StephenKMackSD's Blog

You have to credit Mr. Ross Douthat with persistence, or more accurately, with an unrelenting ideological fixation with the behavior of the lowers orders of political humanity: the working class. By which he means those shiftless poor who won’t, out of moral recalcitrance, adopt the morality of it’s betters. Mr. Douthat is really sounding the moral smugness of Reagan and his obsessions with ‘Welfare Queens driving Cadillacs’ which he alluded to in his 1976 presidential bid, and those ubiquitous out of wedlock children . Except that Mr. Douthat shifts the focus to the ‘working class male’ another maladroit code word for the morally feckless black male.

The second, by Binyamin Appelbaum, looked at the decline of work itself among less-educated men, and the forces driving this decline: low wages and weak job growth, the availability of safety-net income, the burden of criminal records, and the fraying of paternal and marital bonds.

 

The ‘availability of of safety-net income’ is the code word for welfare chiseling, not very hard to interpret this, you need only look to the code words and phrases among all the rhetorical garnish to Mr. Douthat’s essay. Add to this ‘the burden of criminal records, and the fraying of paternal and marital bonds’ to round out the right wing rhetorical engagement with the poor: the Black Family in Moral Crisis as rehearsed by a reactionary political moralist.

Almost Marx

In the first paragraph Mr. Dyer’s essay he repeats what might be or is the Nihilist Republican Party Line on the very weak President Obama: not just a lame duck, but on the political critical list, as a result of his political weakness. In the second paragraph he lists the Presidents damming abuses of Presidential power: murder by drone and the War on ISIS. Political gridlock and hyper-partisanship follow, as if the Republicans hadn’t been completely obstructionist since 2008, with varying degrees of success. Redefine Mr. Dyer’s notion of ‘ hyper-partisanship’ as in reality Republican intransigence, if political honesty be the point! Then to add a touch of  near paranoid melodrama to the evolving story line, and perhaps rescue it from readerly ennui, he introduces the notion of ‘the deep state’. Or is this an attempt to pad his essay? It makes for a weak segue to the CIA Report, and the preposterous fashioning of the notion that Sen. Feinstein is an heroic crusader against CIA malfeasance. The value of one speech on the Senate floor trumps a career as apologist for the American National Security State, except that the CIA made an error in judgement and spied on the senator’s committee. The whole of America’s political class, including Sen. Feinstein, are at fault not just the scapegoat CIA. Sen. Feinstein’s delay of the vote on ‘the use force resolution’ regarding Iraq is testament to her political/moral culpability, that has continued to this day.
Political Cynic
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/de85486e-802e-11e4-9907-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3LWXy7KAb

Give Sen. McCain a few political moments to regain his ideological composure.He will quickly join the apologetic lock step of the torture rationalizers. Sen. McCain has long since spent his moral capital: D.K. makes a bad misstep to begin her/his essay with the shopworn moralizing of such an utterly compromised public figure.
Sen. Feinstein’s self-congratulatory and self-exculpatory address to the Senate today, December 9, 2014, is too little too late. An act of political courage, such as she and her colleagues Wyden and Udall taking to the Senate floor and all three taking turns reading the un-redacted report, not released today, into the congressional record, would have amounted to that illusive ethical quantity. Senators have legal immunity on what they speak about, in session. But being that we are dealing with the abject political conformists of that body of 100 careerists, it did not happen.
So what we have is Sen. Feinstein scolding the CIA for it’s misdeeds, yet America’s whole political class stands indited, as the report simply makes a bit clearer. We know that the CIA torturers made video recordings of torture sessions and destroyed the evidence. Our knowledge of the scope of the mendacity and wrongdoing is expanded, while carefully redacted from the report is the vital names of the political actors and places where these acts were perpetrated, in our name. To call this report an act of self-serving political cowardice is not in the realm of moral/political hyperbole.
Almost Marx
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/12/american-intelligence-and-torture

Left un-mentioned in this news story are some important but inconvenient facts concerning the current ‘Ukrainian Crisis’, that is due to western political meddling: Victoria Nuland, Amb. Pyatt and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in concert with the EU spent billions to bring down a duly elected but manifestly corrupt government. The political alliance that brought down the duly elected regime included Right Sector and Svoboda, both notorious neo-fascist organizations. Puntin was supposed to accept this dismal state of affairs: ABM’s on the Russian border and IMF Austerity operating in Ukraine. So much for the plans of the Nuland led and financed coup which has devolved into a low level murderous war. Don’t poke the Russian Bear with a stick, in his own backyard!

