I had a sense of déjà vu as I read Mr. Luce’s column. Except that he seemed to echo David Brooks, who dons, at his political convenience, the mantle of popular sociologist,  political prophet and/or national moral scold. Sometimes all three of these persona make an appearance in his rhetorical meanders. In Mr. Luce’s essay the players are familiar Clinton and Trump, with the addition of Cruz or other actors doing walk-ons, yet the political context seems not just amiss, but surreal to the point of sowing the seeds of a confusion that is  politically exploitable.This, an old gambit used by Neo-Conservatives, but renders Mr. Luce’s essay into the realm of mystery, comprehended only by himself, or just call it an exercise in recursive imagining. If my explanation seems a bit off kilter, I take my cue from our author’s extemporizing on a theme.

As readers, we see the Republican Party committing a mass suicide, although some of the Republican Nihilists, and the bellicose Neo-Conservatives,have declared for Mrs. Clinton. The Trump candidacy is a result of the nihilism that the Republicans have exercised since Obama’s inauguration in 2009 to the present. And Mrs. Clinton and her New Democratic allies demonstrated, with documentary evidence, the character of the Party as utterly in the hands of a machine candidate and her minions: Deborah Wasserman-Schultz’s  firing from the DNC and seamless hiring by the Clinton coterie makes clear the what and why of The New Democrats: who operate in this political/moral context as the savior of American political rationalism.  

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5ac101f0-70ee-11e6-9ac1-1055824ca907.html#axzz4JHD6g8ym

Never fear we are in the ‘safe space’ once inhabited by the paranoid chatter of Allen Bloom of ‘The Closing of The American Mind’ and his two Neo-Conservative allies: Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘Illiberal Education’ and Roger Kimball’s ‘Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education’, these three Neo-Conservatives attacked Academia, Bloom from the angle of lazy, unimaginative students addled by rock music and their own narcissism, D’Souza from the angle of a failed educational system, and Kimball from the idea of political apostates, the ‘tenured radicals’ who managed a corrupt system, that perverted the very idea of education.But given the time lapse between our three experts of other decades, the debate about the ‘enemy within’ i.e. the contemporary student body has changed a bit to reflect the times. Yet what is true of yesterday’s ‘enemy’ is true of the political present. That enemy is our own children, cast in the role of the spoiled rotten, or foreshortened to, the scourge of coddled Millennials. The attack from the Conservatives, and their allies, remains the same over the decades ‘students’ are guilty of bad faith and political mendacity prima facie!

Old Socialist

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2016/08/content-may-cause-trauma

Title this ‘The Ersatz Dandy at 85’ still tilting at the ‘Left’: this time it’s Chomsky. Still comically dressed , who imagines himself to be the natural inheritor of the tradition of Brummel and Baudelaire, but totally lacking the aphoristic and dramatic talents of Wilde! Mr. Wolf , the last gasp of a Southern WASP Elite reeking of the stale dusty tomb of Dandyism, celebrated by pitch man Philip Delves Broughton. Because the world remade by the modern prophets of The Free Market Hayek, Mises, Friedman everything is commodified. The once civic actor, of the more than 2000 year old evolution, of a tradition of the shared destiny of the commonwealth, has been supplanted by the Market, in which everyone is an entrepreneur, with something to sell: themselves as thinkers/writers/polemicists pitching a product. Mr. Wolfe resembles Mae West in her Louis Quatorze apartment awash in white and gold, waiting for the last act.

Sincerely yours,

Myra Breckenridge

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0031d3d4-6f92-11e6-a0c9-1365ce54b926.html#axzz4JD9z85ZP

Mr. Lawson ‘the Thatcher Revolution’ was finished or simply collapsed from the weight of a  mendacious faith in the ‘Free Market’ in 2008! Or has that fact passed you by? Mrs. Thatcher passed out copies of ‘The Road to Serfdom’ like party favors, but one can see that the title was a prescient description  of the political present. Knowing that compassion and care are utterly irrelevant, even scorned practices, concepts in Hayek circles, what can we make of a news story from the Guardian and a report from Oxfam?

“Headline: More than a million people in UK living in destitution, study shows

The Thatcher Revolution, in the year 2016, and its egregious failures to meet the needs of its citizens through some 37 years (Tory and New Labour) are glaringly  obvious, to all but the most myopic of Hayek’s acolytes. Perhaps, the editors of The Financial Times, can look to these sobering statistics and find the root of The Rebellion Against The Elites, that has become their idée fixe?

