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Political Observer shares @FT report on Isaac Herzog’s toxic mendacity: as if Genocide was/is the lie of Anti-Semites!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Dec 06, 2024

Israel-Hamas war

Headline: Israeli president calls Elon Musk to revive Gaza hostage talks

Sub-headline: Families of those held in enclave urge Isaac Herzog to keep issue in focus for incoming Trump administration

https://www.ft.com/content/ff1778d9-3954-438d-9977-dca7472cc2a4

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog spoke to Elon Musk this week in a bid to enlist the world’s richest man to keep the stalled negotiations for the release of Israeli hostages on the incoming Trump administration’s agenda.

The conversation, which took place at the urging of some of the families of hostages still being held by Hamas, was part of Herzog’s “wide and fairly extensive efforts to apply pressure on all parties”, a person familiar with the conversation said. About 100 hostages, more than a third of whom are believed to be dead, are still held in the besieged enclave.

The unconventional outreach to Musk, who has no official role involving the Middle East in President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration, underlines both Musk’s outsize role during the transition period and the lengths to which the desperate families of hostages must resort to inject urgency into the issue.

While it’s unclear what day Musk and Herzog spoke, Trump posted on his social network Truth Social on Monday evening that if the hostages are not released by the time he takes office on January 20 “there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East”.

Trump has spoken multiple times to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since winning the election — even hosting Netanyahu’s wife and son at his Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this week — and to Herzog, who has a ceremonial role in Israeli politics.

In an earlier conversation on November 11, Herzog “emphasised the urgent need to secure the return of the Israeli hostages”, according to his office.

The latest conversation between Musk and Herzog was of a “general nature, and from a policy to . . . put pressure wherever pressure can be placed to keep the issue” front and centre, the person familiar with the conversation said. The call was first reported by Israel’s Channel 12.

The person said the call was not simply an attempt to influence Trump. “Musk’s role in the Trump camp is one thing but he is also the key figure of one of the most important social media platforms for awareness and narrative,” they said.

Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hamas took 250 people hostage in its surprise October 7, 2023 raid on Israel, which killed 1,200 people, according to local officials. While dozens were released in a brief Israeli hostage-for-Palestinian prisoner swap in November that year, the rest have remained captive despite many failed rounds of indirect negotiations between the US and Israel with mediators Egypt and Qatar.

Seven of the remaining hostages also hold American nationality, although five of them are believed to be dead.

Trump has blamed outgoing US President Joe Biden for failing to secure the release of the hostages, and is banking on a renewed set of negotiations to succeed. This could repeat the spectacle of the release of US diplomats held hostage in Iran under Jimmy Carter, who were freed as Ronald Reagan took power in 1981.

Negotiations have stalled over Hamas’s demand that the staggered release of all the hostages accompany assurances that Israel’s war in Gaza will simultaneously wind down and eventually end.

Netanyahu has resisted this, sparking street protests in Israel as more hostages either die from their injuries, from Israeli bombings or are executed by Hamas as IDF forces close in on their locations.

But this last week a tentative new approach was made, according to two people familiar with the situation. They said Ronen Bar, chief of Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet, conveyed to Egyptian intelligence that Israel would agree to a 60-day ceasefire in exchange for the release of the female hostages, wounded and elderly.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/ff1778d9-3954-438d-9977-dca7472cc2a4

Editor: There can be no surprise that reporters Mehul Srivastava & Joe Miller follows the @FT Party Line on The Gaza Genocide! Yet the penultimate paragraph of this ‘report’ offers the horrific facts of that metaticising atrosity! And the active criminal complicity of the National Security States of ‘The Mythical West’!

Israel’s offensive has killed at least 42,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, according to local health officials, displaced most of the entire 2.3mn population in the besieged enclave and triggered a severe hunger crisis.

Political Observer

Political Observer offers more that just this front page. I offer selections from Claire Gatinois and Solenn de Royer, of Le Mond’s, postmortem of Macron’s ‘twilight’?

stephenkmacksd.com/

Dec 05, 2024

Le Monde offers this on Macron :

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Editor: The Reader has to congratulate Le Monde, and its reporters Claire Gatinois and Solenn de Royer, for their 3633 word exsumation of Macron and Macronism? The Reader might even choose her favorite selections, and totally ignore my own! One might read the reportage of Claire Gatinois and Solenn de Royer as contemporary riff on Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honoré de Balzac? That might also riff on the themes of Lucien de Rubempré of The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans? The Reader might become annarored, even seduced, by the style of these two reporters, and again ignore my own! This vast canvas invites dissent, as does the title of this essay, followed by Chapter Headings, in a nod to the novel as formative ?

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The wound of dissolution:

Editor: engaging in some self-serving shorthand will make this more palatlatable?

Since the disastrous dissolution, which saw him lose around a hundred MPs, Macron has grown weary of criticism,…”Who are you talking about?”…I think I’ve flipped everyone quite nicely,” he wrote to his interlocutor, convinced that inviting MPs to lunch in small groups, as he’s been doing since the summer, is enough to win them back…Macron prefers to mince words… president Nicolas Sarkozy, who never misses an opportunity to have a dig at his predecessor, Jacques Chirac… said former conservative senator Pierre Charon (Les Républicains, LR)…Roger-Petit, known as “BRP,” who used to encourage “the chief” to be “Gaullian” by calling “the people” back to the polls…One witness to the scene reported that lawyer and editorialist Charles Consigny…Former manager of the Elysée presidential palace and current vice president of Publicis France, Clément Leonarduzzi – nicknamed “Clément Leonardisso” (a play on “dissolution”) by Macron supporters –… The identical reconstruction of the cathedral, five years after it was ravaged by fire, is seen as a signature achievement of Macron’s presidency and an opportunity for redemption. It will be an “unforgettable moment that will resonate worldwide,” said Leonarduzzi.

