Mr. John Lloyd provides an interesting, almost compelling political travelogue, yet it is lopsided in that the specter that haunts ‘The West’ is that the once ascendant dogmas of Neo-Liberalism have, in sum, been shown that it was a political/civic delusion based on the idea that The Market was the only essential kind of knowledge. And that the republican heritage that can be traced from Greece and Rome, to the Italian City States, The Glorious Revolution to the American constitutional experiment needed to be discarded in favor of something called The Free Market. Has this experiment in the primacy of Market epistemology and it’s Neo-Liberal politics proven itself to be viable or even tenable?  Of course, this is The Financial Times, and capitalist apologetics and self-exculpatory propagandizing is the rule, this publication being one of the most prestigious of that rare but necessary antidotes to the predations of the Left, as imagined by the defenders of an utterly failed epistemological/political model. The specter that haunts the bourgeois imagination is not just Marx, Keynes or even Piketty but the Left that ‘still swims in cold waters’ to slightly alter this assertion.

Mr. Lloyd’s essay does offer some valuable insights, yet the challenge is to separate those from the political hysterics in a minor key. Mr. Lloyd points to ‘Marine Le Pen’s National Front’ as indicative of the power of the Right in opposition to the Neo-Liberal dispensation. But other manifestations of a resurgent Right remain unmentioned. Either due to considerations of space, or more likely in service to an ideological perspective.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1f10ad52-588c-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz3luEFlsJ5

Mr. Capiro, thank you for your comment.
It is easy to agree with Mr. Oppenheimer, in his conclusion:

‘My opinion: If Maduro wants to prove to the world that this year’s legislative elections will not be a sham, he should appoint a credible National Electoral Tribunal — one of the main demands of the student protests that left 43 dead last year — allow an audit of the voting registry, and give opposition candidates equal time on television.
That may be too much to ask to a president who has arrested Venezuela’s top opposition leaders, including democratically elected Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma and Leopoldo López, on bogus charges that are hard to take seriously.
But if the Obama administration and Latin American countries are serious when they say that Venezuela’s crisis should be resolved at the ballot box, they should start demanding Maduro take these steps to clean up the election process —and they should do it now.’

One can only wish that the Neo-Confederate/Originalist Justices on America’s Supreme Court and their Centrist ally Justice Kennedy could have demonstrated the same dedication to a transparent,free, and fair system of voting, that was at the center of Shelby County v. Holder!

On the question of Mr. Dallen, who describes himself as a ‘good capitalist’ said in half-jest in this YouTube video, probably places him in the Anti-Meduro camp, or am I reading too much into it? From the video Mr. Dallen handles himself like an experienced intellectual politician i.e. a think tank good citizen.

But his testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee is not on YouTube, nor as I searched under his name and the date of his testimony at C-Span, I was unable to locate it. Would be grateful if you could supply the link or links.
StephenKMackSD

http://www.economist.com/comment/2859405#comment-2859405

Pay attention to this sentence as demonstrative of The Financial Times argument, if that is what this collection of low grade insults and retrograde Neo-Liberal apologetics can be called:

‘Yet the longer he stays, the more he will tarnish the Labour brand irrevocably.’

‘Brand’ is the language of the Market utterly corrupted by the public relations maven Edward Bernays, and the Political Romantics/Economists, a trio composed of von Mises, Hayek, Friedman with an assist from screen writer and scribbler Ayn Rand. In sum the Market is the final arbiter of all things! To call the Neo-Liberal vision politically, civically, ethically stunted, even the expression of a pernicious nihilism, is only a surprise to the Financial Times editors and writers, not to Labour voters.

But don’t forget if you can that what holds all of this essay together is not rational argument but screeching political hysterics in the defense of :

‘Voters put Tony Blair in power three times at the head of a modernised and centrist Labour party. ‘

Tony Blair and New Labour willfully discarded Old Labour, as a relic, in deference to the predations, but most importantly to the winning of Mrs. Thatcher. Willful forgetting of Labour’s Socialist past, and it’s arrival as ‘Centrist’ is what the FT celebrates, and then uses it as a cudgel against the apostate Mr. Corbyn. Would the exercise of historical honesty demand that the real apostate be identified as Mr. Blair and that Mr. Corbyn simply represents a Restoration?

For a first class hatchet job on Mr. Corbyn see this essay at The Economist which engages in hysterics, political metaphysics and in a fictive imaging of the dire future of Mr. Corbyn’s fall from political power: it is expressed in a breathtaking, even uncanny act of verisimilitude.

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21664557-one-britains-most-outlandish-mps-wins-leadership-its-second-largest-party-cor-blimey

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e2029c2e-5965-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz3lacCFMDO

A reply to this comment posted at The Financial Times:

Is the benighted Age of Neo-Liberalism reaching one of it’s many political denouements? Not according to ‘our columnist’ even with this disclaimer:

‘ Nonetheless, little store should be set by that rough forecast. British politics has seemed remarkably unpredictable, fragmentary and volatile in recent years. Never more so than today.’

‘Our columnist’ quite carefully and specifically presents a ‘speculative history’ of the political future of Mr. Corbyn, or just call a fictive account of that future? Is the reader invited into the thought process or just instructed as to how it will evolve? We are at the historical moment of the political rise of Mr. Corbyn, yet ‘our columnist’ foresees, with a startling specificity, his political fall from power. This reader might call this prescience- or might it be called the rhetorical creature of political ideology?

Mr. Corbyn represents the end of a political center thoroughly colonized by  Neo-Liberalism: except that the whole of politics has been equally colonized by  neoliberal rationalism . For the particulars on that neoliberal rationalism see Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos

Political Reporter

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21664557-one-britains-most-outlandish-mps-wins-leadership-its-second-largest-party-cor-blimey

Beware of the manifesto bearing Public Intellectual/Politician or should we call Mr. Taylor by his actual name? a former ‘ Chief Adviser on Political Strategy to the Prime Minister’? See Mr. Taylor’s impressive CV here:

https://www.thersa.org/events/speakers/matthew-taylor/

The temptation is to compare Mr. Taylor’s fascination with  Professor Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Entrepreneurial State, with Mrs. Thatcher’s penchant for passing out copies of Road to Serfdom? If Utopianism is the object of the Right’s contempt for Marx and his epigones, and even Keynes or Piketty, where might the thinking reader put Mr. Taylor’s enthusiasm? Here are some links about Professor Mariana Mazzucato and her book:

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

http://www.anthempress.com/the-entrepreneurial-state

http://marianamazzucato.com/the-entrepreneurial-state/

Reviews of her book:

The Economist is a bit fretful of Professor Mazzucato’s thesis, yet after the initial repetition of press release chatter, in the end warms to the notion of The Entrepreneurial State: that oscillates politically between   Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian imperatives and a control of the costs of ‘entitlements’ as a measure of necessary reforms. The last paragraph of the review is telling:

Quibbles aside, Ms Mazzucato is right to argue that the state has played a central role in producing game-changing breakthroughs, and that its contribution to the success of technology-based businesses should not be underestimated. She is also right to point out that the “profligate” countries that are suffering the most from the current crisis (such as Greece and Italy) are those that have spent the least on R&D and education. There are many reasons why policymakers must modernise the state and bring entitlements under control. But one of the most important is that a well-run state is a vital part of a successful innovation system.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21584307-new-book-points-out-big-role-governments-play-creating-innovative-businesses

Jeff Madrick, at the NYRB has unstinting praise for Professor Mazzucato: ‘ It is one of the most incisive economic books in years.’ Mr. Madrick doesn’t share Mr. Wortsell’s penchant for concise and clear definitions. He also reviews ‘Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets, Speculation and the State’ by William H. Janeway. Insights are many and worth your time and attention, although his almost worshipful stance to Janeway reaches to the level of the obsequious- he seems star struck, dazzled by Janeway’s ability to make money. The real insights offered by Mr. Madrick is that he devotes time to Mr. Janeway’s book that offer a history of government involvement with innovative technologies. A long excerpt worthy of quotation:

Mazzucato claims not that business entrepreneurs and venture capitalists did not make crucial contributions, but that they were, on balance, more averse to risks than government researchers. One successful venture capitalist, William Janeway, fully acknowledges the fundamental contributions of government research in his book, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy. He is concerned that the antigovernment attitudes of recent decades may prove dangerous. “The very success in ‘liberating’ the market economy from the encroachment of the state,” he writes, which defines today’s conventional economic wisdom, as the quote by Summers suggests, “has potentially dire consequences for the Innovation Economy.”

