Headline:May warns UK faces ‘crisis’ following Bercow ruling
Sub-headline: Commons Speaker has said PM’s Brexit deal must be substantially changed before a further vote
Headline: Bercow’s bombshell cannot mask May’s Brexit failure
Sub-headline:Prime minister has lacked political skill and made serious mis-steps from the outset
Old Socialist
Headline: Do not let company founders hide from accountability
Sub-headline: Lyft’s dual class structure will prevent shareholders from having reasonable input
Recall Mr. Singer as the purchaser of Argentina’s bad debt? and the fact that Macri paid the ransom for re-admittance into the Free Market Club? as I recall 1.3 billion was the price tag! And less that a year and a half, with the peso in free fall, Macri applied and got an IMF bailout for his failing Austerity Lite: de Kirchner is waiting in the wings: the definition of ‘success’?
That bit of inconvenient ‘Economic History’ puts Mr. Singer’s plea for ‘shareholder accountability’ garnished with self-congratulation where? Examples here:
My firm, Elliott Management, frequently encounters technology companies where founders or longtime managers created remarkable innovations but then struggled with the challenges of maturing products, expanding organisations or slowing growth.
They often respond by aggressively seeking new sources of growth, paying richly for acquisitions that do not fit with their business models or allocating capital towards peripheral activities that fail to generate returns. Worse, such efforts often damage the core businesses that brought success in the first place.
…
Many companies are able to pull off these transitions without active shareholder involvement. But even at the most successful tech groups, allegations of privacy violations and other abuses have been most acute at companies such as Facebook and Google where dual-class structures are in place.
…
Those with the insight and daring to found a business deserve our respect. But once they sell the vast majority of the company to the public, they should not be allowed to run it forever without any shareholder input. Public ownership must mean public accountability.
My selection of quotations is self-serving, but not anymore self-serving than Mr. Singer’s whole argument,that Capitalism, and its companies need investors like himself to keep them ‘honest’! Public Ownership and Public Accountability under the leadership of Vulture Capitalists like Singer is the sine qua non of Capitalist Virtue.
Almost Marx
https://www.ft.com/content/b41a9896-4572-11e9-b83b-0c525dad548f
Headline:Emmanuel Macron scents revival as France’s great debate ends
Sub-headline: President plans next steps after national dialogue that has shown his campaigning vigour
M. Macron addresses not ‘the people’ but 600 mayors, should this surprise?
Mr Macron — who launched the debate with a marathon seven-hour performance of fielding questions, joking and sparring with 600 mayors in a small town in Normandy — has been in his element criss-crossing the country after retreating from public view in what seemed like a crisis of confidence following the first demonstrations.
But Boris Vallaud and Patrick Devedjian provide some political context:
“He prefers a direct dialogue,” said Boris Vallaud, a member of parliament for the now much-diminished French Socialist party. “Everyone marvels at the performance, but the fact that he’s going over the heads of the parliament, the unions, the representative institutions, is a weakening of democracy.”
Patrick Devedjian, a former government minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy and a politician of the opposition Les Républicains, put it more bluntly: “It worked well. He was good.”
Does the attentive reader of this Financial Times ‘report’ need to look any further than the items Macron excluded from this debate:
He excluded some ideas from the start, including a reimposition of the wealth tax abolished by his government and the reversal of hard-won liberal laws such as those allowing gay marriage and ending the death penalty. said were not subject to consideration
This Financial Times ‘report’ ends with an anonymous comment from ‘one senior official’ : ‘more concrete changes for them ,not less reform’ reflects the opinion of the ‘people’ , or just the magical thinking of a Macron political operative repeating ‘The Party Line’ ? Hoping that the unrest will shrink further, in the month that this ‘report’ will take to put together. And will be subject to ‘…Mr Macron’s advisers insist that he will respond with his characteristic energy to the issues raised by the debate,…’ . An ‘actual debate’ would not be subject to any politically self-serving limitations!
“Their demands are really that things move quicker, not that they stop,” said one senior official familiar with Mr Macron’s thinking. “They want to see more concrete changes for them, not less reform. The conclusion of the great debate will not be to do nothing. The French people won’t accept that.”
Old Socialist
Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.
Headline: Macron’s response to the ‘gilets jaunes’ taps a French thirst for debate
Sub-headline: A Montpellier window into grievances aired in the ‘Grand Débat National’
Poor Macron, he stumbles over his authoritarianism under the rubric of Jupertarian Politics, that is facing the test of popular discontent. The canny ‘reformer’ would have started with the ‘Grand Débat National’ and built upon it. Consider this the arrogance of an enarque , in sum, a Technocrat of Neo-Liberal Disasterism.
Ms. Chassany continues to produce apologetic propaganda, but this time she personalizes it, with the addition of her family members, that adds charm and an insight into what matters to her, in its way winning and humanizing! Also indicative of a class bias, but propaganda is just that, and no more.