‘I let them’

…the president has retreated to his small circle of communicators: the strategist Jonathan Guémas, his collaborator Jonas Bayard and the indispensable Roger-Petit. These loyal “musketeers” keep alive the story of an “inevitable” dissolution… “We’ve avoided a massacre,” some strategists want to believe, convinced that a “clarification” has indeed taken place: the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) has shown that it is not ready to take power… “We’ve avoided a massacre,” some strategists want to believe, convinced that a “clarification” has indeed taken place: the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) has shown that it is not ready to take power…Alexis Kohler has struggled to maintain control during Macron’s second term…Despite rumors of his imminent departure for the banking sector, his exit keeps being postponed. “I can’t leave him,” he told a visitor in September,…Following a cabinet meeting, Macron slipped away, unwilling to linger with the members of the current government who are no longer from his own party and who he distrusts….”The light has shifted,” said a member of the president’s cabinet, who added: “We are in the sublime of effacement, as Stendhal would say.”…”What do we do?” asked distraught Renaissance senator François Patriat on the sidelines of former prime minister Elisabeth Borne’s decoration ceremony on November 25…in the morning, they are told “not to touch anything,” and to “let [Prime Minister Michel] Barnier govern”; in the evening, the president is pleased to have his own men in government to “weigh in.”

Barnier, the ‘Leclerc tank’

“Well, we didn’t understand each other,” Barnier would occasionally say on his way home from a meeting with the president, whom he had to endure downplaying the staggering public deficit while firmly cautioning against raising taxes….But beneath his pleasant, polished façade, the prime minister can be sensitive and rigid, concerned about his prerogatives. “You thought you were dealing with a courteous, malleable gentleman, but you’ve inherited a Leclerc tank that runs over you,” a person close to the prime minister told the teams at the presidency….”At the European level, Michel Barnier is an element of stability,” said Patrick Hetzel, higher education minister and a close friend of Barnier.

‘He’s no longer the same’

Macron hoped to regain a little breathing space by devoting himself to geopolitics….A “clear victory,” he wrote to the president, who immediately replied, “Yes, and we must turn this into an opportunity.”…At the end of November, at the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, he made the point to his peers that he was a “veteran”: Few people can boast such longevity….which came into effect on November 27, between Hezbollah and the Israeli authorities. The American president, Joe Biden, went so far as to salute his counterpart for this fruitful “partnership….In September, his friends found him tired and emaciated. The post-dissolution elation was followed by a period of uncertainty. What if this self-confident president was starting to have doubts?…He’s a “warrior,” said former MP Vignal, convinced that Macron will regain his panache. “Leave the bullshit to the government,” he suggested by text message at the end of the summer, urging him to embark on a tour of France, as he did after the Yellow Vests movement and the protests against the pension reform….Conservative MP Olivier Marleix compared him to a “dead star.”

‘Emmanuel is a child’

As his influence wanes, Macron clings to the trappings of power….”The scum,” said the president, who sends those who criticize him for enjoying his “good pleasure” back to the bitter camp….A month later, he showed the same ease in sunny Rio de Janeiro, on the sidelines of the G20, alternating between jogging along Copacabana Bay and sightseeing with Brigitte, enjoying the attention of passers-by everywhere. “I love Rio,” he said…. the French president, dressed casually, replied that the Haitians are “complete morons” for having dismissed their prime minister, Garry Conille, whom he described as “astounding.” He added that they only have themselves to blame if chaos reigns…The windows of the Elysée Palace are lit up late at night. What does Macron think about when he can’t sleep? Perhaps he reflects on all those he “fed,” as he puts it, over the past seven years, and who are now turning their backs on him? Outside the palace, gossip circulates. His little quirks are dissected and mocked, much like his habit of always insisting to be served first; or the newly ordered chairs for the Council of Ministers embossed with “RF” (for “République Française”)…”Emmanuel is a child,” former French president François Hollande once told Le Monde, “he plays.” He’s a “theater kid” who “has always mistaken society with the stage,” said essayist Alain Minc…doesn’t have harsh enough words for the dissolution (“the worst political trauma the Fifth Republic has seen in 50 years”) and its instigator, a “child king” with “narcissism pushed to a pathological level” and a propensity for “denying reality.”…

‘Curse of the gods’

On the evening of the dissolution, which risked paving the way for the far right to form a government, former advisers to the Elysée thought fondly of former interior minister Gérard Collomb, who died in 2023. Upon leaving the Interior Ministry in 2018, the Lyon native had warned his friend, the president, against hubris, the “curse of the gods” that afflicts those who become “too sure of themselves.”…”The gods blind those they want to lose,” said the former Greek teacher, who was laughed at by everyone at the time….His former minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, who was one of the most eager to praise the intelligence and disruption of this much-admired young president, blamed this “fallen angel” for having “taken the country with him into the void he had chosen to rush into.”… During their summer tête-à-tête, the president said: “Make me a note with a few points on which to move forward.” “I’m not your collaborator,” said the former trade unionist.- “You’ve always been tough,” said the president, who has never been considerate of intermediary bodies…. This is what sociologist Marc Joly has attempted to analyze in a book, La Pensée Perverse au Pouvoir (“Perverse Thinking in Power”), surprised to see so many comments on the president’s supposed “madness” in the wake of his decried decision.

