StephenKMackSD's Blog

Headline:Emmanuel Macron vows to press ahead with France economic reforms

Sub-headline: President acknowledges ‘rising anger’ but calls for patience in his new year’s address

Macron in quotes:

“The results [of economic reforms] cannot be immediate and the impatience, that I share, cannot allow for any renunciation.”

…

Mr Macron also called out those who “take the pretext of speaking in the name of the people . . . [but] are only the mouthpieces of a hateful crowd”.

Mr. Keohane’s comments:

The president is battling to draw a line under a year of often violent protests in order to press on with economic reforms aimed at lifting growth and bringing down France’s stubbornly high unemployment rate.

Mr. Keohane  as political fabulist:

Elected in May 2017, Mr Macron initially rode a wave of popularity but as 2018 ends his approval rating hovers close to 20 per cent, having halved this year.

Mr. Keohane recalls a ‘wave of popularity’ for Macron. This writer recalls vividly that in the final round of voting in the French elections 36.5% of voters rendered their ballots spoiled and or uncountable. It appears that both the editors of this newspaper, and Mr. Keohane fail to make what might well be the very inconvenient connection, between a high percentage of spoiled ballots, and the rise of the gilets jaunes, and even considering the  possibly tangential, yet possibly very real connection. Macron refers to the gilets jaunes as ‘hateful crowd’ ( A riff on Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’?)

A collection of photographs of demonstrations from last weekend , December 29 & 30 2018, is clear empirical evidence  that the ‘hateful crowd’ is still a vital part of the the continuing Macron Melodrama:

https://www.google.com/search?q=gilets+jaunes+demonstration+december+29+-30&safe=strict&client=firefox-b-1&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjj2fvq9szfAhV5ITQIHXPBDPIQsAR6BAgGEAE&biw=1252&bih=562

Consider this report from France 24:

Headline: Security tight on Champs-Élysées as Yellow Vests call New Year protest

https://www.france24.com/en/20181231-french-police-braces-nye-unrest-yellow-vests-plan-champs-elysees-rally

The above links consigns Mr. Keohane’s paragraph below in the category of the wishful thinking of a fellow traveler:

Mr Macron will hope those gestures, and the falling numbers of protesters on the streets on recent weekends, will allow him to continue with his economic reforms.

Both Macron’s unslakable ambition to be the Leader of the E.U. , even in its state of continuing crisis, first the Greeks and then the Italians! and even France’s inability to meet the EU budget rules, from The Financial Times of February 13, 2017

Headline: France on course to break EU budget rules

Sub-headline:Deficit at risk of breaching eurozone’s limit, says European Commission

https://www.ft.com/content/ab4f1d98-f1d4-11e6-8758-6876151821a6

The above supplies the reason for Macron’s Austerity, in that its possible failure, or even a strategic backtracking, threatens his Imperial Ambitions. As replacement for  the axis of  Merkel/Schnabel/ECB, at the apex of their collective power, that crushed the Greeks.

The speculations of  ‘Citi’s economics team’ has a  special resonance for Macron, as a former ‘Banker’ and full time Neo-Liberal Reformer.

In a recent note to clients, Citi’s economics team said the gilets jaunes protests “raise the risk of more lasting damage, if they undermine confidence in either the perpetuation of the structural reforms undertaken by Emmanuel Macron or — and more importantly in our view — if they result indirectly in further reducing the likelihood of euro area institutional reform”.

Unless “his popularity picks up again, it is not obvious why other leaders will want to emulate his unapologetically centrist, liberal, pro-European positioning,” the Citi analysts added. “Incentives to do so are inevitably influenced by the perceived political gains this positioning generates.”   

Is that  ‘Citi’s economics team’ ready to consign Macron to the scrapheap, as another failed Neo-Liberal Reformer? That ‘team’ would have preferred the Thatcherite radical Fillon, anyway.  From the January 27 , 2018 edition of the Telegraph:

Headline: Francois Fillon – A year on, the extraordinary fall of the would-be French president is back under the microscope

A year after his likely victory over the political upstart Emmanuel Macron in France’s presidential elections was scuppered by a scandal over his British wife, François Fillon is back in the news.

Who killed François Fillon?, to be broadcast on BFMTV, is one of a pair of documentaries due to air next week to mark the moment the conservative candidate’s bid for the Elysée was fatally damaged by a report in a weekly investigative magazine.

