StephenKMackSD's Blog

The Financial Times has found the near perfect apologist for ‘Austerity’! A reading of the Wikipedia entry on Nicholas Ian Macpherson, Baron Macpherson of Earl’s Court, is impressive, to say the least.

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

In the wake of the utterly failed Neo-Liberal Dogmas, in the Crash of 2008, what those Neo-Liberals offered was the political necessity of the wholesale dismantling of the Post War Welfare  State, as the means to the end of bringing back an elusive prosperity. This was part of the larger plan of the Mont Pelerin Olympians, of destroying the very fabric of the ‘West’: the shared destiny of the ‘Commonwealth’ and its replacement with the Social Dawinism of the ‘Almighty Market’, celebrated by the epigones of Austrian Economic Romanticism.

Baron Macpherson’s historically garnished rationalizations for more politically and economically sophisticated iterations, of the necessity of the ‘Strong Medicine’ of that Austerity, faces the real political end of this mirage, in the person of Jeremy Corbyn. With each twist and turn of Tory political desperation, Mr. Corbyn’s political strength grows. Real questions remain: will the Tories call for another ill-fated referendum? Another is where is Rovian political guru/technocrat Lynton Crosby?

The reader is presented, on the same page, a link to Martin Wolf’s intervention on the question of the viability of ‘Austerity’, which is his usual to and fro, but ends in this final  paragraph:

‘So should austerity be over? If we mean that it is safe to leave the fiscal deficit where it is, the answer is no. If we mean that it is possible to avoid lowering the share of public spending in GDP any further, the answer is yes. The argument that the UK has chronically underfunded public services is respectable. But higher spending means higher taxes. That additional taxation also needs to be well targeted and designed. The extra money raised needs to be well spent, too. Otherwise, the effort would be a huge waste. That would be quite senseless.’

https://www.ft.com/content/1b94c71e-5054-11e7-bfb8-997009366969

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/48b2f6f8-5270-11e7-a1f2-db19572361bb

Wolfgang Kowalsky maladroit attempt to lay the blame for the current political unrest and dissatisfaction: Populism of both Left and Right, as the product of the Prophets of French Theory, who were advocates of  a toxic ‘relativism’ expresses political desperation. Like the obedient Neo-Liberal apologist, Kowalsky needs a villain for his shoddy little melodrama, and those political/moral nihilists of that ‘French Theory’ will do just fine! Not to forget the title that reeks of a Left-Wing animus posed as a question: The Left And Science In LaLaLand?

As Francois Cusset’s 2003 book titled ‘French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States’ and its English translation in 2008, these thinkers had seen their day in France in the 1960’s. As the Ferry and Renaut book ‘French Philosophy of the Sixties : an essay on Antihumanism’ published in 1984 in France and 1990 in English helped to establish that the ‘French Theorists’ were of a past not a future. Derrida, who died in 2004, spent many years teaching in American Universities, as his intellectual stardom faded in France. But without the Master,‘Deconstruction’ and its American advocates/thinkers slowly faded as an intellectual vogue.

As Cusset’s narrative unfolds, the decline of the ‘New Criticism‘ in the American Academy, and the void this loss of status created, in fact helped set the stage for the rise of ‘French Theory’. The luster of that exotic ‘Theory’ has simply faded over time! But its ghost makes a perfect stand-in for the actual culprit of the Rise of Populism, which is the Collapsed Utopianism Of the Neo-Liberal Mirage. That began its political ascent with the rise of Thatcher/Reagan and is now in a protracted state of slow-motion collapse. Intellectual honesty won’t meet the needs of the Neo-Liberal apologist, so myth-making is the argumentative imperative!

Eugène Drieu La Rochelle

https://www.socialeurope.eu/2017/06/left-science-lalaland/

Are the Jupitarian Politics of President Macron about to hit a shoal of his own making? Protectionism in the name of National Security. The mantra of the EU Cartel has always been ‘Free Trade’ but what to do with those wiley Capitalist Chinese? who seem better at the game than any Westerner.

