StephenKMackSD's Blog

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

The once ascendant Kremlinologist, after the ‘Fall of the Soviet Union’, seemed to have disappeared without a trace, except for the ever present Mr. Strobe Talbott, his twitter    soubriquet ‘Russia Hand’,  who now heads Brookings,the headquarters of advocates/agents for the American Empire:  Neo-Conservatives i.e.  ‘Liberal Internationalists’ and its coterie of Zionist agents/apologists. File the ‘politics’ of Brookings under the heading of American bourgeois political conformity.

Those Kremlinologists have now morphed into Putinologists: the pretenders to that mantle are the reporters and pundits who people the American/European news media. What we as readers confront, in the closing days of 2016 in ‘Long Form Journalism’ are two ‘experts’ in the field, Michael Crowley and Niall Ferguson.

Mr. Crowley’s essay is long, and to say the least, sketchy on the psychological profile of Putin, as it is the purest kind of self-serving speculation. This is the stuff of News Magazines and its Pundits, like the predigested ‘News’ of Time Magazine of the Henry Luce era. Crowley is stronger on repeating the received wisdom, in the political portion of his  profile of Putin, from a series of American sources, who share Mr. Crowley’s beliefs.

According to diagnostician Crowley, Putin is suffering from a debilitating case of ‘profound humiliation’ over the fall of the Soviet Union, that has now reached the stage of a fully realized pathology.Mr. Crowley’s psychological profile lacks the arcane, yet resonant Freudian vocabulary of the once ascendant  practitioners of Psycho-biography.

This is anti-Putin propaganda, that mimics actual Journalism, that appeals to the prejudices, and the cultivated paranoia of a careful campaign of the demonization of Putin: as the subverter of the American democratic process, after the recitation of  his other  crimes. Notice that the Crowley essay is neatly framed, in its introduction and coda , by a  nostalgia for the easily manipulable drunkard Boris Yeltsin, yet he is a kind of comic figure. Yeltsin appointed Putin, so that nostalgia mixed with comedy is utterly misplaced.

The readers of the political tip-sheet Politico, inside and outside the political power structure-the sharing of ‘insider information’ with a wider public is the fraudulent mystique of Politico. Read the whole of the essay, aptly titled ‘Putin’s Revenge’ here:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/russia-putin-hack-dnc-clinton-election-2016-cold-war-214532

Consider next the essay of Niall Ferguson published at Foreign Policy ‘The Russian Question’.

Mr. Ferguson’s argument is in part a staid historical approach that features in its introduction the ‘German Question’ as historically comparable to the arguments of his essay ‘The Russian Question’. That Mr. Ferguson is the official biographer/hagiographer  for Henry Kissinger, he makes an appearance as the ‘voice of reason’. ‘Wold Order’ Kissinger’s latest book, that extemporizes on the Huntington theme expressed as ‘…four evolving and incompatible conceptions of international order: America,European,Chinese and Islamic. Russia’s place in the scheme of things is ambiguous. This reads as shopworn, but it suits the Ferguson purpose, except that the villains of Russian revanchism and Putin are inconveniently lost. Kissinger’s 2014 prescient warning about ‘cyberwarfare’, featuring Thomas Hobbes, provides the necessary cover, for this extemporizing on a theme, Mr. Ferguson shifts into Neo-Con high gear:

That crisis has already arrived. As I write, the burning question of American politics is how far the Russian government was successful in its efforts to influence the outcome of November’s presidential election. That Russia tried to do this is no longer in serious dispute. Russian hackers successfully accessed the emails of the Democratic National Committee. WikiLeaks acted as the conduit. The resulting email dumps and leaks probably reinforced voters’ negative views of Hillary Clinton. Given Donald Trump’s narrow margin of victory in key swing states, one might claim that this was decisive — though no more or less decisive than all the other factors that made up the minds of crucial voters in an election where “everything mattered.” President Barack Obama now says that “when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections … we need to take action” and that “we will.”

That the Russians have committed an ‘Act of War’ against the sacrosanct USA. Now, that the assertions of America’s utterly lawless ‘Security Apparatus’ produces ‘evidence on demand’ to ‘prove’ Russia guilt, somehow escapes the attention of this writer does not surprise. The defenders of the Hegemon suffer a telling lack of recall when it comes to their own ‘Acts of War’: Stuxnet , just one example among many. And given Mr. Kissinger’s past record of bellicosity, allied to political machination,love of intrigue and egotism on a grand scale:  he is not the ‘voice of reason’, in American Foreign Policy, as Mr. Ferguson portrays him. And linking to and briefly quoting  Franklin Foer’s and  Anne Applebaum’s political hysterics, and calling their assertions ‘circumstantial’, introduces their cultivated paranoia into the conversation, and is a tacit recognition of their delusions as having some kind of efficacy. So much more to be said, but trying the reader’s patience, nor reinforcing the tired recitation of American National Security State propaganda, like Mr. Crowley and Mr. Ferguson is not my aim.

