StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2015/03/10-congress-letter-iran-nuclear-deal

Let some fresh air into the Brookings Vatican, the stale ‘leadership’ @StrobeTalbott as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith demonstrates the fact that this Old Cold Warrior, and his epigones like @MaloneySuzanne are educated/indoctrinated and certified by each other to parrot to ever-changing Party Line: the current Political Theology being expressed in the last paragraph of Ms. Maloney’s doctrinaire recitation, couched in speculation, which in sum is a defense of the Cotton letter and it’s signatories :

‘Ultimately, the loss of the good opinion of a few Democrats is a small price to pay if the letter hits its real target. The most reliable opponent of a nuclear deal resides in Tehran, and it is entirely possible that the Republican letter has reinforced his aversion to compromise. Washington’s pundits may jeer, but I worry that Senator Cotton & co. may yet have the last laugh.’

‘…the loss of the good opinion of a few Democrats…’ tips Ms. Maloney’s hand!
For an alternative see Philip Weiss’ essay here for a more plausible speculation of the origin of the Cotton Letter:

Senator who spearheaded letter to Iran got $1 million from Kristol’s ‘Emergency C’tee for Israel’

‘I don’t know who wrote the letter, but I can tell you whose fingerprints are on it: the only folks who are supporting it publicly, the hard-right Israel lobby. Even as Cotton himself splutters on national television, rightwing lobby groups are the main voices out there defending the letter.
Like Bill Kristol of the Emergency Committee for Israel:
Cotton open letter: “Just so you know, we’re a constitutional democracy. Congress (or next president) has a say.” Dem response: Hysteria.
J Street’s Dylan Williams fingers Bill Kristol for writing the letter:
Who gave @SenTomCotton & others the awful idea for the Iran letter? Seems like Sarah Palin-for-VP-level bad advice doesn’t it @BillKristol ?
There’s a reason for Williams’s suspicion. Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel gave Tom Cotton nearly $1 million in his race for the Senate just five months ago, Eli Clifton reported. “Cotton received $960,250 in supportive campaign advertising in the last month.” (Thanks to Kay24 in comments).

Political Skeptic

Here is the law very clearly stated and the link:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/953

‘Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both. This section shall not abridge the right of a citizen to apply, himself or his agent, to any foreign government or the agents thereof for redress of any injury which he may have sustained from such government or any of its agents or subjects.’

Sen. Cotton and his senatorial allies have not just breached a tradition but have broken the law! The law states it unambiguously, except for the exceptionalist claim that is the genesis of this letter! The desperation of the Nihilist Republicans, not content with the making Foreign Policy by inviting a head of state, Mr. Netanyahu, to address a  joint session of Congress , but now seek to subvert the power of the President of the United States to make treaties with other nations! Lawless political nihilism is the order of the day in this once Republic!

StephenKMackSD

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/aca7c0d0-c6a4-11e4-a13d-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Tpp8Y1TZ

Austerity and structural reform are the one true way to salvation, they insist. As Merkel put it in 2013: “What we have done, everyone else can do.”

Even with Mr. Ash’s three provisos this is still Neo-Liberalism. Note the idea of ‘structural reform’ as indicative of that Neo-Liberalism at it’s most formulaic?
But recall, for all the Teutonic self-congratulation and or to call it at it’s most vulgar, bootstrapping of Ms. Merkel, that Germany was bailed out in 1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953. See the essay by Gillian Tett at the Financial Times of January 16, 2015:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Tpp8Y1TZ
A report on an address by Benjamin M. Friedman titled A Predictable Pathology.The PDF is here:

Click to access friedman.pdf

Mr. Ash is an historian, and yet such a potent piece of evidence is excluded from the melodramatic story of the destiny of Europe and it’s self-creation, the monetary union. And that it should come from the house organ of Capitalist Apologetics is surprising, to say the least.
From my perspective, it will take two generations to fully purge the Neo-Liberal Collective’s political/ethical delusion from what remains of our civic life and institutions, and most importantly from our very process of thought!

