Bret repeats the Trump Party Line:
While:
For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-
real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
______________________________________________________________
Income Inequality in the United States
Gaps in earnings between America’s most affluent and the rest of the country continue to grow year after year.
Almost Marx
Headline: Hobson, Corbyn and antisemitic tropes
Sub-headline: It troubles me that scholars are teaching Hobson’s Imperialism without flagging the antisemitic dimensions of his thought or contextualizing it appropriately, says Abigail Green
In its concerted campaign to defame Jeremy Corbyn, The Guardian has enlisted Abigail Green, Professor of modern European history, University of Oxford, to add a bit of intellectual respectability, to a coterie led by the mendacious, hysterical Jonathan Freedland.
…
As a historian with a different intellectual focus, I am struggling with the idea that it is possible to teach an analysis of the relationship between imperialism and capitalism, written in 1902 and reflecting contemporary antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish capitalist power, without any reference to this context. That Corbyn endorsed this book is troubling, but more troubling for me is the thought that scholars all over the world are teaching Imperialism without bothering to flag the antisemitic dimensions of Hobson’s thought or to contextualise it appropriately. Under these circumstances, the repeated failures by Corbyn (and many others) to identify antisemitic tropes about Jewish money, power and globalism for what they are is hardly surprising. That does not make the failure to call out these – and other – antisemitic tropes any more acceptable.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/may/03/hobson-corbyn-and-antisemitic-tropes?CMP=fb_cif
Here is a copy of a letter authored by Corbyn, in answer to his forward to Hobson’s book, as an endorsement/apologetic for the Anti-Semitism expressed by Hobson :
Please note that Prof. Green engages in self-serving equivocation about Corbyn’s supposed endorsement of Hobson’s Anti-Semitism: isn’t that a standard set by a politically prudent academic? I have rendered them in bold. Corbyn’s letter to Board President Marie van der Zyl will never put the question to rest. As Corbyn gets closer to actual political power, the more concerted the campaign to smear him with baseless accusation. Except Prof. Green’s equivocations are too attached to a cultivation of academic respectability, rather than the outright political hysteria of Jonathan Freedland’s maladroit polemics.
Old Socialist
Headline: How to get rid of Nicolás Maduro
Sub-headline: An attempt to depose the dictator appears to have failed. Try again
The Posh Boys paraphrase both John Bolton and Mike Pompeo:
John Bolton, America’s national security adviser, said on April 30th that senior regime officials, including the defence minister and the commander of the presidential guard, had agreed to dump Mr Maduro and transfer power to Mr Guaidó. Mike Pompeo, America’s secretary of state, later insisted that Mr Maduro had been worried enough to have a plane waiting to spirit him to Havana but was dissuaded by his Russian allies.
And the Trump administration’s propaganda about ‘the troika of tyranny’ is repeated here:
The Trump administration has lumped Venezuela in with Cuba and Nicaragua in a “troika of tyranny”. It seems as eager to dislodge Cuba’s 60-year-old communist regime as it is to get rid of Mr Maduro. To that end it recently intensified America’s embargo on the island, including by letting American citizens sue European and Canadian companies that do business using Cuban assets stolen after the revolution.
The Posh Boys at The Economist offer this sketch of a strategy.
American disdain for Cuba’s regime is justified. Its hundreds of spies in Venezuela help keep Mr Maduro in power. But the swipes at Cuba will tighten this bond precisely when America should be trying to prise it apart. Lawsuits against European firms will frustrate concerted diplomatic action against Venezuela. In the cause of removing Mr Maduro, America should for the time being set its quarrel with Cuba to one side.
The crucial choice lies with Venezuela’s army commanders. Mr Maduro’s misrule offers them no future. It has crushed the economy, starved the people, strangled democracy and forced more than 3m Venezuelans into exile. The hardship is bound to worsen with new American oil sanctions this year. The generals must begin to act like patriots. They need to destroy the regime, before the regime destroys their country.
