StephenKMackSD's Blog

‘A senior Western diplomat told The Daily Beast’, ‘one European leader replied’,’Video footage, purportedly shot in Petrovsky today’,’Boasts by separatists’: We’re in familiar Daily Beast territory pioneered by the once troika of Lake/Rogen/Kirchick! The anonymous sources, until we arrive at ‘Ukraine’s military spokesman Andriy Lysenko’ and ‘His colleague, Markiyan Lubkivsky’: call these last two what they are political allies of Mr. Weiss, and members of the Coup Government.
On stage next is ‘The “defense minister” of the separatist “Donetsk People’s Republic,” Vladimir Kononov’ the bad guy in this badly constructed Weiss New Cold War Melodrama. As a dramaturge Mr. Weiss lacks the necessary talent to bring off his lengthy reports on skirmishes that  appear in the narrative attributed to Kononov? Why would any ‘reporter’, Mr. Weiss in particular, take the word of “defense minister” of the separatists? Or has Mr. Weiss’ narrative switched gears? Sources Novosti Donbassa and James Miller?
After this we get a rather long, complex discussion on military strategy in the Ukraine by this ‘reporter’ who sounds more like a partisan. Add a bit of Putin as The New Stalin followed by more partisan speculation and military strategizing: this military component of his argument is where Mr. Weiss demonstrates his real  sophistication and knowledge, and it hard to argue with his intelligence and ability,even if one dissents of his politics/ideology. But then in the final paragraph he badly stumbles over a maladroitly exercised speculation in the mode of Freud/Lucan that seems- it speaks for itself in regards to his perception of and psychoanalysis of Putin:

‘His foreign policy has ever been one of Freudian projections and double-binds. He accuses his opponents of the sins and crimes of which he himself is guilty, then fashions a trap for them whereby they lose whatever move they make. Arm Ukraine? Do that and we’ll escalate the war. Don’t arm Ukraine? We’ll escalate anyway. Abide by Minsk? We’ll violate it and blame you for breaking it. Break Minsk? Even better!’

StephenKMackSD
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/03/can-anyone-stop-putin-s-new-blitz.html

I read Herzog when it came out in paperback from Bantam or Dell, I forget which, in 1965. Those were the days when corner liquor stores had paperback books for sale, it was another age, perhaps, when even drunks had intellectual aspirations?
What struck me at age twenty was that the book was utterly boring. His obsession with writing letters to the great philosophers, his Japanese mistress and part of the book being in French. What an utter waste of time! At the same time I read Mailer’s An American Dream, call this vile, self-indulgent, imitation Hemingway.
Last year I read Ravelstein, the roman a clef of Allen Bloom’s life, and it was the same ‘novel’ as Herzog, except it was Chick as the main character, who describes his long relationship with Ravelstein, and thankfully had given up writing letters to his imaginary rivals!
In the interim I had read War and Peace,Les Misérables, The Count of Monte Cristo, and the Musketeer books, Life and Fate,The Yawning Heights, August 1914(The Red Wheel), Swann’s Way almost all of Vidal and Calvino. All of which had more life,more zest than the always self-obsessed, and usually sour Mr. Bellow, could hope to muster. Even Mr. Roth’s exercise in political paranoia,  The Plot Against America, manages to garner the reader’s admiration, even affection, for it’s lead character a young and winning Philip Roth.
Reading Bellow reminds me of reading The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson, a spiritually suffocating re-visit to 1950’s America, and the economic aspirations/delusions of the children of the Depression era, as adults living,striving in post WWII America: the era of The Organization Man. Bellow manages the dingy depressing grey with certain authority, not to mention the ennui producing self-obsessions of his authorial alter egos.

American Littérateur

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21652253-making-20th-century-american-master-early-days-yet

After Katie Martin’s comments on the Greek soap opera, of June 1, 2015 on fastFT here:

http://www.ft.com/intl/fastft/331801

What can we think of a newspaper that quotes one of the conspirators involved in the cover up of the true extent of Greek indebtedness, Goldman Sachs, on the Greek Crisis?

Mr. Mackintosh provides the answer with, at first ,some statistical data that acts as garnish, nothing more, to this snide and contemptuous politicized repetition of that, by now, shopworn old canard of the Lazy Southern Tier vs the Virtuous Northern Tier. Add to this the notion of Greek Myths, that makes a heady brew of Neo-Liberal apologetics carefully, but unsophisticatedly confected by an employee who knows the Party Line by heart.

Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f8ca9d56-0877-11e5-b38c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3buNZNsbG

You have the utter gaul, you and your newspaper,to quote from an organization that colluded to hide the real extent of the indebtedness of the Greek government ? And then to trivialize the fight of the Greek government and it’s people against the predations of the whole of the floundering, in fact the utter failure of the Neo-Liberal Project, in it’s political expression of the E.U., by calling it melodrama! As if your readership didn’t have access to other sources like this:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/greek-debt-crisis-how-goldman-sachs-helped-greece-to-mask-its-true-debt-a-676634.html

Sub-headline:

Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country’s already bloated deficit.

And this :

Greece’s debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period — to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.

StephenKMackSD

“There is great uncertainty at a time when the world needs greater stability and certainty,” said Mr Lew.”

Mr. Lew and his fellow technocrats have reason to worry about an ‘accident’ that will end in an acceleration of the slow but inexorable collapse of the EU, and the Corporatist politics that is the realization of Thatcher/Reagan, with an assist from the ambition and vision of  éminence grise Jean Monnet:

Following World War II, France was in severe need of reconstruction and completely dependent on coal from Germany’s main remaining coal-mining areas, the Ruhr and Saar areas. (The German coal fields in Upper Silesia had been handed over to Polish administration by the Allies in 1945, see Oder-Neisse line.)

In 1945 Monnet proposed the Monnet Plan, also known as the “Theory of l’Engrenage” (not to be confused with the Schuman plan). It included taking control of the remaining German coal-producing areas and redirecting the production away from the German industry and into the French, thus permanently weakening Germany and raising the French economy considerably above its pre-war levels. The plan was adopted by Charles de Gaulle in early 1946.^[1]

Later that year, Monnet successfully negotiated the Blum–Byrnes agreement with the United States, which cleared France from a $2.8 billon debt (mostly World War I loans) and provided the country with an additional low-interest loan of $650 million. In return, France opened its cinemas to American movies.^[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Monnet

The ‘accident’ will not be avoided, as Mr. Lew and his Neo-Liberal confederates scheme, plan and hope for- the economic cudgel is quite an effective weapon! With Spain next, and then perhaps Portugal and Ireland, who will assert their sovereignty over their economic lives, as part and parcel of the Enlightenment/Kantian Tradition of emancipation from tutelage, to foreshorten the argument.

Mr. Lew and his superior President Obama, will brook no interference from Greece, in their collective ambition, to enable not political rule by civic actors, whose allegiance/practice is the principle of the cultivation of civic republican virtue, but whose sole motive is to a Corporatism, that annuls any kind of notion or practice of democracy.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2f601ae4-060c-11e5-b676-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3bXzuUB1n

I salute you for actually having the fortitude, and what ever it took, to reply to a twitter bottom feeder! But the unanswerable question remains for you and yours: are your pro forma ‘acts of contrition’ going to bring back the dead? If so, the power of punditry has reached new levels of what? Mr. Breyman took your measure as thinker/strategist with a telling, eviscerating accuracy. And it demonstrates that Lippmann’s faith in experts/technocrats,as a bulwark against the predations of democracy, was an open door to experts like the Dulles brothers, the Bundy brothers,McNamara, Kissinger, Kirkpatrick and the rest of the sorry parade of front women/men for the American Empire. And it’s high cost in human lives, an idea/construct outside the ken of ‘the strategic thinker’, in the safety of her/his study, classroom,colloquia. Recall Herman Kahn and thinking the unthinkable? As a human being you are worthy of compassion, as we all are, because we are human. But if you are honest, did the policies you supported demonstrate that necessary idea and practice of compassion and even forgiveness, that is implied in your tweet? Your stance reminds me of portions of Kai Bird’s book on the Bundy brothers, in which he recounts stories of Robert McNamara openly crying at Washington parties, at the height of the Vietnam War. Was it guilt, self-pity,remorse or histrionics, or just an amalgam of all those emotions.
StephenKMackSD

Thank you to all my twitter homies who wanted to bring to my attention that both Mr. Friedman and Mr. Hayek believed in the ‘basic income’ as what? Concern for the poor and the downtrodden? Or just a bit of self-apologetics/propaganda, for their red in tooth and claw Social Darwinism masquerading as Economics/Science, in the war against the Keynesians and that old Devil Marx ? Isn’t it flabbergasting even in the face of the Soviet’s murderous State Capitalism/Marxism, that Marx should still be a potent voice in our ‘debates’ or rather our trading in polemics. Or that that notorious queer, according to Mr. Ferguson, Keynes should still have the power to animate our conversations.
Best regards to all,
StephenKMackSD, aka Almost Marx

The usual Economist Left fear mongering in their essay titled ‘The wild ones’, in the face of the slow motion collapse of the Neo-Liberal paradigm. That paradigm embraces both the E.U. and the euro, with Ms. Merkel as the enforcer of that political/economic orthodoxy. Expel from your thoughts that Germany was bailed out four times in the 20th Century (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953) for the particulars on Benjamin Friedman, the esteemed economic historian’s address to a collection of central bank governors, see this from The Financial Times:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html
On the Euro, as a checkmate on Keynesian interventionism,  see Gregg Palast’s informative essay titled  ‘Robert Mundell, evil genius of the euro’
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/26/robert-mundell-evil-genius-euro?CMP=share_btn_tw
Also read Yanis Varoufakis’ essay titled ‘Austerity Is the Only Deal-Breaker’ at Project Syndicate as reply and challenge to Philip Stephens essay at The Financial Times.

Varoufakis

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/greece-government-reforms-by-yanis-varoufakis-2015-05
Philip Stephens

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/61aa05b0-fe1d-11e4-9f10-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3b0VFoQ6E

But for the pièce de résistance of Left Wing fear mongering, nothing quite matches  Columbia Business School Professor Charles Calomiris on Bloomberg Surveillance:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-05-05/greeks-playing-a-crazy-game-of-chicken-calomiris

Also see this reply to Prof. Calomiris :

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/bloombergtv-prosyn-columbia_biz-cwcalomiris/

Political Observer

The usual Left Hysteria mongering from Neo-Liberal reporters/pundits at one of it’s nerve centers Bloomberg! Fear Monger in Chief ‘He can’t think straight’ @cwcalomiris followed by severe scolding of those ‘radicals’, but not just that, but as pardoners of murderers. That places the Syriza leadership outside the pale. The rhetoric of the Cold War and the New Cold War harnessed to the utterly shopworn/failed Neo-Liberal consensus, as it slowly unravels! Therefore the resort to the melodramatic framing of interminable ‘crisis’, and it’s denial. That unraveling upsets the Neo-Liberal intelligentsia and it’s reportorial minions. Consider the word intelligentsia as a descriptive, rather than a statement of some kind of fact, perhaps, in the broadest sense a term of art.
On a related matter, the ‘euro’ as Neo-Liberal instrument to checkmate the Keynesians see this essay by Gregg Palast’s essay here:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/26/robert-mundell-evil-genius-euro?CMP=share_btn_tw

‘But Mundell, a can-do Canadian-American, intended to do something about it: come up with a weapon that would blow away government rules and labor regulations. (He really hated the union plumbers who charged a bundle to move his throne.)
“It’s very hard to fire workers in Europe,” he complained. His answer: the euro.
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.’

Almost Marx

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-05-05/greeks-playing-a-crazy-game-of-chicken-calomiris

The victories of Syriza in Greece,of SNP in Scotland and Podemos in Spain has,perhaps, led the Oxbridgers at the Economist to do some preemptive thinking or just call it propagandizing, as the in order too of checkmating the ‘Left’: that amorphous self-created creature, that haunts the thoughts and economic schemes of The Neo-Liberal Thought Collective, or just call them the Neo-Hayekians for short! I will admit to ignorance of the British political context that could have given rise to this essay. But the muted political hysteria of the Economist’s writers, as advocates and apologists for the utterly failed Neo-Liberal Project, can’t ever be underestimated!

The walk-ons are of interest: Thomas Payne in the guise of his pamphlet Agrarian Justice gets what might be called a dismissive hearing. Then James Meade takes the stage for more of the same, except that his argument about the decline of employment in the computer age rings more than true: economic reality entered by the back door of that posh London office?

Then Free Market Demi-God Milton Friedman, as nod to the dubious thinking on the Right, enters stage right. Succeeded by an interlude of cold hard facts and figures: Economic Science forgets it’s origins, as the companion volume to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and it’s beginnings as Political Economy. Perhaps discarded as a sign that science trumps morality/ethics?   After all this, and more, the conclusion is that The Basic Income is unworkable. Don’t call it Economic Strum und Drang, although it shares something like the Romantic sensibility’s faith in it’s intuitions, the Economist writers just gussied it up as Science.

Almost Marx