StephenKMackSD's Blog

The Neo-Liberal Consensus is failed, no matter the pronouncements coming from The Economist or The Financial Times! These declarations about the ‘Hard Left’,’Loony Left’ and other such locutions are the rhetorical cover adopted to mask that failure.

Ignoring the rise of both Right and Left in response to the Depression of 2008 is key to the a-historical approach to this  seemingly endless Political Crisis: The why of it, this crisis is   endemic, remains outside the ken of The Economist editorlists. The ‘Wisdom of the Market’ the touchstone of Hayek’s economic epistemology is the purest of theologies: ‘Markets’ are subject to the vicissitudes of human emotion or ‘Animal Spirits’! Not subject to some posited ersatz Rationalism: Markets are about the herd instinct, the most dangerous of human frailties.

An historically based appraisal of the rise of both the ‘Left’ and the ‘Right’ in response to  that failed Neo-Liberal paradigm might make this situation comprehensible. That 2008 Depression and it’s successor Austerity, presented as necessary ‘strong medicine’ in response to the excesses of that Market. And the present economic doldrums, allied to the economic stratification under the rubric of ‘Inequality’,  make both the rise of the ‘Left’ and the ‘Right’ subject to a reasoned analysis. Instead what we get from The Economist, and it’s writers, is a repetition of usual Anti-Left hysterics framed in the most self-serving melodramatic terms as demonstrative of political irrationality. Would that The Economist writers might apply the same standard used to vilify Mr. Corbyn to the economic actors in the Market, who were authors of that 2008 Depression, with the aid and comfort provided by an utterly corrupt political class- but now I’ve strayed into a Utopian reverie not unlike the one that The Economist editorial writers bask.

Political Reporter

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21661662-victory-hard-left-candidate-would-be-bad-labourbut-also-tories

Never let it be said that the Oxbridgers, at the Economist, ever let their elite educations go the waste. As in the title of this essay, a literary reference for only the most sophisticated reader to decipher.
While I though Mr.Jeremy Warner’s essay at The Telegraph titled ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to turn Britain into Zimbabwe ‘People’s QE’ has been embraced by the Labour leadership contender, but it would lead us to calamity’ was a kind of politically desperate hyperbole:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/11814767/Jeremy-Corbyns-plan-to-turn-Britain-into-Zimbabwe.html
I come to The Economist, as regular reader, to find the same brand of hyperbole in more temperate, muted language, but none the less in thrall to Neo-Liberal apologetics, that has afflicted the financial press since the Depression of 2008. While ignoring the Keynesianism adopted to staunch the economic hemorrhaging.
Nor do we read from this collection of Cotton Mathers anything but the ‘spectral evidence’ that New Labour’s collection of Imaginary Centrist supply:Blair and the rest. Call it the looming disaster of Corbyn!
What could have possibly led to the rise of Corbyn, Podemos,Syriza,Sen. Sanders or even The Tea Party,Mr. Farage,Ms.Marine Le Pen etc?  That is the unexplored question of this protracted exercise in Corbyn Hysterics: avoid at all costs a discussion of the dismal failure of the Neo-Liberal idea and practice, the collapse of Free Market Utopianism brought forth inconvenient political monsters, to paraphrase Goya.

Almost Marx

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21661662-victory-hard-left-candidate-would-be-bad-labourbut-also-tories

Tundan Sabah’s wonderfully pungent comment echoes some, but not all of my thoughts, regarding these ‘revelations’. His deliciously contemptuous polemic helped me to clarify my own thoughts, the measure of writing at it’s best.   The raw data collected by MI5 is enough to convict the man in 2015, yet not enough to be arrested and put on trial for treason at the time? We now have the proof? That raw data is just that, no more no less. But what a perfect opportunity to air the perpetual grievances that the Financial Times holds for any political manifestation of the ‘Left’. That ‘Left’ is prima facie guilty of subversion/treason, of the deeply held beliefs of the defenders of the predations of Capital and it’s actors.Rational analysis gives way to the usual politically calculated hysterics.

For those who are interested John Banville in his novel The Untouchable has taken as his starting point Anthony Blunt and the whole circle around him. The Cambridge Five and even that Establishment stalwart Graham Greene appears, in the most unappealing literary guise. Banville’s novel provides the insights that I wrote about earlier in my comment.

