StephenKMackSD's Blog

This reader found Mr. Luce’s latest essay to be awash in Trump Hysterics, that reads in part like a denial of responsibility. In sum, the Neo-Liberals, whose Utopianism has collapsed, just as its theology of The Self-Correcting Market has proven to be another mirage. And more importantly Luce, as one of those Neo-Liberals, fails to see his responsibility in creating the economic/political conditions that led to Trump and Trumpism. Republican Nihilism expressed as ‘NO’ to all of Obama’s attempts at ‘the art of the possible’, and the rise of the Tea Party Jacobins. The Tea Party faction then purged the Conservatives from the Party, as insufficiently radical, Richard Luger being the most ignominious case of that purge!

Against that backdrop we have Obama’s de facto pardon of Wall Street Thieves rationalized as ‘putting the past behind us’! The political pronouncement of FDR of ‘I welcome your hatred’ was utterly foreign territory to this New Democrat. Note Obama’s fulsome praise for Reagan: The New Democrats became Reaganites under the ‘Leadership’ of the Clintons.

The nomination of the utterly unpopular Hillary Clinton, by a demonstrably corrupt Party machine, made Circus Ringmaster Trump’s  decisiveness,  established by years of television propaganda, appeal to the notion of the ‘Strong Man’ authoritarian tendency in American political life. In a very real way the four victories of FDR helped to establish that ‘Strong Man’ ideology in the American psyche, if one is honest! The Trump victory, given this historical background, should not surprise!

Then Mr. Luce presents John McCain as the White Knight in his political morality tale. For an antidote to this bogus hagiography, see this Mint Press News essay by Whitney Webb, that confronts the facts of McCain’s support for Neo-Nazi’s in Ukraine and religious extremists in Syria.

http://www.mintpressnews.com/right-wing-extremists-condemned-charlottesville-funded-armed-ukraine-syria/230897/

In Christopher Hitchens reviled phrase ‘The chickens have come home to roost’ or to lapse into a pastiche of Biblical phraseology ‘You reap what you sow’! The rise and victory of Trump and Trumpism, are the watershed of the complete failure of America’s Political Class, aided and abetted by newspaper scribblers.

What is absent from Mr. Luce’s moralizing essay are these compelling historical facts, regarding the racism of the Republican Party : the Dixiecrat Mass Migration into the Republican Party after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1960’s , the Goldwater Campaign proclamation that ‘extremism in pursuit of liberty is no vice’, the Southern Strategy of Nixon, Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign based on ‘Welfare Queens Diving Cadillacs‘, Reagan’s Neshoba County Fair speech that opened his 1980 campaign: I believe in States Rights, within miles of where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were brutally murdered, Bush the Elder aided by the unmourned Lee Atwater in the notorious Willie Horton ads. The record, of the Dixiecrat colonization of the Republican Party, is utterly clear, except to those newspaper scribblers who might be able to plead historical ignorance. Mr. Luce’s vaunted expertise makes him ineligible to make such a claim!

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/18788b8e-825d-11e7-a4ce-15b2513cb3ff

My comment on  Mr. Rachman’s latest essay  has been removed from the comments section of The Financial Times.

https://www.ft.com/content/308e0f90-80ce-11e7-94e2-c5b903247afd

My ‘crime against FT decorum’ comparing Mr. Rachman to Rip Van Winkle! Not to speak of my comparing Trump to Reagan. I know this qualifies as Heresy!

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2017/08/14/gideon-rachman-hystericsepisode-dxxiii-america-is-now-a-dangerous-nation-or-sleepers-awake-a-comment-by-old-socialist/

Old Socialist

Headline: America is now a dangerous nation

Sub-headline: The president may exploit an overseas conflict to distract from problems at home

Caption under a photograph of Donald Trump: Donald Trump is offering the very opposite of the steady, predictable and calm leadership US allies seek from Washington

The opening paragraph of Mr.  Rachman’s August 14, 2017 essay:

The claim that America is a “threat to world peace” has been a staple of Russian and Iranian propaganda for many years. For believers in the western alliance, it is painful to acknowledge that there is now some truth to this idea. Under Donald Trump, America looks like a dangerous nation.

