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

Ms. Slaughter begins her disappointing, even trivializing essay framed by part of the catechism of Neo-Liberalism  ‘the global market in education’. Education is civic concern with nothing to do with the worshipers of Market Discipline. The Charter School movement in America, that has produced massive fraud to the tune of 3.3 billion dollars of looted public funds, has passed by this writer. So does the continuing crisis in American Education, since the rise of Mario Savio and The Free Speech movement in 1964 to the political present, escapes this political conformist’s ken. But Ms. Slaughter does manage this  exercise in ‘Neo-Liberal Futurism’ :

High walls and high prices are an invitation for digital disrupters to find new ways to compete.

For the particulars on New America Foundation- what America needs of is another propaganda outlet for policy technocrats between government jobs- see this SourceWatch  entry:

The New America Foundation is a Washington D.C.-headquartered think tank which states that it “invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States … With an emphasis on big ideas, impartial analysis and pragmatic solutions, New America invests in outstanding individuals whose ability to communicate to wide and influential audiences can change the country’s policy discourse in critical areas, bringing promising new ideas and debates to the fore.”^[1]

The foundation, which was launched in 1999, has as its CEO Steve Coll, a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine while the chairman of the Board of Directors is the Chairman & CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt.^[1]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/New_America_Foundation

For the New America Foundation ties to the political reactionary Peter G. Peterson Foundation see this SourceWatch entry:

Peter G. Peterson, born June 5, 1926, is a controversial Wall Street billionaire who uses his wealth to underwrite a diversity of organizations and PR campaigns to generate public support for slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, citing concerns over “unsustainable” federal budget deficits. In 2007, he made a fortune from the public offering of the private equity firm he co-founded, Blackstone Group, and pledged to spend $1 billion of this money to “fix America’s key fiscal-sustainability problems.” He endowed this money to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which he launched in 2008 (see below for more).^[1] His son, Michael A. Peterson, is the President and Chief Operating Officer of the foundation.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Peter_G._Peterson_Foundation

Ms. Slaughter’s pose as concerned public intellectual, under the descriptor of an ersatz Progressivism, and its alliance with the Peterson  clique, in the cause of education, is just part of her attempt at self-rescue, from her catastrophic intellectual interventions in the area of Foreign Policy. As a regular reader of The Financial Times, this essay reads as if it were dictated to secretary and revised, in a few hurried free moments, during a busy schedule.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c3c967b6-7bfa-11e6-ae24-f193b105145e.html#axzz4KkGAR9Hq

The focus of the Erasmus essay is one chapter, ‘The Priest, the Sinner and the Non-Believer’ of Mr Tsoukalis’ book ‘In Defence of Europe’. Mr. Tsoukalis and his think tank ELIAMEP are not just advocates of the European Idea/Ideal, but its full time apologists! Just view the Wikipedia entries on ELIAMEP, and his own entry to confirm his status as a well credentialed, and decorated academic, whose  ‘think tank’ clearly demonstrates his status as  EU apologist:

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

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

The question that leaps to the mind of the regular reader is how long will The Economist continue to give credence to the shopworn construct of The Virtuous Norther Tier vs The Profligate Southern Tier, or iterations on the same theme? As descriptor of anything resembling ‘reality’ this dialectic has no cogency, except as the tool of public shaming of the Greeks, in defense of the European Ideology. In sum this ideology is built on the shaky foundation of German Economic Virtue. Can the reader take this at face value? Here is compelling challenge to that vaunted ‘virtue’ : Gillian Tett’s ‘a debt to history’ published on January 15, 2015 in the Financial Times:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html

The sub-headline is instructive:

To some, Germany faces a moral duty to help Greece, given the aid that it has previously enjoyed

In sum, Ms. Tett reports on an after dinner speech by economic historian Benjamin Friedman. Here is the quite stunning part, as reported by Ms.Tett:

‘For a couple of minutes Friedman then offered a brief review of western financial history, highlighting the unprecedented nature of Europe’s single currency experiment, and offering a description of sovereign and local government defaults in the 20th century. Then, with an edge to his voice, Friedman pointed out that one of the great beneficiaries of debt forgiveness throughout the last century was Germany: on multiple occasions (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953), the western allies had restructured German debt.