One need only look to American history and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, that the US has taken it’s self-proclaimed hegemony over the whole of the Western Hemisphere as a given, of the notion/practice of spheres of influence. It has been a defense of territorial mischief and murder since it’s inception. To reduce it to cartoonish elementalism, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander or a variation on quid pro quo.

Mr. Hollande isn’t the first EU leader to try to fix the mendacious and dishonest, not to speak of blundering and incompetent, political machinations of ideologically fixated incompetents like Ms. Nuland and her allies: Ms. Rice and R2P zealot Samantha Power and their allies in the ‘press’ like Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum or fake French Philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy!
Political Cynic
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/49151cbe-7d72-11e4-b927-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3LDd9Nvid

Mr. Luce can’t quite contain his enthusiasm for Mr. Carter, whose credentials and experience look to be near perfect for a Pentagon bureaucrat, in fact he is a creature of the American National Security State. What he lacks, in common with Mr. Luce, is combat experience, a virtue that Mr. Hegel brought to the table. Although having an actual soldier/politician of the moral/political standing of Mr. Hegel was an impediment to his confirmation as Secretary of Defense: recall Sen. McCain’s maladroit questioning of candidate Hegel? To call it shabby,insulting and mean spirited also describes the political career of Sen. McCain. Mr. Luce somehow takes the opinion of Sen. McCain seriously as some kind of expert in the field of Pentagon management, when what he is expert at is a concerted campaign to sell war with Iran, recall his irresponsible and dull witted Bomb,bomb,bomb Iran? Mr. Carter is an ally of the hardliners on Iran but one might hope a more sophisticated rationalizer of such a policy.

On the vexing question of Obama’s ‘micromanagement’ : the president is in charge and as such that old saw ‘the buck stops here’ applies. The whole charge is to characterize the president as a dithering incompetent manager as confirmation of his political/moral status as other.
Political Realist
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4b06cb60-7b12-11e4-b630-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3L7pIk9RL

David Brooks in his December 1, 2014 essay titled Class Prejudice Resurgent
(http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/opinion/david-brooks-class-prejudice-resurgent.html?_r=0)

offers his usual ideologically based, deliberate misreading of race relations in American, of the present, as not based on racial prejudice but as centered on ‘classism’. He elaborates on this point with an illustration from British history, how relevant this historical citation from the history of another nation seems labored, to state the obvious: except for slavery and the decimation of indigenous peoples, America has prided itself as egalitarian in spirit, if not in practice. And do not forget ‘meritocracy’ as a singular American accomplishment, that Mr. Brooks celebrates, he being an example of the rightness of that system.
There is nothing that is more dependable than Conservatism self-willed political myopia, about the question of race, especially since the migration of the Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in the mid 1960’s, as stinging rebuke to the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Right Acts. The Party of Lincoln transformed itself almost overnight into the Party that politically enabled Richard Nixon and his Southern Strategy.
There is so much more to say about Mr. Brooks’ essay, which trivializes the idea and practice of a national conversation about race in America, to the much more manageable discussion about class, although Conservatism is always about the care and maintenance of that benighted system. Racism is alive and well in 21st Century America, and the Brooks’ essay is proof of Conservatism’s and Conservatives lack of candor/honesty on this vexing question.
Political Cynic

