StephenKMackSD's Blog

For some further insights into some of the questions raised in Mr. Munchau’s essay, and other pertinent questions about the how of the EU, and it’s methods and self-serving ‘legal interpretations’  see Mr.Nathan Tankus’ essay:

Mario Draghi: The ECB Has No Mandate To Ensure Checks Clear Or Credit Cards Work

http://goo.gl/9gUFnn

The Tankus essay adds dimension to Mr. Munchau’s insightful and utterly necessary rejoinder to EU apologists i.e. the ‘Serial Defaulter’ Germany, and their putative ‘Hero’ Schäuble The Terrible.

StephenKMackSD

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e903ad46-3201-11e5-8873-775ba7c2ea3d.html#axzz3h0YOxz9F

Putting all this together, Europe now has a system where liquidity and insolvency problems can occur and can be deliberately generated (at least in part) by the central bank. Then the Troika can force that country into an “IMF program” if it wants to continue having a functioning banking system. Alternatively, the central bank can choose to simply “suspend convertibility” to the unit of account and force the write down of deposits until the banks are solvent again. During this drawn out period payments grind to a halt and mass business disruptions and failures can and will be generated. In other words Europe has created a system where you either comply with the dictates of unelected bureaucrats or you accept a more disorderly version of the United States banking system before the Civil War. The bottom line is that if you feel inclined to visit Europe remember that the payments system can fail you at any time. Plan accordingly.

http://goo.gl/stbf0x

Mr.Moisés Naím is a Think Tank Technocrat who manages to offer not one valuable insight into Trump or Tsipras! Nor even the attempt to hint at or even sketch, no matter how briefly, the historical/political context that produced these two political actors. Instead just a bland recitation of the current political orthodoxy: Trump as political opportunist/television vaudevillian, a kind of political Don Rickels, and Tsipras as politically irresponsible communist rabble rouser. With this recitation of, by now, well worn cliches Mr. Naím should qualify for a place in the New York Times editorial page, with the likes of David Brooks and Thomas Friedman: something to be read with your morning cup of coffee, and just as quickly forgotten in the rush of events of the work day. Except when the boss mentions that he’d read one or the other of these writers and says, in passing, that he valued the insights offered. And like a good employee, she/he silently nods in tacit agreement,while wondering at the lack of critical thinking skills of her/his immediate superior.
Political Observer

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/07/donald-trump-greece-tsipras-immigration-austerity/399299/#about-the-authors

The worse they sound, the better they do. That is the power of anti-politics. Mr Trump is merely a symptom. His Republican rivals should beware. Trump Towers will fall. Other skyscrapers loom.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/33c34aa8-3086-11e5-8873-775ba7c2ea3d.html#axzz3geS87b3A

You have to give Sen. Cotton his due! As student of Harvey Mansfield and protege of William Kristol he is a well credentialed Neo-Con, but with the political savvy to frame his criticism of Kerry in biblical terms.Therefore capturing a large segment of Republican voters, who are Evangelicals or their allies, with this rhetorical gambit.

Sec. Rice’s assurances leave one a bit cold, as she and her allies Nuland,Power and Pyatt are notorious prevaricators,or should it be dissimulators?

Does Kerry represent a change from the Rice/Power/Nuland/Pyatt menage? Who have produced the political nihilism of Ukraine, and it’s offspring The New Cold War!  Sec. Kerry’s jingoistic speech at the 2012 Convention, in praise of Obama’s policies, was utterly distasteful, but perhaps, it was just the price to be paid for admission to a position on the world stage, that represents Sec. Kerry’s ambition? Or has Sec. Kerry become just like the men he once criticized, so many years ago: McNamara, the Bundy brothers and the rest of the once ascendent WASP elite, like the Alsop brothers, whose crime was believing that policy technocrats and their journalistic publicists could change the world, for the better, by waging a war against anti-colonialists and making it a war against the Communist Menace.

Political Observer

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/tom-cotton-john-kerry-pontius-pilate-iran-deal-120520.html#ixzz3gjK6DbRL

From the deep recesses of the intellectual technocracy comes ‘the Globalist’ aided by Mr.  André Reichel as writer/prognosticator,  on the ‘last man standing’ for Europe or at least the Europe represented by Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble. The Germany called the Serial Defaulter of Europe, at least in the judgement of  Mr. Martin Wolf of The Financial Times:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fcb2fb16-1e5c-11e5-ab0f-6bb9974f25d0.html#axzz3geS87b3A

Or read Ms. Tett’s revelatory essay on an address by Benjamin Friedman, the esteemed economic historian, that takes up the issue of those defaults:

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

But never fear our guide to the intricacies of the EU comes up with this astounding exercise in dis-information. Or call it by it’s real name apologetics:

Some of Schäuble’s critics call him “neoliberal” – something that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Just before the above quote is this laughable obsequious pandering to the  Schäuble ego:

 The German finance minister knows his Winston Churchill (and his dictum about never letting a good crisis go to waste.)

