StephenKMackSD's Blog

Recall Andy Divine’s essay of October 12, 2018?

Headline: The Danger of Trump’s Political Accomplishments

It was the usual political travelogue that is Andy’s  specialty. ‘Kanye and Khashoggi and even Kavanaugh’

…

The Kavanaugh-Ford showdown also helped upend the overly simple view that women somehow form a monolithic bloc, all united around “women’s” issues, with those issues being defined by the left. In fact, partisanship and tribe trump gender, and always have. Women are no more a single ideological bloc than men, as a majority of white female voters proved in the 2016 election, when they voted for the gross dude over the feminist icon. (One of the really eye-opening parts of Jill Lepore’s new history of the United States, These Truths, is her account of how indispensable women were to the construction of the conservative movement.) These cultural fights, after all, are dynamic. They can rebound on you. If you’d predicted that the Kavanaugh hearings would have been a net-plus for the GOP a couple of weeks ago, people would have deemed you crazy. Today? Not so much. By November, who knows?

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-sullivan-the-danger-of-trumps-accomplishments.html

Andy can’t suppress his political enthusiasm for Conservatives and their opinions. note the insights of Jill Lapore’s book that provides information , on the part played by women in the rise of Conservatism.  Andy’s ignorance of American political history in terms of Conservative women-the names Phyllis Schlafly and Peggy Noonan are just two of the well known writers/activists.

There are some other ‘points of interest’ on his itinerary but Andy finally lites on Christopher Browning essay at The New York Review of Books titled “The Suffocation of Democracy.” Political Melodrama resonates with Mr. Divine, and Weimar, and its ‘suffocation’ by the Nazis, is rife with a usable example of a more than possible historical recrudescence, in American terms. Reader beware! as the New York Review of Books has become the headquarters for Ukrainian Coup propaganda authored by Timothy Snyder and his fellow travelers. The New Cold Warrior has many cunning guises, and writes ideologically usable propaganda. How historically convenient that this essay should suit Mr. Divine ideological needs.

Next under the political analysis of Mr. Divine, he considers  Reihan Salam’s Melting Pot or Civil War?, but a more careful look reveals that the full title of the book is ‘Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders’ Mr. Salam is a First Generation American, meaning that his parent immigrated to America and is executive editor of National Review. He could more accurately be described as that favorite Conservative hybrid , the ‘Libertarian’ or should it be termed more like an light coating of whitewash.

The reason why Salam’s book  deserves mention is that it plays the part of sub-text to Mr. Divine’s essay of October 26, 2018 titled:

Headline:  Democrats Can’t Keep Dodging Immigration As a Real Issue

More political travelogue but with a full scale attack on the New Democrats for their failure to take a position on ‘Border Security’ . The  security he is speaking of is the Southern Border, where the great unwashed Mestizo Horde will invade and not just dilute Anglo-Protestant culture, as outlined in the paranoid hysteria of Samuel P. Huntington’s 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, but will cast it into mongrel status! Mr. Divine plays on the historical ignorance of his readership allied to his own cynical mendacity! There is no excuse for his ignorance of this Huntington racist tract!

Mr. Divine finds an ally in fellow immigrant David Frum:

David Frum is right: “If liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals will not do.” And unless the Democrats get a grip on this question, and win back the trust of the voters on it, their chance of regaining the presidency is minimal. Until one Democratic candidate declares that he or she will end illegal immigration, period, shift legal immigration toward those with skills, invest in the immigration bureaucracy, and enforce the borders strongly but humanely, Trump will continue to own this defining policy issue in 2020.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/democrats-cant-keep-dodging-immigration-as-a-real-issue.html

‘Shift legal immigration toward those with skills’ in sum immigrants like Andy Divine and David Frum are welcome, but the refugees from American murderous political adventurism, in its southern neighbors, that began with The Monroe Doctrine of 1823: in sum, America would be,and is, the ultimate arbiter of the political legitimacy of any and all political regimes in its southern neighbors.