Notice the use of ‘Russian’ and ‘Iranian’ Anti-American propaganda to frame his Anti-Trump screed. In a word, desperation! But first notice the rhetorical framing by the headline writers of this newspaper.  And then compare these statements of what? confirming the fact of America as ‘dangerous’, at least under the leadership of Trump. Has Mr. Rachman just woken up? Rip Van Winkle? ‘The War on Terror‘, in sum, the realization of Huntington’s paranoid conception of ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ now rages on eight fronts, most of which originated with Obama and one of his capos Monsignor Brennan.

What follows is a complicated bill of attainder against Trump. In melodramatic terms, name this Rachman Melodrama ‘The Political Crimes of Trump’. But note that Trump is the natural successor to another celebrity, Ronald Reagan, who came to prominence as movie star, spokesman for General Electric, and television star of G.E. Theater, and in his career doldrums star of Death Valley Days.  Ronny was sincere, winning, and most important likable, though no less a Social Darwinist than ‘The Donald’!  Trump is none of these, yet he established himself, in the public mind, through that Television Circus, as a ‘Leader‘ whose motto was ‘results not excuses’ : his particular ‘Brand’ of Social Darwinism chimed with the failed Neo-Liberal Dogmas, that still pervade American political/civic life.

Mr. Rachman is in mourning for the ‘Decline of the American Hegemon’, in sum, the political moral/glue that held The West together against the mongrel hoards. Rachman now plays the part of Huntington’s vulgarized journalistic successor.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/308e0f90-80ce-11e7-94e2-c5b903247afd

‘If there is a civil war going on, it has been started by those who exploit the situation, in order to create a new Soviet or Khmer Rouge style system, or an invisible, communist underground empire of intimidation…

In your zeal to blame the ‘Left’, your political myopia leads the way! Your possible motto: never let political reality interfere with the expression of your ideology! Where does the outbreak of open contempt for the Democratic Process, the Rule of Law and respect for human life, in Charlottesville, fit in to your replay of Cold War paranoia, old and new?  Call Charlottesville the realization of well organized and financed White Racism.

The last outbreak of that Civil War was in Ferguson, as the population rose up against an authoritarian  civil government, in which almost all of black citizens were under the thrall of a city government that used ‘fines’ and ‘Court Orders’ as a means of ‘subjugation’! The Police execution of Michael Brown, instead of a trial by jury, led to the evolutionary development of  ‘Black Lives Matter’ and its titular leader Deray McKesson. Mr. McKesson became the protege of Obama/Clinton apologist Michael Eric Dyson. Dyson is just another Corporatist New Democrat.  In this case the notion of ‘Left’ is utterly irrelevant!

So what is patently obvious is that this country must face the fact that the ‘Civil Right Era’ was just an historical caesura in a pattern of that endemic, not to speak of ineradicable,  White Racism. The evidence of this stares the reader in the face in the Justices of the Supreme Court: Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas and their fellow traveler Kennedy. The Federalist Society is in effect immersed in a radical nostalgia for Pre-Civil War America and its practice and belief of White Male Supremacy as the Natural Order: the Patriarchy. As the first four Justices I named above are avid members of that Society, this can leave no doubt of the reality of cognitive capture exercised by these Klansman. Who learned  a valuable lesson from the Bork fiasco, future Neo-Confederate/Originalist candidates for the Supreme Court must not resemble a villain out of the pages of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ ! The imperative: cultivate the ‘look’ of bourgeois political respectability. And always frame your comments in the political platitudes of that ‘respectability’.

I look forward to the self-congratulatory ‘Liberal Agonizing‘ of Mr. Beinart regarding  Charlottesville. He will expatiate on the mendacity/violence of the ‘Alt-Right’. Note that the characterization of  ‘Alt-Right’ is used instead of Klansman. ‘Alt-Right’ is a characterization that recognizes the rhetorical power of the Breitbart/Bannon ‘Brand’ of American Neo-Fascism.