His name is also splattered over a slew of newspaper and magazine reports that pore over the weeks after it was revealed by the Canard Enchainé that he paid his wife Penelope hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ euros for an allegedly fake job as his parliamentary assistant.

The devastating report came as Mr Fillon, a former prime minister under president Nicolas Sarkozy, was riding high in the opinion polls, tipped to easily beat both the far-Right candidate Marine Le Pen and the newcomer Mr Macron in the presidential race.

But his past suddenly caught up with him and he managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Now the disgraced Mr Fillon has abandoned politics, and his Republicans party, which in its former guise had ruled the country for decades, is reduced to a rump in parliament and is bitterly divided over its divisive new leader’s plans to move it to further to the right.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/27/francois-fillon-year-extraordinary-fall-would-be-french-president/

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/4f009528-0d37-11e9-a3aa-118c761d2745

Headline: Don’t mourn bohemia — it’s everywhere now

Sub-headline: We think of offbeat enclaves as a thing of the past. But bohemia isn’t gone, it’s just permeated the whole of city life

Mr. Ganesh resumes his rightful place as feuilletonist ,in residence, at The Financial Times, with the exception of the  paraphrases from the erstaz pop sociology of David Brooks, from 2000’s ‘Bobos’. And his claim  ‘I write this as a Bobo with Bobo friends’ – how could Mr. Ganesh allow himself to be subject to the dull-witted reductionism of the trivializing, not to speak of the malign, Mr. Brooks?

Brooks, who morphed into a War Monger, and then into a staunch defender of the IDF’s mass murder of Palestinians. Brooks’ roll-a-coaster de-evolution from Kulturkritik to War monger, and then to the status of self-appointed Political Moralist, makes real the the fact that America is about the rhetorical/political reification of self-created fictions.  The United States of Amnesia is allied to James’ ‘bitch goddess’ of success, as the ultimate measure of the worth of male hetero humans!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/262aa374-09c1-11e9-9fe8-acdb36967cfc

Stephen Kotkin voices a telling critique of Canadian Frontiersman & full time political/ cultural hysteric Jordan Peterson in the TLS:

(The clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson contributes a new  twelve-page foreword excoriating Marxism, which in its banalities adds nothing to Ericson’s original foreword.)

P.S. Note that Mr. Kotkin’s remark on Peterson is parenthetical!
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/solzhenitsyn-as-he-saw-himself/

There are in Mr. Ganesh’s latest political feuilleton some serio-comic moments. His perpetual political misapprehension, or is it a cultivated ignorance? that  deserve highlighting , my focus will be as selective as Mr. Ganesh’s!

“Turn out the lights when Mattis leaves”, tweeted Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, upon the defence secretary’s resignation last week.

The ‘Center’ of American political life is now dominated by the alliance between the New Democrats and the Neo-Conservative. Rep. Schiff is a true believer in that Party Line: Russian Revanchism and the myth of ‘Russian Meddling’ in the 2016 election. In sum a full time political hysteric for the New Cold War.

It took the trauma of Mr Trump’s presidency to focus Democratic minds.

Mrs. Clinton was always ‘tougher than any man in the room’ i.e. the absolute ally of the Neo-Conservative War Mongers! The house -broken Schiff just repeats the Party Line!

These intellectual conversions go beyond policy to ways of seeing the world. Parts of the left took to relativism as it oozed out of the universities in the 1970s.

‘Relativism’ was the Party Line of the critics of Rorty and Post-Modernists like Derrida- too sophisticated for this newspaper writer! Its echos the yammerings of Canadian Frontiersman Jordan Peterson’s attack on the Marxist-Postmodernists, based on his cultivated historical ignorance, masquerading as the current expression of  The Patriarchal Enlightenment!

None of this is to mock. Democrats are ending up in the correct place on lots of issues, even if tardily and for the wrong reasons. Nor is this phenomenon unique to American progressives.

A very sophisticated iteration of ‘mocking’ is Mr Ganesh’s metier! What is an American ‘Progressive’? The drivel that used to be the calling card of Neo-Liberal Ariana Huffington? protege of Milton Freedman and acolyte of Obama? Those ‘Progressives’  have now come to their senses and joined The Party of War! Mr. Ganesh is in an almost celebratory mood, but he can’t leave behind his skill as polemicist!

But of all the US left’s conversions since 2016, the most consequential for the world could be its renewed commitment to American leadership, up to and perhaps including the military kind. There was nothing inevitable about it. The opposite seemed more likely not long ago.

