StephenKMackSD's Blog

Old Socialist comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 13, 2025

Editor: There can be no doubt that Zanny Menton Beddoes and her cadre of Oxbridgers, and other various educational replicants, are Neo-Cons or entusiastic fellow traveler’s? Netnayahu and his government are guilty of Genocide yet Beddoes and her cadre ignore that contiuing crime! The Title, headline and sub-headline give the game away, the whole of it reeks of the celebratory:

Leaders | Strike it lucky

Israel has taken an audacious but terrifying gamble

The world would be safer if Iran abandoned its nuclear dreams, but that outcome may prove unattainable

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/06/13/israel-has-taken-an-audacious-but-terrifying-gamble?utm_content=ed-picks-image-link-1&etear=nl_today_1&utm_campaign=r.the-economist-today&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=6/13/2025&utm_id=2088048

Editor: The first three paragraphs are unsurprising propganda

FOR THREE decades, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has warned that Israel’s gravest external threat is Iran. And no Iranian threat is graver than its programme to acquire a nuclear bomb. Israel is a small, densely populated country within missile range of the Islamic Republic. A nuclear-armed Iran would put its very existence at risk.

Early on Friday June 13th, Mr Netanyahu at last acted on this conviction, dispatching wave after wave of Israeli aircraft to strike Iran. They attacked nuclear installations in Natanz, 300km south of the capital Tehran, as well as officials associated with the weapons programme. And they also killed the top echelons of the Iranian armed forces, including Mohamad Bagheri, the chief of staff.

Mr Netanyahu once had a reputation as a risk-averse leader, but this strike was audacious, even reckless. Israel is entitled to take action to stop Iran from getting a bomb. The prime minister is justified in fearing that a nuclear-armed Iran would hold dire consequences for his country. He appears to have the support of President Donald Trump, an essential ally. Friday’s assault could turn out to be a devastating blow against the regime in Tehran. But it also threatens a bewildering range of outcomes, including some that are bad for Israel and America.

---

Editor: The Hero of this political apologetic is presented as the ‘Mr. Netanyahu once had a reputation as a risk-averse leader’ Yet The Economist failes to inform the reader.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/netanyahu-tesfies-in-his-corruption-trial-latest-in-a-long-series-of-scandals

---

Editor: The Economist offers these conjectures, speculations and belicosity!

The Islamic Republic has been a malign presence in the region, sponsoring terrorists, violent militias and despotic regimes, including that of Bashar al-Assad in Syria

…

Iran backed Hamas, which launched a murderous attack on the country from Gaza on October 7th 2023.

…

An Iranian bomb would make all of this worse. (Editor: where in the proof of an Iranian Bomb?)

…

Even without any proliferation, a nuclear-armed Iran would be perceived in the region as a constraint on the Israel Defence Forces’ freedom of manoeuvre.

…

Israeli officials argue that they would eventually have no choice but to attack Iran’s nuclear programme and that they had a brief window to carry one out. Iran is weaker than it has been for decades.

…

In a recorded address, Mr Netanyahu claimed to have evidence that Iran is weaponising its technology, saying that it may be close to a device. His officials believe that, in talks with America about a deal that would halt the nuclear programme, Iran has been creating a smokescreen behind which its scientists were in reality pressing rapidly ahead.

…

Having killed many Iranian officials, it may have caused so much chaos in Tehran that the regime cannot mount a powerful response. After being on the receiving end of such a show of strength, the mullahs may be deterred from mounting another attempt to build a nuclear arsenal.

…

However, Friday’s offensive is also a huge gamble. For one thing, the urgency may not be as great as Israel suggests. In March America’s intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, said that Mr Khamenei had not reauthorised the weapons programme he suspended in 2003.

…

The strike is also a gamble because of its potential regional and global consequences. Although Iran is less able to retaliate than it once was, it can still cause a lot of harm. Already, on June 13th Iran loosed over 100 drones against Israel.

Editor: The Voice of Reason of a kind ?

Odd as it may sound, a collapse of the rotten Iranian regime, much as it is hated within the country and in the region, could also be highly destabilising. Iran is a big and complex country without a history of democracy. Nobody can say what might emerge from the chaos.

…

Even in a world where the old rules are breaking down, an endless pattern of regular bombing raids on a sovereign nation would carry a heavy diplomatic and political cost. Eventually, repeated strikes could stretch America’s patience and inflame public opinion there, doing long-term harm to the alliance with America upon which Israel depends.

…

The hope is that Iran’s nuclear programme will be destroyed never to return. That would be vindication for Israel’s prime minister. But if not, Israel will have to live with the paradox that Mr Netanyahu engenders. At a time when the Gulf states are offering a new vision of the Arab world built on the coexistence with Israel that comes from economic development, his eagerness to resort to conflict risks making their plans impossible. In attempting to spare the Middle East from Iranian aggression, he risks trapping it in a cycle of violent destruction and instability. In its own way, that poses an existential threat to Israel, too.

Editor: The final paragraph of this what to name it? Oxbridger self-serving political morilizing, tinctured in self-congratulation?

Old Socialist.

Political Cynic comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 12, 2025

^…

The Spectator: How to ruin a city

Douglas Murray

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-to-ruin-a-city/?status=Active&utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BLND%20%2020250612%20%20HOUSE%20ADS%20%20MG+CID_0ca11f651694f5d797da8a8678c4c7bb

…

So it is with the stand-off between Newsom and Donald Trump. Conservative estimates suggest that between ten and 12 million people entered the US illegally in the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency – almost doubling the number of illegals in the country. Trump has already fulfilled his campaign promise of sealing the southern border, so that the number still breaking into the country via that route is effectively zero. But he is also intent on fulfilling his campaign promise of removing the people already in the country who shouldn’t be. He and his border tsar, Tom Homan, have made it clear that they are prioritising the removal of the more than half a million illegal migrants who are thought to have criminal records.

On a good day the Trump administration has managed to deport around 800 illegals. But you can do the math yourself on how long it would take to complete the task. At the current speed, assuming there are no more legal or physical challenges, Trump and Homan might be able to deport all the illegal migrants with a criminal record by 2027 or 2028. If they want to deport the millions who came in between 2020 and 2024 alone, President Trump would have to remain in office for years, if not decades. Which is not actually a proposal.

The unrest that broke out in Los Angeles this week was not even the result of Homan’s team simply detaining illegal migrants. They were seeking people who were engaged in criminal activity. But the unwiser parts of the American left decided to assume their normal position. They blamed law enforcement for causing the problem and pretended that the resulting violence was peaceful. All this as the public could see footage of masked left-wing activists spitting in the faces of policemen and throwing stones at them.

Now Trump has sent in the National Guard and Marines and told ‘insurrectionists’ that ‘if they spit, we will hit’. Newsom, Hillary Clinton and other Democrat bigwigs are pretending that it is Homan, Trump and law enforcement who are the bad guys, while the people burning cars on the streets and looting the local Apple store are merely reacting to the provocation.

Which brings me back to that central imbalance of our time – in the US as here. Why is the person who caused the mess allowed to be presented in the kindliest light, while the people trying to clean up after them must be portrayed in the crappiest?

