StephenKMackSD's Blog

My two comments to this Telegraph news story:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11490893/ECB-hits-out-at-Greek-blackmail-claims-as-Merkel-holds-steady-in-bail-out-demands.html#comment-1925048816

Comment number one:

The Germans were bailed out four time in the 20th Century: 1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953! Given that reality reported here in the ultra respectable and ultra conservative Financial Times:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0…
What must we as ordinary folk make of the Greek claim of War Reparations? The negotiations were handled by the Victors,the US and it’s allies in their best interests, not in the interest of the Greek people. With the Soviet threat as a political reality, that made a quick and painless resolution of those War Reparations, for the US and her allies, a low, if not to speak of a relatively unimportant matter, to be arrived at and then forgotten.So the Greeks in power at the time accepted the crumbs the Allies granted to them, but some will never forget this whole sordid affair, and as such the Greeks are loath to forgive the penny pinching Germans as masters of the EU.
StephenKMackSD

Comment number two, a reply to Jonathan Tokeley:

So the War Reparations were the ransom the Greeks paid for being rescued from a Soviet Coup? That is your ‘argument’?
For the very complex history of the Greek Civil War see this Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G…
And what must a reader make of this:
‘The insurgents were demoralized by the bitter split between the USSR’s Joseph Stalin (who wanted the war ended) and Yugoslavia’s Tito (who wanted it to continue).[13] In June 1948, the Soviet Union and its satellites broke off relations with President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia. In one of the meetings held in Kremlin with Yugoslav representatives, during the Soviet-Yugoslav crisis,[57]
Joseph Stalin stated his unqualified opposition to the “Greek
uprising”. Stalin explained to the Yugoslav delegation that the
situation in Greece has always been different from the one in
Yugoslavia, because the US and Britain would “never permit [Greece] to
break off their lines of communication in the Mediterranean.” (Stalin
used the word svernut, Russian for “fold up”, to express what the Greek Communists should do.)’
In this excerpt Tito looks like the ‘bad guy’ and Stalin looks like the political realist.
StephenKMackSD

The champagne corks are popping in the fortresses of Neo-Liberalism, or have I overstated the case? The Mighty Piketty has been brought low by a mere graduate student! Where else but at the Financial Times or The Economist would this rate such a celebratory essay by Mr. Sandbu or his political clone? Note the rhetorical frame: Free Lunch!

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is and will remain the urtext! The point of Piketty’s book, his theorizing, his polemic was to inspire debate and it has fulfilled it’s author’s civic ambition. Yes, his civic ambition: how could I make such a claim in the face of the Neo-Liberalism’s corrosive economic/political ascendency?

Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/bbf09ba8-cd51-11e4-9144-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Uvo4Rghs

As the Neo-Liberal paradigm continues to flounder, even collapse, engulfing the E.U. with it, it is vital that we not forget the question of Germany’s war time reparations debt to Greece, as much as the Economist would like to trivialize it:while not perceiving the fact that the victors set the whole standard of that repayment, not in the interests of Greece but in their own parochial political interests. Add to that the fact that Germany was rescued from it’s own bad economic decisions four times in the 20th Century,1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953. See Gillian Tett’s January 15,2015 essay titled ‘The debt of history’ on a speech by Benjamin Friedman on that vexing question at The Financial Times, The Economist’s sister publication:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Uvo4Rghs
That should have laid to rest the manufactured political melodrama of the Virtuous North vs the profligate South. But still The Economist trades on that shopworn, not to speak of bankrupt dramaturgy, as it’s rhetorical frame!
Allied to that is the usual fixation of the ‘Left’ as the looming threat, the Sword of Damocles, to adhere to the melodramatic frame. Although, should we be surprised that in the face of a collapsing Neo-Liberalism that the rise of both the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ was a political inevitability? But as intransigent Capitalist apologists, The Economist writers can’t resist exercising their idée fixe, their political obsession.