President Macron’s Neo-Liberalism Lite, in this instance, deploys the notion of National Security as a motive for his very specific proposal. Do Western European states have an obligation to their populations to protect them from potentially hostile takeovers, of their key industries, by a potential hostile State or State Actors? The question, in this case, partakes of two unsavory aspects: the recrudescence of ‘Yellow Peril’ as motive for action, in sum a racist idea. And the very real threat that this State, or its Actors, may act against the best interests of the State in which this industry resides, and the states where it subsidiaries may be?

Another question arises: does a Capitalism, governed by the Economic Dawinism of the Hayek/Mises/Friedman Trinity, have any professed civic/political obligation except profit?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/73aadc3a-5118-11e7-bfb8-997009366969

The first part of this paragraph is predicated upon the fiction that the rise of Thatcher/Reagan set two Western Economies on the right track : away from the Post War Welfare State, toward a Utopia predicated upon the the Free Market Myth and its Trinity Hayek/Mises/Friedman.

During the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the early 1980s, the two largest English-speaking democracies rebooted their growth machines and put paid to fears of enduring malaise. Both were right to chafe at the price controls and worker unrest of the 1970s. Yet they over-corrected.

The Financial Collapse of 2008 puts this in the category of self-apologetical fiction, that demonstrates that Neo-Liberalism was not ‘The Royal Road to Prosperity’ but ‘The Road to the Poorhouse’ for the 99%. Mr. Luce is a Corporatist, as if the regular reader of his essays needs a reminder!

In the second part of this paragraph is devoted to a brief cautionary tale: those canny French Lawyers and Financiers moved to ‘The Promise Land of The Free Market’ , only to inflate London Real Estate out of the purchasing range of  those Virtuous British Lawyers and Financiers!

Hundreds of thousands of French lawyers and financiers may have moved to London in the last generation. Many more British have been priced out of their own capital city.

The whole of Mr. Luce’s essay has about it the aura of  a rickety Fable, hastily written against a fast approaching deadline.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/58bf0c00-5052-11e7-bfb8-997009366969

The reader just has to laugh at the assertions that M. Macron makes in the first paragraph of  Anne-Sylvaine Chassany essay!

Emmanuel Macron’s decision to open up Louis XIV’s palace in Versailles for Russia’s Vladimir Putin at the end of May made perfect sense for the newly elected French leader who once defined his future presidential style as “Jupiterian”.

Even if En Marche wins big in the coming election, the more the French people hear and see the hubris , no other word describes the hauteur of M. Macron, the less likely they are to support the Neo-Liberal Reform he has to offer. Allied to ‘More Europe’ meaning a closer alliance with the Merkel/Schäuble pretenders to an economic virtue that is belied by their history in the 20th Century. 

The hauteur  of M. Macron is on full display in the penultimate paragraph of  Anne-Sylvaine Chassany’s essay:

Even though his “Jupiterian” style needs perfecting (he was caught on camera making a distasteful joke about Comoran migrants recently), and even though it highlights contempt for the press, Mr Macron does get it. The French do not want a “normal” president, Mr Macron told weekly magazine Challenges in October. “On the contrary, such a concept destabilises them, it makes them feel insecure.” Leaders ought to refuse to be dictated by the news and they should have an ability “to enlighten, to know, to spell out a meaning and a direction anchored in French history”, he added.

According to M. Macron the French don’t want a President they want a paterfamilias, a concept not from The Sun King, but from Roman antiquity: a Patriarch who controlled the lives of every person in his household! Not former Vichyite turned Neo-Liberal Mitterrand, nor the bully boy Sarkozy, but de Gaulle to the second power. Welcome to President  Macron! and let the Street Demonstrations and political unrest begin, in earnest!

Committed Observer 

https://www.ft.com/content/17f75282-4f61-11e7-a1f2-db19572361bb

Mr. Ganesh begins his latest essay with the sentence:

Emmanuel Macron can now expect control of the French parliament to go with the presidency he clinched last month.