StephenKMackSD

P.S. I noticed, as I was scrolling through the comments section, that you have made it your political mission, to ride ideological herd on other commenter besides myself. You really need to be a regular reader of the @FT who pioneered the political notion of ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’ as the rubric that has framed so much of its editorial comments. And become one of the consistent rhetorical frames used by it hirelings, in its various iterations. Both Black Block and Police Thuggery are the twin manifestation of an utterly collapsed Neo-Liberal Utopianism, and the rise of the Corporatist/Neo-Faschist State, which is the present and future reality of ‘The West’!

http://disq.us/p/1lb9ggk

The reader can only wonder at the number of thinkers and writers engaged in the rehabilitation of Freud. The journey of Psychoanalysis from ‘Science’ to ‘Metaphysic’, and now to its status as a singular expression of  Freud’s Philosophy of Mind, in a breathtakingly brief essay by David Livingstone Smith -is this the final step in the project of revisionism? Prof. Smith’s rehabilitative efforts are of such a narrow focus on the philosophy of mind of Freud, will it have more staying power than some of the other acts dedicated to the rescue of Psychoanalysis? While denuding it of its scientific pretensions? Here is a link to my December 15, 2015 essay in reply to a review of  Prof. Gretzky’s ‘Political Freud’ that can offer some insights into the Freudian Rehabilitation Project:

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2015/12/15/eli-zaretsky-on-political-freud-a-comment-by-philosophical-apprentice/

Philosophical Apprentice

December 15 2015

Is there no end of the Freud Apologists and their project of historical revisionism, rehabilitation? Although Prof. Zaretsky offers Freud as ‘political’, that breaks new ground in Freudian Rehabilitation. But the Project remains the same. The chorus of respectable bourgeois apologists has grown since the reviews for Adam Phillips’ ‘Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst’. The ‘science’ of psychoanalysis, that once morphed into a metaphysic has once again been adapted to the needs of a political pragmatism, as the in order too of rescue from political/intellectual/moral irrelevance. Describe the journey from science to metaphysic to politics as a kind of map of the desperate acolytes.  A sample of the reviews of the Phillips’ book:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-becoming-freud-the-making-of-a-psychoanalyst-by-adam-phillips/2014/06/27/240684e2-d4aa-11e3-8a78-8fe50322a72c_story.html

http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/the-freud-we-wish-for

Mr. William Geraldi’s review titled ‘Sigmund Freud, the Never-Ending Storyteller’ certainly takes first place in this collection of reviews of Mr. Phillips Freudian Revisionism: this review makes these astounding pronouncements on ‘psychoanalysis’ and the ‘ Freudian unconscious in particular’ was ‘​was from the beginning a Jewish literary enterprise.’ Given this what can any reader make of the original Freudian claim of psychoanalysis as a ‘science’ and as Freud’s status as ‘physician’ ?

http://www.vqronline.org/nonfiction-criticism/2014/06/sigmund-freud-never-ending-storyteller

Some quotation seems in order:

‘Phillips writes that “the modern individual Sigmund Freud would eventually describe was a person under continuous threat with little knowledge of what was really happening to him”—​a Jew, in other words, as Freud himself admitted in The Resistances to Psychoanalysis. The paradoxes at the hub of Freud—​the heaving dichotomies of life/death, sex/death, past/present, present/future, sickness/health—​are human paradoxes, to be sure, but they are human paradoxes expertly manifest in Hebraic mythos. Phillips contends that “Freud’s work shows us … that nothing in our lives is self-​evident, that not even the facts of our lives speak for themselves.” Consider how that assertion applies both to the Torah and to the indispensible modern Jewish writers, from Bruno Schulz and Franz Kafka to Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and you’ll begin to see how psychoanalysis in general and the Freudian unconscious in particular—​that dark swamp of our minds—​was from the beginning a Jewish literary enterprise.’

