StephenKMackSD's Blog

Is Mr. Ganesh playing Tiresias or Cassandra in this episode of The Brexit Melodrama? I’ll assume that it is Tiresias, because Cassandra was fated to never to be believed. Because this is The Financial Times, I’m sure that Mr. Ganesh’s particular iteration of ‘declinism’, as a direct result of the Brexit, will find, not just agreement, but high praise for the Ganesh prescience! The EU, the tarted up cartel masquerading as as ersatz democracy, appeals to the inherent mendacity of the Capitalist Apologist!

The rhetorical rule of the Tory is to always sing the praises of The Iron Lady and her breaking of the hold that those corrupt union miners had on the politics of 70’s Britain. Was it an error not to mention the ‘Falklands War’ as the final victory for a defunct Imperial Britain?

Another Myth that Mr. Ganesh can’t let go of is the idea that ‘growth’ is the sine qua non of a functioning, indeed, flourishing economy. The thought and practice that the growth model is infinitely realizable is the great Neo-Liberal fiction., The ‘as if’ here is that the model proposed by Manfred Max Neef of ‘development’ as opposed to ‘growth’ has no claim to political/economic legitimacy.

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

What fuels Mr. Ganesh’s political vision? for want of a more apt descriptor, is not Social Darwinism, but the vulgar ‘dog eat dog’ of competition, as the sine qua non of homo economicus. Our political fate is not the republicanism, that has evolved over two thousand plus years of Western History, but the stunted, not to speak of bankrupt model constructed by the Hayek/Mises/Friedman Trinity. The twin Myths of The Iron Lady and The Mont Pelerin Philosopher Kings have their champion in Mr. Ganesh.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/dc402d22-9178-11e7-a9e6-11d2f0ebb7f0

xxxxxxxxx

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

StephenKMackSD

Stephen54321,
Thank you for your comment. At least know that I was alive and well when the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army had the spotlight. But please don’t forget the shared hysteria mongering of respectable bourgeois pundits and intellectuals, when The Black Panthers ‘invaded’ the California state capitol!
http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/history/article148667224.html

‘Student Radicals’ and ‘The Panthers’ were the start of Reagan’s war on ‘Radicals’ heavily garnished with respectable white racism: in ’76 by ‘Welfare Queens Driving Cadillacs’ and in ’80 the notorious Neshoba County Fair speech that opened his ’80 campaign: ‘I believe in States Rights‘! He metaphorically spit on the graves of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.

http://neshobademocrat.com/Content/NEWS/News/Article/Transcript-of-Ronald-Reagan-s-1980-Neshoba-County-Fair-speech/2/297/15599
The Second American Civil War is here and now! Except that now we have an unapologetic Fascist Trump, not the carefully stage managed Reaganite version. And an utterly corrupt Republican Party- where is the Party of Lincoln? And the New Democrats led by Mrs. Clinton and her coterie of Corporatists, that defines the Politics of the Present. Yet this new Civil War is episodic in nature, Ferguson and Charlottesville were its latest flashpoints. The very cause of the current revolutionary moments is inescapable: the number and frequency of police executions of black folks, that is all pervasive!

What does ‘freedom’ mean in the present political context? You don’t have an answer, neither does Mr. Hedges, in his latest political sermonizing, that cultivates self-congratulation and abject political conformity, in the name of the myth of an ersatz civic peace.

Not to belabor the point, see my comments here:

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2017/08/29/on-chris-hedges-political-sermon-of-april-27-2017-almost-marx-comments/

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2017/08/27/my-reply-to-lee-jones/

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2017/08/25/andrew-sullivan-as-andy-divine-episode-mmmxliii-andy-takes-his-political-demons-for-a-walk-in-the-sun-political-cynic-reports/

StephenKMackSD

http://disq.us/p/1lvp4br

@Paris azawak @StephenKMackSD

Thank you for your thought provoking comment. To paraphrase Blanche Dubois, I rely on the arguments of my critics. Why will Macron’s ‘Jupertarian Politics’ be different than other forms of authoritarian rule? If you read Ms. Chassany essay and my comment there (http://on.ft.com/2wXBsk1).

https://www.ft.com/content/6dd2a7a0-8e23-11e7-a352-e46f43c5825d

I quote from Henrik Uterwedde:

Macron has got full permission from Parliament that this reform shall be laid down by decree. This gives him complete freedom to simultaneously hold ongoing, intensive consultations with trade unions and business federations and flexibly respond to their criticism. The president wants parliament to pass these planned regulations in September. His plan for reform has great economic import but it is also highly significant politically: a litmus test for Macron’s ability to push through unpopular decisions and bring about real change in his country.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/president-macrons-first-100-days

Describe to me the symbiosis that exists between this autocrat and his En Marche callabos, and those he wields power over! In sum, if a leader accomplishes his political agenda by ‘decree’ i.e. fiat,  and given the fractious nature of French political life, what will be the result? Not to forget the near 37% abstentions, spoiled ballots etc. that marked the final vote in the French election.

