StephenKMackSD's Blog

The Stephens essay is the perfect opportunity to re-post the Barber/Ganesh video, the title of which features the ‘soft left’, when what is at issue is the ‘hard left’ and the utter importance of the ‘centrists’ , which is, in fact, a defense of a center thoroughly colonized by the political contagion of Neo-Liberalism. But Owen Jones in the New Statesman, a source uncongenial to the FT readership,  quotes  BBC journalist Mark Mardell on the journalists who celebrate the ‘soft center’, represented here by  Stephens, Barber and Ganesh: presenting themselves and their political allies as the only rational political actors:

Assessing the Corbyn campaign, the BBC journalist Mark Mardell was intriguingly candid. “It is hardly surprising that Westminster journalists crave the ideologically soft centre,” he writes. “None is on the minimum wage, let alone tax credits, nor are any, to my knowledge, owners of third homes on the Cayman Islands, or running big corporations. They are nearly all university educated and live in London or the South East of England (Yes, all that goes for me, too). There is group-think in the muddled middle, a fear of thinking outside a comfortable box.” Whatever their pretences, the BBC and many of its journalists will be among those attempting to undermine a Corbyn leadership.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/owen-jones-right-are-mocking-jeremy-corbyn-because-secretly-they-fear-him

Mr. Stephens’ agitprop is long on the mendacity, policy failures not to speak of the virulent political ugliness of the ‘left’ hard or soft:

The choice of Mr Corbyn as leader undoubtedly would be a startlingly self-destructive act for Labour. The veteran MP hails from a segment of the self-indulgent left that has always preferred to rail against US imperialism than to consider how to improve the life chances of ordinary folk. Never troubled by the choices of office, his frame is them versus us — the “them” being the rich, the powerful and, above all, the Americans, the “us” the oppressed peoples of Latin America or the Middle East.

More of the same:

His domestic policy platform consists of Venezuelan-style state direction of the economy: big tax hikes, nationalisations and more spending on everything except defence. Abroad, he would advocate withdrawal from Nato and, possibly, from the EU. Mr Corbyn’s visceral anti-Americanism is of the type that makes a hero of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

The political breadth of Mr. Corbyn’s mendacity, according to the narrative confected by Stephens, wedded to a ruthless political ambition, elides all political categories. Yet for Tony Blair to represent what Labour might stand for takes an act of political amnesia, that is the legacy of Mrs. Thatcher: Another revelatory quote from the Jones essay:

But the troll right has been eclipsed by a far more savvy – and nervous – right. “Socialism represents an enduring temptation,” warned Margaret Thatcher in her memoirs. “No one should underestimate Labour’s potential appeal.” As her former chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, put it on her 80th birthday: “The real triumph was to have transformed not just one party, but two.” This was the sincerely held belief of the right’s iconic leader herself. As her close personal friend, Tory MP Conor Burns, told me, Thatcher once declared to a crowd of her supporters: “Our greatest achievement was Tony Blair. We forced our opponents to change.” New Labour’s acceptance of many of the underlying assumptions of Thatcherism was, in the view of Thatcher and her supporters, the crowning glory of their great crusade. Their project was safe, unchallenged, a new political consensus.

 “Our greatest achievement was Tony Blair. We forced our opponents to change.”

Political Dissident

You have to marvel at the Financial Times and their policy of Left political hysteria mongering, here are Lionel Barber and Janan Ganesh in a carefully staged, but strategically brief, political conversation.

‘FT editor Lionel Barber talks to political commentator Janan Ganesh about the leadership crisis in the UK’s Labour party.under the headline: ‘Soft left is the real threat to Labour’

Yet the conversation is taken up by a long, mutually constructed  diatribe about the ‘hard left’. Watch the video here:

http://video.ft.com/4400769905001/Soft-left-is-the-real-threat-to-Labour/World

Then see Owen Jones’ essay at The New Statesmen which explores the same territory, yet presents a more nuanced picture, although Mr. Jones essay is much longer. The Barber/Ganesh video looks just like what it is propaganda, aimed at the Conservative readership of the FT!  The Jones essay offers this compelling insight into how the respectable bourgeois press, with a careful definition provided by BBC journalist Mark Mardell, handles the ‘left’.

Assessing the Corbyn campaign, the BBC journalist Mark Mardell was intriguingly candid. “It is hardly surprising that Westminster journalists crave the ideologically soft centre,” he writes. “None is on the minimum wage, let alone tax credits, nor are any, to my knowledge, owners of third homes on the Cayman Islands, or running big corporations. They are nearly all university educated and live in London or the South East of England (Yes, all that goes for me, too). There is group-think in the muddled middle, a fear of thinking outside a comfortable box.” Whatever their pretences, the BBC and many of its journalists will be among those attempting to undermine a Corbyn leadership.

Mr. Jones offers valuable insights, he is a ‘left journalist’, yet acquits his journalistic responsibility in a way that puts the Barber/Ganesh agitprop into proper perspective.

