StephenKMackSD's Blog

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

Welcome to the United States of Amnesia, where the heroes and villains change according to the political weather. In the present political atmosphere in Washington D.C.,  Mr. Mueller is the hero, whose record of incompetence has been erased from the American historical memory. What is obvious is that the 2001 investigation into the Anthrax Attack was never ‘solved’ although a person of interest was named by the FBI .

“Bruce Edwards Ivins is an extremely sensitive suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.”^[2]

On August 6, 2008, based on DNA evidence leading to an anthrax vial in Ivins’s lab, federal prosecutors declared Ivins to be the sole culprit of the crime.^[4] Two days later, Senator Charles Grassley and Rep. Rush Holt called for hearings into the DOJ and FBI’s handling of the investigation.^[5][6] On February 19, 2010, the FBI formally closed its investigation.^[7]

In 2008, the FBI requested a review of the scientific methods used in their investigation from the National Academy of Sciences, which released their findings in the 2011 report Review of the Scientific Approaches Used During the FBI’s Investigation of the 2001 Anthrax Letters.^[8] The report cast doubt on the U.S. government’s conclusion that Ivins was the perpetrator, finding that although the type of anthrax used in the letters was correctly identified as the Ames strain of the bacterium, there was insufficient scientific evidence for the FBI’s assertion that it originated from Ivins’s laboratory. The FBI responded by pointing out that the review panel asserted that it would not be possible to reach a definite conclusion based on science alone, and said that a combination of factors led the FBI to conclude that Ivins had been the perpetrator.^[9] Some information about the case related to Ivins’s mental problems is still under seal.^[10][11] Lawsuits filed by the widow of the first anthrax victim Bob Stevens were settled by the government for $2.5 million with no admission of liability. According to a statement in the settlement agreement, the settlement was reached solely for the purpose of “avoiding the expenses and risks of further litigations”.^[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks

And the FBI Crime Lab Scandal:

Headline: Civil servants lament Theresa May’s ‘wasted year’ over Brexit

Sub-headline: Mandarins accuse No 10 of stifling policy debates and alienating EU partners

Who are the ‘Mandarins’ that take center stage  in this ‘news story’ by George Parker and James Blitz:

Senior officials, Current and former senior civil servants, They say, John Kerr, a crossbench peer and former head of the Foreign Office, Nicholas Macpherson, a crossbench peer, Philip Hammond, the chancellor, some government insiders, one senior official, the official added., Another leading Whitehall figure, Whitehall insiders, Ministers point, Some civil servants, one senior Whitehall figure., Downing Street officials, David Jones, who was a junior minister, A Number 10 spokesman said, Allies point, Officials, 100 civil servants, one veteran civil servant, Lord Macpherson.

https://www.ft.com/content/a8f25c62-7218-11e7-aca6-c6bd07df1a3c

Except for speaking parts by John Kerr, Nicholas Macpherson and David Jones, the remainder of this polemic against Theresa May is defined by anonymous comments, as I have noted in the above paragraph. Here at The Financial Times the Cult of The Iron Lady is received wisdom. Mrs. Thatcher could not resist the temptation to best even her closest male allies in debate, she was perpetually confrontational, even bellicose, to both friend and foe.  The reader need only look how Mrs. May handled her visit to the Grenfell Tower in which see met with officials and not with the victims: she is a ‘control freak’ but of a decidedly different kind than Mrs. Thatcher. 

How blatantly obvious is it that all of Mrs. May’s critics are men, including the ‘reporters’? Mrs. May is being treated as Jeremy Corbyn was treated in the pages of this newspaper, culminating in the manufactured charge of his fostering Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Don’t forget the invaluable assistance rendered by Jonathan Freedland in the pages of The Guardian, as defender of the utterly unscrupulous Blairite faction, defending itself against the predations of the Populist Hoard.

As argued by the quoted actual and anonymous sources compiled by its ‘reporters’ Mrs. May’s approach to the Brexit expresses incompetence : if true what political action can the members of the Party adopt to take a more ‘realistic negotiating position’ ? Or is the raison d’être of this polemic all about the first steps in a campaign to remove Mrs May from office?

