Wasn’t the kind of book written by Mr. Wolff , melodramatically titled ‘Fire and Fury’ once the province of respectable journalistic hacks/has beens, like what the Bob Woodward atelier used to churn out? Woodward’s salad days of Watergate, at The Post, are just a memory: except for the new movie starring Hollywood’s Gold Dust Twins Tom Hanks and  Meryl Streep. Jeff Bezos compares to Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham how? Neither Ben nor Kay were contract employees of the CIA?

Now, back to the Wolff  polemic:  anything like reportorial standards, in Mr. Wolff’s case as a ‘Media Critic’, were discarded in the name of  ‘Cognitive Capture’? (Way too highfalutin a term for Wolff’s particular brand of ‘Journalism‘?) Or  grabbing the readers attention at the cost of verisimilitude? Again, too much?

But pay attention to the real story here, the American Political Class and its Journalistic Fellow Travelers have been fretting and fuming about the Wolff political polemic for at least a week. Even a well known Brookings policy technocrat tweeted a long quote from the inspired satire of the  ‘Gorilla Channel’.  What more could Trump ask of his tweets and of Wolff’s book than to keep his opponents in a continual state of exploitable political disequilibrium : he just perfected, if that’s the right word , what his mentor Roy Cohn taught him.

Political Cynic

https://www.ft.com/content/d36c087a-f239-11e7-ac08-07c3086a2625

Mr. Stephens, the unapologetic Neo-Conservative war monger ‘uncovers’ the corruption of the Iranian Revolution in 2018. The Reuters expose of 2013 is offered as quite compelling evidence. Yet Stephens is not just content with this three part expose,  he enlists his fellow travelers Ken Weinstein of the Hudson Institute and Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. In his essay framed by the notion of ‘finding a way forward on Iran’. Does he make his case?

If the reader looks to the Russian Revolution of 1917, as instructive of the possible evolution of these kinds of political upheavals: its leader Lenin,  was a State Capitalist, as he was a reactionary, and as greedy and mendacious as the Iranian Ayatollahs in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Mr. Stephens isn’t quite historically sophisticated, or more likely he pursues an ideological agenda that finds ‘history’ an inconvenient impediment. As what he produces are some conjectures that don’t amount to ‘a way forward’, but remain in the arena of self-aggrandizing foreign policy chatter, of a would be Technocrat. With an appetite for fomenting politically useful discord.

Obama is the villain in the Iranian Melodrama, as confected  by Stephens, but he is simultaneously  a ‘fellow traveler’ in the NATO, EU, and Foundation for the Defence of Democracies’ Ukrainian Coup and the continuing War in that country!

Political Observer

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/hegel/37AB969551F8C80F177936F7773B3E1F

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo3637657.html

Philosophical Apprentice

The new world disorder and the fracturing of the west

The geopolitical situation remains tense, although the world economy is improving

Despite the portentous headline, and its sub-headline, as an act of rhetorical subtraction Mr. Wolf is in familiar territory. Or more of the same from @FT Neo-Liberal Apologist? The Financial Times Party Line evolves in small, nearly imperceptible increments, from Wolf’s essay to essay. Yet the reader is confronted by the uncanny :déjà vu ! This reiteration  featuring the Jupertarian pol Macron, as some kind of political answer to the rise of the dread Populists, who once were described as participating in The Rebellion Against The Elites, much too highfalutin for popular consumption. The only way to bring Neo-Liberalism to France was by Macron’s authoritarianism: call him M. 37%!

Yet to be confronted by this partisan is the dismal collapse of the Neo-Liberal Myth, and its equally dismal Austerity. Not to speak of the myth of The Self-correcting Market: where is it? Ten years after the Depression of 2008 it has yet to manifest itself! The political present is subject to the want of candor of this utterly failed Technocrat and his coterie of acolytes/editors.