Almost Marx

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/08/europe-monetary-union-fiscal-political-anger-south

America’s favorite Straussian, Mr. Fukuyama, can be depended upon to hit the high spots of the perennial Political Moralizing that infects the hectoring rhetoric of the Right. His concern for the ‘poor’ the ‘underclass’ finds the perfect opportunity, to demonstrate his status as a Big Thinker with a wide ranging concern for the whole of the American Community. But compare this book review with this essay from the American Interest of December 2013 portentously titled the Decay of American Political Institutions. The point of this essay is an all out attack on the melorist politics of the 20th Century, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt:

The Decay of American Political Institutions

Be patient with Mr. Fukuyama’s verbosity, his status as a Big Thinker renders the virtues of brevity and concision null. A reader might just ruminate on the question: of what relevance is the Straussian imperative of esoteric reading of texts philosophical and otherwise? What weight should we, might we, attach to this essay written for the popular press?

Political Skeptic

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6b7cd1f0-c1c1-11e4-bd24-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Tcw9ZBIJ

guest-llanmjn,
Thank you for your comment.
The very condition of ‘decline’ is an indictment of the Neo-Liberal model, or should I say the perception of ‘decline’. The very real question is this: where are the jobs that can help the average working family to buy a house,raise and educate their children and save for retirement? Poorly paying Service Sector jobs, Wall-Mart being the most ready example of the Neo-Liberal paradigm’s failure.
The War between the failed New Democrats and the nihilist Republicans is another kind of proof of that failure: the founding principle of republicanism was the notion and practice of the cultivation of civic republican virtue. See J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment for a history of that idea/practice and it’s potency from the Greeks through the Italian City States, and the English/British experience to the Founders, to foreshorten it for brevity’s sake.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/1729.html
Neo-Liberalism seeks to and has sought to replace that guiding principle with Market Discipline,Free Market apologetics, the replacement of active citizenship as the bearer of the weight of that civic responsibility, with the notion of entrepreneurship as civic/ethical/political singularity.
See Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste by Philip Mirowski for telling critique of the Neo-Liberal model.
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste
Your first sentence is an assertion without foundation, not to speak of unnecessarily profane! What I attacked was the political cynicism of the New Democrats and the political nihilism of the Republicans: Government is the problem! Should a citizen have anything like faith in the democratic process, much less the good faith of her/his fellow citizens? See Annette Baier’s Postures of the Mind and her essay Secular Faith for an explanation of this civic/ethical necessity.
http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/postures-of-the-mind
I also called into question Mr. Nye’s Political Theology i.e. his belief in the staying power of American hegemony, asserting another belief, that is American Exceptionalism: the notion that the ‘decline’ of American Power is somewhere in the distant future. The assertion is based on what empirical evidence? The myopia, not to speak of willful blindness, to a pernicious institutional sclerosis is the reason I called Mr.Nye’s approach to the question Brezhnevism. But we needn’t look any further that the utter jingoism of American politicians, think tank denizens, and pundits that are seeking to wage war on Putin, Iran and ISIS at the same time, as if our treasuries are endless, and the ultimate betrayal, to offer up our children to Mars!

StephenKMackSD

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21645716-no-other-country-ready-challenge-americas-dominant-global-position-end-not

Is American Power unassailable? Our politics is ruled by two wings of the same Neo-Liberal Party. The Democrats who willfully discarded the tradition of The New Deal for a politics highly tinctured with Reaganism, that made the New Democrats electable in the changed political atmosphere: the vulgarized Free Market Ideology in various iterations. And the Republicans who have sunk themselves in to an unyielding political nihilism, in sum: Government is the problem!
American politicians, both Republican and Democratic, and their apologists in the Press can’t seem to emancipate themselves from their own self-righteous jingoism: the targets for this appetite for war on two fronts: Iran and Russia are two most favored nations for continual demonization and Western provocations. Although the Western Press would deny such a charge, read the pages of this publication as one small sample of such propagandistic skulduggery!
Mr. Nye recites the Political Theology of this historical moment, that is the notion that American Hegemony is an unchanging fact, rather than a closely held belief. Call it by another less flattering name Brezhnevism.