Neo-Liberalism collapsed in 2008! Robber Capital killed the political goose that laid the golden egg: Free Market Reform, that from Thatcher/Reagan to the execrable Clinton/Obama New Democrats has held sway.  Given the choice between Le Pen and Macron, Macron ‘won’ in the category of ‘the lesser of two evils’

What is troubling is that the French couldn’t or wouldn’t look across the Channel, even when Thatcherite Fillon was the front runner, reciting his Speed and Shock dreck.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

@citoyen @StephenKMackSD

Thank you for your very challenging, indeed, provocative comment. It offered me the opportunity for thought, what more could a writer ask?

In the Age of the collapse in the Neo-Liberal Dogmas, I wonder about your choice of screen name. The citizen is the primary actor in the Republican Tradition, see The Machiavellian Moment by J.G.A. Pocock for an historical/intellectual reference point, for my statement about that central actor in that tradition. Compare that actor, to the central actor in the Neo-Liberal World View, who is the entrepreneur, a human who thinks that The Market is an historical singularity, that defines the aspirations homo economicus, in toto. A reference point for that Neo-Liberal view is Hayek: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, link here:

http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/current_issue25_34.html

To address your question , if you will pardon my reducing your formulation to this: how do we rescue Capitalism from its self-destructive greed, and it devastating environmental consequences ? That could be expressed as its inherent nihilism. The model of ‘development’ as opposed to that of ‘growth’ as advocated by Manfred Max Neef seems to me to be the answer. The first approach must be that of a New-New Deal, that segues into an Economy remade into a Capitalism that serves human need and aspiration. And not the needs of Capital! In a world now dominated by the Corporatism of NAFTA, TPP and TTIP and its precursor in the EU, my Utopianism doesn’t appear to be the product of mere ‘Left’ wishful thinking. Where is that ‘Self-Correcting Market’ that was an essential cornerstone of the Neo-Liberal Mythology?

I don’t think that Capitalism is incapable of taking human need seriously. It believes in dog eat dog, to put it in vulgar terms. If your looking for the paradigmatic figure of that Corporatism: Michael Bloomberg former Mayor of New York. He helped to remove Judge Shira Scheindlin from the Stop and Frisk case, although the three judges that removed her made it clear she was not guilty of any wrongdoing. And he helped the prosecutors convict Cecily McMillian, Of Occupy Wall Street. Also watch his self-congratulatory 2014 Harvard Commencement Speech, where he warns about the ‘forces of repression’ and warned his audience about those who would deny to others the right of free speech!

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/ac5befb8-8d74-11e7-9580-c651950d3672

The editors of The Financial Times published  Anne-Sylvaine Chassany intervention on the side of Macron’s Jupertarian Politics today :

https://www.ft.com/content/6dd2a7a0-8e23-11e7-a352-e46f43c5825d

But what I missed was this essay by George de Menil , whose credentials are quite impressive, or am I being seduced by his title? ‘ a director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales’ ,that was published on August 30, 2017.

M. de Menil offers the same Neo-Liberal Party Line, except for these two sentences, which uses German ‘reforms’ of Labor Laws as a standard that the French must adopt.

‘The first is the absence of laws limiting the freedom of businesses to fix their own economic strategies.’

‘A second big difference involves the degree to which sectoral agreements may be arbitrarily imposed on companies and workers who were not a party to their negotiation.’

But note that the first consideration of each of these statements ranks the interest of ‘businesses’ and ‘corporations’ as of primary concern, and the place of workers/employees as second. In the droit du travail the place of that worker/employee is first.

Neo-Liberalism has no moral/ethical component: The Myth of the Wisdom of The Market, and the notion/belief that the Market is the only viable form of human knowledge, in sum an epistemology, attacks the very foundations of Western values, morals and politics. Its nothing less than a pernicious Market Utopianism, whose sine qua non is unslakable greed!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/ac5befb8-8d74-11e7-9580-c651950d3672

Welcome to the Neo-Liberalization of France. To paraphrase Margot Channing in ‘All About Eve’ hang on its going to be a bumpy ride ! Even E.U. hack  Henrik Uterwedde at Social Europe dared to say that Macron and his callabos in La République En Marche will push their ‘Reforms‘ through by Decree, in sum, Macron’s Jupertarian Politics are authoritarian in nature and in fact!