So why couldn’t Germany do the same for others? “There is ample precedent within Europe for both debt relief and debt restructuring . . . There is no economic ground for Germany to be the only European country in modern times to be granted official debt relief on a massive scale and certainly no moral ground either.

“The supposed ability of today’s most heavily indebted European countries to reduce their obligations over time, even in relation to the scale of their economies, is likely yet another fiction,” he continued, warning of political unrest if this situation continued.’

The Economist and Mr Tsoukalis share both an ideology and an interest in the manufacture of usable propaganda,  even if that propaganda is couched in a complete perversion of any recognizable theology, and a self-willed for getting of history. The Economist/Tsoukalis ménage almost rivals the political theology of Carl Schmitt and his latter-day epigones !

Another question occurs, when does the ‘West’s’ leading newspaper begin to exercise ‘the due diligence’ that is the foundation of actual Journalism as opposed to highfalutin  propaganda?

Political Observer

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2016/09/forgive-me-father

Perhaps the most famous piece of stage direction in Western literature occurs in the third act of Shakespeare’s classic play “The Winter’s Tale: “Exit pursued by a bear.” There’s plenty of reason to think that being pursued by a bear, the most iconic image of Russia in international relations, is precisely how the United States must feel at the moment. Seemingly in every direction we turn, Russia is there, chasing our policy choices off the stage of world events. Despite valiant efforts to negotiate with Russia in Ukraine, Crimea, Syria, Iran, missile defense in Europe, NATO membership, and cybersecurity — to name just a few — Moscow and Washington have serious disagreements.Perhaps the most famous piece of stage direction in Western literature occurs in the third act of Shakespeare’s classic play “The Winter’s Tale: “Exit pursued by a bear.” There’s plenty of reason to think that being pursued by a bear, the most iconic image of Russia in international relations, is precisely how the United States must feel at the moment. Seemingly in every direction we turn, Russia is there, chasing our policy choices off the stage of world events. Despite valiant efforts to negotiate with Russia in Ukraine, Crimea, Syria, Iran, missile defense in Europe, NATO membership, and cybersecurity — to name just a few — Moscow and Washington have serious disagreements.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/14/how-to-negotiate-with-putin-on-anything-russia-obama-syria/

Here is James Stavridis’ essay on The West’s Problem Child , Putin. Despite the rhetorical framing from The Winter’s Tale, we are in the shopworn territory of  Family Melodrama writ large.  Mr. Stavridis is the replacement for the last two military figures that have not simply disappointed – Colin Powell as an utterly gullible instrument of Neo-Conservative War Mongers and David Petraeus as pussy-whipped consort to Paula Broadwell’s political ambition, not to speak of his own libido, as the why of his surrendered judgement. The  central  claim of Mr. Stavridis’ first paragraph is that America is the hapless victim of Putin’s political nihilism, his status as spoiler to the magnanimity of the USA is established ? America as the eternal victim, somehow that just won’t wash! Should the reader take the mention of Ukraine, as part of that over-arching claim, of America as victim of Putin’s machinations as somehow a viable argument?  NATO was an active co-conspirator in the 2014 Ukrainian Coup along with other bad actors: the EU, Victoria Nuland, Jeffrey Pyatt, The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty etc., etc. The in-order-to of his recitation of the Party Line of America’s betrayed virtue seems to crumple, under the weight of just one instance of Mr.Stavridis’ lack of candor, in defense not of republican values, but of his defense of the American Nation Security State to which he owes his allegiance.

The first order of the business of the policy technocrat is to demonstrate, that he is first and foremost a political conformist, to the current iteration of political orthodoxy, as Mr. Stavridis does with this first paragraph. But the question that remains is what does he offer in the remainder of his essay that the reader can evaluate as valuable to a continuing debate about American Foreign Policy?

Here is Mr. Stavridis’ list of recommendations:

Begin by understanding the Russian worldview.

Accept the supremacy of Putin.

Prepare for a long and difficult process.

Sharpen your logic.

Don’t overlook the personal.

Is any of this advice beyond the ken of the most inexperienced diplomat? I would hope not! It’s called pragmatism.