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/54104d98-eedd-11e7-ac08-07c3086a2625

@Koln

The world, or its delicate microcosm  at The Financial Times, is beset with ‘trolls’ of all varieties: Anti-Zionists, Corbynistas, Brexiteers, Russians etc. etc. But the fact is, though you vigorously deny its applicability, Gaza resembles the Warsaw Ghetto:

During the first year and a half, thousands of Polish Jews as well as some Romani people from smaller towns and the countryside were brought into the Ghetto. Nevertheless, the typhus epidemics and starvation kept the inhabitants at about the same number.^[35] An average daily food ration in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw was limited to 184 calories, compared to 699 calories allowed for the gentile Poles and 2,613 calories for the Germans.^[36] In August, the rations fell to 177 calories per person. The German authorities were solely responsible for the arrival of food aid, consisting usually of dry bread, flour and potatoes of the lowest quality, groats, turnips, and a small monthly supplement of margarine, sugar, and meat.^[37]

…

The only real means of survival was the smuggling of food and bartering; with men, women and children all taking part in it. Up to 80 percent of food consumed in the Ghetto was brought in illegally.^[37] Private workshops were created to manufacture goods to be sold secretly on the Aryan side of the city. Foodstuffs were smuggled often by children alone who crossed the Ghetto wall any way possible by the hundreds, sometimes several times a day, returning with goods that could weigh as much as they did. Smuggling was often the only source of subsistence for the Ghetto inhabitants, who would otherwise have died of starvation.^[37] Unemployment leading to lack of funds was a major problem in the ghetto.

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

Your petty bourgeois respectable politics have been offended by my ‘trolling’ ,so you resort to this rhetoric of obfuscation, by way of invidious comparison :

…that they would not dare apply to anyone else – Myanmar’s persecution of the Myanmar, the atrocities of Rwanda, even Assad’s Syria.

For the record, you have good company – Iran’s Ahmadinejad, for one.

Happy New Year,

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/2AiBy2Q

All the reportage about the current Iranian domestic crisis in the ‘Western Press’ is awash in hypocrisy! The record of ‘Western Meddling‘, starting with the Coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, is irrefutable :

‘Mohammad Mosaddegh[a] (Persian: محمد مصدق‎; IPA: [mohæmˈmæd(-e) mosædˈdeɣ] ( listen);[b] 16 June 1882 – 5 March 1967), was an Iranian politician. He was the head of a democratically elected government,[4][5][6] holding office as the Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 until 1953, when his government was overthrown in a coup d’état aided by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service.[7][8]

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

SAVAK:

SAVAK (Persian: ساواک, short for سازمان اطلاعات و امنیت کشور Sāzemān-e Ettelā’āt va Amniyat-e Keshvar, literally “Organization of National Intelligence and Security”) was the secret police, domestic security and intelligence service of Pahlavi dynasty. It was established by Iran’s Mohammad Reza Shah with the help of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Israeli MOSSAD.^[1] SAVAK operated from 1957 until the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when the prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar ordered its dissolution during the outbreak of Iranian Revolution. SAVAK has been described as Iran’s “most hated and feared institution” prior to the revolution of 1979 because of its practice of torturing and executing opponents of the Pahlavi regime.^[2][3] At its peak, the organization had as many as 60,000 agents serving in its ranks according to one source,^[4] although Gholam Reza Afkhami estimates SAVAK staffing at between 4,000 and 6,000.^[5]

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

Or Sepâh?

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) (in Persian: سپاه پاسداران انقلاب اسلامی‎, translit. Sepâh-e Pâsdârân-e Enghelâb-e Eslâmi, lit. ‘Army of Guardians of the Islamic Revolution’ or Sepâh for short) is a branch of Iran’s Armed Forces founded after 1979 Revolution.^[2] Whereas the regular military (or Artesh) defends Iran’s borders and maintains internal order, according to the Iranian constitution, the Revolutionary Guard (pasdaran) is intended to protect the country’s Islamic Republic system.^[3] The Revolutionary Guards state that their role in protecting the Islamic system is preventing foreign interference as well as coups by the military or “deviant movements”.^[4][5]

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

The popular political/economic discontent is a fact, as is the subversion practiced by Western bad actors, who wish to both foment and exploit this crisis for their own ends! America, Israel and their ‘Security Agencies’  are the main bad actors, as are their Neo-Conservative war mongering allies: whose blood lust is as unslakable, as their complete absence of military service, except for Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. McCain. ‘We are all Iranian dissidents now‘ are the words that will escape this political necromancer’s mouth. Its as tired and shop-worn as his political opportunism. Straight Talk Express?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/0064cb72-efac-11e7-ac08-07c3086a2625

To all those who replied to my comment: thank you! That my modest polemic has raised the ire of so many FT readers makes my intervention worthwhile . The power of history as reply to the warmongers, who seek war with not just Iran, but with the world, as codified in Huntington’s ‘Clash’, is just  Cold War paranoia writ large. In service to the collective hegemonic wet dream of the Foreign Policy Technocrats ,who populate the respectable Think Tanks of both Europe and America. And in America politicians like Cotton and McCain or public intellectuals, Porcine Spartans like Wm. Kristol, Jeffrey Goldberg, Robert Kagan.

What is the difference between SAVAK and Sepâh? One authoritarian regime replaces another? We need to look at the culpability of the West represented by the The Sykes–Picot Agreement and The Balfour Declaration as a continuation of a pernicious European imperialism, not to speak of the European/American interventions in the region since WWII.

If Zionism has legitimacy, why is Political Islam, even in its most radical anti-imperialist iteration, not granted the same legitimacy? Because it dares to assert itself against the Hegemon? Like the Soviets they are not rational political/moral actors, this according to the Cold Warriors of the last century. And the Neo-Conservative/Neo-Liberal alliance that represents today’s political center: in America, the New Democrats and the Republican ultra-nationalists.

Happy New Year,

StephenKMackSD

Headline: Macron reforms will boost eurozone, says poll of economists

Sub-headline: Most experts predict growth of 2.3% in 2018 despite Italy election risks

An overwhelming majority also thought 2018 would be the year when the ECB ended its quantitative easing programme of mass bond buying. A significant minority of 34 per cent thought growth would be strong enough for the central bank to end QE — which is about to enter its fourth year — in September.

The expectation of an end to QE came even though inflation was expected to remain weak, at 1.5 per cent — short of the central bank’s target of close to 2 per cent.

Alberto Gallo, a portfolio manager and head of macro strategy at Algebris Investments, a fund, said: “The recovery will accelerate in 2018 on the combination of political stability, fiscal stimulus and stimulative monetary policy.”

Mr Macron’s economic agenda would be “the single most important reason for the continued eurozone recovery in 2018”, said André Sapir, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based think-tank, and a professor at Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Laurence Boone, chief economist at Axa Investment Managers, said the most important short-term impact of Mr Macron’s reforms was their “wow” factor — halting the populist anti-euro wave and spurring confidence in the French appetite for reform.

“I would see another grand coalition as a positive development,” said Jennifer McKeown, chief European economist at Capital Economics, a consultancy. “Admittedly, the implications for businesses would be less positive than those of a coalition involving the FDP. But tax cuts for households, particularly on lower incomes, should help to support consumer spending growth within Germany. Meanwhile, a relatively open stance towards eurozone reform and fiscal integration would bode well for the stability of the region as a whole.”

“A new grand coalition would not fundamentally change its policy stance and it would also not be willing to make major steps towards more integration in the eurozone,” said Peter Bofinger, a professor at Würzburg university and a member of the German Council of Economic Experts.

“A new grand coalition would not fundamentally change its policy stance and it would also not be willing to make major steps towards more integration in the eurozone,” said Peter Bofinger, a professor at Würzburg university and a member of the German Council of Economic Experts.

