StephenKMackSD's Blog

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

@Chris

Thank you for your thought provoking comment.

Disruptive tech, Uber and Facebook, Silicone Valley. Disruptive tech means simply a change of platform, an evolution in communication like the telegraph and telephone, not to speak of radio and television! Uber is a taxi company not a ‘ride hailing service’ as the Financial Times ‘reporters’ would have it . And the state, for want of a better descriptor, has the duty of protecting its citizens by regulating them! And Facebook, an electronic medium, supplies news to its members, it is a public site and as such it should be governed as television and radio. The FCC set those regulations long ago, and have since been ignored, or better yet betrayed! Look to its recent decision of the de-regulation Internet! The Neo-Liberal dispensation is about the Free Market Lie, reiterated at this publication without surcease.

Your point on the Silicone Valley and its Prophets is well taken : look to Mr. Zuckerberg’s recent ‘tour’, a reported in the pages of the Financial Times:

Mark Zuckerberg sounded a warning on Friday about the social and political fragmentation caused by America’s opioid crisis, as he ended a nationwide tour to understand the forces that had put Donald Trump in the White House. At one point the Facebook chief executive officer choked up as he talked about the effects of opioid addiction, adding: “This stuff is really upsetting to talk about.” His comments followed a year in which he had promised to visit all corners of the US to get out of his normal “bubble”. The well-publicised visits around the country prompted speculation that Mr Zuckerberg was considering a future presidential bid, and while he has said he is not planning a run, he has not explicitly ruled it out in future. In a discussion at the University of Kansas on Friday, the Facebook boss offered what amounted to a “State of the Union” commentary on what he had discovered about social conditions in the US. Besides the devastating impact of the opioid epidemic — which he described as the single biggest surprise — he also highlighted the lost jobs and uncertainty caused by technology and free trade. Referring to the opioid crisis, he said: “One of the things that struck me, that I don’t think we all fully internalise, is how this epidemic has affected people’s attitudes more broadly on policy issues.” The effects of watching people they know succumb to addiction had made many Americans more fearful about crime and supporters of stronger border defences to stop drugs to come into the country, he suggested. Meanwhile, referring to the impact of technological advances, he said: “We’re also starting to see they’ve left a lot of people behind. There’s a big gap in the country, and it’s getting bigger . . . I think that’s at the heart of a lot of the politically divisive debates that we have.”

https://www.ft.com/content/8936e254-c645-11e7-a1d2-6786f39ef675

Mr. Zuckerberg is, to put it with as much ‘charity’ as I am capable, a political naif or  Corporatist knave? Who indeed thinks himself as the Prophet of the enlightened New Electronic Age ! One has a nostalgia for the days of Bernard Baruch and his park bench!

Regards & Merry Christmas

StephenKMackSD

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

Even with the E.C. J.  ruling, The Financial Times ‘reporters’ are still awash in the Neo-Liberal rhetoric  of ‘ride hailing services’ , ‘peer to peer services‘! Government’s first duty is to protect the lives of its citizens! Or should the reader look to Ronald Reagan’s ‘government is the problem’ as an answer to the question about public welfare? The Free Market failed all but that 1%, leaving the 99% paying for the 1%’s bail-out! Or should that reader look to the The Grenfell Tower fire as the starkest kind of object lesson of what government might have done?

The E.C.J.’s decision will have broader significance for how technology companies that offer traditional peer-to-peer services should be regulated in the EU. With Uber now not classified as a digital company, EU governments will no longer have to prove to the European Commission that any restrictions on its business have to be “reasonable” and “proportionate” as stated by digital single market rules.

“After today’s judgment innovators will increasingly be subject to divergent national and sectoral rules,” said Jakob Kucharczyk of the Computer & Communications Industry Association in Brussels.

Jakob Kucharczyk’s ‘innovators’ , the authors of our  Brave New World,  are in fact Corporatist thieves who seek to dismantle the very reasons for government: to protect its citizens from unscrupulous and mendacious economic/political/civic actors, who cry foul when their scheming lies are uncovered and rendered null.

Old Socialist

What could be more filled with self-exculpatory mendacity that the latest essay from Neo-Conservative David Frum? Trump demonstrates that the political class in America is failed. Trump was the Ring-Master of The Apprentice, in all of its iterations, that established in the public mind that Trump was a Leader. Television is a propaganda medium!

Mr. Frum’s usual self-presentation is that of the voice of political reason. forget the Axis of Evil merde, it was just a stepping stone to his present incarnation as political moralist. The dispute between Jennifer Rubin and Charles Cooke presented here in melodramatic terms:

On Monday morning the conservative media world woke up to a savagely personal attack in National Review upon the Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin.