Political Observer

The Russian Question

As the Argentine Political Melodrama continues to unfold,  as reported at The Financial Times, the curious reader will look to other sources of information, in regards to the Panama Papers revelations, and about the Macri families ties to Mossack Fonseca law firm. See the Buenos Aires Herald of September 19,2016:

Headline:New company linked to Macri family in Panama Papers documents

Karter Properties is linked to a family close to Franco Macri, that of Pier Andrea Nocella, an Italian film producer who is also the grandson of the late Giorgio, a close personal friend of Franco and Tonini Macri, Mauricio’s father and uncle.

Giorgio Nocella was also a director of SOCMA, one of Franco’s big-name firms historically.

Karter Properties was created in January 5, 1999, by his then 27-year-old grandson Pier, and registered at the same address as Fleg — Saffrey Square 205, Bank Lane, Bahamas, a building shared by some Supreme Court officers and the firm Gucci, among others.

In the case of Fleg, Lussich has claimed that that while Mauricio Macri did allow his father to use his name in the directory of the firm, that situation changed quickly when other employees of Franco’s firm Socma were used for that role instead. Página/12 raised doubts on that claim, saying that the replacement of the current president as a director took over a decade to come to fruition.

Karter, meanwhile, does register changes in its directory, with Nocella replaced by Uruguayan Luis Vieira Merola.

The investigation alleges Karter and Fleg were “twin” companies, although the former did not register any operations in Brazil, as Fleg did.

Fleg Trading played a role as a holding company for the Pago Fácil business of Franco’s holding in the Mercosur giants. The move was done via Owners Do Brasil Participações, a company based in São Paulo, of which Fleg Trading was a majority share-holder.

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/221786/new-company-linked-to-macri-family-in-panama-papers-documents

Are readers looking at another Brazil? where the political actors who impeached Rousseff – Michel Temer is barred from seeking office for 8 years:

Headline: Credibility of Brazil’s Interim President Collapses as he receives 8-Year Ban on Running for Office

https://theintercept.com/2016/06/03/credibility-of-brazils-interim-president-collapses-receives-8-year-ban-on-running/

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/78c0dfa6-cc86-11e6-b8ce-b9c03770f8b1

Is it too early to engage in a bit of schadenfreude? The rest of the world seems to be over the false promises of Neo-Liberalism, and are in the grip of The Rebellion Against The Elites e. g. The Brexit and the election of Caudillo Donald Trump. Although the possible election, in France, of ‘speed’ and ‘shock’ Thatcherite Fillon, seems to indicate that the siren call of the unfettered ‘Free Market’ is still ‘marketable’, given an almost charismatic front man.  The sacrifice of  JPMorgan alum Mr Prat-Gay just seems like what the Party Regulars might call a ‘shaking out process’, the ‘fine tuning’of the Macri ‘economic recovery’, after ending their economic servitude to the Vulture Capitalist Paul Singer. Yet Wolfgang Streeck offers some valuable insights on the self-destructive character of Capitalism:

Capitalism as we know it has benefited greatly from the rise of countermovements against the rule of profit and of the market. Socialism and trade unionism, by putting a brake on commodification, prevented capitalism from destroying its non-capitalist foundations—trust, good faith, altruism, solidarity within families and communities, and the like. Under Keynesianism and Fordism, capitalism’s more or less loyal opposition secured and helped stabilize aggregate demand, especially in recessions. Where circumstances were favourable, working-class organization even served as a ‘productivity whip’, by forcing capital to embark on more advanced production concepts. It is in this sense that Geoffrey Hodgson has argued that capitalism can survive only as long as it is not completely capitalist—as it has not yet rid itself, or the society in which it resides, of ‘necessary impurities’. [20] Seen this way, capitalism’s defeat of its opposition may actually have been a Pyrrhic victory, freeing it from countervailing powers which, while sometimes inconvenient, had in fact supported it. Could it be that victorious capitalism has become its own worst enemy?

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

Many readers will find Mr. Streeck’s revisionist Marxism inhospitable, yet the reader not trapped in her/his own political/economic myopia, might use his insights to access the Macri Program, within the wider question of the what and the how of that ‘economic recovery’. Can the failure of Neo-Liberalism in Europe and America be a valuable object lesson for Macri and his reformers?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/2d82da08-cb8c-11e6-864f-20dcb35cede2

@Observer Thank you for posting the link to this essay. Yet read the final paragraph of the review, and the final sentence, which I have italicized,  expressed in the subjunctive mood, leaves the reader shaking her head, at the faith of the reviewer or just her/his ideological myopia :

One resides in, as he writes, “the difference between an order imposed by treaties and an order built in sustained reflection about appropriate policy—and the gains to be derived from it.” In the 1920s internationalism was imposed; after the 1960s it developed, in the main, spontaneously, “as a result of calculations about advantage”. That seems right, though today’s anti-globalists would deny it. In their view, the Washington consensus is also imposed, selfishly and undemocratically, on unwilling victims. If that were true, the portents really would be bleak.

We live, in the 2016, in the collapse of that ‘Washington Consensus’ as economic/existential fact, in sum those portents of bleakness have realized themselves historically, pace Hegel!

