You have the utter gaul, you and your newspaper,to quote from an organization that colluded to hide the real extent of the indebtedness of the Greek government ? And then to trivialize the fight of the Greek government and it’s people against the predations of the whole of the floundering, in fact the utter failure of the Neo-Liberal Project, in it’s political expression of the E.U., by calling it melodrama! As if your readership didn’t have access to other sources like this:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/greek-debt-crisis-how-goldman-sachs-helped-greece-to-mask-its-true-debt-a-676634.html

Sub-headline:

Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country’s already bloated deficit.

And this :

Greece’s debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period — to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.

StephenKMackSD

“There is great uncertainty at a time when the world needs greater stability and certainty,” said Mr Lew.”

Mr. Lew and his fellow technocrats have reason to worry about an ‘accident’ that will end in an acceleration of the slow but inexorable collapse of the EU, and the Corporatist politics that is the realization of Thatcher/Reagan, with an assist from the ambition and vision of  éminence grise Jean Monnet:

Following World War II, France was in severe need of reconstruction and completely dependent on coal from Germany’s main remaining coal-mining areas, the Ruhr and Saar areas. (The German coal fields in Upper Silesia had been handed over to Polish administration by the Allies in 1945, see Oder-Neisse line.)

In 1945 Monnet proposed the Monnet Plan, also known as the “Theory of l’Engrenage” (not to be confused with the Schuman plan). It included taking control of the remaining German coal-producing areas and redirecting the production away from the German industry and into the French, thus permanently weakening Germany and raising the French economy considerably above its pre-war levels. The plan was adopted by Charles de Gaulle in early 1946.^[1]

Later that year, Monnet successfully negotiated the Blum–Byrnes agreement with the United States, which cleared France from a $2.8 billon debt (mostly World War I loans) and provided the country with an additional low-interest loan of $650 million. In return, France opened its cinemas to American movies.^[9]

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

The ‘accident’ will not be avoided, as Mr. Lew and his Neo-Liberal confederates scheme, plan and hope for- the economic cudgel is quite an effective weapon! With Spain next, and then perhaps Portugal and Ireland, who will assert their sovereignty over their economic lives, as part and parcel of the Enlightenment/Kantian Tradition of emancipation from tutelage, to foreshorten the argument.

Mr. Lew and his superior President Obama, will brook no interference from Greece, in their collective ambition, to enable not political rule by civic actors, whose allegiance/practice is the principle of the cultivation of civic republican virtue, but whose sole motive is to a Corporatism, that annuls any kind of notion or practice of democracy.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2f601ae4-060c-11e5-b676-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3bXzuUB1n

I salute you for actually having the fortitude, and what ever it took, to reply to a twitter bottom feeder! But the unanswerable question remains for you and yours: are your pro forma ‘acts of contrition’ going to bring back the dead? If so, the power of punditry has reached new levels of what? Mr. Breyman took your measure as thinker/strategist with a telling, eviscerating accuracy. And it demonstrates that Lippmann’s faith in experts/technocrats,as a bulwark against the predations of democracy, was an open door to experts like the Dulles brothers, the Bundy brothers,McNamara, Kissinger, Kirkpatrick and the rest of the sorry parade of front women/men for the American Empire. And it’s high cost in human lives, an idea/construct outside the ken of ‘the strategic thinker’, in the safety of her/his study, classroom,colloquia. Recall Herman Kahn and thinking the unthinkable? As a human being you are worthy of compassion, as we all are, because we are human. But if you are honest, did the policies you supported demonstrate that necessary idea and practice of compassion and even forgiveness, that is implied in your tweet? Your stance reminds me of portions of Kai Bird’s book on the Bundy brothers, in which he recounts stories of Robert McNamara openly crying at Washington parties, at the height of the Vietnam War. Was it guilt, self-pity,remorse or histrionics, or just an amalgam of all those emotions.
StephenKMackSD

