StephenKMackSD's Blog

Neo-Liberal ‘Reformer’ Macri vs Union Boss Hugo Moyano, or the Oligarchs are about to collide with the Porteños, might be a more apt description for this ‘news report’ by Mr. Mander. The 24 hour strike advocated by this ‘Union Boss’ is the purest kind of political theater, or just the blackmail of the lower orders spoiled by the de Kirchner coddling. So might the narrative be, as told by a Financial Times reporter?

First Mr. Mander supplies this, sure to send the regular reader of the august Financial Times into a fit of righteous indignation over this provocation by Federico Suarez:

“We can’t allow this neoliberal government to take away all our rights just for the benefit of the rich,” says Federico Suarez, a builder who supports the strike and describes Mr Macri as “scum”.

Mr. Mander interrupts the flow of his narrative to offer this evaluation of Mr. Moyano as leader and person, framed by this bit of reportorial dishonesty, disguised as speculation by anonymous sources, in sum hearsay : ‘…some believe’ , its truth value?

…some believe that Mr Moyano, the head of a union clan who denies charges that he has embezzled union welfare funds, may be trying to gain lenient treatment in the courts in return for toning down his confrontational stance.

But patience! the next  quotes are from the Oligarchs:

“The rate of inflation today is determined by the unions, not the central bank,” says Nicolás Catena, a leading figure in Argentina’s wine industry and a respected economist.

“It was very ingenuous to think that direct investment would suddenly leap just because of the change of government,” says Eduardo Costantini, a veteran financier and real estate developer.

Although foreign direct investment has increased from about $7bn a year in the latter years of the previous populist government to nearly $11bn last year, it remains low at 1.7 per cent of gross domestic product, compared with an average of about 3 per cent in the region, according to Treasury minister Nicolás Dujovne.

On Mr. Costantini’s investments:

He himself has bought more than $200m worth of land in Buenos Aires over the past year and is investing $400m in a real estate development in the downtown financial district.

The truth about the Neo-Liberalization of the Argentine economy, and the ‘strong medicine’ of Austerity, that is its sine qua non, is left to dotcom entrepreneur Alec Oxenford :

Even so, the resistance to the government’s attempts to liberalise Argentina’s economy means that progress is much slower than investors — and Mr Macri — might like. “I’m sure that Macri’s natural inclination as a businessman is to go full speed ahead. Shock therapy is in his nature,” says Alec Oxenford, a dotcom entrepreneur.

But beware, those ‘coddled  porteños’ exert a power of their own,that strikes fear in the hearts of the ‘Reformers‘ , to continue in the vein of rhetorical melodrama engaged in by Mr. Mander :

In one of the most dramatic examples of the challenges Mr Macri faces, protesters showered police with rocks outside Congress before his coalition managed to push through a watered down pension reform in December, still knocking the president’s approval ratings.  

What can ‘The Reformers’ hope for? There is no possibility of Macri winning over , in sum, bribing this  ‘corrupt Union Boss‘ and his followers. A Show Trail of  Mr. Moyano might offer the perfect opportunity, to help to avoid another ‘watered down’ attempt at Reform?

Political Cynic

https://www.ft.com/content/2b06911a-11fa-11e8-8cb6-b9ccc4c4dbbb

Mr. Andrei Soldatov has something to sell, an ‘analyst’ who shares the prejudices of The Financial Times editors, his ‘expertise’ on Russian skullduggery: ‘The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries’. The hyperbolic title alone evokes a kind of muted awe! Destined for the Best-Seller’s List?

Not much in this essay  except a ‘history made to measure’ of the ‘the second Chechen war’ and Putin as its inept orchestrator, as a kind of telling behavioral paradigm ?  The New Cold War , cultivated by the political alliance between the New Democrats and the porcine Spartans, the bellicose Neo-Conservatives, and their concerted propaganda campaign, waged over time, comes to fruition via the ‘investigation’ by FBI hack Mueller: a melodrama conceived with the 21 inch black and white screen of 1952 American in mind , starring ‘The Thirteen’ of  ‘a St Petersburg-based “troll farm” ‘. And now a word from our sponsor!

