StephenKMackSD's Blog

Headline:President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen To Lie To Congress About The Moscow Tower Project

Sub-headline:Trump received 10 personal updates from Michael Cohen and encouraged a planned meeting with Vladimir Putin.

BuzzFeedNews’ ‘report’ from two anonymous ‘federal law enforcement officials’ is the latest ‘evidence’ of the Guilt of Trump, he committed an impeachable offense!

President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.

Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen.

And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/trump-russia-cohen-moscow-tower-mueller-investigation?ref=bfnsplash

Political Cynic

Headline: Time for America to embrace the class struggle

Sub-headline: This faultline feels less fraught than rifts over race, gender and sexuality

Mr. Ganesh spends most of his essay chattering about ‘Identity Politics’ in its various iterations of Left and Right, ( Usually its the Right that attacks the Left for this political crime!) yet he misses entirely ,or is simply ignorant of, The Rainbow Coalition of Jesse Jackson, as a uniting force in the desert of Identity Politics?

Mr. Ganesh ends his essay with this paragraph awash in jejune political chatter. Mr. Ganesh’s political myopia, allows him his expression of cultivated ignorance of the fact that the American Nation is still in the collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle. The real division between the 1% and the 99% defines our political present, in all its bleakness. Senator Sanders reminds his fellow citizens, that Mrs. Clinton was the partner of President Clinton, and his Financial Reform ‘Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999’ that was/is the harbinger of economic catastrophe, that has become a permanent part of American life. And the concomitant rise of the dreaded Know-Nothing Trump, in all his Game Show Host glory. The ‘choice’ has already been made, Mr. Ganesh myopia again expresses itself.

How telling that it was Bernie Sanders, a socialist, who blamed Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 on a fixation with such things. The “fight of today”, he said, is against the “oligarchy”. The senator for Vermont sees a class-based politics as good for the party. A better argument is that it is good for the US. A democratic nation has to fall out over something. Exactly what, it must choose with the most enormous care.

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/0c6be82a-1976-11e9-b93e-f4351a53f1c3

Mueller has indited Russians who cannot be tried in any American Court, and he won’t be conducting any Show Trials in absentia. A poor investment of his fraudulent prestige, of time and absent any self-serving propaganda potential, not to speak of its absurdist potential .
It isn’t the ‘Left’ who is accusing Trump, its center lies in the Clinton/Clapper/Brennan political alliance, and the myth not backed by any evidence- why weren’t the computers and servers attacked by Russia impounded by the FBI, when the charges of ‘Russian Interference’ were leveled by Clinton? In the face of manufactured hysteria ’empirical evidence‘ becomes an irrelevance!

Mr. Luce being a Posh Boy and potentially an Integrity Initiative fellow traveler, might lead to speculation, certainly the sine qua non of the whole of this myth’s reason d’etre, that the charge of Trump being a ‘Russian Asset’ has about it the stench of the Frankenheimer’s adaptation of the Condon’s Cold War pot boiler of the Manchurian Candidate, published in 1959 at the height of  American Soviet paranoia.

As for Mueller and Comey as paragons of FBI virtue, recall the fact that the FBI, and its Directors, were party to the cover-up of the their utterly incompetent Crime Lab, see ‘Tainting Evidence : Behind the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab’‘ by John Kelly and Phillip Wearne. Cases based on the ‘evidence’ provided by that ‘Crime Lab’ through the years 1980 t0 2000 were thrown out! Twenty years of demonstrated incompetence, not to mention mendacity. A record the FBI would like to bury, with the help of de facto apologists like Mr. Luce.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/8a5c64fc-1a53-11e9-9e64-d150b3105d21

As that current cliche goes ‘you drank the Kool-Aid’ ! As an American of 17 years I ,like so many others, saw the result of John Kennedy’s death and the publication of The Warren Report: the presentation of the Magic Bullet theory postulated /invented by Arlen Specter, and the 30 foot tower built by CBS to prove the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald. Even Cronkite couldn’t sell this!
Then, Senator Church’s report that said that there was more than one assassin! My point, who today believes that Mr. Oswald was that lone assassin.
The Warren Commission was run by CIA head Allen Dulles. Kennedy said he would ‘smash the CIA into a million pieces’ over the Bay of Pigs.
I have no faith in the liars Clinton/Clapper/Brennan nor the CIA ,The NSA, the FBI. But I have absolute faith in your gullibility, in your belief in the evolving narrative constructed/confected by this trio of liars and their National Security State allies. Everything they have said, and the ‘evidence’ and their reconstruction of the timeline of that Russian Interference is set in stone like the guilt of Mr. Oswald! History teaches some very valuable lessons: the value of propaganda is that it is endlessly repeated, for maximizing the number of impressions, that then becomes the measure of its truth value.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD   

Mr. Ganesh, in this essay, is back where he belongs, as feuilletonist. On the dissolute M. Houellebecq read this interview by Angelique Chrisafis from 2015:

Headline: Interview: Michel Houellebecq: ‘Am I Islamophobic? Probably, yes’

Sub-headline: Michel Houellebecq is the ageing enfant terrible of French literature. His new book imagines a France ruled by Islamists and he has been under 24-hour police protection since the Charlie Hebdo attack. Does he really hate women and Muslims or is he just a twisted provocateur?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/06/michel-houellebecq-submission-am-i-islamophobic-probably-yes

On Voltaire’s Bastards that 1995 doorstop, or coffee table decor , by John Ralston Saul, see this exhaustive review :

‘Are We “Voltaire’s Bastards?”‘ : John Ralston Saul and Post-Modern Representations of the Enlightenment by Nicholas Hudson

…

Yet the resemblance with Voltaire goes even deeper,

and is marked by the ironies also inherent in the career of his predecessor in the eighteenth century. For all his irreverence, Voltaire was a man enamored with the life of the court and the privileged world of the aristocracy. He thirsted for recognition at Versailles and when it was not served with sufficient flourish, he escaped to Berlin, where he showed himself entirely willing to set aside his anti-militarism in obeisance to the bellicose, if belletristic, Frederick the Great. Voltaire was not without democratic and populist impulses, which showed themselves in his

defense of the natifs in Geneva and his courageous campaigns in favor of victims of religious persecution such as Calas and La Barre. But one cannot not help noticing that both Voltaire and the husband of our

Governor-General tend to view the world’s sufferings through the bay-windows of large houses. Part of the fun of Voltaire’s Bastards is that Saul seems to know many of the people he attacks. His understanding of culture, like Voltaire’s, concentrates on the role of the ‘elite,’ whom he

both blames for social dysfunction, and loads with the responsibility of leading the masses out of darkness.

…

https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/lumen/2001-v20-lumen0276/1012306ar.pdf

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/eee12b7a-14d0-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e

Two questions and a comment that the mendacious,recalcitrant Neo-Liberal Macron is incapable of answering, with anything like honesty : Macron must go !

…

“I’m here today because I’m not happy with what is happening in France,” said Serge Perrin, a 70-year-old retiree. “You can’t ask the French people to pay for the errors of globalisation.”

…

The mayor of Bourges, Pascal Blanc, said that the government needed to act quickly and bring an end to the protests by finding a way to reconnect with the people of France. “This is the ninth act of this movement. How many acts will there be in this play?” asked Mr Blanc.

…

“This national debate won’t change anything,” said Audrey, who declined to give her second name. “Macron has already said he won’t change his direction. So it is optics.”

…

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/2f517eda-1698-11e9-9e64-d150b3105d21

Mr. Rachman’s choice of Jan-Werner Müller as not just a representative, but advocate, for a nostalgia that has at its center, a return of a ‘Liberalism’ of the kind that takes as its exemplars : ‘Isaiah Berlin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Karl Popper, and Raymond Aron’ is misbegotten.
See Mr. Müller’s essay titled ‘What Cold War Liberalism Can Teach Us Today’ at The New York Review of Books of November 26, 2018:  Some revelatory quotations and commentary:

But if liberal democracy itself is under threat of collapse because of this weakened center, why are the great defenders of the “open society” such as Isaiah Berlin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Karl Popper, and Raymond Aron so little invoked?

