A fascinating interview with you at the Economist! But the questioner Anne McElvoy gets it right when she calls your politics almost oligarchic.  Too close for comfort? Like Lippmann, in the American context, and his epigones, at least in this, express a contempt for too much Democracy. The Democracy envisioned was one in which the technocrats/think tank partisans will blunt the force of too much Democracy, because these technocrats will be given plenty of media time to make their case. You echo the Party Line at The Financial Times of The Rebellion Against The Elites. Read Janan Genesh’s latest essay ,where he acts the part of Robespierre to the unredeemable Labour Party:

https://www.ft.com/content/bf4bd252-83cd-11e6-a29c-6e7d9515ad15

The question occurs: What did you expect the the opposition to be like after the failed Neo-Liberalism of both Thatcher and Blair?  Another sedate Oxbridger tailored by Gieves & Hawkes?

Old Socialist

http://econ.st/2cEeF33

Notice that Mr. Ganesh gives a kind of testimonial to the notion of ‘prudent capitulation’ in his opening paragraph, awash in the hyperbolic, and then claims for the New Labour loyalists the role of a McCarthyite victim of ‘Socialist Vigilantes’. Can those ‘Moderates’ i.e. the Blairites, be the practitioners of that special kind of capitulation, and the victim of those vigilantes? Or is this a bit of rhetorical prestidigitation?

But then Mr. Ganesh reveals his rhetorical strategy, after his melodramatic introduction, as a pox on both your houses: name it Tory Triumphalism! Mr. Ganesh’s practice of London Spleen makes a triumphant return to the pages of the Financial Times:

‘The people they want tend not to join political parties. Their participation in real life gets in the way. An entirely fresh movement founded on the pro-European centre-left could, perhaps, attract those who feel dispossessed by Mr Corbyn and what is shaping up to be a hard exit from the EU. An invitation into an old, tainted party to fight ideologues who know the difference between Leninism and anarcho-syndicalism for mastery of things called the National Executive Committee is, for many people, a refusable offer.

Keeping the wrong people out is easier than bringing the right people in. Having proven so derelict in the first duty, the moderates should not bank on their own excellence in the second.

Scene:

Then comes the accusation by our Robespierre of the ‘Moderates’ being the dupes of the ‘Hard Left’:

Keeping the wrong people out is easier than bringing the right people in. Having proven so derelict in the first duty, the moderates should not bank on their own excellence in the second.

Even if the rebels dislodge Mr Corbyn, the party will be remembered as one that twice voted for the hard left

Our Maximilien anticipates the quickening in his audience, and executes his coup de grace:

They cannot organise their way out of this fix and they cannot brainstorm their way out of it either. Labour moderates have an unhealthy relationship with abstract thought. They do too much of it without getting any better at it. They believe earthly electoral success always flows from prior victory in the meta-world of ideas. In Mr Smith’s second-hand leftism they saw proof of their own intellectual fatigue. So expect some working papers over the next year, with names like “Towards a Renewed Social Democracy” and findings — be a bit tougher on immigration, for example — that any sentient adult with access to the news could have drafted for them in advance.

Amid the cheers of the Convention the prisoner’s hands are bound behind him, and he is escorted to the tumbril, for the journey to where revolutionary justice will administered.

End scene!

The Ganesh melodrama then a takes a turn toward the politically jejune, but not before he quotes Philip Roth’s ‘ecstasy of sanctimony’ as indicative of the ‘politics’ of Corbyn and his fellow travelers. Roth, a writer whose whole career was monument to his insufferable narcissism.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/bf4bd252-83cd-11e6-a29c-6e7d9515ad15

Never fear, Mr. Sarkozy’s resort to the neo-fascist trope “your ancestors are the Gauls.” : the autochthonous tribe, a distant echo of Heidegger’s volk! This, an example of a usable political nostalgia, all scrubbed clean of any taint, making it more palatable to the respectable bourgeois voter. That voter, who might be considering Le Pen, just might be swayed by Sarkozy’s rhetoric?

What of the Sarkozy record on the riots in the banlieues as demonstrative of his ‘Leadership’ ?