He feels replaced

Brigitte Macron has put on a show, displaying an unalterable cheerfulness: “The French don’t deserve him,” she told actress Arielle Dombasle, who accompanied the presidential couple to Morocco. “We’re counting our friends, and there aren’t many of them,” she told TV host Stéphane Bern…. But it’s François Mitterrand that Macron looks to for inspiration, wondering how the old monarch went about governing souls. At the end of his two terms in office, the Socialist president pretended to support Lionel Jospin, the Socialist candidate to succeed him, while sabotaging him under the table. Like him, Macron, who will not be able to stand for re-election in the next presidential election, seems incapable of imagining his successor. “Talking to him about 2027 is like talking to him about death,” said a close friend….”The president loves a fight. And here, he has no fight. He feels like he’s been replaced,” said Renaissance MP Karl Olive, as former prime minister Gabriel Attal, 35, prepares to take over the reins of the presidential party….”And I’ll be honest,” said the president, “even Gabriel got us into trouble by being so egotistical.” “You put him out of a job without notice!” said Vignal. Haunted by this balance sheet, which he fears will be erased, overshadowed by the abyssal debt and political decay, Macron spoke to a few friends about the idea of writing a book, a “credo” that would revisit his policy platform work, Révolution, published in 2016. “Michel Barnier will be your Medvedev,” a writer told Macron, in an allusion to the short-lived Russian president who enabled Vladimir Putin to return to power after two successive terms…. In 1940, the historian analyzed the causes of the nation’s collapse, and wrote that “the story of this strange defeat, that of our French will, dulled by conservatism, lulled to sleep by conformism, softened by bureaucracy, abandoned by part of its elites,” said Macron, believing that the past holds lessons for the present. The man who got himself elected by presenting himself as a transgressive reformer, eager to overcome the blockages of the Fifth Republic, and who has ended up a paralyzed Fifth Republic leader, doesn’t seem to see how much this “strange defeat” resonates with his own.

Political Observer.

Political Observer shares @FT report on Isaac Herzog’s toxic mendacity: as if Genocide was/is the lie of Anti-Semites!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Dec 06, 2024

Israel-Hamas war

Headline: Israeli president calls Elon Musk to revive Gaza hostage talks

Sub-headline: Families of those held in enclave urge Isaac Herzog to keep issue in focus for incoming Trump administration

https://www.ft.com/content/ff1778d9-3954-438d-9977-dca7472cc2a4

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog spoke to Elon Musk this week in a bid to enlist the world’s richest man to keep the stalled negotiations for the release of Israeli hostages on the incoming Trump administration’s agenda.

The conversation, which took place at the urging of some of the families of hostages still being held by Hamas, was part of Herzog’s “wide and fairly extensive efforts to apply pressure on all parties”, a person familiar with the conversation said. About 100 hostages, more than a third of whom are believed to be dead, are still held in the besieged enclave.

The unconventional outreach to Musk, who has no official role involving the Middle East in President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration, underlines both Musk’s outsize role during the transition period and the lengths to which the desperate families of hostages must resort to inject urgency into the issue.

While it’s unclear what day Musk and Herzog spoke, Trump posted on his social network Truth Social on Monday evening that if the hostages are not released by the time he takes office on January 20 “there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East”.

Trump has spoken multiple times to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since winning the election — even hosting Netanyahu’s wife and son at his Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this week — and to Herzog, who has a ceremonial role in Israeli politics.

In an earlier conversation on November 11, Herzog “emphasised the urgent need to secure the return of the Israeli hostages”, according to his office.

The latest conversation between Musk and Herzog was of a “general nature, and from a policy to . . . put pressure wherever pressure can be placed to keep the issue” front and centre, the person familiar with the conversation said. The call was first reported by Israel’s Channel 12.

The person said the call was not simply an attempt to influence Trump. “Musk’s role in the Trump camp is one thing but he is also the key figure of one of the most important social media platforms for awareness and narrative,” they said.

Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hamas took 250 people hostage in its surprise October 7, 2023 raid on Israel, which killed 1,200 people, according to local officials. While dozens were released in a brief Israeli hostage-for-Palestinian prisoner swap in November that year, the rest have remained captive despite many failed rounds of indirect negotiations between the US and Israel with mediators Egypt and Qatar.

Seven of the remaining hostages also hold American nationality, although five of them are believed to be dead.

Trump has blamed outgoing US President Joe Biden for failing to secure the release of the hostages, and is banking on a renewed set of negotiations to succeed. This could repeat the spectacle of the release of US diplomats held hostage in Iran under Jimmy Carter, who were freed as Ronald Reagan took power in 1981.

Negotiations have stalled over Hamas’s demand that the staggered release of all the hostages accompany assurances that Israel’s war in Gaza will simultaneously wind down and eventually end.

Netanyahu has resisted this, sparking street protests in Israel as more hostages either die from their injuries, from Israeli bombings or are executed by Hamas as IDF forces close in on their locations.

But this last week a tentative new approach was made, according to two people familiar with the situation. They said Ronen Bar, chief of Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet, conveyed to Egyptian intelligence that Israel would agree to a 60-day ceasefire in exchange for the release of the female hostages, wounded and elderly.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/ff1778d9-3954-438d-9977-dca7472cc2a4

Editor: There can be no surprise that reporters Mehul Srivastava & Joe Miller follows the @FT Party Line on The Gaza Genocide! Yet the penultimate paragraph of this ‘report’ offers the horrific facts of that metaticising atrosity! And the active criminal complicity of the National Security States of ‘The Mythical West’!

Israel’s offensive has killed at least 42,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, according to local health officials, displaced most of the entire 2.3mn population in the besieged enclave and triggered a severe hunger crisis.

Political Observer

Political Observer comments.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Dec 04, 2024

Editor: This from Chicago Magazine of Febuary 1, 2017 might just put Mr. Stephens enthiasm for Rahm Emanuel, into another, more accurate perspspective !