The ‘as if’ of this essay, by Mr. Andrei Soldatov, is that somehow Putin The Terrible has won some kind of victory in a Propaganda War between the US and Russia. Both Mueller and Soldatov would have produced a more adroit kind of propaganda,  had they both consulted Edward L. Bernays’ 1928 classic monograph called Propaganda.

Political Realist

https://www.ft.com/content/8fe0148c-14af-11e8-9e9c-25c814761640

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was once portrayed in the Western Press as a mad man, for his statements awash in his cultivated ideological/historical ignorance of the Holocaust, not to speak of his belief in the 12th Imam, as signs of his irrationalism. How many Western Leaders believe in the Virgin Birth and the ascent of Jesus, and other cornerstones of the Catholic Faith?
Mr. Netanyahu faces the possibility of arrest over charges of corruption, but now waves the remains of an Iranian drone and threatens an all out attack on Iran. Israel has between 100-200 nuclear bombs and the means to deliver them to targets in Iran. While Israeli apologists maintain the fiction that those bombs don’t exist. And or bragging in print about this ‘open secret’. Mordechai Vanunu is the person of conscience, in fact hero, who revealed the existence of these weapons to the world.
American diplomats and the President need to cut off all aid to Israel until Mr. Netanyahu offers an unambiguous retraction of this war mongering.It will never happen, but the world community must condemn this in the strongest terms. Let AIPAC lead the way to sanity. More delusional thinking.
Iran is another pariah nation like Russia and North Korea, not just subject to the scorn freely printed in the Western Press, but to the war cries of demagogues like Mr. Netanyahu. Yet he has the will and the power to plunge the world more deeply into the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ that will dwarf the Shoah, in its exercise of unalloyed nihilism, acting as political self exculpation.
Political Observer
https://www.ft.com/content/8e4200d8-149e-11e8-9376-4a6390addb44

Headline: Uber chief executive says group about more than car transport

Sub-headline: Dara Khosrowshahi offers expanded vision by which company will be the Amazon of rides

Uber and it’s latest Technocrat, Dara Khosrowshahi have a vision: the complete co-option of states and municipalities to exercise their political/moral responsibility to their citizens, yes citizens not consumers, to put strict enforceable rules as to who, and how, public transportation will be provided by private companies, in sum,  governed in the public interest! Its called government for a reason!

Its quite simple, except to the acolytes of an utterly failed Neo-Liberal Model of ‘Market Ascendancy’ now in its tenth year of what? How about this, ‘profound malaise’ or some other benign locution? The Amazon of rides makes the reader wonder at the breadth of Mr.Khosrowshahi ‘vision’ as a kind of  Capitalist Monopoly.

Mr. Khosrowshahi models his company on Mr. Bezos’ ever expanding reach, by being a paid propagandist for the CIA, and owner of the Washington Post, the Neo-Con Paper of Record. That newspaper has seen better days, as chronicled in dependable Hollywood  kitsch, starring two bankable names Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in ‘The Post’. Mr. Bezos’ ambitions and their fulfillment has become the paradigm by which Mr. Khosrowshahi models his transportation company. What the world needs is one more would be oligarch with a vision! Bezos, Soros, the Koch brothers, Bloomberg etc., etc. This ‘news story’ resembles a press release in its brevity and lack of actual content.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/fa514ce2-120b-11e8-940e-08320fc2a277

 Headline: New TfL rules put further brake on Uber’s ambitions

Sub-headline: Private-hire operators will be forced to limit the time their drivers work

‘London’s transport authority has intensified its battle with Uber by announcing it will introduce regulations that would force ride-hailing apps to limit the time their drivers work and turn over travel data to the government. The new regulations from Transport for London would cover all private-hire companies, including traditional minicab groups. But the agency said the overhaul was specifically aimed at the “many new services being offered” — a clear reference to Uber, which is by far the largest new entrant in the British capital.

“The private-hire market is unrecognisable from when current legislation was introduced,” said Helen Chapman, interim director of licensing, regulation and charging at TfL.