Political Cynic

An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story

Niebuhr’s reputation as a primary American Philosopher demonstrates with stunning clarity the paucity of intellectual standards in America. He was no Sartre, Heidegger nor was even comparable to William James. He was, in fact, a tent preacher with intellectual and moral pretension. As Richard Fox’s near worshipful biography points out, time after time, Niebuhr was a craven political and moral conformist: in his days in Chicago he opined that the working class shouldn’t give up violence as a methodology and that he was Marxient thinker. Those pronouncements came back to haunt him when J. Edgar Hoover was stalking him. The political result was Niebuhr’s letter denouncing ‘The Left’, not to speak of formation the ADA, with ‘Vital Center’ author Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.  Protecting ‘Liberal Free Speech’ but throwing ‘The Left’ to the McCarthy/Nixon wolves and their political capo J.Edgar Hoover. Please read Schlesinger’s diary entries from the early 50’s, where he makes noises like ‘Big Jim McLain‘, the use of the word ‘commies’ is indicative of the political myopia demonstrated by sons, who edited his diaries for publication. Accurate history is more important than covering your old man’s ass! Those entries, read in the political present express both the comedy and menace of  Schlesinger’s obsequious political conformity.

Niebuhr shared something in common with ‘friendly witness’ Elia Kazan: the rationalization that bound their separate careers was that they both thought that their ‘radical pasts’ should not interfere with their very important, indeed vital life mission. Kazan’s was making movies and Niebuhr’s was winning converts to ‘Christian Realism’ ,which was in sum a riff on ‘render unto Caesar’ and the central belief in ‘Inherent Evil’ of  the human person. Institutional Christian Self-Hatred is Augustine’s self-loathing for being human writ large, and his later epigones.

The reader can see the why of President Obama’s admiration for this ersatz ‘American Philosopher’, both share a belief in, not just the imperfectability of the human person, but its inherent ‘Evil’,  allied with a political/moral rhetoric that appeals to the aspirations of their respective audiences. Christian Realism advocates/embraces not just the idea of the saved and dammed in eschatological terms, but in terms of the Cold War ethos. That ethos has now been applied, by Obama, to the Age of The War on Terror, and the utterly catastrophic Neo-Liberal Theology, that has been operative since the Reagan era. Note that Obama never praised FDR, but was fulsome in his praise for Reagan.

Almost Marx

Here is an excerpt from Alice Bamford’s review of Amanda Anderson’s  ‘Bleak Liberalism’ in the New Left Review of May/June 2017. Which places ‘Liberalism’ and its primary thinkers like Schlesinger and Niebuhr, among others, to an examination of their political mendacity: which looks like a utter betrayal of what that ‘Liberalism’ could have been. If only its thinkers/defenders had exercised something like dissent as a singular moral/political imperative of that very ‘Liberalism’. Is the Liberal thinker/actor even capable of such an act of moral imagination?

Yet while ostensibly offering a defence of ‘political liberalism’, Anderson’s case rests on a near total abstraction from politics as such. Despite the pivotal role played by their thought in her narrative, the record of Anderson’s chosen Cold War liberals is never examined. Clergyman Niebuhr approved the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, applauded the development of the H-bomb, and advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Schlesinger colluded with (and lied about) the us invasion of Cuba, backed Kennedy’s wars in Indochina and counselled Americans under Johnson that ‘we must hold the line in Vietnam’, even telling Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, architect of escalation under both presidents: ‘You have been one of the greatest public servants in American history, and your departure from the government is an incalculable loss to this nation.’ Aron never spoke out against the French occupation of Indochina, or torture in Algeria; Camus not only refused to condemn France’s Algerian war, but backed the Suez expedition against Egypt. Berlin witch-hunted Isaac Deutscher out of a job in the British academy. Such particulars of the past, however, are too mundane for reference on the nebulous plane at which the history of ideas enters Bleak Liberalism.

https://newleftreview.org/II/105/alice-bamford-in-the-wake-of-trilling

A.M.

(Added August 3, 2017 7:33 AM PDT)

Capitalist Folk Hero Steve Eisman, the inspiration for a Hollywood film, predictions should be taken seriously by the readership of The Financial Times? He was just a canny player in the game of Casino that is Wall Street. Here is a link to a June 8, 2017 news story by Alan Rappeport:

Headline: Bill to Erase Some Dodd-Frank Banking Rules Passes in House

‘WASHINGTON — The House approved legislation on Thursday to erase a number of core financial regulations put in place by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, as Republicans moved a step closer to delivering on their promises to eliminate rules that they claim have strangled small businesses and stagnated the economy.