Headline: Rahm Emanuel: The Least Popular Mayor in Modern Chicago History

Sub-headline:The mayor’s job approval drops well below the Bilandic Line in the latest Tribune poll—and his approval rating among white voters is just four points ahead of Harold Washington’s in 1985. By Whet Moser February 1, 2016, 3:56 pm

By Whet Moser February 1, 2016, 3:56 pm

https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/february-2016/rahm-emanuel-the-least-popular-mayor-in-modern-chicago-history/

A decade ago, TV writer John Rodgers was trying to figure out how low George W. Bush’s approval ratings would go. A friend predicted 27 percent, because that was the percentage of the vote the hapless Alan Keyes received in his comically lopsided Senate race against Barack Obama. “Twenty-seven percent of the population of Illinois voted for him,” his friend said. “They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgment.” (Bush would drop to 25 percent in the Gallup poll, making it a pretty impressive prediction.)

The Tribune just polled ‘s approval rating. What do you know: it is 27 percent.

It’s a big poll for a local politician, almost 1,000 respondents, and Emanuel gets killed on basically every question. The only thing resembling a bright spot is that “only” 41 percent of respondents think he should resign, versus 51 percent who don’t. But the racial breakdown is dramatic. Whites are 26 percent for resigning versus 69 percent against, while blacks and Hispanics have basically same split: 51 percent and 50 percent for resignation, respectively, versus 40 percent against. It’s a big blow for a politician who needed the black vote to win a surprisingly contested second term.

How bad is 27 percent? It’s real bad. According to my search of Tribune job approval polls, since the era of Daley dominance began no mayor has ever been this unpopular. In fact, it’s so bad that it’s six points below the previous worst.

Richard J. Daley

He served before the age of regular job-approval polling, but a Gallup poll taken 10 years after his death in 1986 gave him a 73 percent job-approval rating. Before his last election, Daley won a Trib poll in a four-way mayoral primary with 55 percent.

Michael Bilandic

Remember him? He was the machine politician whose handling of the 1979 blizzard—both logistically and politically—is a famous cautionary tale for urban leaders. Prior to it, he had a 48-percent approval rating, according to a WBBM poll; afterwards, he fell to 33 percent.

Jane Byrne

She won because of Bilandic’s collapse, but a year later had a mere 35 percent job-approval rating—and, according to the Tribune in 1980, her good/excellent numbers were actually lower than Bilandic’s.

Harold Washington

Racial tensions caused problems for Washington in City Council, but his top-line numbers were good: 54 percent approval versus 36 percent disapproval in 1985 (though the split was 33/58 for whites), and 67 percent approval in 1987. The Trib used the northwest and southwest sides as a proxy for white voter approval that year, and he notched 47 percent in the former and 32 percent in the latter.

Eugene Sawyer

Washington’s successor was unable to fill his shoes, but his numbers weren’t atrocious. In 1988 the Tribune polled residents on a number of questions about his performance; 55 percent thought he was not “strong, decisive, and independent”; 54 percent thought he was not an “effective leader”; and 45 percent said he wasn’t “good at getting things done.”

Richard M. Daley

For most of his tenure, Da Mare maintained high approval ratings: 80 percent in 1991, 79 percent in 1999. After the Hired Truck scandal, arguably the biggest of his time in office, it slipped to 53 percent in 2005. By late 2009, after the parking-meter deal turned into a disaster, even the great Daley slipped to a Byrne-level 35 percent.

As for Rahm? His highest job approval ratings are among whites, but they’re bad, too: 37 percent, a mere four points above Harold Washington’s approval rating among whites in 1985.

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Editor: Mr Stephens assumes that his particular reader won’t bother to check readily avavalable sourses of information! He is a propgandist by avovation and temperament. In this particular instance Mr. Stephens dons the weak guise of a Political Reformer of the New Democratic Party, fogetting that the Neo-Conservatives and the New Democrats have made an allience in the 2024 election. That Bill & Hillary Clinton, Braack Obama are now desperate to begin a political reinvention, post the resounding victory of Trump.

Mr. Stephens wastes no time in presenting Rahm Emanuel as the answer, yet the first paragraph above makes plain the fact Stephens wastes no time pointing out that Progressive Left as a natural enemy of the Parties hierarchy and presents Rahm Emanuel the natural enemy of : ‘The progressive left despises his pragmatism and liberal centrism’. Stephen’s re-invents Emanuel?

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There’s a buzz around Rahm Emanuel — the former Bill Clinton adviser, former Illinois congressman, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, former mayor of Chicago — possibly becoming the next head of the Democratic National Committee. The progressive left despises his pragmatism and liberal centrism. He has a reputation for abrasiveness. And his current job, as ambassador to Japan, has traditionally served as a posting for high-level political has-beens like Walter Mondale and Howard Baker.

But he also has a gift for constructing winning coalitions with difficult, unexpected partners.

…

Editor: Mr. Stephens relies on the well worn bad actor of ‘the progressive left’ that always falls into line with the New Demcratic majorty!

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Editor: Here is a New York Times essay on ‘The Brothers Emanuel’ of June 15, 1997 by By Elisabeth Bumiller

The best Rahm Emanuel story is not the one about the decomposing two-and-a-half-foot fish he sent to a pollster who displeased him. It is not about the time – the many times – that he hung up on political contributors in a Chicago mayor’s race, saying he was embarrassed to accept their $5,000 checks because they were $25,000 kind of guys. No, the definitive Rahm Emanuel story takes place in Little Rock, Ark., in the heady days after Bill Clinton was first elected President.