I printed a copy of Edward Luce’s essay of November 30, 2014 on Hillary Clinton:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e84aa190-76f2-11e4-8273-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3KhGhi6Q6
I printed it last night so that this morning I could read it without resort to the computer. I wasn’t surprised at the ideologically fueled misapprehension of American politics, it is as if Mr. Luce’s knowledge of American politics begins with Ronald Reagan, and that he is incurious about anything besides that historical moment. Mr. Luce spends a great deal of space on the ‘Left’ in this country, the Democratic Party and Mrs. Clinton, are it’s constituent parts. One wonders where Mr. Luce spends his days in Washington D.C., although he did spend his sabbatical year as speech writer for economic buccaneer Larry Summers,and where he conjured his idea of ‘Left’ and the New Democrats, who modeled themselves after the political success of Ronald Reagan is a question fraught – he resorts to the level of political cartoon in service to his ideological blinders. I would quote from his polemic but the Financial Times is quite fussy at any quotation of it’s copyrighted material.
Mr. Luce’s exploits the American political tradition of post war America: anticommunism and the tradition inaugurated by the Nixon/McCarren/Mundt/McCarthy political alliance, except that Mr. Luce’s political/historical ignorance hinders a fuller and more honest apprehension of the current ‘Left’, that in actuality is Neo-Liberalism: Mrs. Clinton and even Mr. Luce’s former employer Mr. Summers. Mr. Luce’s act of reactionary historical re-description came to naught with his readers. Compared to his readers comments, most couched in No-Nothing political reaction, renders Mr. Luce a more rhetorically sophisticated political reactionary. Yet one feels that Mr. Luce did his best to give his conception of the American ‘Left’ a drubbing, that failed to move his readers: the comments section has been closed.
One further thought: to call Elizabeth Warren a ‘populist’, when she is a New Deal Democrat: her introduction of a bill to reinstate a Glass-Steagall co-sponsored by Sen. McCain is an inescapable confirmation of that fact, that Mr. Luce chooses to ignore.
Political Observer

Mr. Stephens has to be congratulated for staying so close to the script of the respectable Foreign Policy chatterer, while seeming to impart a seasoned wisdom to the reader. Absent from the essay is any mention of the 100 to 200 nuclear war heads that Israel possesses, and the missiles to deliver them: political conformists don’t mention that the balance of power in the ‘Middle East’ was breached by Israel, and that if anything Iran is simply seeking to redress that imbalance, as so many countries have done. I forgot that the prevailing propaganda is that the Iranians are mad men incapable of rational, deliberative, self-interested thought: wasn’t that the party line that the hawks used against the Soviet Union? Or is a perpetual state of political amnesia our self-elected destiny?
Then there is this: ‘What the superpower does here, matters there. Allowing Mr Assad to step over a red line in Syria sent a message to Russia’s Vladimir Putin about what he might get away with in Ukraine.’ On the issue of Ukraine, another historical elision is evident in Mr. Stephens’ essay: Nuland, Pyatt,The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Right Sector and Svoboda conspired and overthrew a duly elected government in Ukraine. And that blatant example of perennial American political adventurism continues to cost human lives. ‘Match restraint with implacable robustness’ is a motto that reeks bourgeois political respectability, and perfect for consumption by the readership of The Financial Times, what else need be said!
Political Realist

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5ee70878-7588-11e4-a1a9-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3KKKgopyX

Recall if you will the Edward Luce essay of November 21,2014 ‘Yes I can,says Obama’:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6e1e0428-7127-11e4-85d5-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3K2C2V2jX
In which Mr. Luce in his very clever way engages in nearly faint praise for the President and almost scolds the Republicans for their charge of unconstitutional behavior, rising to the level of an impeachable offense, in the exercise ‘prosecutorial discretion’ in the matter of immigration. For Mr. Luce the challenge of writing for the Financial Times, and the mainspring of his cleverness, was not to offend his very conservative readership, while attempting to capture the politics of the present moment and it’s vexing ideological and partisan complexity: his exercise of that cleverness almost succeeded.
For a very well thought out piece of propaganda, that veers close to political actuality, while being carefully massaged even homogenized for more easy consumption, see Mr. Ross Douthat’s essay at the New York Times of November 22, ‘The making of an Imperial President’:

Continue reading →

Not one mention of Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick or his co-conspirators UBS Bank and Bank of America in the wholesale looting of the city of Detroit? Congratulation to V.V.B for carefully eliding from the essay the important political actors except for the political/legal and judicial technocrats whose main function was to engage in unstinting self-praise about ‘compromise’. Unsurprisingly, V.V. B. hews to the current political orthodoxy.
When have we not seen the false dawn of Neo-Liberalism praised to the skies in these pages? The Free Market was another name for theft and a culture steeped in self-serving mendacity. At all costs save the floundering Neo-Liberal paradigm from any taint- a fools errand and what a demonstrable failure!
For an alternative viewpoint see The World Socialist Web Site, sure to raise the hackles of all those true believers at the Economist, readers and writers:
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/04/12/detr-a12.html
Some telling quotes from this are instructive:
‘US Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes approved a settlement Thursday handing $85 million to the banks that swindled the city of Detroit out of hundreds of millions of dollars in an interest rate swap deal. UBS Bank and Bank of America will receive a flat sum to unwind the agreements entered into by the city in 2005-06.
The agreement was the third attempt by the banks to extract millions of dollars from the city from financial arrangements negotiated by the administration of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Judge Rhodes rejected two earlier proposals involving higher payouts, evidently concerned that they were too nakedly one-sided.
The judge called the deal an example of “the very spirit of negotiation and compromise.” In reality the agreement represents the continued looting of Detroit by financial institutions that enticed the city into complex and highly risky deals in violation of state statutes. Both Judge Rhodes and Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr have acknowledged that the two banks likely broke the law when they negotiated the swaps, which were a bet that interest rates would rise, when in fact they fell to nearly zero following the financial crisis of 2008.’
‘In 2009 the city of Detroit pledged its casino tax revenue as collateral for the swaps. Judge Rhodes said this likely violated provisions of the Michigan Gaming Act, which stipulates that casino revenue must be used for “socially beneficial” purposes.
The swaps also violated Michigan’s Revised Municipal Finance Act of 2001, which was enacted to protect cities from predatory deals. An attorney representing insurer Ambac Assurance testified during the bankruptcy hearings that “This deal should have the swap counterparties (i.e. the banks) paying the city, not the city paying the swap counterparties.”
Despite this, Judge Rhodes called the deal “entirely reasonable,” claiming a lawsuit against the banks would be too long and costly. With the agreement UBS and Bank of America have agreed to vote in favor of the restructuring plan advanced by Orr. Rhodes said the deal sets the stage for a potential “cram down,” in which a restructuring plan can be imposed on creditors.
The agreement to pay the banks follows the announcement of a deal Tuesday to pay major creditors 74 cents on the dollar for debts owed by the city. This represents a huge increase over earlier proposals, some of which were as low as 15 cents on the dollar. Among the creditors affected are wealthy bond insurers such as Assured Guaranty Ltd, Ambac Assurance Corp and National Public Finance Guaranty Corp (NPFG). In the wake of the deal bondholders, including major banks that hold Detroit debt are being told they will continue to receive “timely payment of principle in interest” in full.’
‘The proposal is contingent on the full payment by all parties signing on to the so-called Grand Bargain involving the state of Michigan, wealthy private foundations and the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). To this date the Michigan legislature has not voted approval of the money pledged by the administration of Republican Governor Rick Snyder as part of the agreement.
Orr is also proposing that city pension funds be managed by a five-person board, with two additional non-voting members. The plan requires that union representatives be excluded from the board.
The threat to exclude the unions from the management of the pension boards is meant to put pressure on the leaders of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and other unions to drop their opposition to Orr’s proposed plan of adjustment. For their part the unions are more than willing to sign off on pension cuts as long as their control of the multi-billion dollar retiree investment funds remains intact.
At the same timeg the unions are supporting a reactionary scheme promoted by wealthy creditors to force the city to sell off artwork from the Detroit Institute of Arts. The creditors say they have lined up a group of investors who have made bids on portions of the museum’s priceless collection.
The payoff to Bank of America and UBS highlights the thoroughly undemocratic character of the bankruptcy proceedings. The banks can violate the law with impunity while pensions are slashed in violation of the state constitution and the art at the DIA is held to ransom.’

True to Neo-Liberal form, save the co-conspirators Bank of America and UBS , but for the pensioners let them experience the insecurity celebrated by Alan Greenspan.

Almost Marx
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/11/detroits-bankruptcy-plan#commentForm