Political Observer

You have to wonder at the political desperation that gave birth to Mr. Runciman’s essay. Just call it chatter! One could compare it to the Party Line of The Financial Times’ ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’ which appears in its many guises and iterations, on an almost daily basis. Along with the hand-wringing of Mr. Wolf or Mr. Stephen’s on the fact that Capitalism and its actors are at best thieves: their own worst enemy.

Capitalism and democracy: the strain is showing

Martin Wolf

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e46e8c00-6b72-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c.html

Global elites must heed the warning of populist rage

Martin Wolf

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/54f0f5c6-4d05-11e6-88c5-db83e98a590a.html#axzz4KcnSoE7g

How to save capitalism from capitalists

Philip Stephens

(‘The delicious first two paragraphs of the Stephen’s essay are not to be missed by the true believers, who read the Financial Times with regularity. A bit of shock treatment? Patience is required by the true believer! Political Observer)

Once in a while capitalism has to be rescued from the depredations of, well, capitalists. Unconstrained, enterprise curdles into monopoly, innovation into rent-seeking. Today’s swashbuckling “disrupters” set up tomorrow’s cosy cartels. Capitalism works when someone enforces competition; and successful capitalists do not much like competition.

Theodore Roosevelt understood this when, as US president, he deployed the Sherman Act against the industrial titans at the turn of the 20th century. Henceforth antitrust, or competition, law has served, sometimes effectively, sometimes less so, to protect the interest of consumers and thereby legitimise the profits of big business. US president Ronald Reagan, scarcely a leftie, presided over the break-up of AT&T.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c69e7972-79c0-11e6-97ae-647294649b28.html#axzz4KcnSoE7g

Yet Mr. Runciman leaps about rhetorically from assertion to assertion, without touching political terra firma, because his is not a critique of Corbyn, per say. But a maladroit defense of the Labour status quo i.e. the Blair Neo-Liberals or ‘Moderates’, represented by Owen Smith, as Liz Kendall’s essay extrapolates on the Wolf/Stephens/Financial Times theme, she is a devout Neo-Liberal, who lards her essay with the hallowed jargon of the trio of Free Marketers: Hayek, Mises and Friedman. Not to speak of her enthusiasm as true believer. This final paragraph makes plain her status as New Labour to the core:

Finally, we must face up to our responsibilities abroad and deal with world as it is, not as we wish it would be. While lessons must be learnt from Iraq and Libya, this cannot mean Britain withdrawing from the world and hoping difficult problems go away. Making these arguments will not be easy but Labour moderates must have the courage of our convictions. It is the only path back to power, and to change the country for the better.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/57cae772-7b4d-11e6-ae24-f193b105145e.html#axzz4KcnSoE7g

Corbyn is building his political base through a concerted campaign. Just how hard is that to comprehend for a seasoned political observer? Again the reader confronts Mr. Runciman’s muddled propaganda, in the most direct way via the maladroit ‘death by enthusiasm’ trope.

Political Observer

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/opinions/death-by-enthusiasm-labour-party-membership-jeremy-corbyn

In his review/essay of ‘Tiny Alice’ Mr. Roth presents his case against Mr. Albee in full heterosexual defensiveness as he attacks the closeted playwright as literary type, as well as a writer. Compare this first quoted paragraph which uses this slur ‘ ghastly pansy rhetoric’ to the last paragraph that advocates for a ‘homosexual hero’ not veiled by some instantiation of ‘ angst-ridden priest, or an angry Negro, or an aging actress; or worst of all, Everyman.’ (Mr. Roth is his maladroit way alludes to the work of both James Baldwin and Tennessee Williams.) How is that hero to be realized, to have literary personhood, to be an actor, in this or any other drama? It’s almost as if the ‘Homosexual’ is a category outside, ‘The Other’ not realized as human: that Roth makes the ‘subject’ of  his imperious and empirically ludicrous demand. But the real question here, looking back from 2016 to 1965, is to make the schizophrenia that Mr. Roth presents as legitimate, in the premier journal of the New York Liberal Literati of it’s time, into the point of inquiry.  It seems fitting on the news of Edward Albee’s death, that we look at the reception of his work, in it’s time and literary/political milieu suffused with homophobia.

