StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.nationalreview.com/author/rich-lowry

Political Cynic

The reader need not depend on The Financial Times for a defense of America’s Wars of Empire. The New York Times has published Sen. Tom Cotton’s essay on the subject, that repeats the highfalutin shibboleths of ‘Wilsonian Idealism’, with far greater fidelity than these editorial writers could possibly muster.

After President Bashar al-Assad of Syria once again attacked his own citizens with poison gas, the civilized world recoiled in horror at images of children writhing in pain and suffocating to death. President Trump voiced this justified outrage at a news conference on Wednesday, and the next day he took swift, decisive action against the outlaw Assad regime. But these strikes did more than simply punish Mr. Assad and deter future attacks; they have gone a long way to restoring our badly damaged credibility in the world.

It’s hard to overstate just how low the standing of the United States had fallen because of President Barack Obama’s failure to enforce his own “red line” against Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013. I was one of the few Republican members of Congress who supported strikes against Syria then. Because of that, I’ve heard from dozens of world leaders expressing their doubts about the security commitments of the United States.

Although, I have only posted the first two paragraphs of his essay, I’ve provided a link to the whole essay. Call this a stirring defense of Pax American, by the protege of both arch-reactionary Harvey Mansfield, and Porcine Spartan William Kristol.

What lessons might the reader learn form Seymour Hersh’s 2013 essay on the ‘chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August.’ ?

But in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote. A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’

The complaints focus on what Washington did not have: any advance warning from the assumed source of the attack. The military intelligence community has for years produced a highly classified early morning intelligence summary, known as the Morning Report, for the secretary of defence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; a copy also goes to the national security adviser and the director of national intelligence. The Morning Report includes no political or economic information, but provides a summary of important military events around the world, with all available intelligence about them. A senior intelligence consultant told me that some time after the attack he reviewed the reports for 20 August through 23 August. For two days – 20 and 21 August – there was no mention of Syria. On 22 August the lead item in the Morning Report dealt with Egypt; a subsequent item discussed an internal change in the command structure of one of the rebel groups in Syria. Nothing was noted about the use of nerve gas in Damascus that day. It was not until 23 August that the use of sarin became a dominant issue, although hundreds of photographs and videos of the massacre had gone viral within hours on YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites. At this point, the administration knew no more than the public.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin

Or this from Mr. Hersh’s reporting on Samantha Power role in the 2013 Obama policy:

One legislator with more than two decades of experience in military affairs told me that he came away from one such briefing persuaded that ‘only the Assad government had sarin and the rebels did not.’ Similarly, following the release of the UN report on 16 September confirming that sarin was used on 21 August, Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, told a press conference: ‘It’s very important to note that only the [Assad] regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition possesses sarin.’

It is not known whether the highly classified reporting on al-Nusra was made available to Power’s office, but her comment was a reflection of the attitude that swept through the administration. ‘The immediate assumption was that Assad had done it,’ the former senior intelligence official told me. ‘The new director of the CIA, [John] Brennan, jumped to that conclusion … drives to the White House and says: “Look at what I’ve got!” It was all verbal; they just waved the bloody shirt. There was a lot of political pressure to bring Obama to the table to help the rebels, and there was wishful thinking that this [tying Assad to the sarin attack] would force Obama’s hand: “This is the Zimmermann telegram of the Syrian rebellion and now Obama can react.” Wishful thinking by the Samantha Power wing within the administration. Unfortunately, some members of the Joint Chiefs who were alerted that he was going to attack weren’t so sure it was a good thing.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin

Mr. Hersh’s reporting on Obama’s abandonment of his ‘Red Line’:

The administration’s distortion of the facts surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable question: do we have the whole story of Obama’s willingness to walk away from his ‘red line’ threat to bomb Syria? He had claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin

Nor can the reader of Mr. Hersh’s essay ignore the political/ideological/religious factionalism that defines the ‘Rebels’. We have been in this territory before, yet Trump’s unslakable bellicosity, allied to his advisers, drawn from the most jingoistic factions of the military, make conflict inevitable. The stark lessons of 2013, as reported upon by Hersh, will be ignored in favor of a de-evolutionary Pax Americana, in a 21st Century dominated by Trumpism, that can only lead to catastrophe.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/432b264a-1b7c-11e7-bcac-6d03d067f81f