Mr. Ganesh is too practiced, too glib an apologist for the benighted twins of British Politics, the Tories and New Labour, to make such a preposterous argument that Macron ‘clinched’ the French presidency. In America that descriptor has a decisive connotation, it does not apply to the Macron win. (Although it may or might apply to En Marche in the coming vote.) The presidential election was about the choice of ‘the lesser of two evils’, spoiled ballots and general dismay at the choice offered. The French election didn’t mirror the dismal American electoral choice of Clinton vs Trump, but was representative of the the declining standards of both elections, and the candidates offered in ‘Western Democracies’. A subject that Mr. Ganesh will never address!

The next paragraph is informative but not in the way its author intends:

Britain is not merely losing its head, then, but is doing so as the nations against which it measures itself find theirs. It is succumbing to relative, not just absolute, fiasco, “led” by a prime minister who is drained of all confidence after a botched election, governing at the mercy of 10 Democratic Unionist MPs from Northern Ireland, chased down by a rampant Labour opposition, one week out from talks to exit the EU.

Imagine that Mr. Ganesh is fulminating against the possible future Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn, with just a bit of deft editing this line of argument could apply to his defeat in a coming election. The argument is that Mrs. May needs to go, and go post-haste! Britain needs a strong leader in the Brexit negotiations.

What is left for Mr. Ganesh is recrimination and political anguish, in which he plays a small part:

A discredited prime minister (or an unelected new one) kept going by an ultra-conservative minority party, unable to do much other than Brexit: Labour could not design a more provocative spectacle, one more likely to irk the young, the liberal, the urban.

Mr. Ganesh is featured, in this paragraph, as ‘the young, the liberal, the urban’ . Mr. Ganesh is neither young nor liberal, except in the definitional terms of  Blairite New Labour. ‘Tory Hipster’ is a more appropriate epithet for Mr. Ganesh.

Mr. Ganesh then calls for Mrs. May to make the magnanimous political gesture of  announcing that she will leave at an appointed date:

If Mrs May were to say that she will leave by the time of the Conservative party conference in October, some of the rancour against her would ease. The DUP deal would be understood as a means of giving the country a government through some difficult weeks and not as a deeper compromise by the Tories.

Mr. Ganesh’s final thought is not about a misplaced Tory nostalgia for the 1970’s but about their nostalgia for the decisive leadership of Mrs. Thatcher.

The Tories must at least attempt a more lasting fix. A nation with a deficit to clear and a momentous Europe policy to shape needs one. And it is a strange day when Tories look to the 1970s as a time to recapture.

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/19ad8aa4-4f4f-11e7-a1f2-db19572361bb

The political present and the immediate future look bleak for the Mrs. May, her only allies being those Northern Ireland political romantics, who think they can turn back time, and their belief in the benighted erosions that rule the modern world. Mrs. May’s backward looking politics is founded first on bourgeois respectable politics, that masks the ugly Oakshottian dimension of the loathing of The Political/Moral Other as utterly unworthy. Mr. Rachman chooses to ignore this part of the present reality and focuses on the one bright light in the political present: Macron and his En Marche.

We now have strong and stable leadership — but in France, not Britain. Theresa May, Britain’s prime minister, will enter the Brexit negotiations gravely weakened after the UK general election. By contrast, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, is poised to emerge from legislative elections with the huge parliamentary majority that Mrs May once dreamt of.

‘We now have strong and stable leadership — but in France, not Britain.‘: now substitute ‘we now have stable Neo-Liberal leadership’ in the above sentence and Mr. Rachman’s assertion would be a better reflection of his actual loyalties. Although the ‘Speed and Shock’ of Fillon would be Rachman’s actual choice, but he will settle for the Neo-Liberalism Lite of the Reformer, or is that Political Redeemer?

Those ‘legislative elections’ are about to cement the political victory of En Marche, at least according to The Financial Times. The Political Reform of Macron cannot happen without  legislative power. But what of the Streets? Those pesky ‘Leftists’ will fight Macron’s ‘Reforms’ with ferocity, if the political past is an indicator of the future.

What follows is a long and unsurprising apologetic for the EU comes this pronouncement:

Mr Macron needs to show French voters that leaving the EU will bring only pain. If, at the same time, he can rebuild the Franco-German partnership at the heart of the EU, he might be able to restore the popularity of the European project in France.

