StephenKMackSD's Blog

Thank you for your thought provoking comment on Ms. Rubin’s obsession with Sen. Sanders.  It led me to think about Ms. Rubin, as a member of The Podhoretz Clan, by marriage. She comes by her support for Biden because he represents the current political middle: defined as the alliance between the New Democrats & the Neo-Cons. Recall that the War Mongering Norman, the head of the Clan, made his literary mark with his ‘Making It’: a monument to his unslakable egotism, wedded to self-promotion:the whole of it devoted to braggadocio on a grand scale.
If Irving Kristol was first generation of the Neo-Cons, Norman is not quite the next generation, but he was a bridge to that next generation.Those City College Trotskyites devolved into Radical Nationalist, and found support across the political spectrum: Henry Jackson, and even the problematic ‘Liberal’  Daniel Patrick Moynihan?

Title: Moynihan and the Neocons

By Greg Weiner

In his biography of Norman Podhoretz, Thomas Jeffers reports that one St. Patrick’s Day — Podhoretz could not recall the year — United States senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan alighted unannounced on his old friend’s Manhattan doorstep to offer an accounting of himself. The precise content of the conversation is unrecorded, but tension over Moynihan’s senatorial record — on policy toward the Soviets especially — was generally understood to have strained the men’s years-long friendship.

Today, more than a generation after that encounter, and more than a decade after the senator’s death, many neoconservatives still want an accounting from Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Their dispositions are at once admiring and aggravated; the intellectual kinship is often celebrated, though sometimes mixed with accusations of ideological betrayal. I was at a recent conference of political scientists, presenting a paper on Moynihan, when one audience member, perfectly pleasant and seemingly admiringly disposed toward the scholar-statesman, exclaimed: “Reagan could have used Moynihan’s help, but he didn’t get it because Moynihan liked being a senator!” The accusation is not uncommon. Neither is the underlying assumption: Moynihan was one of us, but his politics trumped his principles.

Yet the veracity of the charge hinges on to whom the “us” refers. Some tenets of neoconservatism — at least as its “godfather,” Irving Kristol, elucidated it — reasonably describe Moynihan. But Moynihan always rejected “neoconservatism” as a label, and what neoconservatism eventually became, a political movement, never enticed him. He always felt that the goals that he did share with Kristol — what Kristol described as a “conservative welfare state” that rejected the Great Society model, for example, appears to be close to what Moynihan understood to be the ethic of the New Deal — were properly described as liberal.

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/moynihan-and-the-neocons

Ms. Rubin is representative of a coterie of Ultra-Nationalists, who find Mr. Sanders Left-Wing Social Democracy a threat to their particular ‘brand’ of political nihilism, while finding Mr. Biden a companionable fellow traveler.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

Andy Divine is or was an enthusiast for the Bell Curve and the Iraq War, and sundry other forms of political/moral nihilism. But the indefatigable Andy ,in his latest encyclical, instructs the reader about what ‘Real Conservatism’ looks like. His examples of Conservative Virtue are former FBI Director Robert Mueller and Congressman Justin Amash.

This Is What a Real Conservative Looks Like in 2019

This week, two eminent Republicans did something quite novel in 2019. They committed conservatism. By conservatism, I mean a philosophy of limited, constitutional government, individual rights, trust in tradition, love of country, prudence in foreign policy and restraint at home. Restraint means not doing something that you could. It means conceding the right of your opponents to run the country for a while — for the sake of the common good. It means admitting that sometimes you’re wrong. It means give as well as take. It often means compromise.

…

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/andrew-sullivan-this-is-what-a-real-conservative-looks-like.html

This excerpt is almost comic, if weren’t for the fact that an apology, for his enthusiasm for the War on Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands of dead and displaced cannot be taken back. It is part of Andy’s self-congratulatory rhetorical amnesia, the very cornerstone of his polemic:

It means conceding the right of your opponents to run the country for a while — for the sake of the common good. It means admitting that sometimes you’re wrong. It means give as well as take. It often means compromise.

Mueller record of political conformity and opportunism is easy to map: On the War on Iraq:

On February 11, 2003, one month before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Mueller gave testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Mueller informed the American public that “[s]even countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea—remain active in the United States and continue to support terrorist groups that have targeted Americans. As Director Tenet has pointed out, Secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical or radiological material.”^[43][44] Highlighting this worry in February 2003, FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley wrote an open letter to Mueller in which she warned that “the bureau will [not] be able to stem the flood of terrorism that will likely head our way in the wake of an attack on Iraq”^[45][46] and encouraged Mueller to “share [her concerns] with the President and Attorney General.”^[46]

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

On the FBI Crime Lab scandal: Mueller was head of the FBI from on September 4, 2001 so he was an integral part of the active cover-up that the FBI engaged in. Tainting Evidence : Behind the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab which was published on June 2, 1998. Justice delayed is Justice denied!