This whole Antisemitism Crisis has been invented by New Labour’s powerful allies like Jonathan Freedland. Who turned the posting of an editorial cartoon into an indictable crime, against bourgeois political respectability. In this shaky political melodrama Freedland plays a modern day Javert, or given his insufferable egotism, a modern day Zola!
No matter, the political angst of Tulip Siddiq, who is quite obviously following the New Labour Party Line: Corbyn is the prime target of the Blair Neo-Liberals. Mr. Livingstone is simply a means to an end, even if his comments are inconveniently, but historically correct. To the consternation of apologists who engage in defamation of any dissenter, who criticizes Israel and its founding mythology of Zionism.
For a corrective that also offers valuable new information about Israeli government involvement in this ‘scandal’, of the latest episode of this long running British Telenovela. Read Ben White’s essay titled ‘The Israel lobby scandal and Labour’s anti-Semitism ‘crisis’ are intimately linked.’  A long quotation from Mr. White’s essay offers insights that make the reading of his whole essay, very informative and enlightening:

The latest revelations to emerge from the Al Jazeera investigation into the work of the Israeli embassy in London and pro-Israel lobby groups in Britain are a reminder of an issue that once dominated the headlines: the Labour Party’s so-called “anti-Semitism crisis”.

Like Israeli embassy official Shai Masot being caught on camera seeking to “take down” British politicians, the fact that Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) director MP Joan Ryan is shown to have misrepresented and smeared a pro-Palestinian party member is instructive, but not a shock.

The so-called ‘anti-Semitism crisis’ – that involved a handful of individuals in a political party of more than 400 MPs and peers and around 500,000 members – was also used as a stick with which to beat Corbyn by his enemies

For Ryan to claim that it is “anti-Semitic” to describe LFI as a well-funded, prestigious group, membership of which can be “a stepping-stone to good jobs” is instructive about just how willing Israel’s apologists are to drain the term of all meaning.

It is also a reminder of how the charge of anti-Semitism has been weaponised by both the Israeli government and the enemies of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The latter occurred during Corbyn’s leadership election bid in 2015, when papers such as the Daily Mail and Jewish Chronicle ran a series of articles attacking the veteran left-winger, including attacking him through crude efforts at guilt through (tenuous) association.

But the Labour “anti-Semitism crisis” really got going in February 2016, with the resignation of a former intern at Israel lobby group the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) from the Oxford University Labour Club in protest at its endorsement of Israeli Apartheid Week.

http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/israel-lobby-scandal-intimately-linked-labour-s-anti-semitism-crisis-325901600

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/b4bf8338-1b94-11e7-a266-12672483791a

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@Pseudo Nym @Alan G

‘The gnashing of Jewish teeth’ is very descriptive of the hewing to the Party Line of Jewish Victim-hood, that organizations like AIPAC and J Street in American, use as a political cudgel, to accuse any critic or criticism of Judaism/Zionism as heretical: prima facae Antisemitism! Just consider the various Front Organizations, in Britain, that are, in fact, propaganda outlets for Zionists apologetics. Or journalists like Jonathan Freedland who writes regularly for The Guardian and the American publication of The New York Review of Books.

Antisemitism is defined by your ideological stance, because if you politicize your religion and your culture, with its cornerstone of ‘The Diaspora Myth’, as Jews continued to live in Palestine alongside of Arabs for millennia, then no criticism will rise to the status of legitimacy.

Consider this, if Zionism has legitimacy, then Political Islam also has legitimacy! Or consider the case of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: they had their land invaded, and genocide committed against them, by white Europeans, into the political present,yet their claim for a Home Land of their own might be met with what?

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

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@John Smith @tom older

Mr. Smith, I found Mr. Older’s comment enlightening and informative, in its historical dimension, and on Tulip Siddiq’s membership in the Labour Friends of Israel! The comment is ‘helpful’ in that it identifies/clarifies Siddiq’s political loyalties. Hewing to the Party Line of the invented ‘Labour Antisemitism Crisis’ is of utmost importance, to the Tony Blair faction of Neo-Liberalism, whose project is the reification of its bourgeois political respectability.