From what political quarter comes this?
If anything, the debate has raised expectations of reform — again — with the political risk of generating further disenchantment if it does not translate into concrete measures.
The Great Unwashed is exacting its costs on France’s Neo-Liberal Golden Boy, whose political ambition seeks the World Stage of the Leadership of the European Union, as his political capital is a the point of 31% : almost a match to the 36.5% of spoiled and uncountable ballots,that brought Macron to ‘power’ . Celebrated in the pages of this newspaper as a turning point in French politics, as the coming of Neo-Liberalism, not so carefully placed under the propaganda rubric of ‘reform’. Could this be the turning point that signals the end of French Socialism? The expression of a hope of the Financial Times coterie?
Tellingly, they differed on the wealth tax — calls for its reinstatement have been omnipresent in the protests
The repeal of the ‘Wealth Tax’ is a demonstration of Macron’s status as Oligarch!
Old Socialist
https://www.ft.com/content/3e977470-457e-11e9-b168-96a37d002cd3
Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.
Headline:In this Cold War between Trump and China, beware the enemy within
Sub-headline: As tensions rise across the Pacific, whose side are US socialists on?
As preamble to my comment on the above, recall Mr. Ferguson’s stern warning from February 24, 2019:
Headline: Let me give you the real news about hate crime
Sub-headline: Those who fabricate racist attacks will only help re-elect Trump
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/let-me-give-you-the-real-news-about-hate-crime-96gpsrsr5
The featured protagonist in this essay was ‘gay African-American actor Justin (“Jussie”) Smollett‘. In sum, Mr. Smollett wanted a raise from his $1800 per episode salary. And staged an attack, as part of an utterly misguided attempt to somehow get the raise he wanted: this scheme demonstrates an utter lack of maturity, in fact it was the act of a child!
The real targets for Mr. Ferguson’s withering contempt were two prominent Senators Harris and Booker, who sided with Mr. Smollett, their only real ‘mistake’ was to have trusted Mr. Smollett? There exists a built in solidarity with black people that Mr. Ferguson will never understand? Call it a lack of Moral Imagination! Another possibility is that Mr. Ferguson hasn’t yet read ‘The New Jim Crow’ ? The other very pressing question that begs to be discussed is that both Harris and Booker are presidential candidates, to engage in cynicism.
Further into his diatribe on the subject of ‘The Left’ and Fake Hate Crimes Mr. Ferguson offers this:
The problem is that there is not enough of the right kind of hate crime to validate the narrative, so cherished by the left, that Trump’s election unleashed a wave of white supremacist violence. Only half the known offenders in US hate crimes in 2017 were in fact white. Anti-semitic acts often turn out to be by non-white perpetrators, though you would need to read between the lines of The New York Times to work that out.
Mr. Ferguson is relentless in his attacks on Harris, with the addition of the 47 year old Southern Poverty Law Centre, another manifestation of ‘The Left’
Democrats such as Harris want to talk only about white extremism — rather in the way that the phoney civil rights organisation the Southern Poverty Law Centre used to publish a list of “anti-Muslim extremists” but never a list of Muslim extremists. Ironically, Nawaz and my wife both appeared on that list — until he sued them.
Look to the Southern Poverty Law Centre website here :
Here is the most recent example of Mr. Ferguson’s Anti-Left Paranoia, that framed the beginning of my essay. He garnishes it with a reference to Fukuyama’s monument to Starussian historical mendacity The End of History. Nothing impresses American Hicks, and their fellow travelers, more that a labored reference to Hegel and prolixity on a grand scale!
Headline:In this Cold War between Trump and China, beware the enemy within
Sub-headline: As tensions rise across the Pacific, whose side are US socialists on?
But Mr. Ferguson has found a New Prophet in Graham Allison and his Destined for War and his Thucydides’s Trap, that reaches back to the Greeks, for a rhetorical fame for this expression of Declinism, that is Mr. Ferguson’s obsession. It even outranks ‘End of History’ merde as a way to fear monger, in a more highfalutin key.
But Mr. Ferguson ends his carefully framed essay with an attacks on ‘left-wing firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ ‘congresswoman Ilhan Omar’ , ‘ Council on American-Islamic Relations’. What is the patient reader to make of this not so veiled accusation of potential treason. Mr. Ferguson is ignorant of American history! At the beginning of the Cold War in America, the Party Line of the Republicans was that the New Deal was a Generation of Treason. Mr. Ferguson attempts to rehabilitate this lie, as some how viable in the New Cold War with China, via Mr. Allison’s nihilist polemic. Mr. Ferguson’s obsession with the left, is a function of his search for political apostates, while the American Political Class’ failures are manifested in the Trump presidency!
Old Socialist
__________________________________________________________
Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.