It was there that Emanuel, then Clinton’s chief fund-raiser, repaired with George Stephanopoulos, Mandy Grunwald and other aides to Doe’s, the campaign hangout. Revenge was heavy in the air as the group discussed the enemies – Democrats, Republicans, members of the press – who wronged them during the 1992 campaign. Clifford Jackson, the ex-friend of the President and peddler of the Clinton draft-dodging stories, was high on the list. So was William Donald Schaefer, then the Governor of Maryland and a Democrat who endorsed George Bush. Nathan Landow, the fund-raiser who backed the candidacy of Paul Tsongas, made it, too.

Suddenly Emanuel grabbed his steak knife and, as those who were there remember it, shouted out the name of another enemy, lifted the knife, then brought it down with full force into the table.

”Dead!” he screamed.

The group immediately joined in the cathartic release: ”Nat Landow! Dead! Cliff Jackson! Dead! Bill Schaefer! Dead!”

…

Editor: This from Foreign Policy

Passport

Rahm Emanuel and Israel It was inevitable that the world would eventually realize the unhappy fact that President-elect Barack Obama will not represent a complete break with the past 60 years of American diplomacy. By tapping Rahm Emanuel, a fierce partisan of Israel who volunteered as a mechanic in northern Israel during the first Gulf War, it is fair …

By David Kenner, Middle East editor at Foreign Policy from 2013-2018.

Rahm Emanuel and Israel

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Editor: This from Jewish Journal

November 6, 2008

…

His father, a pediatrician still practicing near Chicago, immigrated to the United States from Israel and spoke Hebrew with his son, when Emanuel was a boy. Emanuel volunteered as a civilian volunteer in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1991 Gulf War, serving in one of Israel’s northern bases, rust-proofing brakes.

…

Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s pick for Chief of Staff, is tough, direct and wedded to his roots

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Mr Stephens avoids the mention that he and Emanual are not just Zionists but of the the most belicose iteration of that cardre. Mr. Stephens acts as a conduit for Emanual’s politics, which he characterises as: But he also has a gift for constructing winning coalitions with difficult, unexpected partners.

With Hillary Clinton’s hysterical attack on the Constitutional guarantee of Free Speech, and calling her students Foreign Agents: and Biden Pardoning his son- when will be the propitious moment arrive for Rahm Emanuel to take the lead role of The New Democratic Party ? Mr. Stephens is a propagandist and constructs a senario dubed ‘Flip the Script’, that reeks of the arcaine vocabulary of those mythically re-engeneered ‘Mad Men’?

Political Observer .

Political Observer & Almost Marx confront 1826 words, about China & Elon Musk

stephenkmacksd.com/

Dec 02, 2024

The Financial Times employes: Edward White in Shanghai, Cheng Leng in Hong Kong, Kana Inagaki in London and Stephen Morris in San Francisco and ‘Additional reporting by Ding Wenjie and Joe Leahy in Beijing!’

Editor : after these below quoted selections from this Financial Times diatritribe against Elon Musk, there remain 1826 words.

…

Musk could potentially provide a “critical bridge” between China and the Trump administration, says Philippe Houchois, an analyst with US investment bank Jefferies.

…

Given the stakes for Tesla, the entrepreneur might be expected to act as a “moderating influence” on Trump’s planned tariffs, Houchois adds — and “how much or [for] how long markets ignore potential conflicts of interests ranging from political responsibilities to governance and compensation, is unclear”.

…

Two Democratic senators have sought a federal investigation into Musk’s reported communication with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, raising concern over Musk’s high-level security clearances and billions of dollars in US government funding.

….

Other parts of his empire run directly into points of tension between the US and China. SpaceX, his commercial rocket and satellite business, has drawn sharp criticism from Chinese military analysts who see the company and its vast network of Starlink satellites as part of the American military’s expansion into space. And X, the social media platform, is banned in China.

Yaqiu Wang, research director for China at Freedom House, a US-based advocacy group, warns that Beijing has become “very deft” at manipulating foreign business leaders — including leveraging their companies’ access to the country — to compel them to “toe” the Communist party line, she warns.

“Musk is not only vulnerable to Beijing’s pressure given his extensive business interests in China, he also seems to genuinely enjoy close relationships with China’s authoritarian leaders,” she says. “This dynamic creates ample opportunities for the CCP to influence Trump’s China policy.”

…

The prospect of facilitating the loan sparked fierce competition among Chinese banks. Some lobbied the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, one of Tesla’s regulators in Beijing, to be added to the list of approved lenders. From the bankers’ point of view, the deal was not only financially failproof, but it was also an opportunity to demonstrate alignment with Beijing’s supportive green industrial policy.

In the end, loans totalling nearly $1.4bn came from a consortium of some of the country’s biggest state-owned lenders: China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank. The interest rate on the debt was pegged at 90 per cent of China’s one-year benchmark interest rate, a discount that state lenders usually offer to their best clients, almost always other Chinese groups.

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Editor:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mHVaWbtE6oVHVqvfKWnazXZvsNm9ZtMmgTpf77Qlapg/edit?usp=sharing

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Political Observer & Almost Marx

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Some further thouhts:

Editor: What are the Imperatines Of Capital but prophet! Espessially in the watershed of the Economic Collapse of 2007-2008: that Obama said ‘lets put this behind us’ and his Simpson -Boles Austerity that cratered! Obama betrayed the very people who voted for him, while embracing his Wall Street backers

What the Financial Times, and its many contributers don’t just miss, but ignore is that Elon Musk’s self-consept is World-Historical in nature ! His self-concept transcenedes the rest of the Trump ‘the hangers on’! His Rocket Ships do what no others have done, his World Wide Starlink, Neuralink is a neurotechnological company that’s developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) that allows users to control devices with their thoughts.

