StephenKMackSD's Blog

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

Philip Stephens, Gideon Rachman, Ramzy Mardini and Edward Luce express in varying tonalities, in The Financial Times over the last few weeks, the political schizophrenia of the moment: in response to the latest fear mongering about ISIL, their murderous brutality, and a gift for enacting grisly political theater. Terror and fear their most potent weapons. That the Western Media and imperial governments have found useful in reviving ‘The War on Terror’. President Obama has reluctantly admitted that the Menendez/Feinstein/Clinton coterie is correct, and/or that he was wrong, misinformed by bad intelligence?
The political destiny of the American Empire is perpetual war to defend ‘Western Values’ i.e. keep the flow of oil and defend our allies/clients, in their order of importance: apartheid Israel, Wahhabi Saudi Arabia etc., etc.

Here is a tantalizing  excerpt of Mr. Juan Cole’s September 11, 2014 essay titled ‘Obama’s ISIL Actions are Defensive, Despite Rhetoric of going on Offense’ that sounds notes not even considered by the The Financial Times collection of policy scribblers, and quite refreshing is his voice, his arguments!

‘Analysts will focus on his four-step program of fighting ISIL, but it is in the president’s analogies to his present battle that we find clues to what he really expects to happen. He says that this is not a war as Iraq and Afghanistan were wars, i.e. with the commitment of several divisions of conventional US ground troops. He cautioned:

“But I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil. This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground. This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.”

Invoking Yemen and Somalia is a signal of minimalism in every way. On MSNBC, veteran, experienced and brilliant correspondent Richard Engel took apart this analogy. He pointed out that Yemen and Somalia are holding actions but that in Iraq the US and its allies would have to take territory.’

http://www.juancole.com/2014/09/defensive-rhetoric-offense.html

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0c98991c-48c2-11e4-9d04-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3FHc3GQh0

Not at all surprised that your Susan Glasser essay is absent a comments section:
‘Putin profits politically from wars and western apologists’
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6512d3c8-2955-11e4-8b81-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3BM3PdBtC
Even the Edward Luce essay of August 17, 2014:’Obama’s Hippocratic oath enfeebles his diplomacy’ was a more convincing and better written piece of propaganda, although it was in it’s own way quite a feeble effort to harness the power of political conformity.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6b415dfc-23ae-11e4-be13-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3AgHAme80
Ms. Glasser has excellent credentials: once editor in chief of Foreign Policy and now at Politico where she heads the Long Form Journalism and Opinions Division. Should we credit Ms. Glasser as the party responsible for the recent Strobe Talbott essay The Making of Vladimir Putin?
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/putin-the-backstory-110151.html#.U_p4NGOzLVI
An eight page essay, as it printed out, completely devoid of footnotes, and mysteriously unattributed quotes. Perhaps Politico is above such mundane considerations and practices? Mr. Talbott’s essay was an exercise in historical revisionism, the self-exculpatory and hysteria mongering. He is better at that hysteria mongering than Ms. Glasser, she points simply to those ‘Left Wing coddlers’ of Mr. Putin, a category of unnamed persons, i.e. Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation Magazine, but true to form, as an incurious political conformist ignores Mr. Paul Craig Roberts and his regular reporting/opinionating on the Ukrainian Coup and it’s aftermath.

Home

Ms. Glasser’s essay seems not quite up to the standard that Luce and Talbott set, even as that standard is low, to say the least. She repeats this bit of American/E.U. approved history without  a hint of irony: she and Ms. Clinton both continue to use the accusation that MH17 was shot down by ‘rebels’ i.e. Russian agents.  Again  the incurious Ms. Glasser and Ms. Clinton have both missed an important component of the shooting down of MH17, or are willfully ignorant of information that refutes their own belief:

A Thursday article in the New Straits Times, Malaysia’s flagship English-language newspaper, charged the US- and European-backed Ukrainian regime in Kiev with shooting down Malaysian Airlines flight MH 17 in east Ukraine last month. Given the tightly controlled character of the Malaysian media, it appears that the accusation that Kiev shot down MH17 has the imprimatur of the Malaysian state.

The US and European media have buried this remarkable report, which refutes the wave of allegations planted by the CIA in international media claiming that Russian president Vladimir Putin was responsible for the destruction of MH17, without presenting any evidence to back up this charge.

The New Straits Times article, titled “US analysts conclude MH17 downed by aircraft,” lays out evidence that Ukrainian fighter aircraft attacked the jetliner with first a missile, then with bursts of 30-millimeter machine gun fire from both sides of MH17. The Russian army has already presented detailed radar and satellite data showing a Ukrainian Sukhoi-25 fighter jet tailing MH17 shortly before the jetliner crashed. The Kiev regime denied that its fighters were airborne in the area, however.