Thank you to all my twitter homies who wanted to bring to my attention that both Mr. Friedman and Mr. Hayek believed in the ‘basic income’ as what? Concern for the poor and the downtrodden? Or just a bit of self-apologetics/propaganda, for their red in tooth and claw Social Darwinism masquerading as Economics/Science, in the war against the Keynesians and that old Devil Marx ? Isn’t it flabbergasting even in the face of the Soviet’s murderous State Capitalism/Marxism, that Marx should still be a potent voice in our ‘debates’ or rather our trading in polemics. Or that that notorious queer, according to Mr. Ferguson, Keynes should still have the power to animate our conversations.
Best regards to all,
StephenKMackSD, aka Almost Marx

The usual Economist Left fear mongering in their essay titled ‘The wild ones’, in the face of the slow motion collapse of the Neo-Liberal paradigm. That paradigm embraces both the E.U. and the euro, with Ms. Merkel as the enforcer of that political/economic orthodoxy. Expel from your thoughts that Germany was bailed out four times in the 20th Century (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953) for the particulars on Benjamin Friedman, the esteemed economic historian’s address to a collection of central bank governors, see this from The Financial Times:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html
On the Euro, as a checkmate on Keynesian interventionism,  see Gregg Palast’s informative essay titled  ‘Robert Mundell, evil genius of the euro’
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/26/robert-mundell-evil-genius-euro?CMP=share_btn_tw
Also read Yanis Varoufakis’ essay titled ‘Austerity Is the Only Deal-Breaker’ at Project Syndicate as reply and challenge to Philip Stephens essay at The Financial Times.

Varoufakis

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/greece-government-reforms-by-yanis-varoufakis-2015-05
Philip Stephens

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/61aa05b0-fe1d-11e4-9f10-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3b0VFoQ6E

But for the pièce de résistance of Left Wing fear mongering, nothing quite matches  Columbia Business School Professor Charles Calomiris on Bloomberg Surveillance:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-05-05/greeks-playing-a-crazy-game-of-chicken-calomiris

Also see this reply to Prof. Calomiris :

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/bloombergtv-prosyn-columbia_biz-cwcalomiris/

Political Observer

The usual Left Hysteria mongering from Neo-Liberal reporters/pundits at one of it’s nerve centers Bloomberg! Fear Monger in Chief ‘He can’t think straight’ @cwcalomiris followed by severe scolding of those ‘radicals’, but not just that, but as pardoners of murderers. That places the Syriza leadership outside the pale. The rhetoric of the Cold War and the New Cold War harnessed to the utterly shopworn/failed Neo-Liberal consensus, as it slowly unravels! Therefore the resort to the melodramatic framing of interminable ‘crisis’, and it’s denial. That unraveling upsets the Neo-Liberal intelligentsia and it’s reportorial minions. Consider the word intelligentsia as a descriptive, rather than a statement of some kind of fact, perhaps, in the broadest sense a term of art.
On a related matter, the ‘euro’ as Neo-Liberal instrument to checkmate the Keynesians see this essay by Gregg Palast’s essay here:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/26/robert-mundell-evil-genius-euro?CMP=share_btn_tw

‘But Mundell, a can-do Canadian-American, intended to do something about it: come up with a weapon that would blow away government rules and labor regulations. (He really hated the union plumbers who charged a bundle to move his throne.)
“It’s very hard to fire workers in Europe,” he complained. His answer: the euro.
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.’

Almost Marx

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-05-05/greeks-playing-a-crazy-game-of-chicken-calomiris

The victories of Syriza in Greece,of SNP in Scotland and Podemos in Spain has,perhaps, led the Oxbridgers at the Economist to do some preemptive thinking or just call it propagandizing, as the in order too of checkmating the ‘Left’: that amorphous self-created creature, that haunts the thoughts and economic schemes of The Neo-Liberal Thought Collective, or just call them the Neo-Hayekians for short! I will admit to ignorance of the British political context that could have given rise to this essay. But the muted political hysteria of the Economist’s writers, as advocates and apologists for the utterly failed Neo-Liberal Project, can’t ever be underestimated!

The walk-ons are of interest: Thomas Payne in the guise of his pamphlet Agrarian Justice gets what might be called a dismissive hearing. Then James Meade takes the stage for more of the same, except that his argument about the decline of employment in the computer age rings more than true: economic reality entered by the back door of that posh London office?

Then Free Market Demi-God Milton Friedman, as nod to the dubious thinking on the Right, enters stage right. Succeeded by an interlude of cold hard facts and figures: Economic Science forgets it’s origins, as the companion volume to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and it’s beginnings as Political Economy. Perhaps discarded as a sign that science trumps morality/ethics?   After all this, and more, the conclusion is that The Basic Income is unworkable. Don’t call it Economic Strum und Drang, although it shares something like the Romantic sensibility’s faith in it’s intuitions, the Economist writers just gussied it up as Science.

Almost Marx   

The New Cold War is in full swing, so the academically qualified apologists for this re-engineered recrudescence  will come forward, as members in good standing of the National Security States of the E.U. to quietly supply ‘reasons’. And to effect a bit of Russia bashing, in the process of fueling The New Cold War, as a perfectly legitimate response to Russia’s self-serving historical blindness and recalcitrance.  Ignoring this from IISS on Obama’s discarding of the Bush missile shield from 2009:

Click to access 51-6-02-Fitzpatrick.pdf

Or this excerpt from Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_missile_defense_complex_in_Poland
‘EIS was cancelled in 2009 and subsequently replaced with a phased plan—the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System, which will include SM-3 Block IIA interceptors to be positioned in Poland from 2018.’
Or this from the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6720153.stm

Titled: Q&A on Missile Defence
All of this is very confusing , yet we can discern a pattern of a more technically sophisticated strategy of encirclement or at the least something that functions in it’s stead.
But we do as readers have the Ukrainian Coup as incontrovertible evidence of American/EU/NATO political provocation/meddling although there are stronger words for this subversion!
And then this:

Pro-Russian Hackers Expose U.S. Military Contractor Activity in Ukraine

With the title:
‘Pro-Russian Hackers Expose U.S. Military Contractor Activity in Ukraine
The hactivist group ‘CyberBerkut’ has been relentlessly leaking and stealing documents from the Ukranian government and military allies’
Read more at http://observer.com/2015/03/pro-russian-hackers-expose-u-s-military-contractor-activity-in-ukraine/#ixzz3b66qJjMu
Or this revelatory essay at The New Republic:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121880/new-laws-ukraine-make-it-illegal-bring-its-ugly-past
‘ The new laws in Ukraine go further. Their aim is to impose a sharp break between present-day Ukraine and its entire Soviet past, now deemed criminal. As they foreground a questionable story of ethnic Ukrainians who throughout their history fought Russian domination, these initiatives also whitewash dark areas of the country’s past.’
Mr. Clark does a workman like job supplying ‘reasons’, yet one can fully understand the Russian position as a rational, reasonable response to US/EU/NATO aggression on the installment plan! Even with the evocative historical garnish Mr. Clark’s essays qualifies as propaganda!

Political Observer

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/24/russia-nato-expansion-memory-grievances

What is needed here is an exercise in honesty! Is or was Mr. Hellbeck a supporter of the Coup Government like BHL, Timothy Snyder and the his propaganda in the New York Review of Books, Anne Applebaum, Black Widow Victoria Nuland and her confederate Amb. Pyatt? Or R2P zealot Samantha Power? The list of rationalizers/apologists for the Coup, who fostered the notion of Freedom Fighters rather than Nazis, has eventuated in Poroshenko, as successor to ‘Yats’, and this law  governing ‘historical memory’ ! The keening and breast beating has begun with Mr. Hellbeck! The Coup another example of American/EU/NATO murderous political adventurism, that has a denouement in this ‘law’ that exposes the actuality of what President Obama, and his collection of Neo-Con/R2P harpies have wrought in the name of ‘Freedom’!

