StephenKMackSD's Blog

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

Headline: Where is San Francisco’s Bonfire of the Vanities?

Sub-headline: The city is home to the biggest story in US commerce — yet the tech boom does not yet have its Tom Wolfe

Who but feuilletonist Janan Ganesh would celebrate The Great American Dandy, as conceived by kitschmeister Walt Disney? Mr. Wolfe is forgotten, except in this diverting celebration of a writer ,whose specialty was with the surfaces of the human endeavor: to celebrate the trivial, the vacuous, a kind of  riff on what Television is! Was The Bonfires the natural literary inheritor of Aron Spelling’s pioneering ‘Dynasty’ ,recast and re-staged in New York City? The question ramify! As opposed to the  exploration of time, place and character? Instead of a series of literary snap-shots of the greedy and self-seeking: a pastiche of what literature might provide to the reader? Or to be more generous a sub-genre of the literary endeavor? Or, again, just cultivating the possibilities of BestSellerdom in the waning days of Reganism?

Mr. Ganesh and Mr. Wolfe are kindred spirits whose sensibilities and politics resonate. Mr. Ganesh’s talent for evocation finds his rightful place in the Financial Time’s ‘Life & Arts’ section of this Capitalist propaganda sheet.

The reader will never confuse Mr. Wolfe with Thomas Clayton Wolfe of ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ or ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’ !

Tom Wolfe never left Richmond Virginia! and his animus toward Jews and Blacks was amply demonstrated in his ‘satire’ ‘ Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.’!

Some of Mr. Ganesh readership, with longer historical memories, will recall Vikram Seth’s ‘Golden Gate’ of 1986 which predates the 1987 publication of ‘The Bonfire‘ ?

The Golden Gate (1986) is the first novel by poet and novelist Vikram Seth. The work is a novel in verse composed of 590 Onegin stanzas (sonnets written in iambic tetrameter, with the rhyme scheme following the ABABCCDDEFFEGG pattern of Eugene Onegin). It was inspired by Charles Johnston‘s translation of Pushkin‘s Eugene Onegin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Gate_(Seth_novel)

Perhaps, a bit too highfalutin for Mr. Ganesh’s pseudo-egalitarian taste?

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/3bf99516-02b9-11e9-9d01-cd4d49afbbe3

Headline:Democracies Are Fighting for Their Lives

Sub-headline: Can they save themselves?

The Headline writers of National Interest cultivate hysteria with their headline and sub-headline.

Like Mr. Fukuyama before him,  Mr. Moeller frames his polemic with a paraphrase from a philosopher , in this case Spinoza. The reader might just wonder at what a 17th Century thinker might offer in the way of the critique of democracy, well before the time of the Age of Democratic Revolutions chronicled by R.R. Palmer? 

Spinoza’s Prediction

The Jewish-Dutch philosopher Spinoza (1632–1677) predicted that democracy would be guided by and taken over by demagogues jettisoning reason and logic. Freedom for individuals in whatever way it was seen when Spinoza lived would be there, but the mediocrity of rulers would lead to chaos. The elite would rebel against such a system. The people would be confronted with the choice between freedom and chaos versus order and tyranny. Spinoza predicted that people would choose order and tyranny. Men are by nature unequal and equality among unequals is an absurdity. Therefore, a system which Spinoza labels aristocracy or monarchy with the ablest individuals in charge would inevitably prevail.

Mr. Moeller then begins his essay with the a BBC sponsored survey of ‘voting patterns’ in the Brexit vote:

It is thought-provoking that the BBC in February 2017 published a localized breakdown of voting patterns determining the outcome of the British referendum to leave the European Union of June 23, 2016 (the Brexit referendum). It says that “a statistical analysis of the data obtained for over a thousand individual local government wards confirms how the strength of the local Leave vote was strongly associated with lower educational qualifications. Wards, where the population had fewer qualifications, tended to have a higher Leave vote. If the proportion of the local electorate with a degree or similar qualification was one percentage point lower, then on average the leave vote was higher by nearly one percentage point.” History will tell whether the decision to leave was good or bad for Britain, but as the data reveals it was decided by the less educated while the higher educated would have liked Britain to stay. Moreover, those earning most of the money to keep Britain going including welfare payments are found among the higher educated.

The bad actors in Mr. Moeller‘s Brexit Melodrama are the ‘less educated’ , indeed a self-appointed  Platonic Guardian, the sine qua non of the Neo-Conservative form of authoritarianism, is the author of this polemic!

The reader might just begin here with the news that Media’s Elite is dominated by the children of the affluent, not say the privileged:

Headline: Media elite: 51% of UK journalists went to private school, more than in 1980s – study

Britain’s media industry now has a greater proportion of privately-educated journalists than two decades ago, a new study reveals.

Up to 51 percent of journalists in UK newsrooms attended private schools throughout their education, compared to 49 percent in 1986.

The study, published by the Social Mobility Commission, reveals the extent to which people from privileged backgrounds are given preferential treatment in recruitment.

The findings could also explain why some journalists seem to be so out of touch with the struggles of working-class people affected by government policies such as austerity and mass migration.

The findings come after Director General of the BBC Lord Hall of Birkenhead admitted that the television sector is too often a source of social exclusion, as it tends to only hire the “well-connected and well-off” from the south of England.

Speaking at a creative skills conference in March, Lord Hall said: “The truth is, broadcasting in particular remains a relationship-based, ‘who you know’ industry.”

“Of course this marginalizes those who don’t have connections… and it favors the well-connected and well-off from the southeast of England,” he asserted, according to the Times.

Medicine, however, beat the media industry for growth in the number of privately-schooled people it employs, standing at 61 percent.

By contrast, the proportion of such individuals in CEO roles is now at 34 percent, down from 70 percent in 1987.

Just over half of solicitors were found to have been educated in private schools, down from 68 in 1988.

But the judicial sector was by far the most elitist of all, with 74 percent of judges having attended private schools.

The commission carrying out the research said that for years policies have failed to narrow the social gap between “haves and have nots.”

“The old agenda has not delivered enough social progress,” the commission’s report says.

…

https://www.rt.com/uk/394621-media-elite-private-school/

Add to this the revelation that the BBC funded an attack on Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn :

Headline:UK to investigate state-funded attack on Corbyn

Sub-headline: UK Foreign Office Minister Alan Duncan has authorized a probe into allegations that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was targeted in a propaganda attack funded by the government.

According to a report by the Sunday Mail, leaked documents show that the Scottish-based Institute for Statecraft, which had received hundreds of thousands of pounds in Foreign Office money to fight online “Russian propaganda,” also promoted tweets calling the Labour leader a “useful idiot” for Moscow.

Speaking on BBC, Duncan said he ordered the investigation immediately after learning about the allegations over the weekend.

“I don’t know the facts but if there is any kind of organization for which we are paying which is involved in domestic politics in that way, I would totally condemn it, and I have already over the weekend asked for a report to be on my desk by 10 o’clock this morning to say if there is any such activity,” he said Monday.

The minister said he wanted Statecraft to stop its anti-Labour attacks. “Not only must it stop, I want to know why on earth it happened in the first place.”

In late November, Parliament asked Duncan about Foreign Office’s funding of the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative.

The FM’s response revealed that the “charitable” organization had received £296,500 in the 2017-18 financial year and was expected to rise to £1,961,000 this year.

The so-called Integrity Initiative is supposed to counter disinformation on social media by hiring “clusters” of journalists and online activists across Europe.

However, the Institute for Statecraft’s official Twitter account repeatedly retweeted anti-Corbyn posts.

One of the tweets called Corbyn a useful idiot and stated: “His open visceral anti-westernism helped the Kremlin cause, as surely as if he had been secretly peddling Westminster tittle-tattle for money.”

