StephenKMackSD's Blog

This is Mr. Wolf in full panic mode! Too little too late? The ‘Elites’ that Wolf keeps referring to as some kind of political objects/persons worthy of veneration, were the hucksters who inaugurated the Neo-Liberal blight, that collapsed in the loudest economic thud since 1929. Occupy Wall Street and Thomas Piketty soon followed, with the news of the 99% and the 1% equaling  ‘Rising Inequality’ as populist slogan! Its hard to face the fact of that collapse, and that it produced the ‘populists’ of all stripes in Mr. Wolf’s cri de cœur. To complete the picture readers are confronted with the ‘populist rabble’ portrayed in an ominous cartoon, or at least two of their number reading a newspaper, do ‘they’ actually do that? Careful Financial Times your obvious and odious class bias is showing. Mr. Wolf is sinking into the mire of anti-populism: Right,Left and Libertarian. Taking responsibility for one’s catastrophic mistakes is not a trait of the Neo-Liberal intellectual/apologist!

Mr. Wolf sounds like a French noble on his way to the guillotine, in extremus he lets go of his rage and his sense of felt injustice, as he passes the peasants he once ruled over with his velvet gloved iron fist. A scene almost out of A Tale of Two Cities, starring Ronald Coleman as Sydney Carton, although Mr. Wolf’s performance doesn’t quite match Coleman’s eloquent final soliloquy.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/135385ca-c399-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3ySCZNYUl

Courtney Weaver’s essay never strays far from the confines of bourgeois political respectability, with her choice of ‘experts’, whose pallid political observations provide a counter point to her own pedestrian historical observations/speculations.

The elephant in the room: The Republican Party has devolved, over the past eight years, into a Fascist Party, with its own strutting Caudillo, in Donald Trump, with the rest scurrying behind in a kind of caricature of partisan squabbling! Richard Lugar was the last of the Conservatives who had an allegiance to the idea and practice of governance: he was forced out!  Perhaps what Bloomberg is attempting, trying is to give what ever is left of the Eisenhower Republican wing an actual choice! Not too terribly difficult to figure out, if you focus on identifying the glaringly obvious problem, and stop trying to be historically sophisticated and newsy.

Now, Bloomberg is problematical is his support for the Manhattan Institute’s  ‘Broken Windows Policing’ and the utterly dubious ‘Stop and Frisk’, not to speak of his enthusiastic support for the national swindle of Charter Schools . But he might offer the front runners in both Parties a telling object lesson.  Or perhaps Trump & Co., who see collectively, the Republican Party as made up of Neo-Confederate Originalists, zealous Neo-Conservatives, and ubiquitous Theocrats in waiting- Bloomberg might just be the predictor of losing in 2016. Has the time come for a bit of political moderation, or have Trump and his allies no sense of political self-preservation?

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ca4244e4-c419-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3yOr7jGS9

Dominic Johnson in his book, ‘God Is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human’ simply rehabilitates a not so soft determinism,that keeps appearing in the intellectual life of the world in ever new guises, but remains in service of tribalist political conformity: the fear of a punishing god is a ‘useful evolutionary adaptation’ in the pseudo-scientific jargon used by both Johnson and the writer at The Economist, to review the book awash in such chatter. And then this howler, in this maladroit review:

‘ Raping your neighbour’s mate might once have made evolutionary sense—spreading your own genes at little cost—but “in a clever and gossiping species, knowledge of selfish actions could spread and come back to haunt us” in the form of a furious husband or a village mob.’

When did ‘raping your neighbor’s wife once have made evolutionary sense’ ?

An example of Determinism’s Past:

One of the many dogmas of the Psychoanalytic Mythology was that the Superego acted as a kind of gatekeeper, or as a more highfalutin kind conscience: Freud was a great borrower and adapter of ideas, to put it mildly. That Superego acts as a mere place holder, the internalized punitive god, in the wake of the utter collapse of the the Freud Cult, although the True Believers still propagandize!