Regards, StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/2nuq9vC

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http://on.ft.com/2of5rhM

@Quietly Waiting
The very existence of the American Political/Legal Romanticism, dubbed The Federalist Society, is proof that the Brown I and II Supreme Court cases were the precipitating legal events, that legitimized this radical political nostalgia for a Pre-Civil War America. The names Rehnquist,Scalia, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and now Gorsuch, were or are the ultimate arbiters of American Law, in the political present, confirms that dismal assessment.
With the martyr Robert Bork standing as the great object lesson to the Neo-Confederate Originalists i.e. don’t look like or echo the loathsome racism of some character out of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. Rather cultivate the white bourgeois politically respectable guise of Roberts and Gorsuch, as a central part of canny excise of a Public Relations campaign to appear as ‘just plain folks’. A talent Ronald Reagan mastered with great success. ‘There you go again’ that ‘awe shucks demeanor‘ played well, with an audience addled by 30 years of television entertainment. Except that Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair speech placed him firmly in the Dixiecrat Tradition!

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/2peAXu5

The Financial Times has closed the comments section to Mr. Haass’ latest essay on the Syrian bombing:

Mr. Haass:

In the summer of 2013 the Syrian government employed chemical weapons against its own civilians, killing an estimated 1,500 men, women and children in the process. It did so in defiance of international warnings that such action would be met with severe consequences.

https://www.ft.com/content/cdf31270-1ac2-11e7-a266-12672483791a

Mr. Hersh:

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.

In his nationally televised speech about Syria on 10 September, Obama laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on the rebel-held suburb of Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad’s government, and made it clear he was prepared to back up his earlier public warnings that any use of chemical weapons would cross a ‘red line’: ‘Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people,’ he said. ‘We know the Assad regime was responsible … And that is why, after careful deliberation, I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike.’ Obama was going to war to back up a public threat, but he was doing so without knowing for sure who did what in the early morning of 21 August.

He cited a list of what appeared to be hard-won evidence of Assad’s culpability: ‘In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighbourhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.’ Obama’s certainty was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told the New York Times: ‘No one with whom I’ve spoken doubts the intelligence’ directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin

Headline: Beware of the return of the Clinton dynasty

Sub-headline: A public revival would blunt Democratic attacks on the Trump presidency

Mr. Luce and the headline writers at the Financial Times have produced a simulacrum of Journalism. Contrary to Luce and those writers, the Clinton Corporatist Democrats are still in charge! Schumer & Pelosi still hold office in the Senate and the House. The Clintonites put Tom Perez into the DNC chairmanship. They couldn’t stand the thought that Keith Ellison might just be a threat to their hegemony, even though to call him a ‘reformist’ is the purest kind of inflation. Where are Podesta, Donna Brazile,Debbie Wassermann-Schultz, Robby Mook,  Jennifer Palmieri,  Amanda Renteria, Huma Abedin?

The Clinton Operatives haven’t gone anywhere, they have been busy stoking the fires of the New Cold War, by having their allies/confederates/lapdogs, in and out of office, call the imagined Russian interference in the American election ‘An Act of War’! The ghosts of the Nixon/McCarthy have taken over the New Democrats, in their desperation of losing to Trump. Even the coven of Neo-Cons in the State Dept. represented by Victoria Nuland and Richard Holbrooke protege Susan Rice are doing their part.

Read part of a transcript of an interview of Noam Chomsky at Democracy Now, in which he opines on the question of Russian interference in the American election:

‘NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s a pretty remarkable fact that—first of all, it is a joke. Half the world is cracking up in laughter. The United States doesn’t just interfere in elections. It overthrows governments it doesn’t like, institutes military dictatorships. Simply in the case of Russia alone—it’s the least of it—the U.S. government, under Clinton, intervened quite blatantly and openly, then tried to conceal it, to get their man Yeltsin in, in all sorts of ways. So, this, as I say, it’s considered—it’s turning the United States, again, into a laughingstock in the world.

