StephenKMackSD's Blog

Macri’s ascendancy has hit a small snag: the death of Folk Hero Santiago Maldonado,and the clueless comments of the operatives of Macri. The Argentine Melodrama has one more day before the vote takes place. Will de Kirchner gain a Senate seat, from which to to hector the Macri’s Neo-Liberal political/economic re-invigoration? Even though she is under indictment.

But pay attention to the august Financial Times’ ‘reporter’ , the usually reliable Mr. Mander, engaging in what might just be maladroit conspiracy mongering, by default.

With results from forensic tests yet to be announced, wild speculation surrounding the Maldonado scandal that has engrossed the nation for more than two months will not be put to rest until after the elections.

The regular reader of the Financial Times has to wonder at the why of ‘wild speculation surrounding the Maldonado scandal that has engrossed the nation for more than two months will not be put to rest until after the elections.’ I don’t recall reading about the Santiago Maldonado case in The Financial Times.  If another reader, or one of the editors of this publication can direct me to reports in this newspaper I would be grateful.

This might be one of the many reasons to subscribe to the English language daily, The Buenos Aries Herald!

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/printed-edition/

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/7183e74a-b5ee-11e7-aa26-bb002965bce8

From the ‘Straight Talk Express’ to Bomb,Bomb,Bomb Iran This Neo-Conservative War monger, now presents himself as ‘The Voice of Reason’ or one of the fabled ‘Adults in the Room’ of 2006-2007. The whole of the American Political Class, the Neo-Confederate/Neo-Conservative Republicans and their evil twin the New Democrats, Hillary and her minions, just call them both Trump’s midwives, will be this Republic’s official undertakers! The imperatives of the American National Security State swallowed what was left of that Republic long ago!

Old Socialist

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/mccains-anti-trump-broadside-a-half-baked-brief-for-empire/

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

Headline: After Catalans, Italian regions step up autonomy call

Sub-headline:Northern League uses Lombardy and Veneto referendums to push for special status

Its not just the European Project that is under threat from the dreaded Populist Monster , but the  Nation State, the very foundation of Monnet’s Coal and Steel cartel, that suffers from the pretensions of Democracy, as it has evolved. First the long historical evolution of Catalan, and now the lukewarm votes in Lombardy and Veneto for ‘more autonomy’, approved by the Italian Constitutional Court.

This ambiguous position is reflected in Sunday’s referendums, which are consultative and non-binding. They are carefully phrased to ask voters if they want more “autonomy” without threatening “national unity”. Unlike the Catalan vote they have been approved by the Italian constitutional court.

As informative as this news story by Rachel Sanderson is, as to the political actors in the Italian politics of the present, should the reader look to Daniel T. Rogers’ book ‘Age of Fracture‘, written in an American political/historical/economic context, for a telling simile/metaphor for the evolving European crisis? That describes both the EU and the Nation State, caught in the rip tide of  history, exacerbated by the utterly failed Neo-Liberal Dispensation?

A link to Prof. Rogers book:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674064362

Philosophical Apprentice

https://www.ft.com/content/c2712ffa-acd9-11e7-beba-5521c713abf4

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

Headline: Election tests Macri’s promise to make Argentina ‘normal’ again

Sub-headline: Legislative poll will be a referendum on the reformist president

You know your reading the Financial Times by the opening paragraphs in praise of an oligarch:

Few have navigated Argentina’s erratic economy as shrewdly as Eduardo Eurnekian. Despite half a century of recurring financial crises, the 84-year-old billionaire has come out on top; he now controls Aeropuertos Argentina 2000, one of the world’s largest private airport operators.

But note that this oligarch is switching economic tracks:

Sensing the shift, Mr Eurnekian is moving into a business that would have been almost unthinkable only a few years ago in a country well known for cronyism, debt defaults and high — mobile banking.

Mr. Eurnekian is now going to become just another speculator, gambler instead of managing private airports. All this presented by Benedict Mander as ‘proof’ that Mr. Eurnekian is prescient about Argentina’s future, about to be re-made by the ‘Reforms’ of Macri, or just call it an attempt to Neo-Liberalize that economy. Yet the phenomenon of  ‘Globalisation‘ is the motive of this oligarch to find a new profit stream.

“There is no way we are going back to the past,” says Mr Eurnekian, who is backing Wanap, Argentina’s first online-only bank. “Globalisation will either absorb us, or it will not. There is no halfway house.”