The question remains, what about the double life of the closeted homosexual have to do with the double life of the spy? Was that double life just a habit of being, that dovetailed so well with the life of the spy? As a kind of nihilist/romantic delusion? And did the animus for the heterosexual establishment play a part in the emotional makeup of these spies? Cedric Belfrage wasn’t gay, but the essay offers an opportunity to reflect, even in a small way, on the larger picture of Britain in the thirties, and almost to the present moment of The New Cold War.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c3c3bf66-4751-11e5-af2f-4d6e0e5eda22.html#axzz3jRy9p98r

If Trump is the culmination of Republican Party mendacity: From Goldwater, the Dixiecrat mass migration in 1964 and 1965, to the New Nixon of 68, The Southern Strategy that even pitchman Reagan embraced at the Neshoba County Fair in 1980, to Willy Horton of Lee Atwater & Bush I or political low life Karl Rove of Bush II. Mr. Huckabee is the combination of the Theocrat & the No-Nothing. He is an ally of Franklin Graham, a most notorious bigot . It runs in the family, recall Billy and Dick on the notorious Jews of Hollywood?
Where are the Eisenhower Republicans? The Republicans are committing political suicide before our eyes, with Trump leading the march off the cliff, as an exercise of pathological ego and Mussolini like strutting!
We are in trouble, the sane conservatives, who practiced and believed in governance, like the last of his breed Richard Lugar, was unceremoniously purged from the Party. You don’t even have to believe in Lugar’s political positions, he practiced ‘the art of the possible’ in good faith, not the political nihilism as practiced by the McConnell/Boehner duo!

Political Observer

Mr. Clive Crook left The Financial Times for Bloomberg View, both house organs of Capitalist Apologetics. His regular readers won’t be disappointed in his latest essay at Bloomberg titled ‘Are You Rich? No Need to Apologize‘ . It takes the form of dressing down one Mr. Anand Giridharadas, a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, for having the temerity to address a pressing question, about the whole endeavor, of the ‘Aspen Consensus’:

The Aspen Consensus, I believe, tries to market the idea of generosity as a substitute for the idea of justice. It says: make money in all the usual ways, and then give some back through a foundation, or factor in social impact, or add a second or third bottom line to your analysis, or give a left sock to the poor for every right sock you sell.

The Aspen Consensus says, “Do more good” — not “Do less harm.”

The Crook Rule is never bite the hand that feeds you, with the help of ‘Socialists’ as the root cause of the problem. Think of Occupy Wall Street and the candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders and other manifestation of dissatisfaction with Capitalism, as practiced in the watershed of the utter failure of it’s Neo-Liberal iteration.

I’ve always thought of Aspen as the playground of respectable bourgeois chatterers like David Brooks and Arianna Huffington, among other intellectual personalities who are inductees into the pantheon of American Fraudulence.  But Mr. Anand Giridharadas had the independence of mind to question the whole institutional endeavor of Aspen, or at least something resembling it. With the proviso that anyone delivering a Ted Talk, or writing for the New York Times is completely house trained!

In his desperation Mr. Crook resorts to my favorite Panglossian Steven Pinker and his ‘Better Angels of Our Nature’:

Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature” shows that capitalism and trade helped to end humankind’s saga of perpetual war.

“Intellectual elites,” Pinker says, “have always felt superior to businesspeople, and it doesn’t occur to them to credit mere merchants with something as noble as peace.” Giridharadas says, as though it’s self-evident: “We know that enlightened capital didn’t get rid of the slave trade.” Actually, I think you could argue that it did — but even if that’s going too far, advances in social justice were enabled by rising prosperity, and rising prosperity was the product of capitalist development.

Then there is this puzzling rhetorical frame for the dissidence of Mr. Giridharadas, perhaps a reference to his place of residence? A celebrated borough of New York City.

All I’m claiming is that the presumption of capitalist immorality — that set of shared and largely unexamined assumptions we’ll call the Brooklyn Consensus — is lazy.

Political Reporter

Leadership is to politics what productivity is to economics: not quite the only thing that matters but almost. A party with a good frontman or woman can afford to get everything else wrong, and probably will not. Most other variables — policy, strategy, organisation — flow from the leader.

It is anti-intellectual to see politics like this. We are meant to read impersonal forces and historic inevitability into every election result; the current self-mutilation of Britain’s Labour party is supposedly an epiphenomenon of a pan-European crisis of the left.

The first two paragraphs are jaw dropping, as Mr. Ganesh is either channeling Hegel or extemporizing on some theme of Conservatism, in a heightened manic state: a deadline looms and too much coffee? The whole essay moves at the speed of a runaway train, whose engineer has suffered an aneurism in situ, and is slumped over the controls pushing the throttle to the maximum. The Perils of Pauline? The essay also has something of the serio-comic about it: the comedies of Max Sennett? In addition, the first two paragraphs are larded with political/intellectual cliches, recited as if they were received wisdom instead of a recitation of the prosaic.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0884c558-44ca-11e5-b3b2-1672f710807b.html#axzz3jBRHY3W6

Isn’t the very idea of the  writer, who has been very successful, yoked to the exercise of egotism? What is the driving force that leads anyone to be a writer? The thought/practice that one has something important to say, that should be paid attention to. Even we who simply post comments, to essays like this, think we have something worth reading, even though our egotism hasn’t reached the domain of self-regard of Mr. Raphael.
Mr. Raphael is not just a fiction writer but his essays/reviews appear in the most prestigious literary review in English, The Times Literary Supplement. And for very good reason: his intelligence and breadth of learning put him in the first rank of writers.
The memoir is the perfect place to exercise your demons, if the writer engages in restraint leavened by wit and an engaging style. Count your blessings this isn’t television or the movies: you actually have to use your perception skill as reader to bring alive what is printed on the page. It is an active engagement instead of a passive absorption of images and sound. That’s why movies and television are such useful, effective propaganda instruments.

