StephenKMackSD's Blog

The Posh Boys on the Editorial Board of the prestigious Financial Times waste no time in their lengthy praise/advocacy for NATO. A selection of quotations from this essay and some commentary follow:

Collective defence of the Atlantic community’s democracies sat alongside the Marshall financial aid plan.

The Marshall Plan was part of the rehabilitation of Europe after War II, what is left out of this is that the Marshall Plan was also about the institutionalization of  American power in Europe, allied to the fact that the  political fate of Easter Europe had been decided by Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt at Yalta. Eisenhower pulled the troops out of Eastern Europe , some say to quickly to foil Stalin’s Imperialism.

Europe needs US support to check Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

…to counter Mr Putin’s revanchist ambitions…

Putin acts here as the incarnation of Stalin. Putin hysteria is the very lifeblood of The New Cold War: Crimea and Ukraine its exemplars . While the promises made by the American political actors, to Gorbachev to limit the expansion of NATO are subject to a self-serving political amnesia. Not to forget that The Atlantic Council, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty still function as propaganda outlets for NATO. Make note of the fact that the utterly notorious Elliott Abrams is a Senior Fellow.

Permanent military facilities in Europe provide vital bases for US-led strikes against Islamist terrorists.
…cyber warfare, the proliferation of new technologies and China’s rising military power present new challenges.

Its almost as if the reader is experiencing a kind of deja vu, of the xenophobic paranoia writ large of Huntington’s ‘Clash’. The editors will defend Europe i.e. the EU as the evolving bastion of a State Capitalism, whose reason d’etre is to provide a political framework for a Market Singularity, that places the efficient function and profitability of  ‘The Market’ above every other imperative!

Now is not the time for western democracies to walk away from the world’s most successful military alliance.

Given the above, what can the reader make of NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg comments regarding ‘Brazil, other Latin American countries’ joining NATO?

Headline: NATO chief says Brazil, other Latin American countries could become ‘partners’

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – NATO can look at the possibility of other Latin American states joining Colombia in becoming alliance partners, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday, while appearing to rule out U.S. President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Brazil could one day become a full member of the North Atlantic security body.

“Until 2017, NATO didn’t have any partners in Latin America and then in 2017 we got our first partner, which was Colombia, and to be a close partner of NATO is something that is good for NATO and the partner country,” the NATO leader told Reuters in an interview ahead of a NATO ministerial meeting in Washington.

“So of course, it is a possibility to look into the possibility of having also other countries in Latin America become partners which then provides a platform, a framework for close political and practical cooperation,” he said.

At a joint White House news conference last month, Trump said he had told visiting far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro he would designate Brazil a “major non-NATO ally” and possibly go further by supporting a campaign to make Brazil “maybe a NATO ally,” something that would imply full membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-brazil-latam-interview/nato-chief-says-brazil-other-latin-american-countries-could-become-partners-idUSKCN1RF2TT

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/40aaa992-5520-11e9-91f9-b6515a54c5b1

Added April 07, 2019

Headline:NATO ‘broke away’ from intl law, lost its legitimacy – ex-OSCE Parliamentary Assembly VP to RT

NATO broke away from international law and risks “collapse” or a conflict that will “destroy Europe,” if it does not change its modus operandi, Willy Wimmer, the former vice president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, told RT.

As the US-led military alliance marked its 70th anniversary on Thursday, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg stated that the bloc remains essential for global security. “We stand together, fight together, and, sometimes, die together,” he said in a speech in Washington.

Stoltenberg, however, is not striking a chord with the people NATO claims to be protecting, Wimmer believes. The veteran German politician explained to RT that “it is not the message that Germans, the Europeans and even the Americans want to hear.”

…

https://www.rt.com/news/455776-nato-legitimacy-international-law/

 

Thank you to Paul Craig Roberts for posting this!

 

Just reached your ‘Against the neoliberalism taboo’ and your criticism of Daniel Rogers Dissent essay. I read Prof. Rogers ‘Age of Fracture’, relying on the praise offered in the TLS. I was impressed until I reached the Epilogue, where he frames it in a quotation from the execrable *Drama Queen and ‘Bell Curve’ advocate/apologist/enthusiast Andrew Sullivan!

In this Epilogue, Prof. Rogers proceeds to piss away the very impressive arguments that he built in the preceding chapters. I’m still angry about his betrayal of his own valuable  historical/political insights, that devolved into a verbose exercise in bourgeois political respectability.

*As a Queer I reserve the right for the use of this term!

Best regards

StephenKMackSD

http://www.focaalblog.com/2018/01/12/quinn-slobodian-against-the-neoliberalism-taboo/

P.S. Thank your for your indispensable voice!