The ‘Left’ in America is not Schiff nor any other New Democrat, but Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, and many others, newly elected to the House. An inconvenient fact, that has everything to do with Mr. Ganesh cultivated myopia!

At least since the Vietnam war soured, Democrats have been coy about the projection of hard power.

Mr. Ganesh can’t bring himself to say that America lost the Vietnam War! It didn’t ‘sour’ as he frames it, in the most trivial terms. Call it the exercise of a retrograde apologetics?

Either way, a party that was trending towards a mild pessimism about American power now increasingly seethes at the declinists, quietists and isolationists.

The ‘Declinists’ ,that Mr. Ganesh includes in his notion that the Democrats ‘seethes’ against, are the Neo-Conservatives, who are the New Democrats staunchest allies in the ‘Political Center’ that is The Party of Perpetual War!

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/2a6188e0-08f4-11e9-9fe8-acdb36967cfc

Headline: Putin poses a bigger threat than populism

We are living in momentous times. The key phenomena of 2016 and 2017 continued to dominate 2018: Brexit and Donald Trump. This was not just because of their own unpredictability and international impact but also because they illustrate a wider disruption of the established rules-based international order. This populist challenge has manifested itself in many different forms.

The opening paragraph gives the game away, framed in the political panic of an apologists for that ‘rules-based international order’ another name for American Hegemony i.e. NATO, and the EU as its partner. Call this what it is Propaganda framed in maladroit Political Melodrama! Brexit and Trump are the twin phenomenon ‘because they illustrate a wider disruption of the established rules-based international order.’ That ‘rule based international order’ didn’t just embrace the Neo-Liberal Mythology, it was its enactor, that clung to this monstrosity  until the collapse of 2008. But still it can’t emancipate itself from this failed Mythology’s thrall! This is the key element in the rise of the dread Populism, that Mr.Eamon Delaney erases from his ‘history made to measure’ : call it utterly inconvenient to his hysterical polemic!

The attack on Putin, as the historical recrudescence of the redoubtable Stalin, is this essay’s reason d’etre! But the Populists must be shamed in print as they are the witting/unwitting accomplices of the Master Political Games-man Putin!

Most notably we saw it with the often violent protests of the gilets jaunes in France, who posed a serious challenge to President Macron’s reform agenda for both France and, ambitiously, for the European Union.

The gilets jaunes’ demands are incoherent and contradictory but the protests represent an angry reaction against globalisation. It is the same with the anti-establishment sentiment behind Brexit and President Trump. Added resentment at immigration and multiculturalism has fuelled similar reactions in Germany, Hungary and Poland and the rise of strongman leaders in Turkey, Brazil and the Philippines. We should, however, not give too much validity to the motives behind these manifestations of anger. Much of it stems from a feeling of individual empowerment and negativity fed by a 24-hour news cycle and social media, which is why it can be manipulated by resourceful governments such as the meddling Russians.

‘President Macron’s reform agenda’ is the defense of the Neo-Liberalization of France. What Mr. Delaney carefully omits from his enthusiasm for the ‘Reformist’ Macron is that 36.5% of voters, in the final round of voting, rendered their ballots spoiled or otherwise uncountable. That already presents what can only be the precursors to the gilets jaunes, if the writer were being historically honest , but propaganda and honesty are antithetical practices if not concepts!

Brexit and President Trump,  added resentment at immigration and multiculturalism has fuelled similar reactions in Germany, Hungary and Poland and the rise of strongman leaders in Turkey, Brazil and the Philippines.

The above catalogue of the ‘bad actors’ and their countries of origin , simply fill out the picture of the what that ‘rules-based international order’ must contend with in the volatile politica present.

The reader is then confronted, after some nearly vacuous preliminary chatter, to the final paragraph of Mr.Delaney ‘s polemic:

One of the greatest international threats is on the edge of Europe itself: the continued threat from Russia. Not only can Vladimir Putin raise the stakes in his Ukraine incursion at will, but he has also been testing western defences, engaging in cyberattacks and meddling in the Baltics and Balkans, not to mention the poisoning of opponents. As we enter 2019, Nato and the EU will need to be more vigilant than ever.

The point of propaganda is to endlessly repeat The Party Line, allied to assuring that the reader is exposed to as many impressions of that Line as possible. As my Latin Professor repeated to us almost daily, ‘repetition is the mother of memory’! The reader can see clearly that repetition of ‘impressions’ is also the key to effective propagandizing!