Political Observer

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21645716-no-other-country-ready-challenge-americas-dominant-global-position-end-not

One can only marvel at an utterly obsequious Congress in it’s kowtowing to Mr, Netanyahu. See Daniel Larison’s essay at The American Conservative for a withering evaluation of that herd of independent minds:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-disgraceful-spectacle-in-congress/
The Hill reports that 56 Democratic members of Congress would not attend the Netanyahu address:
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/232160-whip-list-dems-skipping-netanyahu-speech
Of note also is the fact that Israel has in it’s possession between 100 to 200 nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, a fact that Mr. Netanyahu failed to mention is his speech. That fact remains a festering open secret, that makes the supposed or even an actual Iranian nuclear program, seem like a rational response to the perceived threat of nuclear imbalance in the region. But that thought is rendered null by the felt notion that ‘we’, the Israelis, can possess nuclear weapons as the experience of the Holocaust makes us wiser custodians of such a destructive potential. While the ‘they’, the Iranians, take the guise of the Soviets of the Old Cold War, as mad men incapable of rational thought or even the exercise of the barest self-interest.
One could also look at the Republicans and Mr. Netanyahu as in the thrall of their own exercise of political nihilism. The Republicans and their obsession with the political destruction of President Obama and Mr. Netanyahu’s Zionism as the interminable final stage that Hannah Arendt sagely warned against:

Arendt: Born in conflict, Israel will degenerate into Sparta, and American Jews will need to back away

See this wide ranging essay from Counterpunch by Hammad Said for an outline of the Arendt position and much more.

Relevance of Hannah Arendt’s “A Report On The Banality Of Evil” To Gaza

Also see Edward C. Corrigan’s Jewish Critics of Zionism and of Israel’s Treatment of the Palestinians:

Jewish Critics of Zionism and of Israel’s Treatment of the Palestinians

Political Observer

Title Mr. Luce’s essay A Maladroit Apology for Neo-Liberalism with Mayor Emanuel as the main character, seeking to overcome the Neo-Marxist Syriza stand-in Mr Garcia. Some American Political Melodramas have been built on lesser foundations, many of them authored by Financial Times pundits.
Mr. Garcia is here not just a Syriza stand-in: a rabid anti-capitalist, but a creature of the machine politics of the Daily Dynasty and of the utterly corrupt Public Sector Unions (Teachers Unions have met the Mayor’s wrath) allied to that insidious machine. In a less overheated rhetorical key, Mr. Garcia has more in common with New Dealer Elizabeth Warren than with the with the Greek anti-austerity party. Perhaps, Mr. Luce in his role as dramaturge seeks to heighten the dramatic antithesis?
The pressing question: Who will save Chicago? Mr.Luce frames the question with the appropriate foreboding of the perennial idee fixe of Neo-Liberal pundits. Mr. Luce in his political ardor forgets to include among the Mayors supporters the Charter School entrepreneurs whose experiments in privatized ‘public education’ has proven to be a ‘Free Market’ crime spree.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/08/08/how-will-charter-schools-deal-with-their-corruption-scandals/

Charter Schools Gone Wild: Study Finds Widespread Fraud, Mismanagement and Waste

Political Skeptic

Mr.Sergei Guriev presents his case on the Nemtsov murder with a simulacrum of eloquence, but it is easy to see the propaganda triumph of the catechism of the New Cold War in his essay. In the fact that conspiracy theory, as long as it is directed at Putin the Terrible, is not just acceptable but an absolute political/ethical necessity. In no other context would the champion of bourgeois politically respectable punditry, the Financial Times, permit such a breech of it’s own conception of etiquette!

The turning point of this political melodrama was reached after the Ukrainian Coup has so miserably, ignominiously failed: the misbegotten product of American/EU political adventurism, that has proven the Foreign Policy competence of Nuland,Rice and Power to be nonexistent, and by definition President Obama. The billions wasted, the lives lost, mere bagatelles in the pursuit of NATO’s hegemonic encirclement fantasy.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/cdfab7d0-c008-11e4-9708-00144feab7de.html#axzz3T14Sbf6P

Putinology has replaced the Kremlinology of the Old Cold War, and it is just as unreliable: Strobe Talbott at Brookings is an experienced practitioner of those black arts, old and new! This political theology is framed in the shopworn vocabulary of political moralizing. The New Cold War rhetoric is fueled by righteous indignation, allied with jingoist apologetics for the Ukrainian Coup of 2014: Nuland, Pyatt, Rice and Power fueled by billions of tax dollars sponsored/nurtured the uprising and it’s faltering aftermath.With President Obama acting as accessory, before and after the fact.

What does dissident Nemtsov’s assassination have to do with American/EU murderous political adventurism in Ukraine? That is a question the Financial Times will not ask, instead, like a great many respectable Western publications, it will follow the Party Line of Putin as the New Stalin: a monster who only understands the language of violence. World War III  beckons !

Political Skeptic

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/57ef1530-bf41-11e4-99f8-00144feab7de.html#axzz3T5KM6yGK