StephenKMackSD's Blog

Trump’s ‘five fateful foreign policy choices’ headline begins this essay, but just one sentence of Mr. Rachman’s dependable, and infrequently modulated political melodrama, demonstrates a certain repetitive political myopia, my apologies to the reader for this clumsy description, yet I think it an apt characterization of the Rachman rhetorical strategy:

The incredulity and alarm that Mr Trump’s appointments have caused in the Washington establishment are compounded by his disdain for the government’s own experts.

The technocrats that are in a ‘state of alarm’ are the ‘experts’ some of whom date back to the debates/debacles of the 1960’s to the dismal present : the Cuban missile crisis, the Dominican Republic  Coup of 1963, Vietnam. This interspersed, in no particular order, of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, El Salvador etc., etc. To the fall of the Soviet Union and its rehabilitation to a Market Economy, that precipitated the rise of the Oligarchs and the KGB victors.  To the calamitous ‘War on Terror’, Our 30 Years War, from 2001 to its current iteration. The record of this dismal list of failures, of this coterie of ‘experts’, is  American History!

The Trump Strategy can be viewed in his Apprentice television circus: to cultivate a usable disequilibrium, in his opponents, and be aware, that in the mind and ‘moral world view’ of the Caudillo, the Strong Man, everyone is an opponent! That is what puts Paul Ryan’s attempt to ‘tutor’ Trump, in the practices of American politics into the realm of black comedy. Not forgetting the strong element of schadenfreude: a personal confession!

Trump is the issue of a Republican Party, that made political nihilism its operative strategy, since 2008. And now the strategic thinkers, who practiced this political necromancy, are shocked,surprised, aghast at the rise of someone like Trump. And the New Democrats have proved themselves to be utterly corrupt, in their support for Hillary Clinton, a candidate committed to the Neo-Liberal status quo. Although she leads in the popular vote by 2.5 million votes.

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/fa9ed50e-c04d-11e6-81c2-f57d90f6741a

Ms. Chassany’s descriptive analysis of the French political contest is awash in the indispensable polling numbers favored by a class of the pseudo-technocrats, whose corollaries in the American election, were proven to be, not exactly wrong, but wide of the mark. Even though Clinton leads the popular vote by, at last count, 2.5 million votes, she lost in the Electoral College.

Ms. Chassany’s essay takes as its point of departure the possible ‘lurch to the left’ of the French Socialists in the person of the ‘fiery leftwinger’ Arnaud Montebourg. The villain of the piece has been identified, to be compared to the, in sum, Neo-Liberal ‘Mr. Valls, a social democrat’: the political infection of the ‘Free Market Mythology’ is rampant across the desiccated political spectrum of an equally mythical ‘West’.

Define Mr. Valls’ and his politics as that of: ‘the instigator of President Hollande’s midterm shift in favour of tax cuts, deregulation and a measure of labour market flexibility.’… ‘The 54-year-old is also a strict secularist, backing controversial local bans on burkini swimsuits…’

But, here is a telling paragraph that lets the Financial Times reader know the full extent of the nihilism of ‘many leftwing  voters’:

‘“The problem for Valls is that for many leftwing voters, the primary is an opportunity to punish the outgoing government, not to choose the best presidential candidate,” says François Miquet-Marty, head of ViaVoice, a pollster. “The Socialist party could go the way of the Labour party by nominating someone like Montebourg, who is to the left of the party’s centre of gravity. This could result in the party splitting up.”’

Mr. Valls looks to be a ‘social democrat‘ with a great deal in common with the Marinetti-Thatcherite Fillon, except for the exaltation of ‘speed’ and ‘shock’ in his politics that seeks ‘to eradicate French gloom’ .

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/7a5396a4-be05-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080

I recall asking my mother what ‘without portfolio’ meant, when I was seven or eight years old, as I looked at one of her copies of Ladies Home Journal. This popular woman’s magazine, for generations of women, had as one its writers, Claire Boothe Luce and her column was called Ambassador Without Portfolio, or a title something like that. What brought this memory back to me, was that when I read Mr. Kuper’s essay on Ms. Huffington, I was reminded that what Mrs. Luce and Ms. Huffington have in common was their shared and very canny ability at self-promotion.