The notion of moral conscience as possible rejoinder to the scientism of Johnson’s book: for those interested in the idea of the evolution of conscience through  history  might consult ‘Moral Conscience through the Ages,Fifth Century BCE to the Present’ by Richard Sorabji: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo18882802.html

Adam Smith’s contribution to Moral/Ethical conduct was ‘the impartial spectator’ as means to measure one’s conduct, against a possibly more objectified standard. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is quite long, so for convenience’s sake consult D.D. Raphael’s The Impartial Spectator, Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-impartial-spectator-9780199568260?q=impartial%20spectator&lang=en&cc=us

Mr. Smith’s is a centuries old methodology to ‘check’ your moral self-inquires , because we are talking about morality and ethics (an impossibility in the world remade using the Johnson Formulation, i.e. The punitive Deity is the sine qua non of ‘civilization’,rational calculation is beyond the reach of creatures determined by their ‘brains’, ‘minds’, ‘neural networks’, and the leaden cliche ‘hard wired’! )

We reach the end of the ‘review’ to find this rather unsurprising attack on Notorious Atheists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris:

‘Mr Johnson does not seem a pious man himself. But unlike atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, he is not out to embarrass religious belief and chase its subscribers from the public square. The religious instinct is too deep-seated, he thinks. Instead, critics of superstition are best advised to work with the grain of human psychology rather than against it, finding more benevolent ways to satisfy human yearning for something “out there”. What form such an atheist religion should take, though, God only knows.’

Yet unmentioned is another Atheist, Jonathan Miller whose ‘Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief’ and ‘Atheism Tapes’ places him in the front rank of nonbelievers, but he lacks the advantage of being a radical ripe for a bit of useful fear mongering!

Philosophical Apprentice

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21688835-belief-divine-punishment-may-be-inherent-and-useful-evolutionary-adaptation-helping?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/InthehandsofanangryGod

As usual Mr. Luce is a nervous nelly, this time about our friend Mayor Bloomberg entering the presidential race! Who can forget hiz honor’s leadership in so many areas: well, you know, he managed to get Judge Shira A. Scheindlin removed  from the Stop and Frisk case, as reported here in The New York Times. (One might just note, for no good reason, except that hiz honor might very well have lost that case, but putting the fix in with the three judge panel, made the political road a whole lot easier!)

‘A federal appeals panel in Manhattan that had abruptly removed Judge Shira A. Scheindlin from New York City’s high-profile stop-and-frisk litigation and questioned her conduct in the case issued a lengthy explanation on Wednesday, saying it had made “no findings of misconduct, actual bias or actual partiality” by the judge.

The three-judge panel’s Oct. 31 order has been the subject of pointed debate among judges, lawyers and others, and the statement on Wednesday appeared to be an effort to soften the tone of the original ruling, if not its import. The new opinion was another turn in the stop-and-frisk litigation, in which Judge Scheindlin issued a landmark decision in August imposing sweeping changes on the Police Department, including the appointment of a monitor.’

‘saying it had made “no findings of misconduct, actual bias or actual partiality” by the judge.’ I  think that this comment is demonstrative of self-exculpatory chatter that is a specialty of American Jurisprudence.

On hiz honors’ enthusiastic support for Charter Schools, some examples of are in order:

Just one example from Diane Ravitch:

Nominee for Best Charter School Scandal of the Year

An example of the ‘success’ in NYC, an interview with wunderkind Joel Klein in US News, title and subtitle is key,

Regaining Control of Public Education
Former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein explains what others could learn from the Big Apple’s success.:

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2015/01/02/under-bloomberg-new-york-city-schools-prioritized-choice

Or just read Sharon Higgins’ indispensable blog, for the latest scandals as related to Charter Schools :

http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/

This is just two examples of the Bloomberg Magic Touch for Leadership! But picture this: could we expect hiz honor to do some arm-twisting once he is elected? The picture of Roberts, Alito, Scalia ,Thomas or even Kennedy getting the ‘Bloomberg Treatment’ has a kind of crude appeal.

Mr. Luce, there is no telling how long Bloomberg’s fascination with this scheme will last! Recall the title of Robert Evan’s autobiography ‘The Kid Stays in The Picture’?

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e25f28d6-c0f8-11e5-9fdb-87b8d15baec2.html#axzz3yGUy3exN

Mr. Ganesh, in his first two paragraphs, faintly echos, suggests, that old Rogers and Hart standard The Lady is a Tramp:

I get too hungry, for dinner at eight
I like the theater, but never come late
I never bother, with people I hate
That’s why the lady is a tramp

I don’t like crap games, with barons and earls
Won’t go to Harlem, in ermine and pearls
Won’t dish the dirt, with the rest of the girls
That’s why the lady is a tramp

‘For someone who is quite good at it, David Cameron is not very interested in politics. Britain’s prime minister does not read Robert Caro’s monumental works on American statecraft for fun. He avoids Borgen, the television drama about a Danish government, because it is “too much like work”.

He never talks policy or strategy with friends, most of whom pre-date his career. His Downing Street is not Bill Clinton’s White House: there are no late-night symposia over pizza, no infectious enthusiasm for politics as sport. When he retires, he will retire easily.’