Macron has got full permission from Parliament that this reform shall be laid down by decree. This gives him complete freedom to simultaneously hold ongoing, intensive consultations with trade unions and business federations and flexibly respond to their criticism. The president wants parliament to pass these planned regulations in September. His plan for reform has great economic import but it is also highly significant politically: a litmus test for Macron’s ability to push through unpopular decisions and bring about real change in his country.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/president-macrons-first-100-days

What Ms. Chassany carefully leaves out of her advocacy journalism is that Macron won, but that French voters expressed their collective enthusiasm for Macron, by a rate of nearly 37% of spoiled,blank, or uncountable ballots!

And what of Le Pen and her very large constituency of voters, or Mélenchon? According to Ms. Chassany, Macron’s approval rating are ‘plunging’. Will the fractious nature of French politics reassert itself, in opposition to Macron’s rule by decree, what to call this? political delusion?  Too many questions remain to be seen, both Ms. Chassany and Mr. Uterwedde’s triumphalist narratives, like Macron’s Jupertarian Politics, need to put to the political test. Although Ms. Chassany does give the briefest space to the CGT’s call for a ‘day of strike’ on September 12th. Let many flowers bloom on that date!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/6dd2a7a0-8e23-11e7-a352-e46f43c5825d

Never will this publication face the demonstrative fact that ‘Uber’ has as its reason d’etre as the avoidance, indeed, a bold and mendacious  attack on the State’s power to regulate taxi services in the public interest! ‘Uber’ is NOT a ‘car-hailing app’ but an attack on the power and responsibility of the State to license taxi’s, as part of the responsibility of acting in the public interest!

The motto of The Financial Times is ‘what ever the traffic will bear’! This political/economic/ethical position can’t even be described as Neo-Liberal, because it is even a cruder, a more vulgar expression of  the greed and self-seeking nature of Capitalism. Its a dog eat dog world! In this jejune exercise, the FT has few propaganda peers. The many and diverse characters, in this melodrama, get photos and extended commentary, the ‘as if’ here is that they warrant extended commentary. This as the dog days of summer come to a close.

My particular favorite is the professional grifter Arianna Huffington, who never tires of running her con, while cultivating the fiction that she is that ‘White Knight’,that is the sine qua non of her genius at self-promotion wedded to her unslakable opportunism. Her cultivation of  the self-created myth as that charming and self-less ‘little Greek girl’ has by now become shopworn.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/972d602e-8e26-11e7-9084-d0c17942ba93

The reader can consider Mr. Uterwedde essay the chatter of one more Neo-Liberal hetaira, or should the reader call him another EU apologist? singing the praises of the Macron’s Jupertarian Politics! Think of Macron as a pretty De Gaulle? His politics are defined as the social/political/ethical poison of the Free Market. As codified by the Mt. Pelerin Philosopher Kings (recall Mises enthusiasm for Mussolini?) is about to descend on the French voting public: that has expressed their collective enthusiasm for Macon, by a rate of nearly 37% of spoiled,blank, or uncountable ballots!

The opening quote from Mr. Uterwedde propaganda intervention takes its rhetorical shape as:

France needs courageous policies that include clear (even if unpopular) choices, frankness when explaining the challenges, more societal dialogue, and a less chaotic and uncoordinated style of governance.

But just paragraphs later Macronism is defined, as what it is, the dictatorship of La République En Marche  :

Macron has got full permission from Parliament that this reform shall be laid down by decree. This gives him complete freedom to simultaneously hold ongoing, intensive consultations with trade unions and business federations and flexibly respond to their criticism. The president wants parliament to pass these planned regulations in September. His plan for reform has great economic import but it is also highly significant politically: a litmus test for Macron’s ability to push through unpopular decisions and bring about real change in his country.

What the world cries out for is one more intellectual for hire, to spread the Gospel of Market Reform, in the the watershed of its near total collapse, as idea and practice. The reader  doesn’t need Mr. Henrik Uterwedde, to celebrate at length Macronism, that is consonant with dictatorship! We already have Neo-Conservative ghoul Bret Stephens’s slavering celebration of the end of Socialist France at The New York Times.