Mrs. Luce was a talented writer, who married well, and wrote ‘The Women’ for the stage that became a Hollywood  film. Mrs. Luce was a very conservative Roman Catholic and an even more conservative Republican. And a rabid Anticommunist, like her husband of the Time-Life empire. Henry Luce was a powerful force in controlling public opinion, before the age of the Internet, and Time magazine was his very powerful instrument of enforcing his world view, while demonizing those who dissented. Compare his influence to the Hearst family nation- wide, the Chandler family in Los Angeles and Robert R. McCormick of Chicago. The present ‘Time’ is a pale ghost of what it once was under Luce’s management. The only time one sees Time mentioned on the internet is when its editors. of this ‘News Magazine’, name their ‘Person of the Year’: this year’s pick Donald Trump!

Ms. Huffington built her American ‘brand’ on her biography of Picasso, and her long time status as acolyte of Milton Friedman. Then Ms. Huffington, once a pillar of Conservatism,   morphed into that ersatz political category of Progressive. And launched her Huffington Post on the unpaid labor of her stable of writers. And then sold it to AOL and declared it was ‘just a business’, rather that a political instrument to elect fellow ersatz Progressive Barack Obama. In her latest book,  Ms. Huffington now offers her fellow overachievers advice on getting more sleep, enabling their continued triumph in the dog eat dog world of an utterly collapsed Neo-Liberalism.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/a4322038-bc09-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080

@Pastaneta @Premonition

Is there nothing like the perpetual keening of the minions of Capitalist Class? With apologies to Karl Marx! The Bail Out followed by Quantitative Easing isn’t/wasn’t enough? On that question see these two essays that define the term antithetical.

AEI propagandist first

The Fed’s $3.5T QE Purchases Have Generated Almost Half a Trillion Dollars for the US Treasury Since 2009

NYT hack second:

And not one prosecution of any Investment House or Bank executive, whose combined criminality was ‘put behind us’ as Obama looked to the future! Obama just another Neo-Liberal conformist, whose appointments were run of the mill, in every way. That ‘Hope and Change’ evolved into the SOS, and our present economic doldrums, if that even describes an economy made up of low paying service jobs: the realization of the ‘philosophy ‘ of the Hayek/Mises/Friedman trio, with the help of that indefatigable pamphleteer Ayn Rand. This trio plus one believed the future was about Robber Capital being the master, to the groveling Worker as slave, without the mythical possibility of the Slave’s self-emancipation through a fight to the death. A schoolmaster’s daydream! See Hegel and Kojève for the ennui inducing particulars.

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/2ga7iC8

In his Moscow Diary Mr. Luce produces more New Cold War hysterical propaganda with the aid of his Greek chorus of policy experts: ‘Bob Legvold, the veteran Columbia University Russianist’ who chants about : “a crisis of small thinking” and “global irresponsibility”, Wolfgang Ischinger, head of the Munich Security Conference who adds: global governance had “catastrophically collapsed” and Mathew Burrows, a former senior CIA officer, who adds this wan note on the ‘defeat’ of Mrs. Clinton: ‘“I can’t imagine how depressed it would have been if Hillary Clinton had won.” Please note that at last count Mrs. Clinton led the popular vote by 2.5 million votes.

What Mr. Luce misses is that what Trump brings to his presidency is the character he portrayed on The Apprentice, that was the prelude to his run for office. That character’s raison d’etre was to keeps his apprentices in a state of apprehension, his seeming changeability, his unending demands kept those contestants in an exploitable state of not knowing, of disequilibrium, that was the key to controlling their behavior.The fear of losing in a game, in which the rewards were so great, in terms of money and prestige, was the pressure point.

In the case of Trump as politician, contemplate the facts of Nixon’s interference in the Vietnam War negotiations, and Reagan’s Iran Hostage negotiation interventions. Only in this case, as the clumsy exercise of Trump as political naif. Only Trump is not that naif, but a Caudillo, who seeks to exploit the state of ‘not knowing’ in the technocrats that Mr. Luce interviewed, as the central actors in his Moscow Diary. Call this The Panic of the Technocratic Elites, who face an opponent who practices One-upmanship with the sang-froid of a master, while seeming to be that blundering political naif.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/d5bdfc9c-b7c4-11e6-961e-a1acd97f622d

In reading Mr. Waldron’s review of two of Mr. Sunstein’s books, in the October 9,2014 edition of The New Your Review of Books:

For Sunstein’s idea is that we who know better should manipulate the choice architecture so that those who are less likely to perceive what is good for them can be induced to choose the options that we have decided are in their best interest. Thaler and Sunstein talk sometimes of “asymmetric paternalism.” The guiding principle of this approach

is that we should design policies that help the least sophisticated people in society while imposing the smallest possible costs on the most sophisticated.