1)

The disaster of the play, however—its tediousness, its pretentiousness, its galling sophistication, its gratuitous and easy symbolizing, its ghastly pansy rhetoric and repartee—all of this can be traced to his own unwillingness or inability to put its real subject at the center of the action. An article on the theater page of The New York Times indicates that Albee is distressed by the search that has begun for the meaning of the play; the Times also reports that he is amused by it, as well. When they expect him to become miserable they don’t say; soon, I would think. For despair, not archness, is usually what settles over a writer unable to invent characters and an action and a tone appropriate to his feelings and convictions. Why Tiny Alice is so unconvincing, so remote, so obviously a sham—so much the kind of play that makes you want to rise from your seat and shout, “Baloney”—is that its surface is an attempt to disguise the subject on the one hand, and to falsify its significance on the other. All that talk about illusion and reality may even be the compulsive chattering of a dramatist who at some level senses that he is trapped in a lie.

2)

Tiny Alice is a homosexual day-dream in which the celibate male is tempted and seduced by the overpowering female, only to be betrayed by the male lover and murdered by the cruel law, or in this instance, cruel lawyer. It has as much to do with Christ’s Passion as a little girl’s dreaming about being a princess locked in a tower has to do with the fate of Mary Stuart. Unlike Genet, who dramatizes the fact of fantasying in Our Lady of the Flowers, Albee would lead us to believe that his fantasy has significance altogether removed from the dread or the desire which inspired it; consequently, the attitudes he takes towards his material are unfailingly inappropriate. His subject is emasculation—as was Strindberg’s in The Father, a play I mention because its themes, treated openly and directly, and necessarily connected in the action, are the very ones that Albee has so vulgarized and sentimentalized in Tiny Alice: male weakness, female strength, and the limits of human knowledge. How long before a play is produced on Broadway in which the homosexual hero is presented as a homosexual, and not disguised as an angst-ridden priest, or an angry Negro, or an aging actress; or worst of all, Everyman?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1965/02/25/the-play-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/ ATTENTION: This link is behind a pay wall!

American Writer

The exchange of letters is informative :

Tiny Alice

Colin Powell Urged Hillary Clinton’s Team Not to Scapegoat Him for Her Private Server, Leaked Emails Reveal

This is very interesting in terms of palace gossip and as Foreign Policy chatter, but this quote from Powell demonstrates the myth of his political ‘virtue’ in the starkest terms :

‘Powell added in a tangential complaint: “I told you about the gig I lost at a University because she so overcharged them they came under heat and couldn’t any fees for awhile. I should send her a bill.” ‘

Political Cynic

Opus Dei’s Ross Douthat is way out of his usual territory: the hectoring chatter about sexual morality, directed to the liberated women of America, who feel they don’t need the tutelage of one more stupid straight white male, offering censure about their wombs, and whether or not they have proper licensure to give birth to children. Or more importantly to terminate a pregnancy, because they lack the theological sophistication of those sporting a penis! And usually are celibate!

The target of Mr. Douthat’s contempt/scorn today is the Trump/Putin Romance as referred to in the American/European Press, once called ‘The West’. It is the usual potted history, eliding the most salient facts in his self-servingly cartoonish re-description.The first paragraph is indicative of that argumentative approach:

RUSSIA’S place in American politics used to be (relatively) simple. The further right you stood, the more you feared Ivan and his Slavic wiles. The further left, the more you likely thought the Red Menace was mostly just a scare story.

Read the whole of the essay here:

Then compare Douthat’s small essay, Oh! small in every way, to David Remnick’s  historically adroit, not to speak of sprawling essay, in comparison to Douthat’s, on Putin the Terrible, and his mythical romance with Trump. This the creation of one of the defenders of a teetering political status quo. That status quo represented  in the person of the perpetually bellicose Hillary Clinton. And her coterie of Neo-Conservative fellow travelers: Kristol, Kagan, Goldberg, Nuland and other luminaries of the Strauss/Schmitt Universe. Now, your patience is required for both essays