Janeway is a well-informed economist as well as a successful venture entrepreneur, and he argues for the importance of government in the nation’s economic growth. With the development of huge, highly profitable corporations in steel, oil, aluminum, chemicals, and communications by the late 1800s, he notes, crucial research was increasingly dominated by the private sector. Janeway cites the business historian Alfred Chandler to show that this is not an example of the free market at work. Rather, the huge, unchallenged profits of large oligopolistic companies enabled them to make long-term investments in research. Chandler called it the “visible hand.” Still, while Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, as well as research labs at General Electric, DuPont, and Alcoa, among others, made important, even legendary discoveries, they were also partly financed by Washington.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/24/innovation-government-was-crucial-after-all/

See Mr.Tim Worstall‘s rather tart dismissal at Forbes, as he looks at the idea of ‘public goods’ as argued by Professor Mazzucato. His conclusion is expressed as kind of doubt that is hard to argue with.

But if we’ve got a patent there then it’s not a public good any more, is it? For the patent itself means that whatever it is is now excludable. This is an either or proposition. Either something is a public good because we cannot exclude people from it and therefore it must be that we cannot get a patent on it. Or, alternatively, we can get a patent, it is excludable, therefore it is a private, not public, good. It cannot be both patented and also a public good.

And it’s on the basis of this sort of argumentation that she wants to upend the system of fostering innovation and invention. I think not, don’t you? Whether we agree or not with the State taking a larger role let’s at least wait until someone comes up with some logically consistent arguments.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/15/the-intellectual-hole-at-the-heart-of-mariana-mazzucatos-entrepreneurial-state/

One could wonder, out loud, whether Professor Mazzucato’s book is a predictor of the Political Corporatism, that, in America, is the course charted by President Obama and his Republican allies in Congress? The TPA and TPP?

With my exploration of  Professor Mazzucato’s book/Progressive Manifesto, Mr. Taylor returns, in his essay, to the political world of Labour politics, and a very sophisticated plea for a leadership headed by the ‘Progressive’ Ms. Kendall not by ‘Left Wing Firebrand’ Mr. Corbyn, to foreshorten it!

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f9298302-555c-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz3l9RhbZR7

A cynic might title this, ‘Fake French Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy inserts himself into the current Refugee Crisis in Europe’. This man thinks of himself as the natural inheritor of the mantle of Sartre and Camus. Perhaps he is, in the age of television and the internet, a kind of vapid facsimile of the Public Intellectual of another time and place: a creation of self-will and broad based public relations.  With a veneer of anguished moralizing chatter attuned to the political orthodoxy of the moment? There is no mistaking the high flown hectoring rhetoric, nor forgetting  M. Lévy last moral performance of note, that took place at  Ukraine: Thinking together Kyiv, 15-19 May 2014

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-05-06-newsitem-en.html

But I am forgetting his many rhetorical interventions on the question of Charlie Hebdo:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernardhenri-levy/in-praise-of-blasphemy_b_7185898.html

One wonders at this sentence:

Our society of the spectacle, normally so quick to manufacture an instant celebrity to serve as the “face” of the crisis du jour (anything from swine flu to a truckers’ strike), has not taken an interest in the fate of a single one of the “migrants.”

Had M. Lévy missed these? His essay being published before these appeared?

Aylan Kurdi | News Franceify

 

I can’t find a credit for this. An oversight perhaps. Mea culpa!

 

Some, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, claim that the conflicts generating these refugees rage only in Arab countries that are being bombed by the West.