Mr. Berlin demonstrated what kind of ‘Liberal’ he was. Read Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic by David Caute! *Read Tariq Ali’s enlightening  review of Mr. Caute book here:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/isaac-isaiah-david-caute-review

That ‘weakened Center’ is now constituted by the New Democrats and the Neo-Conservatives, in sum , The Party Of War and or The Party of Empire.

But what Schlesinger outlined in an influential 1949 book called The Vital Center was not a matter of mere pragmatism, let alone triangulation between extreme left and right. These thinkers sought to craft a principled politics of freedom for the circumstances of the twentieth century.

What Schlesinger advocated with his ‘Vital Center’ was a politics that viewed anyone outside that center, meaning the Left, excluding the Cold War Liberals, were not welcome to participate in America’s electoral process, in sum, that ‘Vital Center’ was  McCartyite. Its institutional expression was the Americans for Democratic Action.

This was very different from the tendency of today’s disoriented centrists to preemptively enact the agenda of populists—…

There are no ‘disoriented centrists’ just the alliance between the bellicose Mrs. Clinton and her Neo-Con cadre, led by Wm. Kristol,Robert Kagan and Jeffrey Goldberg.

Rather than looking forward to a perfected future, right-wing populists in particular conjure up a fantasized past of a homogeneous, pure volk. In fact, they tend to reduce all political questions to questions of belonging: they insinuate that those citizens who do not share their conception of the people do not properly belong to the people at all; if citizens criticize populists, they are quickly condemned as traitors.

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/11/26/what-cold-war-liberalism-can-teach-us-today/

This reader recognizes the above technique from the 2008 Republican Campaign, that portrayed Obama as ‘not one of us’!

Please read the rest of Mr. Müller’s essay, his bad judgement is on full display.

To the question of Carl Schmitt, read this enlightening essay by Mark Lilla, from May 17, 1997 issue of The New York Review of Books, in which he reviews eleven books by or about Schmitt titled ‘The Enemy of Liberalism’ .

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/05/15/the-enemy-of-liberalism/

See also ‘The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt’ by Gopal Balakrishnan published in 2000 by Verso:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/581-the-enemy

One of the books reviewed by Mr. Lilla Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss:The Hidden Dialogue:

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3637206.html

The reader has to wonder that Mr. Schmitt and his writing exists, as a revelation to the ‘Chief foreign affairs commentator’ of the prestigious Financial Times!

The resurgence of interest in Schmitt is testimony to a global backlash against liberalism. As the Princeton political theorist Jan-Werner Müller puts it, Schmitt was “the [20th]century’s most brilliant enemy of liberalism”.

My encounter with Schmitt’s books and ideas began with the Lilla essay, that I have linked to. That led me eventually to Balakrishnan’s ‘Intellectual Portrait’ and to Heinrich Meier’s book, on the relation between Strauss and Schmitt.

Another puzzling revelation in the Balakrishnan book, is that on page 292 note 15 – Schmitt wrote a letter of recommendation for Leo Strauss, to the Rockefeller Foundation, that enabled Strauss to travel to Britain, to do research on his Hobbes book in or very near 1932. Did Schmitt save the life of Strauss? This might just put Mr. Rachman’s penultimate paragraph in a some what different light?

Perhaps more surprisingly, the study of Schmitt has also entered the academic mainstream. As Professor Müller puts it: “In many ways his thought has been normalised.” In 2017, Oxford University Press published The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt. The blurb notes: “Despite Schmitt’s rabid anti-Semitism . . . the appeal of his trenchant critiques of . . . representative democracy and international law . . . is undiminished.”

https://www.ft.com/content/bc9c69fe-14da-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e

Old Socialist

*Note that Mr. Ali provides a link to Christopher Hitches’ essay about Berlin at The London Review of Books. Not to be missed!

Thank you for your reply. In its essence, the term ‘Cultural Marxism’ is a term of abuse that describes ‘Critical Theory’ the product of ‘The Frankfurt School’?.That ‘School’ was founded by Felix Weil, a millionaires son, and called the ‘Institute for Marxism’, that evolved into the ‘The Frankfurt School’ and its two most famous members Adorno and Horkheimer. See this portion of a review of the the Rolf Wiggerhaus book*  :

The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance. By Rolf Wiggershaus. Trans. Michael Robertson Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 787 Pp.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8675.1995.tb00031.x

The question that seems to me as the most pressing is why not use the term ‘Critical Theory’ ? the most obvious answer is that this seemingly benign term lacks the propaganda potential of ‘Cultural Marxism’.