American Litterateur

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/13/going-up-to-cambridge-and-beyond-memoir-frederic-raphael-review?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Never fear it is perpetually 1952 at The Beast! And the political weather is always turbulent. There is my consistent  favorite, Mr. Weiss, to do the heavy lifting, handling the weighty matter of Robert Conquest’s obituary, stoking the New Cold War fires with Old Cold War Nostalgia, it was a bravura performance. But Mr. Nimmo has the pedestrian task of a bit of bashing both of Corbyn and Putin. Tony Blair’s political hysterics at the Guardian and the unstinting political screeching at The Financial Times hasn’t phased Mr. Nemmo, as the front rank of Corbyn as Satan propganda.

The fact that Putin is a religious and political conservative doesn’t interfere with the main thesis of the essay that RT is the font of Corbyn Apologetics. Putin is in editorial control of RT, recall it is 1952, and dictators keep their media outlets under strict ideological control. What might this unregenerate Leftist have in common with the very Conservative Mr. Putin? To drive a political wedge in Britain as part of his Master Plan to defeat ‘Western Hegemony’? We are deep in McCarthy/Nixon territory.

Given this, how does one explain the Judith Miller Scooter Libby alliance? to bring the discussion back to American ground. The New York Times is without doubt an outlet for American propaganda, and this is simply one instance of that glaring reality.But again, we are anchored in 1952, at the height of The Cold War and those kinds of questions constitute an ideological deviation that will be severely punished. Most likely in the pages of The Daily Beast, with Mr. Nimmo acting as inquisitor, recall that McCarthy/Nixon tradition.

Political Observer

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/17/how-putin-is-meddling-in-england-s-elections.html

The obituary of Mr. Conquest is the perfect opportunity for Old Cold War Nostalgia that dovetails quite nicely with the New Cold War and Putin as the New Stalin! No surprise here! The crimes of Stalin and his western apologists on the Left are well documented, yet that self-imposed ideologically driven blindness wasn’t really broken until the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the West in 1973. The Nouveaux Philosophes of Bernard-Henri Levy and his Barbarism with a Human Face are the political issues of that publication. The Left can’t be absolved of that willful ignorance fueled by ideological lock step. But even the Neo-Cons like Irving Kristol were guilty of that same crime, as were many others, in their radical youth.
On the question of literary criticism, one wonders where Mr. Conquest was, when one of the greatest practitioners of that art was V.S. Pritchett, or were his politics of the wrong school? His Complete Collected Essays prove his staying power as critic and stylist.
Mr. Michael Weiss attempted an obituary at The Daily Beast, that didn’t quite have the polish and depth that this essay demonstrates: Oxbridgers demonstrate that polish and literary sophistication, with a kind of confident ease, that only money and status can buy!
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/06/robert-conquest-the-man…

American Littérateur

The Neo-Liberal Consensus is not just fissuring before our eyes, due to it’s abject failure to deliver on it’s ersatz utopianism, based on the fiction of the self-correcting Market and other self-serving fictions: those fictions can no longer hold, in the face of the seventh year of the economic doldrums, of it’s watershed.  First we had the essay by Tony Blair full of the same panic and hysterics, heavily garnished with self-congratulation of the political adept,a Neo-Thatcherite, with this surprising claim :

We forced change on the Tories.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/12/even-if-hate-me-dont-take-labour-over-cliff-edge-tony-blair

Compare Mr. Blair’s assertion to a claim made by  Mrs. Thatcher:

‘“Our greatest achievement was Tony Blair. We forced our opponents to change.”

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/owen-jones-right-are-mocking-jeremy-corbyn-because-secretly-they-fear-him

And now we have Mr. Baldwin in full panic mode, as the thoroughly colonized New Labor is presented as a Centrist alternative to the ‘Radical Leftists’ like Mr. Corbyn. The proclamation: we  are the sane ones, the electable ones, in answer to the ‘Populism’ of Mr. Farage and to look outside our own political parochialism, for a moment to Europe , Syriza Podemos and their ally the radical,unelectable political nihilist Mr. Corbyn.

As he defies decades of history — from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the rise of a global economy and the financial crash — Mr Corbyn has as much in common with the shallow populism of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump as he does with Syriza and Podemos. But in one regard the Corbyn campaign has been more adept and modern than that of any recent Labour politician: he seems genuinely to want people to engage with politics again.

In the thrall of his panic Mr. Baldwin repeats the foreshortened Neo-Liberal rationalist history of the post-war, yet eliding from his potted history the total abject failure of the Neo-Liberal theory and practice of ‘government’ -recall the Reagan’s notorious catch-phrase of ‘government is the problem’? Also recall Mrs. Thatcher’s penchant for passing out copies of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/24639070-41cc-11e5-b98b-87c7270955cf.html#ft-article-comments