https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-impartial-spectator-9780199568260?cc=us&lang=en&#

J.G.A. Pocock offers some telling insights in his essay of  1992, in a collection published in 1996 by Verso, on the ‘Question of Europe’ in his essay of the same name, in this collection of essays of the same title. I was only able to share page 308, as 309 was not in the Google preview. On page 309 Pocock offers the idea that Europe would become  ‘an ’empire’ of the market’ , a vital insight to the political present!

This collection of essays edited by Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson is a really worth your time and attention, and J.G. A. Pocock’s essay is  still a valuable meditation on historiography and the idea, the potential/actual practice of Europe, the EU. An absolute pleasure to read and contemplate it’s ideas, not to speak of a worthy challenge to the reader’s preconceptions and even that reader’s myopia.

The Question of Europe

It is absolutely appropriate to include in this essay Mr. Pocock’s comments on the Brexit:

J.G.A. Pocock

Profoundly anti-democratic and anti-constitutional, the EU obliges you to leave by the only act it recognises: the referendum, which can be ignored as a snap decision you didn’t really mean. If you are to go ahead, it must be by your own constitutional machinery: crown, parliament and people; election, debate and statute. This will take time and deliberation, which is the way decisions of any magnitude should be taken.

The Scots will come along, or not, deciding to live in their own history, which is not what the global market wants us to do. Avoid further referendums and act for yourselves as you know how to act and be.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n14/on-brexit/where-are-we-now

Political Observer

America abounds in Political Romantics who long for a halcyon past.Even if they have to invent that past. What it comes down to is a longing, in many American Conservatives, for the year 1859 just before the Civil War, when the white male patriarchy was in it’s unquestioned ascendancy: women and slaves knew their respective places , servitude. Women, because they were naturally in need of masculine tutelage, and slaves were inherently inferior to whites. Aided and abetted by a Christianity that fully supported servitude as a ‘natural state’ of lesser beings in ‘God’s Plan’ and that ‘Plan’s’ managers on earth, the white male. Mrs. Schlafly came by her reactionary stance against the late 20th Century, and it’s obsessions with the  equality of Women and Blacks, as a natural outgrowth of her political/moral conformity, to the political orthodoxy of her time and place, not hard to understand. Kant’s injunction of self-emancipation from tutelage was the undiscovered in the lives of Ms. Schlafly and her political/moral coterie. And her work for McCarthy and the John Birch Society, another expression of her ‘Conservatism’, as defense against a Godless Fifth Column of Radical Jews in God’s Country- yes Antisemitism, as one of the unspoken drivers of that iteration of Conservatism, at least as narrated in the pages of the ultra respectable Financial Times!  One can only wonder about Mrs. Schlafly’s attitude about the Neo-Conservatives, who were an integral part of ‘The Reagan Revolution’ awash in the nostalgic style of FDR’s New Deal. Kristol and Podhoretz come to mind.

I forgot to include the work of Betty Friedan, my apologies for this gross oversight, mea culpa! whose ‘Feminine Mystique’ was one of the most important books published in 1963.Friedan was a pioneer, who appeared on talk shows of the time, and took more guff than she should have. But she was a tireless worker for the rights of women, and she made a political space for women like Mrs. Schlafly! Friedan and her book became one of the most read and controversial books in the history of The Woman’s Rights movement, and the target of  Mrs. Schlafly’s ire. Read of her career and life here, she was one of those Godless Fifth Column I refer to in my first post:

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

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f2ef915c-754f-11e6-bf48-b372cdb1043a.html#axzz4Jm2XHEmd

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