Or this barely disguised patronizing insult:

This approach to economic management revolves more around political economy than pure economics, which is why North American economists do not get it – like Paul Krugman eloquently and obsessively in the New York Times.

The very terms of the ‘re-negotiated’ agreement with Greece render this statement denying Mr. Schäuble‘s Neo-Liberalism ludicrous. Even the IMF has said further Austerity measures are counterproductive. We can see that the selling off of publicly held assets, and the cuts in pensions etc.- all of these actions consistent with the textbook model of ‘Reform’ in the Neo-Liberal economic theology: the destruction of the institutions of the Welfare State are the primary goal of neoliberal rationalism, as define by Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos. Germany terms are Neo-Liberal to the core!

Then we come to Mr.Reichel central explanatory concern, that of Politics vs. Economics or the French v. German practices:

This particular German form of economic management is also profoundly at odds with France’s very state-centered ideas of how a national economy should be structured.

The core idea of France is to believe in the primacy of politics over all matters in society. Although not as strong as it used to be, French dirigisme (state control of economic and social matters) is still alive and kicking.The French state still owns sizable amounts of shares in major French companies such as GDF Suez (the utility company), Thales (the defense contractor), Air France-KLM, Renault (the carmaker), Areva (the nuclear power group) and France Telecom.

This contrasts sharply from the German notion of the primacy of politics – which restricts it to setting carefully calibrated rules to markets, politics and society.

Call this what it is self-congratulatory technocratic chatter. The central argument is that Germany is a genuine Market Economy and France is, in effect, still an economy laboring under quasi-socialist principals.

Reading through all the cliche mongering in this essay, here is what might be considered Mr. Reichel‘s central argument, disregarding the plentiful technocratic rhetorical garnish:

All of this is why probably the most significant clash over Greece is not between creditors and debtors, as is so often assumed. The real clash is between the competing views of France and Germany over the future of Europe and the Eurozone.

The political/moral fate of the Greek people remains outside the ken of this thinker, demonstrating the vacuous ethical/moral core of the technocrat in the role of political actor.

Almost Marx

Schäuble: Europe’s Last Man Standing

Nebenkanzler is the perfect shadow leader of the fissuring EU, the perfect stern pater familias : a stock character in almost all of European literature. Yet what renders the German political/moral position null is the reports in these pages by Mr. Wolf ,and Ms. Tett’s compelling report on Benjamin Friedman’s speech. The quote from a German Marshall Fund technocrat, a institutional relic of the Old Cold War, originally funded by a gift from the West German government, and another technocrat from the Soros funded European Council on Foreign Relations adds a dash of ideological verisimilitude, indicative of ‘European Values’: perhaps the prerequisite for those ‘values’ is perpetual economic/political amnesia and the chutzpah to pretend that the Dream of Europe is still viable. While the European and American economies are still mired in the watershed of the utter failure of Free Market Delusion. What is holding this decidedly fragile thing together? The ideological infused chatter, indeed apologetics of a servile economic press, and their allies in various think tanks: the itinerant, for hire intellectuals who make the Sophists appear virtuous?

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/09c4ff30-2fb9-11e5-8873-775ba7c2ea3d.html#axzz3gcrREluL

Here is a copy of page 100 and 101 of Cloaked in Virtue. I have provided a link to a copy that can be enlarged for easier reading :

https://goo.gl/WzYPNu

In this page and a half Xenos describes the Straussian method used in the interpretation of Spinoza’s Treatise and  Xenophon’s Hiero. But here is a description of the Straussian Method that applies to the whole of Strauss’ interpretive endeavors:

See this methodology, described by Mr. Xenos, used by two prominent Neo-Conservative thinkers/technocrats:

First, Mr. Fukuyama in this essay: ‘The Decay of American Political Institutions’, I’m sorry to say is no longer available. A Google search provides a link that doesn’t work! In place of that, here is a link to my January 5, 2014 comment that provides some quotations from the essay and my replies:

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/my-current-project-excerpt-from-a-reply-to-francis-fukuyamas-essay-the-decay-of-american-political-institutions-by-political-observer/

Second, Robert Kagan’s ‘Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire’:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117859/allure-normalcy-what-america-still-owes-world

Here are links to the three comments I wrote in reply to the Kagan essay. I suffered from the intellectual malady/ennui that Xenos so carefully describes/articulates/demonstrates in the latter part of  page 101, as I have posted above:

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/on-robert-kagan-before-intellectual-exhaustion-set-in-by-political-cynic-part-i/

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/kagan-on-the-resolute-courage-of-american-imperialists-part-2-by-political-cynic/

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2014/06/21/on-robert-kagan-part-3/

StephenKMackSD

On the dubious question of ‘mis-remembering Reagan’

A quotation from his notorious ‘States Rights’ speech that opened his 1980 campaign, see this quotation that leaves no doubt, in terms of content and place, that Reagan was a Southern Strategist completely in the mold of Nixon :

I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

http://neshobademocrat.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=297&ArticleID=15599

On the question of Central America see these two books, one a political polemic and the other a ‘dispassionate reassessment’ according to Benjamin Schwarz of the Atlantic :

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/dirty-hands/377364/

Weakness and Deceit: US Policy and El Salvador by Raymond Bonner
Hamish Hamilton, 408 pp, £13.95, February 1985, ISBN 0 241 11392 X

Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992 By William M. LeoGrande

On the politically inconvenient ‘October Surprise’

Not only did Reagan deal with terrorists as president, as revealed in the Iran-Contra scandal, the preponderance of evidence now supports the charge that his campaign negotiated with Iranian hostage-takers while he was running for president in 1980, to delay the release of hostages before the election, which could have helped Carter win reelection — what was known as “The October Surprise.” Given that Reagan wasn’t president then, but was negotiating to thwart a president’s attempt to get hostages released, this is not simply questionable behavior, it is arguably an act of treason. Democrats’ reluctance to vigorously investigate Reagan’s misdeeds — the exact opposite of GOP attitudes toward Clinton and Obama — has left much of the true story still shrouded in mystery, but what we do know is damning enough in itself, and still cries out for a truly thorough investigation.

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/07/ronald_reagan_treason_amnesia_gop_hypocrites_forget_their_hero_negotiated_with_terrorists_he_was_just_really_bad_at_it/

‘Scott Walker is a formidable addition to the Republican field.’

Gov. Scott Walker is another Neo-Liberal in the mold of Mayor Emanuel of Chicago: utterly careless in the war against the Menace of Public Sector Unionism allied to an assault on Public Education: the cancel of tenure! The quotation from Arthur Brooks of The American Enterprise Institute and his book with the ludicrous title  ‘The Conservative Heart’: I’ve read his column at the New York Times and wondered at it’s complete political banality, steeped in the conservative bathos and third rate moralizing that David Brooks practices with greater fluency. One can only wonder at Gov. Walker’s popularity and his radical nostalgia, with Reagan acting as stand in for 1859, and the revival of the political career of Russ Feingold.

Political Cynic

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21657798-scott-walker-serious-addition-2016-field-blind-spot-about-changing

‘Club Med’ is a maladroit attempt at insulting the Greeks, it riffs off of the Profligate Southern Tier myth. See this from Forbes, carefully framed in the notion of inefficiency, after all it is Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/03/13/contrary-to-what-most-people-think-greeks-work-the-longest-hours-in-europe-infographic/
Headline:Contrary To What Most People Think, Greeks Work The Longest Hours In Europe [Infographic]
On the question of Free Market Neo-Liberalism as antithetical to democracy see Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos
Ms. Brown posits the notion of neoliberal rationalism, as the Market alternative to our shared republican tradition, our shared civic/political/ethical destiny.
Neo-Liberalism seeks to supplant the notion and practice of the shared fate of the commonwealth, the res public, the public thing, with the ‘values of the market’ i.e. the rapacious Social Dawinism of the likes of Hayek, von Mises, Friedman  and the vulgar pamphleteer Ayn Rand.
Also see  The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
J.G.A. Pocock, that traces the vital republican idea of the cultivation of civic republican virtue as one of the actual historical singularities that has shaped Europe and America.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/1729.html
‘ There is nothing antithetical to democracy whatsoever in economic neo-liberalism.’ The ‘values of the Market’ i.e. Neo-Liberalism, and it’s ally and creature Corporatism, are about political manipulation, in the name of the freedom to make profits, at any cost. Hayek’s polemic The Road to Serfdom should be considered as a biography of the dismal political present. All one need do is adapt the ‘esoteric reading’ of texts manufactured by Leo Strauss!
Just for good measure read Ms. Tett’s ‘A Debt to History’ ‘To some, Germany faces a moral duty to help Greece, given the aid that it has previously enjoyed’
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html
Due diligence,in future, should be your measure!
Regards,
StephenKMackSD

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f6872342-2bd2-11e5-acfb-cbd2e1c81cca.html#axzz3g9ceZq1C