StephenKMackSD's Blog

Recall that old saw ‘think like a lawyer’? Its an invitation to the exercise of self-serving mendacity, at the very least. Here is the center  of the case that The Economist makes for believing the lawless operatives of the American National State.

In language as blunt as it is startling, the assessment, written by the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency, declares that this crime is no whodunnit. Though the declassified report does not make public its sources or supporting evidence, it declares the “high confidence” of American spy chiefs that they know the culprit. It finds that: “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign… to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

The descriptor ‘high confidence’ is the rhetorical place holder for the actual evidence, that is so secret that it can’t be used in a public document. That lack of ‘evidence’ is the product of  National Security State rampant paternalism.

Some of the readers of this newspaper are old enough to recall Joe McCarthy’s waving around his ‘List of Names’. This is the purest hyperbole, to match this:

‘AMERICAN democracy has suffered a grave assault…’

The Trinity of American Exceptionalism, American Hypocrisy and American Mendacity comes together in the notion that ‘grave assault’: American innocence besmirched by a kind of abstruse Russian revanchism?

The record of American interference in the domestic affairs of other countries, since the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823,  even to the point of invasion and occupation, the disappeared facts of the case. Call it American Stalinism i.e. the attempt to erase the inconvenient facts of history, allied to the branding of dissidents as ‘deviationists’. In the Age of the Internet, those dissidents to the Party Line are named ‘trolls’ who are by rhetorical prestidigitation the 5th Column from another age.

Call this moment in American History 1952 Redux. Except that the role of Inquisitor is continually shifting from Republicans like the Neo-Con McCain to New Democrats like Neo-Liberal Schumer.  While the role of Paul Ryan, as Trump apologists, casts him in the role of a Hubert Humphrey to his Lyndon Johnson. Ryan’s burning political ambition renders him a comic figure, without a trace of the pathos, that can humanize even the most unsympathetic comic bungler.

Political Cynic

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2017/01/assault-democracy?spc=scode&spv=xm&ah=9d7f7ab945510a56fa6d37c30b6f1709

Headline: Manuel Valls shifts to left as France’s Socialist frontrunner

Sub-headline: Favourite to be party’s presidential candidate unveils policy plans

January 2,2017

Mr Valls promised on Tuesday not to reform France’s 35-hour working week or its labour laws and to reject the politics of austerity. “Today the question is not the deficit, it is growth and employment,” he said.

https://www.ft.com/content/3af8282a-d134-11e6-9341-7393bb2e1b51

It is hard to keep up with the ever changing French Political situation, and the utterly changeable Mr. Valls and his evolution? pragmatism? opportunism?

With his (Valls ed.) departure, however, the Socialist party now has a real opportunity to debate its differences and decide its identity. It is important that it should do so — rather than seeking to maintain a superficial consensus — in order to provide a real counterbalance to an increasingly assertive French right.

…

And he has plenty of enemies in his party, after questioning core policies such as the 35-hour week.

https://www.ft.com/content/5b13c7c2-bbae-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080

In this  December 6,2016 editorial The Financial Times gives its recommendation to Valls in light of Hollande: ‘He had also signally failed to restore dynamism to the economy and raise living standards in the deprived, deindustrialising regions where blue-collar voters are increasingly attentive to the Eurosceptic, protectionist rhetoric of Marine Le Pen.’ 

Headline:France’s Socialist party has a chance to rebuild

Sub-headline: The successor to Hollande must resolve the longstanding divisions

Manuel Valls’ entry into the race is a welcome development. The outgoing prime minister’s zeal for market-oriented reform and tough law and order stance are in tune with a rightward shift in the French electorate. Yet Mr Valls may struggle to overcome his association with Mr Hollande’s failed term. And he has plenty of enemies in his party, after questioning core policies such as the 35-hour week. Arnaud Montebourg, one of the rebels who left the government in 2014, is a more obvious representative of the party’s leftwing. He could also be a more natural choice for working-class voters tempted to defect to Ms Le Pen.

