StephenKMackSD's Blog

‘The same guarded hopefulness applies to an Economist editor’s only true master: the liberal credo of open markets and individual freedom.’

This valedictory oration is made up of Neo-Liberal rationalizations, apologetics all framed in the self-exculpatory: a defense of freedom and Free Markets garnished by the current declinism made popular by Niall Ferguson and Mr. Fukuyayma, and a host scribbling epigones.
Call it shopworn at best, although Mr. Micklethwait writes with a certain ideological brio e. g. the foul calumny that a Capital set free by the Financial Reform of 1999, in America, is to blame for the Crisis of 2008. And other such injustices, and an unmentioned ‘Left’ that haunts this essay: it’s shade the ever-present Prof. Piketty.
This essay should take it’s place beside Mr Micklethwait and Mr. Wooldridge’s almost prescient The Right Nation.
Political Skeptic
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21641204-john-micklethwait-who-has-edited-newspaper-2006-leaves-today-these-are-his-parting

Here, in sum, is the central conceit of Ms. Applebaum’s hysteria mongering essay, the patient reader is rewarded with this indictment of Russia under Putin, the Party Line of the Neo-Con/R2P menage, as refracted through the Litvinenko murder, all is revealed as in bad fiction, in her concluding paragraph :

‘ If we are serious about halting the growth of a Russian regime which is not only corrupt but also dangerous, posing a security threat to London as well as the rest of Europe, the best thing we can do is change this attitude. We should enforce our own laws, not only pursuing any alleged murder and treating Russian criminal cases with the seriousness they deserve, but closing the loopholes and ending the accounting tricks that have helped enrich a kleptocratic elite.’

Ms. Applebaum is a professional Russophobe i.e. a political ally of the Neo-Cons and R2P zealots that enabled the Ukrainian Coup, with billions of American dollars and substantial investment of EU money. The cast of characters:Victoria Nuland, Amb. Pyatt,Yats, allied with Right Sector and Svoboda who acted as enablers for the coup, that ousted the utterly corrupt but duly elected Viktor Yanukovich. Add to that list the zealous Samantha Power, Susan Rice and an utterly disingenuous and or clueless President Obama. And please don’t forget Ms. Applebaum’s newest idee fixe of ‘Terrorism’. For a counterpoint to this extended commentary  see her essay at Slate of January 23, 2015 that cautions the reader against over-reacting to ‘Terrorism’, in the Charlie Hebdo massacres :

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/01/europe_s_response_to_charlie_hebdo_attacks_europe_shouldn_t_overreact_to.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_bot

How is it that the evil political mastermind  Putin, in her wobbly myth-making narrative, is connected to Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun? That is the central question that Ms. Applebaum leaves unanswered, but simply by rhetorical proximity might lead to an unavoidable conclusion, or should I characterize it as a jump? History is not Ms. Applebaum’s strong suit, as the case of  dissident Georgi Markov demonstrates, he was killed in London street, in 1978, by means of ricin impregnated pellets, fired into his leg via an umbrella wielded by a Bulgarian secret police operative:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgi_Markov

Political Observer

We are asked today, as readers of the august Financial Times, to choose between the Neo-Liberalism of Mr. Rachman or Mr. Wolf. How predictable that the utter failure of Free Market Capitalism, which found it’s first iterations in the rise of the politics and the ersatz moralizing of Thatcher/Reagan, to it’s shuddering collapse in 2008. And all the apologists/rationalizers, not to speak of the profiteers, economic buccaneers, that played such a prominent role in the Greek debacle are household names, of course unmentioned in these pages, the watchword in bourgeois political respectability.

Mr. Rachman abuses the tolerance of his readers with Left and Right hysteria mongering and extemporizes on the shopworn cliche of the industrious northerner/shiftless southerner, a self-serving political/historical amnesia is the rule of the political moment. Yet Mr. Wolf and his model offers debt mitigation tied to the elusively undefined ‘reform’: to reform Neo-Liberalism demands even more Neo-Liberalism: see Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste for a history, intellectual and political, of the Neo-Liberal Thought Collective. The near conversation between Rachman and Wolf was instructive, not about the failure of the Neo-Liberal economic model, but about the limits/parameters of the debate in the respectable bourgeois press.