Almost Marx

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21646782-greeces-leaders-look-poor-match-challenges-facing-country-bumbling-toward-disaster

One simply has to marvel at Mr. O’Hanlon’s exercise in hagiography and apologetics. It reminds me of the late Joe Alsop, and his long line of political enthusiasms. See Edwin Yoder’s Joe Alsop’s Cold War and the gossip fest disguised as social history, The Gerogetown Set by Gregg Herken, for a full exposition of those enthusiasms and their exorbitant costs.
One is tempted to say that the new world of Think Tanks has spawned Joe Alsops by the score, careerists, self-promoters more than willing to do the political spade work necessary to manufacture the new heroes, not to speak of their care and maintenance, in the Age of the Internet.
One is also reminded of the Bundy brothers chronicled in The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms  by Kai Bird as the policy experts that helped to usher in one of Mr. Alsop’s final political enthusiasms, the Vietnam War.

In that vein this paragraph shouldn’t surprise as an extended apologetic for the Iraq War and it’s political/military enactors :

To be sure, Petraeus didn’t do it alone—and he was always quick to share the credit. Among the people he raved about most, when we used to go for runs or when various think tanks like mine would host him for discussions about the war on his visits home in 2007-2008, were General Stanley McChrystal, who ramped up American special operations orders of magnitude above where it had been before; HR McMaster, then a relatively junior officer among the first to make proper counterinsurgency tactics work in Iraq even before the surge; Seth Moulton and Ann Gildroy Fox, young Marine Corps reservists who tried to catalyze a Shia awakening of sorts in eastern Iraq (Moulton is now a Congressman from Massachusetts); General Ray Odierno and General Lloyd Austin, who directed the surge at the operational level; General Jim Dubik and General Marty Dempsey, who ran the training programs for Iraqi forces in those crucial times; General John Allen, who among other Marine Corps leaders was crucial in nurturing the Sunni awakening process in al-Anbar province; and Petraeus’s main civilian counterpart, Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

This dream team refashioned the Iraqi Security Forces and their leadership, then worked with them to bring down violence rates in Iraq an incredible 90 percent and give Iraqi leaders a chance to turn their country around. That change, tragically, was largely squandered in ensuing years, but Petraeus and Crocker et al gave them the chance. On balance, this was arguably the greatest military comeback in American history, after four successive years of losing the war.

Following this is an assurance from Mr. O’ Hanlon of the integrity,veracity and trustworthiness of the Patraeus/Broadwell alliance: This in in the face of the charge of leaking top secret information, for which others have served jail time. Forty thousand dollars and two years probation were the lot of Mr. O’Hanlon’s friend. Such is the political/legal fate of a Hero and National Treasure as narrated by his friend and political defender, who, we are assured , has not made his last contribution to the flourishing of The American Empire.

Political Skeptic

Mr. Gass, in his essay misses the point of the incident: the Republican Party in it’s post 9-11 phase and it’s two losses to Obama, has lapsed into a consistent political hysteria mongering. Yet it is also consistent with the post WWII politics of the Nixon/Mundt/McCarthy/McCarren political cabal, and the notion of ‘a generation of treason’ in the Post-War, post New Deal era of American life.
Senator Cruz’s politics are shot through with political/ethical paranoia and he is the paradigmatic politician, the vanguard of that modern Republican Party. That is a truly frightening political reality to confront, so Mr. Gass opts to use his comment as an ineffective political analgesic.

Political Cynic

Call Mr. Luce a dramaturge that can’t resist the temptation of producing melodrama instead of it’s more virtuous sibling. The first paragraph of his essay posits the notions of: The multilateral Iran negotiations as being Obama’s biggest foreign policy gamble, the president ignores domestic opposition, read the notorious Cotton letter signed by 47 Republican Senators, allied to near unanimous Middle East dissent, this locution a stand in for Israel and it’s domestic political allies, AIPAC etc. The first paragraph leads to the second that includes these gems, I paraphrase: the political notion that President Bush tried to impose ‘democracy’ at the point of a gun, instead of another American colony/outpost  and that President Obama is his sub rosa ally. The Luce political schizophrenia is on full display, as the remainder of the essay is a grudging recognition of  President Obama’s political wisdom, although Mr. Luce makes his judgement out of an all pervasive negativity.