Andy Divine has the habit of public moralizing on the political conduct of others, from his column of March 08, 2019.
Let’s get this out of the way first: Using the phrases “all about the Benjamins” and “allegiance to a foreign country” when referring to the Israel lobby in D.C., as freshman Democratic representative Ilhan Omar recently did, is anti-Semitic. It should be possible to criticize Washington’s relationship with Israel without deploying crude and freighted language like this. But it got me wondering: Is it possible to write honestly about the Israel lobby’s power in D.C. without using any anti-Semitic “tropes” at all?
The basic facts are not really in dispute. A very powerful lobby deploys the money and passions of its members to ensure that a foreign country gets very, very special treatment from the U.S. Many of its supporters are Evangelical Protestants who want to accelerate the Second Coming. Others spring from an older and very American form of Christian Zionism. Many others are also American Jews with a commitment to Israel that has its roots both in the Torah and in a vow never to allow a second Holocaust.
Mr. Divine presents himself as an authority on bigotry, the ‘Anti-Antisemitism’ of Rep. Omar. Yet the reader with a memory reaching back to 1994 can’t forget Andy’s advocacy for The Bell Curve, and here is a link to a collection of responses published in The New Republic:
https://newrepublic.com/article/120890/responses-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt
This devastating review in the New York Review of Books by Charles Lane:
A link to Max Reed’s 2011 Gawker essay:
https://gawker.com/5863453/a-readers-guide-to-andrew-sullivans-defense-of-race-science
The one thing that Andy depends upon is the ignorance of his readership , the younger readers might think that he is an Idiosyncratic Centrist, that advocates the use of hallucinogens, while still advocating the Centrist idea of political moderation. Those readers don’t recall Andy’s ‘evolution’ from Thatcherite , to Neo-Conservative to Neo-Liberal : never forgetting his unquenchable bellicosity in Foreign Policy and his advocacy for a Eugenics for a New Age. His condemnation of Rep .Omar is the product of his self-infatuated mendacity all dressed-up in Pundit Drag.
Old Socialist
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/how-should-we-talk-about-the-israel-lobbys-power.html
Headline: Two Dozen House Republicans Oppose Anti-Hate Resolution for Some Reason
Mr. Chait proves himself to be a true ‘Centrist’ , the current alliance between the Neo-Cons & The New Democrats, by focusing on the minority Republican response to the ‘Anti-Hate Resolution’.
What he ignores is that the New Democrats, in the person of Pelosi ,could not identify Rep. Ilhan Omar as the ‘reason’ for this ‘Resolution’ . So it was couched in a generic condemnation of ‘hate’, that made some of the Republicans rebel against what they perceived to be ‘political correctness’ that the Republicans (Dixiecrats almost to a person) find to be a Leftist Dogma.
The most salient points Mr. Chait avoids, at all political costs, is a frank discussion of the power of AIPAC, and its strangle hold it has on American Politics. In that regard the whole of American Politics is strictly controlled by this Lobby. Rep. Ilhan Omar deviated from the acceptable discourse, to put it the mildest terms. In the spirit of frankness she is an Apostate who needs to be rebuked, shamed into conformity. Has it worked?
Pelosi can no longer control the Party, as Sanders, Warren, and even AIPAC loyalist Harris support Rep. Omar. The New-New Dealers are the future of the Party, and the New Democrats are its past. Even though they control of the Party apparatus ,peopled with their apparatchiks like Wassermann-Schultz, Schumer etc., the political agents of the New-New Deal, are now an unpleasant fact of political life for the Old Guard Clintonites: who will stop at nothing to try to kill this newest iteration of a New Deal, re-imagined by Rep. Omar and her sisters in the House. Mr. Chait is an Old Guard loyalist/apologist, whose allegiance to that coterie is always manifested in his carefully crafted propaganda interventions.
Old Socialist
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/house-resolution-anti-semitism-republicans-oppose.html
Headline: Quantitative easing was the father of millennial socialism
Sub-headline: Federal Reserve’s bid to stave off depression sowed the seeds of a generational revolt
Welcome to Mr. David McWilliams and his brand of Political Economy, that is obsessed with a search for the cause of the New-New Deal : a cunning blend of Herbert Spencer , Oscar Wilde, and Walt Disney. His Enemies List begins with Ben Bernanke and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. With additional actors : quantitative easing, millennials , leftwing politics, 2008 crash, unorthodox monetary policy, and other villains too numerous to mention, allied with a host of suggestive economic data, bathed is withering sarcasm.