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CNBC Disruptor 50

Elon Musk’s 10 greatest inventions changing the world

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/13/elon-musks-10-greatest-inventions-changing-the-world.html

Political Observer asks the question: Is Caldwell the unofficial Intellectual Court Historian of The New York Times?

stephenkmacksd.com/

Dec 01, 2024

In his latest essay in The New York Times Mr. Caldwell expresses an enthisasm for Wolfgang Streeck:

Headline: This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time

Nov. 28, 2024

Editor: A brief selection from the first part of Mr. Caldwell’s 1595 word essay:

…

As Mr. Streeck sees it, a series of (mostly American) attempts to calm the economy after the ’70s produced the system we now call neoliberalism. “Neoliberalism,” he argues, “was, above all, a political-economic project to end the inflation state and free capital from its imprisonment in the postwar settlement.” This project has never really been reconsidered, even as one administration’s fix turns into the next generation’s crisis.

At each stage of neoliberalism’s evolution, Mr. Streeck stresses, key decisions have been made by technocrats, experts and other actors relatively insulated from democratic accountability. When the crash came in 2008, central bankers stepped in to take over the economy, devising quantitative easing and other novel methods of generating liquidity. During the Covid emergency of 2020 and 2021, Western countries turned into full-blown expertocracies, bypassing democracy outright. A minuscule class of administrators issued mandates on every aspect of national life — masks, vaccinations, travel, education, church openings — and incurred debt at levels that even the most profligate Reaganite would have considered surreal.

Mr. Streeck has a clear vision of something paradoxical about the neoliberal project: For the global economy to be “free,” it must be constrained. What the proponents of neoliberalism mean by a free market is a deregulated market. But getting to deregulation is trickier than it looks because in free societies, regulations are the result of people’s sovereign right to make their own rules. The more democratic the world’s societies are, the more idiosyncratic they will be, and the more their economic rules will diverge. But that is exactly what businesses cannot tolerate — at least not under globalization. Money and goods must be able to move frictionlessly and efficiently across borders. This requires a uniform set of laws. Somehow, democracy is going to have to give way.

A uniform set of laws also requires a single international norm. Which norm? That’s another problem, as Mr. Streeck sees it: The global regime we have is a reliable copy of the American one. This brings order and efficiency but also tilts the playing field in favor of American corporations, banks and investors.

Perhaps that is what blighted the West’s relations with Russia, where the transition to global capitalism “was tightly controlled by American government agencies, foundations and N.G.O.s,” Mr. Streeck says, and the oligarchs who emerged to run the government in the 1990s were “received with open arms by American corporations and, not least, the London real estate market.” To an Indian or a Chinese person, “free markets” established on these terms might carry the threat of imperial highhandedness and lost self-determination.

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Editor: as infromative as this is, what might The Reader make of Mr. Calwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West by Christopher Caldwell , Doubleday, 422 pp., $30.00

Reviewed by Malise Ruthven in the December 17, 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books:

The Big Muslim Problem!

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Powell, who died in 1998, has been castigated as a racist and condemned, not to say vilified, by the liberal left; but as Christopher Caldwell argues in his provocatively titled book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, his demographic predictions have proved remarkably accurate. In one of his speeches Powell shocked his audience by predicting that Britain’s nonwhite population of barely a million would reach 4.5 million by 2002; according to the Office of National Statistics, the size of Britain’s “ethnic minority” population actually reached 4.6 million in 2001. His predictions for the ethnic composition of major cities such as Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and Inner London were similarly on target. Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality predicts that by 2011 the population of Leicester will be 50 percent nonwhite, making it the first major British city without a white majority.

This pattern is being replicated in cities throughout Western Europe. According to Caldwell, Europe is now a “continent of migrants” with more than 10 percent of its people living outside their countries of birth. The figure includes both non-European immigrants and citizens of countries belonging to the enlarged European Union who are permitted to move freely within its territory. But it also includes a substantial body of immigrants—namely Muslims—whom Caldwell regards as posing “the most acute problems” on account of their religion (an issue never mentioned by Powell in his speeches).

The statistics are highly variable since many countries do not register the religion of their citizens. However, it is generally assumed that there are now upward of 13 million Muslims, and possibly as many as 20 million (Caldwell’s preferred figure), living in the European Union. The largest concentrations are in France with more than 5 million, Germany with around 3 million, Britain with 1.6 million, Spain with a million, and the Netherlands and Bulgaria with just under a million. Overall, the proportion of Muslims now residing in the European Union (including the indigenous Bulgarian Muslims) remains at 5 percent, a proportion twice that of the “nearly seven million American Muslims” mentioned by President Barack Obama in his Cairo University speech last June.

Individual cities, however, have much higher concentrations. Karoly Lorant, a Hungarian economist who wrote a paper on the subject for the European Parliament, calculates that Muslims already make up 25 percent of the population in Marseilles and Rotterdam, 20 percent in Malmö, 15 percent in Brussels and Birmingham, and 10 percent in London, Paris, and Copenhagen. If the French national figure of around 5 million were proportionately reproduced in the US, it would make for 24 million American Muslims. Moreover, given that immigrant Muslims have a higher birthrate than indigenous white Europeans or other immigrant groups such as Eastern Europeans or African-Caribbeans, that population seems set to increase, regardless of tighter controls on immigration now being imposed by governments. The US National Intelligence Council expects that by 2025 the Muslim population of Europe will have doubled.

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Editor: This Caldwell opinion piece appeared in The Financial Times of September 23, 2011 is demostrative of his politics

Opinion Christopher Caldwell

Headline: The president just does not get the American centre

Sub-headline: Barack Obama is a typical American – the more he says, the less you know him

https://www.ft.com/content/fa9208f0-e480-11e0-92a3-00144feabdc0#axzz1YppvW0CO

Editor: Mr. Caldwell is here billed as : The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. A selection from the Weekley Standard version of Caldwell

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Populism will work a charm on this electorate, but it is a note that Mr Obama is strangely unable to sound.