https://www.ft.com/content/5b13c7c2-bbae-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080

Now read this excerpt of  Wolfgang Streeck’s essay titled ‘How Will Capitalism End’ at The New Left Review of May-June 2014:

Thirdly, the commodification of human labour may have reached a critical point. Deregulation of labour markets under international competition has undone whatever prospects there might once have been for a general limitation of working hours. [25] It has also made employment more precarious for a growing share of the population. [26] With the rising labour-market participation of women, due in part to the disappearance of the ‘family wage’, hours per month sold by families to employers have increased while wages have lagged behind productivity, most dramatically in the capitalist heartland, the us (see Figure 7). At the same time, deregulation and the destruction of trade unions notwithstanding, labour markets typically fail to clear, and residual unemployment on the order of 7 to 8 per cent has become the new normal, even in a country like Sweden. Sweatshops have expanded in many industries including services, but mostly on the global periphery, beyond the reach of the authorities and what remains of trade unions in the capitalist centre, and out of view of consumers. As sweated labour competes with workers in countries with historically strong labour protections, working conditions for the former deteriorate while unemployment becomes endemic for the latter. Meanwhile, complaints multiply about the penetration of work into family life, alongside pressures from labour markets to join an unending race to upgrade one’s ‘human capital’. Moreover, global mobility enables employers to replace unwilling local workers with willing immigrant ones. It also compensates for sub-replacement fertility, itself due in part to a changed balance between unpaid and paid work and between non-market and market consumption. The result is a secular weakening of social counter-movements, caused by a loss of class and social solidarity and accompanied by crippling political conflicts over ethnic diversity, even in traditionally liberal countries such as the Netherlands, Sweden or Norway.

[25] Consider the attack on the last remnants of the 35-hour week in France, under the auspices of a Socialist president and his party.

https://newleftreview.org/II/87/wolfgang-streeck-how-will-capitalism-end

In sum the Financial Times and Valls once agreed about the 35 -hour week, as a first step toward the Neo-Liberalization of Socialist France, except that Hollande led the way! And then Valls capitulated to the faction led by ‘ Arnaud Montebourg, the firebrand former industry minister’, the leader of the ‘extremists’ in his Party! The pretense of this editorial, an advocacy of the  ‘reform’ of the Socialist Party in France. In sum, how can the Financial Times support Valls, given his capitulation?  But what of the Speed and Shock of the Marinetti/Thatcherism of François Fillon? Except that he is a friend of Putin.What are the editors to do?

Political Observer

The notion that Marco Rubio, Bob Corker and John McCain, and his running dog Lindsey Graham, represent the voice of political rationalism, has all the credibility of a script written by Mel Brooks, with a cast of comic political figures. Or to reach back even further into the history of American movies, not cinema,  Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant black comedy ‘Dr. Stangelove’, and its collection of satiric characters is probably a more descriptive analogy, to this quartet of senators, mentioned above!* I forgot to give proper credit to the screen writers Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George. This film is the work of all three! Recall Sen. McCain’s rendition of Bomb,Bomb,Bomb Iran?

Mr Tillerson is trying his best to hew to the current respectable political Party Line. But receiving the ‘Order of Friendship’, from Putin, is of the same order of magnitude of Paul Robeson receiving the Stalin Peace Prize?

*added on January 11, 2017, 3:32 PST

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/ea135b7a-d7f8-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6aa8e

Kerry once stood for something noble, the cultivation of civic republican virtue, American decency, but then he became the victim of his own political ambition, and his desire to play a role on the world stage.
He is not exactly like Rostow, McNamara, or the Bundy brothers i.e. ‘The Best and the Brightest’ or Joe Alsop’s WASP Ascendancy: Joe was always myopic about himself and his Fraternity of goyisher technocrats.
Its hard to forgive Kerry’s 2012 DNC speech praising American Exceptionalism, Moral Authority, Strategic Imperatives, and ,of course the leadership of Obama: the price of admission was high, but Kerry paid that price with a real enthusiasm, and eloquence. Not to speak of a gift to exploit that political moment, as the necessary step to a place that would fulfill a part of his ambition.