Editor: Mr. Murry loves to trade in a bad/mad collection of what was once the territory of Evelyn Waugh, without his talent. The American Setting of a California, that is ruled by New Democrats like Old Money Gavin Newsome, freighted with Ileagal Aliens who wash dishes in posh returaunts, and wipe the shitty bottoms of the children of the wealthy, and middle class! And sweep the streets and pickup the garbage! Of that world Mr. Murray is uninterested, but also addicted to his Self -Concept, as would-be Political/Moral Gadfly facing off those Mestizo Hordes, as presented by racist Samuel P. Huntington? The fact that the work of Huntington is perhaps in unknown to Mr. Murray, does not absolve him of the charge of fellow traveling!

Political Observer.

Political Observer on forgetting History, American Fashism of the political present & ‘Nostalgia for the Strong Man’ …

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 12, 2025

Old Socialist.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 11, 2025

Old Socialist scoffs at Zanny Minton Beddoes’ collection of self-serving political cliches, in almost praise of a Joe Biden presidency.

Posted on November 20, 2020 by stephenkmacksd

Should any reader be surprised that Beddoes is an Oxbridger? It’s an Economist Tradition. Note this from the Economist:

Ms. Minton Beddoes joined The Economist in 1994 after spending two years as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she worked on macroeconomic adjustment programmes in Africa and the transition economies of Eastern Europe. Before joining the IMF, she worked as an adviser to the Minister of Finance in Poland, as part of a small group headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard University.

Wikipedia supplies more detailed information on Beddoes IMF responsibilities:

After graduation, she was recruited as an adviser to the Minister of Finance in Poland, in 1992,^[3] as part of a small group headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard. She then spent two years as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she worked on macroeconomic adjustment programmes in Africa and the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanny_Minton_Beddoes

Beddoes is member, in very good standing, of the Economic Elite, that is only reinforced by her service with the IMF. She worked with the ‘Shock Therapy’ obsessed Prof. Sachs, who now denies his toxic prescriptions, for implementing those destructive policies across Eastern Europe. See ‘Europe Since 1989: A History’ by Philipp Ther for a telling history of Sach’s destructive ideological fixsation.

Chapter 4: Getting on the Neoliberal Bandwagon

Chapter 5: Second-Wave Neoliberalism

Beddoes being the first women to be the Editor of the Economist. She is a long time employee of the newspaper since 1994. Her ideological conformity is a proven political quantity. Reading the opening paragraph of her essay demonstrates that fact.

Some years loom large in history. Usually it is the end of a war or the onset of a revolution that punctuates the shift from one chapter to another. 2020 will be an exception. The defeat of Donald Trump marked the end of one of the most divisive and damaging presidencies in American history. A once-in-a-century pandemic has created the opportunity for an economic and social reset as dramatic as that of the Progressive era. The big question for 2021 is whether politicians are bold enough to grasp it.

Call this restrained political melodrama. She has been schooled, by that Economist team of Micklethwait & Wooldridge, that team of Economist Writers, who have proven to be the best re-write men in Journalism. Taking their shorter Economist articles and fleshing them out, into those best selling 400 page paperbacks.

Next:

Covid-19 has not just pummelled the global economy. It has changed the trajectory of the three big forces that are shaping the modern world. Globalisation has been truncated. The digital revolution has been radically accelerated. And the geopolitical rivalry between America and China has intensified.

Then comes this astounding sentence, ever uttered by any editor of this reactionary newspaper:

At the same time, the pandemic has worsened one of today’s great scourges: inequality.

One of the most enlightening aspects of reading ‘Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist’ by Alexander Zevin is that a self-serving political/moral hypocrisy is the very sine qua non of this newspaper. So Beddoes mention of inequality brings to mind:

From May 5th 2014

By R.A.

Headline: Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”, summarised in four paragraphs

Sub-headline: A very brief summary of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”

It is the economics book that took the world by storm. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, written by the French economist Thomas Piketty, was published in French in 2013 and in English in March 2014. The English version quickly became an unlikely bestseller, and it prompted a broad and energetic debate on the book’s subject: the outlook for global inequality. Some reckon it heralds or may itself cause a pronounced shift in the focus of economic policy, toward distributional questions. The Economist hailed Professor Piketty as “the modern Marx” (Karl, that is). But what is his book all about?

…

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2014/05/04/thomas-pikettys-capital-summarised-in-four-paragraphs

And this:

May 3,2014

Headline: A modern Marx

Sub-headline: Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster book is a great piece of scholarship, but a poor guide to policy

WHEN the first volume of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” was published in 1867, it took five years to sell 1,000 copies in its original German. It was not translated into English for two decades, and this newspaper did not see fit to mention it until 1907. By comparison, Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” is an overnight sensation. Originally published in French (when we first reviewed it), Mr Piketty’s vast tome on income-and-wealth distribution has become a bestseller since the English translation appeared in March. In America it is the top-selling book on Amazon, fiction included.

The book’s success has a lot to do with being about the right subject at the right time. Inequality has suddenly become a fevered topic, especially in America. Having for years dismissed the gaps between the haves and have-nots as a European obsession, Americans, stung by the excesses of Wall Street, are suddenly talking about the rich and redistribution. Hence the attraction of a book which argues that growing wealth concentration is inherent to capitalism and recommends a global tax on wealth as the progressive solution.

…

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2014/05/03/a-modern-marx

To be fair R.A. published a revelatory set of essays on Piketty’s book. The first essay in this valuable set of commentaries on ‘Capital’.

LAST year Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics and a renowned expert on global inequality, published a book titled “Capital in the Twenty-first Century”—in French. It will be released in English on March 10th. We reviewed the book earlier this year, but it is detailed and important enough, in our opinion, to deserve additional discussion. We will therefore be publishing a series of posts over the next few weeks—live-blogging the book, as it were—to draw out its arguments at slightly greater length. Starting today, with the book’s introduction.

Capital, as I will refer to Mr Piketty’s book from here on out, is an incredibly ambitious book. The author has self-consciously put the book forward as a companion to, and perhaps the intellectual equal of, Karl Marx’s Capital. Like Marx, Mr Piketty aims to provide a political economy theory of everything. More specifically, he attempts to re-establish distribution as the central issue in economics, and in doing so to reorient our perceptions of the trajectory of growth in the modern economic era. Mr Piketty’s great advantage in attempting all this, relative to past peers, is a wealth of data and analysis, compiled by himself and others over the last 15 or so years.

…

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/02/book-clubs

This newspaper has never had any interest in ‘inequality’. Look at this depiction of Jeremy Corbyn, the foremost political reformer in British politics. Who attacked the very ‘inequality’ of both New Labour and the Tories, that Beddoes finds so compelling. This is pure political pose!

A selection of quotations from the Beddoes essay is instructive, of the level of political posturing, wedded to an unslakable hypocrisy-the very life-blood of this newspaper! As Beddoes moves from imperative to imperative, as she describes it, I will try to be brief and make some choices that will incite criticism:

On Globalization:

…

Although globalisation will still be about goods and capital crossing borders, people will travel less. The Asian countries that controlled the virus most effectively were also those that shut their borders most strictly. Their experience will shape others’ policies. Border restrictions and quarantines will stay in place long after covid-19 caseloads fall. And even after tourism restarts, migration will remain much harder. That will dent the prospects of poor countries that rely on flows of remittances from their migrant workers abroad, reinforcing the damage done by the pandemic itself. Some 150m people are likely to fall into extreme poverty by the end of 2021.

Global commerce will be conducted against an inauspicious geopolitical backdrop. Mr Trump’s mercurial mercantilism will be gone, but America’s suspicion of China will not end with the departure of “Tariff Man”, as the president was proud to be known. Tariffs, now levied on two-thirds of imports from China, will remain, as will restrictions on its technology companies. The splintering of the digital world and its supply chain into two parts, one Chinese-dominated and the other American-led, will continue. Sino-American rivalry will not be the only fissiparous influence on globalisation. Chastened by their reliance on imported medical supplies and other critical goods (often from China), governments from Europe to India will redefine the scope of “strategic industries” that must be protected. State aid to support this new industrial policy has become and will remain ubiquitous.

…

https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/after-the-crisis-opportunity

On China:

…

With the West battered and China crowing, plenty of pundits (including in this publication) will declare the pandemic to be the death knell for a Western-led world order. That will prove premature. For all its “vaccine diplomacy”, China inspires fear and suspicion more than admiration. And for all his determination to bring China centre-stage, its president, Xi Jinping, shows little appetite for genuine global leadership. Although Mr Trump’s contempt for allies and forays into transactional diplomacy have shaken trust in the American-led global order, they have not destroyed it.

…

On Biden, as the political antidote to a ‘dangerous Leftism’ = Left-Wing Social Democrats. Medicare for all is not an integral part of ‘Bidenomics’ (Call this neologism what it is a dull-witted placeholder for actual argument)

…

But he could be just the right person. Mr Biden’s policy platform is ambitious enough. Behind the slogan of “build back better” is a bold, but not radical, attempt to marry short-term stimulus with hefty investment in green infrastructure, research and technology to dramatically accelerate America’s energy transformation. From expanding health-care access to improving social insurance, the social contract proposed by Bidenomics is a 21st-century version of the Progressive era: bold reform without dangerous leftism.

…

This selective quotation, from the final paragraph of Beddoes’ essay is less that enthusiastic about Biden, that descends into demotic moralizing.

… Mr Biden himself is too focused on repairing yesterday’s world rather than building tomorrow’s, and too keen to protect existing jobs and prop up ossified multilateral institutions to push for the kind of change that is needed. The biggest danger is not the leftist lurch that many Republicans fear—it is of inaction, timidity and stasis. For America and the world, that would be a terrible shame.

https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/after-the-crisis-opportunity

Beddoes is like so many self-appointed political technocrats ,obsessed with ‘policy’, rather than what effect those policies have on human lives. Its ‘as if’ these technos are in a laboratory, rather than the unpredictable, and utterly ungovernable human world. This was called ‘Social Engineering’, in the days of the Soviets, but not a subject that the once ascendet Neo-Liberals, and their fellow travelers, would dare to broach about their own Utopianism, now in a state of ungovernable collapse.

Old Socialist

Old Socialist.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 11, 2025

Old Socialist scoffs at Zanny Minton Beddoes’ collection of self-serving political cliches, in almost praise of a Joe Biden presidency.

Posted on November 20, 2020 by stephenkmacksd

Should any reader be surprised that Beddoes is an Oxbridger? It’s an Economist Tradition. Note this from the Economist:

Ms. Minton Beddoes joined The Economist in 1994 after spending two years as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she worked on macroeconomic adjustment programmes in Africa and the transition economies of Eastern Europe. Before joining the IMF, she worked as an adviser to the Minister of Finance in Poland, as part of a small group headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard University.

Wikipedia supplies more detailed information on Beddoes IMF responsibilities:

After graduation, she was recruited as an adviser to the Minister of Finance in Poland, in 1992,^[3] as part of a small group headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard. She then spent two years as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she worked on macroeconomic adjustment programmes in Africa and the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanny_Minton_Beddoes

Beddoes is member, in very good standing, of the Economic Elite, that is only reinforced by her service with the IMF. She worked with the ‘Shock Therapy’ obsessed Prof. Sachs, who now denies his toxic prescriptions, for implementing those destructive policies across Eastern Europe. See ‘Europe Since 1989: A History’ by Philipp Ther for a telling history of Sach’s destructive ideological fixsation.

Chapter 4: Getting on the Neoliberal Bandwagon

Chapter 5: Second-Wave Neoliberalism

Beddoes being the first women to be the Editor of the Economist. She is a long time employee of the newspaper since 1994. Her ideological conformity is a proven political quantity. Reading the opening paragraph of her essay demonstrates that fact.

Some years loom large in history. Usually it is the end of a war or the onset of a revolution that punctuates the shift from one chapter to another. 2020 will be an exception. The defeat of Donald Trump marked the end of one of the most divisive and damaging presidencies in American history. A once-in-a-century pandemic has created the opportunity for an economic and social reset as dramatic as that of the Progressive era. The big question for 2021 is whether politicians are bold enough to grasp it.

Call this restrained political melodrama. She has been schooled, by that Economist team of Micklethwait & Wooldridge, that team of Economist Writers, who have proven to be the best re-write men in Journalism. Taking their shorter Economist articles and fleshing them out, into those best selling 400 page paperbacks.

Next:

Covid-19 has not just pummelled the global economy. It has changed the trajectory of the three big forces that are shaping the modern world. Globalisation has been truncated. The digital revolution has been radically accelerated. And the geopolitical rivalry between America and China has intensified.

Then comes this astounding sentence, ever uttered by any editor of this reactionary newspaper:

At the same time, the pandemic has worsened one of today’s great scourges: inequality.

One of the most enlightening aspects of reading ‘Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist’ by Alexander Zevin is that a self-serving political/moral hypocrisy is the very sine qua non of this newspaper. So Beddoes mention of inequality brings to mind:

From May 5th 2014

By R.A.

Headline: Thomas Piketty’s “Capital”, summarised in four paragraphs

Sub-headline: A very brief summary of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”

It is the economics book that took the world by storm. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, written by the French economist Thomas Piketty, was published in French in 2013 and in English in March 2014. The English version quickly became an unlikely bestseller, and it prompted a broad and energetic debate on the book’s subject: the outlook for global inequality. Some reckon it heralds or may itself cause a pronounced shift in the focus of economic policy, toward distributional questions. The Economist hailed Professor Piketty as “the modern Marx” (Karl, that is). But what is his book all about?

…

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2014/05/04/thomas-pikettys-capital-summarised-in-four-paragraphs

And this:

May 3,2014

Headline: A modern Marx

Sub-headline: Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster book is a great piece of scholarship, but a poor guide to policy

WHEN the first volume of Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” was published in 1867, it took five years to sell 1,000 copies in its original German. It was not translated into English for two decades, and this newspaper did not see fit to mention it until 1907. By comparison, Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” is an overnight sensation. Originally published in French (when we first reviewed it), Mr Piketty’s vast tome on income-and-wealth distribution has become a bestseller since the English translation appeared in March. In America it is the top-selling book on Amazon, fiction included.

The book’s success has a lot to do with being about the right subject at the right time. Inequality has suddenly become a fevered topic, especially in America. Having for years dismissed the gaps between the haves and have-nots as a European obsession, Americans, stung by the excesses of Wall Street, are suddenly talking about the rich and redistribution. Hence the attraction of a book which argues that growing wealth concentration is inherent to capitalism and recommends a global tax on wealth as the progressive solution.

…

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2014/05/03/a-modern-marx

To be fair R.A. published a revelatory set of essays on Piketty’s book. The first essay in this valuable set of commentaries on ‘Capital’.

LAST year Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics and a renowned expert on global inequality, published a book titled “Capital in the Twenty-first Century”—in French. It will be released in English on March 10th. We reviewed the book earlier this year, but it is detailed and important enough, in our opinion, to deserve additional discussion. We will therefore be publishing a series of posts over the next few weeks—live-blogging the book, as it were—to draw out its arguments at slightly greater length. Starting today, with the book’s introduction.

Capital, as I will refer to Mr Piketty’s book from here on out, is an incredibly ambitious book. The author has self-consciously put the book forward as a companion to, and perhaps the intellectual equal of, Karl Marx’s Capital. Like Marx, Mr Piketty aims to provide a political economy theory of everything. More specifically, he attempts to re-establish distribution as the central issue in economics, and in doing so to reorient our perceptions of the trajectory of growth in the modern economic era. Mr Piketty’s great advantage in attempting all this, relative to past peers, is a wealth of data and analysis, compiled by himself and others over the last 15 or so years.

…

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/02/book-clubs

This newspaper has never had any interest in ‘inequality’. Look at this depiction of Jeremy Corbyn, the foremost political reformer in British politics. Who attacked the very ‘inequality’ of both New Labour and the Tories, that Beddoes finds so compelling. This is pure political pose!

A selection of quotations from the Beddoes essay is instructive, of the level of political posturing, wedded to an unslakable hypocrisy-the very life-blood of this newspaper! As Beddoes moves from imperative to imperative, as she describes it, I will try to be brief and make some choices that will incite criticism:

On Globalization:

…

Although globalisation will still be about goods and capital crossing borders, people will travel less. The Asian countries that controlled the virus most effectively were also those that shut their borders most strictly. Their experience will shape others’ policies. Border restrictions and quarantines will stay in place long after covid-19 caseloads fall. And even after tourism restarts, migration will remain much harder. That will dent the prospects of poor countries that rely on flows of remittances from their migrant workers abroad, reinforcing the damage done by the pandemic itself. Some 150m people are likely to fall into extreme poverty by the end of 2021.

Global commerce will be conducted against an inauspicious geopolitical backdrop. Mr Trump’s mercurial mercantilism will be gone, but America’s suspicion of China will not end with the departure of “Tariff Man”, as the president was proud to be known. Tariffs, now levied on two-thirds of imports from China, will remain, as will restrictions on its technology companies. The splintering of the digital world and its supply chain into two parts, one Chinese-dominated and the other American-led, will continue. Sino-American rivalry will not be the only fissiparous influence on globalisation. Chastened by their reliance on imported medical supplies and other critical goods (often from China), governments from Europe to India will redefine the scope of “strategic industries” that must be protected. State aid to support this new industrial policy has become and will remain ubiquitous.

…

https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/after-the-crisis-opportunity

On China:

…

With the West battered and China crowing, plenty of pundits (including in this publication) will declare the pandemic to be the death knell for a Western-led world order. That will prove premature. For all its “vaccine diplomacy”, China inspires fear and suspicion more than admiration. And for all his determination to bring China centre-stage, its president, Xi Jinping, shows little appetite for genuine global leadership. Although Mr Trump’s contempt for allies and forays into transactional diplomacy have shaken trust in the American-led global order, they have not destroyed it.

…

On Biden, as the political antidote to a ‘dangerous Leftism’ = Left-Wing Social Democrats. Medicare for all is not an integral part of ‘Bidenomics’ (Call this neologism what it is a dull-witted placeholder for actual argument)

…

But he could be just the right person. Mr Biden’s policy platform is ambitious enough. Behind the slogan of “build back better” is a bold, but not radical, attempt to marry short-term stimulus with hefty investment in green infrastructure, research and technology to dramatically accelerate America’s energy transformation. From expanding health-care access to improving social insurance, the social contract proposed by Bidenomics is a 21st-century version of the Progressive era: bold reform without dangerous leftism.

…

This selective quotation, from the final paragraph of Beddoes’ essay is less that enthusiastic about Biden, that descends into demotic moralizing.

… Mr Biden himself is too focused on repairing yesterday’s world rather than building tomorrow’s, and too keen to protect existing jobs and prop up ossified multilateral institutions to push for the kind of change that is needed. The biggest danger is not the leftist lurch that many Republicans fear—it is of inaction, timidity and stasis. For America and the world, that would be a terrible shame.

https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2020/11/17/after-the-crisis-opportunity

Beddoes is like so many self-appointed political technocrats ,obsessed with ‘policy’, rather than what effect those policies have on human lives. Its ‘as if’ these technos are in a laboratory, rather than the unpredictable, and utterly ungovernable human world. This was called ‘Social Engineering’, in the days of the Soviets, but not a subject that the once ascendet Neo-Liberals, and their fellow travelers, would dare to broach about their own Utopianism, now in a state of ungovernable collapse.

Old Socialist

Political Observer

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 08, 2025

Headline: The divide in tomorrow’s Britain: power women and powerless men

Sub-headline: Young women in the UK are now, for the first time, more likely to be in education, employment or training

If you’re losing the game, change the rules. It’s a strategy my six-year-old swears by. But it’s also Labour’s plan for the next election. Sir Keir Starmer recently confirmed that the party remains committed to lowering the voting age to 16 — a manifesto pledge that was expected to add hundreds of thousands of voters to the Labour tally (which is of course why it was in the manifesto in the first place).

At the last election, Labour won a stonking 42 per cent of the youth vote: next were the Lib Dems, all the way down on 18. But since then something weird has happened. The latest polling by More in Common has Labour on 30 per cent among 18 to 24-year-olds — still in the lead, but only just ahead of the Greens on 27 per cent. Reform, meanwhile, are on 22 per cent. In other words, a full half of the youth vote is now going to the populist parties of left and right. Which probably isn’t what those manifesto writers had in mind.

In many ways, this isn’t much of a surprise. As I’ve pointed out before, age is now the key fault line in British politics: the Tories, in particular, are so reliant on the grey vote that their supporters’ average age, as the US pollster Frank Luntz puts it, is “deceased”.