Philippe Legrain, a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics’ European Institute, said: “The Italian elections could lead to the formation of a government hostile to euro membership that reawakens fears about the integrity of the euro and the sustainability of Italian government debt.

https://www.ft.com/content/cfb03d8c-ea55-11e7-bd17-521324c81e23

@Les Kaye votes Leave! @StephenKMackSD @Britannia rules the waves

@Les Kaye votes Leave!

Thank you, for your both thoughtful and informative response. The ‘decline’ I’m speaking of is not just Mrs. Thatcher’s penchant for passing out  ‘The Road to Serfdom’ as if it were a party favor. Consider Mr. Gary Younge’s 2013 essay: Mrs Thatcher never won more than 44% of the vote, except for the period after the war over The Malvinas, the pathetic last gasp of the Empire! An attempt to rescue Britain from its imperial decline. Compare it to the invasion of Granada in 1983 by Dutch Reagan, he always wanted to play John Wayne!

With the exception of the immediate aftermath of the Falklands war, Thatcher was never a massively popular politician. She never won more than 44 percent of the vote, though in Britain’s winner-takes-all parliamentary system that was enough to secure massive majorities. Her reign over the country was partial. She left her party decimated in Scotland, the North of England and most urban centers, relying on her electoral fiefdom in the South, the Midlands and rural areas. She was divisive, apparently revelling in the acrimony engendered by massive strikes, riots, hunger strikes and economic upheaval for which she was in no small part responsible. She was authoritarian, abolishing the city’s elected authorities because they opposed her agenda and banning Sinn Fein representatives’ voices from the television because they advocated armed resistance to the British occupation of Northern Ireland. (For six tedious years they would be shown with the lips moving, the sound of their voice turned down and their words read by actors). She was a crude majoritarian who never had the support of the majority and became a liability even to her allies. Her political career perished when she was shot by her own troops who tired of her leading them into reckless battle.

But while she was never popular she was a populist. She had a keen understanding of and affinity to some of the least appealing impulses in the British psyche. Her petty nationalism in Europe and post colonial nostalgia played out in the Falklands War; her monocultural racism, expressing sympathy for Britons who “fear rather being swamped by an alien culture”; her appeal to material acquisition over class solidarity or even class mobility; her ability to equate the private and privatized with freedom and choice and the public and nationalized with constraint and imposition.

https://www.thenation.com/article/how-did-margaret-thatcher-do-it/

Please note that this excerpt from the National Archives, which introduces this essay by Alan Travis on Mrs. Thatcher, who ties the War in the Malvinas to her long held project to destroy the power of the Unions: again the analogy with Reagan’s destruction of the Air Traffic Controllers Union is  more than apt. An example of Thatcher’s attempt to forestall the reality of British decline as a world power.

“We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty,” Margaret Thatcher speech to the backbench 1922 committee, July 1984.

The Cabinet papers published under the 30-year rule lay bare the scale of Margaret Thatcher’s long-held ambitions to crush the power of Britain’s trade unions even before she had won her historic 144-seat majority landslide victory.

The Downing Street papers from 1983 show she told Ferdinand Mount, then head of her policy unit, that she agreed that Norman Tebbit’s gradualist approach to trade union reform was too timid and that they should “neglect no opportunity to erode trade union membership”.

Thatcher told Mount to put the policy work in hand but to keep his trade union reform paper, in which he referred to the unions as “a politicised mafia”, wholly confidential. “We must neglect no opportunity to erode trade union membership wherever this corresponds to the wishes of the workforce. We must see to it our new legal structure discourages trade union membership of the new industries,” wrote Mount.

He said that by the end of the century they also hoped to see “a trade union movement whose exclusive relationship with the Labour party is reduced out of all recognition. Again, it is absurd and unjust that millions of Conservatives, Liberals and Social Democrats should be supporting the Labour party directly or indirectly. This relationship fossilises the Labour party and stultifies the whole political dialogue.”