Kerry, at the least, acted as the broker of the Iran agreement expressed his commitment to peace. Yet the Ukrainian Coup of 2014 led by ‘diplomats’ Neo-Con Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt, demonstrated the policy schizophrenia of Obama. And the mendacity of the American Policy Establishment, NATO, the EU and American NGO’s, that were/are political bad actors.
Given the ascendancy of the Know-Nothing Trump, its best to face the fact that Kerry wasn’t a paragon, but was a man and political actor, whose DNC speech codified his faith in the political metaphysics of American Exceptionalism. And insured his rise to that position of power and prestige.

Political Observer

In sum, and I’m foreshortening Wolf’s self-serving ramble through most of the 20th and 21st Centuries economic/political history: this is one of the ‘core arguments’ of that potted history, that he reconstructs, eliding what is inconvenient, in his melodramatic essay: ‘The long and painful journey to world disorder’ :

The Middle East is in turmoil. Mass migration has become a threat to European stability. Mr Putin’s Russia is on the march. Mr Xi’s China is increasingly assertive. The west seems impotent.

These geopolitical shifts are, in part, the result of desirable changes, notably the spread of rapid economic development beyond the west, particularly to the Asian giants, China and India. Some are also the result of choices made elsewhere, not least Russia’s decision to reject liberal democracy in favour of nationalism and autocracy as the core of its post-communist identity and China’s to combine a market economy with communist control.

Mr. Wolf identifies the enemies of The New Cold War as revanchist Russia under the leadership of autocrat Putin, and China as subversive because of its State Capitalism under the Communist banner, the combination of For Profit and Communism is antithetical to Wolf’s Free Market sensibility.What goes unmentioned is China’s  ‘belligerence’ in the South China Sea!  The two new enemies are tersely sketched out, the potted history the framing device that lends credibility to this propagandistic reductivism.

Mr. Wolf lacks the capacity for candor. He mentions the political rise of Neo-Liberals Thatcher and Reagan, yet utterly fails to connect the Crash of 2008, and its economic/political watershed in the rise of The Rebellion Against The Elites, to that very Neo-Liberalism. Which was not only about the apotheosis of the Market, but the active destruction of the Welfare State, that has exacerbated the predations of that Crash and its reverberations into the present moment. The Populists were born of that 2008 Crash, and the failure of the technocratic elite to bring about the return of economic prosperity. Yet he recognises the problems of that Crash, and its aftermath, in his careful re-description while hewing to the Party Line. The imperative: do not connect Neo-Liberal policies and its actors to that Crash and the dismal economic present:

Western economies have also been affected, to varying degrees, by slowing growth, rising inequality, high unemployment (especially in southern Europe), falling labour force participation and deindustrialisation. These shifts have had particularly adverse effects on relatively unskilled men. Anger over mass immigration has grown, particularly in parts of the population also adversely affected by other changes.

Some of these shifts were the result of economic changes that were either inevitable or the downside of desirable developments. The threat to unskilled workers posed by technology could not be plausibly halted, nor could the rising competitiveness of emerging economies. Yet, in economic policy, too, big mistakes were made, notably the failure to ensure the gains from economic growth were more widely shared. The financial crisis of 2007-09 and subsequent eurozone crisis were, however, the decisive events.