Similar messages targeted other top members of Labour such as Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s top aide. A message retweeted by the Institute for Statecraft had links to a newspaper report that said: “Milne is not a spy – that would be beneath him. But what he has done, wittingly or unwittingly, is work with the Kremlin agenda.”

…

https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/12/11/582602/UK-Duncan-Corbyn-attack-Institute-for-Statecraft-Russia

What can the reader think, after the revelations that the elite dominated media, and its most prominent member the BBC, has engaged in a campaign of defamation of Mr. Corbyn. It has been reported in the press, not dominated by the graduates of Elite Schools,  that the amount spent on this ‘campaign’ was 20 million pounds! The revelations of these two reports does have  the tendency to not just undermine Mr. Moeller‘s argument but to place in the category of misplaced institutional faith !

Mr. Moeller continues his polemic with six major problems:

1. How representative is democracy?

2. Those who are supported by the system versus those generating wealth.

3. The size of welfare benefits is growing.

4. Politics has become a profession.

5. Social networking.

6. Politicians are out of tune with the people, especially over immigration.

Questions 1 and 4 are related: Walter Lippmann was the great advocate for the role of the Technocrat in the role of decision making, as a check against ‘too much democracy’. The professionalization of politicians is just a function of that ‘faith’: in the ability of those Technocrats to steer the policy and laws of a country. The Rise of the Think Tank is also a function of the institutionalization of the ‘Expert’ , that now just don’t advocate, but write the laws that the politicians argue over and pass, in a betrayal of the very notion of governance and the role of the legislator, the writing of laws!

Questions 2 and 3 are about first the idea that societies are stratified into two participants in the ‘Market Economy’ that has replaced ‘Civic Life’ as the measure of what defines them: The Producers and The Drones, the product of the mind of the greed ridden pamphleteer Ayn Rand. The size of the Welfare State has steadily declined, since the rise of Thatcher/Reagan, and their sub rosa allies New Labour and the New Democrats, until the present! But one belief of Conservatives and Neo-Liberals share is an article of faith that the poor are prima facae undeserving! The utter failure of the Free Market Mythology is erased from causality of the 2008 Economic Depression, and the failure of one of its cornerstones The Self-Correcting Market to as yet to manifest itself!

Number 5 concerns ‘Social Networking’ as a threat to the political system to ‘set the agenda for political action’. A threat to the very professional politicians and their Technocratic allies that Mr. M sees as part of the ‘larger problem of failing, declining legitimacy‘ Decline and decay the twin obsessions of the Neo-Conservative!

Question 5 concerns ‘immigration’, though Mr. M. does not place it its historical context! In the Western hemisphere the Refugees are fleeing the regimes put in place by the American hegemon that have been catastrophic! ‘A Nation of Immigrants’ suffers from convenient amnesia. And Game Show Host Trump seeks to make ‘Fortress America’ a reality on its southern border.

In the Eastern Hemisphere the Refugees are fleeing  America’s Wars of Empire, called The War on Terror. The dreaded ‘Populists’ have simply been opportunistic!  America has left Europe on its own, to deal with a problem it has created: another erasure of responsibility!

The  final question: What happens now? leaves little doubt as to Mr. M.’s loyalty to the very central dogma of Neo-Conservatism, that the Lower Orders i.e. ‘ the less educated majority’ must submit to the political will  dictated to them by an ‘Enlightened’, not to speak of and self-appointed, Platonic Guardians. Note that ‘Social Networks’ are an equal threat to the hegemony of Guardians. How will these two putative majorities be tamed?

Liberal, representative democracy is mired in a clash between the less educated majority of people, and those with higher education. Social networks have sharpened this confrontation by offering the majority something they didn’t have before: access to the media with the possibility of setting the agenda.

Old Socialist

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/democracies-are-fighting-their-lives-38467

Voter Suppression was institutionalized by Shelby County v. Holder, cobbled together by the Roberts/Scalia duo of Neo-Confederate/Originalists, under the rubric of ‘things have changed’ a jurisprudental metaphor, eviscerated by Ginsberg in her empirically based   defense of  the ‘pre-clearance clause‘.