Just a reminder:

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-05-06-newsitem-en.html

Ukraine: Thinking together

Kyiv, 15-19 May 2014

‘ Under the heading “Ukraine: Thinking together” an international group of intellectuals will gather in Kyiv to demonstrate solidarity, meet their Ukrainian counterparts, and carry out a broad public discussion about the meaning of Ukrainian pluralism for the future of Europe, Russia, and the world. The discussions, taking place from 15 to 19 May, will feature some of Europe’s, America’s, Russia’s and Ukraine’s most interesting opinion makers and intellectuals, including Bernard-Henri Lévy, Slavenka Drakulic, Timothy Snyder, Mustafa Nayem, Serhii Leshchenko, Agnieszka Holland, Adam Michnik, Serhii Zhadan, Ivan Krastev, Wolf Biermann, Karl Schlögel and Bernard Kouchner.’

StephenKMackSD

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121880/new-laws-ukraine-make-it-illegal-bring-its-ugly-past?utm_content=buffer72687&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Mr. Stephens in his essay at The Financial Times titled ‘How politics will seal the fate of Greece’ seeks to explore the ‘political’ dimension of the Greek conundrum. The question might be posed as to how successful Mr. Stephens is  in his examination of that political dimension? First one might just observe that at The Economist of May 9,2015 , the FT’s sister publication, an essay was published by the title of ‘The sorry saga of Syriza’ with a sub-headline that tells the whole of Economist’s story: ‘In its first hundred days Greece’s government has dismally failed. A crunch looms’. Now in this essay there is some necessary scene setting at the Philhellenism exhibition at the B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation in Athens, with an all important mournful quote from Dimitra Varkarakis about the sad  state of Greek/German relations that has implications for the whole of Europe. Those Oxbridgers are nothing if not steeped in the  classics as re-imagined by generations of British Dons. The anonymous author takes the name of Charlemagne , the blog’s title. In the essay Charlemagne charges that Syriza’s  leadership are Coffee House Marxists who are incompetent governors and are wearing ideological blinkers . The concluding paragraph , awash in political melodrama, is worth quoting in full:

In almost every way, Syriza has brought the opposite of what it promised. It vowed an end to depression in Greece. Instead, growth has slumped. It pledged to end austerity politics in Europe, but has done more to embolden its advocates than any German could have hoped. It promised to jettison the bad habits of old parties, and seems instead to have acquired them. Back at the Athens museum, perusing a catalogue of his Philhellenic collection, Mr Varkarakis is downbeat. “Two hundred years ago, everyone loved Greece,” he says. “Now…” His voice trails off.

What then Of Mr. Stephens politics ‘that will seal the fate of Greece’? The sub-headline answers that question, cannily embedded in New Cold War rhetoric: ‘Can Europe really allow Athens to fall into the arms of Moscow?’ Mr. Stephens contribution to the Greek Conundrum is to call Syriza leadership ‘ bungling amateurs’, ‘ preening’, ‘pirouetting’,  ‘undergraduate Marxists’, and even hints at narcissism. Yet Mr. Stephens reserves his withering contempt for the ‘real hardliners’ in Madrid, Lisbon and Dublin, forgetting the triumph of SNP in the British elections.  SNP surely qualifies as ‘hardliners’ and ‘populist’,  and just as subversive of the E.U. and by implication the IMF and it’s prescription of Austerity.  The Neo-Liberalism that has ruled the politics of the West since the rise of  Thatcher and Reagan is now under serious threat, from the ‘hardliners’ and ‘populists’, not to speak of social democratic intellectuals like Piketty, Stiglitz and Krugman or the power of Occupy Wall Street that utterly changed the economic conversation.

Almost Marx