 

This lasts until Mr. Ganesh surrenders to his usual cynicism of how the World Is or at least how Politicians view it:

‘All politicians understand Yes, No and Undecided. Only the winners understand Don’t Much Care. Mr Cameron communicates crisply because he knows most people only tune in for a few minutes a day. He does not lose himself in marginalia that no swing voter will ever notice. Rousing a nation through force of personality is something leaders do in films: the real art of politics is accepting apathy and bending it to your purposes.’

His essay is about the uses the adroit politician makes of apathy:

‘And it all starts with the realisation that apathy is not a type of sickness. Unlike the Labour party, opinion pollsters chose self-examination over self-indulgence after flunking last year’s general election.’

A reader might first ask, is this a companion piece to his December 28,2015 essay in defense of ‘the politics of fear’?

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a40adeb4-a973-11e5-955c-1e1d6de94879.html#axzz3xpY72Xl1

Will Mr. Ganesh complete his advocacy for the cardinal historical/political sins? Fear, Apathy, Acedia, Vainglory, and even with the addition the seven deadly sins: Pride, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wraith and Sloth? Perhaps, here are some answers:

‘Apathy is a respectable disposition in a country where, for most people most of the time, life is tolerable-to-good.’ ‘They priggishly elide apathy with dysfunction: if voters do not care, something must be wrong with the body politic.’

This essay devolves into a sneering attack on the ‘Left’ and Jeremy Corbyn and the’ movement building’ at the center of reclaiming Labour, from the Neo-Liberalism of Tony Blair. One can’t imagine Mr. Ganesh trundling his trolleys through the Tesco, but rather through Waitrose , Sainsbury’s or Marks & Spencers.

Mr. Ganesh’s final paragraph dismisses the ‘hot heads and crusaders’ with self-congratulatory rhetoric, as if he were dismissing a insolent cabby in London, circa 1900!

‘Apathetic Britons are not waiting to be redeemed. They just have lives to get on with. Not only are they apolitical; they rouse themselves to vote every five years precisely to stop hot heads and crusaders from running their country. They like Mr Cameron because he governs well enough to save them having to think about politics. He is prime minister because someone has to be.’

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4b8bd6f6-bdcf-11e5-9fdb-87b8d15baec2.html#axzz3y5UO93Qh

Like Michael Eric Dyson, Mr. Capehart can’t forgive Dr. West’s political candor and refreshing moral honesty, it goes against the grain of the loyal political apologist! West was candid with Obama, when he promised that he would vigorously campaign for him, but if and when he thought him wrong on issues, or pursuing the wrong political path, that he would be equal in his zeal to criticize him. Dr. West has lived up to his word: in 2008 Obama ran as a ‘Progressive’ but in the last seven years has governed as a moderate conservative, or just call it the exercise of an unimaginative Neo-Liberalism.  Dr. West’s criticisms are completely valid, even if they offend the delicate political sensibilities of Dyson and Capehart, with addition of Ta Nehisi Coates about the  ‘challenge to Sanders revolutionary mien’, the Dyson/Capehart not so sub rosa tribalism remains one the  glaring unaddressed questions of this essay. West’s crime, of that kind of disloyalty, requires the political elders, to publicly shame the heretic. The theological rhetorical frame is completely appropriate here!

Without surprise Capehart’s essay devolves into political advocacy for the political inevitability of Hillary, as check against the political heretic Sanders.

Political Observer

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/01/22/how-cornel-west-hurts-bernie-sanders/

I just finished reading chapter 3 of Deirdre N. McCloskey’s  The Rhetoric of Economics, Second Edition titled Figures of Economic Speech and its first sub-title Even Mathematical Economist Uses, and Must Use , Literary Devices : The Case of Paul Samuelson. Her argument is that metaphor is indispensable in all forms of economic argument/rhetoric. Reading Mr. Robert Zoellick’s essay one is forcefully confronted with Professor McCloskey’s indispensable examination of economic rhetoric, or should it be called wisdom? Some selective quotation of Zoellick’s essay offer proof of the efficacy of  Prof. McCloskey’s thesis.

The former US Treasury secretary fears emerging markets face sluggish global demand, capital outflows, weaker investment prospects and depreciating exchange rates.

e.g.:emerging markets, sluggish global demand, capital outflows, weaker investment prospects, depreciating exchange rates

There are many more examples in Mr. Zoellick’s essay of the use of metaphor as central to economic argument . One wonders at the choice of Summers and Rogoff as the experts he quotes or paraphrases. Yet the appeal to authority is not just the choice of the author of this essay but the choice of the editors at The Financial Times.

On Summers: his enthusiastic support for Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act  is just the beginning:

‘In 1999 Summers endorsed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act which removed the separation between investment and commercial banks, saying “With this bill, the American financial system takes a major step forward towards the 21st Century.”^[22]‘

‘In 1999 Summers endorsed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act which removed the separation between investment and commercial banks, saying “With this bill, the American financial system takes a major step forward towards the 21st Century.”^[22]‘

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

On Rogoff: See this insightful essay by Dean Baker titled Reinhart and Rogoff Are Not Being Straight from April 26, 2013 at New York Times eXaminer.

https://www.nytexaminer.com/2013/04/reinhart-and-rogoff-are-not-being-straight/

‘Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, used their second NYT column in a week, to complain about how they are being treated. Their complaint deserves tears from crocodiles everywhere. They try to present themselves as ivory tower economists who cannot possibly be blamed for the ways in which their work has been used to justify public policy, specifically as a rationale to cut government programs and raise taxes, measures that lead to unemployment in a downturn.

This portrayal is disingenuous in the the extreme. Reinhart and Rogoff surely are aware of how their work has been used. They have also encouraged this use in public writings and talks. While it is unfortunate that they have “received hate-filled, even threatening, e-mail messages,” as one who works in the lower-paid corners of policy debates, let me say, welcome to the club.’

Or this Wikipedia entry:

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

‘In April 2013, Rogoff was at the centre of worldwide attention with Carmen Reinhart (coauthor of the book This Time is Different) when their widely cited study “Growth in a Time of Debt” was shown to contain computation errors which critics claim undermine its central thesis that too much debt causes recession.^[7][8] An analysis by Herndon, Ash and Pollin argued that “coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in the post-war period.”^[9] Their calculations demonstrated that high debt countries grew at 2.2 percent, rather than the −0.1 percent figure initially cited by Reinhart and Rogoff.^[9] Rogoff and Reinhardt claimed that their fundamental conclusions were accurate after correcting the coding errors detected by their critics.^[10][11] They further disavowed the claim frequently attributed to them that a 90% government debt to GDP ratio is a specific tipping point for growth outcomes.^[12] Further papers by Rogoff and Reinhart,^[13] and the International Monetary Fund,^[14] which were not found to contain similar errors, reached conclusions similar to the initial paper. The subject remains controversial, because of the political ramifications of the research, though in Rogoff and Reinhart’s words “[t]he politically charged discussion … has falsely equated our finding of a negative association between debt and growth with an unambiguous call for austerity.”^[12] He is a member in the Group of Thirty.’

Mr. Zoellick’s concluding paragraph:

‘If in 2016 there is no shift from monetary to growth policies, the future envisioned by Profs Summers and Rogoff could prove more likely: sluggish growth; currency conflicts; and populist politics and fights over distribution — punctuated by mini-crises as struggling economies falter. Political leaders can either try to shape their countries’ destinies now or risk a future reckoning from the decade’s economic experiments.’

To foreshorten this: the failure of Neo-Liberal Dogmas has summoned forth the devil of a spent Keynesianism, which now must be slain to protect those precious Dogmas!

Unrepentant Socialist

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c1dec280-b47b-11e5-b147-e5e5bba42e51.html#axzz3xbzJrt3q

Robert Gordon’s book, ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living since the Civil War’,  of usable historical reconstruction/remembrance, acting here as political nostalgia, for the once great Engine of Capital in America: in the face of the collapse  2008, and the dismal present of an economy geared to the imperatives of the 1%, is reviewed here at The Economist. But what is absent from this book review, and the book itself, in the narrative of the continuing of life of Capital,is the victory of Financialization over the production of goods and services,that have actual value to its civic partners (Yes,civic partners! Producers without customers , in what world?): Capital has devolved into a malfunctioning casino, subject to even greater crises, than a Capital that actually produced something of value. The practice of nostalgia for a vibrant past, as compensatory in the dismal present? Even your still from Chaplin is an implicit reference, comic though it may be, to the person as part of the cogs of industry, an implicit visual critique of atomization that produces alienation. It provides undermining  decoration. Your writer enthuses on Mr.Gordon’s celebratory volume :

‘Anybody who is tempted by this argument should read Robert Gordon’s magnificent new book.’

Yet, the ardor of your writer cools in her/his last paragraph, that points to the drawbacks of  Mr. Gordon’s readable popular history of ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth’ and  his doubt as to the economic consequences of the ‘IT revolution’:

‘But he goes too far in downplaying the current IT revolution. Where the first half of the book is brilliant, the second can be frustrating. Mr Gordon understates how IT has transformed people’s lives and he has little to say about the extent to which artificial intelligence will intensify this. He also fails to come to terms with the extent to which, thanks to 3D printing and the internet of things, the information revolution is spreading from the virtual world to the physical world. Mr Gordon may be right that the IT revolution will not restore economic growth rates to the level America once enjoyed. Only time will tell. But he is definitely wrong to underplay the extent to which the revolution is changing every aspect of our daily lives.’

American Scribbler

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21685437-why-economic-growth-soared-america-early-20th-century-and-why-it-wont-be?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/Gforce

Mr. Miller instead of opting for the foreign policy techno-chatter favored by other ‘Experts’, favors something that resembles the cliche ridden patois of the sports announcer of American football. Although Mr. Miller has no talent for the necessary brevity of between the plays commentary. File this under the melodramatic heading of Obama’s last year meditation, and a complete waste of the reader’s time. For a grim, but utterly realistic appraisal of Israel as Western/World conundrum, see Perry Anderson’s essay at The New Left Review titled The House of Zion:

https://newleftreview.org/II/96/perry-anderson-the-house-of-zion

‘Since the turn of the century, the Arab states have come to constitute a zone for Western military intervention without parallel in the post-Cold War world—us invasion of Iraq, nato bombardment of Libya, us proxies in Syria, Washington-backed gcc assault on Yemen. What of their traditional enemy? At the time of the second Intifada, an essay in these pages surveyed the balance of forces between the two nationalisms, Zionist and Palestinian, reflected in the naked inequities of the Oslo Accords. [1] Since then, how much has changed? On the West Bank, very little. The first Intifada was the rebellion of a new generation of Palestinians, whose activists came from local universities that were themselves recent creations. Displacing the compliant notables on whom the occupiers had relied, they led a three-year wave of popular demonstrations, strikes, boycotts and punishment of collaborators. The exiled plo in Tunis was caught by surprise, and played little part in it. Driven out of its bases in Lebanon, and defunded by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the Gulf War, the organization was rescued from its weakness by the Oslo accords, which returned it in pomp to bits of the homeland.’

A critical reader can’t accept a Foreign Policy expert, sometime government employee and full time Zionist, to present anything but this cynical political handicapping: a wordy description of the maladroit, not to speak of the misplaced good intentions/aspirations of the Obama/Kerry team, as argued by Mr. Miller.

Here is Mr. Miller in 2005 making the case for ‘The case for Israel-first advocacy is compelling.‘ And for America as the indispensable  broker:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/22/AR2005052200883.html

‘The case for Israel-first advocacy is compelling. Israelis live in a dangerous neighborhood; they have only one real friend and critically important security requirements that the United States is committed to furthering. Practically speaking, Israel sits on land the Arabs want, so without Israel’s trust and confidence there can be no peace process.

Having worked for the past six secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, I believe in the importance of a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship. Paradoxically, it is our intimacy with the Israelis that gives America — only America — the capacity to be an honest and effective broker. Arab governments have come to accept this reality. That is why — even now — when our credibility is so diminished in the region, they continue to press for U.S. engagement.

American Scribbler

The Last Temptation of Barack Obama and John Kerry 

One marvels at the almost eloquent call for the return to political rationality/civility by Mr. Schama,  with an assist from governor Haley:

‘As the child of Indian Sikhs she warned against conflating whole ethnic and religious communities with criminals or terrorists.’

Yet the governor is still a Republican who subscribes to the current Party Dogmas:

‘By any normal criteria Ms Haley is a rock-ribbed conservative: opposed to abortion, gun control and the Affordable Care Act.’

One can consider Trump as the culmination of  Republican Party mendacity. The beginning of Trumpism can be traced from the ‘Generation of Treason’ Anti-New Deal propaganda offensive of the Nixon/Mundt/McCarthy/McCarren Cold War alliance. And from Goldwater and his allies, who purged the Republican Liberals from the Convention in 1964, the Dixiecrat mass migration to the Republican Party in 1964 and 1965, after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, to the New Nixon of 68: The Southern Strategy, that even pitchman Reagan embraced in his first speech after his nomination at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980.  And then to the Willy Horton hysterics confected by Lee Atwater & Bush I. And the rise of political capo Karl Rove of Bush II. The key fact of that Dixiecrat migration into the Republican Party in ’64 and ’65, is unmentioned in Mr. Schama’s brief, historically superficial commentary.The root of the Republicans political necromancy of the present is that acceptance of Dixiecrat Feudalism, as politically/economically/morally plausible in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6dfc4986-bae2-11e5-b151-8e15c9a029fb.html#axzz3xPy7TKTY