The reader must cultivate patience for we are in the journalistic territory of ‘The Big Read’,  and we have just begun the guided tour !

The emancipation of Argentine politics/economics from its ‘shadow of its Populist Past’ is the rhetorical frame of this propaganda intervention. Call it the master narrative of Mander’s essay.

Why should or could the reader of Mander’s exercise in self-serving political prescience, garnished with arresting graphs, pictures, a pod cast and an insert called ‘Regional Trends’,  look elsewhere for news about the de Kirchner years?  Here is a Guardian opinion piece written by Mark Weisbrot of October 22, 2011.

Headline: Cristina Kirchner and Argentina’s good fortune

Sub-headline: Under the Kirchner administrations, Argentina has achieved the fastest growth in the west – after defaulting. Listening, Europe?

Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is expected to coast to re-election as president of Argentina on Sunday, despite having faced hostility from the media for most of her presidency, and from many of the most powerful economic interests in the country. So it seems a good time to ask why this might happen.

Yes, it’s the economy. Since Argentina defaulted on $95bn of international debt nine years ago and blew off the International Monetary Fund, the economy has done remarkably well. For the years 2002-2011, using the IMF’s projections for the end of this year, Argentina has chalked up real GDP growth of about 94%. This is the fastest economic growth in the western hemisphere – about twice that of Brazil, for example, which has also improved enormously over past performance. Since President Fernandez or her late husband Nestor Kirchner, who preceded her as president, were running the country for eight of these nine years, it shouldn’t be surprising that voters will reward her with another term.

The benefits of growth don’t always trickle down, but in this case, the Argentine government has made sure that many did. Poverty and extreme poverty have been reduced by about two thirds since their peak in 2002, and employment has increased to record levels. Social spending by the government has nearly tripled in real terms. In 2009, the government implemented a cash transfer program for children that now reaches the households of more than 3.5 million children. It is probably the largest such program, relative to national income, in Latin America.

Inequality has also been considerably reduced in Argentina during this remarkable expansion. This is in contrast to most other fast-growing economies in the world (and some of the slower-growing ones like the United States), where inequality has increased over the past decade. In 2001, Argentines in the 95th percentile of the income distribution had 32 times the income of those in the 5th percentile. By last year, that ratio had fallen by nearly half, to a multiple of 17.

I can already imagine the comments that I will get for this piece: people will shout about Argentina’s inflation rate, which, according to some private estimates, is running between 20 and 25% at present. Yes, that is too high, and will likely be brought down in the months and years ahead (it was much lower through most of the past nine years). But it is important to remember that it is real income (adjusted for inflation) and employment, as well as the distribution of income, that determine people’s living standards. If inflation is high but your income is rising faster than inflation, you are better-off than if inflation is much lower and your income does not keep up with inflation – or if you don’t have a job at all.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/23/cristina-kirchner-argentina

Now this was in 2011, so what might this six year old opinion piece offer to the reader of the august Financial Times ? Had the Argentine economy collapsed in the intervening years? Or were the voters tired of de Kirchner ? She is running for Senator in the coming election of October 22, 2017:

Peronist factions are divided in two main groups; the Front for Victory, led by the former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, leads the parliamentary opposition to Macri’s administration. Another group is composed of politicians from the Justicialist Party and the Renewal Front.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_legislative_election,_2017

Macri did pay Paul Singer over a one billion dollar ransom for re-admittance to the Neo-Liberal family of Nations. But the answer is here:

“It took a year and a half for investors and companies to get comfortable with the idea of investing in Argentina [again], but now I’m being contacted several times a day,” says Noah Mamet, former US ambassador in Buenos Aires who is now in the private sector.

It seems that the only real qualification for Mamet’s appointment to the Ambassadorship to Argentina was that he raised six figures sums for President Obama in 2012:

Since his appointment as U.S. ambassador to Argentina, Mamet has been criticized for being part of a group of nominated “ambassadors that raised six-figure sums” for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, including by websites such as The Washington Examiner and The Huffington Post.^[19][20]

In December 2013, BuzzFeed reported that Mamet’s nomination as ambassador to Argentina was “met with surprise, and in some cases anger, by his peers in the donor class. Democratic Party donors complain privately that Mamet unfairly leveraged his clients’ work for his own political gain and benefited from a close personal relationship with President Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina.”^[21] A group of retired United States Foreign Service officers have since called for an end to the practice of appointing political contributors and supporters as ambassadors.^[22] Mamet has also been criticized for lack of “major diplomatic experience” and not visiting Argentina prior to his nomination.^[20][23]

In 2014, fifteen former presidents of the State Department Employees Union (AFSA) made an official request to reject Mamet’s nomination to ambassadorship, which also included George Tsunis (for Norway) and Colleen Bell (for Hungary), because “they showed limited knowledge of the countries to which they’d been nominated” at their Senate committee hearings.^[24]

AFSA issued a letter to the U.S. State Department urging it to “oppose granting of Senate consent to these three candidates.”^[25] The letter was the first of its kind, which set a new historical precedent to ambassadorial designations in the U.S.^[25]

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

Mr. Mamet is President & Founder at Noah Mamet & Associates LLC. Greater Los Angeles Area-Public Relations and Communications.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/f6960986-b251-11e7-a398-73d59db9e399

.

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

Is this paragraph even a surprise coming from a ‘Think Tank’ whose reason d’etre is the production of pro-EU propaganda, and to treat all other points of view as heretical? Kostas Botopoulos provides the indictment of Mr. Varoufakis as that heretic.

From both a political and a legal point of view it is obvious that the EU framework allows for many types of regional settlement (ranging from advanced autonomy to federalism) other than separatism. The non-negotiable and unilateral “secession” of Catalonia evokes the populist themes of Brexit much more than the nuances of a regionalist settlement.

But the historical context of the Germans, as four time defaulters in the 20th Century, treated the Greeks as if their own history were a product of their unconvincing yet politically usable, and utterly convenient political amnesia. In sum, German fiscal probity is a usable 21st Century mythology.

Benjamin Friedman’s address, as reported by Gillian Tett in the pages of the august Financial Times, provides the facts relating to the German intransigence toward the Greeks, and the fact that the Germans  enjoyed an economic tolerance that the Greeks were not entitled to, according to the Germans and EU apologists.

A link to Ms. Tett’s article:

https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0

A portion of Mr. Friedman’s address, followed by a link to the entire address

In the watershed of the Depression of 2008, and the EU that is a Cartel pretending to be a Democracy- look to Quebec, the Zapatistas, Scotland and Catalan to see that the Nation State is not as stable as its apologists would like. In this atmosphere of crisis, over time, the recognition that the EU began its life as a steel and coal cartel, that pretends to be democratic, while engaging in the subversion of a democratically elected government in Ukraine. Conspiring with NATO and The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, not to speak of Right Sector, Svoboda and other bad actors, that places Mr. Botopoulos’ demonization of Mr. Varoufakis in its broader political context. Perhaps the EU should rehabilitate one of the ‘legal instruments’ of the ancien régime the Lettres de cachet to silence the heretical Mr. Varoufakis?

Committed Observer

No More Crises As Opportunities: An Answer To Yanis Varoufakis

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 

Headline:Chile warms to re-electing billionaire Sebastián Piñera

Sub-headline: Country swings to the right as Latin American ‘pink tide’ recedes

‘Pink Tide‘ is a descriptor, or more aptly a propaganda ploy, to bait The Financial Times readership. To describe any political expression that deviates from the Free Market Gospel, that is by definition an expression of dreaded ‘Leftism’ , even if it be Left Wing Social Democracy.  The headline should read The Editors of the Financial Times’ nostalgia for The Chicago Boys. Pinochet gets a mention in a sentence, that doesn’t even refer to those harbingers of disaster, better to call them Milton Friedman’s Army of Corporatist Hacks! Chile’s conservative society produced Salvador Allende, yet the ‘political cleansing’ that Pinochet practiced remade Chile?  The Financial Times recognizes the ‘ruthless dictatorship’ of Pinochet, but fails to mention the costs of the Monetarist Utopianism of Mr. Friedman’s minions.

Chile’s conservative society has produced a more stable political system in the last quarter century since Pinochet quit power, after presiding what began as one of the region’s most ruthless dictatorships.

The above quote mere window dressing, for the hope of a return of a Corporatist to the leadership of Chile.  This essay relies on quotations from Piñera‘s fellow travelers, and a nod to another Free Marketeer, Macri as savior of Argentinian Political Virtue: its return to the Neo-Liberal coterie of nations, by way of a billion dollar ransom paid to Vulture Capitalist Paul Singer.