So why are the Democrats focusing on this? In fact, why are they focusing so much attention on the one element of Trump’s programs which is fairly reasonable, the one ray of light in this gloom: trying to reduce tensions with Russia? That’s—the tensions on the Russian border are extremely serious. They could escalate to a major terminal war. Efforts to try to reduce them should be welcomed. Just a couple of days ago, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Jack Matlock, came out and said he just can’t believe that so much attention is being paid to apparent efforts by the incoming administration to establish connections with Russia. He said, “Sure, that’s just what they ought to be doing.”

So, meanwhile, this one topic is the primary locus of concern and critique, while, meanwhile, the policies are proceeding step by step, which are extremely destructive and harmful. So, you know, yeah, maybe the Russians tried to interfere in the election. That’s not a major issue. Maybe the people in the Trump campaign were talking to the Russians. Well, OK, not a major point, certainly less than is being done constantly. And it is a kind of a paradox, I think, that the one issue that seems to inflame the Democratic opposition is the one thing that has some justification and reasonable aspects to it.

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/full_interview_noam_chomsky_on_democracy

And the New Democrats will, after the Gorsuch Melodrama is decided yea or nay, revert to type, meaning the same failed Neo-Reaganism that ‘Goldwater Girl’ Hillary ably represents.

The comic notion that the New Democrats, sans Clinton, are the political instrument that will check Trump, and the Republican Nihilists/Dixiecrats, is tantamount to the fox guarding the hen house. New Democratic Corporatists vs. Republican Corporatists? They are  both on the same side: The Property Party.

Political Cynic

https://www.ft.com/content/e63646c4-1962-11e7-a53d-df09f373be87

It is a surprise that Mr. Ganesh begins his latest essay, that posits the notion that angry votes are ‘nostalgic for paternalist government’ with the observations of Saul Bellow and his attack on FDR, as a member of the now utterly forgotten WASP elite, who graduated from an exclusive prep school, as the expression of the power of a goyisher elite.

The FDR of ‘I welcome your hatred’ directed at his Wall Street enemies! Poor Mr. Bellow suffered from a life long complex, born of the persistent, even intractable Antisemitism of America from 1924 to his death in 2005. Mr. Bellow failed to see the what and the why of the political ascension of that ‘Groton boy’, who, by the way, saved Capitalism from itself: Glass-Steagall and Securities Exchange Act of 1934,in alliance with Ferdinand Pecora.

And not to forget Bellow’s praise of Allen Bloom’s ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ that collection of Neo-Conservative cultural/political paranoiac ramblings, couched in a irrational hatred of  ‘Rock and Roll’ addicted nihilistic youth: his students.  And Bellow’s tribute to this Nihilist dressed in ‘Classicist Drag’ that is his repetitive, not to speak of the tedious, ‘Ravelstein’. Mr. Ganesh’s demonstrable ignorance of the American literary/political context, of which Bellow was an integral part, places his argument about the nostalgia of voters for a powerful elite, read authoritarian political leadership, where?

That ‘where’ is manifested in his rhetorical failure, in his carefully constructed argument, predicated on political misdirection: Neo-Liberalism failed in 2008, and the watershed of that Crash. Allied with the ignominious failure of  the  Neo-Liberal Elites to address that failure, and the problems that have manifested themselves, up until the present.

In the American political context this was demonstrated by the Podesta e mails, that  proved to be the undoing of the Corporatist Democrat Hillary Clinton.  And her confederates Podesta, Donna Brazile,Debbie Wassermann-Schultz, Robby Mook,  Jennifer Palmieri,  Amanda Renteria, Huma Abedin. The New Democrats lost in the Rust Belt, because of the utter corruption of the Party, as those leaked e mails proved. This group engaged in a concerted effort to bury the New Deal Insurgency of Bernie Sanders, and succeeded in gaining the popular vote, but lost in the Electoral College.