Almost Marx

Mr. Rachman’s hysterically charged first few paragraphs :

Syriza have won the Greek election. But, perhaps just as startling, the “far left” party is making considerable headway in the struggle to win over elite opinion in the west. Many mainstream economists and policy makers are so alarmed by the state of the Greek economy that they have come to agree with Syriza’s argument that the only solution is to make a radical cut in Greece’s national debt, which stands at 175 per cent of gross domestic product.”Greece’s debt needs to be right-sized,” one senior anglophone policy maker told me in Davos. “And the Germans should remember they benefited from official debt relief in the 1950s.” Letters from Nobel Prize winners and several opinion pieces in this newspaper have made similar arguments.Unfortunately, an explicit Greek debt write-off would cause more problems in Europe than it solved. Three main negative effects could be expected. First, it would cause a political backlash in northern Europe, which would strengthen far-right and nationalist parties. Second, far-left and anti-capitalist parties would gain credibility in southern Europe and would press for similar debt writedowns, as well as much expanded social spending — something that would lead to a collapse in market confidence. Third, the breakdown in trust between members of the EU that would follow a Greek default — even a negotiated default — would make it much harder to keep the EU together.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9af36742-a555-11e4-bf11-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Q2Qb5bhv

Mr.Wolf’s opening paragraph:

Sometimes the right thing to do is the wise thing. That is the case now for Greece. Done correctly, debt reduction would benefit Greece and the rest of the eurozone. It would create difficulties. But these would be smaller than those created by throwing Greece to the wolves. Unfortunately, reaching such an agreement may be impossible. That is why the belief that the eurozone crisis is over is mistaken.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/44c56806-a556-11e4-ad35-00144feab7de.html#axzz3Q2Qb5bhv

Almost Marx

M.S. is located in Amsterdam and perhaps her/his distance led to the development of a severe case of strategic myopia: the Republicans have made a bad bet on their 2014 victory at the polls, with 36.6% of eligible voters taking part. The Republicans are so eager for electoral justification, as a party, that they are already making foreign policy:  Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Mr. Netanyahu to speak before a joint session of Congress, and this utter political misstep, or just the usual Republican blundering,  as reported in the NYT:

‘WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Thursday formally abandoned plans to vote on a contentious bill that would make most abortions illegal after 20 weeks of pregnancy as they struggled to mend another unwelcome rift that threatens to tarnish their party’s image with women and younger voters. Instead, the House approved a separate and more limited measure to forbid the use of taxpayer funding to pay for abortions.
Republican leaders decided on Wednesday night to cancel a vote on the 20-week ban bill to quell a revolt from women within the party who objected that the legislation did not do enough to accommodate victims of rape.’

The Republicans can’t even quell the rebellion of their Conservative women on this issue!
The ‘pantomime’ that M.S. refers to is the fact that President Obama’s completely modest political proposals are, in effect, dead on arrival. M.S. fails to recognize that this is the opening salvos of Campaign 2016, that with any luck will prefigure the coronation of Ms. Clinton and or the triumph of New Dealer Senator Warren,  if all goes as planned. In the speculations/plans/strategizing of the New Democrats. The Republican’s hunger for political power has made them reckless, and leads to the most salient question: What happened to the public relations savvy of the Republican Party of the Reagan era? The Republicans are now controlled by the political nihilists who don’t think strategically, but react like Pavlov’s dog, to the perceived provocations of President Obama’s modest proposals. This unrelenting political nihilism is what Mrs. Clinton or Senator Warren will successfully campaign against.

Political Observer

Mr. Luce does his best to appeal to the Republican readers of The Financial Times by producing as boring and cliche ridden a commentary on the State of the Union address, as the speech by the president. See this rhetorical clinker as indicative:
‘The state of the union is improving and Mr Obama’s Kumbaya days are over.’
I read the print version of the State of the Union posted by CNN, as I’ve grown weary of the ennui inducing live version. From the sub-headline of the Luce essay that includes the descriptor ‘strutting’ to the concluding notion of ‘another Clinton presidency’: this column reflects shopworn Washington insider cynicism seamlessly blended with self-evident Neo-Liberal mendacity. Clinton, who proved his own Neo-Liberal credentials by ending Glass-Steagall, the harbinger of the 2008 economic collapse, and Federal Welfare:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/08/27/repeal-of-glass-steagall-caused-the-financial-crisis:

In fact, the financial crisis might not have happened at all but for the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall law that separated commercial and investment banking for seven decades. If there is any hope of avoiding another meltdown, it’s critical to understand why Glass-Steagall repeal helped to cause the crisis. Without a return to something like Glass-Steagall, another greater catastrophe is just a matter of time.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/welfare/stories/wf082396.htm

Today, we are ending welfare as we know it,” Clinton said at a White House ceremony, where he was flanked by three former welfare recipients. “But I hope this day will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began.

The president’s speech was the usual fourth of July oration, highlighted by his politically incremental proposals, that fell flat with the Republicans No-Nothings and Mr. Luce: in sum an utterly predictable confluence of event and subsequent commentary in the respectable bourgeois press, in it’s Conservative iteration. To quote the Neo-Liberal wisdom of Ronald Reagan: Government is the problem!

Political Skeptic

What worries me as an atheist is what Islamophobia has become in the wake of the Paris murders, not that it hasn’t reached such a pitch that one’s conscience was daily pricked by events and the propaganda that was/is it’s fruit. The fear mongering has become unapologetic from even the ‘liberals’ who used to speak in more sedate terms of ‘tolerance’: a pernicious political conformity has taken hold of the prophets of the Enlightenment, whose ignorance of the complete diversity of that historical/literary/political force leaves one in a state of awe at the self-enforced ignorance of the experts. Or more accurately a motley collection of scribblers/apologists . Regarding the fact of that diversity made up of theists,deists,and atheists and other assorted thinkers/writers/advocates as relevant to an argument about the ‘historical entity’ called by the name Enlightenment, or more accurately called Enlightenments. The paradigmatic work of the French Enlightenment is Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. He was a deist.
This in a political atmosphere of the witch hunting of ‘terrorists’ or simply persons that are identified as ‘suspects’ in the political opportunity that this crisis offers, to the authoritarians in our political midst. Recall Carl Schmitt’s advocacy of that opportunity? Governments and police agencies operate with impunity, within that atmosphere, aided by the unrelenting propaganda of the ‘otherness’ of Muslims, when in fact Islam is an integral part of the Abrahamic Tradition and The West. The political hysteria mongering has reached a level that cannot be tolerated by any person of conscience no matter what their identification: theist,deists,atheist and even the religiously indifferent.
As both an atheist and a queer I cannot turn my back on the historical evidence past and present of the murderous record of that Abrahamic Tradition, toward persons like myself throughout history, but that prick of conscience about political context and manifest political hysteria demand a different response.

Queer Atheist

In response to Robert Colburn’s post:

http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/secularism-privilege-christians.html#comment-308372

Neo-Conservative Mr. Goldberg begins his long essay, French Prime Minister : ‘I Refuse to use This Term Islamophobia’ with these paragraphs:

The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, has emerged over the past tumultuous week as one of the West’s most vocal foes of Islamism, though he’s actually been talking about the threat it poses for a long while. During the course of an interview conducted before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, he told me—he went out of his way to tell me, in fact—that he refuses to use the term ‘Islamophobia’ to describe the phenomenon of anti-Muslim prejudice, because, he says, the accusation of Islamophobia is often used as a weapon by Islamism’s apologists to silence their critics.

Most of my conversation with Valls was focused on the fragile state of French Jewry—here is my post on his comments, which included the now-widely circulated statement that, “if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France”—and I didn’t realize the importance of his comment about Islamophobia until I re-read the transcript of our interview.

“It is very important to make clear to people that Islam has nothing to do with ISIS,” Valls told me. “There is a prejudice in society about this, but on the other hand, I refuse to use this term ‘Islamophobia,’ because those who use this word are trying to invalidate any criticism at all of Islamist ideology. The charge of ‘Islamophobia’ is used to silence people. ”

Then he adds this regarding ‘anti-Muslim’  Islamophobic behavior. Is it just a question of semantics or the cultivation of a respectable form of hatred for the other?

