http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2bc11fe8-0dd5-11e5-9a65-00144feabdc0.html?hubRefSrc=email&utm_source=lfemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=lfnotification#lf_comment=326599569

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/speech-of-hope-for-greece-by-yanis-varoufakis-2015-06

http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/07/investing/argentina-economy-stocks/

‘ Argentina’s Merval stock market is up 45% this year, more than Europe’s stellar performance and way more than the S&P 500.
Even everyday Argentines, battered by rising food prices and electric bills, are feeling better lately. The country’s consumer confidence index is up over 40% from a year ago, according to Torcuato di Tella University, a private university in Buenos Aires. ‘

Prof. Francesco Giavazzi’s essay is full of hyperbole, that first demonstrates a certain ignorance of  American politics in this :

‘Imagine President Barack Obama taking part in high-level talks for months on end, where little was on the agenda except the state of Tennessee.’

One can easily imagine the president focusing his attention on Tennessee, although not to the exclusion of all other concerns, that isn’t even realistic! Or this bit of respectable bourgeois political chatter that reflects the political orthodoxy of the moment.

 The jihadis of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) represent a new and serious threat to the west, as does Mr Putin’s revanchism.

This melodramatic frame puts the Greeks, ‘… a country that represents 1.8 per cent of the eurozone’s economic output.’ , into proper perspective?  Putin and Isis are at the Gates, sounds like a riff on the warmed over political hysteria of Niall Ferguson. Except that we can trace the rise of militant Islam and ‘Putin’s revanchism’ to American and European political adventurism: the as if operating here is self willed blindness or self-serving dishonesty! The professor’s rather obtuse argument, such as it is, is that the E.U. must let the Greeks fend for themselves, even at the high cost of the ‘Grexit’. The Greeks refuse to give up their utterly corrupt welfare state, led by  Syriza, they are like Ireland and Slovenia, not worth the money spent on the rescue attempt!

The rescue of the Germans four times in the 20th Century, from the 20’s to the early 50’s, doesn’t even figure in Prof. Giavazzi’s argument. In fact the Germans look like the deadbeats he accuses the Greeks of being! I know, as Henry Ford opined history is bunk!  It’s a question of Neo-Liberal cynicism: the near panic of the possibility of the fissuring  E.U. has been the idee fixe of the financial press for years. Have the Neo-Liberals conceded that the Greeks will exit? And is Prof. Giavazzi’s essay the fist of many such essays? Yet the question remains who will be next? Spain led by the Anti-Austerity Podemos? In the end, will the E.U. eventually be made up of that mythical virtuous Northern Tier alone?

Political Observer

The first of these essays dated June 6,2015 is titled Chronicle of a struggle in which quite surprisingly Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Mr Tsipras literary contribution to the debate, followed by the Oxbridger’s literary contribution of Joseph K. of Kafka’s The Trial and Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, play a large part in the rhetorical framing of more Economist hectoring, even bulling tone! The attacks on the Greeks at The Economist has been nothing but relentless, the betrayal of Capitalism, in it’s Corporatist iteration of the E.U., is not to be excused, much less countenanced. The promise of financial ruin and the human suffering that accompanies it is an effective cudgel.

The rules by which this game is played, one-upmanship, of this educated elite is from Stephen Potter’s The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating, published in 1947: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Potter

And one-upmanship here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-upmanship

To say the least the British are adroit practitioners of this game, they’ve mastered it’s techniques for almost two generations! Two Kafka’s trumps one Hemingway!

The second of these essays, dated June 8,2015, is, again, at the Economist, melodramatically titled ‘Dancing on a volcano‘. Not even two whole days have elapsed before readers are again confronted with Greeks, in their role as the epitome of the mendacious. The Economist engages in tiresome Red Bating as if it were 1952 in America, as a sop to their Conservative readership. The first paragraph of the essay tells the whole story, the rest mere agitprop:

Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s prime minister, knows that time is running short for his country to reach a deal with its creditors. This makes it all the more remarkable that, on June 5th, he made a speech in parliament denouncing the creditors’ latest set of proposals. Mr Tsipras stated that “there isn’t a specific deadline for an agreement”. The country’s bail-out monitors (the European Commission , the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank) are growing impatient with the Greek government’s delaying tactics—most recently postponing a €300m ($337m) debt payment to the IMF, then missing a deadline for presenting a revised set of negotiating proposals to Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission president. It may be politically necessary for Mr Tsipras to demonstrate his independence from Greece’s creditors and postpone a deal until the last minute, but he is taking his country frighteningly close to the edge.

Then we come to an essay at The Guardian, dated June 9,2015 by Syriza party member and economist Costas Lapavitsas, titled If the eurozone thinks Greece can be blackmailed,it is wrong . The sub-headline is revelatory:

Greece’s creditors do not have the country’s best interests at heart. Syriza, which still has enormous popular support, will not be afraid to examine the alternatives

Mr. Lapavitsas makes his position abundantly clear in his two concluding paragraphs:

The economy, meanwhile, is again moving toward recession, liquidity is extremely short, the public sector is delaying domestic payments and deposits are draining away from banks. Above all, the country cannot meet its debt payments this summer. Crisis is truly upon us.

The only political force that could lead Greece out of this quagmire remains Syriza, which still enjoys enormous popular support. If the lenders prove intransigent, the government should examine all alternative paths. Those who think the country will submit to blackmail because it does not know how to handle the alternative are wrong. Greece can and will survive.

The fate of the E.U. , Monnet’s conception/execution now thoroughly colonized, and or the harbinger of Neo-Liberalism, i.e. the euro as the end of Keynesian economic interventionism by sovereign nations controlling their own currency. Or the E.U. effectively controlled by Germany, bailed out four times in the 20th Century that refuses to grant economic largess to Greece. Is Mr. Lapavitsas bluffing?

On the question of the euro as bulwark against Keynesian interventionism:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/26/robert-mundell-evil-genius-euro?CMP=share_btn_tw

On German bailout in 20th Century see:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html

Almost Marx

Instead of wasting your time reading Mr. Isquith’s ‘Liberal’ apologetics for Reagan, go to The American Conservative and read Daniel Larison’s The Perils of Reaganolatry!

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-perils-of-reaganolatry/

‘The trouble for the GOP isn’t just that younger voters don’t remember Reagan, but that most of them have fairly clear memories of the last administration and/or the current Republican leadership. Presidential candidates can talk about Reagan all they like, but it won’t change the fact that for most people that became politically engaged over the last fifteen years Republican governance has a horrible reputation of incompetence and recklessness. Republican candidates almost have to fall back on praising someone who hasn’t been in office in a quarter century, since for most of the time since then their party has become synonymous with failed and disastrous policies.’

Reagan opened his 1980 campaign at the Nashoba County Fair just miles from where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered.

Here from Wiki is the entry on his speech:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan%27s_Neshoba_County_Fair_%22states%27_rights%22_speech

And for the full transcript of this moral/political obscenity the Nashoba Democrat provides a full transcript :

http://neshobademocrat.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=297&ArticleID=15599

‘I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.’

What does Reagan’s ‘I believe in States Rights’ have in common with FDR’s  ‘I welcome your hatred’? Reagan was the natural inheritor of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, his appointment of  Rehnquist to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Scalia as Associate Justice is prima facie evidence of that fact. Also Reagan marks the ascent of the Neo-Liberal Dogma, Thatcher was his British ally: we now live in the collapse of that Dogma!

