As per usual it won’t take long before this comments section is closed to any further replies, Mrs. Clinton has far too many enemies: when the going gets tough the Financial Times folds, to paraphrase that American Philosopher Vince Lombardi.

Here is what I see for President Hillary Clinton after her less than impressive win over Trump, all those ‘spoiler’ 3rd Party candidates, sapping the strength of her slim victory. Some American Myths never die, like the ‘political spoiler’ that reared its ugly head in 1992 with Ross Perot and was succeeded in 2000 by Ralph Nader. These ‘spoilers’ had the irritating habit of being politically right, but only in retrospect!

Mrs. Clinton and her Sec. of State Victoria Nuland, a more bellicose duo of militarily inexperienced jingos one can hardly recall, except for Kristol and a number of Neo-Conservative Policy Experts.The Clinton/Nuland duo will exploit the South China Sea and Ukraine hot spots, with a kind of manic glee, until they go head to head with an utterly ruthless Putin. Or will the fake crisis begin on the Polish border with Russia? One can only guess that it will end badly i.e. how many lives lost, for what? With Ms. Nuland, and her porcine Spartan husband Robert Kagan, resorting to the unthinkable first use of tactical nuclear weapons?

Another burning question of a possible Clinton victory in 2016: when the President invites Zionist Caudillo Netanyahu to the White House will there be wholesale chaos in the streets of Washington D.C.? All my speculations fitting quite easily into Mr. Luce’s bracing melodramatic framing of the pressing issue of Obama’s Foreign Policy passivity as opposed to Hillary’s bellicosity argued as American Exceptionalism. If my comment seems a bit muddled, here at its end , it simply reflects Mr. Luce’s habit of trying to balance antitheticals and not quite succeeding.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1476d7ca-6076-11e6-b38c-7b39cbb1138a.html#axzz4HEJfeufv

After the Economic Collapse of 2008, the bourgeois press refuses to call it a Depression, which it was and still is, no matter the lack of candor of a Press fully owned by Capital. The Self-Correcting Market one of the central dogmas of Neo-Liberal Utopianism has proven to be mythical, as all else presented by the economists who were the propagandists for this ‘reform’ of the imperatives that animated the New Deal. The names of Hayek,Mises, Friedman under the organizational umbrella of Mont Pelerin Society,  not to speak of the vulgar pamphleteer Ayn Rand, acting as an apostle of Greed, have resulted in catastrophe still exercising its hegemony over the Economies of the West. Is this overstatement? Yet the same experts/technocrats offer a New Utopianism to replace the old: Free Trade as it is now called under the political banner of TPP. In sum a Corporatist Coup directed at what is left of the American Republic, swallowed whole by the imperatives of the cancer of the National Security State, yet still somehow active in the political imaginations of American political actors, as some kind of fictional given in the political present .

How long can anyone entertain the fantasy that Obama is, among other things, a ‘Progressive’? He is a ‘Progressive’ in the sense that grifter Arianna Huffington was a ‘Progressive’. In sum what that means is a Neo-Liberal in New Democratic Drag, or just a Reaganite ! The TPP is, in fact, a Corporatist Coup against what remains of the Republic: as it codifies the right of Corporations to sue countries for lost profits, for laws that protect countries from rapacious greedy Corporate practices. Environmental protection laws are a big part of what those suits by Corporations will attack. In victory over the unhinged Trump, will Hillary and Tim come to ‘reconsider’ Hillary’s ill advised prior reconsideration, as a matter of an ‘evolution’ on the question? Think of Obama’s ‘evolution’ on Gay Marriage as opportunism wrapped in Christian moralizing chatter, as the product of an ‘anguished’ wrestling with conscience.

Almost Marx

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/obama-congress-trade-warning-226952

The Plot Against America: the usual shopworn obsessions with Roth! Narcissism takes the lead in this utterly tepid anti-fascist tract, that features the very appealing narrator/hero: Mr. Roth as a child. Lindbergh is a featured player, but strategically always just off stage, the éminence grise, the villain of this appealing melodrama, marinated in Mr. Roth’s rampant retrospective paranoia . But it never emancipates itself from that melodrama, it would have been more appropriate as a T.V. movie. with Roth providing a self-congratulatory introduction.
Lindbergh was an actual hero, the antithesis of the clownish fascist Ring Master Trump. Lindbergh and America First disappeared after December 7th.
Portnoy’s Complaint was a comic tour de force, as yet to be matched by Roth. Portnoy and Myra Breckenridge were the scandalous satirical literary polemics of the late 60’s in America.
American Writer

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blogs/sameer-rahim/what-philip-roth-can-teach-us-about-donald-trump

To be Ganeshed is to be subject to the attacks of a polemicist, of a professional Neo-Liberal Apologist, he ‘reads’ the ‘history’ of the past tailored to ideological need, in the political present. He is Dr. Pangloss berefed of his sunny disposition but animated by a pressing need for political vindication, achieved rhetorically.