For the reader without the patience to read this whole tedious essay there is the last paragraph:
For the purist, capitalism without default is a bit like Catholicism without hell. But we have confession for a reason. Everyone needs absolution. QE was capitalism’s confessional. But what if the day of reckoning was only postponed? What if a policy designed to protect the balance sheets of the wealthy has unleashed forces that may lead to the mass appropriation of those assets in the years ahead?
https://www.ft.com/content/cbed81fc-3b56-11e9-9988-28303f70fcff
The patient reader might ask what has this amalgam of Herbert Spencer, Oscar Wilde and Walt Disney have in common with a Catholicism, that more closely resembles Calvinism? In the most simplistic terms Bernanke is the Devil and Ocasio-Cortez is his Apostate. The rise of a New-New Deal is the foundation of Mr. McWilliams’ search for the cause of this political manifestation/misfortune that is reduced to a vulgar pastiche of theology.
Old Socialist
https://www.ft.com/content/cbed81fc-3b56-11e9-9988-28303f70fcff
The headline writers at The Financial Times worked their dark magic to confect this:
The fallen superpower: US foreign policy from triumph to hubris
Veteran diplomat William Burns details shifts under five presidents in ‘The Back Channel’
Who better than Posh Boy Lionel Barber to write this meditation on the career of William Burns ? His very impressive C.V. is available here:
In the memoir of his diplomatic career, titled The Back Channel , is reviewed by Barber. Mr. Burns left the Diplomatic Service in 2014, and became the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is a graduate of Oxford University.
In the Age of Trump, the points of agreement between Barber and Burns are presented here:
Burns correctly singles out the elder Bush’s administration as the model. The national security team that managed the end of the cold war was top drawer. James Baker was a shrewd secretary of state who enjoyed the trust of the president. Bush Sr understood the importance of restraint. His decision not to topple Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war looks even wiser given the debacle after the second Gulf war.
But, as Burns recognises, the US stood at the pinnacle of power in 1991. One year later, as Bill Clinton prepared to enter the White House, Burns warned in a prescient memo that victory in the cold war masked more malign developments. The forces of fragmentation were on the rise, with the risk of a retreat into nationalism or religious extremism or a combination of the two.
“Ideological competition was not over — it was simply reshaped,” Burns wrote, “In much of the world . . . Islamic conservatism remains a potent alternative to democracy as an organising principle.”
The Adults in the Room is subject to a political resuscitation. It is more of the same defense of The American Empire, the bleak headline is just the hysterical frame, as a caution not to abandon the fiction of America as benign hegemon. In its round- about way it is the re-rendering of Huntington’s ‘Clash’ in more palatable terms, for easier consumption.
Headline: The Great Myth of the So-Called “Adults in the Room”
The leading myth of the mainstream media over the past year has been the idea that there were “adults in the room” in the Oval Office of the White House. These so-called adults were for the most part general officers, both active duty and retired, who were going to restrain the excesses of Donald Trump by providing moderate and authoritative advice that he couldn’t get anywhere else.
Thus far, we have witnessed two Army generals who have served as the national security adviser, and two Marine generals who have served as Secretary of Homeland Security, Secretary of Defense, and even chief of staff to the president. The past two weeks have been two of the most immoderate weeks in the brief history of the Trump administration, demonstrating that the adults are either AWOL (Absent without Leave) or unable to broadcast on Trump’s frequency.
It was fatuous to assume that general officers could provide the kind of support that such an inexperienced president required. The example of Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State George C. Marshall in the Truman administration was singular because he was an unusual soldier-statesman. The examples of Generals Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell are not particularly useful because they had high-level civilian mentors such as Henry A. Kissinger, Frank Carlucci, and James Baker. Generals H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, Michael Flynn, and James Mattis lacked civilian guidance in the White House; they had no background for offering the sophisticated guidance needed on the geopolitical issues that bedevil our president.
…
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/21/the-great-myth-of-the-so-called-adults-in-the-room/
Old Socialist
https://www.ft.com/content/34bbaa0e-3e79-11e9-9bee-efab61506f44
While Macron’s Napoleonic Ambition never seems to be in contact with the wholesale rebellion that is tearing France apart: his Neo-Liberalization of France has met defiance by the seeming leaderless ‘The Great Unwashed’:
https://newleftreview.org/II/115/didier-fassin-anne-claire-defossez-an-improbable-movement
In lieu of National Leadership Macron’s propaganda campaign concentrates on the Leadership of the EU. Unable to lead his home country, he puts his energy to leading a Mythical Europe. With a Plan
The Brexit ‘trap’ — but no contentious eurozone reforms
Sharing refugee burden in exchange for stronger borders
Olive branch to UK on security
‘Buy European’ idea is back — again
Treaty changes
Macron presents himself as The Leader of Europe, while he has proved that he is incapable of leading France, except by police violence. His popularity ratings Jan. 2019, 28%, 32 % as of Feb 2019.
Old Socialist
https://www.ft.com/content/5b4db15c-3f56-11e9-b896-fe36ec32aece
March 05,2019 attempted to post this in the comments section of The Financial Times, but the link for The New Left Review is designated as ‘malformed content’
O.S.
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