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who has consistently advocated a tough approach to crime and restoring law and order, was a major probable contender for the 2007 presidential election. Success or failure on his part in quelling violence in suburban ghettos may thus have had far-ranging implications. Any action by Sarkozy was likely to be attacked by the political opposition, as well as by members of his Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) political coalition who also expect to run for the presidency. Le Monde, in a 5 November editorial [17] reminisced about the “catastrophic” elections of 2002 where right-wing candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen managed to enter the second round of voting, showing concern that a similar situation might arise in the upcoming elections as a backlash to the riots.

After the fourth night of riots, Sarkozy declared a zero tolerance policy towards urban violence and announced that 17 companies of riot police (C.R.S.) and 7 mobile police squadrons (escadrons de gendarmerie mobile) would be stationed in contentious Paris neighborhoods. Sarkozy has said that he believes that some of the violence may be at the instigation of organized gangs. “… All of this doesn’t appear to us to be completely spontaneous”, he said [18]. Undercover police officers were sent to identify “gang leaders, drug traffickers and big shots.” Sarkozy’s approach was criticized by left-wing politicians who called for greater public funding for housing, education, and job creation, and refraining from “dangerous demagoguery” [19]. Sarkozy was further criticized after he referred to the rioters as racaille and voyous [20] (translating to “scum” [21], “riff-raff” [22], “thugs” [23] or “hoodlums” [24]). During his visit to Clichy-sous-Bois, the Interior Minister was to meet with the families of the two youths killed, but when the tear gas grenade was sent into the Clichy mosque, the families pulled out of the meeting. Bouna Traoré’s brother Siyakah said, “There is no way we’re going to see Sarkozy, who is incompetent. What happened in the mosque is really disrespectful.” [25] The families finally met Prime minister Dominique de Villepin on 3 November.

The left-wing newspaper Libération cited the exasperation of suburb youth at the harassment by the police and Interior Minister Sarkozy (“lack of respect”) [26]. A schoolkid parent declaration that “Torching a school is unacceptable, but the one who put on the fire is Sarkozy” was all over the French press, including conservative Le Figaro [27].

Azouz Begag, delegate minister for the promotion of equal opportunity, made several declarations about the recent unrest, opposing himself to Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy for the latter’s use of “imprecise, warlike semantics”, which he says cannot help bring back calm in the affected areas [28].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_2005_French_riots

Sarkozy: Xenophobe, Islamophobe, not speak of being an enemy of the minority immigrant community, and the failed project of  ‘integration’ into ‘mainstream’ French life. If such a project ever existed, at least as an ideal of a class of thinkers/actors  who remain in the shadow of both Sarkozy and Le Pen’s benighted politics. That politics being the grotesque offspring of Charlie Hebdo’s Enlightenment writ large. The spirit of French Colonialism is alive and well as domestic political phenomenon.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/fbd2316a-83c5-11e6-a29c-6e7d9515ad15#comments

Headline: How the west might soon be lost

Sub-headline: Under a President Trump, democracy would lose credibility as a model for a civilised political life

Mr. Wolf’s intervention is too little too late! Awash in the misplaced self-congratulation of the Neo-Liberal sage, in panic mode, or something close to it. Perhaps a foreshortened description of America’s political history might help, my political bias will be readily apparent. The political fact of the Republicans continuing resort to political irrationalism, and don’t forget the contribution of the New Democrats, Republicans in all but name.

The post World War II history of The Republicans, who have been engaging in, and or, flirting with political necromancy since their ‘Generation of Treason’ sloganeering of the post-war period . The  McCarthy/Nixon/McCarren/Mundt political alliance used this as a political war cry against The New Deal. Then came Goldwater of the infamous: ‘radicalism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.’ ( The rallying cry of the Tea Party avant la lettre?)  Quickly followed by the Dixiecrat migration of ’64 and ’65, after the passage of both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.  The election of Nixon and his ‘Southern Strategy’, followed by States Rights advocate Ronald Reagan. Then came Bush I and his Willy Horton race baiting , and then Neo-Reaganite Bill Clinton whose ‘Welfare Reform’ , ‘Financial Reform’ and ‘Crime Bill’ were monuments to Republican political/moral paranoia, and cemented the fact that the New Democrats were betrayers of the New Deal, in the name of scheming ambition.The New Democrats as the not so sub rosa allies of the Republicans. Not to forget, Bush II and his unalloyed economic incompetence, wedded to an irrepressible war mongering and the once discarded idea and practice of ‘Nation Building’, in sum ‘Nation Destroying’ !   The Republican political nihilism inaugurated by McConnell/Boehner and McConnell/Ryan as a ‘political strategy’ adapted in the face of the losses of 2008 and 2012. Add to this the  rise of the Tea Party anti-government radicals, that helped set the political stage for Trump, in fact he looks like the natural inheritor of this long Republican Tradition. And most especially the Nihilism adopted from 2008 to the political present, except to those who are willfully, self-servingly myopic. Not to speak of the utter failure of the Neo-Liberal dispensation, and the inability of ‘Western Capitalism’ i.e. Europe and America, to recover something like prosperity. Trump rides the tide of that ignominious failure!