Old Socialist

Further thoughts:

That Huntington, Andy Divine, David Frum are white males who were/are an integral part of a Conservative Elite,  Mr. Salam is jut a fellow traveler employed by the reactionary National Review, are  in their various iterations of xenophobes . Huntington’s xenophobia is the most extreme, as he views ‘The Other’ in  terms of  his Clash of Civilizations ,paranoia writ on a wold wide scale, yet he more specifically points to those Mestizo Hordes in ‘Who Are We?’ as the most imminent threat to American Protestant virtue: this bespeak a kind of extreme historical/political/ideological myopia , or just the prejudice of a white male from the 18th Century!

Frum is an immigrant from a very wealthy Canadian family, who came to America and became a propagandist for ‘The War on Terror’ and over time has ‘evolved’ into a self-proclaimed ‘Wise Republican Elder’, for a Party now utterly in thrall to the Dixiecrat racialist ethos.

Mr. Divine whose political enthusiasm for the ‘Bell Curve’ places him in the long tradition of the British Colonial mentality, that looks at the lesser beings of planet Earth as in need of the civilizing tutelage of The British White Male. With the proviso that ‘they‘ can never quite measure up to that standard, but must persevere under that life long tutelage.

October 28 & 29, 2018 10:55 AM PDT

The American polity is crumbling from the inside, led not just by Trump’s cultivated political irrationalism, but the active participation of the New Democrats, in sum, the utterly corrupt Clinton Coterie that has captured the Democratic Party’s political apparatus, and smothered the reformist wing of the Party led by Sanders, in 2016. Yet Sanders vision has captured the political imaginations of voters, that still animates a resurgent New Dealism,  as opposed to the sclerotic New Democrats.

Both de Blasio and Cuomo represent that Clinton Coterie, that has yet to pay a political price for the unleashing of the Neo-Liberal Swindle on America: except that Trump won the election and the Republicans control both house of congress! The catastrophic consequences of Trump’s victory in the Electoral College, that inaugurated Trump’s political irrationalism, by way of the propaganda tool of NBC’s popular Game Show that featured Trump as a viable ‘Leader’ are now the facts of history!

The political moralizing coming from the New Democrats, and their allies in Corporate Media and the American Academy, is about the search for a check on Trump and Trumpism. Allied to the hope of political advantage by capturing the House in the 2018 Mid-Terms . Why after Chancellorsville are the pipe bombs a surprise? The rage of the ‘Deplorables’, the codification of Mrs. Clinton’s elitist contempt, for the victims of the Neo-Liberal Swindle! Enacted by Bill Clinton and Larry Summers, is a political reality, that the Political Elites, in their various guises, have failed to recognize as they seek to do business as usual.

I will be casting my vote this weekend, by mail, in California. I will not be voting for ‘The Lesser of Two Evils’ as Chomsky argues, but for Greens and others that share a vision of what might just be politically possible. Instead of a casting my vote for New Democrats who refuse to reform themselves, because feeding at the trough is more rewarding than  Reform ,that will leave them unemployed. To this voter, the New Democrats’ self-presentation of there is no alternative is an expression of that unhappy amalgam of both opportunism and nihilism. My voting for actual change is not an exercise in political nihilism, nor a capitulation to Trumpism, but the exercise of the hope for actual change, rather than the political entropy of the irrationalist political present.

Publius

https://www.ft.com/content/694709a6-d896-11e8-a854-33d6f82e62f8

The Oxbridgers here at The Economist proclaim not just their support for the Welfare State, as being an integral part of an ‘Enlightened Capital’ ,but their political enthusiasm for it.  Framing their argument by The Beveridge Report from a ‘Liberal Economist’. In sum, the ‘Welfare State‘ is the product of ‘Liberalism’, in their history made to measure. This eliminates the ‘Left’ from their political equation. Not to speak, in the political present , of Jeremy Corbyn, as the embodiment of the very idea, not to say practice, of that Welfare State.