The reader is left to wonder, do any of these Armchair Generals have any military or strategic experience? Or is this a riff on the Neo-Conservatives, who got America into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Neither War nor Occupation of these two countries has resulted in anything but bloody stalemates. Note that slavering Neo-Con Elliott Abrams is in charge of this operation.
Political Observer
Headline: Joe Biden would offer US voters a welcome breather
Sub-headline: Americans tend not to elect several high-drama presidents in a row
If Mr. Biden has ‘friends’ like … ? Here Mr. Ganesh defines Biden for what he is:
He is, in other words, everything that Hillary Clinton was in 2016: an insider in a rebel age, a fixture of the establishment that President Donald Trump defined himself against to such devastating effect. If an insider flopped last time, how can one succeed next time?
The Biden candidacy is as usual reduced, in the Corporate Media, to a horse race. The ‘because’ is about winning and nothing else.Mr. Ganesh gives an quick snapshot of Biden’s as political conformist in the New Democratic mold.
As with a mugging victim who avoids the same street ever after, the fear is natural but irrational.
Without meaning too? Ganesh offers this telling analogy. Watch an excerpt from Mr. Biden’s speech before the Senate on November 18, 1993 on ‘predators’ :
Mr. Biden was the author of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994
‘Sponsored by Representative Jack Brooks of Texas, the bill was originally written by Senator Joe Biden of Delaware and then was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton.’
That somehow Biden will qualify as a ‘Populist’ is on its face preposterous:
In 2016, Mr Trump ran as an outsider. In 2020, he will have to run as an incumbent. Simply decrying his opponent as a creature of the swamp, when he himself has been immersed in the same gunk for four years, will not be quite as lethal. The onus will be on him to identify what he has done — not said, but done — for working Americans.
It is the populist’s eternal quandary: you can only be elected as an outsider once.
Sen. Sanders qualifies as an actual Populist, Joe is a New Democrat to his core, meaning he is a Reaganite in Democratic Drag. Ganesh then presents an ersatz history made to measure, that has a breath taking , yet utterly unfulfilled, historical reach : Warren G. Harding , Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Obama vs McCain. This functions as mere historical bric-a-brac. The problem with Mr. Ganesh’s ‘history’ is that some of his readership watched Mr. Biden’s career unfold in ‘real time’.
What follows is more political handicapping: Bernie Sander, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg, the latest New Democrat Anti-Populist. In summation, Mr. Ganesh’s view is that Trump is worried about Mr. Biden: the empirical evidence, four tweets in one day from Trump on the Biden candidacy.
Old Socialist
P.S. Hair-plugs,Restylane & Botox make Mr. Biden look like an aging Hollywood Star on the skids.
https://www.ft.com/content/d3f0dfd4-6bee-11e9-80c7-60ee53e6681d
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Here is an actual Antisemitic cartoon from Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer. And note, if the cartoon you were shrieking about were Antisemitic, Netanyahu would have had Trump by a leash, and BiBi would not have looked like a cute puppy !
StephenKMackSD
Before Andy Divine’s latest attack on the political monster he helped to create, Trump, sinks into the shit-hole of a well deserved obscurity, some observations: Andy scours the internet for his “to appease an angry king” as his most recent descriptor of our Game Show President! This intellectual habit is pervasive!
More to the point, he has refused to protect the American election system from the malevolent designs of a foreign enemy. Thanks to leaks, we know now that he has been doing this for the last two years, even though other members of the administration, like Kirstjen Nielsen, were prepared to take strong, defensive measures. Why? Because any mention of Russian interference reminds him of the question of his legitimacy, and that enrages him. Which is to say he has openly put his personal amour propre before the interests of every citizen in this country who wants to preserve our electoral integrity. This alone is an unambiguously impeachable offense. Congress should immediately subpoena Nielsen to testify about the president’s deliberate refusal to perform his core duties. I see no way Trump can actually stop her now she is outside the administration — if she has the courage to expose the ugly truth.
Andy is a ‘True Believer’ in the Russian Election Interference myth confected by Brennan/Clapper/Clinton coterie. The same affliction shared by Mueller and his ‘investigation’: that interference is foundational, indeed its raison d’être.