Here are some quotations from Mr. Wolf that demonstrate his political orthodoxy:

America’s allies support the US largely because they trust it. That trust is based on its perceived commitment to predictable, values-based behaviour.

Headline: A misplaced mea culpa for neoliberalism

Sub-headline:The International Monetary Fund should stick to its knitting and tackle the decline in productivity

 

As an all-purpose insult, “neoliberalism” has lost any meaning it might once have had. Whether it is a supposed sin of commission, such as privatisation; one of omission, such as allowing a bankrupt company to close; or just an outcome with some losers, neoliberalism has become the catch-all criticism of unthinking radicals who lack the skills of empirical argument.

The greatest insult of all, however, is that to our intelligence when august international institutions hitch their wagon to these noisy criticisms. This sorry spectacle befell the International Monetary Fund last week when it published an article in its flagship magazine questioning its own neoliberal tendencies and concluding that “instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality, in turn jeopardising durable expansion”.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ae448fcc-23fa-11e6-9d4d-c11776a5124d.html#axzz4AGn6Q32x

A vital feature of the US-led global order has been the role of multilateral institutions, such as the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. In binding itself by the rules of an open economic system, the US has encouraged others to do the same. The result has been extraordinary growth in prosperity: between 1950 and 2015, average global real output per head rose sixfold. Mr Trump does not understand this system. The results of repudiation could be calamitous for all.

The Iraq war has damaged trust in US wisdom and competence. But the global financial crisis has been even more destructive. Many have long suspected US motives. But they thought it knew how to manage a capitalist system. The crisis devastated that confidence.

The next quotation is not a complete surprise coming from a defender of Neo-Liberalism, yet the ‘why’ of Trump, and the Party Line, here at The Financial Times, of ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’ is about the destruction of the ‘Middle Class’. That is the watershed of that Neo-Liberalism, and its misplaced faith in the Market, as the only valid form of knowledge, as argued by Hayek and his vocal coterie. Mr. Wolf’s ‘growth in prosperity’ is about the flourishing of the 1%, not about the myth of ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’!

The result has been extraordinary growth in prosperity: between 1950 and 2015, average global real output per head rose sixfold.

And what Financial Times essay would be complete without the obligatory appearance of ‘straw man’ Vladimir Putin, the political monster for all seasons?

Mr Putin and other actual or would-be despots would cheer.

Mr. Wolf’s intent is clear. He is an advocate of the position of the political rationalism of Hillary Clinton, as opposed the the utterly irrational Mr. Trump! In the lesser of two evils argument the notion of virtue is discarded as irrelevant.

Old Socialist

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/804537f6-83d2-11e6-8897-2359a58ac7a5.html#axzz4LUqQjvdg