Although the prime minister responded by saying she agreed with Mount, his demand to ensure that trade union members had to opt in, rather than opt out of the political levy – as now being contemplated by the Labour leader, Ed Miliband – was regarded as a step too far at that time by Thatcher and Tebbit because it revived the argument about the financing of political parties. The Tories feared it could also lead to a quid pro quo ban on company donations.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/01/margaret-thatcher-trade-union-reform-national-archives

More on the planning stage of this effort to destroy the power of the Unions:

They were not alone in their determination to take on the unions. As early as January 1983, Nigel Lawson – who had already spent two years as energy secretary building up coal stocks in preparation for the expected showdown with the miners – was telling Thatcher: “If Scargill succeeds in bringing about such a strike, we must do everything in our power to defeat him, including ensuring that the strike results in widespread closures.”

In March, Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, also urged her to take on the miners, telling her: “Events have not, however, challenged the post-war impression of their invincibility, for we have yet to beat a national stoppage … In my view the last thing we should do today is lend credibility to Scargill.”

The cabinet papers released by the National Archives on Thursday show that the preparations – including a debate among Whitehall officials over whether troops should be used during the miners’ strike – were well under way. Lawson also argued for a rapid acceleration in the pace of the pit closures secretly scheduled for 1983/84, demanding that 34 pits, including a dozen in Yorkshire and the Midlands, should be listed, rather than the 20 that eventually sparked the start of the strike in March 1984.

The papers show that detailed discussions on withstanding a coal strike went on in a secret committee of Whitehall officials known as Misc 57 throughout 1983. A good deal of work had already been done in 1982, when it was decided that it was not practicable to use servicemen to move coal by rail.

By that October, in a “secret and personal” note to Thatcher, Peter Gregson, the Cabinet Office deputy secretary, was telling her that using the army to move coal by road would be a formidable undertaking: “4-5,000 lorry movements a day for 20 weeks … the law and order problems of coping with pickets would be enormous … a major risk would be the power station workers would refuse to handle coal brought in by servicemen this way”.

Misc  57 had thought there might be a limited role for the troops in delivering ancillary materials, such as lighting-up oil, under close supervision.

But Thatcher was careful not to close the door on the use of the army to move coal from the working pits to the power stations, and ordered further work to be done. In the following May, the issue was reopened when the Cabinet Office derided such uses of the army as “spectacular gestures which are likely in practice to worsen the situation”.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/01/margaret-thatcher-trade-union-reform-national-archives

Mrs. Thatcher, at best ruled, without anything resembling a majority of voters. An authoritarian personality, who even fought with, and shamed her coterie of male policy technocrats , which led to her downfall. Even her political allies grew tired of her unslakable imperiousness!

Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg’s classic song  Ding Dong the Witch is Dead summed up the opprobrium in which Mrs. Thatcher was held at the time of her death.  Even though the British ruling class, the Tories and New Labour, found the funds for a lavish State Funeral. The utter collapse of the Free Market Delusion in 2008, and the subsequently failed  Austerity,  at the time of her death, made voters realize the true extent of Thatcher’s failed Economic Program, her authoritarianism: that expressed the perpetual mendacity of her interpretation of The Road to Serfdom, as, in fact, a narrative that described the dismal political present.

Yet the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, under the fiercest attacks from both Tories and New Labour, including Jonathan Freedland‘s specious, yet predictably hysterical  ‘Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem’ has failed to stop his popularity. His political flourishing, in a politics still in the thrall of the demonstrable failure of both Neo-Liberalism and its successor Austerity, is described in the Financial Times and other conservative publications as part of a dread Populist uprising against The Elites. Call this the desperation of a failed political class, awash in a nostalgia for the mendacious, authoritarian Mrs. Thatcher! What they have is the rather wan Mrs. May.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/2CaApgn

Here is another reply to StephenKMackSD Britannia rules the waves that you might find of interest: it was removed because Barry doesn’t understand that the FT doesn’t  allow profanity.