There is more:

‘In reference to every Freudian’s loving or bitter impulse to tackle the august founder, Bloom speaks of “the burden of the writing psychoanalyst, who is tempted to a battle he is doomed to lose,” meaning that Freud can be an oily, protean subject, whether approached from the logical, biographical, or pedagogical angle. The one angle not doomed to failure is the one that Peter Brooks takes in Psychoanalysis and Storytelling and that Adam Phillips emphasizes here (with no mention of Brooks): Freud the storyteller. Brooks calls psychoanalysis “not only narrative and linguistic but also oral, a praxis of narrative construction within a context of live storytelling.” Say what you will about the psycholinguistics of Jacques Lacan, but Freud and his theory have always been about language, the language of the self telling stories, “this new language for the heart and soul and conscience of modern people,” as Phillips phrases it.’

For the surprising literary antecedent to Freud’s ‘psychoanalytic project’, Cervantes’ Quixote,  see ‘Freud’s Paranoid Quest,Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion by John C. Farrell, Chapter 6 ‘Freud as Quixote’:

http://nyupress.org/books/9780814726501/

And see this unsurprisingly hostile review of Mr. Farrel’s book in the New York Times by Sarah Boxer titled ‘Flogging Freud’:

https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/10/reviews/970810.10boxert.html

Some of the Evaluations of Freud and Psychoanalysis:

Freud, Biologist of the Mind by Frank Sulloway

Freud Evaluated, The Completed Arc by Malcolm Macmillan https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/freud-evaluated

The Memory Wars, Freud’s Legacy in Dispute by Frederick Crews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memory_Wars

Follies of the Wise, Dissenting Essays by Frederick Crews https://books.google.com/books/about/Follies_of_the_Wise.html?id=SKQGIZHuhW8C

Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend by Frederick Crews http://www.amazon.com/Unauthorized-Freud-Doubters-Confront-Legend/dp/0670872210

Freudian Fallacy: An Alternative View of Freudian Theory by E.M. Thornton

http://www.amazon.com/Freudian-Fallacy-Alternative-View-Theory/dp/0385278624/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason,3rd Edition by Ernest Gellner, Forward by Jose Brunner

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0631234136.html

Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry by Thomas Szasz

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Freud-Krauss-Criticism-Psychoanalysis-Psychiatry/dp/0815602472

Philosophical  Apprentice

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161440

The fact that America is in a state of Civil War has escaped the attention of the ‘Liberal’ Mr. Peter Beinart! He places himself rhetorically as the ‘objective viewer’ of the  state of American divisive politics of the present.  In sum, in this melodrama of ‘Left Wing Violence’ ‘antifas’ vs Trumpian Political Nihilism, as framed by the political rationalism of a Bourgeois Liberal, as answer to this violence. But note that the fact of the raging Civil War of the present is beyond the ken of Beinart’s Liberalism. Like the Bourgeois Liberals of the Cold War, Schlesinger and Niebuhr, who made alliance with the Nixon/McCarren/Mundt/McCarty Cold Warriors, Mr. Beinart will fear monger about ‘Left Wing Violence’ as the -in-order-too of demonstrating his ethical/political superiority, in defending the ‘Free Speech Rights’ of self-described Aryan Milo Yiannopoulos and Charles Murray of ‘Bell Curve’ Conservative Sociology.

First, the reader is to forget that kittenish Neo-Faschist Yiannopoulos was given an obsequious television interview by Bill Maher, viewed by millions, and then posted on YouTube? Mr. Yiannopoulos was denied a single opportunity to speak to an audience of one hundred Conservative students.

As for Mr. Murray, he has enjoyed the widest possible audience, is Mr.Beinart so young as not to remember Andrew Sullivan’s shameless advocacy/apologetics in The New Republic of the 90’s ? 

Given those egregious betrayals of ‘Free Speech Rights’, how would Mr. Beinart compare these actions to the complete blackout practiced by the Corporate Media against Noam Chomsky for over sixty years? Like the ‘Good Liberal’ Mr.Beinart simply exploits an opportunity to burnish his credentials as part of an imagined ‘Rational Political Center’, once represented by the Schlesinger/Niebuhr alliance and its political organ the Americans for Democratic Action: the apotheosis of ‘The Vital Center’ to the exclusion of all dissenters!