What follows is an essay that should have been subject to a ruthless editing, that features a ‘Whose Who’ of the American Conservative thought. Or to be more precise, the Neo-Conservatives that are part of a coterie that includes Mr. Frum. The Neo-Conservative with any real political power Sen. Tom Cotton, is utterly absent. In essence, Mr. Frum speaks of and about a coterie of political scribblers like himself. The question is should these Neo-Conservatives support or oppose Trump? using the attack by Mr. Cooke on Ms. Rubin as its rhetorical frame. I offer the reader this advice: skip to these last two paragraphs awash in jejune political observation:

Conservatism is what conservatives think, say, and do. As conservatives change—as much through the harsh fact of death and birth as by the fluctuations of opinion—so does what it mean to be a conservative.

The Trump presidency is a huge political fact. He may not be the leader of American conservatism, but he is its most spectacular and vulnerable asset. The project of defending him against his coming political travails—or at least of assailing those who doubt and oppose him—is already changing what it means to be a conservative. The word “conservative” will of course continue in use. But its meaning is being rewritten day by day by the actions of those who claim the word. It is their commitment to Trump that etches Trumpism into them. And while Trump may indeed pass, that self-etching will not soon be effaced.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/conservatism-is-what-conservatives-think-say-and-do/548738/

Old Socialist

The reader of Mr. Stephens latest essay portentously titled “The Real Russia Scandal’ has to be unimpressed as he restates the ‘evidence’ of Russian meddling in the American election, and it corollary of Trump and his minions being active co-conspirators with Putin. Yet the whole of Stephens essay rests on leaks from the CIA and other National Security agencies and ‘reports’ from The Washington Post, a newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos, a contractee of the CIA. Not to speak of the notorious liars Clapper and Brennan, or of Hillary Clinton’s loud proclamations of that Russian meddling, allied to the myth of American innocence.

But never mind those ascertainable facts of the political present. Mr Stephens writes inept political propaganda. The animus of the Neo-Conservatives to Russia has deep roots that date back to the late 30’s, and his intellectual precursors.  Mr. Stephens reference to his 2006 Premature Anti-Russianism in the Wall Street Journal is evidence of the long duration of that Neo-Conservative perpetual bellicosity. Note too that these Neo-Cons, like Stephens and Wm. Kristol beat the war drum without any military experience, that might just temper, or at the least, lead to a kind of diplomatic restraint/rationalism.

The reader need only look to American popular culture, for the historical characters that reflects the Cold War mentality re-expressed by Stephens. Look to United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,  script by Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George.  Or to Sidney Lumet’s  Fail Safe  script by Walter Bernstein
Peter George and the character of Dr. Groeteschele.

Committed Observer

Mr. Kuper’s self-presentation is that of the voice of ‘reason’ but it takes patience to read through Mr. Kuper’s collection of cliches, framed by the dubious, even invidious comparison of ‘The Greatest Generation’ and the ‘Baby Boomers’. In terms of Melodrama its moral/political/historical reductivism is worthy of the small screen.  Any political, even moralizing stand-in for rational argument, is marshaled for this- it reminds this reader of the rhetoric used by Allan Bloom’s ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ * replacing the Anti-Student hysterics with the the ‘clash of values’ between the ‘The Greatest Generation’ and the  ‘Baby Boomers’. With some interesting historical examples:

The incompetence of the Brexiters: they had no plan! What was Mr. Cameron’s plan? What was Mr. Cameron’s motive for his referendum? A regret able expression of Tory political arrogance, or the demonstrated incompetence of a Post-Baby Boomer ?

The Republican’s failed attempt to repeal Obamacare: Obamacare is and will remain the property of the Heritage Foundation, in sum it is the Free Market answer to what should have been Single Payer, if Obama wasn’t what he is and remains a Reaganite in New Democratic drag

Russiagate: This, the creation of a desperate Hillary Clinton, and her New Democratic surrogates , with the help of the notorious liars Clapper and Brennan.  And the strategic leaking by the CIA, and other sympathetic operatives of the American National Security State.

The exemplar of ‘The Greatest Generation’ Harold Macmillan: whose revelation of his inherent upperclass paternalism shaped his politics. ‘followed by Clement Attlee (badly wounded in Iraq in the first world war, prime minister 1945-1951), John F Kennedy and George HW Bush.’  In sum, ‘The Greatest Generation’ was morally/politically superior when compared to Trump and Bush Jr.