So much more to be said about Mr. Wolf’s essay, whose outsize ambition isn’t quite realized, even though it is long by Financial Times standard. Let me quote the first paragraph of Chris Hedges essay of January 1, 2017 at Truthdig. Sure to raise the hackles of Mr. Wolf and his readers:

The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx predicted, would be marked by global capital being unable to expand and generate profits at former levels. Capitalists would begin to consume the government along with the physical and social structures that sustained them. Democracy, social welfare, electoral participation, the common good and investment in public transportation, roads, bridges, utilities, industry, education, ecosystem protection and health care would be sacrificed to feed the mania for short-term profit. These assaults would destroy the host. This is the stage of late capitalism that Donald Trump represents.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/defying_donald_trumps_kleptocracy_20170101

Almost Marx

(January 08,2017) Further thoughts:

I read, for the second time, Mr. Wolf’s essay and was surprised by its clumsy and uneven presentation. It is composed of parts of an argument, that takes the form of notations, thoughts strung together that were/are germane to the topic, but lack integration into an argumentative whole. Wolf extemporizes on the Decline of the West, in all its doom and gloom: a West whose gift was/is Capitalism, in its most pristine form, that has not just been subject to its perennial and periodic crises, but to what  Mr. Hedges characterizes as:

The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx predicted, would be marked by global capital being unable to expand and generate profits at former levels.

In the final section titled ‘Free trade and Prosperity’ , one wonders at Wolf’s faith in the Capitalist Party line of ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ to engage in vulgar reductivism. Two questions occur: what happened to the myth of the ‘Self-Correcting Market’? In the thought of Hayek the ‘Market’, and its winnowing mechanisms, has epistemological primacy.  And to engage with the real world, as opposed to policy questions, like the fate of ‘The West’ ,the ‘Liberal International Order’ and the ‘Fate of Capitalism’ three cornerstones, in danger from the dread Populist Insurgency: how might Wolf address the question of poverty in Great Britain.

The UK has 3.9 million people in “persistent poverty” according to a report released from the Office for National Statistics today.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-poverty-the-charts-that-show-the-true-state-of-low-income-britain-a7031666.html

This essay is enlivened by the charts Mr. Wolf finds indispensable to his essays.

A.M.

After the ersatz moralizing tone on Mrs. May’s religious upbringing, as presented/argued  by the Economist’s writers: comparing her to Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown because of her and their religious upbringing. And the utterly laughable comparison of her political style to that of ‘her cricketing hero, Geoffrey Boycott’ ! What to call this idiocy?

A social reformism rooted in her Anglican upbringing and practice (“part of who I am and therefore how I approach things”, she has said) has been a constant of her career. When the voters of Maidenhead first sent her to Westminster in 1997 she was, in this respect, to the left of her party. In 2002 she warned her colleagues and their supporters that they had become known as “the nasty party”. The following year, as shadow transport minister, she argued for more state intervention in the economy, a more nuanced relationship with trade unions and limits on fat-cat excesses.

All of this lives on in her premiership. When, having lost the Brexit referendum, Mr Cameron resigned, Mrs May enumerated the inequities of modern Britain as she launched her campaign to succeed him: boys born poor die nine years earlier than others; children educated in state schools are less likely to reach the top professions than those educated privately; many women earn less than men.

When she became prime minister she repeated some of these “burning injustices” on the steps of Downing Street. She has talked up a new generation of state-run grammar schools (schools, like the one she attended, that are allowed to select their pupils through competitive exams) to give clever children from poor backgrounds a leg up. She has hinted at worker representation on company boards; she has lamented the effect of the Bank of England’s low interest rates on savers.

Mrs. May is hobbled by her Christian ethical/political scruples, from being like Mrs. Thatcher, a committed and ruthless Hayekian, and her epigones like Tony Blair and David Cameron. She is a weak and suffering from various maladies as described here, but she suffers from the contempt ‘by public-school boys given to cavalier confidence and clever-clever plans:’ The mention of this acts as cover for the contempt of the Economist writers, whose essay is awash in contempt for Mrs. May’s weaknesses, psychological and physical.

Mrs May patently stands apart from many of her colleagues in ways that go beyond this reformism; there is a social distance, too. Some say it has to do with the isolating shock of losing both of her parents when she was relatively young. Others cite her experience of diabetes—the prime minister must inject herself with insulin several times a day. But the best explanation is her career as a woman educated at a provincial grammar-school (the granddaughter of domestic servants, no less) in a party dominated by public-school boys given to cavalier confidence and clever-clever plans. When her allies praise Mrs May’s methodical style and her disdain for chummy, informal “sofa government”, they are channelling her long-held exasperation with the know-it-all posh boys—particularly Mr Cameron and George Osborne, his chancellor.

This is an insidious and very cleverly written attack on Mrs. May from The Economist, the very bastion of Neo-Liberal advocacy, apologetics.The pronouncement: she is not one of us!

This is an example of the analytical rigor of the  Theologians at the Economist. It is serio-comic:

There may be lessons as to Mrs May’s possible longevity and success from her fellow children of the cloth, Mr Brown and Mrs Merkel.

The Economist comes to bury Mrs. May not to praise her! Not since the halcyon days of the rise of Jeremy Corby, has the polemical power of the Economist’s  writers been used to such stunning effect! Those writers have produced a minor classic of reactionary polemics, attacking their own Tories, and its leader Mrs. May.

One wonders at the insularity of British Conservative political class, and it’s House Organ The Economist. In America, Reagan’s adroit use of the ‘Eleventh Commandment’, never speak ill of another Republican, served to maintain Republican power for 12 years. Or at least until the New Democrats, ersatz Republicans in New Deal drag, the Clintons, came to power completing, enacting the Reagan Agenda, with a manic relish. The Economist’s search for Apostates in the ranks of ‘the children of the cloth’ is a futile attempt to rescue Neo-Liberalism in its state of total collapse!

So much more to be said on this commentary!

Political Observer

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21713834-understanding-britains-unelected-prime-minister-and-her-prospects-means-grasping-her-background

My reply to guest-wooomeo

Thank you for your reply. Yet the Republican Party membership you refer to are the respectable bourgeois wing of the Party, who are in utter denial that what they collectively represented since 1947: the Mundt/McCarty/McCarren/Nixon Party,the Barry Goldwater of ‘extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice’  the Southern Strategy of Nixon, The Reagan of the Noshoba County Fair speech: ‘I believe in States Rights’, the Willie Horton race baiting of Bush The Elder, or the utterly bellicose Bush The Younger, and his capos Cheney and Rumsfeld. Those respectable Republican stalwarts you look to as leaders of the Party are appalled by their creature Trump. He is the populist version of the  Nixon and Reagan Republicans, groomed by experts in the canny use of the dye pot, and the paint and powder favored by both Nixon and Reagan.

The collapse of the Neo-Liberal Dogmas, and the Economic Depression that we are still mired in, 8 years after that fact. The technocrats who advocated this ‘Revolution’, and were its enactors, still can’t bring that elusive thing called Prosperity back from what looks like extinction. Even after the Bailout, the utterly failed Austerity and Quantitative Easing- the jobs being created are low paying service jobs. Given all this, why is the rise of Trump so inexplicable? or any one of the many populists of both Left and Right. His being Ringmaster on The Apprentice, for so many seasons, established his Leadership credentials, with a receptive audience exhausted by a failed Political Establishment, both respectable mainline Republicans and the utterly corrupt New Democrats!

Pop psychology, or better yet psychological cliche, and the careful use of innuendo, fuel what we in America call a ‘hatchet job’. But one of best examples of the genre, because it takes as its first obligation, to tell a good story, to construct a compelling political melodrama, to portray Mrs. May, even as it relies on cliche, it has the ring of verisimilitude, or of honest reportage. Whoever wrote this is a gifted propagandist, except that the reader is always aware of the ideological root that is this essay’s reason d’etre.

Your comment is utterly irresponsible. What happened to the Rule of Law and the long established Democratic process? If you want to place blame start with the New Democrats and their active subversion of Sanders, in favor of Mrs. Clinton? In the present and pervasive Populist mood, Sanders could have won! As those leaked e mails demonstrated, The Party was corrupt to is core, with a candidate in thrall of Wall Street, with the added fact that Podesta was taking $7,000 a month from a ‘Foundation’, from one of those very Fat Cats.

Also thank NBC for providing a years long platform, from which this Fascist established his ‘Leadership’ style/status! In your rhetorical construction  ‘Whatever it takes’ equals  ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’. Your making noises like a Leninist: the voice of political reason? – support the coming Coup starring one of these political dull wits: Powell or Petraeus. Under the banner of National Reconciliation. Cry havoc.. and let the Second American Civil War commence!

StephenKMackSD

Commenters below have take a new tack in trying to bury this story. The goal-posts of course have to keep changing: any and all manner of chaffe has been thrown up to distract and mis-direct: from Russo-phobia to Seth Rich to the intelligence-agencies-don’t-agree and now to “well, even if they do agree, it’s probably just like the Iraq WMD intel”.

It took me several times, in reading your comments, to reach the tentative conclusion that what is presented in the above paragraph, as the vehicle for your description of the rhetorical/political strategy of your opponents is really a revelation of your own strategy!

Or more pointedly, the strategy adopted by Neo-Conservative guru Leo Strauss, who willfully misread the Philosophical Tradition:

Sphinx Without a Secret

And his American acolytes, like the late Allen Bloom, of ‘The Closing of the American Mind’, being just one. Poor Mr. Bloom, a pretender to the status of Philosopher King, and his camp followers attacked students as being addled by rock music and galloping narcissism. But don’t forget Strauss’ active students, via Bloom and others like Harvey Mansfield, in the rough and tumble of the debates in this century: Robert Kagan and Francis Fukuyama! Your rhetorical sophistication doesn’t quite measure up to these two, but is serviceable

In sum the Neo-Conservative uses ‘evidence’ with the aid of the strategically usable tangential to render the argument as opaque as possible. In your case, the reduction of this strategy is to name the arguments of your antagonists as ‘chaff’ and to dismissively characterize them as  ‘irrelevant’. Although your arguments in this exercise in self-justifying verbosity, are of interest, the point is not exposition but self-serving obfuscation. Not to speak of your self-confessed ignorance of who one of the Founding Fathers, James Monroe* was, in your reply to one of my comments!

(c) have no idea who Monroe was

Happy New Year!

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/2j0cv0j

*Revised 01/02/17 1:26 PDT

Mr. Weiss offers this to his avid readers, to welcome in the New Year:

The headline is further elucidated and/or framed by this sentence fragment from his second paragraph:

‘Ever since, in the long dark history of Soviet and Russian spookery…’

This has all the plangency, mystery, and foreshadowing of ‘it was dark and stormy night’. This is followed by more of Weiss’ foreshortened Melodrama, this chapter titled ‘The Noose Tightens’:

But on Thursday the GRU suddenly emerged from the shadows when the waning Obama administration imposed sanctions on the four top-ranking GRU officers for their roles hacking the private email correspondence of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta. The entire spy agency, along with the FSB, was also sanctioned institutionally.

But there is even more, Mr. Weiss can’t resist the urge to write his potted history. Concision and brevity are absent in his self-serving reconstruction. And not to forget that Weiss’ other aspiration is to be a War Correspondent, call him a Francoist Hemingway!    There is, beyond doubt, a manuscript in his right-hand desk drawer, that is not quite complete. Would that he had the time, to put his calling as Savior of Western Political Virtue, on hold long enough to finish his ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ‘.  Or, would that he had the talent of a Graham Greene, whose ‘entertainments’ still move the reader to this day. Or that he were an Eric Ambler, who was the natural inheritor of a long British tradition of the novel, that were called  ‘thrillers’ yet were impeccable examples of this long tradition.

American Writer

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/31/the-gru-putin-s-no-longer-so-secret-weapon.html

One can only marvel at the persistence of American hypocrisy, and the utter hubris of the idea and practice of American Exceptionalism. The historical record is crystal clear from the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to the Ukrainian Coup of 2014 that America makes its own rules and gets huffy,indignant and bellicose when the tables are turned. The very fact that the National Security Agencies, that have ‘found the evidence’ of Russian Hacking, are lawbreakers on world wide scale shouldn’t raise serious questions with the perceptive reader? This Financial Times essay asks for the suspension of ones critical faculties, that is the cornerstone of an un-reflective political conformity, this is the conformist’s response to political propaganda. What was Putin’s reply to America’s ,Obama’s provocations?

“We regard the recent unfriendly steps taken by the outgoing US administration as provocative and aimed at further weakening the Russia-US relationship.”

“This runs contrary to the fundamental interests of both the Russian and American people. Considering the global security responsibilities of Russia and the United States, this is also damaging to international relations as a whole.”

“As it proceeds from international practice, Russia has reasons to respond in kind. Although we have the right to retaliate, we will not resort to irresponsible ‘kitchen’ diplomacy but will plan our further steps to restore Russian-US relations based on the policies of the Trump Administration.”

“The diplomats who are returning to Russia will spend the New Year’s holidays with their families and friends. We will not create any problems for US diplomats.”

“We will not expel anyone. We will not prevent their families and children from using their traditional leisure sites during the New Year’s holidays.”

“Moreover, I invite all children of US diplomats accredited in Russia to the New Year and Christmas children’s parties in the Kremlin.” [ The Russian Orthodox Church uses the old Julian calendar for religious holidays, which puts Christmas on January 7.]

“It is regrettable that the Obama Administration is ending its term in this manner. Nevertheless, I offer my New Year greetings to President Obama and his family.”

“My season’s greetings also to President-elect Donald Trump and the American people.”

“I wish all of you happiness and prosperity.”

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/12/30/stephen-lendman-reports-president-putins-response-to-obamas-new-sanctions/

Paul Craig Roberts posts Stephen Lendman’s essay. The reader can make a judgement as to Putin’s character, but Mr. Lendman’s two final questions are telling:  Judge for yourself. Who’s the mensch and who’s the menace? Which way will Trump go? 

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/51f9584a-ce92-11e6-864f-20dcb35cede2

My reply to @onomasticator

Putin’s character? Can you possibly be serious?

I marvel at your inability to judge the man by his response to the provocations of Obama! How would the Gangster Putin, as you and so many others conceive him, have reacted to these ‘sanctions’. Your ability to judge the ‘character’ of Putin as the incarnation of ‘evil’ may well be true, but it speaks to the campaign of the demonization of Putin that is a cottage industry in ‘The West’.  The measured and rational tone of Putin’s response is either  the product of the Machiavellianism of The Prince i.e. the apotheosis of the Gangster, or just a canny politician, who just didn’t survive the  dissolution of the Soviet Union, but prevailed, after his appointment by the easily manipulated drunkard Yeltsin.

Why don’t you ask Anna Politkovskaya’s opinion? 

Here is the Wikipedia entry on Politkovskaya’s assassination, and you are right to raise the question, yet there were many other political ‘bad actors’ i.e. Gangsters who were threatened by her journalism. Putin, one among many!

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

As for the Monroe Doctrine, etc: all irrelevant.  

This is the position of Henry Ford: history is bunk!

But this issue is about what the U.S. does about a provocation by a foreign power. It’s that simple.

America is the hegemon, whose exercise of political will, after Nietzsche,  determines the context and meaning of ‘provocation’! One of the burdens of Exceptionalism is always being right! The proof of my assertions is found in your:

This is a domestic U.S. issue now

GOP congressmen can decide whether to put the interests of the country above partisan politics. They can be traitors or patriots.

Your either with us or against us? The GOP led by Dixiecrat Mitch McConnell and Speaker Ryan, a  now closeted acolyte of Ayn Rand, who continually trips over his unslakable political ambition, aided by his inept  ‘Budget’ and ‘Policy’ proposals: Ross Douthat called these ‘policy entrepreneurship’, another name for propaganda. You can count on these two, to lead the Crusade for The New Cold War!

What non-Americans think is beside the point. 

American hubris is perpetual, and so is its ability to tell itself that its actions are always justifiable, by its own measure! Call it by its true name American Hermeticism.

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/2ijbwY8