And this report on the FBI Crime Scandal and the failures of other labs:

Headline: CSI Is a Lie

Sub-headline: America’s forensic-investigation system is overdue for sweeping reform.

Forty years ago, Bob Dylan reacted to the conviction of an innocent man by singing that he couldn’t help but feel ashamed “to live in a land where justice is a game.” Over the ensuing decades, the criminal-justice system has improved in many significant ways. But shame is still an appropriate response to it, as the Washington Post made clear Saturday in an article that begins with a punch to the gut: “Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000,” the newspaper reported, adding that “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.”

The article notes that the admissions from the FBI and Department of Justice “confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques—like hair and bite-mark comparisons—that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.”

That link points back to 2012 coverage of problems with FBI forensic analysis, but the existence of shoddy forensics has been so clear for so long in so many different state and local jurisdictions that the following conclusion is difficult to avoid: Neither police agencies nor prosecutors are willing to call for the sorts of reforms that would prevent many innocents from being wrongfully convicted and imprisoned, and neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party will force their hands.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/csi-is-a-lie/390897/

The desperation of the Midwives of Trump, poor Andy among them , to find heroes like Mueller and Comey ,from one of the most corrupt and authoritarian institutions of the American National Security State, should not surprise. Andy adopts a self-serving ahistoricism at will.

Andy’s enthusiasm for Representative Amish is about his bravery in advocating the impeachment of Trump, in defiance of the Republican Party Line.

Old Socialist

Headline: Argentines should reject the return of Peronism

Sub-headline: President Mauricio Macri should stick to his guns on economic policy

What sector of the Argentine population will read your pro-Macri polemic? in the guise of a dire warning against Peronism, in the redoubtable person of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner? Yet the Editorial Board, read Posh Boys, prints this:

Mr. Macri’s austerity programme is broadly on track to deliver long-term economic gains for Argentina but the short-term pain of sharply falling living standards may be too much for voters. A new Ms Fernández, repackaged in more moderate colours, could offer quicker relief.

https://www.ft.com/content/68306374-82e5-11e9-b592-5fe435b57a3b

After Mr. Macri’s ‘Austerity Lite’ failed, as the peso went into almost free fall, less than a year and a half after his election.  Prat-Gay was fired at the one year mark of Macri’s ‘reforms’:

Headline: Prat-Gay Fired as Argentine Finance Minister After One Year

Alfonso Prat-Gay was fired as Argentina’s Finance Minister after just one year in the post as a long-heralded recovery in the economy fails to materialize.

The ministry he headed will now be split into two, with Luis Caputo, who was finance secretary, heading the new Finance Ministry and Nicolas Dujovne overseeing the Economy Ministry, Cabinet Chief Marcos Pena told a press conference in Buenos Aires on Monday. Prat-Gay plans to speaks to reporters at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Yael Bialostozky, the departing minister’s spokeswoman said in a text message.

…

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-26/prat-gay-resigns-as-argentine-finance-minister-after-one-year

This verifiable failure of Macri’s economic policy was an invitation to the Peronist, in sum, the political rehabilitation of the ever-canny Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Macri’s resort to another IMF rescue is about Failure.

Should this crisis even surprise the most lackadaisical reader/spectator of Argentine politics? Is five years a long enough time, to file criminal charges against and convict a corrupt politician?

Yet Fernández de Kirchner chooses to run as vice-president, it expresses her being in tune with the political mood of the Argentine electorate?

Political Observer

Notice the monetary framing of the headline writers:

Elizabeth Warren is underpriced in the Democratic race

That is buried deep in the body of  the Ganesh chatter:

She is, if not the best candidate in this race, then certainly the most underpriced.

Mr. Ganesh’s ‘insights’ are, to be generous, shopworn! As for political insight the reader needs to look elsewhere. How about this essay from April 25, 2019, from corporate shill and ersatz Feminist Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Headline:  Political good girls are fighting a losing battle

Sub-headline: Female candidates still follow rules that their male competitors gleefully ignore

https://www.ft.com/content/fe6954ca-6690-11e9-b809-6f0d2f5705f6

This collection of ‘insights’ by Ms. Slaughter has escaped the male political gaze of Mr. Ganesh. For the interested reader Mr. Ganesh’s Wikipedia entry contains insights like these:

Ganesh was active in Labour Students, the student wing of the Labour Party, having been inspired to join when he was 19 by Tony Blair‘s 1999 annual Labour Party Conference speech. In an interview with The Guardian at the time Ganesh described himself as “essentially a Portillista”, comparing his politics to Michael Portillo’s, who was the then Conservative Party Shadow Chancellor. Ganesh opted not to attend his local constituency Labour Party meetings as they were “too dominated by Trots”.^[3]

For two years he was a Researcher at the Policy Exchange, a Westminster-based right-wing think tank set up by Conservative MPs Nick Boles, Michael Gove and Francis Maude, and for five years he was political correspondent for The Economist.^[1] Ganesh co-authored Compassionate Conservatism (2006) with Jesse Norman, which received the T.E. UtleyMemorial Prize for young journalists.^[4]

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

When will Mr. Ganesh finally finish that novel, that is gathering dust, in that bottom desk drawer? Or should I say the neglected PDF at the bottom of his computer screen? It will be a contemporary political novel, like Vivian Grey, without the unnecessary digressions. This novel will  outdo the ‘Bonfire‘ of Tom Wolfe, as it will be etched in acid rather, than steeped in the racial/political paranoia, that was the essence of life in the Metropolis, and its greedy mendacious actors, of the Wolfe novel?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/e068c4e6-8130-11e9-9935-ad75bb96c849

Wolfgang Streeck offers a very different perspective here, from the earnest political agonizing of gideon.rachman@ft.com :

Title: Democracy a challenge to the European project

Headline: The EU is a doomed empire

Sub-headline: European tensions are growing. There is Brexit, a Germany without direction, and nationalist forces that aim to bend the EU to serve their own project.

What is the European Union? The closest concept I can come up with is a liberal empire, or better, a neoliberal one. An empire is a hierarchically structured block of nominally sovereign states held together by a gradient of power from a centre to a periphery.

At the centre of the EU is Germany, trying more or less successfully to hide inside a core Europe (Kerneuropa) formed together with France. Germany doesn’t want to be seen as what the British used to call a continental unifier, even if this is what it is. That it likes to hide behind France is a source of power for France; I’ll say more on this crucial relationship later.

Germany, like other imperial countries, most recently the US, conceives of itself, and wants others to do the same, as a benevolent hegemon spreading common sense and moral virtues to its neighbours, at a cost to itself worth bearing for the sake of humanity (1).

In the German-cum-European case, the values used to legitimise empire are those of political liberalism: liberal democracy, constitutional government and individual liberty. Wrapped within them, to be shown when expedient, are free markets and free competition (that is, economic liberalism and, in the present case, neoliberalism). The hegemonic centre has the prerogative of determining the exact composition and the deeper meaning of the imperial value package, and how it is to be applied in specific situations — so it can extract political seigniorage from its periphery, in return for its benevolence.

Preserving imperial asymmetries among nominally sovereign nations requires complicated political and institutional arrangements. Non-hegemonic peripheral states must be ruled by elites that consider the centre and its structures and values as a model for their own country, or must be willing to organise their internal social, political and economic order to make it compatible with the interests of the centre in holding its empire together. Keeping such elites in power is essential for empire to last; as the US experience teaches us, this may have costs in democratic values, economic resources and even lives.

…

https://mondediplo.com/2019/05/06eu

Mr. Rachman’s final paragraph in steeped in doom: ‘The West’ must contend with its self-created enemies China and Russia! That offers the reader nothing but recycled political paranoia.  Except the stark object lesson that the E.U., and not the Enlightenment concept of ‘Europe’, is about a failed attempt at Market driven, rather than a Democracy driven vehicle, for political/economic integration. That is now in a slow-motion collapse. Democracy must lead the way, not the proven bankruptcy of the Market!

The beginnings of a global trade war ensure that this is not an abstract question for the EU. On the contrary, European unity will be tested repeatedly by world events in the coming months and years. Political paralysis and fragmentation is a luxury the EU may not be able to afford.

https://www.ft.com/content/6d2755d4-8053-11e9-9935-ad75bb96c849

Old Socialist

P.S. The comic notion that Emmanuel Macron represents some sort of alternative is the height of political myopia, as the gilets jaunes have now become an integral part of French political/civic life. Macron is the reincarnation of a Bourbon autocrat!

The melodramatic headline for this picture should scream: Tory Bitch Cries Real Tears, For Herself!

Poor Andy can’t even pretend to any sympathy for this incompetent. Even David Cameron managed the usual  “she’s a dedicated public servant”. The last paragraph of Andy’s latest essay is predicated upon his status as an objective observer of the British, the EU, the rise of the right, in what was once called Eastern European politics, and India. Andy’s historical/political sweep is …

If you want to know why neo-fascism is resurgent in Europe, this is why. The European project overreached, and has never recovered from the financial crisis a decade ago. Europeans have always been more attached to their own national identities than to some abstract edifice like the E.U. This has been compounded, as it has in the U.S., by elite contempt for the feelings of ordinary people, denial about elite failure over the last two decades, and an inability of those elites even to speak a language most people can understand. I’d vote against those elites too, if I were Italian or Greek. Their comeuppance cometh. What comes after is the metastasizing problem.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/andrew-sullivan-goodbye-theresa-hello-boris.html

Political scribbler Andy began his career with a youthful infatuation for Mrs. Thatcher, then on to Neo-Conservatism, and then to an idiosyncratic Neo-Liberalism. But Andy has since transcended those  jejune categories, and has become a Political/Moral Prophet. An idiosyncratic egoist and self-promoter, whose prediction: ‘My bet is that Boris Johnson will be prime minister by midsummer.’ is destined to be utterly forgotten by that point in time. By that time Andy will have found a new object of infatuation.

Political Observer

Headline: Does freedom need guidance?

Sub-headline: In this week’s podcast we speak to Cass Sunstein, a former White House advisor and co-author of “Nudge”

Anne McElvoy interviews Cass Sunstein, a former advisor to Barack Obama and co-author of “Nudge”, a theory of how people can be subliminally prompted to make wiser choices. They discuss how far the state should intervene in our personal freedom and why left-wing Democrats might be their own worst enemy. Runtime 23 min

https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2019/05/17/does-freedom-need-guidance?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/doesfreedomneedguidancetheeconomistaskscasssunstein

Anne McElvoy calls ‘Nudge ‘an elegant way to describe human behavior‘, there is no transcript, so this is as close to what she said as I can get. Then Sunstein calls his new book ‘On Freedom’ ‘a song to freedom of choice‘ in his very mild mannered tone, which makes his mechanistic notion of ‘GPS’ sound very reasonable. Not to speak of his quotation from William Blake on ‘true merit’, call it beguiling garnish to his more carefully argued case for his ‘GPS’, which is subject to the actors discretion.  Ms. McElvoy does ask some almost probing questions, though her opening obsequious tone is not quite discarded. But for all that, Kant’s ‘self-emancipation from tutelage’ is an utterly foreign idea to Sunstein: who presents himself as that ‘GPS’?

The Anglo-American Political Tradition, John Stewart Mill, Jeremy Bentham and Hayek are Sunstein’s touchstones, or as he presents them , his New Obsession, as opposed to his Obsession of ten years ago in ‘Nudge’.

After some, what to call it, tedious recapitulation of his ideas, McElvoy then asks Sunstein  a question about the resurgence of Socialism in America, that then becomes for Sunstein a maladroit attack on Bernie Sanders. As a practitioner of ‘moral outrage’ rather than politics. Or what Sunstein, in his mealy-mouthed way, describes in his favored technobabble as the ‘expressive left’ that is ‘potentially destructive’ . Spoken like a true Neo-Liberal, or more aptly sounds like a riff on an Alan Greenspan apothegm.

Mr. Sunstein is a Soft-Core Authoritarian, who was co-author, with Nobel Prize winning Richard Thaler, of ‘Nudge’. Here are two links to reviews of this book, and a reply by Sunstein. This provides necessary intellectual background to the certifiable record of Sunstein’s Soft-Core Authoritarianism:

New York Review of Books October 24, 2013 titled ‘It’s in Your Own Best Interest’ by Samuel Freeman

It’s in Your Own Best Interest

October 9, 2014 New York Review of Books by Jeremy Waldron titled

It’s All for Your Own Good

Nudges: Good and Bad in the October 23 ,2014 letters from Sunstein in reply to Waldron:

Nudges: Good and Bad

That the ‘reviews’ are negative to this self-serving polemic should not surprise. As both Sunstein and Thaler are reliable Technocrats, who like all members of this very exclusive coterie, are the for rent intellectuals, who provide support for the ever expanding reach of the National Security State, in its never ending war on the autonomy of its citizens. The propaganda  instruments are television, movies the internet, they provide the tools by which that state manipulates ‘public opinion’. Sunstein and Thaler practice the art of camouflage, via the cultivation of bourgeois political respectability, and ‘public relations’. They cultivate their pose as benign intellectuals, yet are in fact employees of that state, and its corollary Capitalism, in its decayed state of failed Neo-Liberalism.

Sunstein passes himself off as observer of the the potential mistakes of the ‘Left’ in the Democratic Party. A hireling and ally of the Neo-Liberal Obama, somehow entertains the deeply held notion that ‘we’ will not not make the necessary connections between a well paid propagandist, and his project of political/behavioral manipulation, as somehow within the realm of the benign? The American Political Center is defined, at this moment, by the alliance between The New Democrats  and The Neo-Conservatives: call this catastrophic, and the utterly bankrupt Sunstein is one of its propagandists!

This essay by Kate Yoder , cross posted at Naked Capitalism and Grist provides some answers to ‘Nudge’. Yves Smith’s introduction to Ms. Yoder’s essay is instructive:

Headline: The bad news about nudges: They might be backfiring

Yves here. A problem with “nudges,” as in manipulation that makes clever use of cognitive biases (like putting fruit ahead of cake in a school cafeteria line…which ought to work all of once in getting kids to chose healthier desserts but reportedly has a higher success rate than that) is that, in the climate change context, the measures that will have a big impact require collective action, not individual action.

But this study finding is even worse…..that successful nudges reduce support for broader environmental policies.

Old Socialist

Who better than Mr. John McTernan, ‘Tony Blair’s political secretary’ to ‘review’ three books by three members  ‘Corbyn’s Brain-Trust’ ? At least in the worldview of the Posh Boys & Girls of the Financial Times. Now, it doesn’t quite match the political hysterics of this ‘review’ published in the good , grey Times of February 24, 2019 :

Headline: Review: Dangerous Hero: Corbyn’s Ruthless Plot for Power by Tom Bower — portrait of a monomaniac

Sub-headline: If Jeremy Corbyn became prime minister, he would easily be the most dangerous, most indolent and least intelligent holder of the office in history

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-dangerous-hero-corbyns-ruthless-plot-for-power-by-tom-bower-portrait-of-a-monomaniac-8x0spp3d8

Mr. McTernan is a more adroit propagandist, his first paragraph is steeped in New Labour self-praise, allied to Corbyn’s election as indicative of ‘energy and excitement’.

In Downing Street, when I was Tony Blair’s political secretary, we used to say that political renewal needed new faces, new ideas, new voices, and new channels of communication. When Jeremy Corbyn became UK Labour party leader in a landslide victory in 2015 he certainly wasn’t a new face, though after 32 years on the backbenches he was new to leadership. But his election brought with it energy and excitement.

Yet he pays his way, by carefully placing these three writes in a ‘Radical Tradition’ , known by an honest writer as Left Wing Social Democracy.  Marx’s epigones, not to speak of fellow travelers, in the garb of ‘Reformers’.

This the standard Party Line of New Labour and the Tories, who have presented themselves as the very same thing, except with vital difference being that Thatcherism, in its various iterations, is as failed as the State Capitalism of the Soviets, presented as the sine qua non of Socialism. Its as if Rosa Luxemburg and her coterie never existed, but propaganda has its demands. In Mr. McTernan’s  very well written and argued polemic, Luxemburg and her coterie would play the part of a political inconvenience. Some examples from Mr. McTernan’s ‘review’ are descriptive of his carefully modulated attack on Corbyn and his advocates/apologists.

…

Kogan’s book updates The Battle for the Labour Party, which he wrote with his uncle Maurice Kogan in the early 1980s detailing the rise of the far left under Tony Benn and what then looked like its complete triumph with the defection of David Owen and Shirley Williams to the new Social Democratic party. As Kogan notes, history did not immediately go to the left’s plan. The disastrous 1983 general election, in which Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives routed Michael Foot, nearly broke Labour and led to the leadership of Neil Kinnock and the slow process of modernisation that culminated in New Labour. Tony Blair’s three successive election victories seemed to put paid to the left, but after defeats in 2010 and 2015, and following a change in membership rules, Corbyn became the most leftwing leader in Labour history.

…
The lesson of this book is be patient and be ready to seize your chance. Time and time again, Lansman was. As Kogan puts it — brutally but fairly: “The left had learned in its political wilderness that the historic divisions and sectarianism could be set aside if there was a clear goal. It was uniting around an incredible campaign. Its opponents were drowning under levels of ego and denial”.

…

What is missing in his book is a sense of how Corbyn’s was a victory of ideals too — that the politics were as intoxicating as the campaign was effective and data-driven. This is where Mason and Bastani come in.

…

These two books offer a snapshot of the new radical narrative that would frame the programme of government of an incoming Prime Minister Corbyn.

…

Their starting point is an analysis that sees current capitalism, which they loosely and polemically label “neoliberal”, as in crisis.

…

Yet, while avowedly future-facing, both books have one eye on the past. One might say that a spectre haunts them, that of Karl Marx. And a very particular Marxist moment — not his best-known work Das Kapital, the touchstone of Communist governments, but “The Fragment on Machines” from the Grundrisse notebooks of an unfinished work not published in his lifetime.

…
This is Marx as a prophet, rather than the man whose political legacy was literally tested to destruction during the last century. Indeed, the unpublished writings of Marx, in Bastani’s words, “exerted little influence over communist projects in the 20th century”.
This, in the end, is the point — for authors who write excitedly and excitingly about social, economic and technological change, both Mason and Bastani are both committed to a teleological view of history. They believe it will come to an end — in a form of Marxism. Yet, if the restless forces they describe — both of creation and resistance — are as powerful as they both argue, that final state of society and history seems unlikely. Creative destruction will continue. Ultimately, both writers shine a light on what powers the Corbyn revolution — its optimism, indeed its utopianism. Socialism may have failed historically, but the critics of capitalism have all the songs at the moment — and where the energy goes, the politics follows.

https://www.ft.com/content/59ca75e0-7598-11e9-b0ec-7dff87b9a4a2

Has the fact that Corbyn will be the next Prime Minister, chastened the Editors of The Financial Times to soften their Anti-Corbynism?

Old Socialist

This May 9, 2019 Financial Times report by Benedict Mander provides a clue as to the possible ‘how’ of the coming political self-rehabilitation of Fernández de Kirchner:

Headline: Argentina’s Fernández fuels speculation over election candidacy

Sub-headline: ‘The young are my great bet, my great hope,’ former president tells eager supporters at book event

Argentina’s former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner stormed back into the limelight on Thursday after a long period of silence, stoking speculation over whether she will run for the presidency in October elections.

In a presentation of her best-selling book, Sincerely, Ms Fernández was openly critical of president Mauricio Macri, but refrained from announcing what thousands of ecstatic supporters outside were openly begging her to say — that she would take on the embattled incumbent in the upcoming elections.

“We are living through very difficult times,” Ms Fernández told a packed auditorium which included famous actors, musicians and human rights activists who had been waiting several hours for her arrival. “We need a social contract for all Argentines,” she added.

Although stopping short of openly confirming her candidacy, Ms Fernández’s supporters roared with delight when she greeted them after her speech and, grinning broadly, conducted with her fingers as they chanted “Cristina, president” in front of the cameras.

“The young are my great bet, my great hope,” Ms Fernández said at another point during a speech with strong electoral undertones that was watched attentively on giant screens outside by a youthful crowd that had gathered in torrential rain.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/bbf6f580-72c4-11e9-bf5c-6eeb837566c5

 

May 16,2019 by Benedict Mander

Headline:Bestseller fuels talk of Cristina Fernández’s political comeback

Sub-headline: Success of former Argentine president’s book prompts speculation of run for office in October.

It has been a good few weeks for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The ruling coalition of the man who replaced her as Argentine president, Mauricio Macri, suffered a crushing defeat in the key province of Córdoba last weekend, which further tarnished his damaged credibility ahead of October’s presidential election.

Meanwhile, her new book, Sinceramente (Sincerely), has become the publishing sensation of the year, selling more than 300,000 copies in a fortnight. Ms Fernández was given a rapturous reception at the official launch of the publication at last week’s Buenos Aires book fair.

Her return to the limelight after a period of silence has rattled Mr Macri’s government. He took office promising to bring economic competence but has been forced to seek a $56bn bailout package from the IMF. It has also panicked investors, raising fresh doubts about the vital IMF programme.

The timing of her book has fuelled speculation she is set to challenge Mr Macri in October’s vote. “The book forms part of her [election] campaign, without any doubt,” said Carlos Fara, a political analyst. He noted comments from Ms Fernández’s former cabinet chief, Alberto Fernández, that she was “closer to becoming a candidate every day”.

“No one mounts such an operation [to raise their] profile, then doesn’t use it — whatever they say,” Mr Fara said.

In office from 2007 to 2015, Ms Fernández’s penchant for nationalisation and economic controls left the Argentine economy on the verge of a balance of payments crisis, according to many economists. Now facing multiple corruption allegations, she once described herself as “a very successful lawyer” to explain how she had amassed a fortune while in power on a modest public sector salary.

Sinceramente was a “retrospective reflection” that aimed to at generate debate about how to fix Argentina’s problems, the ex-president said.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/7b016312-772e-11e9-be7d-6d846537acab

May 19,2019, by Benedict Mander

Headline: Fernández double act turns the tables in Argentina’s election

Sub-headline: Ex-president’s decision to run as vice-president is a move to win over centrist voters

Three years ago, Alberto Fernández accused his former boss, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, of “distorting reality” while she was Argentina’s president, while the Peronist party to which they both belong was “pathetic” for bending to her will.