Old Socialist

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

Andy Divine at full screech has the mesmerizing quality of seeing a plane crash or watching a traffic accident happen before your eyes.

The blustering threats exchanged between The Donald and Kim Jong-un sends our Drama Queen into a fits of historically framed distemper! Andy and the New Democrats take a bow for your politically enabling of this Monster.

But not satisfied with his ex cathedra pronouncement on this pissing contest between two very dangerous political posers, he then turns his attention to a wan defense of computer wunderkind James Damore. No need to go any further than his advocacy/defense of ‘The Bell Curve’, to see the argumentative model, the framing  he uses in defense of the misogyny of Mr. Damore. The argument that women are “biologically unsuited”  to coding – call this ‘insight’ very surprising, as my niece and her immediate superior are both women who do coding for a living.  And are very well compensated. Not to speak of both being  promoted to high level positions in their company. Andy continues to demonstrate his ignorance of both the politics and the social history of the American Present. That perpetual ignorance is the engine that powers his logorrhea.

Queer Atheist

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/trumps-reckless-nuclear-bluffing.html#comments

Headline: Why Facebook should pay us a basic income

Sub-headline: If data are the new oil then we may have found a 21st-century revenue stream

At The Financial Times, the propaganda headquarters for Free Market Economics, in sum Neo-Liberalism, since before the ‘Thatcher/Reagan Revolution’ to the present historical moment – that its editors could present an unbiased ‘report’ on the universal basic income is demonstrated in the negative by Mr. Thornhill’s historically garnished serio-comic pastiche. Using the comments of ersatz philanthropist and Capitalist/Internet wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg on the the ‘Alaska Permanent Fund’ . Mr. Thornhill’s ideological myopia, not to speak of this historical ignorance is demonstrated in the fact that The Yukon Territory and Alaska were both built by the use of the ‘Grub Stake’ now dubbed, at least in an American context, the ‘Alaska Permanent Fund’ ! Mr. Thornhill and the Financial Times editors do your homework!

The idea has gained renewed resonance in our own times as we fret about the erosion of living standards, the concentration of wealth and the possible threat of mass unemployment caused by technological change.

There is no ‘fretting’ here at The Financial Times about ‘rising inequality’ gingerly  hinted at here by Mr. Thornhill, just the usual fretting about the populists hoard about to steal the hard earned cash from this Century’s  Robber Barons of Financialized Capital.  Whose Neo-Liberalism has produced untold misery for the 99%, while the 1% bask in profits larger than before the current Depression: denial of the level of the failure of Capital in 2008, has led the apologists for that ‘Free Market Mirage’ to the use of the euphemism of ‘Financial Crisis’.

The reader of Mr. Thornhill’s essay eventually arrives at the  two pressing questions about the universal basic income:

Why should people be paid to do nothing? And how could we possibly afford it?

One of the cornerstone of the Neo-Liberal Theology,  as argued by its tin goddess Ayn Rand, was that the the world was divided into Producers or Drones: call it Economic Calvinism i.e. the saved and the dammed.

The imperative of rebuilding of the whole of America’s Infrastructure could be part a 21st Century New Deal! If American corporations were forced to pay a tax rate of 90%, and also forced to bring their offshore profits home, as the in-order-to of paying their civic/economic/moral debt,  that could be a beginning,  part of a larger plan. And, please don’t lecture me on my ‘Utopianism’ Neo-Liberalism was/is an utterly failed Capitalist Utopianism! Nor my ‘Authoritarianism’ in forcing Corporations to pay their fair share! I am legally compelled to pay my taxes, as is the reader

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/5103204e-7b5b-11e7-ab01-a13271d1ee9c

The reader can only wonder at the Palace Gossip of Arthur Beesley and Jim Brunsden in their report from Brussels.