Headline: The time to rail against the elites was the 1970s

Sub-headline:  Populists credit our rulers with an omnipotence that makes them culpable for all failures

The first paragraph is framed in the triumph of Thatcherism before Thatcher, enabled by the IMF. And the announcement of the death of the ‘Keynesian consensus’: does the name Piketty ring a bell?

Later, from the safety of retirement, Denis Healey would call it a “Pyrrhic defeat”. The International Monetary Fund loan to Britain in 1976 came with fiscal conditions that a Labour chancellor of the exchequer could accept only with a grimace. Behind the hammy remonstrations, he relished the political cover for cuts he had tried to press on colleagues. The retrenchment, and his commitment to monetary targets, put an ailing Keynesian consensus out of its misery. Three years would pass before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister but Thatcherism, in some of its essentials, had begun.

Then appears the villains: ‘co-governing with trade unions’ :  a question occurs, do all citizens and their organizations, being part of a  vital civic democratic polity, act as co-governors? One  finds the usual Thatcherite scapegoating in the name of Neo-Liberal Rationalism. The slandered ‘Third Way’ is New Labour i.e. Thatcherism in New Labour drag.

And so had a period of sound government that may still be with us. In the 1980s, the state unclogged the economy and stopped co-governing with trade unions. In the 1990s, inflation was lastingly tamed and the euro elegantly dodged. In the noughties, investment closed the gap between private affluence and public squalor. With its blend of looseness and generous in-work benefits, Britain’s labour system, so dysfunctional in the 1970s as to raise questions of national governability, is now the surviving glory of a slandered Third Way.

Following this and other enumerations of the blessings that the codified  Neo-Liberalism has produced, he equivocates just enough to qualify as not utterly myopic to the plight of the lower orders.

And so had a period of sound government that may still be with us. In the 1980s, the state unclogged the economy and stopped co-governing with trade unions. In the 1990s, inflation was lastingly tamed and the euro elegantly dodged. In the noughties, investment closed the gap between private affluence and public squalor. With its blend of looseness and generous in-work benefits, Britain’s labour system, so dysfunctional in the 1970s as to raise questions of national governability, is now the surviving glory of a slandered Third Way.

Like all good conservatives ‘National Decline’ becomes a featured player in the Ganesh Melodrama

Failure in the particular does not, however, establish failure overall. We know what that looks like: 20 per cent inflation, industrial pandemonium, and a per capita income substantially lower than the average of France, Germany and Italy. The time to tar and feather our rulers was the 1970s, when many in the troika of government, big business and organised labour really were insouciant about national decline as long as it preserved them as the corporatist powers in the land. Since then, Britain has seen a recovery in wealth and prestige that looks inevitable only in retrospect. David Smith’s book Something Will Turn Up, published last year, charts the change and shows how much it owed to provocative decisions and the hinge decade of the 1970s.

Yet one wonders where Mr. Ganesh has been in terms of this sobering report on poverty in Britain:

More than one million people in the UK, including 312,000 children, are living in destitution, according to research by a leading British charity.The report published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on Wednesday said that migrant groups were the most at risk from extreme poverty, but most of those living in the worst circumstances were born in the UK.The organisation, which is politically neutral and conducts research into the social problems facing the country, defines a person as destitute when “they cannot afford to buy the essentials to eat, stay warm and dry, and keep clean”, for a prolonged period of time.The key factors pushing people already in poverty into destitution included debt repayments, benefit delays or sanctions, and high living costsMigrants in particular faced difficulties due to the low level of benefits they received, as well as difficulty getting jobs.The charity put the number of households living in destitution at 668,000 containing 1,252,000 people.Single men aged between 25 and 34 were the demographic group most likely to be affected by extreme poverty.

Coping strategies

Researchers said those living in destitution adopted a number of approaches to reduce the impact of their conditions on their children.Of those spoken to, 76 percent said they had gone without food, 71 percent said they did not have suitable clothes, and 56 percent said they had not been able to heat their homes.Some said they regularly skipped meals so that their children would not go without food.The foundation said addressing the causes of destitution required action on the root drivers of poverty, including unemployment, low pay and high living costs.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/04/million-live-extreme-poverty-uk-160427143528526.html

His apologetics are put into the high gear of his polemical gift, in the next three paragraphs, in which he scolds and shames the critics of the dismal collapse of the Neo-Liberal dispensation as nostalgics for the political shipwreck of the 70’s. The last two sentences of his essay turn to the most tepid of apologetics:

Politicians, bureaucrats, central bankers and their institutions have done a reasonable job during the lifetime of the median citizen, who was born in 1976. Britons must face the truth about their elites, however pleasant it is.

Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7a67d4d2-57c3-11e6-9f70-badea1b336d4.html#axzz4GPLCTLYx

Mr. Dyson is eloquent, in the most self-congratulatory way, while agreeing with Mr. Glaude’s argument about the pernicious character of Neo-Liberalism, but then equivocates at warp speed, as a rationalization for what is most politically pragmatic i.e. Mrs. Clinton, as an argumentative strategy! Should the watcher be surprised by the rhetorical gambit from an author who attacked, ad nauseam, Cornell West in The New Republic! Please check President Obama’s appointment schedule to see how many appointments Mr. Dyson has had with the president. Mr. Dyson, despite his vehement agreement with Mr. Glaude’s analysis, is in fact a New Democrat swathed in a fusillade of rhetorical apologetics for that very Neo-Liberalism. Mr. Glaude shows too much patience for Mr. Dyson, as windbag and rhetorical bully! In sum Mr. Dyson is a Neo-Liberal hack, who never tires of the sound of his own voice, nor his role as seer/thinker.I lost my tolerance for this ‘debate’ at the 16:49 mark!

Almost Marx

Never fear that the advocates and apologists for Neo-Liberal Utopianism, in it’s 8th year of near free fall, have found a new utopianism to replace the old. Called ‘Free Trade’ or ‘Globalism’ by the zealous advocates, or just the usual political hirelings of Think Tanks and political opportunists of various ideological hues. Simon Tilford and the editors at Project Syndicate prefer the scare headline and an explanatory sub-headline:

Overcoming the Poisonous Politics of Protectionism

Hillary Clinton faces an election that has come to revolve around the legitimacy of a political establishment that she epitomizes. And no issue has fueled that challenge – in the US and Europe alike – more powerfully than international trade

Mr. Telford provides a suitable introduction i.e. a defense of TPP &TTIP, to his scorecard of advocates of the for and against positions:

LONDON – According to conventional economic wisdom, free trade is good – so the freer the better. After all, steady trade liberalization in recent decades has clearly boosted economic growth in developed and developing countries alike. But, as Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley notes, “just because economists agree doesn’t mean they’re right.” And even when economists are right about trade, that doesn’t stop vote-chasing politicians from ignoring their advice.

That is certainly true today. “One thing is now certain about the upcoming presidential election in the United States: the next president will not be a committed free trader,” Eichengreen writes. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, “is at best a lukewarm supporter of freer trade, and of the Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP] in particular. Her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump, is downright hostile to trade deals that would throw open US markets,” promising to impose high import tariffs, particularly on Chinese goods.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/overcoming-the-poisonous-politics-of-protectionism-2016-07

Should the reader be surprised that the NATO general, now the ‘Wests’ appointed  Ukrainian Viceroy, Anders Fogh Rasmussen supports TTIP?

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former secretary general of NATO, is similarly upbeat about the TTIP, arguing that it would add $125 billion to US GDP and a similar amount (proportionally) to the EU economy.

While the utterly staid and or sclerotic editors of The Economist prefer a strategically depoliticized propaganda approach, yet awash in reflected xenophobia of Mr. Trump as exemplar of Anti-Globalization: ‘Farewell, left versus right.’  is utterly mooted by the argument presented in the body of the essay, and the obligatory appearance of ‘Leftist’ Sen. Sanders – so much for argumentative coherence:

Headline: The new political divide

Sub-headline: Farewell, left versus right. The contest that matters now is open against closed

AS POLITICAL theatre, America’s party conventions have no parallel. Activists from right and left converge to choose their nominees and celebrate conservatism (Republicans) and progressivism (Democrats). But this year was different, and not just because Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president by a major party. The conventions highlighted a new political faultline: not between left and right, but between open and closed (see article). Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, summed up one side of this divide with his usual pithiness. “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,” he declared. His anti-trade tirades were echoed by the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.