The announcement comes six months after TfL decided not to renew Uber’s license to operate in London, finding it was not “fit and proper” because its service presented public-safety problems — including a failure to report “serious criminal offences”.

Uber has appealed against the decision and is allowed to continue its operations ahead of a hearing expected this summer.’

https://www.ft.com/content/d4a808a8-1258-11e8-8cb6-b9ccc4c4dbbb

Looks like the TfL just put the kibosh on the plans of  Mr. Khosrowshahi, although Uber has a friend in M. 37%, Macron, whose Neo-Liberalization of the French  economy seems to be gaining momentum:

Headline: Uber wins French employment case

Sub-headline:  Labour tribunal decides Uber was not an employer, in contrast with UK ruling

Uber has won a legal battle in France over the employment status of one of its drivers after a labour tribunal said the ride hailing app was “in the business of intermediation and not that of a transportation service” and therefore did not act as an employer.

The decision from the industrial tribunal highlights the complexity of defining and regulating the service even after Europe’s top court said in December it should be treated as a traditional taxi company instead of a technology group.

On Thursday the French tribunal ruled in favour of Uber against a driver, Florian Menard, who argued he was not self-employed and that his service contract with the company should be reclassified as an employment contract. He argued for compensation in lieu of paid holidays and “concealed work”.

The tribunal said Mr Menard had been free to drive the hours he chose and to refuse trips. “The tribunal holds that the parties are bound by no employment contract and that this is in fact a commercial contract concluded between Mr Menard and Uber,” the ruling said. Mr Menard has one month to appeal.

Uber has faced widespread protests in France over working conditions and low pay. Protests have also swept the UK where Uber lost a key legal appeal in November after a London tribunal upheld a ruling that it must treat drivers as “workers” entitled to the minimum wage and holiday pay.

https://www.ft.com/content/240b1da0-0cbd-11e8-8eb7-42f857ea9f09

Political Observer

Posted 1:46 PM PST

The Daily Beast introduces Mr. Brink’s essay by means of an annoyingly vulgar photo montage, first grab the readership’s attention with a telling bit of  visual propaganda! before the reader even engages with Mr. Lindsey’s  advocacy for  ‘A Free Market Welfare State’ ! Or should the reader call it by its actual name the Guaranteed Income? reeks too much of the dreaded Welfare Stateism! But Mr. Lindsey’s opening paragraphs are demonstrative of the denial of responsibility that the Midwives of Trump use as an utterly unconvincing set of arguments for their lack of political culpability,

Opposition to the Trump presidency has thus far been almost entirely reactive. And understandably so: Responding to the incessant outrages and provocations is an exhausting, full-time job.

But over the longer term, righteous indignation isn’t enough. We need to recognize that Trump is a symptom of deeper ills. While containing the damage he causes is absolutely necessary, we also have to look past him and address the root causes that made his political rise possible.

The platitudinous, allied to vulgar moralizing defines Mr. Lindsey’s intervention:

…

There’s only one sure way to chase the dark forces of authoritarianism, demagoguery, and division out of positions of power and influence.

…

Success in that task is going to require fresh thinking and a new policy vision that defies prevailing ideological orthodoxies on both sides.

…

The case for a new policy vision begins with the recognition that Trump’s appeal, and the appeal of any populist demagogue, is fundamentally negative.

…

In this gathering crisis of legitimacy, voters who have lost faith in the established system are easily drawn to unqualified and irresponsible outsiders who could never dream of attaining high office in better-ordered times.

…

In the present case, Donald Trump’s political persona is the perfect antithesis of America’s highly educated, cosmopolitan meritocracy: thuggish and anti-intellectual, racially divisive, utterly unqualified, and tragicomically incompetent.

…

When Trump supporters feel that they personally are being attacked as “deplorable” racists and xenophobes, they are highly unlikely to respond by joining political ranks with their abusers.

…

Furthermore, since political opportunities for demagogues arise only when the legitimacy of the established order has badly eroded, the emergence of a populist insurgency is a clear indicator of elite failure on a massive scale.

…

The most effective way to defend liberal democracy in a crisis of legitimacy is, first of all, to acknowledge the crisis.