Baby Boomers: Trump, Bush Jr follow as exemplars of  the inherent fecklessness of  the Baby Boomers.  In sum, ‘The Greatest Generation’ was morally/politically superior when compared Trump and Bush Jr.  Yet the reader can see ,with vivid clarity, that Baby Boomers Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were/are very much in the mold of the Greatest Generation’s faith in the expertise of the Neo-Liberal technocratic elites. That belief in the experts dates back to Walter Lippmann’s advocacy that was a check, in sum, his solution to too much democracy: Lippmann looked upon himself as a Platonic Guardian, though not quite to the extremes of Leo Strauss and his Neo-Conservative acolytes.

Mr. Kuper offers this summation:

So we’re left with an insouciant, inexperienced political class of mostly ageing white men. Thankfully, that will soon change. Everyone raised under baby-boomer rule has learnt that awful and unknown things can happen anytime. Brexit and Trump have mobilised a generation of young people, taught them that government matters, and shown that not screwing up is a lofty goal. Unprecedented numbers of US women — most of them born post boom — are now seeking election at every political level. In the Senate, there are about 10 times more female candidates than in 2014. They will have a generation’s worth of mess to clean up.

According to Mr. Kuper that insouciant, inexperienced political class of mostly ageing white men is about to end. Given this, where might the reader place Jeremy Corbyn  or Bernie Sanders? Are women about to signal an end to the Boys Club ? Should the reader take the examples of Hillary Clinton, Debbie Wassermann-Schultz, Donna Brazile , Diane Feinstein as exemplary of what women can do politically?  Or should the reader look to the political career of Elizabeth Warren, as paradigmatic of what just one person can accomplish with her critical voice, her political advocacy?

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/3a31862c-df91-11e7-a8a4-0a1e63a52f9c

*See ‘Essays On The Closing of the American Mind’  edited by Robert L.Stone for a collection of essays, in response to Bloom’s Neo-Conservative political hysteria mongering.

@Joan-Enric Torrent. Barcelona.

E.  Burke and B. Disraeli predicated their ‘Conservatism’ on a shared faith in the benevolence of a landed English aristocracy. Call it what it was a comforting political delusion . The fact of  Dickensian London coming to vivid  literary life  proves that ‘faith’ to be utterly misplaced!Or was it a product of  Dickensian political sniping at that ‘benevolent aristocracy’ ?

The genius of Disraeli was that he used his novels as a way of speculative political  thinking , no such politician, even resembling him exists today. I read ‘Vivian Grey’ until it lapsed into a pastiche of the Gothic. Then I found the revelatory study Benjamin Disraeli: The Novel as Political Discourse by Michael Flavin:

https://books.google.com/books/about/Benjamin_Disraeli.html?id=urNlAAAAMAAJ

On Roger Scruton, I read his Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey until page 291 and then I gave up.

https://books.google.com/books?id=pWlS4lPrcCAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=modern+philosophy,+scruton&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiPjpuVoofYAhUp54MKHTuAAgIQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=modern%20philosophy%2C%20scruton&f=false

It reminded so much of the hectoring, or more candidly, hostile rhetoric adopted by Paul Johnson in his Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times:_A_History_of_the_World_from_the_1920s_to_the_1980s

Johnson’s savage, indeed unrelenting, attack on Dag Hammarskjöld is representative of Johnson’s animus toward his ‘Markings’ ? Or was it the U.N.’s non-denominational chapel featuring the paintings of Mark Rothko’s, that raised Johnson’s ire?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times:_A_History_of_the_World_from_the_1920s_to_the_1980s

Mr. Garton Ash, from his aerie at the ultra -reactionary Hoover Institution ( He and Fukuyama must have some compelling chats in the Versailles lunch room, or is it the catering truck in the parking lot?)

Your gush at the end of your comment:

Mr. Gaston Ash linking of Burke, Scruton and the EU, has been a conceptual surprise full of hope.

One could describe, out of many choices, the Mendacity of The Elites: Monnet’s Neo-Liberalism before the fact: the EU cartel masquerading as Federalist. And Scruton as an Enlightener. This admixture of the patently obvious offers hope?   

StephenKMackSD 

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

Headline: The case for European conservatism above grand designs

Sub-headline: We should work at preserving what we have, rather than dreaming up new projects

Would that Mr. Garton Ash had followed his request for silence on the part of EU partisans. Mr. Garton Ash offers this evaluation of the Macron and his Jupertarian Politics, or just call it rule by decree.  Neo-Liberal Reform of France in the throws of a benighted ‘Socialism’ will only be accomplished by a leader elected with 37% of the eligible voters either abstaining or rendering their ballots null.

In his book-length personal manifesto, tellingly entitled Révolution, French president Emmanuel Macron envisages a great round of democratic consultations across the EU throughout next year, culminating in a single “Plan For Europe”.

