Its not at all surprising that Samantha Power’s byline should appear in the pages of The Paper of Record, The New York Times . This newspaper has been one of the many propaganda arms of The American Empire. Look at its regular columnists : David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Bret Stephens and Arthur C. Brooks ( I forgot amiable Neo-Liberal hack Roger Cohen!) and Paul Krugman. American Exceptionalism is this publication’s ruling political theology, and its hirelings repeat this ad nauseam.
To add a certain piquancy to this essay , Ms. Power’s recent rapprochement, in political time, with American Foreign Policy guru Henry Kissinger , who some might call a monster, is the backdrop to this essay. Ms. Power simply repeats the old formulas, not to speak of shopworn cliches, of The Old Cold War, and presents them as new insights into the political machinations of Putin as The New Stalin.
But things have changed appreciably since the 1950’s : the internet and the birth of such ‘news outlets’ such as RT and Sputnik as purveyors of ‘fake news’ , yet what remains unmentioned in Ms. Power’s screed, is that America has been broadcasting to Eastern Europe and Russia for nearly two generations, with Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Even after the end of the Soviet Union. Ms. Power exercises a glaring double standard: is turnabout fair play? Not in the political world inhabited by Mr. Power, who instances the Ukrainian Coup as demonstrative of Russian revanchism in its extreme form. Again she elides from her brief potted history these American and European bad political actors: NATO, the EU, The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and diplomats Victoria Nuland and Jeffery Pyatt and even herself as co-conspirator in that Coup. The guilt of the Russians in MH17 was a foregone conclusion!
One point that irks Ms. Power is the damage done to the Hillary Clinton Campaign by the Russians, yet no actual proof exists except the word of Intelligence Agencies, whose record of lying and deceit to Americans is well documented. Some of us recall Ms. Power calling Hillary a ‘Monster’ , and then quickly retracting or apologizing for that characterization. The imperative of Careerism calls for stealth rather than frankness!
@B_Eichengreen provides important background, or just call it speculation on his notion that there is a coming conflict between Merkel’s fiscal Conservatism and Macron’s ‘Jupertarian Politics’. Two politicians suffering from galloping hubris, to put it almost diplomatically.
As the august Financial Times has noted, Macron’s plummeting poll numbers, and that near 37% of spoiled, blank and otherwise uncountable ballots, in the final vote . And the Le Pen and Mélenchon coteries of dissidents, will have what effect on the hermetic speculations of Mr. Eichengreen’s technocratic chatter? That first appeared at the home of respectable bourgeois policy opinion, meaning a publication that specializes in EU apologetics , Project Syndicate, by bought and paid for public intellectuals. What better credential to present to the reader than this? ( …formerly Senior Policy Adviser at the International Monetary Fund. )
Four time defaulter Germany, in the person of Merkel, is addicted to the utterly false narrative of German fiscal probity. Gillian Tett provides the necessary background to that specious mythology :
While Macron is an authoritarian, rule by decree, with a ‘mandate’ to bring France into the political family of a benighted Neo-Liberalism. Aux barracades, camarade!
Is it surprising that Mr. Rachman, in his stirring defense of Mr. Soros, elides from his potted history Soros’ support of the 2014 Ukrainian Coup? He was one of many of its supporters, among them: NATO, the EU , The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and Neo-Cons Victoria Nuland and Jeffrey Pyatt. Read the roster of speakers at Ukraine: Thinking together Kyiv, 15-19 May 2014
the http://www.eurozine.com/ukraine-thinking-together/
But not to forget Right Sector and Svoboda, those inconvenient Neo-Faschists, to Mr. Rachman’s tale of Antisemitism directed at the virtuous Mr. Soros.
Mr. Soros is just another billionaire, who puts his money where he will. And whose politics are Neo-Liberal, and his judgement always questionable, if not downright destructive. How many people died in Ukraine because of his political dilettantism? Are his opponents legion, they come from across the political spectrum. How convenient that Mr. Rachman focuses his hectoring polemic against those bad actors, and doesn’t direct any attention to of Mr. Soros, as a bad actor in his own right!
