StephenKMackSD's Blog

Here is Gideon Rachman,at The Financial Times, from his column of December 28, 2015, in the grip of an almost unmanageable rhetorical hysteria, the title gives the game away,

‘Battered, bruised and jumpy — the whole world is on edge’

and then the the sub-title,

‘Not one global power is optimistic and even in America, which should be cheering, the mood is sour’

but be prepared for what reads like Mr. Rachman at his most unhinged! The opening paragraph is worthy of full quotation:

In 2015, a sense of unease and foreboding seemed to settle on all the world’s major power centres. From Beijing to Washington, Berlin to Brasília, Moscow to Tokyo — governments, media and citizens were jumpy and embattled.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c523a45a-a973-11e5-955c-1e1d6de94879.html#axzz3wHln4LUZ

Compare this to Mr. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s essay,dated December 30 2015, Mr. Evans-Pritchard is International Business Editor of The Daily Telegraph, titled,

‘The world’s political and economic order is stronger than it looks’

and its sub-title ,

‘Stefan Zweig tells us in The World of Yesterday what it feels like when the wheels really do come off the global system’

The opening three paragraphs of  Mr. Evans-Pritchard’s essay strike a measured,  if not optimistic tone:

‘Readers have scolded me gently for too much optimism over the past year, wondering why I refuse to see that the world economy is in dire trouble and that the international order is coming apart at the seams.

So for Christmas reading I have retreated to the “World of Yesterday”, the poignant account of Europe’s civilisational suicide in the early 20th century by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig – the top-selling author of the inter-war years.

From there it is a natural progression to Zweig’s equally poignant biography of Erasmus, who saw his own tolerant Latin civilization smothered by fanatics four centuries earlier.’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/12074226/The-worlds-political-and-economic-order-is-stronger-than-it-looks.html

Can history offer insights into the present?

Political Observer

One marvels at the number of stunning aperçus in Mr. Ganesh’s essay:

‘Mr Crosby specialises in what his simpering victims call the “politics of fear”. ‘

‘He cannot make people fear anything they do not already fear, but merely for taking their existing fears seriously…’

‘Playing on people’s fears is not just effective, it is also right. ‘

‘Fear is a respectable emotion that is hard-wired into us as a design feature, not a glitch. We are meant to feel it.’

‘That some of our fears are misplaced does not make the emotion unsound, or electoral appeals to it somehow sordid.’

Mr. Ganesh makes the case for fear, not just as a good that makes us wary in our everyday lives, but of fear as a political good, yet he doesn’t quite discriminate between rational fear and politically inspired fear e.g. fear of ‘the outsider’, although this player in his political melodrama gets the briefest of walk-ons , but the usual cast members, such as blacks, Jews, Muslims, Gays and here at the Financial Times the dreaded Populists of both Left and Right are left unmentioned.

‘The politics of hope has a spurious respectability but reeks of snake oil. It elides good intentions with good outcomes and treats the status quo as a baseline that can only be improved on. For normal people in the actual world, the status quo is superior to many plausible alternatives. Things can be made worse not just better by well-meaning politicians.’

Mr. Ganesh on the ‘politics of hope’ echoes the Lee Atwater and Karl Rove perspective of cynicism/opportunism that Mr. Crosby has brought to British politics. The rough hewn Australian brings a masculine bravado to the effete world of British politics, as narrated by our writer. In sum, Mr. Ganesh is having an unseemly romance with political necromancy, because it has brought victory to his Party! Call it the victory of The Faustians.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a40adeb4-a973-11e5-955c-1e1d6de94879.html#axzz3vqc2kkyM

There is nothing so bracing as viewing David Frum’s carefully  posed snapshot of America’s political history, with the help of fellow traveler Rich Lowry. If Mr. Frum meant his quotations from Mr. Lowry to be edifying or even enlightening the notion of ‘executive intelligence’ falls short. Mr. Lowry’s pastiche of critical evaluation is another exercise of maladroit apologetics, for a Party that has since surrendered to nihilism in its many iterations.