Political Observer

If you can tolerate Bruce Bawer’s almost insufferable attack on the ‘decadence of the present’, surely an idea freighted with political/cultural animus born of a reactionary politics, his seeming attack on scholarship in the age of the decline of print, accompanied by an unbecoming cynicism: considering these impediments, in the early parts of his essay, you might enjoy his look at Henry James through his corresondence, though be forewarned that Mr. Brawer lacks candor when it comes to Mr. James’ sexuality, and his closetedness in relation to his status as spectator rather than participant in life, demonstrated in his literary output. Should James’ choice of a model for his heroines in Minnie Temple be instructive? This to consider the thought – to foreshorten that complex of personality and it relation to that literary output.
If you read just the beginning of William and Henry James Selected Letters published by the University of Virginia Press edited by Skrupskelis,Berkeley and McDermott you find one of the main topics discussed in the early letters in this collection, besides a complex family life, is the subject of constipation, each brother seemed to spend at least some of the space of each letter on this compelling subject.
American Litterateur
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/A-sufferable-snob-8177#footnote-1405-1-backlink

Dear Rep. Peters,

Thank you for your prompt e mail response to my phone call to your office of last week, regarding the proposed secret TPP and it’s twin Fast Track Authority. One of the many questions a voter might ask to a congressional representative would be: how can anyone vote intelligently on this Fast Track Authority when the law itself, the TPP, remains a secret? If you as a legislator wish to read it, you are not allowed to takes notes or even to discuss what you have read with your constituency, in fact you are subject to criminal sanction, if you do so openly. One marvels at the double think that inheres in the very notion of ‘secret legislation’ ! But given the utter failure of NAFTA to deliver on it’s much anticipated and celebrated benefits, should I be surprised at your carefully worded reply, to my statement to your staff member that I don’t support Fast Track or TPP? That failure renders Mr. Ross Poirot prescient rather than as a political spoiler/crank!

The very notion of ‘secret legislation’ is an utter betrayal of republican principal and practice and is anathema, except to the apologists for the predations of the American National Security State, as a model of Corporatism, and it’s political actors, whose loyalty is not to the the notion and practice of the cultivation of civic republican virtue, but to demonstrably bankrupt idea and practice of the ‘Free Market’.

StephenKMackSD

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/25/practical-vision-more-equal-society/

‘Toward a New Radical Reformism

Anthony Atkinson occupies a unique place among economists. During the past half-century, in defiance of prevailing trends, he managed to place the question of inequality at the center of his work while demonstrating that economics is first and foremost a social and moral science. In his new book, Inequality: What Can Be Done?—more personal than his previous ones and wholly focused on a plan of action—he provides us with the broad outlines of a new radical reformism.’

 ‘…while demonstrating that economics is first and foremost a social and moral science.’

The Economist supplies Western propaganda as answer to Putin Propaganda? The New Cold War with Putin as The New Stalin has reached the point of no return. Are we continually ruled by manufactured crises?
What should we readers think of Poroshenko’s new laws?
Reported on here:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/06/ukraine-anti-communist-laws-stir-controversy-150601054437645.html
Under the headline:
‘Ukraine’s ‘anti-communist laws’ stir controversy
A raft of laws passed recently praise far-right groups that fought in WWII and ban the display of Soviet symbols’
Or here at a news source bound to rankle Economist readers:
http://rt.com/news/209563-ukraine-foreigners-government-posts/
Under the headline :
‘Poroshenko aims to change laws to allow foreigners into Ukrainian govt’
Or this from Russia Insider/Financial Times:
‘http://russia-insider.com/ru/ukraine_business/2015/01/27/2781
Under this headline etc.:
‘Kiev Begs IMF for More Money
The IMF has been reluctant to increase its own $17bn commitment, arguing that it has been carrying a disproportionate financial burden. It has been trying instead to muster new money from other international donors.  Why doesn’t Soros just write a check?’
Add this from the FT by Larry Summers:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ff3634fc-fa44-11e4-a41c-00144feab7de.html#axzz3cBxHe74N
Under the headline:
‘Reform-minded Ukraine merits debt reduction’
To The Economist editors: Do better than this tired recitation of the shopworn Party Line on Putin i.e. apologetics for US/NATO/EU political adventurism as the in order too of placing ABM’s at the border of Ukraine/Russia. And the imposition of Austerity in Ukraine: the advancement of the Neo-Liberal nightmare is ‘The Free Market’.
Political Observer

