Political Observer wonders at the ‘Think Tank’ as the instrument of Propaganda. That Sells the Product of Political Respectability, under the guise of both ‘Mastery’ and ‘Expertise’!
Editor: You have to laugh at the very notion in the first paragraph’s self- congratulatory chatter, I’ll put it in italics:
The European Council on Foreign Relations :
In 2007, ECFR’s founders set about creating a pan-European institution that could combine establishment credibility with intellectual insurgency. Today, ECFR remains uniquely placed to continue providing a pan-European perspective on some of the biggest strategic challenges and choices Europeans need to confront, with a network of offices in seven European capitals, over 90 staff from more than 25 different countries and a team of associated researchers in the EU 27 member states. Find out more about our 2022-2025 Strategy Framework
Editor : The reader might ask how can a Think Tank make the oil and water of various imperatives, explanatory frames cohere/mix, without constant agitation? Or is that the point?
Headline: ‘Kamala Harris takes a different view of the world and America’s place in it’
Sub-headline: The US expert believes the vice president’s foreign policy, should she reach the Oval Office, might be a surprise. While she’s heir to the Democratic Party’s traditional leadership, she’s also sensitive to progressives’ demands.
Editor: Célia Belin has written a book about American politics: she is now an expert? and is followed by the long forgotten, for a reason, Strobe Talbott :
Editor: The first breathless paragraphs resemble Hollywood kitsch!
Little seen by the general public and criticized in the media during her vice presidency, Kamala Harris was propelled into candidacy at the speed of light – in a twist that is sure to inspire screenwriters – but remains unknown to Americans and the rest of the world alike.
A heartbeat away from the presidency, Harris has often represented American interests to foreign partners. It was she who met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February 2022 to urge her to believe that Vladimir Putin was determined to invade his country. It was she again who visited France in November 2021 to seal the French-American reconciliation after the Australian submarine scandal. She gave a speech at the Paris Peace Forum, launched space cooperation and took part in a summit on Libya. At these meetings, partners praised her seriousness and capacity for work, butwithout really being able to clarify her foreign policy views, which has often led them to believe, mistakenly, that a Harris administration would be entirely in line with Joe Biden’s. But this undoubtedly underestimates the evolutions that are sweeping America in terms of foreign policy. Though loyal to the president, Harris nevertheless belongs to a new generation of Democrats, who take a different view of the world and America’s place in it.
Editor: I recall Kamala Harris when she jailed the parents of truant students, and laughed about it! Or her AIPAC speech , where she claimed that she raised funds for Israel, instead of selling Girls Scout cookies, that gave groveling a bad name! Not forgetting her de facto pardon of Steve Mnuchin:
But the investigation into what the memo called “widespread misconduct” was closed after Harris’s office declined to file a civil enforcement action against the bank.
Harris’s statement on Tuesday doesn’t explain how involved she was with the decision to not prosecute, or why the decision was made. She also would not say whether the revelations would disqualify Mnuchin for the position of treasury secretary. “The hearings will reveal if it’s disqualifying or not, but certainly he has a history that should be critically examined, as do all of the nominees,” Harris told The Hill. She added that she would review the background and history of all Trump cabinet nominees.
Senate Democrats have vowed to put up a fight over Mnuchin — even creating a website inviting homeowners to list their complaints against OneWest. And yet not one senator has commented publicly on the leaked memo, which received media coverage in Politico, Bloomberg, the New York Post, CBS News, Vanity Fair, CNN, CNBC, and other outlets.
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Editor : here a selection of Célia Belin’s political refashioning of American Politics Made to Measure :
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Sometimes dubbed “the last Atlanticist president,” Biden embodies a classic version of Democratic foreign policy thinking: faith in the virtuous role of American leadership on the international stage, backed by strong international institutions and solid military alliances.
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American power – “smart power,” as Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state in the first Obama administration, called it – to combat Russian and Chinese revisionism and guarantee the stability of the world order.
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More recently, Gaza has become the main issue for progressives. At the Democratic National Convention, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders both hammered home the urgent need for a ceasefire, echoing the thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators outside.
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In several respects, Phil Gordon, the vice president’s national security adviser and former assistant secretary of state for European affairs, has demonstrated the pragmatic caution of this current. Preaching a form of humility and realism, they advocate the use of sanctions rather than force but demand from their allies, including the Europeans, a better sharing of the burden with America.