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At the last election, twice as many young women as men voted Green, and twice as many young men as women voted Reform. The John Smith Centre has found that young women are far more likely to cite the NHS as a key political issue; young men are focused on crime and immigration.
Again, this is a pattern replicated internationally. The journalist John Burn-Murdoch recently pointed out the astonishing gender divide in the South Korean election. Among young men, the left-right split was 24-74. Among young women, it was 58-36. And as he says, you can see a similar (though less dramatic) tendency in countries across the West — including the UK.

The traditional explanation for this is that young men have been captured by the “manosphere” — a generation sitting alone in their basements, in thrall to steroidal podcasters like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. But again, there’s also an economic explanation.

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/the-divide-in-tomorrows-britain-power-women-and-powerless-men-358zd5lnd

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Editor: Look at the approach of The Economist to the territory that Mr. Colevile attempts to diagnose? Consider that the political/sexual/career asperations of men and women are central to The Economist, and Mr. Colevile interventions. In sum ‘The Battle of The Sexes’ is reinvigerated as The West sinks deeper into its collapse, as Russia, China, Iran and BRICS define what the future might be …

In a trendy food market in Warsaw, Poland’s capital, two female engineers are discussing how hard it is to meet a nice, enlightened man. Paulina Nasilowska got a big pay rise a few years ago. Her boyfriend asked: “Did you have an affair with your boss?” He is now an ex-boyfriend.

Ms Nasilowska’s friend, Joanna Walczak, recalls a man she met on Tinder who revealed that he was a “red-pill” guy (a reference to “The Matrix”, a film, meaning someone who sees reality clearly. In the “manosphere”, a global online community of angry men, it means realising that men are oppressed.) He thought household chores and child care were women’s work, and that women could not be leaders. They didn’t have a second date.

Typically for young Polish women, Ms Nasilowska and Ms Walczak support parties of the liberal left, which take women’s issues seriously and promise to legalise abortion. Young Polish men, they complain, hew more to the right, or even to the far right. Consider last year’s election. Then the top choice for 18- to 29-year-old men was Confederation, a party that touts free-market economics and traditional social values. (“Against feminists. In defence of real women” is one of its slogans.) Some 26% of young men backed it; only 6% of their female peers did.

Young Polish men have their own set of complaints. Feminism has gone too far, say two firemen in their 20s in a small town. Lukasz says he used to be able to go to a village dance party and “the women there were wife material.” Nowadays “they’re all posting shameless pictures of themselves on social media,” he laments. The media are “all biased and pushing the culture to the left”, complains Mateusz (neither man would give a surname). People no longer admit that men and women often want to do different kinds of work.

In much of the developed world, the attitudes of young men and women are polarising. The Economist analysed polling data from 20 rich countries, using the European Social Survey, America’s General Social Survey and the Korean Social Survey. Two decades ago there was little difference between men and women aged 18-29 on a self-reported scale of 1-10 from very liberal to very conservative. But our analysis found that by 2020 the gap was 0.75 (see chart 1 ). For context, this is roughly twice the size of the gap in opinion between people with and without a degree in the same year.

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https://www.economist.com/international/2024/03/13/why-the-growing-gulf-between-young-men-and-women

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Men and women have different experiences, so you would expect them to have different worldviews. Nonetheless, the growing gulf between young men and women in developed countries is striking. Polling data from 20 such countries shows that, whereas two decades ago there was little difference between the share of men and women aged 18-29 who described themselves as liberal rather than conservative, the gap has grown to 25 percentage points. Young men also seem more anti-feminist than older men, bucking the trend for each generation to be more liberal than its predecessor. Polls from 27 European countries found that men under 30 were more likely than those over 65 to agree that “advancing women’s and girls’ rights has gone too far because it threatens men’s and boys’ opportunities”. Similar results can be found in Britain, South Korea and China. Young women were likely to believe the opposite.

Unpicking what is going on is not simple. A good place to start is to note that young women are soaring ahead of their male peers academically. In the European Union fully 46% of them earn degrees, versus 35% of young men, a gap that has doubled since 2002. One consequence is that young women are more likely than men to spend their early adulthood in a cocoon of campus liberalism. Meanwhile, boys outnumber girls at the bottom end of the scholastic scale. Across rich countries, 28% of them fail to learn to read to a basic level. That is true of only 18% of girls.

Another big change is that, to varying degrees across the developed world, immense progress has been made in reducing the barriers to women having successful careers. College-educated men are still thriving, too—often as one half of a double-high-income heterosexual couple. Many men welcome these advances and argue for more. However, those among their less-educated brothers who are struggling in the workplace and the dating market are more likely to be resentful, and to blame women for their loss of relative status. And young women, by and large, are glad of past progress but are keenly aware that real threats and unfairness remain, from male violence to the difficulty of juggling careers and children. In short, most young women and worryingly large numbers of young men complain that society is biased against their own sex.

Young women tend to vote for parties of the liberal left. Angry young men, sometimes dismissed as toxically masculine by those parties, are being shrewdly wooed by politicians from the right and the far right. In South Korea their support helped an overtly anti-feminist president win power. In America polls are muddy but some pollsters think young men are souring on the Democrats. In Europe, where many countries offer a kaleidoscope of political choices, young male votes have helped fuel the rise of reactionary outfits such as the AfD in Germany, Confederation in Poland and Chega, which surged at Portugal’s election on March 10th.

Editor: Alice Weidel is currently serving as the co-chairwoman of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

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Editor: The final paragraph of this Economist essay ‘Increasing the supply of educated and (one hopes) less angry men would be good for the women who must share the same world’

There is no easy solution to any of this. But clearly, more should be done to help boys lagging behind at school to do better. Some policies that might work without harming their female classmates include hiring more male teachers (who are exceptionally scarce at primary schools in rich countries), and allowing boys to start school a year later than girls, to reflect the fact that they mature later. Better vocational training could encourage young men to consider jobs they have traditionally shunned, from nursing to administration. Schooling boys better would not only help boys. Increasing the supply of educated and (one hopes) less angry men would be good for the women who must share the same world. ■

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/03/14/making-sense-of-the-gulf-between-young-men-and-women

PoliticaL Observer.

Political Observer takes a minimalist approach, to this political chatter!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 05, 2025

Why Woke Failed

The movement was based on flawed understandings of human nature.

Michael Shermer

Jun 5

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Editor : Woke has become a derisive epithet, to state the obvious and Michael Shermer wallows in it.

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Although some liberals embrace just such an unconstrained vision of human nature, most understand that human behavior is at least partially constrained—especially those educated in the biological and evolutionary sciences who are aware of the research in behavior genetics—so the problem lies chiefly with woke illiberals, who are full-on blank slaters, unconstrained visionaries, and utopian dreamers with no purchase on the reality of human nature, or what, in my book The Believing Brain, I called a Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in all respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold a Realistic Vision of our nature. In keeping with the research from behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology, let’s put a number on that constraint at 40 to 50 percent. In the Realistic Vision, human nature is relatively constrained by our biology and evolutionary history, and therefore social and political systems must be structured around these realities, accentuating the positive and attenuating the negative aspects of our natures.