What is erased from this propaganda catch phrase is that Hegel and Freud were the other two thinkers, who were of equal import to both the eventual thought leaders Horkheimer/Adorno. On Adorno see:

Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius by Detlev Claussen

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057135

What Mr. Claussen makes crystal clear is Adorno’s opposition to the German student Leftists, who idolized him as a precursor, and looked to him for support. Adorno was an intellectual not a ‘revolutionary’ nor a ‘political subversive’ that that catch phrase ‘Cultural Marxism’ conjures ! For a useful introduction to the thought and career of Adorno that adds philosophical depth to Claussen’s biography :

The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno by Gillian Rose

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1555-the-melancholy-science

My reply will not lay the question of ‘Cultural Marxism’ to rest,  but it will add a necessary depth, to place this term in its proper historical/political context: as a propaganda device with which its users inflame the continuing debate, that has at its center the question of rhetorical/political legitimacy.

Regards

StephenKMackSD

*I’m looking at my copy, as I write this.

https://on.ft.com/2FrMT7e

_______________________________________________________

Les Kaye votes Leave!

‘Fluffy academic views of Marxism…’  Bravo! you are in the  territory of Mr. Ganesh’s contemptuous, supercilious feuilletonism: though yours deserves special notice: a rancid poisoned bon bon.

As for the death camps, look to the Middle East’s only ‘Democracy’ and Israel’s open air Death Camp of Gaza! Or America’s genocide against Native Peoples: Benny Morris, in his notorious Haaretz interview, used this as his historical template, for dealing with the recalcitrant indigenous populations of Palestine.  Consider the imprisonment of Asylum Seekers , who have guaranteed legal status, at America’s Southern Border. The separation of children from parents , advocated, but not used by Obama, and endorsed by Clinton. And the death of two of those children. America is ‘A Nation of Immigrants’ the title of a book by John Kennedy, now long forgotten in the politica present, in The United States of Amnesia!

In the historical wake of the Armenian Genocide, the Gulag, the Shoah, what ever happened to John  Donne’s declaration of human solidarity: Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind ?

Your final sentence doesn’t deserve consideration nor comment!

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

Headline: Donald Trump’s stamp on history is greater than his flailing implies

Sub-headline: The furore over the border wall distracts from the president’s effectiveness elsewhere

Two paragraphs of Mr. Ganesh’s essay nearly leapt off the page, for me. The first under consideration voices the notion :  ‘this is the most consequential administration since the end of the cold war.’ If anything is apparent it is that a Sunday Supplement stylist does not make a political writer/commentator.  The fact that Trump had McConnell and Ryan to enact their shared Robber Capital agenda – because Trump is just the Front Man , the Idea Man !

All the same, historians must beware recency bias when assessing the president. The non-materialisation of the wall is embarrassing for Mr Trump. It might even cost him re-election. The mistake is to see it as proof of general presidential weakness. If only. In ways domestic and foreign, this is the most consequential administration since the end of the cold war.

But Mr. Ganesh, so as not to appear as too blatant an apologist for the Economic Agenda authored by the Dixiecrat McConnell and the re-closeted Randian Ryan, political/economic Neanderthals, he engages in the time honored CYA!

None of which is actually to praise the substance of his foreign or domestic reforms. Some of us were happy with the world of 2016, thanks, and still hope the west will return to that status quo ante. No, this is about the scale, not the wisdom, of Mr Trump’s doings. He is a more historic president than his present flailing suggests. And he can “achieve” more, even after his loss of the House of Representatives. Deregulation is often a matter of executive fiat. Judicial and bureaucratic nominees are confirmed by the Senate, where Republicans have a majority. As for foreign policy, the constitution gifts him wide powers. We need not picture what an effectual populist would be like. We are living under one. Imagine his historical weight at the four-year mark.

