StephenKMackSD's Blog

Andy Divine latest essay focuses on ‘Russia-Gate’? The indictments of ‘Russian Trolls’ & ‘Russian Spies’ – but Show Trials in absentia are not what Mueller, Rosenstein and Comey have in mind. Of more import are Trump’s machinations & coverup of his sexual escapades & corruption, that all of a piece, add up to unfitness to hold the office of the Presidency.

The whole point of the Russian Meddling propaganda being the removal of Trump from office. The political allies of the Mueller, Rosenstein, Comey  are the Clinton coterie’s featured players are Brennan, Clapper and their allies in the ‘Deep State’ and in American Corporate Media.

But Andy’s foray into the muck, of this  detour from the stated purpose of the Mueller Investigation, is his portrayal of Trump:

It’s only a shade under three minutes long. But unlike the Billy Bush tape, Trump is not performing or bragging or trying to charm someone he doesn’t know that well. He’s at work, with an intimate, trusted wingman, every single guard down. It really feels like the actual Trump, the man behind the curtain. And this Trump is quite clearly in charge. He’s not some addled 70-something, delegating large swathes of responsibility for day-to-day operations to underlings. He’s clearly aware of everything that’s going on: “Let me know what’s happening, okay?” he says to someone — Pam (Bondi)? — on the phone at first. He talks about how some issue will blow over: “I think this goes away quickly … in two weeks; it’s fine.” He then asks Cohen, “Can we use him anymore?” referring to an Evangelical pastor, and Cohen says absolutely.

Then they briefly discuss “the financing” for the National Enquirer’s capture and withholding of the McDougal story. “So, what do we got to pay for this? $150?” Trump asks at one point, meaning $150,000. The question of “cash” is raised by Trump (the precise wording is hard to make out from the audio), and Cohen strongly rules it out: “No, no, no.”

Andy makes it read like television melodrama of the black and white 21 inch screen era. But Andy shifts into deep analysis mode, or as deep as Andy is capable of going:

…

What this tiny glimpse into reality reveals is something quite simple. It’s not that it’s a shock that Trump has been lying about this incident from the very beginning. That has long been clear. But there’s something about listening to his voice acknowledging this in such a breezy, matter-of-fact tone that exposes the purity of the cynicism behind the lies. “We have no knowledge of any of this,” Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks, had, after all, originally told The Wall Street Journal when it broke the story days before the 2016 election. The idea that Trump had had an affair at all, let alone organized hush money to the National Enquirer, was “totally untrue.” And yet here, as the curtain is pulled back, we hear Trump himself figuring out how to finance its cover-up.

…

Mr. Divine’s unslakable verbosity, his jejune moralizing  go on for paragraph after paragraph, and is fully demonstrated in his latest political encyclical. He fancies himself as possessing some valuable political/moral insights, yet he exhausts the readers patience and forbearance with his self-congratulatory pose as a wise man in search of truth: the end point, for this reader, is to demonstrate his status as bourgeois political chatterer.

Political Observer

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/andrew-sullivan-portrait-of-the-president-as-a-con-man.html

The Financial Times editors again demonstrates their fear of their own readership, by way of disabling the comments section, on this ‘news story ‘ ,on the proposed Impeachment of Rod Rosenstein by House Republicans

There are plenty of reason to dislike the priggish inquisitor Rosenstein, besides the usual arrogance of a lawyer in power. How many Show Trials of absent Russians indited in the investigation will take place? The central cases are just an investigation into Trump’s utterly corrupt machinations and an exposure of his confederates, embellished by those ever-present Russian bad actors: its The New Cold War that simply repeats the cliched propaganda of the Old Cold War. Led by Clinton and her coterie, instead of Nixon/McCarthy/Mundt post WWII hysteria mongering about The New Deal being ‘a generation of treason’.

With this Impeachment proposal the bourgeois News outlets, print, television and the internet  will be in full hysterical cry. ‘The Republican Leadership taking orders from Moscow’ a headline soon to be read somewhere or everywhere, in this continuing American political melodrama: the script writes itself!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/8d82de7c-9065-11e8-b639-7680cedcc421

Headline: Revenge on the US is sweet for Vladimir Putin

Sub-headline:  The Russian president draws satisfaction from embarrassing America

Taking the temperature of ‘The Washington foreign policy establishment’  must have been  a  challenging, even a daunting task. Like Mr. Rachman, and the headline writers at The Financial Times, I engage in self-serving hyperbole. The ‘thought’ of the Foreign Policy establishment is not even broached, but its ’emotional state’ is the point of Mr. Rachman’s unverifiable speculations. The daunting task of a description of such sweep,  on the  range of the stunted American political spectrum, as represented in the Think Tanks of Washington D.C.! Or is this Washington foreign policy establishment’ just the small coterie of Mr. Rachman’s fellow pundits?  The key to this essay is a kind of textbook psychoanalysis, an utterly bankrupt ‘science’, of Putin. But first thing first: the smirking Putin straight out of the Marvel Universe.