This is a benign impulse on their part, but it is not a million miles away from the condescension that worried Bernard Williams.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/10/09/cass-sunstein-its-all-your-own-good/

American Writer

Mr. Tharoor offers very interesting insights on Fillon, the quotations from his speeches are telling. He is the Marinetti/Thatcherite candidate that has become the favorite of the ultra-respectable Financial Times. I put  Marinetti first , the Futurist/Fascist artist and intellectual, because as reported in the Financial Times, Mr. Fillon is an advocate of ‘speed’ and ‘shock’ in his personal ethos, as well as his Thatcherite political program.    The key to their coverage has been not to quote his speeches, that are probably replete with Imperial Nostalgia, but to report on his political rise. And to leave his political apologetics for an argued ‘Benign Empire’ and his religiously rationalized homophobia, under the rubric of his strategically unreported  ‘Conservatism’. Emphasis being placed on the utterly failed Neo-Liberalism, the myth of the ‘Free Market’, that is still the object of veneration of the editorialists/hirelings at the Financial Times.

Mr. Thardoor’s essay attempts, in a short form, too many countries and their political actors, in his rhetorical portrait of the ‘global right wing serge’ and their collective Imperial Nostalgia. As Mr. Tandoor writes for the Washington Post,  he hews to the Neo-Conservative Party Line of Putin as the New Stalin, and the myth of Russian Revanchism, as unexamined points of Neo-Conservative political theology: The New Cold War that Trump, Fillon and Le Pen are attempting to put into momentary  political stasis, pending their political maturation, political enlightenment or their acceptance of the status quo?

Political Observer

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/02/the-other-side-of-the-global-right-wing-surge-nostalgia-for-empire/?postshare=6801480689620291&tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.23823100f5f7#comments

The failure of The Financial Times and its writers/editorialists is that of simple honesty. Globalisation is not the problem, the problem can be defined as the Failure of the Neo-Liberalism, given political legitimacy by the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, and its collapse in 2008. And the failure of the much-touted notion of the Self-correcting Market, that was the purest of theological fiction. The rise of the dread Populists of both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are the specters that haunt the political imaginations of said writers/editorialists. But the winners are on the ‘Right’, as object lesson for the ‘Left’?

The ‘hard centre’, and the assertion that ‘What politics needs is the optimism of a muscular centre.’ Is this master idea a prelude to the revived political career of Tony Blair? Is he the paradigmatic figure, who will galvanize the political drift of the post-Brexit era? The many question raised by Mr. Phillips’ rhetorical intervention, in the mind of the reader, seem to remain in a kind of hopeful stasis? Awaiting the arrival of Mr. Blair in his latest political incarnation?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/65bff04a-b6ec-11e6-ba85-95d1533d9a62

Just finished Chapter 4, titled ‘Splitting the Difference: Habermas’s Critique of Derrida’ by David Couzens Hoy, in this collection of essays. Clarity, insights and beautifully written. I’ve read his The Time of Our Lives : A Critical History of Temporality and found it of equal merit.

StephenKMackSD

To call Obama a ‘liberal technocrat’ when he is most assuredly an unimaginative Neo-Liberal, and to utter this maladroit sentence: ‘When Vladimir Putin’s Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, John Kerry, the outgoing secretary of state, said: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in a 19th-century fashion by invading another country on [a] completely trumped up pretext.” As Kerry is still Sec. of State, leads the incredulous reader to face the fact that the political world, that Mr. Luce describes in his essay, is not the political world that the rest of us are perceiving. 

Obama could not be called a ‘Realist’ nor an ‘Idealist’ but a president who received a Nobel Peace Prize on October 9, 2009, and then, through his evolving policies, made a mockery of that bestowal. Luce’s encomium to Obama exhibits the same strengths of that of his Peace Prize: it exists in the realm of fiction, but in this instance, the writer places himself as the central civic actor, declaring before the end of Obama’s term, how readers are obliged to view that eight years. Historians, writers, thinkers and citizens  will render that judgement only after the fact, not almost two months prior to the end of Obama’s second term!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/18faf0a6-b251-11e6-a37c-f4a01f1b0fa1