The methodology: Sources

One report has even alleged, Several sources consulted for this story said, A former U.S. military officer told The Daily Beast, Some of them are verifiable, One active U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast, Much discussed in U.S. defense circles is what the Israeli news portal YNet reported Monday, YNet’s Alex Fishman wrote, citing Western diplomatic sources, Photographs published by Syria Net purport to show these Russian legionnaires, Pro-Russian sources, too, are now trafficking in speculation, Al-Watan may be a notorious propaganda outlet, but, Russia also has sent intelligence operatives into Syria.,Not long ago, a hacker collective known as Shaltai Boltai (“Humpty Dumpty”) intercepted emails belonging to Igor Strelkov (aka Igor Girkin), In intercepted missive, In early August, Fox News reported, Citing Putin’s help in solidifying the Iran deal, the Obama administration has, The usual suspects have suggested that, etc.

Call this method after the character  J.J. Hunsecker in the film Sweet Smell of Success, perfected by Eli Lake, Josh Rogan and second stringer James Kirchick, at the Daily Beast, until Lake and Rogan went to Bloomberg View. With these sources named and unnamed he cobbles together, with publicly available sources, a plausible story. Mr. Weiss must have started as an intelligence analyst, because his eye for telling detail in a mass of information is highly practiced , or was it his long apprenticeship at The Interpreter magazine choosing and translating selected articles for publication into English translation? My thoughts are that one must read Mr. Weiss with attention to rhetorical method, sources and ideological intent. My comment is prompted by the fact that the Daily Beast no longer has a comments section, perhaps a cost saving measure?

Political Reporter

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/01/russia-puts-boots-on-the-ground-in-syria.html

‘Neo-Libralism? That vague ideology…’ Perhaps your should avail yourself of the scholarship on Neo-Liberalism:

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos

And this on Neo-Liberalism’s Patron Saint, Mr. Hayek:

http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/current_issue25_34.html

Nothing ‘vague’ about Neo-Libralism, nor the fact that it is no longer the object of adoration, except by the panicked politicos, who are the authors of  Left Wing Hysterics like this:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/29/tony-blair-labour-leadership-jeremy-corbyn

StephenKMackSD

Mr. Torreblanca takes a muted Stalinist approach to Prof. Iglesias, if one can use such a term to describe such a European establishmentarian, of impeccable Neo-Liberal credentials. Identifying the professoriate as enemy is a dependable strategy, even if muted. ‘Hard left ‘ political pariah Mr. Corbyn has a walk on.  ‘…Podemos has changed the political weather.’ this is hardly news. Recall the role of Occupy Wall Street and Mr. Piketty’s book in that change of ‘political weather’? That ‘weather’ has been the subject of attack from both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, although Mr.Torreblanca alludes to this, but it doesn’t rate further exploration, in deference to the imperative of Left hysteria, even in it’s muted iteration.

What other book, Capital in the 21st Century, in your memory received a ten part review in The Economist? A link to this very important review by R.A. :

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/02/book-clubs

Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2e8efae2-4d68-11e5-b558-8a9722977189.html#axzz3kOQho4TJ

Trump is the culmination of Republican Party mendacity. The beginning of Trumpism can be traced from the ‘Generation of Treason’ of the Nixon/Mundt/McCarthy/McCarren Cold War alliance. And from Goldwater, the Dixiecrat mass migration in 1964 and 1965, to the New Nixon of 68: The Southern Strategy, that even pitchman Reagan embraced at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980.  And then to Willy Horton of Lee Atwater & Bush I or political capo Karl Rove of Bush II. Admittedly this is a polemically charged argument, but this is a history that is, to say the least, a political inconvenience to Mr.Ponnuru’s rhetorical analgesic.
Trump is an American Caudillo in the mold of Peron, with the strutting showy arrogance of Mussolini, perfected from years of honing his skill at humiliating his underlings on network television.
Mr. Ponnuru offers not political certainty, but repeats a collection of cliches that offer a kind of comfort, that might just be called an exercise in willful political myopia.

Political Reporter

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-28/trump-is-a-nuisance-not-a-nightmare