The Washington foreign policy establishment has experienced many emotions since the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki: incredulity, fear, anger. But foremost among those emotions is a profound sense of humiliation. Here was the US president disgracing himself on an international stage, while the Russian president looked on, smirking.

It wasn’t long in his essay before  the ‘Putin’, shaped by a ‘West’, that has ‘weakened and humiliated Russia for decades.’ appears on cue!

For Vladimir Putin, inflicting this kind of embarrassment on America is deeply satisfying. The Russian president’s worldview is built around the idea that the west has deliberately weakened and humiliated Russia for decades. For Mr Putin, it is payback time.

But the patience of the reader is rewarded with this summation of the ‘Crimes of Putin’ :

In the US and UK, Russia is seen as a violent state that has annexed Crimea and waged an undeclared war in eastern Ukraine. The Russian response is that the western allies have committed greater acts of aggression in Iraq and Libya and have threatened Russia directly, by expanding the Nato alliance up to its borders. Russia’s annexation of Crimea is portrayed as a defensive measure in Moscow, designed partly to ensure that the Russian navy’s base in Sevastopol never plays host to Nato ships.

Mr. Rachman elides from his bill of attainder, the fact that ‘The West’ i.e. America failed or even betrayed the agreements made with Gorbachev, on the expansion of NATO. More inconvenient history! Here is how Mr. Rachman ‘explains’ the expansion of NATO, in that betrayal of the agreement with Gorbachev:

Mr Putin and his acolytes are wrong to blame all the setbacks that the Russian state has experienced since 1991 on western plots. The countries that joined Nato after the end of the cold war did so of their own volition because they had a deep fear of Russia, based on their own recent history.

In sum the Hegemon does at it likes !

Some of  Mr. Rachman’s readers were witnesses to the ‘transition’ of the Soviet Union to Russia and the execrable @RussiaHand, Strobe Talbott, appointed by the Neo-Liberal Bill Clinton,  as head of that ‘transition’: the Shock Therapy of Austerity, on the Russians, was a crime, a revenge on people of the Soviet Union/Russia at the least, led by Mr. Talbott and his coterie of Chicago Boys! All of this utterly inconvenient to the New Cold War propaganda cobbled together by Mr.  Rachman.

Similarly, the economic and political chaos in Russia in the 1990s was not “imposed on Russia by the west”, as the Putinist ideology would have it. It flowed from the collapse of the Soviet system and later mistakes by the Russian government.

Mr. Rachman is one of the many ‘Midwives of Trump’  who pronounces on the psychologically unhinged Putin as fellow conspirator , with Trump, against the post war  ‘rules based order’ and the concomitant crisis of the American Republic.

But now the American democratic system — triumphant in 1989 — is itself in deep trouble. Russia, meanwhile, is once again treated by a US president as a peer superpower.

Mr Rachman’s admonitory concluding paragraph is almost Delphic:

For Mr Putin, it is a moment of sweet revenge. For American liberals, it should be a cause for reflection. Much of what has gone wrong in Mr Putin’s Russia flows from its failure to deal with domestic problems in favour of an effort to blame the west for all the country’s woes. Now it is tempting for American liberals to blame Russia for their Donald Trump nightmare. But the real problems, in both countries, begin at home.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/7d63ecc6-8e5c-11e8-bb8f-a6a2f7bca546

No need to wonder or even agonize over the men leading our once Republic. Mueller, Comey, Brennan, Clapper are the dregs of now vanished Republic, swallowed whole by the imperatives of the National Security State. If you need a reminder of how bankrupt these men are read Comey’s tweet here:

Mr. Comey, like his predecessor J. Edgar Hoover,  is a paranoid political hysteric with a sense of mission, and once possessed a malign power. He now poses as a beacon of moral/political virtue, in the Age of Trump: the Authoritarian Personality is  true, the reader need only pay attention to the unhinged political discourse of the present . Look to the Margaret Kimberley tweet on the porcine Dowager Empress of ‘The Resistance’  Hillary Clinton:

Publius

The concluding paragraph of Ms. Slaughter’s essay, in which she extemporizes on a theme of Martin Luther King, is worthy of full quotation:

‘It is incumbent upon those of us who see an arc of progress bending towards peace and universal human rights to appreciate the full scope of the threat posed to our 20th-century global architecture. Our response has to be more than defending the status quo. We must begin sketching an affirmative counter-vision of state and non-state institutions that empower their members more than they constrain them and solve problems effectively together.’