On voter suppression question I can agree with your tweet, but the cobbled together fantasy of Russian interference in the 2016 American election,  confected  by the notorious lairs Clinton/Clapper/Brennan, and their allies in three of the American National Security State’s most corrupt institutions FBI, CIA and NSA is not based upon the possible empirical evidence, that might have been available of the DNC servers, and or computers- we are left with the fact that Clinton won the popular vote, but lost in the Electoral College in the very states she failed to exercise her due diligence in the campaign.

The congruence between Clintons bruised ego, her perpetual political arrogance, and the Brennan/Clapper duo, as corrupt institutional actors, now out of jobs, not to speak of the allies of this  toxic trio still employed in government-the Russian Interference  in the American Election becomes the political banner, a mythology that unites the Midwives of Trump to rally behind as a show of their political incorruptibility. Its Political Melodrama confected with the Television Viewer in mind.

Political Observer

When you think that America’s ‘Academic Intellectual Class’, has hit rock- bottom- think of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ , a more sophisticated version of what that officious Neo-Con, not to speak of self-appointed wise Platonic Guardian,  Alan Bloom offered in ‘The Closing of the American Mind’. The recycling, of not just riffing on the title of Bloom’s hysterical polemic, with the added intellectual ballast at the level of Moral Psychology, aided by the experience of a practitioner of manufactured political propaganda, makes for a more convincing narrative, about the inherent apostasy of The Student, as nefarious political actor! It has been a very useful political device used by authoritarians, no matter their politics. The ‘Center’ of American politics now defined as the alliance between the Neo-Cons and the Neo-Liberals.

Prof. Cowen begins his essay, with the help of the headline writers of Bloomberg:

Headline: Macron Just Doesn’t Get It

Sub-headline:He and others on the left are being swept along by world-historical forces they do not fully understand.

The sorry truth is that both progressives and neoliberals still don’t get it, and that seems true in France most of all.

Since the election of President Emmanuel Macron in 2017, I have read or heard that he is the leader of the free world, the hope for Europe, and a model for the U.S. Instead, he increasingly seems to be a well-meaning guy elected in the wrong historical era.

…

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-12/macron-is-the-wrong-man-for-france-right-now

Prof. Cowen provides a map of misreadings of Macron:‘a well-meaning guy’  does not cover the territory! 36.5 % of voters, in the final round, rendered their ballots ‘spoiled’ or in some way un-countable. That looks like beginning of the current French Crisis, if you were actually in search of the reasons for the current ‘Revolt’. That startling, yet utterly ignored fact, by Prof. Cowen, and other other pressing questions,  puts these other two propagandists, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt,to shame!

Neo-Liberalism is not and cannot be ‘of the Left’ ! Neo-Liberalism seeks not just to supplant the Republican Tradition, that Tradition’s history as presented in The Machiavellian Moment by J.G.A. Pocock, but to destroy it completely, and replace it with the ‘Value of the Market’ . Such is Prof. Cowen’s demonstration, of not just utter political ignorance, but the self-serving political myopia, of the Corporatist hireling, who writes respectable bourgeois propaganda for Bloomberg Opinion!

To take just one glaring example, of the Refugee Crisis facing Europe, is that Prof Cowen ignores America’s Wars of Empire in the ‘Middle East’! and its seemingly ever expanding theaters of war. That has created this overwhelming flood of desperate refugees fleeing America’s ‘War on Terror’. There is no excuse for this, no mitigation can relieve Prof.Cowen from the moral responsibility of speaking about the reality of this crisis!

Old Socialist

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-12/macron-is-the-wrong-man-for-france-right-now

Here is a helpful link to a Financial Times Lexicon  on Quantitative Easing and a portion of that entry:

Central banks normally set the price of money using official interest rates to regulate the economy. These interest rates radiate out to the rest of the economy. They affect the cost of loans paid by companies, the cost of mortgages for households and the return on saving money. Higher interest rates make borrowing less attractive because taking out a loan becomes more expensive. They also make saving more attractive, demand and spending reduces. Lower interest rates have the reverse effect.