Headline: France pushes for top posts in eurozone reshuffle

Sub-headline: Macron pursues greater economic clout after years of subservience to Germany

Mrs. Merkel and her capo Schäuble might just face a rival for the leadership of the EU? The melodrama unfolds with the help the strategically placed observations of ‘Think Tank’ for-rent policy intellectuals, aided by quotes from ‘anonymous diplomats’. All this hullabaloo about Macron, as his ratings are dropping like Jupiter reduced to a meteor as it plummets toward earth. It makes a spectacular show for just moments!

Mrs Merkel was looking for a political equal and has found a usurper? Should the Merkel/ Schäuble alliance fear the upstart, who threatens the twin myths of German ‘fiscal probity and the EU as a legitimate expression of ‘Federalism’ ? Or will all that protean energy for ‘reform’ of French Labor Law, trumpeted as the cornerstone Macron’s Neo-Liberalism Lite, end in the uniting of the factionalist politics of the French opposition? See Perry Anderson’s essay at the New Left Review of May/June 2017 titled ‘The Center Can Hold: The French Spring‘ for an answer in the negative.

(https://newleftreview.org/II/105/perry-anderson-the-centre-can-hold)

Committed Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/f7b8c4b2-76c8-11e7-a3e8-60495fe6ca71

Headline: Donald Trump’s clash of civilisations versus the global community

Sub-headline: Human affairs are too interwoven to be the product of purely national decision-making

How did I miss  Mr. Wolf’s July 11, 2017 essay extolling the G-20 as:

The G20 embodies the ideal of global community.

This ‘community’ is not about the promotion of republican political virtues, nor the aspirations/welfare of the citizens that constitute that ‘G-20’. Mr. Wolf as an exponent of ‘The Dismal Science’ is incapable of the realization about the actuality of Cosmopolitan Ideal, and its reality in the political present, as presented by Ulrich Beck in his many books, but especially in his ‘Cosmopolitan Vision’, the  English translation of 2006, and ‘Twenty Observations On A World In Turmoil’ the English translation of 2012.

That Dismal Science is not a science but is ‘Political Economy’ with the heavy garnish of ‘Scientism’, and in this context, the Mt. Pelerin Philosopher Kings supplied the necessary propaganda about the emancipatory potential of ‘The Free Market’. Yet, we live now with the political constant of the realization of the failure of that theology.

Mr. Wolf seeks to tie the Nihilist Politics of Mr. Trump to the ‘Clash of Civilization’ of Samuel P. Huntington. Mr. Wolf wisely puts that ‘clash’ in lower case so as to remove the taint of Mr. Huntington’s paranoia of ‘The Other’. But the reader can quite clearly see that Huntington’s ethnic/religious/racial animus is clearly in tune with Trump and Trumpism. Look to Huntington’s ‘Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ for his paranoia of the Mestizo Hoards about to over-run and utterly dilute America’s Anglo-Protestant virtue. 

But Mr. Wolf ignores the vogue that this ‘Clash’ has enjoyed, in the chatter of policy experts and pundits, who were looking for a framing device in the Post-Cold War period: a rationale for their unslakable war mongering: the ‘Clash’ provided an ‘enemy’ that was ubiquitous.

On the Warsaw speech: Mr. Trump’s senior advisors share the Free Market Vision as foundational, not just to America, but is in the interests of the whole of the G-20. ‘The business of the G-20 is business’ to paraphrase Calvin Coolidge.

The speech took further the stance of two of Mr Trump’s senior advisers, HR McMaster and Gary Cohn, in an article published in May: “The world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, non-governmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” They argued that “America First does not mean America alone”.

One marvels at Mr. Wolf’s myopia, if that is what the reader chooses to call the next two paragraphs: ‘The War On Terror‘, now fought on eight fronts, is ‘The Clash of Civilizations’! Our 30 Years War began because of the political ascendancy of the Neo-Conservatives, and their animus to Islam as prima facae heretical! To engage in augmentative reductivism, if Zionism has political legitimacy, so does Political Islam! Then Mr. Wolf advocates his own form of Economic Cosmopolitanism, sans Beck’s all embracing vision of human freedom, as currently practiced by actors across borders in the political present.