More importantly Michelle Bachelet is a Socialist. Here is an excerpt from Bachelet’s Wikipedia entry,  that provides the necessary political/historical context for The Financial Times’  ‘Pink Tide’:

‘Facing growing food shortages, the government of Salvador Allende placed Bachelet’s father in charge of the Food Distribution Office. When General Augusto Pinochet suddenly came to power via the 11 September 1973 coup d’état, Bachelet’s father was detained at the Air War Academy under charges of treason. Following months of daily torture at Santiago’s Public Prison, he suffered a cardiac arrest that resulted in his death on 12 March 1974. In early January 1975, Bachelet and her mother were detained at their apartment by two DINA agents,^[14] who blindfolded and drove them to Villa Grimaldi, a notorious secret detention center in Santiago, where they were separated and subjected to interrogation and torture.^[15] In 2013 Bachelet revealed she had been interrogated by DINA chief Manuel Contreras there.^[16] Some days later, Bachelet was transferred to Cuatro Álamos (“Four Poplars”) detention center, where she was held until the end of January. Thanks to the assistance of Roberto Kozak,^[17] Bachelet was able to go into exile in Australia,^[18] where her older brother, Alberto, had moved in 1969.^[10] Of her torture, Bachelet said in 2004 that “it was nothing in comparison to what others suffered”. She was “yelled at using abusive language, shaken,” and both she and her mother were “threatened with the killing of the other.” She was “never tortured with electricity,” but she did see it being done to other prisoners.^{[19] ‘}

Look no further for confirmation of Ms. Bachelet’s status as  Left/Pink ( In the McCarthy Era, American Leftists were called ‘Pinkos‘). She eventually sought refuge in East Germany-where were she and her mother to go?

In May 1975 Bachelet left Australia and later moved to East Germany, to an apartment assigned to her by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) government in Am Stern, Potsdam; her mother joined her a month later, living separately in Leipzig. In October 1976, she began working at a communal clinic in the Babelsberg neighborhood, as a preparation step to continue her medical studies at an East German university. During this period, she met architect Jorge Leopoldo Dávalos Cartes, another Chilean exile, whom she married in 1977. In January 1978 she went to Leipzig to learn German at the Karl Marx University’s Herder Institute (now the University of Leipzig). Her first child with Dávalos, Jorge Alberto Sebastián, was born there in June 1978. She returned to Potsdam in September 1978 to continue her medical studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin for two years. Five months after enrolling as a student, however, she obtained authorization to return to her country.^[20]

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

Could the America of Nixon/Kissinger have provided refuge?

Washington, D.C., September 11, 2013 – Henry Kissinger urged President Richard Nixon to overthrow the democratically elected Allende government in Chile because his “‘model’ effect can be insidious,” according to documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The coup against Allende occurred on this date 40 years ago. The posted records spotlight Kissinger’s role as the principal policy architect of U.S. efforts to oust the Chilean leader, and assist in the consolidation of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

The documents, which include transcripts of Kissinger’s “telcons” — telephone conversations — that were never shown to the special Senate Committee chaired by Senator Frank Church in the mid 1970s, provide key details about the arguments, decisions, and operations Kissinger made and supervised during his tenure as national security adviser and secretary of state.

“These documents provide the verdict of history on Kissinger’s singular contribution to the denouement of democracy and rise of dictatorship in Chile,” said Peter Kornbluh who directs the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. “They are the evidence of his accountability for the events of forty years ago.”

Today’s posting includes a Kissinger “telcon” with Nixon that records their first conversation after the coup. During the conversation Kissinger tells Nixon that the U.S. had “helped” the coup. “[Word omitted] created the conditions as best as possible.” When Nixon complained about the “liberal crap” in the media about Allende’s overthrow, Kissinger advised him: “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes.”

http://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB437/

This New York Times news story, from 1983, reports on the barring of Hortensia Bussi de Allende, the widow of President Salvador Allende Gossens of Chile, from traveling to America.

This New York Times news story, of 1987, reports on the lifting of that travel ban on Hortensia Bussi de Allende:

The reader can count on the Financial Times to print reliable apologetics for Corporatism, in all its iterations. The receding ‘Pink Tide‘ in Latin America being  indicative of same, using Macri’s rise in Argentina, the ‘political chaos’ in Venezuela, yet Bolivia’s Evo Morales’  Evonomics still holds!

