Instead of wasting your time reading Mr. Isquith’s ‘Liberal’ apologetics for Reagan, go to The American Conservative and read Daniel Larison’s The Perils of Reaganolatry!

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-perils-of-reaganolatry/

‘The trouble for the GOP isn’t just that younger voters don’t remember Reagan, but that most of them have fairly clear memories of the last administration and/or the current Republican leadership. Presidential candidates can talk about Reagan all they like, but it won’t change the fact that for most people that became politically engaged over the last fifteen years Republican governance has a horrible reputation of incompetence and recklessness. Republican candidates almost have to fall back on praising someone who hasn’t been in office in a quarter century, since for most of the time since then their party has become synonymous with failed and disastrous policies.’

Reagan opened his 1980 campaign at the Nashoba County Fair just miles from where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered.

Here from Wiki is the entry on his speech:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan%27s_Neshoba_County_Fair_%22states%27_rights%22_speech

And for the full transcript of this moral/political obscenity the Nashoba Democrat provides a full transcript :

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

‘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.’

What does Reagan’s ‘I believe in States Rights’ have in common with FDR’s  ‘I welcome your hatred’? Reagan was the natural inheritor of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, his appointment of  Rehnquist to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Scalia as Associate Justice is prima facie evidence of that fact. Also Reagan marks the ascent of the Neo-Liberal Dogma, Thatcher was his British ally: we now live in the collapse of that Dogma!

Political Observer

If you can tolerate Bruce Bawer’s almost insufferable attack on the ‘decadence of the present’, surely an idea freighted with political/cultural animus born of a reactionary politics, his seeming attack on scholarship in the age of the decline of print, accompanied by an unbecoming cynicism: considering these impediments, in the early parts of his essay, you might enjoy his look at Henry James through his corresondence, though be forewarned that Mr. Brawer lacks candor when it comes to Mr. James’ sexuality, and his closetedness in relation to his status as spectator rather than participant in life, demonstrated in his literary output. Should James’ choice of a model for his heroines in Minnie Temple be instructive? This to consider the thought – to foreshorten that complex of personality and it relation to that literary output.
If you read just the beginning of William and Henry James Selected Letters published by the University of Virginia Press edited by Skrupskelis,Berkeley and McDermott you find one of the main topics discussed in the early letters in this collection, besides a complex family life, is the subject of constipation, each brother seemed to spend at least some of the space of each letter on this compelling subject.
American Litterateur
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/A-sufferable-snob-8177#footnote-1405-1-backlink

Dear Rep. Peters,

Thank you for your prompt e mail response to my phone call to your office of last week, regarding the proposed secret TPP and it’s twin Fast Track Authority. One of the many questions a voter might ask to a congressional representative would be: how can anyone vote intelligently on this Fast Track Authority when the law itself, the TPP, remains a secret? If you as a legislator wish to read it, you are not allowed to takes notes or even to discuss what you have read with your constituency, in fact you are subject to criminal sanction, if you do so openly. One marvels at the double think that inheres in the very notion of ‘secret legislation’ ! But given the utter failure of NAFTA to deliver on it’s much anticipated and celebrated benefits, should I be surprised at your carefully worded reply, to my statement to your staff member that I don’t support Fast Track or TPP? That failure renders Mr. Ross Poirot prescient rather than as a political spoiler/crank!

The very notion of ‘secret legislation’ is an utter betrayal of republican principal and practice and is anathema, except to the apologists for the predations of the American National Security State, as a model of Corporatism, and it’s political actors, whose loyalty is not to the the notion and practice of the cultivation of civic republican virtue, but to demonstrably bankrupt idea and practice of the ‘Free Market’.

StephenKMackSD

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/25/practical-vision-more-equal-society/

‘Toward a New Radical Reformism

Anthony Atkinson occupies a unique place among economists. During the past half-century, in defiance of prevailing trends, he managed to place the question of inequality at the center of his work while demonstrating that economics is first and foremost a social and moral science. In his new book, Inequality: What Can Be Done?—more personal than his previous ones and wholly focused on a plan of action—he provides us with the broad outlines of a new radical reformism.’

 ‘…while demonstrating that economics is first and foremost a social and moral science.’

