lose in 2020, because the Party structure is still in the thrall of the Neo-Liberal operatives . The Future of the Democratic Party, if it has any kind of future, will be with Ocasio-Cortez, Gabbard , Omar and Tlaib. With the active support of Senator Sanders.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/065210f0-87f2-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2

Hillary Clinton and her confederates Brennan & Clapper and their CrowdStrike ‘evidence’ of Russian Tampering lie was the starting point of FBI stooge Mueller’s ‘investigation’: he never questioned it!

Never fear the New Democrats will pursue ‘impeachment’ ,while the Party, will again steal the nomination from Sanders, with the dull-witted Party Hack and Crime Bill author Joe Biden. Who took a weekend off of the campaign due to the fear of ‘over exposure’ by the Party Technocrats i.e. the Clinton coterie!

While Jerry Nadler pursues recalcitrant Trump confederates. Look for the nominee to be OneWest Bank and AIPAC minion Kamala Harris or Ambulance Chaser Corey Booker,if the utterly uninspiring Joe doesn’t pan out. Or look for the convention surprise, of Hillary offering herself as compromise candidate to a dead-locked convention: this is the stuff of Aaron Spelling Television Melodrama of the 80’s, but perfect for a television audience addled by how many ‘Seasons’ of the ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ merde? That catapulted Trump the Grifter into the American consciousness, as some kind of ‘Leader’ with First Daughter as part of his Brain Trust!

America’s political class is utterly bankrupt, so the spectacle of the New Democrats as Saviors of the Republic is awash in self-seeking fraudulence and might be comic if so much was not at stake!

Political Cynic