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Mr Obama is being sensible when he suggests (eventually) capping upper earners’ tax deductions for mortgage interest and charitable giving.

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But Mr Obama repeats the mistake he made in this summer’s debt ceiling debate – he offers few specifics as to how any of this would work fiscally.

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It makes the allegation of class warfare easier to sustain.

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Populism is a many-splendoured political disposition.

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Having never shown much interest in the opinions of the working class, he now finds it hard to claim their allegiance.

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Mr Obama offered it to them, in the form of his avowal there was no red (or Republican) America and no blue (or Democratic) America.

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Editor: the reader might look to salient fact that Simpson-Bowles was about Austerity, and that Obama’s call was ‘lets put this all behind us’!

He spent the summer calling for a bipartisan “grand bargain” mixing tax rises and entitlement cuts when there was one already on the table – the so-called Simpson-Bowles plan.

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Editor: Obama was a Neo-Liberal, like the Clintons, so Caldwell is here correct!

The centrist voters who put the president in office feel he has abused their trust. It is possible that no collection of programmes and plans, no matter how sensible, will now suffice to restore his standing.

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Mr. Caldwell has now become the official Intellectual Court Historian of The New York Times ?

Political Observer.

The New York Times writes its final chapter?

stephenkmacksd.com/

Nov 30, 2024

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Political Cynic shares that News, in miniature… featuring Gillian Tett as almost a Keynesian? from January 16 2024.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Nov 29, 2024

Not to forget the redoubtable Gillian Tett!

Or her January 16, 2024 essay:

Globalisation

Gillian Tett: Look back to judge chances of a global future

Maybe it’s time to dust off John Maynard Keynes’s warning about taking borderless prosperity for granted

https://www.ft.com/content/4f397d45-3ca6-44fe-9c12-153f64d4e3dd

Editor: A selection from her essay is telling:

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Thus “the projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper.” In plain English: people had taken globalisation so completely for granted that they rarely gave it much thought — and assumed that the free movement of people, money and objects would continue indefinitely. War had seemed like a relic of the past.

Fast forward a century, and it is tempting to laugh or cry at this state of affairs. After all, during the 1914-18 conflict, such sunny complacency had been shattered by massive economic destruction, the closure of borders, disruptions in trade and a fractured capital market.

Globalisation had gone into reverse. Further, the war was followed by the 1929 economic crash, depression and protectionism in the 1930s and, then, another world war. Although globalisation resumed in the middle of the 20th century, it was not until the century’s end that the world returned to the type of globalisation that Keynes observed — ie, a world where it seemed so normal to move goods, capital and ideas around that most observers assumed this would continue indefinitely, and deepen. The only big difference between 2013 and 1913 was that, in the modern era, no one expects to travel “without passport or other formality” across borders. Today, there are inevitably bureaucratic controls.

The chilling question we face is whether we are about to see a replay of Keynes’s tale — namely, an era when globalisation suddenly goes into reverse, as geopolitical conflict rears its head again. So far, the answer is “not entirely”. For, while the political rhetoric in many countries has become lamentably populist, protectionist and nationalist, globalisation is far from dead.

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And when, in October in Marrakech, the IMF held its annual general meeting, its World Economic Outlook included a depressing new feature: a section calculating what might happen if the world slides into a new “Cold War” of two rival geopolitical economic blocs that do not trade with each other.

To (gu)estimate that, the IMF used a model based on the political grouping that emerged at the UN during 2022’s Ukraine vote: namely pro-western and anti-western blocs. It calculated that, if a true cold war emerges, it would cut future global GDP by up to 7 per cent due to lower trade, finance and information flows. Other economists put the figure even higher.

The IMF stresses that such a scenario is theoretical and hopes — by showing policymakers, and voters, the folly of letting globalisation wither — to ensure it never occurs. Yet, the fact it published this “abstract” exercise shows how the world has changed: a decade ago, in 2013, the idea globalisation might go into reverse was as alien as it was in 1913.

Perhaps, then, it is time to republish The Economic Consequences of the Peace — or transmit its message out on the globalised internet.

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Political Cynic

Editor: Further thought on the issues raised by Tett:

Where might the Globalist Agenda stand: given the Genocide in Gaza, and the expanding reach of the Zionist Faschist State’s into Lebanon, Syria and in all likeyhood into Iran: the closing of the The Strait of Hormuz that woud presiptate world wide oil crisis!

And the American Proxy War in Ukraine, and the real possability of Nuclear War with Russia: all these speculations about possibilities might lead the reader of Tett’s essay to – how deft must be the political foot work of the Globalist’s be, to confront the above collection of possible/probables toxins?

StephenKMackSD.

stephenkmacksd.com/

Nov 28, 2024

In the Octorber/November issue of the AARP Magazine on page 50 is a report on Rinvok a medication for the treatment of Crone’s disease.

In the the 1990’s I worked for a a division of Abbott Labs, that was a sub-contractor to Cedars‑Sinai. In that capacity I was first a delivery person to various patients, that included AIDS and Crohn’s patients: it was an education in both the proper treatment of patients and caregivers, and the paying proper deference to the most prestigious Medical Center and its doctors and nurses!

In that capacity I met and and knew both AIDS patients and Crone’s disease patients: over a year and half, and later as a Home Sevice Represetative via phone. I attemnded the CSMC Home Infusion Patient Conferences every Monday morning for many years.