Political Observer

I’m sorry to say that it sounds like Mr. Kay wrote this essay on his lunch hour. Now, I’m not saying that he didn’t have a point, and that it wasn’t well argued, in a self-serving kind of way. That deadline can be a cruel master! Although the reference to gun control did leave me doubting it’s relevance, but sure of it’s appeal to a conservative readership. But  the essay was more a collection of broad generalizations supported by some apt quotations. A rough sketch but not a finished drawing?

Mr. Kay might remind his anonymous economist about  Deirdre N. McCloskey’s book The Rhetoric of Economics, second edition, chapter 7 titled ‘The Unexamined Rhetoric of Economic Quantification’, that quantification is an integral part of economics as a whole, and rhetoric is it’s means of delivery. The part that Keynes plays, as a major character in this literary vinaigrette, as man of reason and empiricism doesn’t quite – the quote from the utterly dubious Robert Rubin brings this essay to a welcome, but ignominious end. My comment, I hope, doesn’t follow Mr. Kay’s lead.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/96a620a8-3a8d-11e5-bbd1-b37bc06f590c.html#axzz3hljetR2h

Notice the extreme defensiveness of Mr. Lake and the reason for that is he is one of ‘those Neo-Cons’ the president is referring to. No surprise here. Mr. Lake has been consistent from The Daily Beast to BV in his unslakable appetite for war, as long as someone else is doing the fighting and dying. He shares that sentiment with William Kristol, Robert Kagan and a host of others.Not many Neo-Cons have served in the Armed Forces: the two most prominent politicians of the Neo-Con world view are McCain and Cotton, and tag-along Lindsey Graham.
The president should be familiar with the Neo-Con as Vitoria Nuland and Amb. Pyatt are, at the least, fellow travelers! Even R2P zealot Samantha Power tows the Party Line. The president’s Foreign Policy reflects a kind of schizophrenia: a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and rapprochement with Iran. Why wouldn’t voters of either Party be a bit befuddled, by the president’s antithetical political/policy positions. This a perfect opening that almost makes Mr. Lake’s essay look credible. Almost!
Political Observer
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-03/obama-plays-politics-of-fear-to-get-his-iran-deal

Is the definition of political misfortune Peter Beinart’s faint praise of Joe Biden, or Jeffrey Goldberg and William Kristol’s praise of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy toughness? Mr. Biden is another stolid, unimaginative New Democrat, not withstanding Mr. Beinart’s attempt at steering the political conversation into a direction that is to say the least puzzling, or just one ‘liberal’ scratching another ‘liberals’ back? Was Mr. Beinart subject to courtship, or was he like John Stewart a regular caller on a prominent office holder? Public intellectual and comedians have a weakness for the powerful!
After Obama’s ‘Hope and Change’ mantra of 2008, that was pure public relations sloganeering devoid of political substance, and the policy schizophrenia of second term: a proxy war in Ukraine led by Victoria Nuland, and her Neo-Con and R2P zealot allies, and the Iran Deal led by John Kerry-what can one make of the whole of it? Not to speak of Obama’s boast that he could be elected to a third term!

Political Reporter

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/run-joe-run-why-democrats-need-a-biden-candidacy/361965/#disqus_thread

The Republicans will never learn, as long as Sen. McConnell and his coterie of sclerotic old white guys, continue to pursue the Neo-Confederate/Originalist Party Line: the myth that women need daddy’s guiding hand, because they are unable to confront such issues as birth control, without the moral surety of  masculine tutelage. The ‘War on Women’ has resonance with all but the religious zealots, who live in the thrall of  religious conservatism/fundamentalism!
Hospitals regularly, as a matter of course, sell tissue harvested from infant circumcisions to drug companies, that manufacture $200 dollar face cream, sold exclusively at plastic surgeons offices. Institutionalized sexual violence is a profit center.
The Republicans will seal their own fate, in 2016, by another round of political nihilism, ushering in Neo-Liberal hack Mrs. Clinton. What ever happened to all that Ronald Reagan political savvy? Or even that old political saw of the 11th commandment? And where are the Eisenhower Republicans?

Political Observer

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/gop-support-grows-for-hardline-planned-parenthood-strategy-120837.html

The Party Line of ‘too much red tape’ can be traced back to the early 1960’s where I first heard that line of argument from the Ev and Charlie Show:

http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/The_Ev_and_Charlie_Show.htm

The whole issue revolves around the deeply held notion that ‘Government is the problem’ , the Reagan political bromide, that eventuated in the economic collapse of 2008, to foreshorten considerably.  With an assist from New Democrat Bill Clinton and his Free Market allies Phil and Wendy Gramm and other ‘reformers’: the repeal of Glass-Steagall was the harbinger of disaster!