Yet here is another paraphrase mixed with quotation of Ms. Slaughter’s as what? friend/ally/apologist for Corporatism:

The chairman of Google’s parent company at the time, Eric Schmidt—who, along with his foundation and Google, had by that point donated nearly $20 million to New America—was not pleased, Lynn told the Times, and called Slaughter to say so. Lynn was informed that his actions had endangered the institution, and he was ultimately fired.

The debacle raised all sorts of questions about New America’s coziness with corporate funders, and as staffers gathered in the conference room—across the lobby from the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab”—they were impatient for answers. Many worried that the think tank’s intellectual integrity had been compromised, and they feared for their reputations. What would happen the next time someone’s work ran crosswise with the interests of a big donor?

Instead of stanching the anxiety, Slaughter stoked it. According to a recording of the meeting, she said that while she recognized that the standard in journalism was never to show sources what you were writing, New America’s “norm can’t be that. We’re an organization that develops relationships with funders. And you know, these are not just black boxes; they’re people. Google is a person, the Ford Foundation—C. . . . And particularly when they give you money, which is really a nice thing . . . basic courtesy I think requires—if you know something really bad, you say, ‘Here’s a heads-up.’ ”

https://www.washingtonian.com/2018/06/24/has-new-america-foundation-lost-its-way-anne-marie-slaughter/

Ms. Slaughter defends the ‘rules based order’ that Henry Kissinger defended in Luce’s recent  interview/audience with The Great Man, in the pages of this newspaper.  She quite carefully frames her twin attack on Putin/Trump, in terms of  an anti-patriarchal criticism, and quite rightly so. Yet it doesn’t quite have the ring of truth. It expresses the current respectable bourgeois Party Line.

Ms. Slaughter has very carefully cultivated the monetary support of Mr. Eric Schmidt, a very powerful donor to her Foundation. Mr. Barry Lynn was fired from his job at New America for honest reporting, not withstanding Ms.  Slaughter’s maladroit intervention argued as:  We’re an organization that develops relationships with funders.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/a5762736-8c01-11e8-affd-da9960227309

Mr. Miller resembles American Jurisprudence: a bottomless well of self-serving mendacity in service to an utterly shameful defense of ‘Manifest Destiny’ i.e. Imperialism & Exceptionalism , genocide, Jim Crow and Segregation and its Wars of Empire, among a long list of crimes. The American Law Court proclaims itself to be above Morality: call this Moral Exceptionalism. The Israeli State has proclaimed itself to be a Jewish Nation: call this Zionist Originalism!

Headline: Israel Passes Controversial Jewish Nation-state Bill After Stormy Debate

Sub-headline: 62 lawmakers vote in favor of the bill after a stormy debate

■ Arab lawmakers tossed out after they tear bill in protest, call it ‘apartheid law’

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-passes-controversial-nation-state-bill-1.6291048

The fact that the Settlements have rendered moot the ‘Two State Solution’ , where dose that place Mr. Miller’s whole career as a Policy Technocrat? What the reader gets from Mr. Miller’s twitter post is resignation & dismay.

Mr. Miller will not confront that Israel is a European Settler State, born out of ‘Western Guilt’ over the Holocaust and the monuments to Imperialism Sykes-Picot and Balfour. What is of political moment for the Zionist State, is its policy of Ethnic Cleansing that has found  support from the Zionists at The New York Times: Stephens,Weiss, Friedman and Brooks. The nihilists mythology of ‘Exceptionalism’ rationalizes horrific crimes against the lesser beings of the planet earth.

In American Jurisprudential terms the decisions of Dred Scott, Buck v. Bell, Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and more recently the rise of the Federalist Society and its propaganda about an invented ‘Originalism’ produced Shelby County v. Holder. These decisions represent the recrudescence of American racism, while the ‘Jewish Nation-state Bill‘ is about what Hannah Arendt foresaw as the political destiny of Israel , to become Sparta.