The vote is a significant step for a measure that still faces long odds of becoming law because of the slim majority that Republicans hold in the Senate.

Even Wall Street lobbyists and lawyers were pessimistic about the chances of the bill, the Financial Choice Act.

“There is zero chance that the Choice Act survives” in its current form in the Senate, said Matthew Dyckman, a lawyer in the financial services practice at Goodwin.

Yet the bill’s passage in the House, by 233 to 186, keeps alive the Republican Party’s dream of unwinding one of President Barack Obama’s signature accomplishments. The vote quickly drew the ire of Democrats who argued that Republicans were giving a handout to Wall Street while putting everyday investors at risk.

Or this news story from The Atlantic of February 3, 2017 by Gillian B. White

Headline: Trump Begins to Chip Away at Banking Regulations

Sub-headline: Justifying his latest executive order, he said that “so many people, friends of mine, with nice businesses” had trouble getting loans.

Prior to a meeting with his economic advisory council on Friday morning, President Donald Trump held a briefing to set the agenda for it. “There’s nobody better to tell me about Dodd-Frank than Jamie,” Trump said, referring to 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act, the single most visible legislative consequence of the banking crisis, and also to J.P. Morgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, with whom he would later meet to discuss regulation. “We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank,” Trump said. “I have so many people, friends of mine, with nice businesses, they can’t borrow money, because the banks just won’t let them borrow because of the rules and regulations and Dodd-Frank.”

Hours later, as promised, the president issued a memorandum that sets in motion his plan to scale back the provisions of Dodd-Frank and repeal the upcoming fiduciary rule—the latest in his slate of executive orders aimed at decreasing regulations. Named for Senators Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, the bipartisan act—formally, it’s the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—was responsible for creating more stringent rules regarding bank capitalization (that is, the amount of money that banks must have on hand), increasing compliance and reporting standards for banks, introducing stricter mortgage requirements, creating the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and curbing excessive risk-taking and the existence of too-big-to-fail institutions on Wall Street.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/trump-dodd-frank/515646/

Should the reader of the report on Mr. Eisman’s opinions on the present financial stability and its durability- is he is aware of the ‘The Financial Choice Act’? Will this bill meet the same political fate as the repeal of the ACA? Even with both houses of congress in Republican control, the Ryan/McConnell legislative team can’t pass that ‘Reform’ of the ACA i.e. The Heritage Foundation Health Care that evolved over political time. That Ryan/McConnell team, and their Tea Party Nihilist confederates, have no interest in governance, their raison d’être is perpetual obstructionism. In sum, this collection of dime store Robespierre’s are incapable of understand the imperative of governance. But the failed Free Market frame of  ‘The Financial Choice Act’ appeals to their Social Darwinism, to dress it up considerably!

On Dodd-Frank:

The stated aim of the legislation is:

To promote the financial stability of the United States by improving accountability and transparency in the financial system, to end “too big to fail”, to protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts, to protect consumers from abusive financial services practices, and for other purposes.^[33]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodd%E2%80%93Frank_Wall_Street_Reform_and_Consumer_Protection_Act

Then their is Paul Ryan’s tough stand on ‘Financial Reform’ , as even more vital than the ACA Repeal, as reported in The Financial Times:

Headline: Donald Trump’s rift with Republicans widens

Sub-headline: Ryan says tax reform ‘absolutely critical’ but president seeks return to healthcare battle

https://www.ft.com/content/47d2cb18-7526-11e7-90c0-90a9d1bc9691

The Republicans can’t pass ‘Health Care Reform’ but they can pass ‘Economic Reform’ framed as the ‘Financial Choice Act’.  ‘The Free Market’ must be set free from the constraints of  the Neo-Liberal Dodd-Frank! This Party Line, in an different time and key was the rationalization that led to the Depression of 2008, and the dismal political present and its Dear Leader Trump.  Mr. Eisman’s investment acumen, in the past, has served him well, but his comments on a probabilistic economic stability lacks evidentiary corroboration, to say the least. Put simply, he needs to be become more curious, that might just lead him to be better informed!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/461c72ea-72df-11e7-93ff-99f383b09ff9

Mr. Stephens essay of July 29, 2017 titled ‘The ‘No Guardrails’ Presidency’ makes the ludicrous argument that Trump is directly related to the year 1968, and its ‘moral chaos’, using a 1998 essay in the Wall Street Journal editorial titled ‘ No Guardrails’. Mr. Stephens ‘summarizes the arguments’ as presented in this 1998 editorial:

In 1993 The Wall Street Journal published a famous editorial called “No Guardrails,” which tried to locate the source of the moral chaos that had engulfed much of America. “How, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, did so many become undone?” the editors wanted to know.