And of a Labour Party that has reclaimed its Socialist roots, and sent the Blairite Faction into full scale political hysterics. With the help of The Economist editors and writers in their continuing political defamation of Corbyn, as Leftist Menace: this reader recalls the Soviet Socialist Realist paintings of Lenin, with Corbyn’s head superimposed over that of Lenin, as just one example of that maladroit visual  propaganda employed by this newspaper. One need only look to the manufactured charge of Anti-Semitism! What is   telling is that with each new attack on Corbyn the membership in the Party led by him grows.

This reader can only wonder ,what The Economist’s elite readerships response to this  endorsement, of the utterly alien notion of the legitimacy of that Welfare State, will be? In the most vulgar Randian terminology this signals the triumph of The Drones over The Producers!

Old Socialist

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/07/12/capitalism-needs-a-welfare-state-to-survive

Such is the desperation of this newspaper, and one of its writers, to find a new augmentative armature on which to hang a ‘new’ description of Trump, has reached the point of the utterly ludicrous!
Can the reader imagine any eminent contemporary philosopher describing Trump in this way?

I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it . . . this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire.

This is a quote from a letter from Hegel to Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer: From page 228 0f Terry Pinkard’s biography of Hegel. This letter written when Hegel was finishing what was to become the  Phenomenological of the Spirit in 1806, while he heard the cannon fire in the distance from Jena. At  the height of his unseemly romance with this tyrant!

Mr. Rachman favors a quote a quote from Hegel is his utter disillusion with Napoleon :

But Hegel suggested that things usually end badly for world historical figures: “They die early like Alexander, they are murdered like Caesar; or transported to St Helena like Napoleon.”

Mr. Rachman chooses the incompetent Neo-Liberal Revolutionary Macron to help him interpret Hegel to the uninitiated:

The quintessential world-historical figure of Hegel’s era was Napoleon, whom the German thinker described as the “world spirit on horseback”. Oddly, the best definition I have read of what Hegel meant by that term, came from the current president of France. Emmanuel Macron told Der Spiegel that “Hegel viewed ‘great men’ as instruments of something far greater . . . He believed that an individual can indeed embody the zeitgeist (world spirit) for a moment, but also that the individual isn’t always clear they are doing so.”

Trump is T.V. Game Show Host, with the guile and cunning of P.T. Barnum, a bully and a coward, whose politics can only be called Fascist!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/f3e9fac6-d550-11e8-ab8e-6be0dcf18713

There should be no surprise that Steve Pifer’s credentials are revelatory of his Russian antipathy, that translates into his latest Pro-Coup apologetics. That the fascists are a permanent part of the Coup government is not all surprising. Right Sector and Svoboda were part of the ‘Revolution Cadre’ that overthrew the ‘Russian Puppet’ ! This Reuters commentary, while  framed in the New Cold War dogmas,  none the less provides part of a  necessary antidote to this Brookings intervention written by Mr. Pifer.

Headline: Commentary: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem

According to Freedom House’s Ukraine project director Matthew Schaaf, “numerous organized radical right-wing groups exist in Ukraine, and while the volunteer battalions may have been officially integrated into state structures, some of them have since spun off political and non-profit structures to implement their vision.” Schaaf noted that “an increase in patriotic discourse supporting Ukraine in its conflict with Russia has coincided with an apparent increase in both public hate speech, sometimes by public officials and magnified by the media, as well as violence towards vulnerable groups such as the LGBT community,” an observation that is supported by a recent Council of Europe study.

…

In an ideal world, President Petro Poroshenko would purge the police and the interior ministry of far-right sympathizers, including Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who has close ties to Azov leader Andriy Biletsky, as well as Sergei Korotkykh, an Azov veteran who is now a high-ranking police official. But Poroshenko would risk major repercussions if he did so; Avakov is his chief political rival, and the ministry he runs controls the police, the National Guard and several former militias.