Whether or not Argentines now believe that the sharp-tongued Mr Fernández is sufficiently independent from the former president — or her puppet — could determine whether he becomes the country’s next leader.

Ms Fernández dumbfounded Argentines on Saturday by announcing that the much lower-profile cabinet minister of her deceased husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner, would face President Mauricio Macri in presidential elections in October, while she would take a back seat as candidate for vice-president.

Markets are expected to take fright at the possibility that Mr Fernández, who stayed on as cabinet minister under Ms Fernández (no relation) for just a few months after she replaced her husband as president in 2007, might have a better chance of winning than Argentina’s first female president.

Nicholas Watson, managing director for Latin America at Teneo Ms Fernandez’s recent return to the public stage with the launch last month of her best-selling book, Sincerely, prompted a sharp sell-off in Argentine bonds.

She “has blindsided everyone with a totally unexpected manoeuvre that resets all parties’ strategies and alters the electoral outlook amid an already unsettled situation”, said Nicholas Watson, managing director for Latin America at Teneo, a risk consultancy in London.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/c06fd9c0-7a43-11e9-81d2-f785092ab560

Even The Economist has this report from May 19, 2019 on Fernández de Kirchner’ announcement that she will run as vice-president:

Headline: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner decides she wants to be vice-president, not president

Sub-headline: But her pick for running mate will be compliant

DAYS BEFORE she is due to go on trial for corruption, Argentina’s former president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has re-written the script for this year’s election, due in October. On May 18th Ms Fernández announced that she would not be running for president, contrary to what she had signaled only days before. Instead, she said, she was asking her chief adviser Alberto Fernández (no relation) to be the candidate for the top job, and she will be the vice-presidential nominee.

“Never have we had so many people sleeping on the street, never so many looking for food and work,” Ms Fernández said, attacking the government of the current president, Mauricio Macri. She explained that her new team was designed “not just to win an election, but to govern.” The news astonished some within her own Peronist movement—another former president, Eduardo Duhalde, said he thought it was “a joke” when he first heard.

Ms Fernández acknowledged that she had not always agreed with Mr Fernández. He was chief of staff to her late husband Néstor Kirchner during his Presidency from 2003 to 2007, and served her in the same position for a few months after she came to power in late 2007. Mr Fernández is known as a wily, backroom operative, but few have any sense of his own agenda. Speaking to journalists outside his home, he said he was ready to work on solving the “immeasurable crisis” the country faces. He insisted his running mate had been the victim of the “judicial system…..a shameful process, a judicial battering.”

…

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/05/19/cristina-fernandez-de-kirchner-decides-she-wants-to-be-vice-president-not-president

On what went wrong? with Macri’s ‘Austerity Lite’ The Financial Times of May 15, 2019 by Colby Smith:

Headline: How much more can Argentina adjust?

When Argentina’s president Mauricio Macri announced that he was once again seeking the IMF’s help in May last year, thousands of citizens flooded the streets in protest. With more than 20 arrangements with the Fund since 1958, Argentines had a sense of what was to come: steep spending cuts and other harsh austerity measures.

The IMF has changed its tack somewhat in recent years — Argentina’s record $56bn programme includes measures to protect social spending — but there’s growing concern that the economic adjustment built into the bailout will become increasingly difficult for Argentines and policymakers alike to bear for much longer.

Since the start of the IMF’s most recent arrangement with Argentina, which began in May but then was tweaked in September to disburse more funds faster, the country has made substantial progress in ridding itself of its major economic imbalances. On the fiscal front, the once gaping deficit has narrowed to 2.6 per cent of GDP — still sizeable, but much smaller than 2017’s level of 3.8 per cent. And on the external front, the country ran a trade surplus of $1.18bn as of March.

In the wake of these adjustments many sectors have been gutted, with construction activity plummeting 12.3 per cent year-over-year in March. Industrial production has also contracted, down 13.4 per cent year-over-year, per this chart from Alberto Ramos at Goldman Sachs:

…

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/05/15/1557907389000/How-much-more-can-Argentina-adjust-/

Yet compare the above with this Financial Times May 3, 2019 essay by Colby Smith:

Headline: Why Argentina’s latest policy pivot might just work

Sub-headline: Sceptics fear that a return to currency intervention would spell doom for Buenos Aires…

With a $72bn stash of foreign reserves — roughly $22bn on a net basis — Argentina’s central bank does not have much room for error. At the same time, investors are unnerved about the possibility that former leftist president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner could dethrone sitting president Mauricio Macri in the upcoming October elections.