In sum, Mr. Eaton’s essay expresses his contempt for Corbyn and his followers, the favored target of the respectable bourgeois press. See the Financial Times in its continuing assault on the ‘Rebellion Against The Elites’ i.e. the evil of ‘Populism’, in its continuing propaganda war against Corbyn. The central concern, even call it the imperative, is to make a path to the Prime Minister’s office for Mr. Khan, and its means is the cultivation of political status quo in his search for ‘power’. His burning political ambition leads him! He is a Blairite to his core. Mr. Eaton offers a firm scolding to the forces of reform: Mr. Corbyn and his army of political troglodytes, street urchins. The reign of  Neo-Liberalism was/is catastrophic, in more than economic terms. And The New Statesman proves the corrupting power of Thatcherism, in its various political iterations. Not to speak of ‘Liberalism’ and its intellectual leader Isaiah Berlin: a professional sycophant to the powerful, who needed a compliant front man. He practiced the dark art of sub rosa character assassination, while maintaining the fiction of his political/moral uprightness. Mr. Eaton maintains that tradition, but is above board in its practice.
The conflict between the Blarites and the forces of ‘Reform’ will define the history of the Labour Party for the next decade and even beyond. Mr. Eaton helps Mr. Khan make his case for ‘power’, but a ‘power’ to what end? More failed/catastrophic Neo-Liberalism? Or the mirage of the ‘Moderates’ i.e. Thatcher Lite? One last thought: Mr. Khan offers a lecture on ‘power’ not a ‘lesson on power’ !

Old Socialist

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/09/sadiq-khan-gives-jeremy-corbyns-supporters-lesson-power

Headline:

We are all Stalinists on Syria

From this utterly preposterous headline, then Mr. Rachman reduces the War raging across ‘The Middle East’ to a public relations problem: A Hideous Black Comedy!

Western politicians must somehow try to frame a policy towards Syria that takes account of these unpredictable oscillations in public sentiment, between indifference and occasional surges of anguish. Those leaders who have based policy around an assumption that their voters’ compassion would be sustained over many months have generally been punished.

It isn’t as if Europe, long before the Sykes–Picot exercise in Imperialism, wasn’t guilty of the horrendous crimes of colonialism, over time.  That is irrelevant to the Rachman strategy,which in sum is an explanation of the Merkel/Obama Conundrum, in its domestic political context. But by some act of rhetorical will Merkel almost disappears from the argument. What is left is an Obama who opines to Jeffrey Goldberg about  “the world is a tough, complicated, messy mean place, and full of hardship and tragedy”. Fatalism wedded to self-serving cynicism, perhaps the hallmark of the last few months of the Obama Administration? Mr. Rachman himself exercises that very fatalism/cynicism in his final sentence:

The conclusion is bleak: to sustain liberal politics at home, western politicians may have to tolerate outrages against liberal values overseas.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a4ee755a-83c2-11e6-8897-2359a58ac7a5.html#axzz4LMyCHmTM

In law and economics, the Coase theorem (pronounced /ˈkoʊs/) describes the economic efficiency of an economic allocation or outcome in the presence of externalities. The theorem states that if trade in an externality is possible and there are sufficiently low transaction costs, bargaining will lead to a Pareto efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property. In practice, obstacles to bargaining or poorly defined property rights can prevent Coasian bargaining. This “theorem” is commonly attributed to Nobel Prize laureate Ronald Coase during his tenure at the University of Chicago. However, Coase himself stated that the theorem was based on perhaps four pages of his 1960 paper “The Problem of Social Cost“,^[1] and that the “Coase theorem” is not about his work at all.^[2]

This 1960 paper, along with his 1937 paper on the nature of the firm (which also emphasizes the role of transaction costs), earned Ronald Coase the 1991 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In this 1960 paper, Coase argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining and hence the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality. Since then, others have demonstrated the importance of the perfect information assumption and shown using game theory that inefficient outcomes are to be expected when this assumption is not met.

Nevertheless, the Coase theorem is considered an important basis for most modern economic analyses of government regulation, especially in the case of externalities, and it has been used by jurists and legal scholars to analyse and resolve legal disputes. George Stigler summarized the resolution of the externality problem in the absence of transaction costs in a 1966 economics textbook in terms of private and social cost, and for the first time called it a “theorem.” Since the 1960s, a voluminous amount of literature on the Coase theorem and its various interpretations, proofs, and criticism has developed and continues to grow.

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

Here is the pertinent comment regarding not ‘reason’ but the power of belief systems to the ‘Lower Orders’ from the British énarque! Anyone who refers to the modern day Dr. Pangloss, Steven Pinker, has placed themselves in the position of moralizing dilettante in need of some intellectual gloss!

I stress my growing concern about the west’s political fragility. Will “the centre”, famously discussed in Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, hold, or will extremes again take over?