As one Ukrainian analyst noted in December, control of these forces make Avakov extremely powerful and Poroshenko’s presidency might not be strong enough to withstand the kind of direct confrontation with Avakov that an attempt to oust him or to strike at his power base could well produce. Poroshenko has endured frequent verbal threats, including calls for revolution, from ultranationalist groups, so he may believe that he needs Avakov to keep them in check.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cohen-ukraine-commentary/commentary-ukraines-neo-nazi-problem-idUSKBN1GV2TY

Freedom House, like The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies are funded by the US government masquerading as NGO’s. The 2014 Coup was the collaborative work of NATO, the EU, The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, not to speak of the very visible Victoria Nuland handing out chocolate chip cookies to the agitators,  not to speak of the paid and unpaid demonstrators.

For some necessary background see this James Carden essay from March 8,2016 issue of The Nation:

Headline: The New Cold Warriors Bare Their Fangs Ahead of the Next Round of Syria Peace Talks

Sub-headline: They praise anyone thought to be standing up to Russia, no matter how noxious.

…

On March 1, Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and testified: “The US and NATO face two primary threats to our security interests: Russian aggression and growing instability on our southern flank.” “Russia,” according to Breedlove, “continues to foment security concerns in multiple locations” around Europe. After launching into a brief and largely inaccurate history of US-Russian relations in the post-Cold War era, Breedlove flatly stated that “Russia does not share common security objectives with the West.” This, perhaps, would come as news to Kerry and Lavrov, who have successfully worked together to solve several “common security objectives,” like getting rid of President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons stockpiles and reaching a nuclear accord with Iran. As ever, the point of Breedlove’s show-testimony before the committee was to convince Congress and the administration that Russia—despite its oft-stated willingness to work with the United States on equal terms—remains the primary threat to European and American security.

At the US-Ukrainian Security Dialogue held in Washington in late February, the charge that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a revanchist power was repeated again and again. One participant, the American Foreign Policy Council’s Stephen Blank, told the gathering that “Putin cannot and will not stop,” therefore “we have to stop Putin, because nothing else will.” Indeed, “there is no basis” for dialogue with Russia.

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-new-cold-warriors-bare-their-fangs-ahead-of-the-next-round-of-syria-peace-talks/

And the where of the  funding for ‘Center for Strategic and International Studies’ ? and that its Chairman of the Board is Thomas J. Pritzker? Or that Brookings publishes his propaganda broadside. The veneer of bourgeois political respectability for this ‘Think Tank’ has long been exposed, as just another propaganda outlet for the bankrupt apologists for the American National Security State! Its board of trustees speaks louder that any argument I can use: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, William Cohen, George Argyros and Brent Scowcroft.

The Chairman of the Board of Trustees is Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman and CEO of The Pritzker Organization,[12] the family’s historical merchant bank. He is also executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation and serves on the board of directors of Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.[13] Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense John J. Hamre has been the president and chief executive officer of CSIS since April 2000.[14]

The board of trustees includes many former senior government officials including Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, William Cohen, George Argyros and Brent Scowcroft. [15]

…

Funding

For fiscal year 2013, CSIS had an operating revenue of US $32.3 million. The sources were 32% corporate, 29% foundation, 19% government, 9% individuals, 5% endowment, and 6% other. CSIS had operating expenses of US $32.2 million for 2013 — 78% for programs, 16% for administration, and 6% for development.[44]

In September 2014, The New York Times reported that the United Arab Emirates had donated a sum greater than $1 million to the organization. Additionally, CSIS has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Japan through the government-funded Japan External Trade Organization, as well as from Norway. After being contacted by the Times, CSIS released a list of foreign state donors, listing 13 governments including those of Germany and China.[45]

…

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

Mr. Pifer begins his essay with what reads like premature triumphalism. Should the reader label it dogma, or just the old fashioned magical thinking of an apologist for the American Empire, as he and his fellow technocrats or policy metaphysicians face the daunting reality of a resurgent Russia, China as better Capitalists that any in ‘The West’?