If the west is asked to unite for a war of civilisations, it will fracture, as it did over the Iraq war. It is easy to agree that what Mr Trump calls “radical Islamist terrorism” is a concern. But to judge it an overriding existential threat is ludicrous. Nazism was an existential threat. So was Soviet communism. Terrorism is just a nuisance. The great danger is that of overreaction. This could poison relations with 1.6bn Muslims worldwide.

We must beware the self-fulfilling prophecy of a clash of civilisations, not just because it is untrue, but because we have to co-operate. The ideal of a global community is not airy-fairy. It reflects today’s reality. Technology and economic development have made humans masters of the planet and dependent upon one another. Interdependence does not stop at national borders. Why indeed should it? Borders are arbitrary.

Then we have this advocacy for ‘economic integration’:

Global economic integration is not a malign plot. It is a natural extension of market forces in an era of rapid technological innovation. Such a world inevitably exposes countries to the policy decisions of others. As we all learned in 2008, the global financial system is no stronger than its weakest links. Those who depend on international trade need confidence in the terms of access to the markets of other countries.

Enforcing  that ‘global economic integration’ are the ‘Trade Agreements’  NAFTA, TPP and the TTIP,  that render useless the laws of the countries that sign these Treaties!  This Intercept news story by David Dayen provides valuable information about the ISDS (investor-state dispute settlement) used as profit centers for Casino Capitalism.

Headline: A Monster Payday in Argentina Shows a Flaw in Trump’s NAFTA Renegotiation

A company that specializes in bankrolling lawsuits has won a huge payday from the government of Argentina, in one of the biggest examples of financiers using the secret courts embedded in trade agreements as casinos.

Burford Capital, the world’s largest firm for “litigation finance,” will earn $140 million on a $13 million investment in an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) case against Argentina over the nationalization of Aerolineas Argentinas, the nation’s flagship airline. The case was brought under Argentina’s bilateral investment treaty with Spain; the investors in the airline were Spanish.

Under ISDS, part of over 3,000 trade agreements worldwide, corporations can sue governments for changes in law or regulation that violate trade agreements, and win awards equaling “expected future profits” they might have otherwise gained. The idea was to protect investors from seizure of assets, outside the court system of the offending government. But instead of helping companies resolve legitimate disputes over seized assets, ISDS has increasingly become a means for rich investors to speculate on lawsuits, winning huge awards and forcing local taxpayers to foot the bill.

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/28/a-monster-payday-in-argentina-shows-a-flaw-in-trumps-nafta-renegotiation/

That ‘malign plot’ is in fact a reality, of the ‘economic integration’ that Mr. Wolf sees as emancipatory. Does the Party Line of the apologists for Capitalism ever change? They  simply reinvent their arguments as opportunism dictates. Mr. Wolf then attempts in his last two paragraphs to place himself were?

How, one might ask, has this clash of civilisations now emerged, not so much between the west and the rest as within the west — a clash symbolised by the contrasting perspectives of Germany’s Angela Merkel and Mr Trump? For that tragedy I blame the rise of US “pluto-populism”. Behind this is something remarkable: the US income distribution is now more like that of a developing than an advanced country. Populism (of both left and right) is a natural consequence of high inequality. If so, Mr Trump may be no temporary anomaly.

The transformation of the US we are seeing might prove enduring. If so, the world has moved into a dangerous era. “The US”, argues former state department official Richard Haass, “is not sufficient, but it is necessary.” He is right. If the one “necessary” player is absent, disorder would appear to be inevitable.

‘Pluto-populism’ of both Left and Right are identified as the twin Enemies of a ‘Political Center’ completely colonized by the failed Neo-Liberal Dogmas.  Mr. Wolf wears the red hat of the Cardinal, and quotes from Foreign Policy Prefect of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in American Exceptionalism Richard Haass, on the necessity of the American Hegemon. Haass is a Thomist, in an age demanding Gustavo Gutiérrez!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/876bd8d8-658a-11e7-8526-7b38dcaef614