But the question remains will the Merkel/Schäuble alliance make way for a ‘real partner’ whose faith is invested in ‘more Europe’ : in a revitalized EU without Britain? Will Macron’s well deserved reputation as a personal and political opportunist eventually sour, a now, merely potential French power sharing  with the Merkel/Schäuble alliance? On the question of Macron’s opportunism, Simon Kuper provides valuable insights that answers some of the pressing questions:

https://www.ft.com/content/464df34e-3a48-11e7-ac89-b01cc67cfeec

Mr. Rachman’s penultimate paragraph is instructive as to his near trivialization of the possibility of a lasting French/German alliance that references  a book ‘That Sweet Enemy’:

Mr Macron is undoubtedly an internationalist. But he is also a president of France and therefore heir to an ancient rivalry with Britain, documented by Robert and Isabelle Tombs (an Anglo-French academic couple), in their 2006 book, That Sweet Enemy. As the Tombs tell it, the histories of both France and Britain have been profoundly influenced by their “love-hate relationship”

I will reference an comment by historian J.G.A. Pocock published in  The London Review of Books that addresses the actual nature of the EU:

Profoundly anti-democratic and anti-constitutional, the EU obliges you to leave by the only act it recognises: the referendum, which can be ignored as a snap decision you didn’t really mean. If you are to go ahead, it must be by your own constitutional machinery: crown, parliament and people; election, debate and statute. This will take time and deliberation, which is the way decisions of any magnitude should be taken.

The Scots will come along, or not, deciding to live in their own history, which is not what the global market wants us to do. Avoid further referendums and act for yourselves as you know how to act and be.

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

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/1eae532c-4f49-11e7-bfb8-997009366969

The mildly curious reader need only read your own description of  Mr. Palmer’s associations to realize exactly who he is in terms of the European Union:

Left-Wing Social Democrat

I’ll begin my comment with this paragraph from Mr. Rachman’s review of Mr. Wright’s book, that demonstrates that Mr. Wright’s book doesn’t labor under a political  misapprehension, but expresses the ideological myopia of a Neo-Conservative public intellectual:

Wright’s book is a convincing refutation of the idea that America might be better off if it abandoned the idea of a liberal global order and acquiesced in the creation of regional spheres of influence for Russia, China and (possibly) Iran. “The liberal international order has been tremendously successful in safeguarding US interests while bolstering the peace and prosperity of most of the rest of the world,” he argues. By contrast, a world organised around regional spheres of influence would be much less stable and would encourage China, Russia and others to test US resolve. In such a world, trade would diminish and democracy would retreat. “The United States would quickly find itself embroiled in conflict and from a much weaker position than it now enjoys.”

The facts are that Russia,China, and Iran(not possibly but actually) have already carved out their ‘spheres of influence’. On Russia: the invention of the myth of its revanchism in Crimea and Ukraine, and its being poised, to do what? on the borders of Europe, or so goes the New Cold War Mythology. On China: the South China Sea dispute waxes and wanes, its an on demand ‘crisis‘ trotted out as need be. On Iran: the reader need only look at the close relation that America’s Protectorate Iraq enjoys with the successors to the 1979 Revolution.

Even Merkel declares, in response to Trump, that Europe must defend itself.  She is, after all, the current representative of ‘The Virtuous Northern Tier’, that myth built on four defaults in the 20th Century, and on being the economic engine that propels the faltering E.U., and its economic cudgel the European Central Bank, not to mention her capo Wolfgang Schäuble.

The reader need only consult the Brookings web site to see Mr. Wright’s rather impressive CV:

https://www.brookings.edu/experts/thomas-wright/

Even the most agnostic reader of this resume, can doubt that Mr. Wright is a Neo-Conservative, who would have been a perfect fit for the Hillary Clinton Administration. Clinton  favored Victoria Nuland, Susan Rice and the rest of the coven of Neo-Cons at The State Dept.