The aggression that Russia unleashed against Ukraine in 2014 is now well into its fifth year. Unfortunately, Moscow has shown no readiness to end the conflict it keeps simmering in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, let alone address the status of Crimea. Hopes of a year ago that a U.N. peacekeeping force might offer a path out of the Donbas morass have dimmed. It appears the Kremlin will wait another year, until after the presidential and parliamentary elections in Ukraine, to reconsider its policy.

In the meantime, attitudes among Ukrainians toward Russia continue to harden. The country is deepening its links to Europe while severing ties to its eastern neighbor. The longer that Moscow holds off on changing its policy, the more the already wide gulf between Ukraine and Russia will grow.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/10/09/russia-vs-ukraine-more-of-the-same/

Not speak of the the rise of the regional power of  Iran, in the wake of the catastrophic Iraq War,  that brought these two counties together! Those Neo-Cons and their New Democratic allies could not have been wrong? ‘The Surge’, a massive bribery program produced stalemate and permanent Occupation!  We have just past the 17th anniversary of the War in Afghanistan.

I printed Mr. Pifer essay, and after I simplified the document, it was two and quarter pages long. It was ,for the most part, a repetition of the same Anti-Putin propaganda that American Think Tank hacks have been writing since 2014. But with the added ‘revelation’ that the Ukrainians are turning away from Russia influence and business dealings like purchasing of natural gas. Hardly a surprise! Would one of the conditions of the IMF loan be that gas must be purchased from European providers?

Headline: World Bank Says Preparing $650 Million Loan Guarantee For Ukraine

The World Bank says it is preparing a $650 million guarantee to help Ukraine obtain funding in global-debt markets, but Kyiv must first comply with economic reforms demanded by the International Monetary Fund.

The World Bank’s Country Office for Ukraine said in a Facebook posting on August 16 that, at the request of Ukrainian authorities, it will provide Kyiv with an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development guarantee so it can raise about $800 million in funding, once the IMF’s demands are met.

“Once appraised and approved, the proposed operation would provide a $650 million IBRD guarantee that is expected to help Ukraine raise about $800 million through a private transaction in the lending market,” the global development lender said.

For Ukraine to obtain the guarantee, the IMF must first “confirm the completion of all reform actions and the adequacy of the macroeconomic framework” established by Kyiv, it said.

Especially “critical” will be the enactment of banking and credit-reform laws passed in July by Ukraine’s legislature, the Verkhovna Rada, the World Bank said.

Ukrainian authorities must also reach agreement with the IMF on a fourth review of its program in Ukraine, “without which the proposed operation will be unable to proceed,” the bank said.

Satu Kahkonen, the World Bank’s country director for Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine, recently said that the bank has invested about $5.5 billion in Ukraine since 2014, including $2.5 billion allocated for various investment projects, $2 billion to support regional budgets and pursue reforms, and $500 million for purchases of natural gas.

An IMF mission is planning to visit Ukraine from September 6-19.

https://www.rferl.org/a/world-bank-says-preparing-650-million-dollar-loan-guarantee-ukraine-if-complies-imf-economic-reforms/29438515.html

Old Socialist

As  reported in The Financial Times, with embellishment, the words of  the Jupertarian Macron reduced to political beggary:   ‘ They were the words his supporters were longing to hear: “People of France, help me.” Where are these supporters?  at least in  the Anglophone World publications like the Economist, The Financial Times, The London Times, The Wall Street Journal , Bloomberg  and other Neo-Liberal publications saw him as the new hope for the French State enmeshed  in a benighted Socialism, that has become sclerotic.  One could not miss the Vanity Fair long interview/hagiography  of Macron, as it editors sought to make Macron and his administration the New Camelot. Presided over by Macron and his wife Brigitte as representatives of a French Renewal and their commitment to be  patrons of the Arts.