The New Yorker and it’s editor/reporter, Mr. Remnick is compelled to think of himself in rather grandiose, self-congratulatory terms. ‘Lenin’s Tomb’ his calling card as ‘expert’ on Russia!  Yet he conforms to the current political orthodoxy, in regards to Putin as The New Stalin, and the mutual admiration between he and Trump.  All of this framed by a photograph of part of a  biting satirical mural. Call Mr. Remnick’s essay an attempt at a duel portrait in miniature of his two protagonists. All of this awash in the current expression of a paranoia, not seen since the heyday of the Nixon/McCarren/McCarthy/Mundt Witch Hunt, at it’s height in 1952. This Nostalgia rivals the enthusiasm of The  Schlesinger / Niebuhr alliance that birthed the ADA! Not to speak of nasty Tabloid titillation worthy of Rupert Murdoch. But Mr. Remnick quickly segues into a quote from R2P zealot Timothy Snyder, who writes respectable bourgeois political propaganda defending the Ukrainian Coup, for the once ultra-respectable ‘Left-Wing’ New York Review of Books.

Quoting Mr. Remnick’s two paragraphs below puts the lie to the long held notion that the Soviet Union was incapable of ‘reforming itself’ :

Twenty-five summers ago, Communist ideology and the Soviet Union itself teetered on the brink of nonexistence. On the morning of July 23, 1991, two newspaper articles appeared that, each in its own way, signalled the end.

A liberal paper called Nezavisimaya Gazeta (The Independent Newspaper) published a leak of a new draft platform for the Communist Party. The draft rejected Marxist-Leninist ideology in favor of European-style social democracy, and it “unconditionally” condemned the “crimes” of the Stalin regime, which “broke and maimed the lives of millions of people, whole nations.” The draft had the endorsement of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was still the Party’s General Secretary, but of no more than a third of the Central Committee.

Mr. Remnick trades in the same New Cold War rhetoric that Mr. Douthat extemporizes upon, but the New Yorker reader is more sophisticated than the New York Times reader.In that that reader is used to reading Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer and other skilled muckrakers in a valuable American Journalistic Tradition. So Mr. Remnick must provide proper historical garnish, to his version of the defense of the stauts quo of Mrs. Clinton, as the only viable option against Trump, as the dupe of Putin. Yet the central belief, the core of their propaganda in it’s iterations is a one dimensional monster, the corollary of the caricature of Stalin of the Old Cold War. But as expert, as neo-technocrat, Mr. Remnick provides a very convincing evidence of Putin as political monster in waiting, during the transition from the Soviet era to the ‘Free Market’ paradise of Russia, achieved by the strong medicine of  ‘Market Discipline’ and it’s degradation of the life of the citizens in an evolving democratic polity, under the watchful direction of corrupt Neo-Liberal thugs.

For some essential background history of Glasnost see Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuval ‘s ‘Voices of Glasnost’, a set of interviews of the political actors who made that ‘internal reform’ happen.

http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-30735-1/

Mr. Remnick’s construction of the Putin Story is compelling reading, as self-constructed evidence of the Future Putin, as an instance of  History Made to Measure, equaling propaganda. Never fear Mr. Remnick condemns Putin for his  cynical manipulation on many fronts i.e. supporting unsavory political actors in many countries. One can only remark that Mr. Remnick ignores the unsavory history of his own country, one of the most blatant recent examples being The Ukrainian Coup of 2014. Of course that Coup is an example of the action of freedom loving people overthrowing a Russian Puppet: call it myth making or just lies! Though nothing quite prepares the reader for Mr. Remnick’s final paragraph steeped in New Cold War paranoia, as a retrograde defense of the bellicose Hillary Clinton, and her coterie of Neo-Conservative ghouls, ending in cheapest kind of vulgarity.

Vladimir Putin is a cunning and cynical reader of his adversaries. He notices that Trump does not know the difference between the Quds Force and the Kurds, or what the “nuclear triad” is; that his analysis of Brexit was based in part on what might be good for his golf courses in Britain; that his knowledge of world affairs is roughly that of someone who subscribes to a daily newspaper but doesn’t always have time to get to it. Overwhelmed with his own problems at home, Putin sees the ready benefit in having the United States led by an unlettered narcissist who believes that geostrategic questions are as easy to resolve as a real-estate closing. Putin knows a chump when he sees one.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-and-putin-a-love-story

Political Cynic