Almost Marx

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/ireland/putin-poses-a-bigger-threat-than-populism-3rld2dh6q

‘The Masters of The Universe’ and their Neo-Liberal Swindle has destroyed  both the Middle & Lowers Classes in America! But at The New York Times all is well!
Merry Christmas,
Almost Marx

Merry Christmas,

Almost Marx

Headline: The crisis of modern liberalism is down to market forces

Sub-headline: Liberals are often led astray by their addiction to macroeconomic variables such as GDP

Mr. Münchau’s  rhetorical/political  landscape is teeming with ideas, concepts and actors:

Wolfgang Kartte :

Like the majority of economic policymakers in Germany, Kartte, who died in 2003, was a lawyer. He said he considered his job as helping the little guy to defend himself against the big guy. This was the job of a lawyer, not of an economist. Moreover, he said he was not interested in levelling the playing field, as the metaphor goes, but in tilting it in favour of the little guy.

‘The Crisis of Modern Liberalism:

The crisis of modern liberalism has similar elements. We have our own version of the little guy versus the big guy problem today — except that there is no one to tilt the field in the other direction. Smaller companies pay more taxes relative to their income than large multinational corporations. The economic policies that followed the financial crisis ended up widening income and wealth differences. Large immigration flows created insecurity, as did the arrival of new technologies. When you call voters deplorable — or patronise them, as happened in the UK after the Brexit vote — you add insult to injury.

Ordoliberalism:

Kartte was an old-fashioned German ordoliberal, a school of thought that originated after the breakdown of German democracy in the early 1930s. The macroeconomics of German ordoliberalism is somewhat dodgy. But they excelled at one particular thing. Their intellectual leaders explained better than anyone else how the German liberal order of the 1920s collapsed and how it drove a majority of the population away from supporting it.

Weimar Republic:

The short, flippant answer is that the Weimar Republic favoured the big guy. The macroeconomic shocks of the period — hyperinflation and depression — are well understood. They contributed to a large extent to the political alienation of the middle classes. But they were not the only causes. The period also saw an increase in industrial cartels that threatened the livelihoods of small merchants and entrepreneurs.

Managing Capital:

This is not an argument about redistribution. This is about actively managing capitalism’s playing field to ensure that the majority of the population stays on it.

Margaret Thatcher:

…

 

Recall Margaret Thatcher’s successful brand of entrepreneurial capitalism in the UK in the 1980s.

…

But to save modern capitalism we will need to find ways to keep the median voter committed to the system, just as Thatcher did in the 1980s.

…

The main constituency backing the Thatcher revolution in the 1980s was the C2s — the demographic classification for skilled working class people. Thatcher looked after the median household. Her successors first lost the middle classes, and then pretended to be shocked by events such as Brexit.

Addiction to macroeconomic aggregate variables:

What often leads the supporters and defenders of modern liberal democracy astray in their analysis is their addiction to macroeconomic aggregate variables such as gross domestic product and the officially recorded rate of unemployment.

The main constituency backing the Thatcher revolution in the 1980s was the C2s — the demographic classification for skilled working class people. Thatcher looked after the median household. Her successors first lost the middle classes, and then pretended to be shocked by events such as Brexit.

Liberal Irony:

Any system that leaves behind 60 per cent of households will eventually fail. It is the ultimate irony: liberalism is failing because of market forces.

Mr. Münchau capacious essay needs to be more historically focused! It appears to this reader, that this essay should have been much longer, to even pretend to argumentative coherence- perhaps this is just the outline, a rough draft, that needs more time and critical focus?

The conventional notion of ‘The Crisis of Liberalism’ ignores that ‘Liberalism’ surrendered en masse to Neo-Liberalism. The proof of that is the rise of both the New Democrats in America, and New Labour in Britain as the enactors of that now utterly failed Free Market Dogmatism: Thatcher was just the distant, but malevolent, precursor of the 2008 Economic Collapse!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/9dfea428-0538-11e9-9d01-cd4d49afbbe3

The Party of War is made up of Republicans and New Democrats: the prospect of something like dismantling just a portion of the military edifice erected to fight ‘The War on Terror’ or just call it ‘America’s Thirty Years War’ sends both these wings of that Party into fits of political hysteria. Led from the New Democratic side by Hillary Clinton, a Neo-Con in all but name, and her faithful clique at MSNBC, led by the ever politically malleable Rachael Maddow. She shares that talent with the disappeared Mr. Luke Harding!