…

The focus of that policy vision should be the great, encompassing interest that unites all Americans across lines of race, class, gender, and religion: restoring economic dynamism and broadly shared prosperity after years of slow growth and high inequality.

…

Put these two trends together, and you’ll understand why, on election night in 2016, only 30 percent of Americans told pollsters that they expected their children to be better off than they are.

…

Meeting the great challenge of reviving the American Dream requires us to stake out new and currently unoccupied territory on the ideological spectrum.

…

Concerns about boosting growth, unleashing entrepreneurship, and removing barriers to competition are usually associated with the political right, while support for strengthening the safety net and social insurance is strongly identified with the left.

…

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-to-save-the-country-from-trump-a-free-market-welfare-state

Mr. Lindsey knows not the virtue of brevity, but knows the opportunity that his essay offers:

At the Niskanen Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., my colleagues and I are doing just that. We are working to identify and enact policies that simultaneously pursue two goals typically considered to be in conflict: a freer, more dynamic private sector and a bigger, more effective public sector. What we’re aiming for, in the words of my colleague Will Wilkinson, is a “free-market welfare state.”

In the midst of a collapsed Capitalism: the 2008 Depression and the failure to make right that collapse,  in one of foundational dogmas of the Neo-Liberal swindle, the Self-correcting Market, that has failed to manifest itself ,ten years after that economic catastrophe. While the 99% are moored in the immiseration of the failed Free Market Mythology, the 1% are reaping record profits, and their intellectual hirelings/false prophets offer fanciful alternatives. Mr. Lindsey offers more of the same poisonous mythology, tinctured with the imperatives of a recrudescent Welfare State, as the answer to an utterly dysfunctional Capitalism? A spoonful of sugar!

Except for the maladroitly framed notion of the Free Market Welfare State: Neo-Liberalism is eternal in the political imaginations of a bought and paid for intellectual class, whose primary loyalty is to rescue Capitalism from its predictable excesses, by means of a vaunted benevolence. A pastiche of Disraeli’s notion of a benevolent landed British aristocracy, as foundational to political stability, and its corollary the civic tranquility of the lower orders? The probability, a much too sophisticated historical analogy!

Almost Marx

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-to-save-the-country-from-trump-a-free-market-welfare-state

Headline: US stocks suffer one of worst weeks since financial crisis

Key Points:

S&P 500 closes up 1.5 per cent for 5.2 per cent weekly decline

FTSE All-World down 6.2 per cent this week and Eurofirst 300 index down 7.2 per cent

Investors withdraw record $30.6bn from global equity funds this week

Vix ‘fear’ gauge retreats to 29 from week’s high of 50

The gloomy picture of near economic irrationality is in need of the analgesic offered by the observation of this Market Technocrat, Mr. Kelly:

“I can see what caused the spark and what fuelled the fire, but the fundamentals remain solid,” said David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management.

Mr. Harvey just offers an observational diagnosis:

“The equity market performed another stage dive while the crowd moved away,” observed Christopher Harvey, an analyst at Wells Fargo. “It wasn’t pretty.”

And an unidentified Goldman Sachs employee offers this analysis, awash in Market  Techno-babble:

“The trading pattern suggests that markets may now be susceptible to both fundamental and technical factors, but most importantly uncertainty that could keep volatility elevated and leave us in a choppier trading pattern than we have seen in some time,” Goldman Sachs wrote in a note.

The IMF enters the melodrama, via the Financial Times reportage by committee:

The International Monetary Fund was as recently as late January hailing the “broadest synchronised global growth upsurge” since 2010, upgrading its forecasts for world economic growth for 2017, 2018 and 2019.

Then Mr. Dowding enters from stage right with his scolding, if not scalding, moralizing  intervention:

Mark Dowding of fixed-income house BlueBay Asset Management said: “Greed was running unchecked in January and so markets were due a dose of reality, or else the party risked getting out of hand.”