On the pressing question of race and the Republican Party, Mr. Frum elides the fact of the Dixiecrat migration to the Republicans in ’64 and ’65, in protest of both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts passing,  at which time Mr. Frum was four and five years old: but being a student of American history this is an ideologically, not to speak of, strategically fueled myopia. The Dixiecrats have ruled the Republican stance on race in America since. The evidence: The Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Nashoba County Fair speech that was the first speech of his campaign: I believe in states rights! Bush I and Lee Atwater’s  Willy Horton ads, the appointments of the Neo-Confederate/Originalists to the Supreme Court: Rehnquist,Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and even sometime ally Anthony Kennedy.

On Trump the ‘politician’: he is a Caudillo like Peron, with the baroque stage manner and bluster of Mussolini.With the spotty veneer of Mr. Lowry’s ‘executive intelligence’ perfected on his television show, based on the ‘principals of Vulture Capital’: which is enough to make Messrs.  Frum and Lowry politically tumescent.

Political Reporter

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/trump-poll-numbers-success/421824/#article-comments

Mr. Luce’s utter misreading of American history, past, present and political, framed by a title that can only be called what it is, a breath taking malapropism, ‘America’s clash of civilisations’. That leaves the reader fully convinced that David Brooks and Mr. Luce are of like minds. The Luce/Brooks view of American politics and history is marked by familiar events and persons, except that all is transmogrified into an incomprehensible but ideologically self-serving muddle. Which these thinkers attempt to unravel and explicate within that frame of the politically self-serving. Here is one example of the Luce iteration of that method:

‘Mr Obama has never been forgiven for saying poor white Americans are suffering from Marxian false consciousness:’

The ‘Marxian false consciousness’ is the purest form of pandering to the conservative reader of the FT, who is posited as anti-intellectual, that translates quite conveniently into anti-Marxist, and most probably Republican. The rhetorical framing is all important to winning what passes for argument, but is in fact a straw man.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f49b83dc-a59b-11e5-a91e-162b86790c58.html#axzz3usCXbRmf

@Olaf von Rein @StephenKMackSD

I usually thank those who reply to my comments, but in your case I’ll just say that part of your comment is well argued and coheres, even if I disagree vehemently with its content. The shouting is I guess, to be expected! The FT is a font of Capitalist Apologetics and the hunting ground for Communists ,Populists and other assorted political riff raff.   I found Mr. Varoufakis’ comments illuminating and worthy of attention, and a much needed reply to the Mario Montis of the EU, the first two paragraphs of your linked essay give the game away:

It is that rare thing: a policy made in Brussels that clearly works. The bold moves against Google and Gazprom over the past two weeks are the latest to be taken by a European institution that has, over half a century, become one of the world’s most formidable defenders of free markets. Yet in perpetuating this admirable tradition, competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager is doing more than challenging two corporate giants from afar. Perhaps without realising it, she is also moving against forceful political currents within the EU itself.

Whatever the merits of these two cases (and I am in no position to judge them), one fact is clear: when Europe speaks on competition policy, others listen to its roar. The words of the commissioner echo through the White House and the Kremlin; from Moscow to Silicon Valley, they are heard intently by the world’s boards. In so many areas — migration, economics, foreign policy — the EU convulses in a frenzy of statements. But in competition policy the EU never barks; when justified, it bites.

‘What concerns Brussels general attitude to free markets, here is a less biased take:’ Consider Mario Monti’s essay an EU press release awash in Neo-Liberal cliche: Free Markets etc. (The writer was EU competition commissioner from 1999 to 2004 and prime minister of Italy from 2011 to 2013). ‘A less biased take’?

The remainder of the essay is framed in the apologetics for the EU and does not address the question that Mr. Varoufakis raises of the Cartel as the antithetical to the values of the Demos/Demi. But what the reader gets is this:

These lessons are at odds with the political mood that is taking hold across Europe. La politique d’abord (“politics first!”) is the order of the day. It is felt as a moral imperative and a necessary corrective for the alleged evils of the rules and rigidities that have held sway for decades. These days, flexibility, discretion and compromise are the watchwords.