But interest rates cannot be cut below zero and when official rates get close to zero the effect they have on regulating the economy becomes muted. Banks still need to make a profit and in troubled times the gap between the official interest rate and the rates faced by companies and households can rise, because lenders want a greater return for the additional risk of granting a loan when times are tough.

When interest rates are close to zero there is another way of affecting the price of money: Quantitative Easing (QE). The aim is still to bring down interest rates faced by companies and households and the most important step in QE is that the central bank creates new money for use in an economy.

Only a central bank can do this because its money is accepted as payment by everybody. Sometimes dubbed incorrectly “printing money” a central bank simply creates new money at the stroke of a computer key, in effect increasing the credit in its own bank account.

…

http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=quantitative-easing

Being who I am, here is an excerpt from an interview with Michael Hudson that offers some even more valuable insights on QE and Mr. Draghi’s loyalty to such interventions !

PERIES: So, Michael, what’s wrong with with the ECB has announced in terms of a trillion euros worth of quantitative easing for Europe?

HUDSON: They head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, has said that he’ll do whatever it takes to keep banks afloat. He doesn’t say whatever it takes to help economic recovery or to help labor more; it’s to help banks make more money because he used to be vice chairman of Goldman Sachs during 2002 to 2005. And his view is that of Wall Street and of the financial sector. It’s not a vantage point of helping labor or helping economies grow. So it’s not surprising that the trillion euros of new money that the Central Bank of Europe is creating hasn’t gone to help Greece, for instance, survive, hasn’t gone to help Greece, Spain, Italy, or Portugal get out of depression by fueling government spending. It’s been given away to the banks to buy bonds and stocks, including buying American stocks and bonds. It’s all the idea that if you can make the financial sector richer, if you can make the one percent and the 10 percent richer, it’s all going to trickle down. This is the view of Paul Krugman, it’s the view of the advisers that Obama has had. It’s trickle-down economics. And instead of trickling down, what it does is drive a wedge in the economy by increasing the value of stocks and bonds and real estate and wealth against labor. So it’s quantitative easing that is largely behind the fact that the distribution of wealth has become worse rather than better since 2008.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/03/michael-hudson-quantitative-easing.html

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/4b478964-fecd-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e521

Headline: A humbler Emmanuel Macron needs to relaunch his agenda

Sub-headline: Crisis over the French president’s reforms is a concern for all of Europe

Macron in neither ‘humbler’ –imagine a humble enarque? , nor  does he need to ‘relaunch his agenda’ , a catch phrase awash in Neo-Liberal jargon, as the Financial Times editors propose! Macron’s plans are described in the text that will be posted below,  after his mealy-mouthed ‘apology’ to the French people. The police strategy of  ‘preemptive arrest’ does not signal humbleness, but shows that Macron shares with Radical Thatcherite Fillon an authoritarianism, Macron’s  under the guise of  the bloated notion of Jupertarianism. With the help of Financial Times’ preposterous phraseology like this: ‘After vanquishing the far-right in the 2017 presidential election,…’  : 36.5% of ballots cast in the final election were ‘spoiled’ or otherwise uncountable. Vanquish is not the right word, perhaps that old comic movie title more aptly describes the Macron victory: ‘The Mouse that Roared’?

Headline: Police flood into Paris to contain gilets jaunes

Sub-headline: Security forces put 8,000 on the streets of the capital to quell fears of rioting

French security forces contained fears of a fourth weekend of rioting by extremist gilets jaunes in Paris with a change of tactics including a massive show of strength.

About 8,000 police and gendarmes refused to allow the gilets jaunes to gain the upper hand, as they had the previous week, by attempting to filter out troublemakers before they could act. They put parts of the city into lockdown before dawn and carried out widespread stop-and-search operations. Plainclothes officers pinpointed extremist elements and made hundreds of “pre-emptive arrests”.