AIDS and its advanced treatments have … My Crone’s disease patients , that is the way I think of them, to this day: all are long gone, but Rinvoq looks like the contempoery suffers of this disease have some hope!

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FDA approves first oral treatment for moderately to severely active Crohn’s disease

Action

FDA has approved Rinvoq (upadacitinib) for adults with moderately to severely active Crohn’s disease who have had an inadequate response or intolerance to one or more tumor necrosis factor blockers. Rinvoq is the first approved oral product available to treat moderately to severely active Crohn’s disease.

Patients should start with 45 mg of Rinvoq once daily for 12 weeks. Following the 12-week period, the recommended maintenance dosage is 15 mg once a day. A maintenance dosage of 30 mg once daily can be considered for patients with refractory, severe, or extensive Crohn’s disease.

Disease or Condition

Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that causes inflammation in the digestive tract. It can affect any part of your digestive tract, and usually affects the small intestine and the beginning of the large intestine. The symptoms of Crohn’s disease depend on where and how severe the inflammation is. The most common symptoms include diarrhea, cramping and stomach pain, and weight loss.

Effectiveness

The efficacy and safety of Rinvoq were evaluated in two randomized induction trials of 857 patients with moderately to severely active Crohn’s disease, CD-1 (NCT03345836) and CD-2 (NCT03345849). Patients were randomized 2:1 to receive 45 mg of Rinvoq or placebo once a day for 12 weeks. At week 12, a greater proportion of patients treated with 45 mg of Rinvoq, as compared to placebo, achieved clinical remission based on the Crohn’s Disease Activity Index (CDAI), which measures clinical and laboratory variables that estimate disease activity in Crohn’s disease. Similarly, a greater proportion of patients treated with 45 mg of Rinvoq demonstrated improvement in intestinal inflammation as assessed by colonoscopy.

To assess Rinvoq as a maintenance treatment, CD-3 (NCT03345823) evaluated 343 patients who responded to 12 weeks of 45 mg of Rinvoq once daily. Patients were re-randomized to receive a maintenance regimen of 15 or 30 mg of Rinvoq once daily or placebo for 52 weeks, representing a total of at least 64 weeks of therapy. At week 52, a greater proportion of patients treated with 15 mg or 30 mg of Rinvoq, as compared to placebo, achieved clinical remission based on the CDAI, and demonstrated improvement in intestinal inflammation as assessed by colonoscopy.

Safety Information

The most common side effects of Rinvoq as indicated for Crohn’s disease are upper respiratory tract infections, anemia, fever, acne, herpes zoster, and headache. Rinvoq is not recommended for use in combination with other Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors, biological therapies for Crohn’s disease, or with strong immunosuppressants such as azathioprine and cyclosporine. Serious infections, mortality, malignancy, major adverse cardiovascular events, and thrombosis have occurred with JAK inhibitors such as Rinvoq. See full prescribing information for additional information on risks associated with Rinvoq.

Designations

Rinvoq received standard review for this indication.

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/news-events-human-drugs/fda-approves-first-oral-treatment-moderately-severely-active-crohns-disease

StephenKMackSD

Political Observer ponders the propitious moment…

stephenkmacksd.com/

Nov 26, 2024

Murtaza Hussain has something to say about Mr. Douglas Murray at The Intersept of December 25, 2018

This March, Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán posted a photo of himself to his official Facebook page holding up a book, titled “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.” Orbán’s photo was of the book’s Hungarian translation, but author Douglas Murray, a British political commentator and journalist, wrote the volume in English. Since its release, the book has made considerable waves. Last summer, Murray was among a group of pop intellectuals collectively deemed to be members of the “Intellectual Dark Web” by the New York Times. Despite being a year old, his book continues to be cited by anti-immigrant hard-liners in the United States, as well as right-wing European politicians like Orbán.

If you’re curious what the book is about, the entire argument is helpfully summed up in the title. Europe is dying — being murdered, in fact — by hordes of Muslim immigrants, aided in their task by craven liberal politicians. As Murray describes it, insufficiently harsh border policies have opened the gates to migrants bent on committing no lesser crimes than mass rape and indiscriminate murder. Meanwhile, white Europeans, exhausted by their own history and driven into moral relativism by the decline of the Christian faith, are slowly being replaced by an implacably hostile and alien population of foreigners.

The “mass movement of peoples in Europe,” Murray writes, has led to “streets in the cold and rainy northern towns of Europe filled with people dressed for the foothills of Pakistan or the sandstorms of Arabia.” This is an early clue to the relentlessly paranoid tenor of the book: In South Asia or the Middle East — just as among the Western immigrant populations who hail from those places — many, if not most, people today dress in Western clothing, regardless of how appropriate it is for the climate.

Murray, though, is gravely alarmed by whatever foreign dress he does see. In his own hometown of London, according to a 2012 census he cites in the book, “only 44.9 percent of London residents now identified themselves as ‘white British.’” The fact that more than 80 percent of Britain is nonetheless white-skinned like him is apparently little comfort: Murray raises the specter of supporters of immigration purposely reducing the population of “white Britons” to 25 percent, 10 percent, or even zero percent in the city of London or, even more luridly, Britain as a whole.

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The Far Right Is Obsessed With a Book About Muslims Destroying Europe. Here’s What It Gets Wrong.

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The Reader might ponder this: with Mayor Eric Adams under a federal indictment:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-the-full-indictment-against-new-york-mayor-eric-adams

Editor: The Mayor was a favorite of the City Journal, the propganda arm of The Manhattan Institute, is this the most opportune moment to announce the appointment of Douglas Murray? Or does the election of Trump signal the propitious moment, for this announcement, given Trump’s appointments and his own xenophobia?

Political Observer