Political Realist

It’s hard to be patient with David Brooks! He never tires of excising his felt prerogatives as Platonic Guardian, combined with his self-awarded status as Old Testament Prophet and the self-appointed inheritor of the mantle of Walter Lippmann. The pretension, not to  speak of egotism, is hard to contemplate, except that we as readers are fully cognizant that he was mentored by William F. Buckley Jr.!
It’s hard to reply to his ersatz philosophizing, his tired carping moralizing and effort to impart political wisdom, refracted through a vocabulary of a vulgarized Sociology, which adds a certain gloss to his public musings, at least to some of his readers.
Look at the Conservatives at the New York Times: Mr. Brooks, Ultramontane Catholic Ross Douthat, who also reviews movies for National Review, and the newest addition,at least to me, Arthur C. Brooks of The American Enterprise Institute. In their various essay they seem to echo each other in subject and tone, while writing on diverse topics. Moral decline, The decline of the American Family, Mr. Douthat’s twin obsessions, out of wed-lock births and the declining birthrate as a whole, the decline of American power, and endless Neo-Liberal apologetics. Add to this a continuous stream of a more sophisticated iteration of Republican Party propaganda.

Political Skeptic

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/for-david-brooks-the-rich-are-people-the-poor-are-numbers-20150311?utm_source=newsletter&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=031215_16&utm_medium=email&ea=c3RlcGhlbmttYWNrQGdtYWlsLmNvbQ==

As reported in these pages on January 16, 2015 by Ms. Tett on an after-dinner address by Benjamin Friedman:

Ms. Tett’s essay:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3UDJlb8Se

The PDF of Prof. Friedman’s remarks:

Click to access friedman.pdf

The Germans are wont to forget their own troubled history of debt forgiveness,1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953. Perhaps the Germans are as equally forgetful of their war reparations debt to the Greek nation? Mr Tsipras is just as ardent to remind the Germans, that it’s status as Economic Powerhouse of Europe was built on a self-serving act of historical amnesia? Playing Politics is not just for the Economic victors of Neo-Liberalism, but for all those with sufficient historical memory  and the will to assert that memory at the propitious moment.

Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8c9db3c6-c8d4-11e4-bc64-00144feab7de.html#axzz3UDJlb8Se

The President may enter into treaties, the advise and consent occurs after the fact of the negotiation, not before!
The proper place for the Cotton letter was, as others have pointed out in this ongoing debate, the Wall Street Journal or another such conservative publication: not as a direct communication to one of the parties of that negotiation, that can be characterized as the American antagonist. The political intent of the Cotton missive was not just to embarrass, but to hold the President up to international ridicule,with the intent to engage in sedition of a presidential prerogative, pure and simple. The Republican Party is in the thrall of a practice of a destructive political nihilism, and Cotton and his Neo-Con mentors, like William Kristol, have overstepped the bounds of the idea and practice of the ‘loyal opposition’, into the territory of the friend/enemy distinction that animated the political thought of Carl Schmitt!

StephenKMackSD

http://www.economist.com/node/21646189/comments#comments

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has some compelling observations to make on Sen. Cotton’s letter:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/03/12/world/middleeast/ap-ml-iran-us-congress.html?_r=0

Some selected quotes:

‘Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called the letter a sign of “the collapse of political ethics and the U.S. system’s internal disintegration,” according to the official IRNA news agency.’
‘Khamenei said states typically remain loyal to their commitments even if governments change, ” but American senators officially announced the commitment will be null and void after this government leaves office. Isn’t this the ultimate degree of the collapse of political ethics and the U.S. system’s internal disintegration?” ‘
‘Khamenei said that whenever the talks approach a deadline, “the tone of the other party, particularly the Americans, becomes harsher, harder and more violent. This is part of their tricks and deceits.” ‘

And this little gem:

‘The supreme leader said a “Zionist clown” had delivered a speech in Washington, an apparent reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress earlier this month, in which he argued against the emerging agreement.’

The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s telling powers of  observation, combined with a practiced polemical brio, make his comments of much more interest than this utterly bland Economist essay, that resembles a disguised apologetics for the nihilist Republican’s subversion of the President’s Constitutional prerogatives!
Political Skeptic

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21646189-republican-letter-makes-diplomacy-harder-dear-ayatollah