Old Socialist

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6cb84f70-6b7c-11e6-a0b1-d87a9fea034f.html#axzz4J6k4VviH

Mr. Wolf rather naively pushes back on Capitalism, in it’s Neo-Liberal form, yet for all the hectoring rhetoric he seems to have missed the fact that President Obama, the ersatz Progressive, has identified the TPP as a part of his ‘Legacy’. The links below demonstrate that fact without question:

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/obama-trade-deal-tpp-227038

Obama to take trade battle to the heartland

Tackling campaign rhetoric from Hillary Clinton as well as Donald Trump, administration officials are traveling the country to tout the deal’s benefits.

By Adam Behsudi 08/16/16 05:06 AM EDT

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/business/international/trans-pacific-partnership-obama.html?_r=0

Obama Readies One Last Push for Trans-Pacific Partnership

By JACKIE CALMES AUG. 21, 2016

What might a reader take from this review of The Panama Papers by Edward N. Luttwak, published by The TLS of August 17,2016 titled ‘Hidden assets, hidden costs’? A long quotation from the essay is not just revelatory about the corruption of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, but that of Neo-Liberal White Knight Mauricio Macri, who was also customer of  Mossack Fonseca. Note that Vulture Capitalist Paul Singer rates a mention as rabid pursuer of assets, that even eluded his greed:

‘The Panama Papers opens with an engaging first-person account by Bastian Obermayer, a well-known investigative journalist for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, of how the whole story started: an unsolicited email from a John Doe offering “data”. As soon as Obermayer accepted the twin conditions of total anonymity and encrypted communications, he received “a big bunch of documents”.

These mostly concerned the alleged smuggling of $65 million out of Argentina on behalf of its President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner – hardly startling news if true, given the country and the person but the documents also included what really mattered: full corporate information on the 123 name-plate-only (“shell”) companies that were used to zig-zag the money surreptitiously around the world, all of them formed by a Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca.

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/

While you savor that bit of what? ‘news’ that should shock, but simply confirms a wide spread cynicism about the opportunities political power offers.A look at this from the Financial Times of November 25, 2015:  Alfonso Prat-Gay appointed Argentina’s new finance minister, by Benedict Mander in Buenos Aires

Mauricio Macri, the centre-right mayor of Buenos Aires who won Argentina’s presidential elections on Sunday, named economist Alfonso Prat-Gay as his finance minister on Wednesday.

The 50-year-old former JPMorgan executive and former central bank governor will be responsible for reinvigorating an economy wracked with double-digit inflation as well as untangling a web of economic controls after 12 years of protectionism and state intervention.

The most urgent task facing Mr Prat-Gay will be to address a severe shortage of foreign exchange reserves at the same time as unifying a complex exchange rate regime and removing strict capital controls, which Mr Macri has promised to do on his first day in office on December 11.

Mr Prat-Gay’s appointment was confirmed during a press conference on Wednesday in which a cabinet dominated by technocrats was announced.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/79d6ce3a-93bd-11e5-bd82-c1fb87bef7af.html#axzz4IpaHJnPg

Or this interview from the April 1, 2016 edition of The Financial Times titled ‘Argentina emerging from the ‘netherworld’, says Alfonso Prat-Gay’ ‘Finance minister cites inflation and Brazil crisis as biggest threats to economy’ by Benedict Mander in Buenos Aires.

“Our financial programme is no longer wishful thinking but a clear possibility. Solving the holdouts problem will open the window to foreign money,” says Mr Prat-Gay, cautioning that a US appeals court still has to approve the lifting of injunctions that will enable Argentina to make the payment. “It’s not over until it’s over. But it’s nearly over.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/79d6ce3a-93bd-11e5-bd82-c1fb87bef7af.html#axzz4IpaHJnPg

Alfonso Prat-Gay, ‘ former JPMorgan executive and former central bank governor’,  in April 2016 seemed highly optimistic some five months ago. The only real question is what has happened since April 2016? An answer provided by Mauricio Macri reported here dated August 30, 2016:

Headline :Argentine leader tries to buoy up enthusiasm for reforms

reported by Daniel Politi in Buenos Aires and John Paul Rathbone in Miami

The southern hemisphere winter has seemingly brought only bad news for Mauricio Macri, Argentina’s new president. The economy has slowed, unemployment has grown and consumer confidence has cratered — and that is only from the most recent numbers.

For now, polls show Argentines giving the benefit of the doubt to the millionaire former businessman’s ambitious reform programme, which seeks to reverse the populist policies of his predecessor, Cristina Fernández.

But with poverty starting to bite thanks to high inflation and investors concerned about Mr Macri’s ability to execute reforms, the enthusiasm that first greeted his government seven months ago risks being worn down.