Next for the reader to consider is the notion of ‘poly-crisis’ as the what ales the EU:

Politicians and authors are right to diagnose a deep “poly-crisis” of the European project. But when you look at their reform proposals, you find that these envisage piecemeal responses to the problems of the eurozone, the Schengen area, the democratic deficit, social protection, and so on. Once these competing proposals have been through the sausage factory of EU decision-making, the resulting actions will be even more complex and pragmatic.

Mr. Garton Ash fails to consider the wisdom of one of Europe’s most eminent historians:

J.G.A. Pocock

Profoundly anti-democratic and anti-constitutional, the EU obliges you to leave by the only act it recognises: the referendum, which can be ignored as a snap decision you didn’t really mean. If you are to go ahead, it must be by your own constitutional machinery: crown, parliament and people; election, debate and statute. This will take time and deliberation, which is the way decisions of any magnitude should be taken.

The Scots will come along, or not, deciding to live in their own history, which is not what the global market wants us to do. Avoid further referendums and act for yourselves as you know how to act and be.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n14/on-brexit/where-are-we-now

The ‘poly-crisis’ of the EU is that it is not an actual  Federation, but a Cartel with the window dressing of free democratic association. In sum, Neo-Liberalism before the fact: the brainchild of Technocrat Supreme Jean Monnet as the in-order-to of selling coal and steel. And as a capitalist bulwark against the Soviet Union. Russian revanchism simply replaces the Soviet menace, in the political present.

Even the mention of Edmund Burke revisiting his native Dublin in the present, and calling the EU ’eminently Burkean union’ identifies- recall that the free spending Burke, received a 30 thousand pound bail out from the Crown, and then voted against the Poor Law.

Many Europeans already have a somewhat conservative attitude to this eminently Burkean union. They want to defend it against the current wave of populist nationalist attacks. They want to look after the family home, mend the eurozone plumbing and erect a better Schengen garden fence, but they don’t want to redesign the whole house. And in these dark times, simply to maintain what has been built since 1945 would already be a great achievement.

Need the reader wonder at Mr. Garton Ash’s declaration of faith in the EU, while ignoring the nearly non-existent foundation for ‘the whole house’ ,courtesy of Jean Monnet and his successors? The ‘what we have’ : a cartel that is not about Federalism nor Democracy , it is about the sale of products, at the highest price: whatever the traffic will bear! Not to forget the dread Populist Menace, that is the bête noire of the respectable bourgeois political apologist, for the abject failure of The Elites. Who placed their wager on the Neo-Liberal swindle and its successor Austerity, that has been catastrophic.   

Not to forget the EU and NATO’s murderous political adventurism in Ukraine, and the troops and weapons dispatched to Poland’s border with Russia. The New Cold War is the product of the collaboration between America and the EU, and the Hoover Institution is one of the many Think Tank advocates, that churn out usable, but not very sophisticated propaganda.

Committed Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/7509d91c-db76-11e7-9504-59efdb70e12f

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.

Perry Anderson

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

The toxicity of greedy European Colonialism, a Sykes-Picot that created ‘The Middle East’ and its ‘Nations‘ , The Balfour Declaration, The Holocaust and European/American Guilt, legitimized the Zionism of atheist Theodor Herzl. Never fear the Neo-Conservative Intelligentsia, in the person of @BretStephensNYT, repeats the Zionist Party Line of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel! Or just call it part of a manufactured theology born of an ersatz modernized  tribalism!

Israel has its own Warsaw Ghetto: call it what it is the Concentration Camp of Gaza. Gaza is totally reliant, of being  reduced to a calorie count of just maintaining a marginal existence. The land and sea blockade make the total control by Israel of all imports into Gaza a fact, as does the cowardly American acquiesce to such an egregious violation of human rights!

America gave $38 billion in military aid ,over a ten year period, to Israel in 2016. A state that has between 100 and 200 nuclear bombs, and the means to deliver them to targets in the region, that is not a signatory to any nuclear arms agreement. Mordechai Vanunu is the whistle-blower that revealed to the world the fact of a nuclear armed Israel. He remains to this day a Prisoner of Conscience.

A nation that continuously re-enacts the conditions of their European oppression, upon the indigenous peoples that they have shared lands for millennia.: the Settler Movement, and their zealotry, of seizing land by ‘law‘, for more room for grandma’s kitchen, and burning down Palestinian olive groves are the vanguard of contemporary Zionism. As is the blundering, not to speak of corrupt, Ultra-Nationalist Netanyahu. The question that occurs: Are Fascism and Zionism compatible forms of  politics?

Karl Kraus’ Ghost