Note that the utter absence of Trumpian political/economic Know-Nothingism, as a possible precipitating factor in this episode of ‘Market Irrationalism’. But the Financial Times’ coterie of Corporatist Apologists, its opinion scribblers, will confect the Party Line on this latest occurrence of Capitalism’s inherent instability. Once checked by the now discarded New Deal reform, and its permutations over political time, before the rise of the catastrophic Neo-Liberal mythology.

Political Economist

https://www.ft.com/content/9ceb6136-0d66-11e8-839d-41ca06376bf2

Mr. Divine is the natural inheritor of the mantle of Staussian Alan Bloom in his ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ . Note that Starussianism is defined by a mendacious re-reading of Philosophical History.  Students are the target of both of these hyper-reactionaries, whose political self-conceptions were/are that of Prophet as political/moral iconoclast. Conceived cinematically, Mr. Divine’s  essay is pure Cecil B. DeMille merde, in  all its dated, indeed laughable melodrama. All that is missing from Andy’s iteration is the pipe-organ trills. A telling excerpt is demonstrative :

The reason I don’t agree with this is because I believe ideas matter. When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/we-all-live-on-campus-now.html

Mr. Divine presumption here is that his readership is utterly ignorant of his political evolution from Thatcherite, to Neo-Conservative, to an idiosyncratic ‘Centrist’ Neo-Liberalism. And he relies on an audience, that are too young to be acquainted with that trajectory.  And as for ‘a hierarchy of oppression’, Mr. Divine forgets that some of his readership recalls with a kind of revulsion his advocacy, indeed, his unsavory apologetics for the Bell Curve.

Some selective quotation from his latest screed is telling:

The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites.

…

Living in this period is to experience a daily, even hourly, psychological hazing from the bigot-in-chief.

…

Liberals welcome dissent because it’s our surest way to avoid error. Cultural Marxists fear dissent because they believe it can do harm to others’ feelings and help sustain existing identity-based power structures.

…

The whole cultural Marxist idea of a microaggression, after all, is that it’s on a spectrum with macro-aggression. Patriarchy and white supremacy — which define our world — come in micro, mini and macro forms — but it’s all connected.

…

But cultural Marxists see no such distinction. In the struggle against patriarchy, a distinction between the public and private makes no sense.

…

There’s a reason that totalitarian states will strip prisoners of their clothing. Left-feminists delight in doing this metaphorically to targeted men — effectively exposing them naked to public ridicule and examination because it both traumatizes the object and more importantly sits out there as a warning to others.

…

Marxism with a patina of liberalism on top is still Marxism — and it’s as hostile to the idea of a free society as white nationalism is. So if you wonder why our discourse is now so freighted with fear, why so many choose silence as the path of least resistance, or why the core concepts of a liberal society — the individual’s uniqueness, the primacy of reason, the protection of due process, an objective truth — are so besieged, this is one of the reasons.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/we-all-live-on-campus-now.html

The whole of this section of his latest essay, targets the ‘Left’ in its many mendacious iterations, allied to a logorrhea steeped in a personal defensiveness: that seems embarrassingly reminiscent of the confessional.

Queer Atheist 

Mr. Stephens, provisionally adopting the role of Dr. Pangloss, in his latest screed, attempts to shame not just ‘the environmental left’ but ‘environmental alarmists’ as an expression of his faith in ‘homo economicus’ : who can fix anything, even the planet it is slowly destroying. And a political present defined by the alliance between Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism: two toxic expressions of nihilism. This nihilism has two branches, an unenlightened exploitative Capital, assisted by its well compensated apologists. And our Clash of Civilization’s ‘War On Terror’ as the ‘almost best of all possible worlds’, with, of course, Mr. Stephens self-given caveats. The last paragraph of his essay reminds the regular reader that here is the perfect New York Times toady: to a Capital in its present state of an un-realized self-correction, and an unslakable bellicosity untested by military experience of any kind. His ex cathedra pronouncements on ‘the environmental left’ and  ‘environmental alarmists’ finds its actual political life as self-congratulatory chatter, of a columnist in need of a subject, that will provoke the ‘Liberal readership’ of The New York Times.

