StephenKMackSD's Blog

The Poles have a history of a pose of independence, this from the Economist of November 30, 2011, with the headline of : ‘Sikorski: hero or traitor? Backwash from Berlin’

What of reaction elsewhere? Readers may be surprised to hear that Poland’s main opposition parties think Mr Sikorski’s stance is tantamount to treason. He faces a no-confidence vote in parliament, and the main opposition leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, wants him brought before the state tribunal (a kind of impeachment) for breaking his constitutional oath: a federal Europe, he argues [link in Polish], would bring Poland back to the colonial status it suffered before 1989. Joachim Brudziński, an MP from Mr Kaczyński’s party, said Mr Sikorski was advocating a “Fourth Reich and German hegemony”.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2011/11/sikorski-hero-or-traitor

Or Mr. Sikorski’s other provocative exercise of political candor, in The Economist of June 23, 2014 titled ‘Sikorski in hot water’:

More illegal recordings are destabilising the Polish government this week. The juiciest revelation so far is that the foreign minister, Radek Sikorski  said in January that he viewed Poland’s alliance with America as “worthless”.

Mr Sikorski’s comments were made in a dinner conversation with the former finance minister, Jacek Rostowski, which was illegally recorded and printed in Wprost, a Polish news weekly. During the often vulgar conversation, Mr Sikorski said the alliance with Washington “is complete bullshit. We’ll get into a conflict with the Germans and the Russians and we’ll think that everything is super because we gave the Americans a blowjob. Losers. Complete losers.”

http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2014/06/polish-politics-0

Or further news on political fate of Mr. and Mrs. Sikorski, titled ‘Radexit and Appoplexit – Radoslaw Sikorski and Anne Applebaum Are Booted out of Poland’:

http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/radexit-and-appoplexit-radoslaw-sikorski-and-anne-applebaum-are-booted-out-poland/ri8887

Those Poles can be prickley political allies, but some of them are like Andrzej Duda firm believers in The New Cold War and the myth of Russian revanchism: the political strategy and Party Line  as exercised in Ukraine by American political operatives like Victoria Nuland and Amb. Pyatt allied with NGO’s like The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe etc., eliding from the political conversation the participation of Right Sector and Svoboda as partners in the Coup.

In deference to American power it is essential that Mr. Duda remind the US that it is advisable that a ‘buffer state’ be  awarded due deference, while denying it’s status as a ‘buffer state’ to the American hegemon. The whole question is about saving face and obtaining that expanded American base.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d6749156-410e-11e5-b98b-87c7270955cf.html#axzz3iim1b9h4

Political Reporter

Where else but breitbart.com, named after the craven political opportunist Andrew, comes this story, in all it’s white hysterical glory, that the historical inevitability of the revival of The Black Panther Party has happened! The model offered by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale was politically fated, to engage in political metaphysics. The New American Civil War has been quietly raging for some time, but the fact of armed black women and men, fed up with eating shit from racist police marks a new stage in that Civil War.

http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2015/08/12/armed-black-panthers-march-in-waller-count-texas-oink-oink-bang-bang/

The picture of those gun toting ‘conservatives’, white people meeting an army of angry,armed black folks appeals to the Neo-Confederate/Originalist wet dream of a Race War. Who will be their Robert E. Lee? Scalia’s already borderline blood pressure must have risen appreciably- one can only imagine the breakfast table histrionics!

Political Observer

I have reached the point of complete exasperation with the self-proclaimed technocrats, the ones that Lippmann celebrated as the guardians against too much democracy, who have been not just wrong, but catastrophically wrong, on almost every ‘policy question’ since 2000 or even before, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and the collection of utter failures in between. Or on the question of our benighted ‘ally’ Israel! The jackbooted thug Netanyahu pronounces himself the spokesman for world Jewry. How credible is that? Think of that Paris synagogue where the congregation spontaneously sang La Marseillaise in answer to his assertion that Israel was the only safe place for Jews.   And the burning question as to who is an Anti-Semite: those who don’t kowtow to this current political orthodoxy are guilty, prima facie!
One is reminded of the gossipy yet insightful histories that are collected in The Georgetown Set, and other books like Joe Alsop’s Cold War, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, The Color of Truth. Of Perry Anderson’s American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers in the New Left Review of September/October 2013 and of the Fall 2013 issue of  Cold War Studies forum on George F. Kennan and the questions that the John Gaddis biography raised.
Do not forgive me for lashing out at your patent moral/ethical bankruptcy, your continuing exercise of bad judgement  and self-aggrandizing self-exculpatory chatter of ‘now I have it right’! Too little too late! You are deserving of not just my paltry exercise of scorn, but of closing up shop as reliable commentators on anything other than the weather, and the condition of your outsize egos!