A Realistic Vision rejects the blank slate belief that people are so malleable and responsive to social programs that governments can engineer their lives into a Great Society of its design, and instead believes that family, custom, law, and traditional institutions are the best sources for social harmony. A Realistic Vision recognizes the need for strict moral education through parents, family, friends, and community because people have a dual nature of being selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative, greedy and generous, and so we need rules and guidelines and encouragement to do the right thing. A Realistic Vision acknowledges that people vary widely both physically and intellectually—in large part because of natural inherited differences—and therefore will rise (or fall) to their natural levels. A Realistic Vision of human nature is what James Madison was thinking of when he penned his oft-quoted dictum in Federalist Paper Number 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The resulting structure of the United States government and its nearly 250 years of successful governance is a tribute to Madison’s (and the other founders’) realistic vision of human nature. If you have a flawed theory of human nature, however, much follows that will also be flawed, including disastrous social policies and failed social movements that have taken hold in recent years and that mark the results of the woke movement.

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Editor: Not to forget Critical Race Theroy

New York University Press

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Or Mr. Richard K. Matthews who layes waste to the cult of Madison!

Book Details

Editor: Revelatory quotations!

Political Observer.

Political Reporter shares one of his comments on Scalia!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 04, 2025

At The Economist: a Scalia obituary, a comment by Political Reporter

Posted on February 18, 2016 by stephenkmacksd

There is no doubt that the author of this obituary is schooled in the Scalia patois, in fact she/he is adept at sounding the notes of witless bulling insult that is the hallmark of that Scalia style!
But was Scalia an ‘Originalist’ Or as Scalia described himself as a ‘faint-hearted originalist’? Here is a partial answer provided by Bruce Allen Murphy,the Fred Morgan Kirby Professor of Civil Rights at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

‘When I teach about the First Amendment Free Exercise of Religion at Lafayette College, which used to occupy a routine pair of classes, I now wheel into the classroom a large white board that will occupy us for weeks, filled with all of the exceptions that the Court has created here restoring, in piecemeal fashion, the pre-Scalia, 1990 decision, world. I explain what has become the “Swiss Cheesing” of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause, allowing, among others, for claims to be considered for exceptions for federal prisoners and others being held in government institutions, for a religious group in Hialeah, Florida seeking to sacrifice animals in religious ceremonies, and for a small religious group seeking to drink ceremonial hallucinogenic tea from the Amazon. The string of exceptions to Scalia’s Smith rule has created so many holes that there is almost no cheese left. After the Hobby Lobby decision, I will have to make one more change to the top of my board, one which risks doubling the number of exceptions, adding next to the words “person’s Free Exercise of Religion rights,” the phrase “and closely-held corporations’ religious rights” Even though the majority in Hobby Lobby has further limited Scalia’s Smith case holding, since that result comports with his pro-religious accommodation, pro-corporation constitutional rights, viewpoint, he silently votes with them. While Scalia likes to say in his public speeches that his version of the Constitution is “Dead. Dead. Dead,” once more his reading of Founding era history to construct his originalist interpretation of the Constitution is very much an evolving work in progress.’- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/156300#sthash.BWyZ4mgK.dpuf

The idea of ‘Originalism’ and or its renaissance is connected to Brown v. Board I &II as made plain in John Dean’s book The Rehnquest Choice:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rehnquist-Choice-Appointment-Redefined/dp/0743233204

Confirmed by The Partisan by John A. Jenkins:

http://www.johnajenkins.com/BookpageThePartisan.html

Also read Joan Biskupic’s barley disguised hagiography American Original:

http://us.macmillan.com/americanoriginal/joanbiskupic

Here is a report from Vanity Fair’s Tina Nguyen on Justice Scalia’s final Supreme Court rant, which is nothing less that reprehensible:

‘Critics of affirmative action, (including the court’s only black justice, Clarence Thomas,) have long argued that the policy backfires on black students, claiming that placing unprepared students in elite academic settings is setting them up for failure. Still, Scalia drew “muted gasps in the courtroom” for his indelicate comments at the end of oral argument, according to The New York Times. From the transcript:

There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well. One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.

I’m just not impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer. Maybe it ought to have fewer.

Bloggier outlets like the Hill reported that Scalia “surprised” the court, while Mother Jones tersely remarked that they would “really be looking forward to his opinion in the case.”

One could defend Scalia by pointing out that justices often float devil’s advocate–type statements during an oral argument in order to test the lawyer’s arguments, and that the only opinion that matters is the one they eventually write down. But even Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSBlog, an elite law reporter who knows a thing or two about not jumping the gun when analyzing the court, found Scalia’s statement “quite clumsy.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/12/scalia-affirmative-action-blacks-admission

Is this encomium to the Originalist Eminence a surprise? Which doesn’t quite eschew substance, but relies on the argot of Scalia, which had its origin, or at least paid homage to the Hollywood Gangster films of the 1930’s.

Political Reporter

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21693161-originalist-chief-devout-and-colourful-end-was-79-obituary-antonin-scalia

My reply to guest-lawelsj

June 4, 2025.

Political Observer explores these questions.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 03, 2025

Headline: Javier Milei’s chainsaw economics in Argentina could lead the way

Sub-headline: If the model can be successfully applied across even just some of the underperforming countries in South America, the economic bounty could be enormous.

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/economics/article/javier-mileis-chainsaw-economics-in-argentina-could-lead-the-way-kq3ss0sqg?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1748983552-5

Editor: Read the first gushing paragraphs of her opininon column;

You’ll no doubt have noticed the growing buzz around Europe, thanks to a brighter economic outlook, Germany’s decision to scrap its debt brake, and some tactical shifts away from the US. But there’s another region that’s been quietly catching investors’ attention: Latin America.

I believe the region could emerge as the unexpected economic winner of the next few years, and perhaps beyond.

Regular readers will be familiar with Argentina’s eccentric, chainsaw-wielding president, Javier Milei, who was my economic hero of 2024. Since becoming president in 2023, Milei has slashed burdensome red tape and bureaucracy, and rolled back unsustainable and unproductive spending, while implementing supply side reforms.

The result has been an astonishing turnaround in Argentina’s economic fortunes. “Hyper-inflation” reduced to a mere 2.2 per cent as of February, with projected GDP growth of 5.5 per cent in the next year. It’s no surprise, then, that Argentina-focused exchange traded funds saw record inflows in 2024, and emerging market debt funds have been hoovering up corporate and government bonds.

But Milei is far from done. With inflation now under control, last week he scrapped reporting and tax rules aimed at unlocking a potential $200 billion injection in the domestic economy, consisting of the unofficial US dollar savings of ordinary Argentines. Previously, attempts to part with this cash were fraught with risk and would have seen individuals and businesses fall foul of strict protectionist currency controls. Now, individuals will be free to spend their dollars at will.

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Editor: here is a Buenos Aires Herald report on Argetine Poverty from February 18, 2024:

Argentina’s poverty rate reached 57.4% in January according to a new report by the Argentine Catholic University’s respected Social Debt Observatory. It’s the highest poverty number since 2004, when the observatory began publishing reports, amid widespread economic deregulation and price hikes.