I watched a video highlight of the ‘Intelligence Committee’ yesterday:

March 28, 2019 | Clip Of Russia’s International Influence 

Intelligence Committee Chair Pushes Back Against GOP Calls to Resign

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/28/gop-adam-schiff-resign-1241749

______________________________________________________________

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.

 

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

Headline: US Democrats should remember, ‘It’s the economy, stupid’

Sub-headline: As long as growth is happening, voters will tolerate presidential character flaws

Here is my selection of the metaphors that Mr. Luce uses in his latest essay on the political watershed of the Mueller Report

But as long as growth is occurring, they will tolerate ethical flaws in their commander-in-chief. Decency comes second. Just ask Bill Clinton. Or Donald Trump.

In the wake of the collapse of The Free Market Mythology the ‘Gig Economy’ and its ‘worker insecurity’, a foundational concept of the Mises/Hayek/Friedman coterie’s war against Unionism, expresses itself in the mirage of ‘Growth’ as central to a Capitalism without limits or constraints. The fate of the actual worker in this economy is about  the growth of Uber and Lyft and other part time or ‘contract employments’ without benefits,  as a way to supplementing meager incomes in the political present. A Posh Boy would not know or care about such economic restraints , but would resort to the capacious  notion of ‘Growth’ as a predictor of the political fortunes of Trump. That pay envelope is the ultimate testing ground of an Economy!

Doctors should not lose sight of the ailment —

The ‘ailment’ that afflicts America is that both the Republicans and the New Democrats are utterly corrupt, and equally invested in the Free Market Swindle.

The special counsel Robert Mueller’s report — or the amuse-bouche we have been given — offers Mr Trump only partial absolution.

Here ‘amuse-bouche’ functions as a stylistic embellishment, that functions as a trivialization of the Mueller Report’s key findings presented  by the Attorney General, but then tries to rescue himself by the notion of  theological  idea of ‘partial absolution’ !

This next paragraph is chock-a-block with descriptive metaphors, that mercifully ends with the fact that the New Democrats will waste their political capital on hearings with star witnesses like the Mueller, Comey and other  carefully selected ‘witnesses’.

Blaming the problem on Russia is like telling a cancer patient they should suspend treatment to sue the driver who ran over their dog. It misses the point.
These basic facts will ensure Washington remains consumed by the Mueller report for months ahead.

Mr. Luce stating the obvious:

The 2020 election is already in danger of becoming another referendum on Mr Trump’s character.

Mr. Luce paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld:

It is worth stressing two known unknowns.

Mr. Luce on the challenge that faces Speaker Pelosi:

It will be hard for the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to marshal these fiefdoms into a single force.

This collection of metaphors is followed by jejune, but necessary political speculation, to emancipate Mr. Luce’s collection of  metaphors/cliches: that becomes by the use of  a self-serving, but ersatz political alchemy, that renders this disparate collection, this essay, into the category of valuable insights .

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/b8e4f7c8-5070-11e9-9c76-bf4a0ce37d49

______________________________________________________________

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.

 

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

Who is ‘the we’ that Mr. Brooks makes the target of his admonition, delivered in his sabbath address to the American Congregation? This ‘we’ is described here:

And what about the rest of us? What about all the hours we spent speculating about the Mueller report, fantasizing about the Trump ruin or watching and reading speculation about these things? What about the superstructure of scandal politics we have built and live in today?

He’s really talking about the political experts ,now called Technocrats, synonymous with himself ,and his fellows scribblers, not to forget the television/internet corporate hirelings, who comment in the Corporate Media on politics.  But back to an earlier part of his essay for context :

Maybe it’s time to declare a national sabbath. Maybe it’s time to step back from the scandalmongering and assess who we are right now.

Democrats might approach this moment with an attitude of humility and honest self-examination. It’s clear that many Democrats made grievous accusations against the president that are not supported by the evidence. It’s clear that people like Beto O’Rourke and John Brennan owe Donald Trump a public apology. If you call someone a traitor and it turns out you lacked the evidence for that charge, then the only decent thing to do is apologize.

Republicans and the Sean Hannity-style Trumpians might also approach this moment with an attitude of humility and honest self-examination. For two years they’ve been calling the Mueller investigation a witch hunt. For two years they’ve been spreading the libel that there are no honest brokers in Washington. It’s all a deep-state conspiracy, a swamp. They should apologize for peddling the sort of deep cynicism that undermines our country’s institutions.

Mr. Brooks’ ‘evolution’ from war mongering Neo-Conservative and Free Market partisan – the collapse of each of these political delusions led him to what used to called, in another time, an agonizing reappraisal. His political self-rescue took the form of an ‘evolution’ towards the preferred and more wide-ranging status as Political Moralist. He morphed into a combination of a preacher and teacher. David Frum, a fellow Neo-Conservative, ‘evolution’ ,in the face of these failures was to become a Wise Republican Elder. The only question that remains for the attentive reader, is why would Brooks resort to the religious practice of Sabbath to frame his  political intervention?