Next to appear, if it hasn’t already, the charge of ‘Treason‘ will be the denouement in the next act in this manufactured melodrama!

https://www.ft.com/content/0e8d4a9a-0616-11e9-9fe8-acdb36967cfc

From the Versailles Grand Dining Room of the Hoover Institution, comes this compelling readable  Year End Roundup from the Niall Ferguson, some irresistible  highlights, the first is ,well , a nonpareil of the trivial, yet signifies one of the many symptoms of ‘The Great Degeneration’ !

One highlight of 2018 was the story of the Dutchman who wanted an age change. Born on March 11, 1949, Emile Ratelband was perfectly content with that day and month. It was just the year he proposed to alter — from 1949 to 1969. “We live in a time when you can change your name and change your gender,” Ratelband argued. “Why can’t I decide my own age?” He was even willing to give up his pension if the Dutch courts would recognise his desire to identify as a middle-aged man, rather than an old one. Of course, being Dutch, the judge said no.

The attack on Elizabeth Warren is, what to say, predictable, she is to the ‘Conservative Political Sensibility’ an Apostate !

If only Ratelband had been born in the United States, he would surely have had more luck. For most of her academic career, Senator Elizabeth Warren claimed to be of Native American origin. Had she not made the mistake of taking a DNA test, she might one day have been hailed as the first Cherokee president.

Also utterly unsurprising is his attack on Chelsea Manning:

From December 1987 until August 2013, Bradley Manning was a male American. The day after Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for espionage, however, his lawyer announced that his client was in fact female. My mentioning that for 25 years Manning was a bloke called Brad will doubtless lead transgender activists to accuse me of “deadnaming”.

For Mr. Ferguson’s animus toward what might be called Sexual Non-Conformists see this essay by Nick Cohen:

Headline: More Niallism: Keynes opposed Versailles because he was a screaming queen

The final two paragraphs of Mr. Cohn’s essay are telling:

If I were a conservative, I would worry. We’ve had rampant Niallism these past few years. Britain and the Eurozone’s austerity policies sound good in a pub argument, but have not worked so well – or indeed at all – in the world beyond the saloon bar. In America, the Republicans went off with the Fergusonesque Tea Party and lost. Now British Conservatives are appeasing Ukip.

They should be careful. Many people who might have given them a hearing will walk away if they carry on like this. They will say of them, as Keynes said of the Conservatives of his day, ‘They offer me neither food nor drink — intellectual nor spiritual consolation… [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilisation which we have already attained.’

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2013/05/more-niallism-keynes-opposed-versailles-because-he-was-a-screaming-queen/

Mr. Ferguson can’t let go of his ‘sexual/gender’ obsessions as the signs of ‘Degeneration’!

Last week it was reported that Brighton and Hove city council had issued new guidance to teachers advising that “menstruation must be inclusive of all genders” because “trans boys and men and non-binary people may have periods”. If we are to believe that menstruation is now a matter of personal choice, then why not age, too?

The reader can explore the remaining  parts of this hysterical polemic for themselves! One reviewer of Kenneth Anger’s ‘Hollywood Babylon’ compared the book to a box of poisoned bon-bons.

Sincerely yours,

Myra Breckenridge

P.S. Be sure to follow me: Hedda&LouellaAreDead.Com

Here are the first two paragraphs of Mr. Divine’s latest political encyclical titled ‘The Establishment Will Never Say No to a War’

The question before us is a relatively simple one: What would be the criteria for removing our remaining troops from the Iraqi, Syrian, and more general Middle Eastern conflicts? Or, for that matter, from Afghanistan, where we have been trapped for more than 17 long years of still open-ended occupation?

If the answer to that question is that only when each of these countries is a healthy pro-American democracy, and Islamist terrorism has ceased to be an “enduring” threat to the West, then the answer, as the old Bob Mankoff joke has it, is “How about never — is never good for you?”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/andrew-sullivan-establishment-will-never-say-no-to-a-war.html

Mr. Divine’s record on supporting the War in Iraq, and  his scrupulous account published by himself, was meant to indemnify him from criticism in the future, a link to his egregious record, in all of its 136 pages:

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

No amount of public moralizing will remove from the public mind Mr. Divine’s cheer-leading for the War in Iraq, nor his enthusiastic support for  The Bell Curve! , nor again for Free Market Economics and its two false prophets Thatcher and Reagan ! Mr. Divine must think that his readership is replaced every few years, by readers who only know of him in his most contemporaneous iteration. Yet some of us are afflicted with long historical memories, that vividly recall the whole of his panoramically bad judgment, in its damming totality!

Old Socialist