Eric Hoffer’s 1951 ‘The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements’ which the perpetually incurious Andy would not know about, having missed the Vietnam War. And LBJ’s use of Hoffer as one of the only American Intellectual props of his ‘Guns and Butter’ strategy! The notion of ‘True Believer’ fits Andy, his enthusiasm for ‘The Bell Curve’ and the War in Iraq are just two examples of his, to call it judgement is to mischaracterize Andy’s fealty to belief systems, enmeshed in a self-serving ideology.
Andy administers a severe scolding to the House New Democratic Leadership, of Deal Maker Pelosi and her subordinate Hoyer, on their lack of courage: ‘The Dems too often assume a defensive crouch, even when our Constitution is at stake.’ in confronting Trump’s continuing provocations. The full paragraph puts into perspective Andy’s ramblings:
The House Speaker, for her part, reacted to a report outlining ten cases of obstruction of justice (ten more than Clinton was accused of) by immediately dissing the idea of impeachment. Steny Hoyer firmly ruled it out. Their response to Mueller was, to my mind, incredible, but telling. I can fully understand taking your time. No one is asking for an impeachment vote yet — just hearings including Trump officials who spoke with Mueller, in a consideration of impeachment. The Dems too often assume a defensive crouch, even when our Constitution is at stake. Against the Big Lie of “No Collusion. No Obstruction,” their message is muddled. They are beginning to wake up, but if a president wantonly obstructs justice and the opposition party immediately worries about the political cost of impeachment, we’re in deep trouble.
As usual I’ve run out of patience with Andy’s self-congratulatory shtick!
Political Skeptic
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/andrew-sullivan-the-appeasement-of-donald-trump.html
“The previous administration chose not to publicize the full story about Russian computer hackers and social media trolls, and how they relate to a broader strategy to undermine America,” Mr. Rosenstein said. He left unmentioned that Republican congressional leaders urged former President Barack Obama to keep quiet about the Kremlin’s operation during the presidential race.
New York Times April 26,2019♣
The Authoritarian Personalities that populate The American National Security State, and it subsidiary branch of American Law Enforcement i.e. the FBI, are addicted to self-congratulation, and attacking those who might even represent any kind of political opposition to their self-proclaimed virtue:
Mr. Rosenstein:
“Today, our nation is safer, elections are more secure, and citizens are better informed about covert foreign influence schemes,” Mr. Rosenstein said. “But not everybody was happy with my decision, in case you did not notice.”
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray as reported in the New York Times April 26, 2019:
The F.B.I. director warned anew on Friday about Russia’s continued meddling in American elections, calling it a “significant counterintelligence threat.” The bureau has shifted additional agents and analysts to shore up defenses against foreign interference, according to a senior F.B.I. official.
…
“We recognize that our adversaries are going to keep adapting and upping their game,” Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, said Friday in a speech in Washington, citing the presence of Russian intelligence officers in the United States and the Kremlin’s record of malign influence operations.
“So we are very much viewing 2018 as just kind of a dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020,” he said.
♥
The New Cold War is not just predicated on the myth of Russian Revanchism in Crimea and Ukraine, but a second front has been opened in America. As the Brennan/Clapper/Clinton mythology of Russian Interference in America’s 2016 election, is accepted without question, in the Mueller Report’s fealty to this political unguent , lavishly applied to the ego of the politically incompetent Hillary Clinton. And her National Security allies and coaches. The power of Putin now rivals the Marvel Universe’s villains , now the mainstay of the American ‘Dream Factories’ profitability, as its diverse collection of Heroes, do battle with a collection World Historical villains.
Philosophical Apprentice
♣
♥
The bumptious Canadian Frontiersman Jordan Peterson has become the latest, in a long line of moral/political reactionaries, defending the waning power of the ubiquitous White Male, and his ebbing control over the lesser beings of the planet.