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On Ukraine and Europe, Harris is firmly maintaining the course set by Biden. At the Munich Security Conference in February, she confirmed that American support for NATO is “ironclad.” In her acceptance speech at the convention, Harris promised to stand by Ukraine and defend democracy in the face of tyranny, entirely in line with Biden’s position over the past four years.
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Editor : this final paragraph of Célia Belin’ essay is steeped in Myths of The New Democrats, as somehow expressing political/moral virtues, that have ended in the slaughter of millions: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, under The Axis of Evil banner of David Frum:
Editor: ‘Harris promised to stand by Ukraine and defend democracy in the face of tyranny, entirely in line with Biden’s position over the past four years.’
Editor: ‘As her Jamaican father’ : He was a Marxist!
Editor : an excerpt from the final paragraph, of this re-writing of Kamala Harris rise to political prominence, is itself infected with the self-serving political enthusiasm, of a Think Tank hireling on assignment!
…on this issue, walking a fine line between recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself and – at the same time – the Palestinians’ right to dignity, security and self-determination. But this balancing act will certainly push her to step up the pressure on Israel, should she enter the Oval Office in January 2025.
Editor: Final thought: Like Leo Strauss @celiabelin attempts to re-write history, yet her Readers were/are witnesses to whole history of Kamala Harris political apotheosis! Pardon the purple!
Political Observer takes the measure of Macron, and his self-serving political opportunism
Aug 29, 2024
Editor: The Washington Post of August 28, 2024:
French President Emmanuel Macron said this week that politics played no part in Durov’s arrest. “France is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship,” Macron said in a post on X. “It will remain so.”
Editor: Jeff Bezos is a CIA employee, sub-contractor.
Editor: Le monde August 27, 2024
Headline : French left denounces ‘denial’ of democracy after Macron refuses to appoint its candidate as PM
Sub-headline: The French president officially ruled out the left-wing coalition’s candidate in the name of ‘institutional stability’ and excluded the radical left from a further day of talks. The other parties in the alliance are refusing to take part in solidarity.
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Some left-wing elected officials are thus all the more upset with Attal’s more recent letter. On Monday, the outgoing PM criticized Mélenchon’s “pretense of openness,” paving the way for “support without participation” when the LFI leader asked whether a Castets government without any members of his party would be subject to a no-confidence vote. Attal believes that Mélenchon wants “the pure and simple implementation of his platform, without openness or compromise.” This statement doesn’t acknowledge the letter Castets sent him on August 12, when the senior civil servant reached out to other political groups, proposing a more collaborative working approach.
Built in haste for the legislative elections, the NFP edifice has so far held firm. But on August 27, it will be subjected to the tremors of Socialist dissension. The party’s two minority factions – led by Hélène Geoffroy, who is close to former Socialist president François Hollande, and the mayor of Rouen, Normandy, Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol – have been calling for a national bureau meeting ever since LFI launched its impeachment plan. Under pressure, Faure has scheduled a meeting for Tuesday at noon during which the political response to Macron will be discussed. Some Socialists disagree with the refusal to go to the Elysée meeting, advocate building a coalition plan and want to distance the party from LFI. “We’re going to have to choose between the interests of the French and Mélenchon’s presidential obsession,” argued former Socialist MP Patrick Mennucci. It’s a new test for the alliance of the political left.
Headline: Why Macron refused to appoint left-wing alliance’s candidate as prime minister
Sub-headline: In a statement on Monday evening, the French president rejected the candidacy of Lucie Castets for prime minister, proposed by the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire alliance, in the name of the necessary ‘institutional stability.’
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Although nothing has emerged from Macron’s meeting with right-wing Sénat President Gérard Larcher, which took place late Monday afternoon, the head of state seems to believe in the goodwill of his camp toward the next government – provided it is not an NFP government. On Friday, right-wing representatives told him that they would not oppose the budget if it did not include tax increases or a freeze on retirement pensions. They also indicated they wouldn’t oppose a prime minister from the left, as long as he or she has “a sense of the state and the general interest, and is familiar with the machinery of state,” explained the president of the LR group in the Sénat, Bruno Retailleau. As for Marine Le Pen, she informed Macron that she would vote against any NFP government, but the Elysée said that she would not vote against another government a priori.