An August 25 poll by Management & Fit, a consultancy, showed Mr Macri’s approval rating at 43 per cent — solid enough, but down from a March peak of 51 per cent.

“I thought change would be for the better, but the truth is I am worse off now,” said Olga Faletti, 68. “Every week I’m scared to go to the supermarket . . . Prices keep increasing and my pension is not enough to make ends meet.”

It is a challenge faced by reformist governments everywhere — how to convince domestic voters and international investors to be patient until new, reformist policies bear fruit.

“Change is not easy,” admitted Marcos Peña, the president’s chief of staff, at an investor conference in Buenos Aires.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/07db6524-6e1a-11e6-a0c9-1365ce54b926.html#axzz4IpaHJnPg

Please note the quotation of ‘consultancies’ as some how  constitutive of ‘objective sources’, of not facts, but of friendly speculation because they are stakeholders in the Mercri ‘Reforms’! Management & Fit, Ecolatina, Stratfor and the nebulous New York based Americas Society and Council of the Americas, what ever this is?

The Pope seems to be hostile to the Mercri ‘Reforms’ as it threatens his constituency the undeserving poor and a Supreme Court’s rejection:

One recent example of the kinds of institutional challenges facing Mr Macri was a decision by the Supreme Court, ordering the government to reverse energy tariff increases that are a cornerstone of its attempts to reduce a fiscal deficit forecast at 5 per cent of GDP.

And a long anonymous quotation:

“Under Fernández, the longer her presidency went on the more apparent it became that the story she was telling was based on lies,” said a government adviser. “Under Macri, it is the opposite: the longer it goes on, the more people will see that what he says is true. It is a whole new way of governing.”

Referring back to the TLS review: why  are Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and  Mauricio Macri both clients of Mossack Fonseca?

Is there hope for the austerity of Mercri? Or does the answer lie in a borrowing, and an extemporizing on the theme of  ‘intelligent austerity’ advocated by Mauricio Cárdenas, Minister of Finance and Public Credit of Colombia, in this interview conducted by tby.

https://www.thebusinessyear.com/colombia-2016/intelligent-austerity/vip-interview

One wonders about the ‘when’ of a realization that the Neo-Liberal Dispensation has exhausted itself, and that it is time, at the least, for a New Deal, that rescues the political/civic whole, rather than attempting to save Capital from it’s own self-destructive  greed?

Old Socialist

In his essay “Lived experience” matters—but not more than everything else Alex Dean places himself in the Tradition of the paranoid chatter of Allen Bloom of ‘The Closing of The American Mind’ and his two Neo-Conservative allies: Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘Illiberal Education’ and Roger Kimball’s ‘Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education’, these three Neo-Conservatives attacked Academia, Bloom from the angle of lazy, unimaginative students addled by rock music and their own narcissism, D’Souza from the angle of a failed educational system, and Kimball from the idea of political apostates, the ‘tenured radicals’ who managed a corrupt system, that perverted the very idea of education.

McCarthyism is an honored American Tradition:the Salem  Witch Trials, which relied on  ‘spectral evidence’ pioneered by Cotton Mather began that tradition. Mr. Dean inexplicably abandons the notion of ‘microagressions”—small slights such as talking over someone’, meaning verbal bulling, in favor of ‘lived experience’ exercised by the amorphous ‘student left’ that  eventually becomes real in ‘Everyday Feminism’ and ‘Cuntry Living’ , both feminist web sites,  and Owen Jones’ walk out of the Sky News panel, because the other panelists refused to call the Orlando murders an attack on LGBTI persons, not because of some claim of an absence of ‘lived experience’, but because of failure of those panelists to recognize the  empirical facts of the case.  Mr. Dean has just begun his search for Apostates in the body politic, as the enemy of the moment, or just the scapegoats for a class of commentators, who speak for a political status quo in utter collapse: Neo-Liberalism, in its myriad iterations.

Mr. Dean astonishingly exhibits his utter ignorance of the idea of ‘lived experience’ as a product of the evolution of the thought of Dilthey, to Husserl’s ‘Life World’, through Heidegger to the existentialism of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, in short the evolution of the philosophical school called Phenomenology: that historical background inconvenient to the imperative of shaming the political other.

Absent also is any mention of  left student radicals in the 1930’s, the 1964 Free Speech movement led by Mario Savio, 1968 Paris or Chicago. In the face of political crisis like the Depression, the Vietnam War or 9-11, the War on Terror , Afghanistan,Iraq, Syria , The Drone Wars in various locations, the  watershed of the 2008 Depression, and the economic doldrums eight years on, has created a sense of a permanent crisis in the West:Europe and America.  All of this history, too politically inconvenient to Mr. Dean’s witch hunting  polemic against the dissidents in our midst, a fifth column threatening our political unity: our own children!