America is not alone. Across Europe, the politicians with momentum are those who argue that the world is a nasty, threatening place, and that wise nations should build walls to keep it out. Such arguments have helped elect an ultranationalist government in Hungary and a Polish one that offers a Trumpian mix of xenophobia and disregard for constitutional norms. Populist, authoritarian European parties of the right or left now enjoy nearly twice as much support as they did in 2000, and are in government or in a ruling coalition in nine countries. So far, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union has been the anti-globalists’ biggest prize: the vote in June to abandon the world’s most successful free-trade club was won by cynically pandering to voters’ insular instincts, splitting mainstream parties down the middle.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21702750-farewell-left-versus-right-contest-matters-now-open-against-closed-new

To be sure the essay wanders off into what the writer feels is pertinent political territory:

News that strengthens the anti-globalisers’ appeal comes almost daily. On July 26th two men claiming allegiance to Islamic State slit the throat of an 85-year-old Catholic priest in a church near Rouen. It was the latest in a string of terrorist atrocities in France and Germany. The danger is that a rising sense of insecurity will lead to more electoral victories for closed-world types. This is the gravest risk to the free world since communism. Nothing matters more than countering it.

Higher walls, lower living standards

Start by remembering what is at stake. The multilateral system of institutions, rules and alliances, led by America, has underpinned global prosperity for seven decades. It enabled the rebuilding of post-war Europe, saw off the closed world of Soviet communism and, by connecting China to the global economy, brought about the greatest poverty reduction in history.

We have reached the hysteria, political and economic, that elides from this potted history the utter failure of Neo-Liberalism to deliver the goods i.e. prosperity. The Myth of the Self-Correcting Market is utterly dead

Distracting the reader with this sales pitch, that only highlights the weak thesis that somehow the political categories of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ do not have political purchase. The vapid categories of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ are more politically manageable, manipulable categories in the production of propaganda and it’s imperatives. Propagandists are by nature paternalistic. The ‘Free Trade Club’ vs.the ‘Wall-Builders’ (More inept sloganeering)  i.e. the New Political Apostates who must  be defeated, and the paradigmatic duo for the job is led by the Clinton/Kaine New Democratic ticket, the argued cosmopolitans of that ‘Globalism’ as replacement for the now moribund Neo-Liberal Utopianism. There is so much more here to be explored, in both these essays! at another time?

Almost Marx

Bernard-Henri Lévy is one of the most ardent intellectual self-promoters of this and even last Century. I still have a paperback copy of ‘Barbarism with a Human Face’ the pages are a dark brown and brittle. Mr. Lévy is part of a intellectual trend, from my American perspective, dating from Jean-François Revel’s ‘Without Marx or Jesus’, ‘The Totalitarian Temptation’, and ‘How Democracies Perish’, all these works dating from the the early 70’s to the early 80’s, remain what they are Cold War polemics. My recollection of ‘Temptation’: it could have benefited from some ruthless editing-an essay turned into a bestseller, ‘How Democracies Perish’ was a screeching maladroit polemic . Yet ‘How Democracies Perish’ published in ’83, acts as stark object lesson of  Mr. Revel’s lack of prescience.
Mr.  Lévy, with the Cassandra like powers demonstrated by Mr. Revel, instructs his readers on the dangers of Mr. Trump. For Americans, it’s like reporting a horrific accident to it’s victims. The takeover of the Republican Party by the political nihilists, as immediate precursors to Trump, remains in the category of the politically inconvenient for the Lévy thesis
But Mr. Lévy being a stolid Neo-Liberal and staunch ally of the Neo-Cons, or even being one. Then Mrs. Clinton’s favoring of Victoria Nuland as Secretary of State, and Lévy as ardent supporter/apologist for the Ukrainian Coup, Nuland was one of the primary foreign political actors directly involved in it’s perpetration, makes for a predictable coalescence of forces :

Ukraine: Thinking together  Kyiv, 15-19 May 2014

‘Under the heading “Ukraine: Thinking together” an international group of intellectuals will gather in Kyiv to demonstrate solidarity, meet their Ukrainian counterparts, and carry out a broad public discussion about the meaning of Ukrainian pluralism for the future of Europe, Russia, and the world. The discussions, taking place from 15 to 19 May, will feature some of Europe’s, America’s, Russia’s and Ukraine’s most interesting opinion makers and intellectuals, including Bernard-Henri Lévy, Slavenka Drakulic, Timothy Snyder, Mustafa Nayem, Serhii Leshchenko, Agnieszka Holland, Adam Michnik, Serhii Zhadan, Ivan Krastev, Wolf Biermann, Karl Schlögel and Bernard Kouchner.’
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-05-06-newsitem-en.html

What can one make of the Lévy political interventions? Another demonstration of  his moral/intellectual status as self-appointed successor to the Camus/Sartre tradition of  the Committed Public Intellectual? Aided by a penchant for heavy handed melodrama.  It seems that the ‘as if’ of Mr. Lévy as thinker/political actor is anchored in a bleak nostalgia for a France and a World perpetually moored in 1945.