The New Straits Times article began, “Intelligence analysts in the United States have already concluded that Malaysia flight MH17 was shot down by an air-to-air missile, and that the Ukrainian government had had something to do with it. This corroborates an emerging theory postulated by local investigators that the Boeing 777-200 was crippled by an air-to-air missile and finished off with cannon fire from a jet that had been shadowing it as it plummeted to earth.”

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Malaysian-press-charges-Uk-by-Alex-Lantier-Government-Corruption_Malaysia-Airlines-Flight-17_Putin_Russia-140809-576.html

The MH17 story has disappeared from the respectable bourgeois press: one can speculate that the reality didn’t conform to that of the American/E.U. narrative of a Russian/Putin manufactured culpability. But Ms. Clinton and Ms. Glasser repeat it as if it were an historical fact. The guilt of the rebels, and by extension Mr. Putin and his American ‘Left political allies’ attain the status of self-serving myth, that echos in a real way the McCarthyite Myth of  the traitors among us, as essential to a rationale for The New Cold War. And as a political correlate the fusion of Neo-Conservatives,Neo-Liberals  and their R2P fellow travelers, into a conformist centrism located to right of anything we have ever known in American/E.U. politics.

Political Observer

‘

I posted this on August 21, 2014:

Political Cynic on Strobe Talbott

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Mr. Strobe Talbott is an historian who writes history made to self-serving ideological
measure. His long paraphrases of the war mongering William Safire, in his opening paragraph serves two purposes, one the appeal to the more conservative readership at Politico and to rhetorically frame his casting of Putin as the New Stalin, in the New Cold War. Identifying Putin’s rapprochement with China and protecting his borders from American political adventurism, just like that of Black Widow Victoria Nuland and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Ukraine, allied with Right Sector and Svoboda! Mr, Talbott confects out of this ‘Putin’s Evil Plan’: nothing sells like fear mongering and political melodrama, after all Mr. Talbott is an experienced Cold Warrior.
On the question of ‘spheres of influence’ American can take no backseat to any other country in our ruthless exercise of our self-given permission of hemispheric hegemony i.e. The Monroe Doctrine, forgive the alliteration!
‘Putin’s aggression’ is a mirror of that exercised by America in this hemisphere, but that fact escapes Mr. Talbott’s attention due to a pressing ideological agenda, again that New Cold War set the standard for his historical revisionism: the twin virtues of concision and brevity are cast aside in favor of an historical re-write that challenges the readers patience and if you are old enough your own memory of the ‘historical facts/examples’ he very carefully cites as corroboration of his fear mongering propaganda/historical revisionism. And I’m only at the first two words of the third paragraph: so much more to say, yet I fear I’ll commit the same error that Mr. Talbott commits, although I don’t need to rescue my lost credibility as a one time Kremlinologist by a self-serving re-write of history.
Political Cynic
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/putin-the-backstory-110151.html?hp=pm_1#.U_U5kGOzLIU

Having finally reached the end of Mr. Talbott’s essay. It took some time and a great deal of patience to read through this ‘history’ of Putin and the end of the first Cold War: Gorbachev and the ill fated transition of the former Soviet Union’s command economy to the ‘Free Market’ Neo-Liberal model, the rise of Yeltsin and of the evil doer Putin: Mr. Talbott is enamored of political melodrama, with a penchant for repeating the propaganda of the American National Security State,  as if it were true/actual. No wonder Mr. Talbott has managed to assume the leadership of a major America think tank, the prerequisite being a slavish conformity to that ever shifting party line.

A good deal of time is spent tracing the implosion of the Soviet state, the rise of Putin and a self-laudatory description of the part Mr. Talbott played in various negotiations with the Soviets. Under the title, not exactly a title but typeface in bold letters, of The backstory begins in the late 1980’s which takes up almost two full pages. One gets the distinct impression that this essay was destined for Foreign Policy or Foreign Affairs  or another specialist periodical but was adapted to fit the looser standards of Politico.A glaring example of this is this long quote, unattributed, on page 5(page 4 of internet post) of my printed copy of the essay:

Just before flying back to Washington, Clinton paid a call on Yeltsin at his retirement dacha. “Boris,” Clinton said, “you’ve got democracy in your heart. You’ve got the trust of the people in your bones. You’ve got the fire in your belly of a real democrat and a real reformer.  I’m not sure Putin has that. Maybe he does. I don’t know. You’ll have to keep an eye on him and use your influence to make sure that he stays on the right path. Putin needs you. Whether he knows it or not, he really needs you, Boris. Russia needs you. You really changed this country, Boris. Not every leader can say that about the country he’s led. You changed Russia. Russia was lucky to have you. The world was lucky you were where you were. I was lucky to have you.  We did a lot of stuff together, you and I. We got through some tough times. We never let it all come apart. We did some good things. They’ll last. It took guts on your part. A lot of that stuff was harder for you than it was for me. I know that.”

Yeltsin was now clutching Clinton by the hand, leaning into him. “Thank you, Bill,” he said. “I understand.”