This preamble is to provide a context for Mr. Brooks’ admonition to both the Republicans and New Democrats about their possible strategies that each might adopt in the wake of the Mueller Report. This has about it the political quaintness of Frank Capra’s  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and its star Jimmy Stewart, who once represented American Virtue in the American Imagination, crafted by Hollywood. Brooks adopts the guise of the political naif as cover for his cynicism wedded to opportunism.

The patient reader eventually comes to Mr. Brooks’ definition of that ‘we’, that evolves  rhetorically into ‘the rest of us‘:

And what about the rest of us? What about all the hours we spent speculating about the Mueller report, fantasizing about the Trump ruin or watching and reading speculation about these things? What about the superstructure of scandal politics we have built and live in today?

I’ll end my comment  with this insight offered by Brooks, that of a political hack pretending to some kind of nonexistent wisdom.

It’s all a wonderful game. You don’t have to know anything about a boring policy subject like economics, poverty or foreign affairs. You can have a long career in politics and media by simply treating public life as an arena of life-or-death gossip.

Political Cynic

______________________________________________________________

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.

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

The sub-headline begins the inauspicious essay from Mr. Luce, in a Shakespearean allusion. The headline writers relied on their elite educations to provide the necessary garnish to Luce’s unalloyed hero worship of  former FBI  director Mueller.

Trump will feel dangerously vindicated — when you strike at a king be sure to kill him

A sample of Luce’s Hero Worship, a latter day Carlyle:

Spare a thought for Robert Mueller. He wrapped up an exhaustive investigation within two years of being asked to do so — easily beating his predecessors. Moreover, he stuck resolutely to his brief. Unlike Kenneth Starr, who expanded his probe into the Clintons’ failed real estate deal in Arkansas to include sex in the White House with an intern, Mr Mueller avoided fishing expeditions. He ran an operation with zero leaks. By any measure he embodied integrity and diligence in a town sorely deficient in both. Yet he managed to disappoint both wings of US politics.

In the Age of Trump Mr. Mueller is the yardstick by which all other political actors are measured. This is political desperation wedded to a deadline: vulgar melodrama ,the stuff of the small black and white screen of 1952:

Mr Mueller is indeed “America’s straightest arrow”.

Never fear the Party Line of Putin as The New Stalin makes its appearance with a warning that Russian Interference in American Elections future is a stark reality that needs to be faced!

…

By the same token, an outsized role was conferred on Vladimir Putin as the evil genius who robbed Hillary Clinton of the presidency. There were large dollops of evidence supporting both views.

…

Likewise, Mr Mueller proved the Russians interfered in the 2016 election — as they have tried to do in other democracies. That threat still exists. Mr Trump publicly requested Russia’s help and Russia obliged.It could happen again. Washington has done almost nothing to strengthen its electoral infrastructure since 2016.

Compare the Hero Worship of Mueller by Luce, with David Bromwich’s Hero Worship of Comey in The London Review of Books of August 9, 2018:

Comey’s memoir has now surpassed the combined sales of Michael Wolff’s portrait of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, and Hillary Clintons’s election elegy What Happened. The book, written in an idiom identical to the one he uses in interviews and press briefings, is clearly the work of an un-ghosted author, and it contains passages most unusual for an official memoir:

There is a place I have visited on the coast of North Carolina where two barrier islands come close together. In the narrow passageway between them, the waters of the Atlantic Ocean meet the waters of the huge and shallow sound that lies behind the islands. There is turbulence in that place and waves appear to break even though no land is visible. I imagine that the leaders of the Department of Justice stand at that spot, between the turbulent waters of the political world and the placid waters of the apolitical sound. Their job is to respond to the political imperatives of the president and the voters who elected him, while also protecting the apolitical work of the thousands of agents, prosecutors, and staff who make up the bulk of the institution. So long as the leaders understand the turbulence, they can find their footing. If they stumble, the ocean water overruns the sound and the department has become just another political organ. Its independent role in American life has been lost and the guardians of justice have drowned.

This depth of formal piety cannot be faked; the passage shows the burden (as Comey sees it) of maintaining constitutional and legal restraints on Donald Trump.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/2018/08/09/david-bromwich/american-breakdown

The record of the FBI is one of criminality  and mendacity pioneered by the execrable J. Edgar Hoover, that was continued by his successors Mueller and Comey: the FBI Crime Lab scandal just one of the many demonstrated coverups and incompetencies wedded to the lies of the FBI.   The desperation experienced by The Midwives of Trump, like Luce and Bromwich, in the Age of Trump, that they helped to birth is thought never to be entertained.