It is no surprise that he would mount a campaign against The New-New Dealers in the Democratic Party Ilhan Omar , Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & Rashida Tlaib. Not to forget Tulsi Gabbard & Bernie Sanders as part of the reformer coterie. Peterson and ally defend the New Democrats i.e. Neo-Liberals who are the ‘hard-working mainstays’ of the Party of The Clinton’s i.e. Reaganites in Democratic Party Drag.
The Democrats will lose in 2020 because they will nominate Hillary Clinton or her clone, the current number of candidates is now 20? while ignoring the Reformers, that Peterson and his co-author find so insidious. While Rep. Nadler and his House allies fritter away their political capital on the Impeachment mirage.
That Mr. Peterson has gained fame, and or infamy, with his war on the self-invented ghost of ‘Marxist Post-Modernism’ ,while framing his own work in psychology in ‘Jungian Archetypes’ produces credulity of the most insidious kind in his acolytes. That leads some to believe that he is a Prophet, indeed a Visionary. Such is Mr. Peterson’s new status that he was asked to write an introduction to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago 1918-56. Stephen Kotkin voices a telling critique of Peterson, full time political/ cultural hysteric , in the TLS:
(The clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson contributes a new twelve-page foreword excoriating Marxism, which in its banalities adds nothing to Ericson’s original foreword.)
P.S. Note that Mr. Kotkin’s remark on Peterson is parenthetical!
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/solzhenitsyn-as-he-saw-himself/
Your last statement gives the game away, the preposterous ‘as if’ being, that the Posh Boys at the Financial Times,are callabos via an ‘apotheosis of certain Democratic outliers’ firmly places you in Trump Political territory!
Regards,
StephenKMackSD
Headline:Voters’ capacity for being appalled by Trump is waning
Sub-headline: The Democrats should think hard about public tolerance for impeachment proceedings
Bravo, Mr. Ganesh!for such a collection of observations beginning and ending with Bertolt Brecht and the East German One Party State. That state that compromised so many, like writer Christa Wolf , by means of Staci coercion. But note that Victor Klemperer elected to stay in the East. The feuilletonist mines World Literature as the in-order-too of his self-aggrandizing project.
The Impeachment of Clinton is one of the featured narratives of Mr. Ganesh’s acidulous historical pastiche. Absent is the more complex , a challenge to his narrative thrust, the Nixon political melodrama. Another inconvenience, to Ganesh, is the fact that the very civic actors, like Gingrich and his minions, were guilty of the same kind of sexual exploitation of female underlings. Political hypocrisy so magnified by both factions rendered the whole of the Clinton impeachment, in the eyes of the electorate, the political moralizing of The Contract with America rendered moot, into mere political theater. The whole spectacle became a comedy of political mendacity with the more ‘likable’ Bill ahead in the polls. Gingrich was on wife number 2 or 3 at this point? Which wife of the Speaker did he desert, on her sick bed?Cancer wasn’t an impediment to the Speaker’s roving eye!
Trump’s approval ratings do have some significance:
Trump’s approval rating : 53.5 disapprove, 41.3 approve
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
Mr. Ganesh closes his essay with this shopworn cliche of the moralizing Conservatism of this, and perhaps other historical moments :
We are all relativists now, or at least enough of us are to matter. That is a larger problem than any one president.
The only problem with ‘relativism’ is that it must be ‘relative’ to a something, a subject, not as some free-floating descriptor. Ganesh employs it as a capacious catch phrase, that attempts, in its poverty, to describes a malady that afflicts a who and or what is its very raison d’être. In sum, it is a term of political abuse. A defense of an imagined ancien régime .
Old Socialist
https://www.ft.com/content/e6f47504-6668-11e9-a79d-04f350474d62
Is the eventual metamorphosis of Mr. West to be a combination of Gore Vidal’s ‘Kalki’ , script writer Bud Schulberg and director Elia Kazan’s ‘A Face in the Crowd’, with a just a bit of Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’?
Mr. West’s fascination with Trump might originate with Mr. West’s own particular self-conception as a Hip-Hop Messiah, in the early stages of his coming to be?
For the details see Jon Caramanica revelatory essay at The New York Times :
At Coachella, the Gospel According to Kanye West
Myra Breckenridge