Their answer, in a nutshell, was 1968 — specifically, the culture of excess, excuses and permission that abruptly supplanted the old American ethic of modesty, responsibility and restraint.

“Certain rules that for a long time had governed behavior also became devalued,” the editorial noted. “Whatever else was going on here, we were repeatedly lowering the barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct.”

Mr. Stephens was born in 1973, so he relies on this editorial to do his thinking for him, probably not thinking, but ideological cogitations. He mentions no other source for his opinion. His opinion occupies the space of the near history-less void, with the pin hole perception of that 1998 editorial, as his only available perception, that is then used to bait the New York Times reader. He succeeded in garnering well over seven hundred replies, as I write this, to his historically mendacious polemic. Most of the readership demographic of this newspaper are old enough to remember vividly the political events of that year. An advantage that Stephens cannot, or because of ideological disposition, refuses to know: as the purpose of his hectoring polemic is to re-write current American history, using the near paranoid political hysterics of the editorial writers of the 1998 Wall Street Journal. In sum Trump and Trumpism is the issue of the ‘moral chaos’ let loose in that year. That has festered for nearly fifty years. Decadence, political and moral, are the twin pillars of the Neo-Conservative Political Theology, in this case Mr. Stephens uses the epithet ‘moral chaos’ as its rhetorical stand in.

The Law of Parsimony is a better guide to the why of the rise of Trump and Trumpism: The utter corruption of both the Republican and New Democratic Parties: as Gore Vidal described it many years ago, American has one party The Property Party, with two wings the Republicans and the Democrats. The ’cause’ of Trump can be better described: the political nihilism of the Republican Party from the election of Obama in 2008 till the 2017 Trump Inaugural, the rise of the Tea Party Zealots, who purged the actual Republican Conservatives who practiced ‘the art of the possible’, in the name political purity/conformity. Look also to the ‘Hope and Change’ rhetoric of Obama that became mere vacuous sloganeering.  The Republican answer to any legislative question was ‘NO’! Mr. Stephens’ propaganda seeks to find a less proximate cause of the Trump political phenomenon, and the ‘moral chaos’ that he has produced. The perpetual specter of the Neo-Conservative, the Conservative ,the Republican and the Right Wing Social Democrats who morphed en masse into Neo-Liberals, is ‘The Left’ in all its instantiations. Not to speak of Neo-Conservatism’s obsession with decline and decay e.g. Fukuyama’s 2013 essay ‘The Decay of American Political Institutions’ and Ferguson’s ‘The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die’. Mr. Stephens is not in the same league as Fukuyama , who practices the Straussian rhetorical method of a mendacious logorrhea, in service to attacking the whole of the melorist politics of the American 20th Century! Fukuyama re-defines the meaning of Reactionary.

Mr. Stephens is an inept and transparent propagandist, who doesn’t simply insult his readership, he holds them in utter contempt. They are most likely a part of the 1968 he pontificates about, some may even have attended the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago? Or been a part of ‘The Summer of Love’ in the Haight? Or in their youth been a follower of Malcolm X ? Mr. Stephens cobbles together, out of one Wall Street Journal editorial, of 1998 vintage, that he ‘updates’, garnished by a T.S. Eliot quote. Mr. Stephens historical ignorance allied to his ideology demonstrate the political/moral toxicity of the Neo-Conservative Political Theology. In sum, Stephens is a moral/political zealot, railing against a past created by Wall Street Journal 1998 editorial, to shame the contemporary complicit readership of The New York Times.

American Writer

One needn’t wonder over Mrs. Jobs  purchase of The Atlantic, after all America is the country where the land thief and murderer were king: the trials and tribulations of the  arriviste was one of the great themes of that insufferable snob and literary genius Henry James. Isn’t the arrival of the Computer Genius and his successor the Internet Entrepreneur just an addition to the Book of American Characters? Please don’t forget Lewis and Clark or the Buffalo Hunter, as part of America’s rough and ready pioneer history, that all those pretenders of the present seek to wash themselves clean of, in this case Mrs. Jobs. It all stated in a garage and ended up where?