Headline: Macron’s struggle to reboot his flagging presidency

Sub-headline: French leader hopes for lift from reform programme but scepticism persists

October 5, 2018

On a visit to French territories in the Caribbean last month, President Emmanuel Macron came down from his Olympian heights and tried to reconnect with an increasingly dismissive public.

https://www.ft.com/content/5924fcb2-c87a-11e8-ba8f-ee390057b8c9

The Financial Times has been, in fact,  from the beginning of the political career of Macron  been the propaganda headquaters for him in the Anglophone World . That ‘dismissive public’ mentioned in the above quotation,  began with a near 37% of voters in the final election rendering their ballots uncountable!

Macron’s ill fated ‘Revolution’ was dealt another rebuff, if that is the proper descriptor,   from one of his Minister’s ‘walk out‘:

Mr Macron was dealt a more serious blow a few days later when Gérard Collomb, his interior minister, walked out of the government, publicly rebuffing the president’s appeals for him to stay. It was the third ministerial departure in as many months.

But this anonymous true believer in Macron and his Retrograde Revolution opines:

“The French are impatient,” said one official. “They want results. They believed in Emmanuel Macron. They still do. But they are questioning us. They still know the status quo is not sustainable. But they want to know whether it will pay off. There would be nothing worse at this stage than to water things down.”

Just ‘who’ believed in Macron? The 37% of voters who rendered their ballots uncountable?  Since  this is The Financial Times, and its defense of  Neo-Liberalism’s ‘Free Market’ merde is an article of Faith to a  rapacious Corporatist agenda.

The government is planning to forge ahead with the next wave of the reform programme. After loosening rules on redundancies and overhauling the state railways, it wants to cut the cost of a generous unemployment insurance system and create more incentives for the jobless to take up work.

It has plans to make the pension system fairer and has embarked on a shake-up of benefits and services to lift more people out of poverty. A bill in parliament contains scores of measures to make it easier to run a business. Its overall impact on growth may be modest but it should lift competitiveness with no cost to the Treasury, according to senior officials.

There is much more to be said about this essay,but this ‘crisis’ demands to be presented in its various dimensions at The Financial Times and other sources. But first we must read The Financial Times editorial on the ‘necessity of Macron’:

Headline: French malaise and why Macron’s reforms matter

Sub-headline: The president’s popularity is waning but he must stick to his economic plans

Emmanuel Macron conveys a vigour and charm that has won him many admirers abroad. Unfortunately for the French president, that is doing little to help at home where he is increasingly unpopular.

Sixteen months after he was swept into the Elysée Palace at the head of the centrist En Marche movement, his ratings in the opinion polls are plunging. Only 29 or so per cent of his compatriots support him. Moreover, those numbers are not the only ones pointing in the wrong direction, intensifying concern about the sustainability of his reformist project.

In a short space of time, Mr Macron has achieved far more than his two predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, who at this stage in their terms were faring better in the opinion polls. He has faced down opposition to push through pro-business reforms. Despite his political travails, he remains unequivocal in his ambition to wean France off its dependence on government spending, and create an economy that is more dynamic and entrepreneurial.

To this end he is rendering the labour market more flexible. He is in the process of shaking up the tax system, shrinking the government’s imprint on the economy and shifting the burden of taxation away from private economic activity. The government has also loosened state control of the SNCF, the railway company, and begun modernising and decentralizing an overly rigid education system — all with a view to stirring the French from their malaise.

https://www.ft.com/content/2d312e90-c187-11e8-95b1-d36dfef1b89a

There is no ‘French malaise’ but the contempt of the electorate for Macron, as demonstrated by the 36.5% of voters, who rendered their votes un-countable in the general election. And the utter failure of Macron and his Jupertarian Politics, read this as Rule by Decree, in sum, Authoritarianism:  that seeks to put France into the Neo-Liberal coterie of nations, mired in the aftermath of the collapse of the Free Market Dogmas. The Financial Times’ Free Market Ideology  dictates that the problem must lie elsewhere, than in the Neo-Liberal Swindle itself i.e. the fictional notion of ‘French malaise’ !