“Our perspective is that this will keep getting worse in February,” the observatory’s Director Agustín Salvia told the Herald. “The crisis is about to explode in systemic terms.”

According to the report, which analyzed the inflationary effects of the 54% Argentine peso devaluation in December, poverty rose from 44.7% in the third quarter of 2023 to 49.5% in December, then 57.4% in January.

Salvia said there is “a generalized impoverishment of Argentine society” as a result of “a decrease in real salaries” as well as “a high risk of losing jobs” and the devaluation of the peso. “Households can’t compensate the effects of inflation on the food basket with working more hours, like they did in 2023.”

“The working class and middle class who don’t receive any welfare suffered the biggest increase [in poverty levels],” the report said.

The observatory also found that 15% of Argentines are destitute — the highest level since 2005. Destitution numbers had been 9.6% in the third quarter of 2023 and 14.2% in December, and went up even more in January “due to the increase in the cost of the basic food basket.”

The National Institute for Statistics and Census (INDEC by its Spanish acronym) considers a family “destitute” when their monthly income is less than the basic food basket. A family is considered to be in poverty if they earn less than the basic food basket plus services, known as the total basic basket.

You may also be interested in: Argentina starts 2024 with a 20.6% monthly inflation rate

“The December 2023 devaluation led to a strong price increase at a general level, and therefore, [an increase of] the basic food basket and the total basic basket,” the document stated.

The report added that while the government increased pensions and social plans in an attempt to absorb the effects of the record-high inflation “the poverty and destitution levels significantly rose.”

Argentina’s monthly inflation rate reached 25.5% in December 2023, the highest since February 1991, according to the National Institute for Statistics and Census (INDEC, for its Spanish acronym). In January, it went down to 20.6%, marking a 254.4% year-on-year inflation.

Within the past two months, gasoline prices more than doubled, private healthcare medicine applied 80% increases, and bus and train fares rose by 251% and 169% respectively. More tariff and price jumps are expected in the upcoming months.

Meanwhile, discussions to increase Argentina’s minimum wage and unemployment benefits fell through on Thursday while social movements protested outside the Labor Ministry. The minimum wage, which defines who receives certain social benefits, currently sits at AR$156,000 a month while the total basic basket for a single adult reached AR$193,000 in January, according to INDEC’s latest report.

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Editor: Here is a report from May 19, 2025 in the Buenos Aires Herald, about Milei and Money!

Headline: Cash savings, tax evasion, bank robbery: Milei confirms no-questions-asked dollar plan

Sub-Headline: The president said he doesn’t care ‘in the slightest’ how Argentines got their dollars

https://buenosairesherald.com/economics/cash-savings-tax-evasion-bank-robbery-milei-confirms-no-questions-asked-dollar-plan

President Javier Milei said that he “does not care in the slightest” how Argentines got their dollars during a television interview on Monday, during which he appeared to encourage tax evasion and play down the risk of courting organized crime.

It comes as his administration prepares a measure to allow the population to spend dollars without justifying where the funds came from, which experts say would facilitate money laundering, tax evasion, and other crimes.

Asked about such risks, Milei responded that economic issues should be separated from legal and security issues.

The move was announced by Economy Minister Luis Caputo in early May, but has yet to be made official.

“Under the mattress, Argentines have… estimates range between US$200 billion and US$400 billion,” Milei said during an interview on América 24 TV channel. “That means between 33% and 66% of the GDP. That implies an injection of funds into the economy that could generate a huge acceleration of the growth rate.”

According to the INDEC statistical bureau, Argentines held US$256 billion in cash and deposits outside the nation’s financial system in the last quarter of 2024.

He said Argentines who save dollars outside the financial system have done so to “avoid the tax that is inflation,” which he described as “devastating.”

Tax evaders are ‘heroes’

Asked about dollars stemming from tax evasion, the president said that “taxes are robbery,” later adding: “people who tried to protect themselves from thieving politicians are heroes, not criminals.”

He went on to argue that organized crime such as drug trafficking should be combated by the Security Ministry and the Defense Ministry, without involving the economy. “You do not use the economy to fight crime,” he said.

For the measure to work, he said, “the key is that nobody asks where you got your dollars. What’s more, I don’t care where you got your dollars. I don’t care in the slightest. That’s to say, economic issues are fixed in the economy. Issues of other kinds are fixed in the legal and judicial sphere. You have to understand that: they shouldn’t be mixed.”

After the plans were announced, María Eugenia Marano, a lawyer focusing on economic crimes, told the Herald that allowing the population to use dollars with no questions asked facilitated bringing laundered money back into the financial system.

Bank robbery

When journalist Antonio Laje asked whether that would mean bank robbers attempting to pay in US$500,000 would be asked no questions, Milei compared the situation to giving a sick person the wrong medicine, before stating: “Again, with the robbery, you shouldn’t mix the problem of crime with the issue of the economy.”

Under current law, such transactions can be reported to the financial authorities as suspicious. That legislation, Milei said, “is horrific.”

“You have to be able to use dollars with ease. Nobody should be asking for explanations for anything.”

Milei said the measure, which he has described as a form of “endogenous dollarization,” would be similar to a tax amnesty, but without paying taxes.

Milei said that the government had not yet passed the measure because it was addressing legal issues. He refused to give a launch date, stating instead that it would be passed once it was “technically impeccable.”

https://buenosairesherald.com/economics/cash-savings-tax-evasion-bank-robbery-milei-confirms-no-questions-asked-dollar-plan

Political Observer.

Political Observer provides a sample of Anderson’s 47 page evaluation, and a link to the full text!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jun 03, 2025

Editor: The final paragraphs of Anderson’s revelatory text.

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When writing in this vein, Tooze has certainly earned his place on the left of liberalism. But the compound is labile. Elsewhere in Crashed, he can write without demur of Obama’s failure to deliver ‘a concerted drive to unify American society around a sustained programme of investment-driven growth and comprehensive modernization’.footnote⁸⁹ Unify American society—or, power against power—cleave it?