The Think Tank, especially Brookings, has become the holding pen for policy intellectuals, with a product to sell. Those intellectuals write the manifestos that simply reiterate the myth of America’s Manifest Destiny, tarted up for the world stage.The American Destiny is to fight ‘The War on Terror’, its own Thirty Years War. Or simply the fulfillment of Huntington’s paranoid conception of his ‘Clash of Civilizations’, rationalized by Mr. Wright with his proviso being ‘short of war’.  Mr. Rachman provides the indispensable service of the ‘yes man’, the perennial character out of the reality of American Corporatism. (See ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’ a 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson and ‘The Organization Man’ by William H. Whyte published  in 1956)

American Dissident

https://www.ft.com/content/5475b230-4b7e-11e7-919a-1e14ce4af89b

@U999 @StephenKMackSD

Thank you for your reply. As I imagine it, Mr. Rachman spends too much time in the company of his fellow pundits, reading their Manifestos and schmoozing at social gatherings, with these Policy Technocrats. Can’t you just see these men- the unsurprising bailiwick of the male gender as ‘expert’-sipping single-malt and exchanging the shopworn cliches of the current ‘climate of opinion’. As in some of Saul Steinberg’s most telling cartoon pastiches of conversations, rendered as a series of cartouches fighting for space in the picture plane.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/2txLO8p

@OliverKamm
Did you think that your history of being an avid supporter, or better yet, call you a close ally of Tony Blair, would remain outside this comments section. You’ve even blocked me from your twitter feed! How prescient of you. But the Wikipedia entry tells the mildly curious reader all she wants to know, about who you are, and more importantly where your political loyalty is ‘invested’!

‘Oliver Kamm (born 1963) is a British journalist and writer. Since 2008 he has been a leader writer and columnist for The Times. Before that he had a 20-year career in the financial sector.

Predominantly identifying with the left and liberal issues, he is a prominent supporter of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. An advocate of the foreign policies pursued by the Blair government, Kamm wrote a short book, Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy (2005), which puts forward the case for an interventionist neoconservative foreign policy.’

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

But that is only the beginning of your self-asserted ‘Left-Wing Politics’ as fiction!

‘Kamm describes his politics as left-wing.[7] His early activities in Labour included canvassing in Leicester South in the 1979 general election, which saw Margaret Thatcher become Prime Minister. While he continued to vote Labour into the 1980s,[8] he eventually became dissatisfied with the party’s leadership and policies, particularly its stance on nuclear disarmament, and left the party in 1988,[9] but has continued to vote for the party on the majority of occasions.[10] He worked for the 1997 election campaign of Martin Bell, who is his uncle,[11] against incumbent Neil Hamilton, drafting a manifesto “so right-wing that Hamilton was incapable of outflanking it.”[12]

That year saw the election of the ‘New Labour’ government of Tony Blair, which Kamm strongly supported, particularly its foreign policy and ‘liberal interventionism’.[13] Although generally supportive of the Labour Party in the 2005 general election, Kamm stated that he could not support Celia Barlow, the Labour candidate in his local constituency, Hove, because of her opposition to Blair’s foreign policies. Instead, he stated that he would vote for the Conservative candidate, Nicholas Boles, who supported the Iraq war.[14] Despite believing the Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown was unsuited for office, he voted for the party at the 2010 general election.[10]

Kamm supported the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, and asserted that “the world is a safer place for the influence” George W. Bush had during his presidency.[15] Although critical of George W. Bush linking Saddam, Iran and North Korea in a combined “axis of evil”,[15] in 2004, he outlined a case for supporting the re-election of George W. Bush.[13] Kamm was a patron of the Henry Jackson Society at its inception in 2005,[16] but is no longer connected to, or a member of HJS.[17] In 2006, he was a signatory to the Euston Manifesto, arguing for a reorientation of the left around what its creators termed ‘anti-totalitarian’ principles. He favourably commented on Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, which has similar themes to Kamm’s own book, arguing that the left should look to the policies of Clement Attlee and Harry S. Truman in the early days of the Cold War as a model for response to Islamism and totalitarianism.[18]’

Your animus to Corbyn and his actual Left-Wing Social Democratic politics is rooted in your Neo-Conservatism, in the guise of the New Labour of Tony Blair.

Old Socialist

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/corbyn-has-won-more-seats-than-expected-but-his-beliefs-are-still-deplorable