Or Martin Sandbu at The Financial Times who warns Macron , at another point in political time: Macron must ‘reform‘ France before all else. Mr. Sandbu last two sentences are instructive of what might just be dubbed ‘The Macron Neo-Liberal Imperative’

Mr Macron must not put his domestic reforms at risk of being weakened by his European initiatives.

An economically thriving France will be strong in Europe, fiscal discipline or not. But a domestic economic promise undermined by a European distraction will make France fail both at home and abroad.

https://www.ft.com/content/de225ddc-865f-11e7-bf50-e1c239b45787

Social Europe is the official/unofficial propaganda arm the EU, and its sham Democracy. That is in fact a Federation of unelected Technocrats, the reflection of Jean Monnet, the unelected Technocrat par excellence. Who created a coal and steel cartel, heavily garnished with the rhetoric of democracy/federalism, now in the control of the Merkel/Schäuble alliance, and its cudgel the European Central Bank! Beware the Merkel/Schäuble alliance! Macron’s hubris and megalomania are the twin dangers to the well being of your Cartel!

Almost Marx 

https://www.socialeurope.eu/president-macrons-first-100-days

Mr. Hedges preaches a great sermon, it is his métier. Its too long, but there is a lot of territory to cover. The mention of Liberal Zionist Peter Beinart makes one wonder at Mr. Hedges historical perspective, as more of the same!

 Headline: The Rise of the Violent Left

Sub-headline : Antifa’s activists say they’re battling burgeoning authoritarianism on the American right. Are they fueling it instead?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-rise-of-the-violent-left/534192/#comment-3465489044

‘Liberal Zionist’ Peter Beinart has reason to attack ‘The Left’,  as it is the very birthplace of BDS!  This essay was posted in September 2017 and was exhumed at The Atlantic just after Charlottesville.

What all the good Left Wing Social Democrats, Hedges,Beinart and even the usually prescient Chomsky, suffer from is a case of political myopia! What they refuse to confront is that the Second American Civil War is here, but it is episodic in nature: Ferguson and Charlottesville being its most recent flashpoints,  but still that conflict will not disappear from American life. The ‘antifas’ and the ‘altright’, American weasel words, are its main protagonists. At least to bourgeois political pundits masquerading as moralists.

What I find truly astounding is that it doesn’t occur to above thinkers, that this is just the halting, episodic instances of that Civil War. And that DeRay Mckesson, leader of Black Lives Matter, co-opted by Clinton/Obama loudmouth Michael Eric Dyson, will be succeeded by a  series of new spokesmen: who will be newer versions of Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seal, Stokely Carmichael,H.Rap Brown in their political ascendancy rather than in their decline. Recall Mr. Brown’s infamous quote, that is not lost on these ‘thinkers’?

“violence is as American as cherry pie”

Look to Bannon’s apocalyptic/paranoid vision of America’s future here:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/23/what-a-1973-french-novel-tells-us-about-marine-le-pen-steve-bannon-and-the-rise-of-the-populist-right-215064

Viewing this in historical/political terms, see this Bannon vision of the future as the culmination of Huntington’s ‘Clash’ but also of his ethic paranoia of ‘Who Are We‘ , of Fukuyama’s Straussian nihilism in his ‘The Decay of American Political Institutions’ :

The Decay of American Political Institutions

And the rise of the Tea Party Jacobins, e.g.  Paul Ryan  and the consequent purging of actual ‘Conservatives’ from the Party e.g. Richard Lugar. Not forgetting the rise of the  precursors of Bannon’s American Fascism, the whole of the Neo-Conservative coven of intellectual/political nihilists. The question arises are the ‘politics’ of Trump and Bannon  interchangeable?

Mr. Hedges succinct reply to my comment might be, beware of false prophets!

Almost Marx

How ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right’

 Headline: The Rise of the Violent Left

Sub-headline : Antifa’s activists say they’re battling burgeoning authoritarianism on the American right. Are they fueling it instead?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-rise-of-the-violent-left/534192/#comment-3465489044

Mr. Lee Jones, ‘Liberal Zionist’ Peter Beinart has reason to attack ‘The Left’,  as it is the very birthplace of BDS!  This essay was posted in September 2017 and was exhumed at The Atlantic just after Charlottesville.

Or can the reader forget the perpetual Anti-Left political hysterics of Andrew Sullivan in his weekly ‘Intelligencer’ columns at the New York Magazine? His pose of ‘centrist rationalist’  in answer to the extremes of Trump, and the ‘Left’ that opposes him is self-servingly mendacious. His unstinting advocacy for ‘The Bell Curve’ is demonstrative of his perpetual racial animus.