Ganesh dare not place the blame where it belongs. He places blame on his imagined notion that the voters are subject to a nostalgia for ‘paternalistic government’ ! Truly an astounding assertion, given that The Rebellion against the Elites, ballyhooed at the Financial Times, was, in effect, a rebellion against that dead end of Neo-Liberalism. The Mainstream parties like New Labour and the New Democrats had long since surrendered to the mirage of the Free Market Delusion. While the  Republicans were/are lost in a nostalgia for untrammeled white male power, dubbed ‘Originalism’, when it is, in fact, the political exhumation of the Dixiecrats.

Mr. Ganesh’s focus is on ‘The West’, that gives him ample space to wander, chatter and to pick and choose his miscreants: Trump, Le Pen, the Brexit quislings. That becomes the great empty rhetorical space in which Mr. Ganesh will pour his usual bile and spleen, on the abstraction of ‘voters’ that wins the loyalty of his coterie of acolytes. Not to forget Ganesh lapse into vulgar pop psychology:

They see modern elites as lax parents, not strict ones, unconscionably passive during the past few decades of foreign economic competition and breakneck social change.

Mr. Ganesh’s  rhetoric comes to one of its many denouements in these two sentences:

To read about the architects of that era is to bathe in shameless, seigneurial elitism. The economist John Maynard Keynes, the diplomats Henry Kissinger and George Kennan, Robert Schuman and other founders of the European project.

One is in awe of this first sentence, steeped in Ganesh’s trademark of withering contempt, in full fledged bravura mode. But where is the great father of the EU cartel  Jean Monnet?

Yet the real villains are given cover by the Ganesh Chatter: the New Labour of Tony Blair and the Tories, have been washed clean of any well deserved taint, by this professional political dramaturge. Who exalts ‘the brute realities of the market’ and the political sadomasochism of the ‘voters’. With the assistance of the un-lamented political reactionary Mr. Bellow.

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/65d719fa-1542-11e7-b0c1-37e417ee6c76

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Mid Pacific Risk,

Thank you for your comment. ‘Your protracted intellectual peacocking’ might just be called thinking, if you weren’t busy practicing that same art, with a certain éclat!  As does Mr. Ganesh, except he lapses into the use of political bile and spleen, that dissolves any insight that his thoughts might offer, into extended vituperation, against his political antagonists. Mr. Ganesh fails to comprehend the various shades that polemic is capable of expressing, its nuanced use eludes him, his contempt leads the way.

On the question of Bellow, his 1964 book ‘Herzog’, which I read sometime in 1965, featured long passages in French. As I recall my frustration of not being a reader of French. He seems rather obviously to be paying court to the very respectable bourgeois critics i.e. WASP’s:

 ‘National Book Award for Fiction^[3] and the The Prix International. TIME magazine named it one of the 100 best novels in the English language since “the beginning of TIME” (1923 to 2005).^[4][5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herzog_(novel)

‘Bellow could be read as commenting on the irony of a Vox Populi being the virtual incarnation of WASP privilege.’

Bellow was a rather unimaginative Conservative, his ally being the notorious Professor Bloom, so I find the notion that he could, or might, see the irony of FDR being the voice of Vox Populi – although this idea has an obvious appeal, in fact it has achieved the status as an observation on the conundrum of The New Deal leader- as a reader of Bellow I find he was a writer of demotic fiction, he is in no way a Jamesian. I find the notion of Bellow as ironist unconvincing.

The irony continues to the present, where many of us watched in deep amazement at a flamboyant walking justification for confiscatory estate taxes from New York City who connected with disaffected working class voters.

The above reference is to Mayor de Blasio? a committed Clinton supporter, a committed Neo-Liberal in Reformist Drag.

Your lapse into Pop Psychoanalysis seems like the anachronism that it is!

Americans will learn the brutal lesson of childhood: Daddy isn’t all powerful and cannot protect you.

The New Dealers like Warren and Sanders can lead the way without the paternalism, if not, then the Greens and the Libertarians will make the political case for a New Deal for the 21st Century.  In answer to the ignominious failure of the Neo-Liberal Dispensation.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

Is there noting so dependable than Mr. Rachman’s speculation, and almost anguish, over the question of Brexit? Or the fact that he is a reliable member of the apologists for the E.U., as the historical precursor of the now utterly collapsed Neo-Liberalism: we are now in the ninth year of its ignominious collapse. Of course, those 1%’s are very happy with the dismal economic/political present. Although the rise and the flourishing of ‘The Populists’ is a constant reminder of the persistent failure of the Free Market Dogmas.