“I think the fragility of a liberal order is the other thing I’ve learned,” he responds. “I was once a confident optimist and rationalist. I also used to believe that everybody could be persuaded by rational argument. I’ve increasingly realised that people need mythologies, people need nationalisms and people need religions. How people get identities that provide emotional enrichment, without ending up with dangerous forms of extremism, is quite problematic.”

He asks me whether I have read Steven Pinker’s optimistic book on the decline of violence. I reply that we’re one big nuclear war away from this turning out to be completely wrong. “Absolutely,” he responds.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bc424150-3165-11e6-ad39-3fee5ffe5b5b.html

Your assertion that Baron Turner of Ecchinswell is somehow not a technocrat with a fixed commitment to ‘reason’ is ludicrous, he is a reformed Keynesian i.e. a Neo-Liberal, although a surprising one:

He goes back further, to the mid-1970s, when he obtained a double first in history and economics at Cambridge. “I was undoubtedly a Keynesian. I thought his General Theory of Employment (1936) was fascinating. I was also wrong then on some things. I believed in prices and incomes policies and I now think those simply don’t work. And I went through a sort of drying-out process in the early 1980s.” He became convinced, he explains, that macroeconomic stability could be secured by rigid rules and “so what matters is supply-side efficiency. The euro was going to make it easier for people to invest without exchange-rate risk and so would produce a higher level of allocative efficiency [when production reflects the preferences of consumers]. That was clearly wrong.

“Actually, I changed my view on that much faster than people may have realised. In 2003 I wrote an article asking, ‘What happens inside the eurozone if we have a banking and deflation crisis?’ Then the financial crisis drove me back to thinking about the macroeconomics of money and debt and, in the process of doing that and also researching my book [Between Debt and the Devil (2015)] I found myself returning to things that I had thought about 40 years ago.

An engaging and challenging interview, and thank you for prodding me to read it. Yet I feel like the Top Banana being fed lines by the Straight Man!  As to your assertion: ‘Your platitudes seem rather silly.’ I will stand by my assertion, that all we really have is our ‘reason’ to guide us.  A Reason guided by one of cornerstones of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, the exercise of the point of view of the impartial spectator used by ethical/political actors in situ. See D.D. Raphael’s book The Impartial Spectator, Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy published by Oxford University Press.

StephenKMackSD

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

After the avalanche of Anti-Corbyn propaganda in the respectable bourgeois press, The Financial Times leading the highfalutin cadre, Mr. Corbyn has won. Even with the thoroughly colonized Party apparatus, by the powerful Blair clique, disqualifying 150,000 of it newest members. Not to mention the manufacture of a fake ‘Antisemitism crisis’ by among others Jonathan Freedland, at the Guardian:

Headline: Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem

Sub-headline: Under Jeremy Corbyn the party has attracted many activists with views hostile to Jews. Its leaders must see why this matters

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/labour-antisemitism-jews-jeremy-corbyn

And others at The Financial Times:

At The Financial Times Robert Shrimsley opines on April 28, 2016:

How Jeremy Corbyn turned me into a political Jew. It is simply impossible to vote for a Labour party that does not appear to like us.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5e642d92-0c57-11e6-9456-444ab5211a2f.html#axzz47LrFIllT

A Financial Times April 28,2016 editorial states:

Jeremy Corbyn’s halfhearted shrug over anti-Semitism.The Labour leader’s failure on this issue is tarnishing his leadership.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/433ec60e-0c60-11e6-9456-444ab5211a2f.html#axzz47LrFIllT

The Financial Times editors even resurrect this February 19, 2016 essay by Simon Schama:

The left’s problem with Jews has a long and miserable history. Anti-Israel demonstrations are in danger of morphing into anti-Semitism, writes Simon Schama

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d6a75c3c-d6f3-11e5-829b-8564e7528e54.html#axzz47LrFIllT

This manufactured crisis simply disappeared, at least from the pages of The Financial Times. See my full comment from May 1, 2016:

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2016/05/01/at-the-financial-times-antisemitism-jeremy-corbyn-the-manufactured-crisis/