When it comes to writing ‘correctives’ to the evolving ‘Left strategies’, even to call them inchoate is not an out of place, but your ideological intervention is an act of self-flattery of the most unwelcome kind!

The Second American Civil War is episodic in nature: Ferguson and Charlottesville being its most recent flashpoints,  but still that conflict will not disappear from American life.  The main component of the ‘altright’, an American weasel word,  is the supremacy of the white male heterosexual, a  closely held belief of that ‘altright’,  under attack from an addled Left, as you present it! If this isn’t the ‘sin’ of identity politics what is?

Look to the record of the the American Judiciary as exemplary : Scott v. Sanders, Buck v. Bell, Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, The 1912 segregation of Washington D.C. by ‘Progressive’ Wilson,  The Aliens Enemies Act of 1917, Korematsu v. U.S., Hirabayashi vs U.S.: the holding prisoner of Americans of Japanese descent in Concentration Camps under the euphemism ‘Interment Camps’! Or consider more contemporaneous Supreme Court decisions: Citizens United: money is speech. Or  Shelby County v Holder where the notion of ‘things have changed’, was operative frame as written by Roberts, and punched up by Scalia, playing Mrs. Malaprop using his ‘redhead’  hypothetical merde!

The one shining light in this collections of the crimes of American Jurisprudence-   consider the continuing,concerted attacks on Brown v. Board of Education by the Federalists and their Dixiecrat founders,  using the dismissive notion that Brown was not legal interpretation but ‘Sociology’ . Eliding from the conversation, this from the preamble to The Declaration of Independence, that may not have the force of Law, but is the very integument that hold together the American Experiment!

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

The rise of Identity Politics is about seeking redress against the crimes of the white male heterosexuals. Some of which I have presented. The inconvenient why of ‘Identity Politics’, and their absolute political/moral necessity!

Headline: Political correctness doesn’t kill people

Sub-headline:  Handwringing over campus activists who “censored” alt-right speakers looks misplaced after the violence in Charlottesville.

The far right knows exactly what happens when the media continually exaggerates the threat posed by campus politics. The state cracks down, teenagers are maimed or killed, and middle-aged sadists re-elect whoever ordered the violent repression. If not, a vigilante like Fields, high on far-right agitprop, will step in. It worked for George Wallace, it worked for Reagan, it worked for Nixon, and it might just work for Trump. In the most optimistic view, the centrist commentators who wasted so many columns scolding student activists to a national audience didn’t know how useful their screeds were to the far right. They forgot that, for the last 50 years, hysterical media anger at uppity college students has always turned out to be unfounded and embarrassing in hindsight. They forgot that college students were right about Vietnam, civil rights, apartheid, and every other cause handwringing centrists accepted long after the fact. The brightest minds in the liberal media simply forgot that college protesters have never been the perpetrators of deadly violence — only the victims. If this is true, it would serve them well to remember.

https://theoutline.com/post/2102/political-correctness-doesn-t-kill-people

The final paragraph of Alex Nichols essay at theoutline.com is revelatory of the problem of those who attack the ‘Left’ from whatever political perspective:

Your last paragraph is so reminiscent of the Party Line that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr used to advocate during the Cold War, at The ADA:

Look at the Founders:

Founding, prominent members included:

• Joseph Alsop^[12]
• Stewart Alsop^[12]
• Chester Bowles^[13]
• John Kenneth Galbraith^[12][14]
• Leon Henderson^[13]
• Hubert Humphrey^[12][13]
• James I. Loeb
• Reinhold Niebuhr^[12][14]
• Joseph P. Lash
• Joseph L. Rauh, Jr.^[12]
• Walter Reuther^[14]
• Eleanor Roosevelt^[12][13][14]
• Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.^[12]
• John E. Stengstacke^[12]
• Wilson W. Wyatt^[13]

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

‘The Vital Center of 1949 was Schlesinger’s defense of Free Speech for respectable Political Centrism, but not for ‘The Left’ in its many iterations, before the Mundt/McCarren/Nixon/McCarthy purge.

Mr. Jones, for some interesting reading about your political precursors, see Richard Fox’s hagiography of Niebuhr, and for some light reading see Schlesinger’s Diaries, as edited by his sons. In the early entries he has a penchant for using  the word ‘commies’, trying to sound like John Wayne in that Cold War potboiler ‘Big Jim McLain’.

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

StephenKMackSD

Charlottesville and the Politics of Left Hysteria