From the editor of The Financial Times, Mr. Barber, the readership, viewership last saw him chowing down in the FT Cafeteria! He,this time, considers the vexing question of ‘Fake News’ , simply put, propaganda. Some of Mr. Barber’s readership are old enough to recall the ‘Managed News’ controversy of the Kennedy presidency. The Financial Times which specializes in Capitalist Apologetics and its corollary a defense of a defunct Neo-Liberalism, opines on ‘Fake News’. Irony? Pankaj Mishra in his latest essay for the London Review of Books:
perfectly describes the persons and the mentality of the milieu at the Financial Times and the Spectator,while not including Mr. Barber, it is demonstrative of a climate of opinion at these publications which specialize in editorial comment and news about politics and policy. The latest ‘advocacy journalism’ at The Financial Times has been its unseemly, even obsequious celebration of Macron’s Jupertarian Politics, another name for ‘rule by decree’: call it the political desperation of the advocates of a Neo-Liberalism, that has reached its terminal state, except to its diehards like the zealot Macron, and his La République En Marche! Is the lesser of two evils about to confront the rage of that 37%, or even the La Pen coterie?
The ideas and commitments of the new prophets of decline do not emerge from any personal experience of it, let alone adversity of the kind suffered by many voters of Brexit and Trump. These men were ideologically formed during the reign of Reagan and Thatcher, and their influence and prestige have grown in step with the expansion of Anglo-America’s intellectual and cultural capital. Lilla, a self-declared ‘centrist liberal’, arrived at his present position by way of working-class Detroit, evangelical Christianity and an early flirtation with neoconservatism. The British writers belong to a traditional elite; shared privilege transcends ideological discrepancies between centrist liberalism and nativism, the Financial Times and the Spectator. Murray and Goodhart were educated at Eton; the fathers of both Luce and Goodhart were Conservative MPs; and all three went to Oxford. Inhabitants of a transatlantic ecosystem of corporate philanthropy, think-tanks and high-altitude conclaves, they can also be found backslapping in the review pages and on Twitter: Murray calls Goodhart’s writing ‘superb’ and Luce’s ‘beautiful’; Emmott thanks Murray for his ‘nice’ review in the Times.
Here Mr. Mishra describes the near incestuous milieu of Mr. Barber and his coterie of fellow travelers: a transatlantic ecosystem of corporate philanthropy, think-tanks and high-altitude conclaves.The only missing piece in Mr. Mishra’s essay is the newspaper, as the platform for political advocacy i.e. propagandizing. Mr. Mishra is reviewing books by the New Declinists, yet he describes with telling accuracy Mr. Barber’s milieu: the Oxford address being just one more venue for the exercise of the wisdom of an elite pundit, or better yet a Demi-Philosopher King.
A report based on anonymous sources and gossip! Chatter, chatter, chatter! Some of Ms.Tett’s readers recall her indispensable ‘A debt to history’ ,as one her very best and most important contributions to actual Journalism, yes in caps!
Then there is this:
But lawyers who know Mueller’s team suspect there might be another explanation: Mueller is doing such a ruthlessly disciplined job that he is preventing any material from leaking. This partly reflects the character of the man, who is respected across party lines as a consummate professional. It also stems from something else: for Mueller and his other former FBI colleagues, this investigation has extraordinary historic importance, given that Trump fired James Comey in May as head of the agency for having mishandled last year’s email investigation into Hillary Clinton. “Mueller is absolutely determined to pursue this to the end — the credibility of the FBI is at stake,” said a lawyer who knows him well.
The Cult of Mueller and its propaganda arm the Financial Times! Mr. Mueller served as the head of the FBI from 2001 to 2013. John F. Kelly and Phillip Wearne published their book ‘Tainting Evidence: Inside the Scandals at the F.B.I. Crime Lab’ in 1998.