StephenKMackSD

Ms. Tett begins her review of PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future, by Paul Mason with some interesting observations on Wikipedia, but it isn’t long before the usual Financial Times’ Anti-Left Hysterics becomes primary, not anything like a surprise. But notice that the Financial Times was/is a defender of Neo-Liberal Utopianism, while Ms Tett exercises the right to criticize the Left Utopianism of Mr. Mason, in the unflattering light of rhetorical shrillness, among other crimes of literary/political decorum. Could the double standard be more obvious?

What is interesting to me, as an American, is the idea that Post-Capitalism elides from the conversation the reality, that with the utter failure of the Neo-Liberal idea/practice and the failure of Austerity, followed by the present economic stagnation is to be succeeded by  Corporatism: the passage of the TPA and it’s successor the TPP are the secret laws that inaugurate that regime, that replaces the ideas and practices of republican rule i.e. the eclipse of popular sovereignty and the rule of indigenous law making,  and the rise of corporate NGO’s as the final arbiters of  how we might live, in a political world remade in the image and practice of a demonstrably failed Capital. Not to speak of the conformity and predations of America’s bought and paid for political class. And the fact that Obama had to appeal to the arch-reactionary Republican Party, to pass this travesty, indeed this utter betrayal of our political tradition, makes a mockery of his original public relations gambit of ‘Hope and Change’.

Perhaps the Post-Capitalism of Mr. Mason might be the successor to the Corporatism that looms in the future of America, but how long must we wait for the myth of the self -correcting Market to become a reality? Or should we discard this along with the collection of Political Romantics that dubbed themselves Economists: Hayek, von Mises, Friedman or script writer and Prophet of Greed Ayn Rand.

Almost Marx

If there is a successor to Edward Said, it is without doubt Pankaj Mishra. For proof  of this claim read his essay titled ‘The Sound of Cracking’, a review of two books cited below, in the August 27, 2015 edition of The London Review of Books (Behind a pay wall or purchase it at the Kindle Store)

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n16/pankaj-mishra/the-sound-of-cracking

For a challenging and insightful essay on Hayek see John Grey’s essay here:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/john-gray-friedrich-hayek-i-knew-and-what-he-got-right-and-wrong

For a more complete examination of Hayek as thinker,writer,economist see this issue of Critical Review titled Hayek:The Good, The Bad,The Ugly.

http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/current_issue25_34.html

Political Observer

Mr. Weiss turns that ever useful Straussian device of packing an essay full to the brim with the argumentatively useful and the tangential, in equal measure, or even what might be politically useful information, to the business of obfuscation rather than clarification. Although Mr. Weiss is probably a third or fourth hand practitioner of that strategy. Could he have been a student of Harvey Mansfield?  Except that in the literary reminiscence that rambling collection of associations is the essence of such a tribute. Not to forget that  Mr. Weiss is well connected in the world of letters as well as politics: Conquest and Hitchens were his associates. And Henry Jackson and Thatcher were his teachers/masters: the congruence of Neo-Cons and Neo-Liberals defines the dismal political present, that also defines Mr. Weiss’ politics. The Old Cold War and the New Cold War have one commonality the Soviet Union/Russia: how convenient a starting point for the essay than the death of Mr. Conquest as an opportunity to revive those ghosts of the Old Cold War as a useful backdrop to the New Cold War?

Political Observer

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/06/robert-conquest-the-man-who-unearthed-the-big-soviet-lie.html

The Stephens essay is the perfect opportunity to re-post the Barber/Ganesh video, the title of which features the ‘soft left’, when what is at issue is the ‘hard left’ and the utter importance of the ‘centrists’ , which is, in fact, a defense of a center thoroughly colonized by the political contagion of Neo-Liberalism. But Owen Jones in the New Statesman, a source uncongenial to the FT readership,  quotes  BBC journalist Mark Mardell on the journalists who celebrate the ‘soft center’, represented here by  Stephens, Barber and Ganesh: presenting themselves and their political allies as the only rational political actors:

Assessing the Corbyn campaign, the BBC journalist Mark Mardell was intriguingly candid. “It is hardly surprising that Westminster journalists crave the ideologically soft centre,” he writes. “None is on the minimum wage, let alone tax credits, nor are any, to my knowledge, owners of third homes on the Cayman Islands, or running big corporations. They are nearly all university educated and live in London or the South East of England (Yes, all that goes for me, too). There is group-think in the muddled middle, a fear of thinking outside a comfortable box.” Whatever their pretences, the BBC and many of its journalists will be among those attempting to undermine a Corbyn leadership.