“In their heart of hearts, most investors believe Argentina won’t vote Cristina back in, but they will be terrified if they do,” said Walter Stoeppelwerth, chief investment officer at Portfolio Personal Inversiones.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/635058a0-6cdd-11e9-80c7-60ee53e6681d

As an antidote to Colby Smith’s optimism the reader might turn to Alan Cibils and Mariano Arana’s January 3, 2018 essay at TripleCrisis, and cross posted at Naked Capitalism. An impressive essay based in a kind of economic realism, instead of an extended apologetic offered by the Financial Time’s Smith. The concluding paragraph of the Cibils/Arana essay is instructive:

Headline: Selling Out Argentina’s Future – Again

…

The factors outlined above generate credible and troublesome doubts about the sustainability of the economic policies implemented by the Macri administration. While there are no signs of a major crisis in the short term (that is, before the 2019 presidential elections), there are good reasons to doubt that the current level of debt accumulation can be sustained to the end of a potential second Macri term (2023). In other words, there are good reasons to believe that Argentines will once again have to exercise their well-developed ability to navigate through yet another profound debt crisis. This is not solely the authors’ opinion. In early November 2017 Standard & Poor’s placed Argentina in a list of the five most fragile economies.[4] It looks like, once again, storm clouds are on the horizon.

http://triplecrisis.com/selling-out-argentinas-future-again/

The politically wise, her enemies would call her opportunistic, Fernández de Kirchner has demonstrated her political adroitness, in offering herself as vice-president rather than as president. A political observer, with any degree of political savvy, could only marvel at this bold step, in her campaign against the failed Neo-Liberalism Lite of Macri. The question that needs asking in terms of political melodrama, a mainstay of the Neo-Liberal Press, is who will be the top of the ticket? Risk Consultancy guru Nicholas Watson articulates the vexing reality of Fernández de Kirchner’s maneuver:

She “has blindsided everyone with a totally unexpected manoeuvre that resets all parties’ strategies and alters the electoral outlook amid an already unsettled situation” …

https://www.ft.com/content/c06fd9c0-7a43-11e9-81d2-f785092ab560

Are the political lessons of the Trump Campaign of 2016 lost on the reporter/pundits of the respectable bourgeois press? To keep one’s opponents in a perpetual state of ‘not knowing’ , the ‘logical’ next step in that campaign was part of the reason that Trump won that election. In vulgar parlance, keep your opponents always on the back foot!

Old Socialist

Andy Divine’s ‘praise’ of Elizabeth Warren, in his first paragraph doesn’t quite ring true!

Headline: Elizabeth Warren Just Transformed the Abortion Debate

Elizabeth Warren is not afraid. Today, she set out a proposal to integrate Roe v. Wade’s provisions for access to abortion into federal law. She even framed her proposal this way: Congress Can Protect Choice. And she’s right. Congress can legislate on abortion; the matter can be settled through politics, rather than through a strained parsing of the Constitution by the courts. Political arguments can be made, and countered. Voters can go to the polls to support candidates who will vote for such a law, which will make any previous Supreme Court ruling irrelevant.

…

But never fear Andy demonstrates that like those Male, punitively Hetero-Evangelicals, he is one of the ultimate arbiters of  a ‘self-congratulatory morality’ that puts politicians like Warren in her place.The last paragraph establishes his ‘holier than thou’ status wrapped in moralizing hypocrisy.

…

I say this as someone deeply committed to the view that abortion is always a grave evil. I could not personally have anything to do with one. But I live in a pluralist society, I will never have to be involved in such a deeply personal decision, and I am equally dedicated to respecting the sincere convictions of my fellow citizens, and their unalienable right to sovereignty over their own bodies. If we take this issue away from a court whose decision still divides the country after 46 years, we can actually come to some compromise on it, like every other democracy. It would once again be possible to make your case, with full and immediate accountability — either for legal abortion or against it, or for a reasonable middle. Roe could be replaced by a federal law — perhaps like the one proposed today by Warren — or state laws of varying degrees of control. What we desperately need to do is take this issue out of the polarizing abstractions and into the nitty and the gritty of democratic give and take.

And whatever side you’re on, have mercy.

Like the male legislators who passed – they in effect outlawed or severely redistricted  abortion- don’t have a uterus, nor any of the other reproductive organs to conceive, nor to carry a fetus to term. So none of the male legislators, nor Mr. Divine, will ever face an actual  choice, that any women in her child bearing years will potentially face! Yet the moral arrogance of these men rules the lives of more than half of the American population. Kant’s ‘self-emancipation from tutelage’ comes to mind. Yet there is a more simplistic answer : no uterus, no vote!

Political Observer

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/andrew-sullian-a-way-through-the-intractable-abortion-wars.html