The reader of the Financial Times is habituated to Capitalist Apologetics- is defense of The Mueller Integrity and possibility of the impeachment of Trump, two imperatives that can be trusted to the demonstratively incompetent Mr. Mueller? His imperative,to rescue ‘the credibility of the FBI is at stake’ ! Ms. Tett becomes in this essay a Mueller partisan .
Yet look to the New Democrats Pelosi and Schumer, who seemed quite amenable with Trump, as they made a shaky alliance on the Debt and DACA?
What can be bothering our Tory Hipster? Or have I misidentified Mr. Ganesh? Is he rather a New Labour Hipster, an acolyte of Tony Blair? So many questions! Another consideration is that approaching deadline!
Is Rees-Mogg’s Conservative position on same-sex marriage, and his opposition to abortion, even in the case of rape at all surprising? Should the reader look to Mrs. Thatcher as the political precursor to Rees-Mogg?
Even given the change/evolution in public opinion that Mr. Ganesh presents. Or Rees-Mogg’s feudal attachment to his ‘high birth’? Should the reader just discard the political thought of both renowned Conservatives, Burke and Disraeli? Who based their politics on their misplaced faith in the primacy of a benevolent English landed aristocracy.
Then Ganesh confronts those elderly political nihilists who voted for the Brexit:
There was an elegiac feel to the Europe referendum even at the time: old people voting more as a final act of defiance against social change than in serious hope of restoring the slow, ordered and, yes, religious nation of their youth.
The dissatisfaction of the electorate with the European Union, Neo-Liberalism avant la lettre or Cartel with the trappings of Democracy? doesn’t even register with Ganesh. Nor the telling object lesson of how the Greeks were treated by the the Merkel/Schäuble blunt instrument of the UCB. Not just by the Anti-Enlightenment elderly, afflicted with a radical political nostalgia, but by younger voters who eventually became the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, and the return of Labour Party to its roots.
On Germany’s many debt restructurings:
For a couple of minutes Friedman then offered a brief review of western financial history, highlighting the unprecedented nature of Europe’s single currency experiment, and offering a description of sovereign and local government defaults in the 20th century. Then, with an edge to his voice, Friedman pointed out that one of the great beneficiaries of debt forgiveness throughout the last century was Germany: on multiple occasions (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953), the western allies had restructured German debt.
Mr. Ganesh end his hectoring polemic with ‘liberalism’ triumphant. Meaning Social Liberalism, and in the lower case, as a diminishment of that triumphalism. Mr.Ganesh’s usual sangfroid has deserted him, in its stead we get Mr. Ganesh in high dudgeon!
But what reader can resist Mr. Ganesh’s obvious talent for the telling aphorism, even if its just a sparkling shard :
Authenticity, the star dust of this political age,…
Thank you for offering a more cogent criticism of my style of writing! Much more welcome that your first comment. Your dissatisfaction, in its inchoate form, lacked that cogency.
I followed Mr. Ganesh’s lead, rhetorically. I attempted to follow Mr. Ganesh’s polemical arguments, he is a polemicist! I answered polemic with polemic. Because I consider the readership of the FT to be very articulate, intelligent, not to speak of well read, my polemic may reference many ideas, thoughts and speculation, that I have learned about here at this newspaper, and my other reading.
Since The Economist began publishing ‘1843’ that publication, in my judgement, has lost much of what it made it challenging, and made it a most hospitable place for me to comment, on its essays on all kinds of subjects. Perhaps you, as a reader of my comment might just consider that that ‘frenetic way’ is based upon my belief that the reader of this publication is a highly sophisticated reader and worthy of being treated as such!
Regards,
StephenKMackSD
P.S. You might just consider me an intellectual, who riffs on the leaps and somersaults pioneered by Robin Williams’ stand up!
