StephenKMackSD's Blog

A ‘Trade Deal’ that is a complete secret, it is a classified document and the only things we know about it are from leaks. But we do know that it’s known provisions surrender our ability to call ourselves a democracy,a nation of laws, that we make to govern ourselves. That we should sacrifice our sovereignty for an unknown, that is supposed to give us some trade advantage, in theory, is too much. If the president is interested in a true debate then let him publish the agreement, so we as citizens may review all of it’s provisions and have a debate about the consequences of a yes or a no vote. It’s really very simple, does the president have a demonstrable faith in our democracy or not?
The Economist gives the game away with the headline ‘Toying with a poorer world’ and it’s sub headline, ‘A Democratic revolt exposes a party deeply divided by foreign trade’, not speak of the opening paragraph:

A SEEMINGLY arcane dispute about how to strengthen America’s hand in foreign trade talks—which for 24 hours this week saw Senate Democrats block debate on a negotiating tool sought by Barack Obama—has exposed just how deeply the Democratic Party is divided by global commerce, and whether it is a threat or an opportunity for American workers.

The Congress is not divided about ‘global commerce’ but about secrecy, where transparency and plain speaking is demanded,nothing that could be called ‘seemingly arcane’, but can rightly be called un-reflective political conformity in the name of ‘Trade’! The rest of the essay is larded with the usual Economist ‘Left Wing’ obsession: Senator Warren is a New Deal Democrat! The opposition to this ‘trade deal’ crosses Party lines because Americans have a deep animus toward what looks like, what is, a complete surrender of our deeply held belief and practice of free and open debate to Presidential claims.
Political Observer

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21651168-democratic-revolt-exposes-party-deeply-divided-foreign-trade-toying-poorer-world

Peter Shrank’s cartoon sets the tone for the whole of this scalding polemical essay titled ‘The sorry saga of Syriza’ on the first hundred days of Syriza, by my almost favorite Oxbridgers. But,Tony Blair, Capitalist Dynamo, wins hands down! Mr. Shrank pictures prime minister Alexis Tsipras as Achilles awkwardly shooting himself in the foot with a bow and arrow: call it a tortured visual metaphor and a perfect partner to the essay that casts the current Greek government in the role of Coffee House Marxists i.e. naive, even incompetent political arrivistes. Yet doesn’t one hundred days in power seem like what it is, a premature occasion for a postmortem, or to engage in plain speaking, ideological warfare. As  Syriza is the Left Wing Devil of the moment, for The Economist and her sister publication The Financial Times. For confirmation of my statement, see this news story by Kerin Hope titled ‘Syriza rebels call for ‘rupture’ with Greece’s creditors’, this ‘news story’ resorts to a full blown hysteria mongering, unlike the more cautious, even the almost deliberative writers at The Economist.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2de54280-fd78-11e4-9e96-00144feabdc0.html?hubRefSrc=twitter#lf-content=133099565:313688398

Notice how this essay is framed by classical allusions, first the crude political cartoon of Mr. Schrank ,quoting from the Iliad, and then the mention of the “Philhellenism” exhibit at B. & M. Theocharakis Foundation in Athens. A mournful quotation from Dimitra Varkarakis, who with her husband owns the articles on exhibit, doesn’t raise any kind of doubt in the readers mind, as to Mrs. Varkarakis’ political sympathies? Syriza won a 36.6% share of the vote. One might just conjecture that the owners of an art collection weren’t voting for Syriza!

Democratic Socialist

In his essay, titled The pivot to America,  in the form of a review of two books: The Obama Doctrine: America’s Grand Strategy Today by Colin Dueck and Super Power: Three Choices for  America’s Role in the World by Ian Bremmer, Mr. Luce departs from his usual procedure of using Republican rhetoric that he has moderated/reshaped for the respectable bourgeois readers of the F.T.  Dueck is an assistant professor at George Mason University and so his audience  is mostly academic, while Bremmer is a peddler of his expertise as president of the Eurasia Group a ‘global risk consultancy’. To take the measure of Mr. Bremmer’s book Luce offers these thumb-nailed choices: Independent America, Moneyball America and Indispensable American.This sort of commentary has it’s place on ESPN.Perhaps that is the audience Mr. Bremmer is courting? Good public relations is the key to sales success!