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

Mr. Stephens’ agitprop is long on the mendacity, policy failures not to speak of the virulent political ugliness of the ‘left’ hard or soft:

The choice of Mr Corbyn as leader undoubtedly would be a startlingly self-destructive act for Labour. The veteran MP hails from a segment of the self-indulgent left that has always preferred to rail against US imperialism than to consider how to improve the life chances of ordinary folk. Never troubled by the choices of office, his frame is them versus us — the “them” being the rich, the powerful and, above all, the Americans, the “us” the oppressed peoples of Latin America or the Middle East.

More of the same:

His domestic policy platform consists of Venezuelan-style state direction of the economy: big tax hikes, nationalisations and more spending on everything except defence. Abroad, he would advocate withdrawal from Nato and, possibly, from the EU. Mr Corbyn’s visceral anti-Americanism is of the type that makes a hero of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

The political breadth of Mr. Corbyn’s mendacity, according to the narrative confected by Stephens, wedded to a ruthless political ambition, elides all political categories. Yet for Tony Blair to represent what Labour might stand for takes an act of political amnesia, that is the legacy of Mrs. Thatcher: Another revelatory quote from the Jones essay:

But the troll right has been eclipsed by a far more savvy – and nervous – right. “Socialism represents an enduring temptation,” warned Margaret Thatcher in her memoirs. “No one should underestimate Labour’s potential appeal.” As her former chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, put it on her 80th birthday: “The real triumph was to have transformed not just one party, but two.” This was the sincerely held belief of the right’s iconic leader herself. As her close personal friend, Tory MP Conor Burns, told me, Thatcher once declared to a crowd of her supporters: “Our greatest achievement was Tony Blair. We forced our opponents to change.” New Labour’s acceptance of many of the underlying assumptions of Thatcherism was, in the view of Thatcher and her supporters, the crowning glory of their great crusade. Their project was safe, unchallenged, a new political consensus.

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

Political Dissident

You have to marvel at the Financial Times and their policy of Left political hysteria mongering, here are Lionel Barber and Janan Ganesh in a carefully staged, but strategically brief, political conversation.

‘FT editor Lionel Barber talks to political commentator Janan Ganesh about the leadership crisis in the UK’s Labour party.under the headline: ‘Soft left is the real threat to Labour’

Yet the conversation is taken up by a long, mutually constructed  diatribe about the ‘hard left’. Watch the video here:

http://video.ft.com/4400769905001/Soft-left-is-the-real-threat-to-Labour/World

Then see Owen Jones’ essay at The New Statesmen which explores the same territory, yet presents a more nuanced picture, although Mr. Jones essay is much longer. The Barber/Ganesh video looks just like what it is propaganda, aimed at the Conservative readership of the FT!  The Jones essay offers this compelling insight into how the respectable bourgeois press, with a careful definition provided by BBC journalist Mark Mardell, handles the ‘left’.

Assessing the Corbyn campaign, the BBC journalist Mark Mardell was intriguingly candid. “It is hardly surprising that Westminster journalists crave the ideologically soft centre,” he writes. “None is on the minimum wage, let alone tax credits, nor are any, to my knowledge, owners of third homes on the Cayman Islands, or running big corporations. They are nearly all university educated and live in London or the South East of England (Yes, all that goes for me, too). There is group-think in the muddled middle, a fear of thinking outside a comfortable box.” Whatever their pretences, the BBC and many of its journalists will be among those attempting to undermine a Corbyn leadership.

Mr. Jones offers valuable insights, he is a ‘left journalist’, yet acquits his journalistic responsibility in a way that puts the Barber/Ganesh agitprop into proper perspective.

Political Observer

I’m sorry to say that it sounds like Mr. Kay wrote this essay on his lunch hour. Now, I’m not saying that he didn’t have a point, and that it wasn’t well argued, in a self-serving kind of way. That deadline can be a cruel master! Although the reference to gun control did leave me doubting it’s relevance, but sure of it’s appeal to a conservative readership. But  the essay was more a collection of broad generalizations supported by some apt quotations. A rough sketch but not a finished drawing?

Mr. Kay might remind his anonymous economist about  Deirdre N. McCloskey’s book The Rhetoric of Economics, second edition, chapter 7 titled ‘The Unexamined Rhetoric of Economic Quantification’, that quantification is an integral part of economics as a whole, and rhetoric is it’s means of delivery. The part that Keynes plays, as a major character in this literary vinaigrette, as man of reason and empiricism doesn’t quite – the quote from the utterly dubious Robert Rubin brings this essay to a welcome, but ignominious end. My comment, I hope, doesn’t follow Mr. Kay’s lead.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/96a620a8-3a8d-11e5-bbd1-b37bc06f590c.html#axzz3hljetR2h