Thank you for your enlightening and thoughtful comment. I read Mr. Sen’s comment on the Brexit in The New Statesman. He still is mired in the idea that the EU is a product of The Enlightenment Dream of a ‘United Europe’! When it is most assuredly the product of Monnet, in his role as Super-Technocrat,who helped to create the Common Market, a steel and coal cartel, that evolved into the E.U. That EU has become the political economic instrument of the four time defaulter Germany under the leadership of Merkel/Schäuble and its blunt economic instrument the ECB. The world watched as that duo and the ECB made Greece tow the political line of Austerity, when Germany defaulted 4 times in the 20th Century! Hypocrisy doesn’t describe it, hubris does. See Ms. Tett’s essay here titled ‘A debt to history’
On the irrelevant question of J.G.A. Pocock as being ‘comfortably ensconced in a rich country’, I would say your barking up the wrong tree. I’ve read his Machiavellian Moment and the first two volumes of his Barbarism and Religion: it is quite astonishing that he covers much of the same intellectual/historical territory, as part of the ‘Western Political/Moral Tradition’ : that is his analysis of the influence of Machiavelli on our republican tradition, and on a critical reading of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Mr. Pocock from my reading of his work is a committed republican. His comments on the Brexit are succinct and devastatingly accurate. The EU has rejected even the idea of reform, that would make it democratic in fact. But the Merkel/Schäuble alliance along with the Neo-Liberal Macron’s Jupertarian Politics, rule by decree, are quite happy with the current simulacrum of democracy. That is the lie that all the Neo-Liberals endlessly repeat, even as the 1% prosper and the 99% are continually lectured that this is ‘The Best of All Possible Worlds’ : Dr. Pangloss is the false prophet of that present.
The editors of The Financial Times lack one of the essentials of Journalism, honesty! Customer Loyalty is being ‘tested’ according to the headline: call it by its real name whatever the traffic will bear! Apple’s price hike is predicated on their creation/cultivation of a coterie of receptive consumers, for their electronic trinkets. Produced in the Sweat Shops of China. Those consumers lives remain incomplete, without an old toy, in its latest’s and greatest edition: New and Improved! shouts the announcer on T.V., Radio and the Internet.
The Free Market produces consumers who are driven to acquire! Apple holds nearly 300 billion dollars of profits offshore, so as to avoid American Taxation. But as the ‘in order too’ of pursuing the demonstrably collapsed ‘Growth Model‘ of Capitalism, in protracted decline, will need to create ‘a scarcity‘ by a price hike. The sub-headline of this ‘news story’ gives the game away:
A decade on from smartphone’s launch, device pricing is critical to revenue growth
Art, and social critic, Harold Rosenberg titled one of his collections of essays The Tradition of the New. The attentive reader can see, quite readily, that the Market for status objects is based on this fetish for newness: that is not just confined to the rarefied world of the Arts. Or that this fetish, the creation, care and maintenance of an appetite for securing ownership of these status objects, is one of the drivers that is the very center of modern life in The West. The created ‘scarcity’, the raising of the price of the new and improved iPhone, can only make more attractive the acquisition of the latest status object, even if it is just an ‘upgrade’.
Were else would the Financial Times turn to for advocacy/support for European wide ‘conscription’, another name for the ‘press gang’, than the Atlantic Council, the propaganda arm of NATO?
Be sure of two things Ms. Braw, nor her children, will be among those ‘chosen’ to serve the cause of the imminent war with Russia. The public intellectuals, who war monger as a condition of their employment, as think tank minions, and apologists for the American National Security State, are the low level apologists for the Mandarin Technocrats of the American War Machine. America is now mired on eight fronts in The Clash Of Civilizations, The War on Terror, or Our 30 Years War, take your pick!
The Apartheid State of Israel is a model to be rejected except by Neo-Conservative’s like David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Bret Stephens, or the ‘Liberal’ Roger Cohn, all at The Paper of Record, The New York Times. Or any American politician, who all quake at the power that AIPAC wields: one deviation from the Party Line of Israeli Exceptionalism, and your career is over. Even Sen. Sanders was admonished when he dared to utter the truism that Israel is not always right.