Luce posits that  a ‘retrenchment overseas’ has gone too far, as Obama has focused on ‘domestic renewal’. No empirical evidence for these two assertion is offered, as they are an even more subtle instance of Mr. Luce’s penchant for Republican/Neo-Conservative re-framing. As observers of the as yet to be congressionally approved war on ISIS , of the Drone Program and the political adventurism of the Ukrainian Coup and the the birth of The New Cold War, with Putin as the New Stalin, not to speak of the classified TPP treaty, this idea of ‘retrenchment overseas’ looks dubious. Perhaps Mr. Luce and his sub rosa allies, the Republicans, will not be satisfied until a war with Iran is a fact, rather than a devout wish!

Of ‘domestic renewal’ I see no evidence! President Obama has ruled as a moderate conservative: the exercise of a timid Neo-Liberalism, in answer to the more robust iterations as exercised by Clinton and Bush II ,and the watershed of that sixteen year reign of the Free Market, in the market collapse of 2008, and the faltering ‘recovery’ as a fact of the last eight years. What ever happened to that article of faith, the self-regulating Market?

What remains absent from the Luce essay is any mention of the president’s favorite ‘philosopher’ Reinhold Niebuhr and his Christian Realism, or the cautionary tale of Obama’s first term, Gordon M. Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to the War in Vietnam. A ‘philosopher’ and a book are more meaningful that the two books under review, that may offer some insights into Obama. But the question remains what animates Obama in policy terms?  Mr. Luce, true to form, only offers Foreign Policy Chatter.

Political Observer

Mr. Alan Beattie does his best to animate his near hysterical tone, in his defense of TPP, with anti-populist rhetoric: populism equals democracy. This is surly a reach, as we in America say!  Aimed at a readership that thinks that this is a political truism, and for the rest of us just another example of what? class prejudice, the rhetoric of the Free Market in collapse? An example of the ‘makes’ and the ‘takers’ in the world view of pseudo-Hayekians or in vulgar parlance the  acolytes of  Ms. Rand?

For the technocratic view see Mr. Jeremy Shapiro’s obsequious essay at the Brookings web site:

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-chaos/posts/2015/05/12-trade-promotion-authority-tpp-shapiro?cid=00900015020089101US0001-05141

See my comment on Mr. Shapiro’s essay here:

https://stephenkmacksd.wordpress.com/2015/05/14/mr-jeremy-shapiro-of-brookings-supports-the-tpp-a-comment-by-political-observer/

The Think Tank denizens are eternal job seekers, that curry favor with the powerful in hopes of finding work within government. A plumb position as an adviser to a President is not just desirable, but key to policy advancement. Does that sound cynical?

The TPP is secret, completely classified except for some revelatory leaks, so how might a conscientious member of congress cast an informed, intelligent vote? I hate to sound like the cynic, mentioned above, but this is not about ‘tribes’ but about party loyalty and political conformity. And Sen. Warren’s challenge to the President is most welcome in this context. Mr. Beattie needs to be reminded, that Sen. Warren is the voice of the politics of the New Deal, long since discarded by the New Democrats, as a homage to the political success of Ronald Reagan, and the political ambition of Bill Clinton.

The President’s slogan in his first campaign was ‘Hope and Change’ but what we got was Al Gore, a feckless Neo-Liberal, who is more than deserving of Sen. Warren’s unrelenting critique! And a no vote in Congress for this surrender of political/legal autonomy. One wonders where the Libertarians are on this issue: Ron and Rand Paul? I would welcome some comments from readers on this issue.

Political Observer

Mr. Shapiro does his very best to articulate his support, and the support of his fellows, at Brookings,  and most importantly, to curry the favor of President Obama, with his essay on the TPP Treaty.

At Brookings, we like to think big and our jobs don’t require the support of specific Congressional districts, so we tend to side with presidents on trade deals. Of course, there is broad recognition that trade liberalization creates winners and losers, but the overall economic benefits outweigh the cost. This implies a focus on creating a safety net for displaced workers can help make up for the losses, but broad support for the deal. Indeed, while Brookings as a whole never takes institutional positions, there is considerably more agreement among the individual Brookings experts on the value of trade deals such as TPP than on most issues.