Headline:Emmanuel Macron’s political problems mask progress on reform

Sub-headline : But the French president still faces big challenges, especially on public spending

https://www.ft.com/content/86784ddc-ce2d-11e8-8d0b-a6539b949662

Philipp Hildebrand  ‘The writer is vice-chairman of BlackRock and a former chairman of the governing board of the Swiss National Bank‘ : There is no progress on ‘reform’ but just the further erosion of the Welfare State, i.e. the devil of ‘public spending’ in the Free Market Mythology. Dull-witted pamphleteer Ayn Rand called it the Darwinian conflict between The Producers and The Drones .The very target of Macron’s Neo-Liberal agenda are The Drones, and the State they made for themselves! ‘BlackRock vice-chairman’  M. Hildebrand is just the apologist/propagandist of the moment.  BlackRock ‘an American global investment management corporation’ is really the only explanation needed for a defender of the ‘reforms’ of Macron! In the world view of Hayek, M. Hildebrand  and Macron, the ‘values of the Market’ are/is the sine qua non of the human endeavor.

Almost Marx

The first paragraph of Mr. Rachman’s latest column on the ‘murder’ of Jamal Khashoggi leaves little doubt that he tows the Party Line, at the same time as he shapes that Party Line of Elite indignation about the ‘murder’ of Khashoggi.

The disappearance and probable death of Jamal Khashoggi is a tragedy and a mystery. It is also a grievous blow to American policy in the Middle East.

What is the easily verifiable record of Saudi Arabia in terms of religious and political dissidents?

Headline: Beheadings: Saudi Arabia Quickens the Pace

https://www.newsweek.com/beheadings-saudi-arabia-quickens-pace-321587

 

Headline: Saudi man executed for witchcraft

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-execution-witchcraft-idUSBRE85I14A20120619

 

Headline: Saudi Arabia executions: The political protesters who were killed – and those still on death row

Sub-headline: The execution of 47 people in Saudi Arabia on New Year’s Day has been condemned around the world

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-executions-the-political-protesters-who-were-killed-and-those-still-on-death-row-a6795016.html

While the Elites and their ‘Foreign Policy Expert’s’ strum and drang ring from every outlet of the respectable bourgeois press, the I.D.F. murders with impunity the Palestinian Rabble as they express their resistance to Zionist Lebensraum!

The ‘enlightened’ Prince Mohammed bin Salman is the product of wishful thinking! He    and his family are the product of the European Imperialism of Sykes-Picot, as Zionism is the beneficiary of The Balfour Declaration.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/d4638966-d059-11e8-a9f2-7574db66bcd5

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD/creators

I am slowly reading this collection of essays titled Transcendental Heidegger edited by Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas, published by Stanford University Press. I have just finished reading chapter 3 ‘Heidegger on Kant on Transcendence’ by David Carr. I can only call it what it is, without hyperbole, an enlightening and insightful  essay that I  felt privileged to read and understand!

After reading Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy by Reiner Schurmann that took months for me to read, much less to come to terms with its exhaustive scholarship? I thought that I would give myself some time away from this thinker.

But I can’t seem to give up on  my more than twenty year interest in this troubling – call him a Monster!- thinker and his development over time. The Black Notebooks only confirm his status as a Nazi. 

StephenKMackSD   

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD/creators

Headline:Why do Americans cling to their European heritage?

Sub-headline: I find nothing about the country harder to explain than the quest for extra-American identities’

Mr. Ganesh never lets his utter historical ignorance get in the the way of his production of his feuilletons. The immigrants, who came to America in the 19th Century, were Italian, German, Polish, Irish, and Eastern European and Russian Jews escaping pogroms.
His historical ignorance leads Mr. Ganesh to ask questions that an American like myself, whose grandfather and grandmother, on my father’s side, came from Poland and Germany in 1865, to puzzle over his indulging his historical ignorance on his readers!