The conflict between the Reformers, Corbyn and his successors, and New Labour will define the history of the Labour Party, for the foreseeable political future. And in view of the truly dismal economic present, as a product of the failed Free Market and the Crash of 2008, it will be a future fraught with perpetual conflict.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/feaf0968-8243-11e6-a29c-6e7d9515ad15.html#axzz4LE4y46b4

Headline: Generation Balls in UK politics already reeks of yesterday

Sub-headline: Picture them roaming public life like ghosts, helping out without ever being central to anything

Mr. Ganesh’s essay of September 23, 2016 is awash in bile and contempt for Mr. Balls and his ‘generation’ of politicians. Mr. Ganesh’s one salient talent as writer is stinging polemic. Nothing new, yet instead of a clear thoughtful analysis of Mr. Ball’s book, and its reason d’etre, or even its arguments, the reader is confronted by that aforementioned bile and contempt. And a collection of cliches as a rhetorical place holder for rational thoughtful criticism:

a zero-sum view of the world, post-national, strategic primacy, stink of yesterday, materialists and technocrats, conscientious social-science graduates, incremental refinement, intangibles of politics, Old Think,  Generation X, Euroscepticism, globalisation

The smartest of the bunch, he tends to see the world as a web of economic problems waiting to be neutralised by the application of reason. His generational peers in Westminster were, like him, materialists and technocrats.

Mr. Ganesh provides in a highly foreshortened pragmatic way, a working definition of Politics, in his characterization of Mr. Balls’ thought/practice : ‘he tends to see the world as a web of economic problems waiting to be neutralised by the application of reason.’  How better, in such limited space, to define politics? Mr. Ganesh is now the victim of his own nihilism, as expressed in his polemic: his ideological myopia is his undoing. All of this leaving the argued ‘centrality’ where? Does a political actor need to hold a position of power to wield influence? The questions abound.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3241b5a4-800b-11e6-8e50-8ec15fb462f4.html#axzz4LBba1GMP

How can Macri be The Knight of Neo-Liberal Faith and Action when he and de Kirchner were both clients of Mossack Fonseca?

Read this TLS review of The Panama Papers by Edward N. Luttwak. A passage worthy of quotation:

If anyone tried to work back from company number 123 to the original money-sending company by way of the 122 companies in between, a lifetime of investigations might not do it, especially because those 122 companies could be registered anywhere in the world, not restricted to the places where Mossack Fonseca had and still have offices, to wit: Anguilla, the Bahamas, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Malta, the Netherlands, Panama, Samoa, the Seychelles, the United Kingdom and two US states: Nevada and Wyoming. Those companies, moreover, could be legally incorporated yet have no identifiable owners at all, because their equity might all be vested in nameless “bearer” shares. Not even the ultra-formidable billionaire Paul Singer, who had bought up heavily discounted Argentine debt, had refused “haircut” payouts and was employing lawyers and investigators everywhere to track down anything of value that he could impound (he did succeed with an Argentine naval vessel), could do anything about the $65 million sitting tantalizingly close to him in Nevada – but now all the data was revealed (too late for Singer because Argentina’s new President, Mauricio Macri, also a Mossack Fonseca client as it happens, had already decided to settle and pay him off, along with all the other hold-out claimants).

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/hidden-costs/

Read the global overview of the Panama Papers here:

https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160403-panama-papers-global-overview.html

My question will not be answered here at the Financial Times, which is part of a cheering section of ‘journalists’ who celebrated Paul Singer’s victory in an  American court, and Macri’s negotiation with the Vulture Capitalist as the in-order- to of rejoining the Family of Neo-Liberal Nations. De Kirchner was corrupt, but the question remains about the why of Macri being a client of the most notorious tax dodging/money laundering organization in history. No honest politician needs such a service!

Who is Gustavo Grobocopatel, Argentine farmer? More likely an Argentine Agribusiness owner, that provides a bit of that old reliable Austrian Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ garnish, to this essay celebrating the rebirth of a vigorous functioning Capitalism in Argentina . In both America and Europe a vigorous functioning Capitalism would be a most welcome change from our perpetual economic doldrums. But it seems our economies overdosed on that ‘creative destruction’ otherwise called theft on a mass scale.

Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fad526b2-7c38-11e6-ae24-f193b105145e.html#axzz4KkGAR9Hq