Walter Lippmann’s misplaced faith in a technocratic elite, as a political buffer against the predations of democracy, is demonstrated with absolute clarity in this statement by Mr. Shapiro. The notion and practice of Constitutional checks and balances, not to speak of the advise and consent role of Congress, has also been lost in Mr. Shapiro’s rhetorical genuflection to presidential power! How can any member of either congressional house vote intelligently on a classified document/treaty? Unless, like Mr. Shapiro, it is an act of political faith driven by an abject political conformity. He is speaking for the foundation itself in his support for TPP. One can only wonder at the ‘faith’ Mr. Shapiro places in the president. The agreement is a classified document, but we do have leaks and speculation as to the effects of this treaty, yet:

All of this demonstrates that the main issue for our experts is how to square the extremely difficult domestic politics of the issue with the TPP’s desirable geopolitical ambitions and economic effects. And it reflects a general worry at Brookings and beyond, that domestic political disputes in the United States are increasingly hobbling American efforts to respond to the dramatic geopolitical challenges of the day.

Have we yet to witness the end of the continuing exercise of the bad faith of Neo-Liberals, or their pandering to the powerful ? Should this surprise? As they are the eternal job seekers, and proximity to power is a continuing temptation: recall Mr. Cass Sunstein, among many others? Even in the face of the seventh year of the dismal watershed of the economic collapse of 2008?  To our great misfortune the rise of the Think Tank and it’s function as the font of political propaganda continues unabated.

Political Observer

In the world of Mr. Ferguson, Keynes is always ‘The Problem’. Mr. Ferguson has a Keynes fixation:a personal prejudice/antipathy, and as a leading apologist for the current economic theology! Mr. Ferguson’s always hectoring tone is welcome to the apologists for that collection of floundering revelations. Not to speak of his penchant for stirring up controversy,and engaging his perceived antagonists in debate.  But the widening fissure in Neo-Liberalism’s phalanx is demonstrated by the victory of SNP in Scotland. It may not appear momentous, but the Tories and New Labor are bound to continue in the Austerity groove until Britain is ensconced at the very bottom of the economic ditch! Not to speak of the auction of Britain’s civic assets, to corporations with no interest in it’s fellow citizens, but ruled by the profit motive alone.

Another Ferguson fixation is with Keynesian Paul Krugman: the real target of this episode of Ferguson’s antipathy! (One can be sure that Mr. Krugman will have a spirited reply to Mr. Ferguson’s polemic, in a future column.) All this backed up by two paragraphs of  winning statistical data that puts the intellectual charlatanry of Krugman in proper perspective? All the evidence that Mr. Ferguson presents to the reader, which is quite persuasive, even shorn of the palpable Ferguson animus.  Yet the SNP, whose platform is Anti-Austerity won  a vast majority of Scotland’s votes. How can the Austerity Triumphalism of Mr. Ferguson be made compatible with this overwhelming vote for SNP, given the evidence presented by Mr. Ferguson? That and other questions await answers that Mr. Ferguson can as yet provide.

Democratic Socialist

Where else but The National Interest, home of the self-infatuated and verbose Francis Fukuyama, would you find an essay by David Rieff titled France’s Grand Illusion? Mr. Rieff manages to execute the historical/literary meander never letting the practice of brevity get in his way. He tries the patience of the reader!

Some selected quotes form the Rieff essay:

Has this anti-Zionism morphed into anti-Semitism in immigrant communities in France, as it has throughout Europe? Unquestionably.

If Mr. Netanyahu presents himself as spokesman for world Jewry, what might be the consequences of such an oft repeated assertion?

On the Washington address to joint session of Congress:

Netanyahu, in defending the visit, has indicated that he is coming to Congress to speak as the representative of the “entire Jewish people.” American Jews are largely appalled by the notion that Netanyahu, or any other Israeli politician — one that we did not elect and do not choose to be represented by — claims to speak for us.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/netanyahu-does-not-speak-for-all-american-jews-commentary/2015/02/20/9c456ecc-b943-11e4-bc30-a4e75503948a_story.html

On the Copenhagen attack:

“Jews have been murdered again on European soil only because they were Jews,” Mr. Netanyahu said Sunday in Jerusalem. “Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country, but we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home,” he added.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/16/world/middleeast/netanyahu-urges-mass-immigration-of-jews-from-europe.html