If environmental alarmists ever wonder why more people haven’t come around to their way of thinking, it isn’t because people like me occasionally voice doubts in newspaper op-eds. It’s because too many past predictions of imminent disaster didn’t come to pass. That isn’t because every alarm is false — many are all too real — but because our Promethean species has shown the will and the wizardry to master it, at least when it’s been given the means to do so.

Political Cynic

Headline: Uber wins French employment case

Sub-headline: Labour tribunal decides Uber was not an employer, in contrast with UK ruling

Here is the critical paragraph in this Financial Times ‘news story’ about Uber in France, and Florian Menard’s case before a ’employment tribunal’ :

The tribunal said Mr Menard had been free to drive the hours he chose and to refuse trips. “The tribunal holds that the parties are bound by no employment contract and that this is in fact a commercial contract concluded between Mr Menard and Uber,” the ruling said. Mr Menard has one month to appeal.

Yet all of the above may be true, about right of refusal and hours, but is M. Menard paid directly  by his customers, or is he paid by his employer Uber? If  Uber issues pay checks, must it deduct taxes, and social insurance etc. ? The rise of M. 37%, Macron, sealed the fate of M. Menard? The ineluctable onslaught of En Marche?

In America the ‘independent contractor scam’ is used extensively by companies who feel no loyalty towards their workers, and exploit the desperation of a work force, in the Age of the collapse of the Neo-Liberal swindle. Yet the IRS has been, in the past, strict about this legitimacy of this nebulous employment status.

Never fear the Financial Times editors, in their Corporatist wisdom, didn’t open a comments section: call it the fear of their own readership’s wrath!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/240b1da0-0cbd-11e8-8eb7-42f857ea9f09

Poor Mr. Luce almost tells the historical truth: In place of America’s Episcopalian elites came the meritocratic establishment. On that  topic of the eclipse of that  ‘Episcopalian elite’ see: The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms, Joe Alsop’s Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue. And for gossip masquerading as ‘History’ see The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington.

But on the question of rise of the Jewish Elite: The Neo-Conservatives were the successors of that Episcopalian elite, of which Mr. Brooks, protege of Wm. F. Buckley Jr.,  was an integral part. His Bobo’s in Paradise, dull witted, politically motivated pop sociology, and or wan satire, take your pick. Is the rhetorical stand-in for the ‘might-have-been’ of historical candor. See The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy for a friendly history of that ascendancy.

Except for Samuel P. Huntington and Francis  Fukuyama that Neo-Conservatism is a largely American Jewish political phenomenon. The fact is that these Neo-Cons were and are the midwives of Trump and Trumpism: a fact exemplified by the panic, that has led to their hysterical Anti-Trumpism.  Instead of the collapse of the legitimacy of the whole American political class: New Democrats and Republicans. These arguments, that Mr. Luce and his coterie of political pundits, at the utterly respectable Financial Times, avoid at all costs, puts that politically respectable reputation in jeopardy. As it almost has the unsavory aroma of Antisemitism. But just name it the want of political candor!

Then the reader is confronted, even a bit astounded, with this ‘Almost Neo-Pikettyism’:

What will America’s elites see when they look inwards? The first will be the shock of self-recognition. Bourgeois bohemians thought they could have it both ways: capital accumulation and moral certainty with no trade-offs. If you studied hard and earned merit, there was plenty of room at the top.

But there was a flaw in this thinking. America’s elites have stored more wealth than they can consume. This creates three problems for everyone else. First, elites invest their surpluses in replicating their advantages. Kids raised in poorer neighbourhoods with mediocre schools stand little chance. Their parents cannot match the social capital of their wealthier peers. The drawbridge is rising. The gap between the self image of meritocratic openness and reality is wide. Psychologists call this “self-discrepancy”. Economists call it barriers to entry.

Or is it a mere argumentative ploy ? But pay attention to this sentence, though there is still much more to comment upon, in Mr. Luce’s essay. Notice that it is a telling self-description of its author, framed in Neo-Liberal terms:

Social capital is about knowing what to say to whom and when, which is a sophisticated skill.