Old Socialist

Mr. Mander’s short essay arrived in my e mail this morning.: July 14, 2018. It does not appear, as such,  in the pages of the Financial Time. Its melodramatic title is ‘Argentina on a knife edge’! Impending  ‘crises’ , manufactured or real sells newspapers and or creates traffic on websites.

But what is of interest, to those readers of this newspaper’s advocacy/apologetics, for Macri’s failed attempt to bring Argentina back into the line with the utterly bankrupt Neo-Liberal coterie of nations. That have tried  to extricate themselves from this trans-generational political/economic nihilism,that has missed the attention of Macri. Macron, and late arrival to the Neo-Liberal fold, Moreno.  That Macri appealed to the IMF, not even a year and a half into his presidency demonstrates with utter clarity that his ‘Austerity Lite’ is a failure!

Never fear, Political Economy, tinctured in statistical modeling, and other forms of Economic Theology, used by the Technocrats/Priests of Economic Science appear in Mr. Mander’s essay, to demonstrate that he is a titular member of that coven.

But look to Mr. Mander’s informative essay published by the Financial Times July 13, 2018 for a more nuanced, but by no means lacking in ideological propinquity/conformity to Macri’s Neo-Liberalism Lite.

In this essay Mr. Mander  quotes from a frustrated man buying half a tank of gas, a sociologist Marcos Novaro, a housewife Gloria Carrasco, an executive , Macri himself and  Eugenia Campos a shop assistant. In sum, he has exercised  his due diligence as a reporter. Or can the reader assume that a ‘stringer’  handled the ‘man in the street interviews’?

Headline: Argentina learns to live with its inflation dragon

Sub-headline: Mauricio Macri is all but ignoring stubbornly rising prices as he searches for growth

https://www.ft.com/content/edce64de-84a5-11e8-96dd-fa565ec55929

A copy on the Financial Times e mail:

Few would dare to assert openly that the recent turbulence in the Argentine peso is over. Nevertheless, the currency has appreciated over the last two weeks. Having reached almost 29 pesos to the dollar, it is now closer to 27. But even if stability has returned to the foreign exchange markets, albeit temporarily, that would be just one battle won in a war whose outcome remains far from certain.

The next step is to start lowering sky-high interest rates, which in turn will allow the government to start reviving economic activity. With a technical recession expected in the second and third quarters of this year, overall growth in 2018 could be close to zero. Only then can authorities effectively tackle alarmingly high levels of inflation, which have taken everyone by surprise, and could reach 30 per cent this year. That is “the logical order” in which to rebalance Argentina’s economy, according to a senior local banker.

In the best of all possible worlds, this plan could work. But President Mauricio Macri is walking a terrifyingly fine line; plenty could go wrong. For one, who knows whether the international context – which played a key role in the rout on the peso – will be kind to Argentina?

Regardless of dangers that Macri cannot control, his next great hurdle is to push a credible 2019 budget bill through congress. That must be done with the support of the unruly Peronist opposition, to enable the government to meet its ambitious targets agreed with the IMF for reducing the primary fiscal deficit to 1.3 per cent of GDP in 2019. While there does appear to be an emerging consensus in Argentina that it needs to balance its budget – and keep it balanced – it remains unclear how this will be achieved.

Wherever you look, someone will always argue why cuts should be made elsewhere. No one wants to be the one to take the hit. Any whiff of a failure to meet the targets will not go down well with the markets, potentially triggering a new round of exchange rate volatility.

Like never before, Macri is hostage to the demands of a population which is showing signs of fatigue with austerity, and the demands of the markets which have effectively obliged him to speed up his drive to reach fiscal equilibrium. Success in appeasing these opposing forces will have a critical bearing on Macri’s re-election chances next year. At least he can take heart from the fact that, for now at least, Peronism has not been capable of presenting a viable alternative.

Old Socialist

David Frum,Wise Republican Elder & Midwife of Trump chatters while the American Empire is in its slow motion collapse!  NATO the tool of Empire, and the E.U., Monnet’s Neo-Liberalism before the fact, are the twin beneficiaries of this Neo-Con’s chatter.

Trump is a Know-Nothing and Frum a political opportunist who sees the advantage of calling Trump what he is: as the means of his political self -rescue from author of the propaganda sloganeering  of  the ‘Axis of Evil’ , to a Political Moralist. Like his ally David Brooks.

Old Socialist

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/post-brexit-britain-needs-americas-help/565043/