Have I engaged in self-serving reductivism? No less so than Mr. Ganesh!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/e534296c-1366-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e

Headline: Sikorski in hot water

Sub-headline: Radek Sikorski said in January in a private conversation that he viewed Poland’s alliance with America as “worthless”.

‘MORE illegal recordings are destabilising the Polish government this week. The juiciest revelation so far is that the foreign minister, Radek Sikorski (pictured), said in January that he viewed Poland’s alliance with America as “worthless”.

Sikorski’s comments were made in a dinner conversation with the former finance minister, Jacek Rostowski, which was illegally recorded and printed in Wprost, a Polish news weekly. During the often vulgar conversation, Mr Sikorski said the alliance with Washington “is complete bullshit. We’ll get into a conflict with the Germans and the Russians and we’ll think that everything is super because we gave the Americans a blowjob. Losers. Complete losers.”

…

https://www.economist.com/eastern-approaches/2014/06/23/sikorski-in-hot-water

____________________________________________________________

Headline: A shaky compass

Sub-headline: Moving away from Russia and towards the European Union

IT WOULD be “naïve” to believe that Vladimir Putin’s recent call for Ukrainian separatists to delay a referendum was genuine, said Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, during a news conference on May 8th. Instead, the Russian leader’s initiative was “a political game”.

Warsaw’s main response to the danger posed by Moscow in recent months has been to push for speeding up further integration within the European Union. In a speech to the Polish parliament earlier this week, Radoslaw Sikorski, the foreign minister, laid out his vision for Poland’s foreign policy.

Ditching earlier concerns by former finance minister Jacek Rostowski, Mr Sikorski called for Poland to move rapidly to adopt the euro—the last core European institution to which Warsaw does not yet belong. “The decision about the eventual adoption of the common currency will not have just a financial and economic character, but rather it will be mainly political, dealing with our security,” said Mr Sikorski.

This view has yet to gain much traction; Polish public opinion shifted away sharply from the euro in the wake of the eurozone crisis, when Poland’s economy performed well while most of the EU was mired in recession. Recent polls show about two-thirds of Poles opposed to joining the euro. The opposition Law and Justice party is also against, which makes the constitutional changes required to adopt the euro impossible to pass.

…

https://www.economist.com/eastern-approaches/2014/05/10/a-shaky-compass

Headline: Populism faces its darkest hour

Sub-headline: But as its rightwing variant flags, the leftwing version could surge

The headline writers Financial Times have produced in the headline a fragment of melodrama that  Mr. Rachman’s wan polemic against Populism can’t vindicate! Both its ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ iterations are subject to the usual recitation of the Party Line of the respectable bourgeois scribbler. As I start to read Mr. Rachman’s essay I see a link to this essay:

Headline: Di Maio pledges his support to France’s yellow vest protesters

Sub-headline: Head of Italy’s Five Star movement urges demonstrators to emulate his party’s success

https://www.ft.com/content/66f419fc-129b-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e

This seems to reify the link between Italian Neo-Fascism and the gilets jaunes!  The motto of the Financial Times is never let an opportunity go to waste, in the search for the defence of the fantasy of the Post -War Liberal Order, as the definitional point, that provides both historical meaning to the politics of the present, and the fact that this construct is under threat from the forces of extremist anarchy, defined as without foundation.

The bad actors of Populism in Mr. Rachman’s history made to measure: Trump, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Alves, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jeremy Corbyn, López Obrador, and even the ghost of Hugo Chávez. With the added mention, of dull-witted enarque Emmanuel Macron, who makes an appearance to complete the attempt to construct an historical verisimilitude.

As Goya said ‘the sleep of reason bring forth monsters’ : define that slumber as  precipitated by the collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, and the reawakening of political activism on the fringes of the politics of that  ‘Center’ : Mr. Rachman defends as an indispensable part of that Post-War Centrist Myth. Think of Lippmann’s enthusiasm for ‘The Expert’, the precursor of the rule by Technocrats,  as the bulwark  against too much Democracy. And of the Technocrat Supreme Jean Monnet the mastermind of the Common Market, a coal and steel cartel, that remained a cartel with the window dressing of Federalism.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/2350acc2-125c-11e9-a581-4ff78404524e