The American  ‘indigenous white’ population took to calling these new arrivals names: whop, micks, kike,yid, kraut, ruski and other degrading epithets, and posting employment advertisements that boldly stated ‘No Irish need apply’. Over time these immigrant communities, in self-defense, began to celebrate their heritage as a completely necessary antidote to this American xenophobia: the land of land stealing and genocidal immigrants, from the ‘Mayflower’ on ,were the utterly intolerant Puritans.  That had alienated all those who once,foolishly, offered them sanctuary. The Salem Witch Trials a monument to their hysteria.

This just a quick sketch of what 19th  Century immigrants faced. Yet, even that experience, did not stop these new citizens from adopting the prejudices of those preceding generation,  in term of prejudice against black and native peoples. Not to speak of the contemporaneous and subsequent wave of immigrants, even slaves,  from Asia!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/6c709840-cd33-11e8-9fe5-24ad351828ab

 

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.

Perry Anderson

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD/creators

Headline: Democrats need their own Mitch McConnell

Sub-headline: The left must learn from the Republican majority leader’s tactical successes

Mr. Ganesh’s opening paragraph of his admonition the New Democrats, who the headline writers of the Financial Times misidentify as ‘Left’ , is a wonder of praise for that Old Dixiecrat McConnell:

Mitch McConnell’s ever-startled face could have been drawn by the cartoonist Tex Avery. The majority leader of the US Senate also does a vivid line in Southernisms: his support for Brett Kavanaugh, whom he navigated on to the Supreme Court, was as “strong as mule piss”.

Frankness demands that McConnell’s face always resembles a soup plate of mush. That the Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress made the confirmation of Kavanaugh almost ‘a slam dunk’. Even after the unmasking of the revelation of the Ford testimony. Mr. Kavanaugh is and was an entitled white heterosexual male, exactly like McConnell. They are both members of the Club! Hard to miss that truism, except to the sycophants of that Republican Party. That Party long ago betrayed its heritage of Abraham Lincoln, for that of Jefferson Davis and his Plantation Mentality: in its contemporary iteration of the Neo-Liberal Trinity of Mises/Hayek/Friedman!

The second paragraph, in sum, is a genuflection that hints at kowtowing to the good grey persona of Sen. McConnell.

And there, his outwardly interesting characteristics end. Grey of hair and persona, the distinguished side of 70, Mr McConnell blends into the collage of Republican life so well that you wonder if a country club is missing its chair of governors. His indistinctiveness allows the craftiest politician in the land to work in relative stealth.

But Mr. Ganesh can’t quite control his enthusiasm, which becomes a careen in the following paragraph:

And to nation-changing effect. With a one-seat margin in the Senate, he has populated the judiciary with conservatives, secured the highest court for the right and passed an improbable tax cut. He fleeced Barack Obama of his last Supreme Court nominee and changed the rules to install Donald Trump’s first by a bare rather than super majority. He survived the Tea Party’s cull of mainstream Republicans, as well as low approval ratings in his own Kentucky. His passage from state-level moderate to operational arm of Trumpism has been bourbon-smooth. This summer he became the Senate’s longest-serving Republican leader.

Sen . McConnell prevailed by his own stealth, and triumphed over many obstacles and who eventually supported Trump. Elaine Chao is Sen. McConnell’s wife and is now Secretary of Transportation, that sinecure was the demonstrable effect of McConnell’s  bourbon-smooth opportunism?

The New Democrats are not ‘Left’ but Neo-Liberal, while Warren and Sanders are New Dealers. To end my comment on Mr. Ganesh’s verbose exercise in political free association, I must point to the utter dependability of a Conservative obsession:

What knavery it used to have was often learnt in the unions.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/6a34e6e8-cc62-11e8-b276-b9069bde0956

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.

Perry Anderson

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary

https://www.patreon.com/StephenKMackSD/creators