Amazon peddler Bezos purchased the Washington Post, and got a $600 million CIA contract. He’ll publish CIA propaganda, in a newspaper that once stood for bourgeois political respectability and political uprightness, of a very specific kind. While upholding the banner of American Exceptionalism under the management of Katharine Graham and editorship of Ben Bradlee, and their star reporters Woodward and Bernstein. This reportorial duo made the reputation of the Post.

Is there a more stogy and boring publication than The Atlantic? One founded by Abolitionists and eventually run by hacks like the Social Darwinist loudmouth Mort Zuckerman, and David Bradley who called this American publication ‘an enterprise’ :that was once a part of the Political/Moral compass, that defined in the starkest terms, what ‘all men are created equal’ meant in the crisis ridden era of slavery/white supremacy.

The Atlantic is the home of the self-appointed Philosopher King and or Wise Republican Elder David Frum. Who has free reign to write at tedious length, as the acolyte of the mendacious ‘Philosopher’ Leo Strauss, on various pressing questions of moral/political import. He has graduated from his short lived status as Bush The Youngers’ propagandist: ‘Axis of Evil’ !

The careful reader will note the close association between this magazine and The Aspen Ideas Festival. A revelatory sample of its attendees and speakers: Arianna Huffington, Davis Brooks, Thomas Friedman and other luminaries of the dismal Neo-Liberal political present, all underwritten by the Koch brothers. The political/moral destiny of this magazine can be charted from Abolitionism to Corporatism: call this historical trajectory what it is, not just a de-evolution but a degradation, or even more pointedly, a betrayal of moral/political vision of its founders. Now reduced to mere sloganeering.

The pressing question: what does Mrs. Jobs bring to the real, the actual tradition of The Atlantic?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/3aa3e420-73ac-11e7-aca6-c6bd07df1a3c

On the Sullivan menu this Friday is the Trump Political/Constitutional Catastrophe, The Heroism of John McCain, and the Mendacity of Left Wing KPFA. America’s Adopted Drama Queen is at full screech in his comments on the Trump Nihilism, reminding this reader of his equally hysterical commentaries on 9/11, and the pressing necessity of waging the War on Iraq , as an obedient, yet an unattractively slavering Neo-Con!

John McCain as a political force for good died as the ‘Straight Talk Express’ stalled and was abandoned. Yet he was treated as some kind of returning hero! Welcomed by a class of politicians that were the midwives of Trump and Trumpism, by way of the New Democrats, and Republican Party awash in Neo-Confederate nostalgia in the rise of the Tea Party Nihilists. Like Mr. Sullivan, the US Senate is desperate as the political/moral legitimacy of the American National Security State experiences a precipitate de-evolution: the remains of the Republic are hermetically sealed at the National Archives.

Would Andy Divine’s weekly Encyclical be complete without the obligatory expression of contempt, some might call it defamation of the ‘Left’, which is equal to the radio station  KPFA ? ‘Progressive’  KPFA dis-invited Dawkins over his comments on Islam. Mr. Dawkins comes in for the charge of both Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

But this paragraph demonstrates that Sullivan is not just myopic on the question the ‘Left’ but on the question of race, demonstrated with a stunning clarity in his continuing admiration, not to speak of his boosterism for the utterly discredited Conservative Sociology of ‘The Bell Curve‘.

I fear that the truth is Islam has become an untouchable shibboleth for some on the left. What they lacerate in other religions, they refuse to mention in Islam. Sexism, homophobia, the death penalty for apostasy … all of this is to be rationalized if the alternative is Islamophobia. Why, one wonders? Is it because Muslims are a small minority? But the same could be said for Jews. My best guess is simply that, for the far left, anything that is predominantly “of color” is preferable to anything, like Judaism and Christianity, that can usually be described as “white.” That’s how “intersectionality” can be used to defend what would otherwise be indefensible. The preoccupation with race on the far left is now so deep, in other words, it’s becoming simply an inversion of that on the far right.

One wonders at the fact that the Catholic Church is guilty, and even unapologetic, about its  sexism, misogyny and homophobia! Not to speak of its long history of pedophilia, practiced by priests who became Princes of Mother Church, who by US civil law were mandated reporters on the welfare of children in their care. Hypocrisy thy name is Andrew Sullivan!

Queer Atheist

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/a-week-of-reckoning.html#comments