The Economist supplies Western propaganda as answer to Putin Propaganda? The New Cold War with Putin as The New Stalin has reached the point of no return. Are we continually ruled by manufactured crises?
What should we readers think of Poroshenko’s new laws?
Reported on here:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/06/ukraine-anti-communist-laws-stir-controversy-150601054437645.html
Under the headline:
‘Ukraine’s ‘anti-communist laws’ stir controversy
A raft of laws passed recently praise far-right groups that fought in WWII and ban the display of Soviet symbols’
Or here at a news source bound to rankle Economist readers:
http://rt.com/news/209563-ukraine-foreigners-government-posts/
Under the headline :
‘Poroshenko aims to change laws to allow foreigners into Ukrainian govt’
Or this from Russia Insider/Financial Times:
‘http://russia-insider.com/ru/ukraine_business/2015/01/27/2781
Under this headline etc.:
‘Kiev Begs IMF for More Money
The IMF has been reluctant to increase its own $17bn commitment, arguing that it has been carrying a disproportionate financial burden. It has been trying instead to muster new money from other international donors.  Why doesn’t Soros just write a check?’
Add this from the FT by Larry Summers:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ff3634fc-fa44-11e4-a41c-00144feab7de.html#axzz3cBxHe74N
Under the headline:
‘Reform-minded Ukraine merits debt reduction’
To The Economist editors: Do better than this tired recitation of the shopworn Party Line on Putin i.e. apologetics for US/NATO/EU political adventurism as the in order too of placing ABM’s at the border of Ukraine/Russia. And the imposition of Austerity in Ukraine: the advancement of the Neo-Liberal nightmare is ‘The Free Market’.
Political Observer

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21652339-vladimir-putin-concocts-new-story-ukraine-leaving-west-wondering-what-he-up

A damming bill of attainder! It reads like a revised script laid down by The Project for a New American Century. Or even an essay written by Neo-Imperial wunderkind Niall Ferguson, with the heavy hand of an editor, to excise the neologisms and to moderate the preening self-congratulatory tone.
Although another possibility would be Senator Tom Cotton as ghostwriter, again carefully edited. The invasion of Iraq was the beginning of endless war in the ‘Middle East’ that’s what the Neo-Cons envisioned and that is what we are stuck with, if we continue.  The basic philosophy of these thinkers is to create and sustain an exploitable chaos, and in that they have succeeded. The Neo-Con is enamored of war and bloodshed as long as it is not their own: Leo Strauss the paradigmatic intellectual.

What The Economist offers in this essay is a lengthy description of the ‘problem’ and some, not even prescriptions, but a dubious call for re-evaluation and action. Some kind of action in answer to the Obama passivity, as again diagnosed by the author/authors: this essay is an exercise of writing by committee. All of this framed by the comments , critiques of Foreign Policy technocrats, if not the authors of the failed policies of the past, then their students.

Political Observer

The ‘ clientelist and corrupt bureaucracy’ that Mr. Stephens refers to in his essay are the very people that conspired with Goldman Sachs to hide the true extent of Greek indebtedness, as the in order to of more debt! This takes irony and the Neo-Liberal screeching about the ‘Greek Crisis’ to new levels of moralizing pretentiousness, not to speak of utter political desperation: the collapse of the EU waits in the wings accompanied by Podemos. Consider the what and the where of the next European anti-austerity Party! The specter of those parties  keeps the whole of the editorial phalanx of The Financial Times relentlessly tapping at their keyboards!

One of the other major questions is who owns the Greek debt? We have this Greek per-election report from Bloomberg:

Click to access MS_Greece_WhoHurts.pdf

Or this February 2, 2015 from Bloomberg:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-02/greece-seeks-third-debt-restructuring-who-s-on-the-hook-

With Germany being bailed out four times in the 20th century as reported by Jillian Tett at the FT :

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

As the debt is held by other Europeans, and with Germany, Ms. Merkel being it’s titular leader- the reluctance of one of the beneficiaries of European economic largess bespeaks an advanced case of hubris, or just the contempt of the leader of the Virtuous Norther Tier against the Profligate Southern Tier: the power of this deeply held prejudice of moral superiority is the poison that will destroy Monnet’s Grand Idea, rooted in a firm belief in the marriage of technocracy and bureaucracy, with the Euro as check against Keynesian interventionism:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/26/robert-mundell-evil-genius-euro?CMP=share_btn_tw

The euro would really do its work when crises hit, Mundell explained. Removing a government’s control over currency would prevent nasty little elected officials from using Keynesian monetary and fiscal juice to pull a nation out of recession.

“It puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians,” he said. “[And] without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business.”

He cited labor laws, environmental regulations and, of course, taxes. All would be flushed away by the euro. Democracy would not be allowed to interfere with the marketplace – or the plumbing. As another Nobelist, Paul Krugman, notes, the creation of the eurozone violated the basic economic rule known as “optimum currency area”. This was a rule devised by Bob Mundell. That doesn’t bother Mundell. For him, the euro wasn’t about turning Europe into a powerful, unified economic unit. It was about Reagan and Thatcher.