Small groups of gilets jaunes from the extremist fringe of the grassroots movement succeeded in playing cat-and-mouse with security forces, but were repeatedly pushed back by police using water cannon, mounted officers and armoured vehicles.

The government deployed a force of 89,000 police and gendarmes across France. Outside the capital, protests passed off mainly peacefully.

In a change of tactics from last week, when Paris saw the worst violence for more than 50 years, police and gendarmes chose to directly confront troublemaking demonstrators.

…

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/08/paris-police-flood-streets-gilets-jaunes

Macron: C’est une cause qui fait monter les travailleurs aux barricades?

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/0a8162ca-fd37-11e8-ac00-57a2a826423e

Mr. Rachman’s little melodrama starring the ‘wounded’ Macron could not qualify for the Spelling-Goldberg treatment on American Network Television, such is its weakness in terms of dramatic kitsch.
Forget the stunning fact that in the final election 36.5% of voters expressed their revulsion at the choice of Macron vs Le Pen, by rendering their ballots uncountable. A subject never broached by Macron’s apologists, here at his propaganda headquaters in the Anglophone World.

Patience grasshopper! Mr. Rachman offers this, and himself as the ultimate arbiter of the question of Macron:

So Macron-haters have seized upon the unrest in Paris to argue that the French president stands revealed as a massively flawed leader — remote, arrogant and pushing an outdated neoliberal agenda. By contrast, Macron-lovers insist that their hero can ride out his current troubles and still be a transformative president.

There is more, but hardly surprising is his contemporary hagiography of The Great Man, with a bit a caviling to lend an ersatz verisimilitude . It cannot be otherwise at The Financial Times:

Neither verdict is convincing. Mr Macron is indeed an impressive figure. He has correctly identified the need for structural reforms of the French economy and has bravely made the case for internationalism. But the bleak truth is that the president is gravely wounded by the gilets jaunes protests, the accompanying violence — and the panic-driven U-turns in government policy.

The above paragraph succeeds the first to demonstrate to the reader that  Mr. Rachman  isn’t just another apologist for Macron, it is a rhetorical feint. Mr. Rachman presents the three imperatives of Macron’s ‘Jupertarian Politics’:

To understand why that is the case, you need to examine three key aspects of the Macron agenda: internal economic reform, deeper European integration and global governance. These three ideas are interdependent.

‘Internal economic reform’ is a stand-in for the Neo-Liberlization of France, that has brought forth open rebellion. ‘Deeper European integration’ means more of the failed institution of the E.U. , a cartel with the trappings of ‘Democracy’: look to Greece and Italy as the economic laboratories that failure. ‘Global Governance ‘ is the place holder for the Trade Agreements TTP and TTIP, that take their Corporatist model from the ersatz democracy of the E.U.

Mr. Rachman sees Macron’s ‘sense of momentum created by these reforms has now been destroyed. ‘:

The Macron loyalists are right to point out that their man has already notched up real achievements. He has pushed through changes to the rigid French labour markets, which should make it easier to create jobs. And he won an important victory against the powerful railway unions. But the sense of momentum created by these reforms has now been destroyed. The Macron government has had to reverse its increase in fuel taxes. And the president is likely to promise further sweeteners to appease the demonstrators.

Appeasement makes its appearance as evidence of the prima facae unworthiness of The Mob, in sum, Macron represents Enlightenment Values, while that Mob represents a retrograde Socialism. The critique that Mr. Rachman offers of Macron is that he capitulated to The Mob. Reading through the rhetorical underbrush of Mr. Rachman’s polemic, the reader reaches its final glum paragraph, awash in *political disillusion :

If Mr Macron had been able to break this dismal cycle, his international credibility would have soared. He could have emerged as the global champion of liberal values — such a champion is sorely needed. Now, however, it seems highly unlikely that Mr Macron can save the world. He will be lucky if he can save his own presidency.

Old Socialist

*This reader just wonders, Isn’t this a bit premature?

https://www.ft.com/content/f0b113e0-fc5f-11e8-ac00-57a2a826423e