Here is the proof that Mr. Rachman, as a member of the press, that confirms his status as expert/technocrat of a very particular kind. Or as apologist for Monnet’s Dream, a cartel with democratic garnish, as it comes apart in agonizing slow motion :

I was sitting in the audience at the annual Anglo-German Königswinter conference as the two ministers attempted to charm their German audience.

The reader looks on in a kind of wonder as Merkel, as the dynamic leader of the four time defaulter Germany, is the arbiter for the Virtuous Norther Tier, as one of its own bids adieu. A melodrama destined for the small screen.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has posted an interview that The Real News Network’s Kim Brown conducted with Nick Dearden, of Jubilee Debt Campaign and Global Justice Now. The headline reads: ‘“Henry VIII Clauses” in Britain’s “Great Repeal” Brexit Bill Gives Government Unprecedented Powers’. A long quote from the transcript is instructive:

KIM BROWN: What are you calling for? And what can people in the UK do on a practical level that might influence the Great Repeal Bill?

NICK DEARDEN: The number of laws that are going to be, not just transferred, but also changed in the next two or three years, is going to be absolutely phenomenal. And it will touch everybody in the country, and every aspect of their lives. And I think people aren’t geared up anywhere near enough for what a big task this is, and how, if we don’t keep our eyes on it, if we don’t try and hold to account the government, challenge what they’re trying to do in various important ways, we’re going to end up with the most enormous power grab.

You know, we don’t have a written constitution here. And most countries that have written constitutions, they wouldn’t allow something like Henry VIII powers. But we have a very archaic parliamentary system. Unfortunately, that does make it easier, for governments like ours, who believe they have a mandate from the British people — even if the British people only voted marginally to leave the European Union — and they didn’t vote for all manner of other things that are now being told… we’re being told, well, that’s just how it is, this is what people voted for.

We never voted to leave the European Single Market, but we’re being told we absolutely have to. We didn’t vote to rip up freedom of movement of people across the European Union. We’re now being told, and yes, absolutely that’s what people voted on. So, all kinds of major decisions are being taken at the moment. And not only are we, as a public, unaware of that, but Parliament is particularly supine, in its ability to challenge the government, or confront the government, or change any of this.

And if we really want to change any of this, then ordinary people need to educate themselves about what’s going on, and we can help do that by trying to explain what the Great Repeal Bill is. We need to get this stuff in the media, and most important, we need to tell our elected representatives not to simply sign away their authority for scrutinizing, and holding the government to account, about how these laws are going to be changed, and what our new laws are going to look like.

I mean, there’s going to be… We’re going to completely have to rethink our trade regime, our food and farming policies. Our immigration policies, our taxation policies -– all of these things are going to have to be rewritten — and they’re going to have to be rewritten very quickly. At the moment, I would say, our Parliament is simply proving itself not to be up to the job of scrutinizing this.

So, if our elected representatives are unable to do it, it falls to us as people, to really start looking in detail at what’s going on. Protesting where we need to protest, challenging and confronting where we need to challenge and confront, and make sure…

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/henry-vii-clauses-britains-great-repeal-brexit-bill-gives-government-unprecedented-powers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Mr. Rachman is too busy speculating, to address such mundane questions as the care and maintenance of democratic values and their institutional protection. What the reader of Mr. Rachman’s speculations gets, is awash in the technocratic chatter of the ‘expert’, in defense of ‘Monnet’s Dream’, as it has realized itself historically into German economic hegemony. With the Greeks acting as the sacrificial victim of German hubris and hypocrisy, is a reality that is avoided at all costs, here at The Financial Times, and by its employee Mr. Rachman.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/655f8dbe-1541-11e7-b0c1-37e417ee6c76

Here is a screen shot from my e mail of commenter89363 post on The Financial Times’ Janan Ganesh’s essay ‘The menace of populism has made the tribal left think again’. Can’t understand the rationale for its removal?

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/13a06188-0fc9-11e7-a88c-50ba212dce4d