Valls was not denying the existence of anti-Muslim sentiment, which is strong across much of France. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, miscreants have shot at Muslim community buildings, and various repulsive threats against individual Muslims have been cataloged. President Francois Hollande, who said Thursday that Muslims are the “first victims of fanaticism, fundamentalism, intolerance,” might be overstating the primacy of anti-Muslim prejudice in the current hierarchy of French bigotries—after all, Hollande just found it necessary to deploy his army to defend Jewish schools from Muslim terrorists, not Muslim schools from Jewish terrorists—but anti-Muslim bigotry is a salient and seemingly permanent feature of life in France. Or to contextualize it differently: Anti-Muslim feeling appears to be more widespread than anti-Jewish feeling across much of France, but anti-Jewish feeling has been expressed recently (and not-so-recently) with far more lethality, and mainly by Muslims.

For some background to the questions of integration, alienation in the banlieues (riots of 2005) and it’s complete relevance to the idea and practice anti-Muslim/Islamaphobic behavior  see this debate between Michèle Tribalat and Gérard Mauger from the Tuesday 1 November 2011 in The Guardian. Mr. Goldberg and M. Valle each have their own political agendas and those agendas are best served when the charge of Islamophobia is elided from the political conversation, as inherently illegitimate. Readers can think for themselves.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/01/france-debate-class-islam-banlieues

Queer Atheist

Mr. Miller is nothing if not dependable in the manufacture of Zionist apologetics, even as Bibi is hardly qualified as a sympathetic political protagonist, Mr. Miller does his best . Although he is careful, in this instance, to open with a wobbly meditation on the Paris massacres. He is weakest in this genre of moralizing speculation and strongest in his  embrace of the horse race mentality of American’s respectable bourgeois commentators. This is the essence of Mr. Miller’s report: Bibi’s chances for re-election and the effect that his Paris performance will have on that outcome,if any. The rhetorical garnish, Mr. Miller’s pretense to political/ethical seriousness, falls flat.
Bibi’s address to the Paris synagog seems emblematic of his political boorishness: after his admonishment to his auditors that they will only be safe in Israel, the audience spontaneously began to sing La Marseillaises, hardly a vote of confidence in Bibi’s sense of tact or occasion, among other questions. This scene fails as political theater, if domestic perception of statesmanship are at all relevant. Given Bibi’s dismal performance,  Mr. Miller’s maladroit arguments seems to teeter on the brink of the unconvincing.

Political Cynic

Bibi Plays Paris

This is my reply to Mr Carlstrom’s essay on the Foreign Policy web site titled From Herzl to Hebdo. Here is an enlightening  excerpt from Mr. Netnayhu’s address to the Paris synagog:

Our president was right when he said that Jews have the right to live in many countries,” Netanyahu said. “But I believe that they know deep in their hearts that they have only one country, the state of Israel, the historic homeland that will accept them with open arms.

Here is the response from his listeners:

Mr. Netanyahu’s audience spontaneously began to sing La Marseillaise, even the person closest to him eventually joined the other members of the audience, in singing the French national anthem.  Call this spontaneous response of his auditors by it’s proper name, an utter rebuke of Mr. Netanyahu’s hysterical ethno-nationalist politicking: aimed at both his domestic Israeli and French audiences.

Mr. Carlstrom uses the opportunity that the French crisis offers , for an extended  report on the immigration of Jews to Israel. Here is an excerpt:

The supermarket shooting by Amedy Coulibaly, a homegrown French jihadi and an acquaintance of the Charlie Hebdo killers, shocked France’s Jewish community, the largest in Europe and the third largest in the world. It followed a steadily intensifying spate of anti-Semitic acts over the past few years: Synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses have been firebombed, and families in religious garb have been attacked on the streets. The victims of last week’s attack were buried in the same Jerusalem cemetery as the four people killed in a 2012 shooting at a Jewish day school in Toulouse. (It is not unusual for Jews from abroad to request burial in Israel for religious reasons: One of the supermarket victims, Philippe Braham, had already buried his parents and a son here.)

On the rise of Antisemitism in France see this report by Sam Knight on the  Mondoweiss web site titled Violence outside Paris synagogue falsely attributed to anti-Semitism(Updated) from July 15, 2014:

Violence outside Paris synagogue falsely attributed to anti-Semitism (Updated)

Political Skeptic