Headline: Nato sounds alarm on Russian submarine activity

Sub-headline: Undersea operations highlight suspicion between Moscow and western alliance

Instead of the usual Financial Times New Cold War hysterics, this news story features  Rear Admiral Andrew Lennon, Nato submarine forces commander to provide the ‘evidence’ of Russian Revanchism.

Yet even New Cold War hack  Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson in his opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times dated May 30, 2016, titled ‘Russia’s got a point: The U.S. broke a NATO promise’ has to grudgingly admit the fact that the U.S. broke its promise to hold NATO to its 1990 members! In this case truth is not an ideological construct, although carefully framed in New Cold War rhetoric:

Moscow solidified its hold on Crimea in April, outlawing the Tatar legislature that had opposed Russia’s annexation of the region since 2014. Together with Russian military provocations against NATO forces in and around the Baltic, this move seems to validate the observations of Western analysts who argue that under Vladimir Putin, an increasingly aggressive Russia is determined to dominate its neighbors and menace Europe.

Mr. Shifrinson provides the historical facts in this paragraph:

In early February 1990, U.S. leaders made the Soviets an offer. According to transcripts of meetings in Moscow on Feb. 9, then-Secretary of State James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation on Germany, U.S. could make “iron-clad guarantees” that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.

But then, like the good policy pornai of the American Empire he follows this recounting of the facts with this imperial rationalization:

Nevertheless, great powers rarely tie their own hands. In internal memorandums and notes, U.S. policymakers soon realized that ruling out NATO’s expansion might not be in the best interests of the United States. By late February, Bush and his advisers had decided to leave the door open.

Headline : Corbyn government is ‘nightmarish’ prospect says business chief

Sub-headline : Outgoing head of EEF manufacturers’ lobby breaks silence to attack Labour

A Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn would be a “nightmarish” prospect for the business world, the outgoing head of the Engineering Employers’ Federation has warned.

Terry Scuoler spent seven years at the helm of the group, which represents Britain’s biggest manufacturers and is politically neutral.

The regular reader of The Financial Times will note the shifts, and or progression in their Anti-Corbyn  propaganda: from The Rebellion Against the Elites to The Populist Menace to using Terry Scuoler’s ‘nightmarish’ specter of the political victory of Corbyn. Framed by the fiction of the ‘politically neutral’ stance Engineering Employers’ Federation. Mr. Scuoler feels duty bound, at the end of his tenure, to finally  engage in a tardy, if very welcome to the Financial Times , declaration of what was/is unsurprising! That Mr.  Scuoler’s opinion of Corbyn is consonant with the Financial Times’ Anti-Corbynism, in its many permutations,  is this ‘news item’s’ raison d’etre. Note the shared rhetorical strategy of hysteria mongering!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/b635e6ea-e654-11e7-8b99-0191e45377ec

‘Others will argue that the British way of life, with ingenuity and application devoted to leisure rather than to work, is superior to that elsewhere and is in any case what people want. I do not doubt this; nor do I question the agreeableness or quality of life in Britain or the tolerance of the British people. There is depth in our society that others have not achieved.’

…

‘I cannot say that I have much sympathy for those who seek to justify our present state of affairs by a pastoral apologia. They remind me of the French and German nobility of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were against progress which was synonymous with industrialisation.’

…

‘You only have to move about western Europe nowadays to realise how poor and unproud the British have become in relation to their neighbours. It shows in the look of our towns, in our airports, in our hospitals and in local amenities; it is painfully apparent in much of our railway system, which until a generation ago was superior to the continental one. In France, for instance, it is evident in spending on household equipment and in the growth of second homes. But lest these be thought subjective judgments let me give two figures that illustrate what has happened over the past 20 years or so.’

…

‘(j) The paradox of the British labour scene at the present time is that, despite the contribution our unions have made towards a better safety record in our factories, their influence and ready resort to strike pressure have not secured better general employment conditions than in France and Germany: not only are real wages lower but hours of work are longer.’

http://www.economist.com/node/13315108

Best regards,

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/2DfBrXS