The American/EU backed Ukrainian Coup was just the opening gambit of the Neo-Conservative political cabal at the State Dept., whose aim is that War with Russia e.g. Victoria Nuland, Jeffrey Pyatt and Susan Rice. (Not to forget the tacit support of Obama nor Mrs Clinton’s unslakable bellicosity: tougher that any man in the room!) These political zealots will employ NATO forces as its front line soldiers. As this political operation grows, so will the opposition in the European States, who don’t want their children sacrificed to the bellicose nihilism of American Fascists.
You have to give Mr. Carter credit for taking over the aging, and reportedly financially strapped Hollywood institution of Swifty Lazar’s annual Oscar Party, and making it his own. Although some of the Old Guard thought him an interloper, the younger generation of self-promoters were of the ‘spell your name right’ Publicity Hound School. Vanity Fair is and was a glossy Fan Magazine, that threw in some actual informative, even ground breaking reportage. The ‘as if’ being that it just wasn’t an updated Photoplay:
Recall, that the ersatz political radical Christopher Hitchens had a regular column, not to speak of his petulant and acerbic understudy James Wolcott. And the political commentator Michael Kingsley, once the political minion of Wm. F. Buckley Jr., whose jejune political insights are designed not offend the political sensibilities of its readership.
Never forgetting the copious collection of advertisements, offering the latest fashions in clothing, shoes and perfume, with the ubiquitous scratch and sniff feature. The subscriber gets her/his magazine in clear plastic wrapper. I look at this magazine, and feel like I need a refreshing dose of reality, after inhabiting the World According to Graydon Carter, for the half hour it takes to turn its pages. I usually take out the trash or clean the toilet! I almost forgot the coverage of the the Latest Star/Starlet and his/her ‘provenance’, or that stroke of genius The Proust Questionnaire.
In your otherwise well argued reply, you seemed to have missed something:
‘The current Conservative leadership is so incompetent, spineless and self-serving that they have made a return to a 1970’s style planned economy under Corbyn look like a real electoral possibility.’
Read Alan Ryan’s essay titled ‘The Planners and the Planed’ in volume 25,number 3-4 2013 edition of Critical Review:
THE PLANNERS AND THE PLANNED
Alan Ryan
ABSTRACT: Much of what makes Hayek so controversial can be found in The Road to Serfdom, the theoretical basis of which is provided by The Counter-Revolution of Science. The Road to Serfdom, a polemic against the “planning mentality,” did not defend complete laissez faire, but argued that planning disrupts the coordination between prices and supply and demand; that effective planning is thus impossible in a modern industrial society; that it is coercive; and, of course, that it leads to totalitarianism. In The Counter-Revolution of Science, Hayek argued that the “planning mentality” is the result of the hubristic attempt to reconstruct society along scientific lines. But the likes of Edward Bellamy envisioned a planned but free society, while John Dewey contrasted planning, where people collectively choose their goals, against a planned economy that is coercively imposed. Hayek’s welcome strictures against a scientistic society and an overly ambitious social science aside, his binary approach to intellectual history distorted through oversimplification.
In the world colonized by the Myth of Free Market Capitalism’s emanciptory potential, a la Smith of ‘The Wealth of Nations’, it is necessary that we defer to profit, as the only viable approach to the ‘management’ of the Economy! The uncomfortable question arises, where has that led us? All of this outside of the democratic process, that otherwise is the model of the ‘Western Democracies’ : ignore, at our collective peril, the failure of that Myth and point to Jeremy Corbyn as the problem, in the face of a Conservative leadership characterized as incompetent, spineless and self-serving. You fail to make the critical distinction between the Planned Economy and the Planning Economy. Perhaps, an alien concept to you and to this newspaper’s editors.
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