Almost Marx

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-national-security-threat-by-bernard-henri-levy-2016-07?utm_source=Project+Syndicate+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0dbfdeec0a-Levy_Trump_the_Traitor_31_7_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-0dbfdeec0a-93479093

1)

Mr. Bloomberg is a self-promoter par excellence, with a gift for self-congratulation. But upon the most cursory examination of his record as Mayor of New York City we are confronted with Stop and Frisk, as monument to that 12 years in office. Stop and Frisk was so egregious an attack on civil liberties, that a suit against it was in the Court system for five years . The mayor was embarrassed and angered by Judge Shira Scheindlin handling of the case, over its five year judicial gestation, so he managed to scare  up three judges who agreed with him, and she was removed from the case. She was not accused of any kind of professional/legal misconduct, in fact, her conduct was exemplary, she made the mistake of deciding against the City and wasn’t quiet about it:her crime! Accuse me of paranoia, if you will, but the why of Judge Scheindlin’s removal, who was an impediment to the Mayor’s political prestige, seems patently obvious, except to those who court political respectability, above all else.  So I will take Mr. Bloomberg’s attack on Trump as a belated self-apologetics, in the perverse mind set of the professional political huckster, who needs always to appear to be above reproach, like Caesar’s wife. Mr. Bloomberg is simply a more astute political operator, compared to Trump’s temper tantrums as nihilistic political theater.

Almost Marx

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/michael-wolff-at-dnc-case-915245?utm_source=twitter

2) I am an opportunist, and have used the body of the text of my first comment, with some additions, at The Financial Times.

Mr. Ganesh is the master of the feuilleton form, heavily inflected with his moral/political rage at Mr. Corbyn as Apostate. He makes a minor form of the past sing with invective. The quality of his bile, allied to a well of resentment, always makes for bracing reading. Call it London Spleen after Baudelaire.

But of more political import Mr. Ganesh plays the part of a Show Doctor, brought in during the out of town tryouts, to make changes to a production, that needs to be punched up for more audience appeal : it is after all Show Business! Mr. Abe Burrows was the most charming, agreeable, not to speak of reliable and proficient practitioner of this now seemingly vanished specialty. Where my comparison fall utterly apart, an unhappy consequence of showing off,  is that one never attacks the Star of the Show, one simply  turns the minor players into featured players, by skillfully rewriting and producing songs for those players, that make for a cunning garnish to a weak and now diminished central character. While still trading on the Star’s drawing power that sells tickets.

I know, this is labored, but is Mr. Jones that featured player, who can, with some new material, turn his role into something that transcends his status as a secondary player, who steals the show? Thank you for your patience.

Chrysostom & Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/84c96778-5242-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c60.html#axzz4FYulKpjB

My reply to Legal Tender:

See the comments of Mr. Jonathan Freedland, at the Guardian, who is the official Ring Master of the manufactured Antisemitism Crisis: the evidence is, in part, an editorial cartoon that depicts Israel as America’s 51’st State, a statement of fact. How inconvenient are facts! The cost to America has been raised from 3.5 billion to 5.5 billion per year, in order to placate Caudillo Netanyahu.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

Is the Luce political myopia ever a surprise? There is so much here, but read this paragraph for confirmation of his myopia that rivals Mr. Magoo’s!

What should most concern the anti-Trump forces? Mrs Clinton’s biggest hurdle is the depth of hatred for her across large parts of America. Personally, I have always found Hillaryphobia hard to fathom. As first lady in the 1990s, she was hated for being a creature of the left — her supposed radical feminism and her push to enact leftwing healthcare reform. Nowadays she is reviled for the opposite reasons.

All one need do to fathom the ‘hatred’ of Mrs. Clinton, and her partner Bill, is to look to the Neo-Liberal policies they both enacted: Financial Reform, Welfare Reform and the utterly notorious ‘Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act’: Mrs. Clinton’s race baiting was of the shameless variety, now erased from history under an impasto of ‘Public Relations’, delivered by her political surrogates, believable except for those of us who witnessed it! Mr. and Mrs. Clinton enacted into Law what Reagan dared not!  And Mrs. Clinton’s adaptation of the Heritage Foundation Health Care plan qualifies as a purely Market based solution i.e. a gift to the Insurance Companies, to characterize it as ‘Left’ is stunning in it’s mis-perception, or just utterly superficial. The rest of the essay I’ll leave to others to pick over. It is a mine of respectable bourgeois political chatter.

Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/44088ede-5027-11e6-8172-e39ecd3b86fc.html#axzz4FQc2Fsyd