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/c0237568-0b30-11e8-8eb7-42f857ea9f09

JDS,

Thank you for your comment. Mr. Luce takes the least obnoxious of the Neo-Cons, Mr. Brooks in his former Neo-Con incarnation, before his self-transmogrification into a Political Sage, as the unofficial historian of a group of pseudo-bohemians, who thought that their thirst for profit was not antithetical to their hippy ways. Mr. Luce used that weak rhetorical frame for his latest essay.

The intellectuals only served as cover, this is one of the more ridiculous comments I’ve read at the FT.

I’ll call your two pronged sentence stunningly superficial, both about the intellectuals and about my ridiculous comment ! Look to Feith and Wolfowitz as Neo-Cons inside the Bush II White House, and Perle as part of the Pentagon Oversight Board. See this essay by Juan Cole on Bush I and his anger at how the Neo-Cons led Bush II astray. Just a sample:

They are mainly Neoconservatives, a group of old Cold Warriors, many of whom had been Democrats, who were dismayed by the Democratic Party’s turn left in the 1970s and the rise of a New Left within it that was critical of Israel. They therefore threw in with Ronald Reagan and then W. Most were Jewish Americans, though R. James Woolsey (former CIA director) and John Bolton were Neoconservatives as well (Woolsey said he was the only Episcopalian of the lot).

Richard Perle, who was appointed to the Pentagon oversight board.

Paul Wolfowitz, who had wanted to invade Baghdad at the conclusion of the Gulf War in 1991, but who was slapped down by Bush Sr., then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, and Secretary of State James Baker.

Cheney and Rumsfeld brought Wolfowitz, who was obsessed with Iraq and alleged in sprng, 2001, that “Iraqi terrorism” was more of a menace than Usama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, to Washington in January 2001 as Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Douglas Feith, then the no. 3 man at the Pentagon, the biggest imperialist since Cecil B. Rhodes, opposed the Oslo Peace Accords and his former law partner was a spokesman for Israeli squatters on Palestinian land in the West Bank. (I’ve been criticized for saying that Feith, Beitar and a Likudnik, had no place high in the US government, as though that were racial bigotry. Having suffered for decades with the idiotic calumny that criticizing Israeli government policy is a form of racism, must we now descend into a moral cesspool where criticizing the crypto-fascist Betar & Likud Party is labeled racism? Is it also racist to say that a supporter of Milosevic shouldn’t have had high office in the US?)

Feith in turn organized a black cell inside the Pentagon, the Office of Strategic Plans, which cherry-picked intelligence in support of an attack on Iraq.

John Bolton, an ill-tempered attorney with no foreign policy experience, who was made undersecretary of state for arms control with the portfolio for “weapons of mass destruction” and was later ambassador to the UN was also from Neocon circles.

https://www.juancole.com/2015/11/neocons-presidency-warning.html

Don’t forget PNAC, Project for the New American Century, founded in 1997 by Wm. Kristol and Robert Kagan, in sum the Neo-Con Vanguard that advocated the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The signatories of the statement of principals:

• Elliott Abrams^[5]
• Gary Bauer^[5]
• William J. Bennett^[5]
• John Ellis “Jeb” Bush^[5]
• Dick Cheney^[5]
• Eliot A. Cohen^[5]
• Midge Decter^[5]
• Paula Dobriansky^[5]
• Steve Forbes^[5]
• Aaron Friedberg^[5]
• Francis Fukuyama^[5]
• Frank Gaffney^[5]
• Fred C. Ikle^[5]
• Donald Kagan^[5]
• Zalmay Khalilzad^[5]
• I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby^[5]
• Norman Podhoretz^[5]
• J. Danforth Quayle^[5]
• Peter W. Rodman^[5]
• Stephen P. Rosen^[5]
• Henry S. Rowen^[5]
• Donald Rumsfeld^[5]
• Vin Weber^[5]
• George Weigel^[5]
• Paul Wolfowitz^[5]

This is a roster of Neo-Cons who were more than willing to send America’s children, to war, to realize their bellicose wet dream. How many of these men,except for Ms. Decter, had any real experience of war, or even a stint in the Armed Services?

Regards,

StephenKMackSD