Political Observer

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/lived-experience-matters-but-not-more-than-everything-else

The Clinton’s Reaganite agenda, they governed as a team, attacked black people on two fronts: Welfare Reform and a Crime bills that enabled The New Jim Crow. Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, of 1999 repealed Glass-Stegall. A harbinger of 2008!

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93Bliley_Act

And what benefit did these three pieces of legislation do for anyone?  Call this whole record catastrophic. Capehart’s attack on Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka and their campaign as a ‘fair-tale candidacy’ smacks of political desperation, of an apologists for the status quo: Obama and Mrs. Clinton as the anointed successor, with the DNC as partner. The as if of this whole propaganda exercise, of name calling, is that Stein and Trump represent the irresponsible political fringe, and by default Mrs. Clinton represents political rationality, sanity. The attack on the Green Party, in regards to NATO , one of the co-conspirators of the Ukrainian Coup, is to provide cover for Victoria Nuland, as a possible candidate for Sec. of State for Clinton. Among a host of other political imperatives. The New Cold War, with Putin as the New Stalin, demands fealty to the Party Line of the defense of NATO, as again in the 21st Century, a bulwark against Russian revanchism. ‘The gangster states of NATO’ is much too candid a description for the political conformist/apologist Capehart, for a foundering NATO e.g. former NATO general Rasmussen is now ‘advisor’, read viceroy, to American puppet Poroshenko.

Ajamu Baraka, Jeremiah Wright and Cornel West are speakers, thinkers and writers who do not mince words, absolutely no surprise, except to the delicate sensibilities of the Washington Post’s Editorial Board.

Political Partisan

P.S. Thank you @walterrhett

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/08/26/jill-steins-foul-language-on-race/?utm_term=.15a3f36dd67b

One can just wonder at Mr. Ozment’s myopia as he proclaims that Merkel, and by definition some very important members of Germany’s political class,  express a fiscal probity that dates back to the stern Protestantism of Martin Luther. Does Mr. Ozment not read the popular press? He missed the very revelatory report by The Financial Times’ Gillian Tett dated January 16, 2015 and titled ‘A debt to history’ and sub-titled ‘To some, Germany faces a moral duty to help Greece, given the aid that it has previously enjoyed’.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html#axzz4IS0nX9Ox

In her essay Ms. Tett reports on an after dinner address by economic historian Benjamin Friedman, for the full text of this speech:

Click to access friedman.pdf

Ms. Tett summarizes some very important sections of Mr. Friedman’s  address:

The mandarins settled comfortably into their chairs, expecting a soothing intellectual discourse on esoteric monetary policy. But Friedman lobbed a grenade.

“We meet at an unsettled time in the economic and political trajectory of many parts of the world, Europe certainly included,” he began in a strikingly flat monotone (I quote from the version of his speech that is now posted online, since I wasn’t allowed to take notes then.) Carefully, he explained that he intended to read his speech from a script, verbatim, to ensure that he got every single word correct. Uneasily, the audience sat up.

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.

Where might the idea of German fiscal probity, as the expression of the Protestant Virtue of Martin Luther, stand in the light four instances of Germany’s debt restructuring in the 20th Century ? Such a record puts Merkel’s and the European Central Bank’s treatment of the Greeks into its proper perspective, and with it Mr. Ozment’s potted history of the Myth of German moral/fiscal virtue as somehow exemplary. A debt to history?

Almost Marx

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/world/germany-s-austerity-bears-the-mark-of-luther-1.536387#.VwIen4Qsh39.twitter

Mr. Payne and the Financial Times are unable to face the fact that New Labour is collapsing, as we enter the ninth year of the utterly failed Neo-Liberal economic/civic model. Mr. Corbyn seems, in his years as a ‘backbencher’, to have developed an ability to mobilize voters, who had given up on the Party of Blair and its epigones. Perhaps those years as a ‘backbencher’ taught Mr. Corbyn many valuable political lessons? That building a constituency is based in the hard work of organization and advocacy, town by town, district by district. Mr. Payne nor the Financial Times can explain the inexplicable: why has Mr. Corbyn been re-elected so many times if he hadn’t somehow, no matter how haltingly, accomplished some tangible political goods for that constituency?  All we readers get is more of the same Rebellion Against The Elites Party Line, from the not just partisans of that Failed Elite, but its committee of  faux technocrats. Even the resort to a pithy quote from Oscar Wilde can save Mr. Payne’s polemic from itself.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b0bb7ed8-6927-11e6-a0b1-d87a9fea034f.html#axzz4ILjuHSY9