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21652339-vladimir-putin-concocts-new-story-ukraine-leaving-west-wondering-what-he-up

A damming bill of attainder! It reads like a revised script laid down by The Project for a New American Century. Or even an essay written by Neo-Imperial wunderkind Niall Ferguson, with the heavy hand of an editor, to excise the neologisms and to moderate the preening self-congratulatory tone.
Although another possibility would be Senator Tom Cotton as ghostwriter, again carefully edited. The invasion of Iraq was the beginning of endless war in the ‘Middle East’ that’s what the Neo-Cons envisioned and that is what we are stuck with, if we continue.  The basic philosophy of these thinkers is to create and sustain an exploitable chaos, and in that they have succeeded. The Neo-Con is enamored of war and bloodshed as long as it is not their own: Leo Strauss the paradigmatic intellectual.

What The Economist offers in this essay is a lengthy description of the ‘problem’ and some, not even prescriptions, but a dubious call for re-evaluation and action. Some kind of action in answer to the Obama passivity, as again diagnosed by the author/authors: this essay is an exercise of writing by committee. All of this framed by the comments , critiques of Foreign Policy technocrats, if not the authors of the failed policies of the past, then their students.

Political Observer

The ‘ clientelist and corrupt bureaucracy’ that Mr. Stephens refers to in his essay are the very people that conspired with Goldman Sachs to hide the true extent of Greek indebtedness, as the in order to of more debt! This takes irony and the Neo-Liberal screeching about the ‘Greek Crisis’ to new levels of moralizing pretentiousness, not to speak of utter political desperation: the collapse of the EU waits in the wings accompanied by Podemos. Consider the what and the where of the next European anti-austerity Party! The specter of those parties  keeps the whole of the editorial phalanx of The Financial Times relentlessly tapping at their keyboards!

One of the other major questions is who owns the Greek debt? We have this Greek per-election report from Bloomberg:

Click to access MS_Greece_WhoHurts.pdf

Or this February 2, 2015 from Bloomberg:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-02/greece-seeks-third-debt-restructuring-who-s-on-the-hook-

With Germany being bailed out four times in the 20th century as reported by Jillian Tett at the FT :

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl

As the debt is held by other Europeans, and with Germany, Ms. Merkel being it’s titular leader- the reluctance of one of the beneficiaries of European economic largess bespeaks an advanced case of hubris, or just the contempt of the leader of the Virtuous Norther Tier against the Profligate Southern Tier: the power of this deeply held prejudice of moral superiority is the poison that will destroy Monnet’s Grand Idea, rooted in a firm belief in the marriage of technocracy and bureaucracy, with the Euro as check against Keynesian interventionism:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/26/robert-mundell-evil-genius-euro?CMP=share_btn_tw

The euro would really do its work when crises hit, Mundell explained. Removing a government’s control over currency would prevent nasty little elected officials from using Keynesian monetary and fiscal juice to pull a nation out of recession.

“It puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians,” he said. “[And] without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business.”

He cited labor laws, environmental regulations and, of course, taxes. All would be flushed away by the euro. Democracy would not be allowed to interfere with the marketplace – or the plumbing. As another Nobelist, Paul Krugman, notes, the creation of the eurozone violated the basic economic rule known as “optimum currency area”. This was a rule devised by Bob Mundell. That doesn’t bother Mundell. For him, the euro wasn’t about turning Europe into a powerful, unified economic unit. It was about Reagan and Thatcher.

Was Monnet’s conception and early realization of the EU Neo-Liberalism avant la lettre? Or simply it’s precursor? Certainly two tantalizing questions that won’t be asked by the writer at The Financial Times!

Almost Marx