Not legally codified institutional democracy but ‘flexibility, discretion and compromise are the watchwords’. I’ll follow your brief, dismissive closing remark with my own: Not good enough!

StephenKMackSD

http://on.ft.com/1RxRowJ

Daniel Politi writes two essays on the lifting of capital controls in which he speaks to Neo-Liberal bureaucrats and brokers or spokesmen for brokerage houses: all this in anticipation of a flood of foreign investment to the New Argentine Economy, that embraces a portion of the ‘strong medicine’ postponed by the long reign of husband and wife (Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner)?

Can one speculate in the pages of this house organ of Capitalist Apologetics, what will be the political picture a year or two years from now? After the settlement with Paul Singer, how will Mauricio Macri numbers look after that ‘strong medicine’ takes hold and trickles down? A political revival  featuring a de Kirchner epigone or even a more charismatic Peronist?

Two reports of interest:

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-08-07/argentinas-vulture-paul-singer-is-wall-street-freedom-fighter

Vulture Capitalists Are the Real Winners of Argentina’s Elections

One wonders what the electorate will think, but more importantly what they will do politically in the wake of these ‘economic reforms’ and the effects on the life of the citizenry? Not to speak of the falling value of the Peso! Which seems here an utter irrelevance! The political blindness of the economic/political ideologue?

The Neo-Liberal Utopian Hayek offered the Market as the only real viable form of knowledge, while ignoring the central place of a vibrant civic/political life, as the cornerstone that made Capitalism a possibility/actuality within that indispensable civic/political frame.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/556d51b4-a447-11e5-873f-68411a84f346.html#axzz3ugKkUgaq

On the fall of the Argentine Peso:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2979e8be-a4e8-11e5-a91e-162b86790c58.html#axzz3ugKkUgaq

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StephenKMackSD

‘But there’s not much upside to getting a raise if the cost of living goes up too. There are many things to do, but most urgent is to repeal and replace Obamacare. When people ask me what’s wrong with the law, I usually say to them, how much time do you have? But if I had to point out one thing, it would be the mandates, the restrictions, all the red tape. How do I know they have failed? You notice we don’t talk about lowering premiums anymore. We’re supposed to be happy if they don’t go up by double digits.

This is the problem: The other side thinks that to lower costs for some people you have to raise them for others. Life is a zero-sum game. They know people won’t buy pricey insurance. So their solution is, don’t give them a choice. We say lower costs for everybody by giving them that choice. Instead of forcing you to buy insurance, we should force insurance companies to compete for your business. Let people find a plan that works for them. And yes, help people pay for health insurance.

I’ve long believed we should offer an individual tax credit to help people pay for premiums—giving more to the old and sick. There are a lot of other ideas out there, but what all conservatives can agree on is this: We think government should encourage personal responsibility, not replace it. We think prices are going up because people have too few choices, not because they have too many. And we think this problem is so urgent that, next year, we are going to unveil a plan to replace every word of Obamacare.’

Here, in essence is The Republican Party Platform for 2016, knowing that the myth of Obama’s ‘weakness on ISIS’ and the Iran Deal will be the Foreign Policy component of their attack. Although Hillary has won the admiration of both Jeffrey Goldberg and William Kristol, in the recent past, for her ‘I’m tougher than any man in the room’ foreign policy stance! And if Trump is the presidential candidate, the Republican Nihilists will either self-destruct as a Party or win, not by a landslide, but by an undeniable plurality, as the result of a domestic terror attack with its actors tied ,by evidence, to Islamic Terrorism of some identifiable variety.
 ‘And we think this problem is so urgent that, next year, we are going to unveil a plan to replace every word of Obamacare.’

– See more at: http://www.speaker.gov/press-release/full-text-speaker-ryans-remarks-library-congress#sthash.kWNqsIy9.dpuf

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