If there is no clear-cut resolution of these tensions in Crashed, it is in part because so much rhetorical emphasis falls on the technical complexity of the ‘giant “systems” and “machines” of financial engineering’, and the vital role of a pragmatic managerialism in keeping them running. Central banks, Tooze has insisted, far from being stoppers of democracy, have often been flywheels of progress. After all, without the good sense of the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve, could the Entente have won the First World War, or the Allies the Second? Without helpful counteractions by Carney and Draghi, could the fall-out of unfortunate developments like the victory of Brexit in one referendum, or the defeat of Renzi in another, have been contained? ‘It would be a grave theoretical error and missed practical opportunity if technocratic structures were held to be a diminution of politics’. They can enhance them. Think of the ‘astounding flair for the situation’—magic term!—of someone like Mario Draghi.footnote⁹⁰

When he writes in this mode, rather than looking to possible avenues of democratic control over them, Tooze explains that ‘there are good reasons to defend technocratic government against the unreasoning passions of mass democracy. It is all too obvious today how important it is to be able to identify matters of potential technical agreement beyond politics.’ Sanity and lunacy so distributed, how can irrational masses be brought to accept rational decisions taken by the Bernankes and the Draghis? There, essential is that ‘coalitions be assembled for unpopular but essential actions’—not just as a conjunctural, but as a permanent necessity: ‘building such ad hoc and lopsided political coalitions is what the governance of capitalism under democratic conditions entails’.footnote⁹¹

Unpopular but essential actions: Tooze’s indictment of the eu brutalization of Greece is searing enough. But does he have anything to say about Tsipras’s shredding of a referendum to comply with it? Nothing. A silent sigh of relief can be deduced. For wasn’t such surrender the responsible course of action, as Stresemann showed? It is enough to recall Durand’s verdict in Fictitious Capital on the overall tale Tooze’s book tells to see the difference between the two writers: ‘Finance is a master blackmailer. Financial hegemony dresses up in the liberal trappings of the market, yet captures the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the body of society to feed its own profits.’ That note is missing in Crashed. There, blackmail—not called as such—is regrettable, but acceptable.

Ad hoc and lopsided coalitions: to date, the most specific illustration Tooze has offered comes in a recent piece on Germany, his European land of reference, in the lrb. In it, he argues for the creation of a Red–Red–Green alliance of the spd, Die Linke and the Greens, in place of the current Black–Red coalition of the cdu–csu–spd that has ruled the country since 2013, as previously from 2005 to 2009. Within the alternative bloc of his hopes, his preference plainly goes to the spd, hailed as ‘no ordinary political party’, but one that for 150 years, from the time of Bismarck to that of Merkel, has ‘stood for a vision of a better, more democratic and socially just Germany’—as if these were adjectives that could encompass the vote for war credits in 1914, the use of the Freikorps to dispatch Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the McCarthyism of the Radikalenerlass in the seventies, and the practice of renditions in this century: not the whole record, but an indelible part of it. Today, obstructing the prospect of a Red–Red–Green alliance is ‘Die Linke’s ingrained hostility to nato’.footnote⁹² The good sense of the spd’s Kaisertreu fealty to it goes without saying.

Such questions aside, what should be the programme of a future Red–Red–Green government? Formally speaking, Tooze’s article is a review of four recent books on Germany, to which he adds three others as he proceeds, though as often in the lrb reference to them is cursory, none accorded the dignity of an actual review. Much of the substance of the piece is devoted to the social consequences of Hartz iv, Schröder’s ‘tough new system of welfare and labour-market regulation’, imposed in 2005. Though he prefers a more to a less lenient view of its neoliberal agenda, and complains that the spd gets no credit for ‘earnest efforts to rebalance’ its consequences—a minimum-wage law has since belatedly ended a situation in which Germany was one of the last countries in Europe without onefootnote⁹³—Tooze leaves no doubt that the condition of the country is far from ideal: inequality has soared, precarity has spread, and with it social and political unrest. To remedy such ills, what agenda of social repair does he outline for a Red–Red–Green coalition? Answer: Germany needs ‘a more pro-European government’, one capable of responding to the ‘bold vision of Europe’s future’ offered by a ‘charismatic’ Emmanuel Macronfootnote⁹⁴—a leader famously capable of constructing a transverse, if lopsided coalition and taking unpopular, but essential decisions. Nothing else. ‘Europe can ill afford further delay’. That empty signifier is all.

It would be wrong to make too much of this. Tooze spreads himself widely, and his accents and formulations vary from place to place. That’s often the price of a growing reputation—la primadonna é mobile—and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. To criticisms of inconsistency, he can in any case reply quite reasonably that nothing he has written falls outside the parameters of a basic commitment to liberalism as it has developed in the West from the time of Wilson and Lloyd George to that of Geithner and Macron, and no one can accuse Crashed of lacking a social sensibility in keeping with this tradition. Yet in today’s world, the question can be asked: how far does that differ from running with the hare and hunting with the hounds—indignant sympathy for the hare, awed admiration for the hounds? ‘Power must be met with power’. Truly?

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii119/articles/perry-anderson-situationism-a-l-envers

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Editor: if in search of an historical/political analogy to describe the ‘Liberalism’ of Tooze, look to Americans for Democratic Action, and two of its founders Arthur Schlesinger and Reinhold Niebuhr:

On the Political Toady Arthur Schlesinger see his journals, as collected and edited by his sons. The Sons have been a bit too honest, as to their fathers political enthusiams! Schlesinger pere, in some sections, makes noises like Joe McCarthy and his Fellow Travelers! In some ‘scenes’ in this collection, Schlesinger echoes that Hollywood Potboiler Big Jim McLain,1952.

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On Reinhold Niebuhr

By Richard Wightman Fox

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/reinhold-niebuhr-a-biography_richard-wightman-fox/528175/item/8646814/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=high_vol_midlist_standard_shopping_retention_17244561358&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=666159745081&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=17244561358&gbraid=0AAAAADwY45hISD6IVv6pjKXLtjD6F_G33&gclid=Cj0KCQjwuvrBBhDcARIsAKRrkjczJQ1yv12gcN0PVHGf24a9114femlxNMpg6bWEA_ZSGJJOXWtze-AaAmIiEALw_wcB#idiq=8646814&edition=2147979

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On The Theopolitics of Reinhold Niebuhr by Political Observer

Posted on May 24, 2012 by stephenkmacksd

I’ve just finished a Reinhold Niebuhr biography by Richard Fox published in 1985. That I find Mr. Niebuhr repugnant as person and Christian Moralist is a statement of my prejudice, without apology. I felt that I wanted to understand who the man was and where he came from. Those questions are answered in some detail in Mr. Fox’s biography, although Mr. Fox seems to be satisfied with hagiography rather that critical engagement with Mr. Niebuhr as theopolitician. Niebuhr appears to be a religious and political conformist swept along from Socialism to Cold War Liberalism: always a little too anxious to prove his patriotism, his Americaness. Niebuhr has become the object of a cult headed by President Obama, perhaps because of the tough minded moralizing represented by Christian Realism: which could be more accurately named Christian Imperialism. It has something in common with the Protestant Christian Politics of Woodrow Wilson, with an emphasis on the necessary use of violence, to reach political ends deemed important enough to warrant it. In the name of the greater political good, even as necessary to emancipate, if only temporarily, man from his natural sinful and irredeemable self-hood. This cliché of the Christian Tradition reeks of the self-hating Augustine, and his successors, who institutionalized the persistent, morally destructive Christian anti-humanism. Imperial Politics with a thin veneer of carefully cultivated piety is an American tradition. I would call Niebuhr hopelessly Middlebrow: more about the care and maintenance of bourgeois political respectability and the self-exculpatory, as key to ex post facto rationalizations identified as ‘Philosophy’ . I was impressed, and moved by one person’s character in Mr. Fox’s biography of Reinhold, and that was the love, devotion and steadfastness of his brother Richard. Engaging with the ‘Philosophy’ of Mr. Niebuhr using the valuable historical frame provided by Mr. Fox will enrich my further reading.

Political Observer