What does all this ‘red tape’ really mean? That businesses and their owners and operators have a real civic obligation to operate honestly and fairly inside a civic structure. Now that is something that the Free Marketeers can’t fathom. It is beyond their ken. In the Neo-Liberal world view, The Free Market is the historical/political/ethical singularity that is above question. Not mentioning the greed, mendacity and chicanery empirically demo started by Capital since that 1999 ‘Reform’.

Those ‘innovators’, like Apple and the rest of the tech giants, have exported their jobs to the sweat shops of Asia and their Help Line customer service centers to India. All in the name of profitability. The newest ‘innovator’ is Uber that skirts around laws that protect consumers against unlicensed taxis, because those ‘innovators’ can’t be bothered with the law, or the interest of public safety. The issue is public safety, in the interests of the commonwealth, not of some utopian chatter about entrepreneurs/innovators being held back by draconian bureaucracy. After 55 years of this endlessly repeated propaganda: the myth of the innovators squelched by state bureaucracy, a central claim of Neo-Liberal Theology. Yet we are in the 7th year of our ‘economic recovery’, that resembles stasis rather than the argued dynamism of the apologists for a Capital!

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/dedf71da-369b-11e5-bdbb-35e55cbae175.html#axzz3hRYTiPvI

In two sentences @Klaus articulates a cogent critique of the Neo-Liberal Delusion that has thoroughly colonized the EU, and it’s Masters Merkel/Schäuble the imperative of this motley duo is to willfully forget their own history, and then endlessly propagandize about their political/economic virtue!

Please recall the propaganda offensive of the Virtuous Northern Tier v. The Profligate Southern Tier? The editors at the FT, and many of it’s readers find this Merkel/Schäuble Party Line politically useful, if not an irresistible antidote to the utter failure of their singular idea of The Self-Correcting Free Market:now in it’s seventh year of ‘recovery’. One might ask if this be ‘recovery’ what might prosperity look like?   The rise of Thatcher/Reagan and their addiction to the economic bromides of political romantics like the risible Hayek and the other Philosophers of Greed like von Mises and Friedman, with help from script writer and pamphleteer Ayn Rand have still not lost the most diehard of their acolytes and political pitchmen: reconsideration and even a volte face of those true believers is not in the cards. Yet we await the next political actor who will appear on the EU stage, Spain, and who is to follow?

You don’t mention Keynes, yet your whole essay is an attempt not just to discredit but to malign his policies : he is the perennial enemy of the Neo-Liberal Apologist, for good reason!  Neo-Liberals refuse to face the failure of their Economic Theology and it’s successor Austerity: it would require an act of impiety, not to speak of sacrilege.

StephenKMackSD

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/27db9c44-3483-11e5-bdbb-35e55cbae175.html?hubRefSrc=email&utm_source=lfemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=lfnotification#lf_comment=354467348

Mr. Feldman rehearses the defensiveness of American Jews not seen since the Rosenberg’s Show Trail. According to documents obtained under The Freedom Of Information Act Mr.Greenglass was suborned to perjury by the prosecution, even though the case against the Rosenbergs was ‘air tight’. For the particulars:

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/160066

‘Early on in the federal investigation into the Rosenberg spy ring, Greenglass was trying to protect members of his family, including his sister; his betrayal of her was to come only later when, according to his own admission, he was pressured into lying by federal prosecutors.’

In this context how seriously should we take Mr. Greenglass’ eventual repudiation of his testimony?

As for Mr. Pollard, he seems to have been  an ardent Zionist whose loyalty to Israel was primary. Was he the embodiment of the Antisemitic trope of dual loyalty? Perhaps this will provide an answer, from the Wikipedia entry:

‘Prior to sentencing, Pollard and his wife Anne gave further defiant media interviews in which they defended their spying and attempted to rally Jewish Americans to their cause. In a 60 Minutes interview, Anne said, “I feel my husband and I did what we were expected to do, and what our moral obligation was as Jews, what our moral obligation was as human beings, and I have no regrets about that.”^[36]‘

He may not be mentally ill, at the least he was an opportunist aided by his galloping narcissism, and the practice of lying as a habit of  being:

‘As of 2014 the full extent of the information Pollard passed to Israel has still not been officially revealed. Press reports cited a secret 46-page memorandum, which Pollard and his attorneys were allowed to view.[35] They were provided to the judge by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who described Pollard’s spying as including, among other things, obtaining and copying the latest version of Radio-Signal Notations (RASIN), a 10-volume manual comprehensively detailing America’s global electronic surveillance network.[8][36]‘

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

The pertinent question might be: why would our closest ally spy on the US? which Mr. Feldman scrupulously avoids asking. The Israelis only admitted culpability for this whole sordid affair in 1998. Mr. Feldman provides the reader with anguished defensive chatter, instead of anything resembling thoughtful analysis.

Political Reporter

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-07-28/jonathan-pollard-s-release-and-the-shame-of-american-jews?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_content=55b9627304d301389a000001&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter