StephenKMackSD's Blog

This cliche ridden attack on Putin as political opportunist and international spoiler is unsurprising. It follows the usual invective from The Financial Times: in sum Putin the Monster. Add to the cast Obama the Political Paralytic, yet America dropped bombs on a hospital in Afghanistan and readily denied responsibility, blamed the Afghanis and then admitted this ‘mistake’. And the drone attacks on any target the president and his advisers choose continue unabated. This is the definition of paralysis?

Mr. Gardner’s other rhetorical ally is a self-satisfied cynicism, that is used with what can only described as too free a hand! Cynicism doesn’t offer any usable insights, nor does invective, unless your motive is not to share your thoughts on a vexing dilemma, but to engage in an act of propaganda? For an antidote to Mr. Gardener’s screed see Vijay Prashad’s essay titled ‘Russia’s Syria gambit’ at The Hindu:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/russias-syria-gambit/article7707958.ece
Read the first two paragraphs of Mr. Prashad’s  essay and experience what thoughtfulness and consideration more closely allied to the exercise of  empiricism can offer to the reader.

On the first day of the 70th session of the United Nations General Assembly, both U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin took the stage. Mr. Obama spoke for twice the designated length, but little in his speech was new.Then, he said, hauntingly, “Nowhere is our commitment to international order more tested than in Syria.” The antidote to this test came in one sentence, “The United States is prepared to work with any nation, including Russia and Iran, to resolve the conflict.” That was that. It suggested that the Western policy toward Syria had failed. Another approach was needed.

Mr. Putin did not offer many details of the alternative direction, but he did propose another view of things. The central crisis in West Asia, he suggested, was the emergence of the “Islamic State”(IS). What caused IS, Mr. Putin argued, was the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. “It is now obvious that the power vacuum created in some countries of the Middle East and North Africa led to the creation of anarchic areas which immediately started to be filled with extremists and terrorists.” Mr. Putin has sought a UN Security Council resolution to clarify the main enemy in Iraq-Syria. In doing so, he has put the West on the back foot.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0ee68cc4-6c34-11e5-8171-ba1968cf791a.html#axzz3nnshNBQ9

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Congratulations to Mr. Shawn Donnan for two well written but highly circumscribed reports on TPP, after all this is The Financial Times, one of the most respected publications of Capitalist Apologetics!

His first essay titled ‘Negotiators strike Pacific trade deal’ ::

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d4a31d08-6b4c-11e5-8171-ba1968cf791a.html#axzz3nYOiEG2x

He quotes at length  ‘Tim Groser, New Zealand’s trade minister and one of the architects of the TPP’:

Tim Groser, New Zealand’s trade minister and one of the architects of the TPP, said its “strategic” implications for global trade were enormous.

“All of this is being lost in these arcane battles over grams of butter and cheese,” he said.

“While people will no doubt laugh at the conservatism of some of the timetables of liberalisation of the most politically sensitive [products in the TPP], that will probably prove to be the wrong take,” he said. “Because the issue is to get the direction of travel right.”

No real need to comment on the partisan character of this essay, it seems obvious that the opponents of TPP, in this report, are mere bit players in this little melodrama.

Mr. Donnan then turns attention in this companion essay titled ‘And now the other TPP battles begin’, to the looming American domestic political battle over the TPP:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/69f94d26-6af5-11e5-8171-ba1968cf791a.html#axzz3nYOiEG2x

Again the antagonists remain in the very proscribed Financial Times/Donnan world view: Mr. Trump and Sen. Orrin Hatch. The fact that Bernie Sanders has made the defeat of TPP an integral part of his presidential campaign remains off stage, too politically inconvenient? Two TPP partisans: one a trade representative another a policy technocrat   are then added ‘Mike Froman, the US trade representative’ and ‘Philip Levy, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.’

One could observe that the Utopianism of Neo-Liberalism/Austerity is being supplanted by a version of TPP as it’s replacement.

Political Reporter

Paul Waldman demonstrates the bankruptcy of ‘Liberalism’ in his essay at The American Prospect titled ‘The GOP Delusions’ with the sub-title of ‘ Politicians and voters, both pretending their party can do things it can’t.’ by using this attack as one of his arguments:

‘Cruz is not a legislator, he’s a performer, a kind of right-wing version of the Code Pink activists who disrupt Capitol Hill hearings.’

Code Pink is a political organization that has used political theater/agitprop to focus national attention on vital political issues, and has been effective in the use of those tactics. Sen. Cruz is a senator elected to govern! Is the difference between them not readily apparent? Except to pundits whose raison d’être is the cultivation of  bourgeois political respectability, Mr. Waldman qualifies as such a writer.
There can be no doubt that the Republican Party will destroy itself: a collection of Dime Store Robespierres, whose belief in governance is non-existent. Sen. Lugar was purged from the Party not because he wasn’t Conservative enough but because he practiced the art of the possible, without apology!
Mr. Waldman doesn’t even address a question or speculation that seems patently obvious: where are the Eisenhower Republicans while the nihilists destroy the Party? He’s too busy appreciating/relishing the Republican Circus, not to speak of indulging in unseemly anti-left hysteria mongering. As the American melodrama unfolds, in a series of carefully orchestrated political events, featuring political actors, who can only pretend that Trump is just another candidate, instead of the main attraction.

Political Reporter

http://prospect.org/article/gops-delusions

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Daryush Shayegan is a Cosmopolitan to his marrow,  a polymath and intellectual. Mr. Huntington was one of the last of the WASP Ascendancy, like the Bundy brothers and their journalistic twins the Alsop brothers. Huntington was an operative of the American National Security State and worked for the South African apartheid government of P.W. Botha: should readers be surprised as to Huntington’s political advocacies, sympathies?   Huntington’s’ Clash’ was the transitional dogma that succeeded the Old Cold War and was the precursor of  the War on Terror. Yet look at  the ‘Nativist’ paranoid vision of Huntington, as argued in his book Who Are We: The Mestizo Horde about to divide and conquer the wondrous American Anglo/Protestant culture: two peoples,two cultures, two languages. The American reality is that like Walt Whitman we embrace multitudes! To say the least, Huntington’s vision of the ‘Clash’ and ‘Who Are We’, when viewed in tandem, are an utterly stunted vision of  the human potential for building an actual world.  The vision of a world, not simply advocated but lived by Mr. Shayegan, is about the actuality of a Cosmopolitanism in the present, not about a longed for Utopia!

Philosophical Apprentice

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5de87dba-6215-11e5-a28b-50226830d644.html

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From his somewhat equivocating first paragraph, to his economic analysis and his lapse into the  prescriptive, Mr. Wolf’s faint praise of Mr. Corbyn and his economic brain trust is mired in Neo-Liberal myopia. The fact that Corbyn and that brain trust are just a beginning of a long overcoming of an entrenched, indeed an institutionalized Neo-Liberalism, hasn’t yet reached the level of an intuition in Mr. Wolf’s consciousness. The a-historical world of a very specific kind of defensive journalism is indicative of that myopia, or is it more accurate to refer to a foreshortened history rather than the a-historical? John Pilger offers a sage analysis of that defensive journalism in this quotation:

These are dark times, in which the propaganda of deceit touches all our lives. It is as if political reality has been privatised and illusion legitimised. The information age is a media age. We have politics by media; censorship by media; war by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of clichés and false assumptions.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43008.htm

Mr. Wolf’s essay doesn’t quite come close to the  notion of  ‘ a surreal assembly line of clichés and false assumptions.’ but comes close enough to offer an invitation to a number of considerations.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d0f0e212-6773-11e5-a57f-21b88f7d973f.html?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Fcomment%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct#axzz3nE8xdtek

The very notion that John Boehner, Scott Walker or Strom Thurmond apologist Trent Lott are representative of Republican Party political rationalism is on it’s face ludicrous. The foreshortened ‘history’ of the recent Republican Party presented by Demetri Sevastopulo and Barney Jopson lacks historical reach, not to speak of it’s ideologically fueled myopia. The fact that Eric Cantor was one of the early congressional advocates/allies of the Tea Party makes his comments, not just superfluous, but self-servingly disingenuous.

Trump is the culmination of Republican Party mendacity. The beginning of Trumpism can be traced from the ‘Generation of Treason’ Anti-New Deal propaganda offensive of the Nixon/Mundt/McCarthy/McCarren Cold War alliance. And from Goldwater and his allies, who purged the Republican Liberals from the Convention in 1964, the Dixiecrat mass migration to the Republican Party in 1964 and 1965, after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, to the New Nixon of 68: The Southern Strategy, that even pitchman Reagan embraced in his first speech after his nomination at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980.  And then to the Willy Horton hysterics confected by Lee Atwater & Bush I. And the rise of 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 rejoinder to the vacuous ‘history’ presented by the Sevastopulo/Jopson duo!

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. It plays perfectly to an audience now thoroughly disenchanted with Neo-Liberalism, it’s  successor Austerity and the present economic stagnation.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1fc84822-64cb-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz3nE8xdtek

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Mr Rachman’s essay is the culmination of a continuation of Anti-Putin propaganda that was begun with the Philip Stephens essay titled ‘Conflicts will become the new norm’ link here:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f83cfbc0-31e1-11e5-91ac-a5e17d9b4cff.html#axzz3nE8xdtek

A catalogue of the risks facing the thoughtful Capitalist rhetorically framed by the construct  ‘ Vladimir Putin’s revanchist designs on Ukraine’. Of course no mention of the EU/American political adventurism of Victoria Nuland and her many co-conspirators, mostly American and EU based NGO’s.

Followed by this ‘report’ by Alex Barker titled ‘The key moments in Russia’s shift from pariah to player’ :

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/710eabc0-65f9-11e5-97d0-1456a776a4f5.html#axzz3nE8xdtek

Alex Barker presents this under the rubric of the political self-rehabilitation of Mr. Putin, yet it reads like a rather clumsy indictment, as a potted history of the Crimes of Putin, to frame it as vulgar political melodrama.

The next entry is ‘Russian air strikes on Syrian targets raise ‘grave concerns’ in US’ by Kathrin Hille in Moscow, Geoff Dyer in New York, Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington and Erika Solomon in Beirut. The editor of this should be credited with the title of  the organizing intelligence, that made these various reports into coherent propaganda. Sec. Carter publicly scolds Mr. Putin, more melodrama!

Ashton Carter, US defence secretary, said the Russian strikes appeared to have hit areas where there was no Isis presence.

“It does appear that they were in areas where there probably were not Isil [Isis] forces and that is precisely one of the problems with this whole [Russian] approach,” Mr Carter said at the Pentagon.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a72cee0a-674e-11e5-a57f-21b88f7d973f.html#axzz3nE8xdtek

The startling revelation that Putin has the means and the power to act unilaterally, just like President Obama and his precursors, comes as a revelation to the FT and its ‘reporters’ and editorialists ?

Mr. Rachman adds to the continuing political/propaganda conversation with the invidious comparison of Putin with George W Bush:

George W Bush famously said that he had looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and “got a sense of his soul”. Maybe he did – for the former US and current Russian presidents are beginning to look like soulmates, when it comes to the idea of a “war on terror”. Like President Bush, President Putin has decided to deploy his country’s military in the Middle East, as part of a war on terrorism. And like President Bush, the Russian leader has argued that he is engaged in a struggle on behalf of the whole civilised world, while appealing for global support.

http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2015/09/vladimir-putins-war-on-terror/

Is the fact that both Putin and Obama can act unilaterally, that there is a parity of sorts, such a disturbing reality to the apologists for America’s unilateral actions? What are the results of America’s interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, it’s drone attacks conducted with absolute impunity? The exercise of honesty might just demand the thought that the current Refugee Crisis is the product of the exercise of  American hegemony. But consider the thought that Putin can also be a spoiler, as he might just be engaging in retribution for ‘Western’ meddling in his own backyard, Ukraine? Or might he just be a peacemaker in the mold of Nobel laureate President Obama?

Political Observer

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@Silicon Valley Matt

Here is an instructive quote from W. Patrick Lang whose CV appears below the long quote describing inter-agency foreign policy meetings at the White House:

‘-It is increasingly clear that President Obama is disengaged from foreign policy and concentrating on what he sees as his revolutionary domestic agenda.  His victory over Bibi/AIPAC in the Iran nuclear deal fracas is likely to be his last serious foreign policy action.  The foreign policy apparat is running on auto-pilot and is in the hands of incompetents like General Allen.  It is reported to me that every interagency foreign policy meeting in the WH begins with a competitive harangue against Putin and the Russians in what has become a mythic self-generated “struggle” against an imagined rival.  In that  atmosphere the ultimate US reaction to increased Russian activity n Syria can nor be predicted.  pl’

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2015/09/httpwwwbbccomnewsworld-europe-34131573.html

‘Colonel W. Patrick Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces (The Green Berets). He served in the Department of Defense both as a serving officer and then as a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service for many years. He is a highly decorated veteran of several of America’s overseas conflicts including the war in Vietnam. He was trained and educated as a specialist in the Middle East by the U.S. Army and served in that region for many years. He was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. In the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) he was the “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism,” and later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service.” For his service in DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” This is the equivalent of a British knighthood. He is an analyst consultant for many television and radio broadcasts.’

Mr. Lang is in a position to know, if only from hearsay, what takes place in these meetings. Your faith in the president’s canny judgement, indeed his ‘trickiness in a good way’ is just that, a kind of faith, i.e. not based in empiricism but in your exercise of belief. Is that a standard that others might exercise with equal results? Neo-Cons, R2P’rs?

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

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

Yesterday, September 29,2015 I watched Vijay Prashad on Democracy Now:

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/9/29/obama_putin_spar_at_un_will

I then read Mr. Stephens essay:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2a6aa668-5d1d-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz3n8SVQctf

On the very questions elucidated by Mr. Prashad, Mr. Stephens not only agrees but the commonalities are quite striking. Except for the fact that Mr. Prashad argues that the US policy of Regime Change and it’s role in creating, for Europe, an unprecedented Refugee Crisis, by means of a policy that has precipitated that crisis: Mr. Stephens studiously avoids this as part of an ideological perspective/fixation: But judge for yourself, the evidence is available. Prashad also considers the vexing question of European provincialism as indicative of a political/moral myopia: a question that is not simply beyond ideological consideration, but beyond the ken of Mr. Stephens.

Then read Paul Craig Roberts essay here:

Obama Deifies American Hegemony — Paul Craig Roberts

Mr. Roberts covers the same territory as Prashad and Stephens, yet he comes from a completely different perspective and manages in his engaged and animated style to broaden the debate to the pernicious character of American Exceptionalism.

Political Observer

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For some revelatory background on Ms. Slaughter as Foreign Policy expert and Public Intellectual start here with Steve Breyman’s essay on Ms. Slaughter:

https://www.nytexaminer.com/2014/05/the-aptly-named-anne-marie-slaughter/

After her catastrophic Foreign Policy interventions, she now turns her attention to the conundrums of being a woman in the work force, and the fact that life is full of competing ‘goods’. What follows is Ms. Jacobs chattering to an elite readership of the FT. One questions occurs: what women or man wants to spend 60,70,80 hours a week working, as the in order too of finding fulfillment in corporate America, to the exclusion of all that might make a life possibly worth living?

All this placed under the rhetorical frame pioneered by ‘Lean In’ corporate apologist Sheryl Sandberg. Not much here, except the possibility for some breakfast table conversation with one’s spouse, or more likely a solitary cup of coffee at Starbucks, and some time on your tablet: checking your e mail, and the happy discovery that you, some how, are a full 20 minutes early today. And have time to devote to this essay, that somehow has intuited your juggling act of work,family and the ‘search for fulfillment’, before that early meeting taking place just 5 minutes away. It is almost as rewarding as the few minutes you spend in the bathroom with that 2 year old copy of People Magazine!

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a5a0fe24-6298-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz3n8SVQctf

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