For a more contemporary evaluation read Adam Tooze’s review  of ‘How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck, from the January 5,2017 edition of The London Review of Books titled ‘A General Logic of Crisis'(Behind a pay wall)

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n01/adam-tooze/a-general-logic-of-crisis

Also read an interview with Mr. Streeck posted at the Verso Books web site:

Wolfgang Streeck, author of the just-published How Will Capitalism End?, was interviewed by Wolfgang Storz. They discuss a possible way out of the euro crisis, the importance of the nation state, a disingenous refugee policy, and his ‘denunciation as a social nationalist’.

This interview was originally published on OXI and translated by Flossie Draper. 

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2926-wolfgang-streeck-why-europe-can-t-function-as-it-stands

StephenKMackSD

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

The Zionist Project seems to be stumbling over its continuing re-enactment of its European oppression i.e. treating the Palestinian People and the other indigenous peoples as if they were infiltrators, on the land they once shared in peace. See this essay on New Historian Benny Morris’ notorious Haaretz  interview:

https://electronicintifada.net/content/top-israeli-historian-analyzes-benny-morriss-shocking-interview/4968

Don’t mention  how Israel treats the Bedouins and the African refugees, Jewish and otherwise, who are treated as a contagion to be managed: how many times need we hear the protestations of Netanyahu and his American sycophants echoing the Zionist Party Line of Eternal Victim, that is the beneficiary of ‘$38bn, 10-year military aid package for Israel’. The Victim narrative simply vanishes in light of that very generous bribery program.

Even America’s U.N. political moralist Samantha Power comments seems sedate when compared to her recent lecture to the Syrian Ambassador!

“The Security Council reaffirmed its established consensus that settlements have no legal validity,” said Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN. “The US has been sending the message that the settlements must stop, privately and publicly, for nearly five decades.”

Ms. Power’s comment seems rather sedate, yet the  ‘abstention’ demonstrates the kind of political cowardice, that renders Ms. Power’s  J’accuse into the realm of self-aggrandizing political theater. 

Political Cynic

https://www.ft.com/content/f5d074dc-c927-11e6-8f29-9445cac8966f

Headline:Democrats, demagogues and despots

Sub-headline: Fear and rage must not be used as an excuse to destroy America’s core institutions

This is my second reading of Mr. Wolf’s essay of December 21,2016, I’m reading it on December 24,2016 , and it seems as if I’ve read this essay many times before, in its various guises: with the addition to his cast of characters, of the most reactionary of the Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton. Who is having a popular revival with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hip-Hop Musical.

Again Mr. Wolf posits himself as part of a ‘vital center’ between the extremes of Right and Left Populism. The regular reader of The Financial Times will recognize his extemporizing on the perennial theme of the ‘Rebellion Against the Elites’, in another guise. What Mr. Wolf leaves out of his narrative is the fact that that ‘center’ has been completely infected by the Neo-Liberal Delusion. And has moved that ‘center’ to the extreme Right of the political spectrum: in sum Mr. Wolf defends what he and his newspaper have always advocated/defended Neo-Liberalism. Even as we are about to enter the ninth year of an economic collapse-where is the mythical Self-Correcting Market? – that is a direct result of that unstinting advocacy wedded to,  in the aftermath of the 2008 collapse, an unending campaign of wan apologetics for this demonstrably  failed economic theology.

To engage in the hyperbolic, for a moment: one can look at the The Mont Pelerin Society  as the mapmakers for the Road to Serfdom, and Globalization as Capitalist Collectivism, even though Soviet Collectivism was the enemy of both Hayek and Popper: my speculation then pushes irony to its outer limit!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/9310dcea-c5d2-11e6-8f29-9445cac8966f

Dmitri Alperovitch has impressive credentials:

CrowdStrike has brought on board senior FBI executives, such as Shawn Henry, former executive assistant director (EAD) of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch, and Steve Chabinsky, former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division. CrowdStrike has received $156 million in funding from Warburg Pincus, Accel Partners, and Google Capital.

He is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank…

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

He has a strong relationship with the American National Security State and with the propaganda arm of NATO, The Atlantic Council.  Is the reader of the Financial Times  so naive, as to think that Mr.Dmitri Alperovitch doesn’t come to this ‘investigation’ without a clear record of his sympathies and antipathies?

And clearly the America that produced and used Stuxnet, which by America’s own  definition was an Act of War, against the Iranian enrichment program, as prelude, in the American narrative , to producing  a nuclear weapon, is incapacitated , by its own exceptionalist  narrative, to exercise anything resembling self-criticism. Just one glaring  example of America’s perennial hubris.

According to Jeh Johnson, head of the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on the Rachael Maddow show last night (12/21/16) ,the Obama administration will declassify and release the information regarding the Russian Hack, that proves the guilt of the Russians e.g. Putin, before the end of its term in office.

One can only wonder what Trump will make of this? The New Cold War comes to a crisis point, as Trump dismisses the very idea of a Russian Hack.

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/34177ec8-c7f9-11e6-8f29-9445cac8966f#comments