This reader is always struck, by the fact that just the most perfunctory checking of the internet, always produces actual historical evidence that just confirms the fact that The Financial Times prints Capitalist propaganda, couched in the highfalutin rhetoric of Free Market Utopianism.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/736b6110-aa12-11e7-ab55-27219df83c97

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

In the opening paragraphs Mr. Stephens modulates his joy at the prospect of war with Iran, he is like most Neo-Conservatives, having no military experience of actual war and its carnage. Ernst Jünger came to celebrate battle in his ‘Storm of Steel’ , by way of the actual experience of that carnage in World War I.  Mr. Stephens courts the readership at The New York Times with his political rationalism, by way of quoting an anonymous source who describes what might go wrong with that decertification, but first a sample of his muted reverie:

Negotiators warn never to take a hostage you can’t shoot. By announcing Friday that the administration would not certify that the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran was in the national interest, Donald Trump has taken a hostage.

The hostage is the deal itself. Contrary to belief, decertification neither violates nor cancels the agreement. It does not betray our commitments to our allies and it does not abrogate our obligations to the Iranians. It’s an act of domestic politics between two branches of the United States government.

But it’s also a psychological step, a brash signal that Trump is prepared to see the deal fail and accept the consequences, including war, if he can’t negotiate a better one. Since Iran insists it won’t budge, it sets Washington and Tehran on a path of confrontation that can be averted only if one side or the other blinks. Decertification is Trump saying: We won’t blink.

Mr. Stephens is vulgar, if not profane, while observing New York Times decorum, ‘we won’t blink’ is pure Madison Ave. sloganeering dreck! That anonymous source:

On Thursday, a well-placed source who advises the administration on Iran policy and supports decertification listed for me all the ways things could go wrong.

Could that ‘well placed source’ be Stephens’ invention? Could it be Victoria Nuland, or any number of other Neo-Conservatives that have colonized the State Department?  Perhaps Stephens consulted his fellow travelers  Robert Kagan, Wm. Kristol, Jeffrey Goldberg? This is interesting speculation but on to the arguments about ‘the way thing could go wrong’.

There’s personnel risk

There’s escalatory risk,

There’s diplomatic risk

the risk that Iran will call Trump’s bluff,

Do any of these reasons need  ‘well placed sources’ to establish their validity? Just the exercise of clear thinking, not corrupted by ideology, could produce such a result! But then Stephens presents this:

So what’s the case for supporting decertification?

Mr. Stephens presents ‘arguments’ shaped by Neo-Conservative animus toward the Islamic Republic, as the regional power in the ‘Middle East’. After the invasion and war on  Iraq. In fact, Iraq has become a close ally of Irans. The demonization of Iran has become the perpetual threat, to the thinkers who concocted the bellicose, hegemonic fantasies of the Project for the New American Century: the Devil of the West of Radical Islam, and the Devil of Iran, in the Neo-Conservative coteries fetid imaginings, mirror each other.

Political Observer

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

In the desperate Age of Trump, writers, pundits, and reviewers ,who produce book chat,   who also consider themselves ‘Liberal’ , ‘Left’ or ‘Progressive‘ are on the hunt for something resembling a Hero. In another desperate time, nearly twenty years ago, that Hero was presented as The Gentleman From New York : Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Biography by Godfrey Hodgson.

Mr. Marcus reviews Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian by Richard Aldous, but the hero Mr. Marcus was searching for proves to be another political opportunist: the evidence of this is provided by Marcus himself, in Schlesinger’s utterly shabby treatment of both Harriman and Stevenson.

Throughout these years, Schlesinger often hid his political ambitions behind his scholarly bow ties and credentials. But a considerable amount of cunning—and sometimes outright deception—paved his way from Harvard Yard to the White House. When he jumped from Harriman’s sinking ship to Stevenson’s more promising one, he shared, as Aldous tells us, “inside knowledge about Harriman to help Stevenson knock him out of the race.” And when he ditched Stevenson for JFK, he recruited a group of fellow Stevenson intellectuals—John Kenneth Galbraith and Henry Steele Commager among them—to publicly endorse Kennedy and thereby prevent old Adlai from considering a third run.

That Mr. Marcus carefully, but maladroitly launders, as ‘necessary’ to Schlesinger’s power obsession. Earlier in his essay Mr. Marcus styles Schlesinger as a kind of American Carl Schmitt.

The Vital Center was the coded apologetics for the purge of the actual Left from American political life, during the Cold War. The ADA was the vehicle for Liberals like Schlesinger and Niebuhr to proclaim their loyalty to Capitalism: its Free Markets as emancipatory, and its politics Democratic.

Look to the Journals 1952-2000, in the early entries, where Mr. Schlesinger repeats the word ‘commies’ to almost comic effect, except to those victims of McCarthyism, both Party Members and Fellow Travelers.  One can also see Mr. Schlesinger appearing in the pages of The Georgetown Set as a perpetual job seeker in the Truman years.

Also look to Richard Fox’s book Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography for Mr. Schlesinger’s ADA accomplice, who propagated the idea of Christian Realism, that among other things rationalized Hiroshima and Nagasaki. J. Edgar Hoover was the supposed reason for  Niebuhr’s notorious letter denouncing Communism, and its American Fellow Travelers: as a means out of his describing himself as a Marxient Thinker, and that the Working Class shouldn’t give up on the use of violence, to achieve its ends, both these from 1932, as I recall.

Mr. Marcus provides an informative history of the current Party Line on Schlesinger: his career as Liberal Public Intellectual really began to take national shape when he became a New Frontier poodle.

Mr. Marcus’  tale ends with Mr. Schlesinger becoming “the swinging soothsayer” as described by Time Magazine.  Gore Vidal once described Time Magazine as the fictional lives of real people. As the reader of his Journals will attest, Schlesinger was an inveterate name dropper, and a social butterfly to point of producing ennui in the reader. But for those readers, with an appetite for tedium, can recall  Mr. Schlesinger opining in his Journal, that he gave up metaphysics for the consolations of the dry martini:  that he stole from Robert Benchley.

Old Socialist

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-power-historian/

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

And these could offer useful signals about the state of the US economy, and whether Donald Trump’s deregulation and tax cut pledges are still unleashing animal spirits.*

Animal Spirits is Keynes’ highfalutin term, that transmogrified into Greenspan’s  ‘Irrational Exuberance’ : this just speculation on my part, but it seems relevant to make certain connections across historical time. Yet this is my second reading of Ms. Tett’s essay and I am in a quandary. note the headline and sub-headline.

Headline: Ham-fisted banking rules spark the creativity of lenders

Sub-headline : Real credit growth and innovation occur in the world of private capital

But as investors and regulators watch names such as JPMorgan and Citigroup, they should also monitor the nameless world of non-banks as well. For one little secret about finance today is that the banking sector is not the really interesting game in town; instead, the real credit growth — and innovation — is now occurring in the world of private capital.

This overturns the layperson’s idea of how a bank is supposed to work. For financiers, however, it is the new norm. The HPS fund seems to be the biggest to date — although it is hard to tell precisely because the “private” market is opaque. But HPS has other, smaller funds. So do most of the other big private equity and hedge fund players, with groups such as Apollo and BlueBay having also created hefty multibillion-dollar vehicles. Consultants such as Prequin reckon that the overall private debt market is already $600bn in size; the industry expects this to hit the trillion-dollar mark in 2020, presuming that the heady growth continues.

And it should provide a broader warning sign too: if you want to track what is really happening to credit today, in a financial system awash with cash, do not just look at the headline institutions. Regulators and investors alike should learn the lessons from 2008, and look at what is happening in the murky “shadow” banking world, be that in China, America or anywhere else. JPMorgan’s peculiar financial child — or grandchild — has become more interesting than JPMorgan.

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

Headline:Kobe Steel shares plunge as scandal widens

Sub-headline: Japanese group adds steel and specialist metals to list of questionable products

…

Kobe Steel, Japan’s third-largest steelmaker and a supplier to global companies including Boeing, Toyota and Nissan, admitted at the weekend to falsifying inspection data on an estimated 20,000 tonnes of metals shipped to about 200 customers in the year to August 2017.

…

Aluminium and copper products have also been affected. Kobe Steel sold metal that failed to meet quality standards promised to clients in products from cars to aircraft and has warned that the problems in certification could date back 10 years.

https://www.ft.com/content/6077dad2-ae47-11e7-aab9-abaa44b1e130

Headline: Five questions on Kobe Steel and quality controls

Sub-headline: Corporate Japan’s reputation takes another blow after false certification comes to light

https://www.ft.com/content/d0da2062-ae62-11e7-beba-5521c713abf4

Call this final entry a kind of pseudo-apologetic, for a documented and longstanding failure of a manufacturer to meet the standards set by its customers. What should a customer expect from a supplier?

Also, the regular reader of this newspaper, might just judge that the concept of The Self-Correcting Market,  has again proven itself to be a self-serving  myth, postulated by the Mt. Pelerin Philosopher Kings. Or should the reader judge that this collective of Political Romantics were just the maladroit apologists for Robber Capital?

Old Socialist