Also Mr. Luce giving credence to the ‘Russian Interference’ lie is that it provides political cover for the Clinton/Clapper/Brennan coterie, and their political allies like MSNBC, Maddow, Schiff and a host of fellow travelers, as the in-order-too of fomenting a New Cold War, based on a self-serving series of political lies. Bret Stephens enunciates the New Party Line:

This sounds like Obama saying that we need is ‘to put the past behind us’, that was his rationalization for not prosecuting the Wall Street Thieves who funded his campaign. Or Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Nixon, to spare the country the ordeal of a protracted exercise of Constitutionally mandated Rule of Law: The Empire must never seem to falter!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/6c5e80e6-4e80-11e9-b401-8d9ef1626294

The same old deflection by this Zionist Apologist: the Genocide -on-the-Installment-Plan of Palestinians enacted every day & posted to twitter, prove the Fascist State of Israel and its propagandists are jut part of Post-Holocaust apotheosis of Jewish Suffering as Historical Singularity.

https://books.google.com/books?id=IR-EAgAAQBAJ&q=I+recognize+the+gaze+of+the+stranger#v=snippet&q=I%20recognize%20the%20gaze%20of%20the%20stranger&f=false

‘I recognize the gaze of the stranger, the widow, and the orphan…’

Moran revelatory essay continues:

Link above

StephenKMackSD

Andy Divine is at full shriek in his March 22,2019 column titled:

Trump Is a Massive Failure — and Getting Exactly What He Wants

What eludes Mr. Divine’s grasp is exactly how to define the pressing question of what Trump wants. What Trump does is to cause political chaos, and then blames others for the consequences of his actions, its straight out of his Reality Television shtick: that ran on NBC for fifteen seasons, 192 episodes, and established in the public mind that somehow Trump was a Leader, a Decision Maker of consequence, whose tag line was ‘Your Fired’ . Look to the number fired from the Trump Administration, since he took the oath of office, including his familiar Omarosa!
Mr. Divine’s essay is a indictment of Trump, with Andy acting in his capacity as an America Political Moralist. Reading his essay straight through to its end is revelatory , but this last plaintive, even mawkish paragraph inspires what?

Yes, we’re numb. Yes, this has become normal. And yes, as far as liberal democracy is concerned, this is an extinction-level event.

Old Socialist

Here is a bit of long overdue political realism, from an anonymous Tory :

One Tory MP who voted for Mrs May’s deal, said: “Every single person I speak to in my party is saying she needs to go — and she needs to go yesterday.”

The ‘leadership’ of May makes one nostalgic for the arrogant Posh Boy Cameron, who led the way toward ‘Brexit’? But  never fear dull-witted enarque, the self-appointed leader of the E.U. ,Macron, who can’t even govern his own country, is the political actor next in line to ‘lead’ the E.U.? Or just one more political poser about to get his political deserts.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/98ec4fc6-4c7d-11e9-bbc9-6917dce3dc62

Headline: Magical thinking crosses party lines in America

Sub-headline: The left may prefer white magic to Donald Trump’s black, but everyone is dabbling

Mr. Luce wastes no time calling to account the New Democrats for their lackadaisical attitude toward Trump. Yet this elides from the political picture the responsibility of both Parties and Pundits, like Luce, in their long-term advocacy for the Neo-Liberal Swindle, and its aftermath from the 2008 Crash to the dismal political present present.Trump is a product of this political/economic catastrophe.

Yet in this thicket of Political Metaphysics, that lapses into  Occult jabber, that is unintentionally comic, Luce fails to ask the salient question: where is the money coming from to support this crowded field of candidates?

The New Democrats, fully under the thumb of the Clinton coterie, not to speak of AIPAC, don’t have an inexhaustible supply of money to waste on these candidates. But to create the fiction of choice might that money be spent upon such candidates, as the in-or-too of lending that fiction plausibility? Also keep in mind the willful destruction of campaign finance reform orchestrated by Citizens United and Justice Roberts, champion of stare decisis ?

While after some maladroit stage management , a specialty of  Mrs. Clinton and her minions , she will enter as the compromise candidate that  offers the best chance to win in 2020. The only real problem with this sketch of a possible scenario is that Sen. Sanders, and his coterie, represent a real danger to this possible coronation of Hillary. So the imperative of attacking Sanders must begin as soon as possible, in sum, The Bernie Bros must be resuscitated and or re-imagined for this campaign.

In his haste to  write his column, Mr. Luce misses an opportunity to think and imagine what might be plausible in an actual American Politics. In favor of a failed, not to speak of a maladroit Hegelian pastiche: Luce should stop reading the Straussian fabulist Fukuyama!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/cc30e206-4a6c-11e9-8b7f-d49067e0f50d

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.

 

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