On the following quote one might make the same assertion about Israel, with some minor adjustments :

In reality, it is not so much that things are actually worse in France—and even with regard to the Muslim immigrant question, one can plausibly argue that despite Charlie Hebdo, it remains considerably better in France than in the United Kingdom—but rather that France’s acute obsession with its own identity has morphed from the dialectical (France as compared with other countries) to the autarchic (France turned inward on itself). Geoffrey Wheatcroft offered an apt encapsulation of this in an essay provocatively titled “Liberté, Fraternité, Morosité.” “Not long ago,” he wrote, “France had a hang-up about America. Now, France has a hang-up about France.”

The fundamental problems of France are not mainly the product of cultural capitulation but rather the result of the transformations of the world economy that make any return to Finkielkraut’s beloved cultural and moral status quo ante a total impossibility.

The Neo-Liberal model/Globalization is in free fall i.e. abject failure which Mr Reiff fails to confront. As an American he proffers no ‘fix’ for American woes, yet feels free to diagnose the French Malady, with an ease that is what? All uttered with a self-congratulation he criticizes in others. Call his whole approach arrogant bordering on the hubristic! He becomes prescriptive, one wonders about the how of it?

How would teaching immigrant kids about the greatness of Racine and Corneille have any effect on any of these questions?

One might just conjecture that a history that includes both Racine and Corneille and an honest confrontation with France’s dismal colonial history: a history that includes the failure to integrate immigrants from the Maghreb, as an integral part of the learning experience for all students, might be a beginning point!

Political Observer

It’s as if Herman Kahn had never died. The mild mannered thinker of the unthinkable reappears as the cartoonisly bellicose academic Tom Nichols.? Or could it be Dr. Strangelove, or one of the other hawkish characters in Kubrick’s classic satire?

All that New Cold War swagger goes  to waste on those of us who lived through the last Cold War, as we recall some of it’s hold overs like Strobe Talbott , Russia Hand, at Brookings. Call the New Cold War a creature of  NATO expansionism as the instrument of the waning power of the American Empire, and the complete failure of a benighted Neo-Liberalism. The doomsayers, like Niall Ferguson, opine that the precipitous rise of China is the end of western hegemony, even with all our sophisticated weaponry. America is in hock to China! Our civic order/life is in tatters. Yet Mr. Nichols prattles on about the Russians like it was 1950, but not quite.

Political Observer

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/russias-supersonic-tu-160-bomber-back-should-america-worry-12787

Ah! Is there nothing more satisfying that reading BHL as he builds his case against the Hebdo Dissenters! It isn’t as if they have some how broken the rules of democratic society by dissenting? Or is that just the problem? Is dissenting from the deeply held political orthodoxy, as articulated by BHL, the central matter?

Also, is it hard to perceive that Hebdo and the Le Pens share a politics of demonization, against a small minority of former colonial subjects, and their children? The Le Pens in direct political attack against immigrants, and Hebdo using the very potent symbol of The Prophet as the means of attack on this minority, this ‘otherness’ in the midst of the authentically French. Xenophobia and Islamophobia express the same fear of otherness, yet BHL leaves this vexing problematic out, as it interferes with his extensive public scolding of the dissidents.

Almost Marx

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/04/the-pen-gala-and-the-gall-of-the-boycott.html

There is a lot of real estate between Singapore and France! Perhaps, that is why it was so easy for J.F. to write his dissent on the PEN dissenters?
Or is it very easy to see that Charlie Hebdo’s attack on Muslims and the Prophet was/is a politically motivated attack on an un-assimilated, vulnerable minority population inside the French nation? Made up of former inhabitants and their children, of their former colonies. How many generations will full assimilation take? You could easily view Hebdo as a retrograde defense of France’s civilizing mission, of it’s cultural hubris. The Hebdo methodology riffs on demonization and defamation: the demeaning cartoons of the Prophet acting as stand-in for that vulnerable population, and in a politically perverse way echoing the Le Pen’s! Or does that thought strain irony to the point of fracture?  All this as the prelude to politically charged violence against the ‘other’ in our midst? Or have we learned nothing from the last bloody Century worthy of inconvenient recall?

Political Observer