Was Monnet’s conception and early realization of the EU Neo-Liberalism avant la lettre? Or simply it’s precursor? Certainly two tantalizing questions that won’t be asked by the writer at The Financial Times!

Almost Marx

‘A senior Western diplomat told The Daily Beast’, ‘one European leader replied’,’Video footage, purportedly shot in Petrovsky today’,’Boasts by separatists’: We’re in familiar Daily Beast territory pioneered by the once troika of Lake/Rogen/Kirchick! The anonymous sources, until we arrive at ‘Ukraine’s military spokesman Andriy Lysenko’ and ‘His colleague, Markiyan Lubkivsky’: call these last two what they are political allies of Mr. Weiss, and members of the Coup Government.
On stage next is ‘The “defense minister” of the separatist “Donetsk People’s Republic,” Vladimir Kononov’ the bad guy in this badly constructed Weiss New Cold War Melodrama. As a dramaturge Mr. Weiss lacks the necessary talent to bring off his lengthy reports on skirmishes that  appear in the narrative attributed to Kononov? Why would any ‘reporter’, Mr. Weiss in particular, take the word of “defense minister” of the separatists? Or has Mr. Weiss’ narrative switched gears? Sources Novosti Donbassa and James Miller?
After this we get a rather long, complex discussion on military strategy in the Ukraine by this ‘reporter’ who sounds more like a partisan. Add a bit of Putin as The New Stalin followed by more partisan speculation and military strategizing: this military component of his argument is where Mr. Weiss demonstrates his real  sophistication and knowledge, and it hard to argue with his intelligence and ability,even if one dissents of his politics/ideology. But then in the final paragraph he badly stumbles over a maladroitly exercised speculation in the mode of Freud/Lucan that seems- it speaks for itself in regards to his perception of and psychoanalysis of Putin:

‘His foreign policy has ever been one of Freudian projections and double-binds. He accuses his opponents of the sins and crimes of which he himself is guilty, then fashions a trap for them whereby they lose whatever move they make. Arm Ukraine? Do that and we’ll escalate the war. Don’t arm Ukraine? We’ll escalate anyway. Abide by Minsk? We’ll violate it and blame you for breaking it. Break Minsk? Even better!’

StephenKMackSD
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/03/can-anyone-stop-putin-s-new-blitz.html

I read Herzog when it came out in paperback from Bantam or Dell, I forget which, in 1965. Those were the days when corner liquor stores had paperback books for sale, it was another age, perhaps, when even drunks had intellectual aspirations?
What struck me at age twenty was that the book was utterly boring. His obsession with writing letters to the great philosophers, his Japanese mistress and part of the book being in French. What an utter waste of time! At the same time I read Mailer’s An American Dream, call this vile, self-indulgent, imitation Hemingway.
Last year I read Ravelstein, the roman a clef of Allen Bloom’s life, and it was the same ‘novel’ as Herzog, except it was Chick as the main character, who describes his long relationship with Ravelstein, and thankfully had given up writing letters to his imaginary rivals!
In the interim I had read War and Peace,Les Misérables, The Count of Monte Cristo, and the Musketeer books, Life and Fate,The Yawning Heights, August 1914(The Red Wheel), Swann’s Way almost all of Vidal and Calvino. All of which had more life,more zest than the always self-obsessed, and usually sour Mr. Bellow, could hope to muster. Even Mr. Roth’s exercise in political paranoia,  The Plot Against America, manages to garner the reader’s admiration, even affection, for it’s lead character a young and winning Philip Roth.
Reading Bellow reminds me of reading The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson, a spiritually suffocating re-visit to 1950’s America, and the economic aspirations/delusions of the children of the Depression era, as adults living,striving in post WWII America: the era of The Organization Man. Bellow manages the dingy depressing grey with certain authority, not to mention the ennui producing self-obsessions of his authorial alter egos.

American Littérateur

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21652253-making-20th-century-american-master-early-days-yet

After Katie Martin’s comments on the Greek soap opera, of June 1, 2015 on fastFT here:

http://www.ft.com/intl/fastft/331801

What can we think of a newspaper that quotes one of the conspirators involved in the cover up of the true extent of Greek indebtedness, Goldman Sachs, on the Greek Crisis?

Mr. Mackintosh provides the answer with, at first ,some statistical data that acts as garnish, nothing more, to this snide and contemptuous politicized repetition of that, by now, shopworn old canard of the Lazy Southern Tier vs the Virtuous Northern Tier. Add to this the notion of Greek Myths, that makes a heady brew of Neo-Liberal apologetics carefully, but unsophisticatedly confected by an employee who knows the Party Line by heart.

Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f8ca9d56-0877-11e5-b38c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3buNZNsbG