But more than 40 days after the Attal government resigned, France is still without a prime minister. “My responsibility is to ensure that the country is neither blocked nor weakened. The governing political parties must not forget the exceptional circumstances of the election of their MPs in the second round of the legislative elections. This vote obliges them,” wrote the French president in the conclusion of the Elysée communiqué. Always quick to hold political leaders responsible for a situation he himself created by deciding to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale.
Editor: Their can be no doubt that Macron and his ‘Jupertarian Politics’, riffing on Mozart, & reeking of political inflation, and the rebirth of ‘French Mad Men’ ? Macron was American Made, a product off the assembly line of the Neo-Liberal Factory, with an impressive academic record, and Banking experience: Rothschild & Cie Banque in Paris.
Headline: Pavel Durov’s arrest is a defense of the rule of law rather than an attack on freedom of expression
Sub-headline: Elon Musk’s view that the arrest of the Telegram boss is ‘censorship’ is, at best, a mistake and, at worst, a demonstration of bad faith.
The Western National Security States have begun their attacks on Free Speech. In Britain the attack has begun on private citizens, who reposted tweets or comments: three thousand citizens including Richard Midhurst have been arrested/detained under Section 127 of the Communications Act !
The political precursor of this was/is the persecution of Julian Assange!
Editor: Damien Leloup public moralizing/scolding begins in the headline.
Headline: Pavel Durov’s arrest is a defense of the rule of law rather than an attack on freedom of expression
It’s an argument that we heard over and over again on Sunday, August 25, from Moscow to San Francisco: The arrest of the CEO of the Telegram messaging service the previous evening by French police is an attack on freedom of expression. “Pavel Durov sits in a French jail tonight, a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies,” asserted far-right American presenter Tucker Carlson; a “very convincing” advertisement for the US Constitution’s First Amendment (which guarantees a very broad right to free speech), rebuked Elon Musk, owner of X and supporter of Donald Trump.
In response, several Russian officials and politicians described the arrest as “political,” in the words of Vladislav Davankov, vice president of the State Duma. Almost comical accusations. In their statements of support, the Kremlin and Russian politicians seemed to forget that it was Russia that first tried to block Telegram − unsuccessfully − in 2018 and that it was people close to the Kremlin who got their hands on the VKontakte empire, created by the Durov brothers, in 2014. On Sunday, a handful of peaceful demonstrators protesting outside the French embassy in Moscow in support of Durov were arrested for taking part in an illegal demonstration.
Editor: The Reader from America wonders … The American Constitution enshrines the right of Free Speech. In fact Oliver Wendell Holmes opined that the only impermissible speech, was to yell fire in a crowded theater.
Michael A. Carrier, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self, 93 MICH. L. REV. 1894 (1995)
Above all, many of the criticisms leveled at France after Durov’s arrest are, whether in good or bad faith, aimed at the wrong target. Contrary to Tucker Carlson’s claims, the Telegram CEO was not arrested for refusing to “censor” political opinions. The French investigation does not concern “opinion crimes,” but quite standard offenses, including the dissemination of child pornography. As in any democracy, Durov is presumed innocent and will have the opportunity to defend himself in a public trial, should he be indicted.
Editor : it takes time to enumerate the crimes of Durov, although the most toxic, shocking charge of ‘Child Pornography’ , seems to have have disappeared from Damien Leloup’s proposed bill of attainder? Reader, again please note the final paragraph in italics. Leloup seems to be in the thrall Class Bias!
Durov’s arrest comes after years of fruitless exchanges between the application and investigators and governments in dozens of countries, all of whom have leveled the same criticisms at the platform: lack of moderation, failure to cooperate even in serious criminal cases… The company refuses to cooperate in any way with law enforcement agencies and only takes action when the balance of power becomes too unfavorable.
It’s easy to understand why, for Silicon Valley bosses like Elon Musk, who are used to flouting European rules with almost total impunity, this arrest came as a shock. It shows that even a billionaire running a platform with hundreds of millions of users cannot forever ignore the rules of the countries in which he wants not only to operate his service, but also to be able to travel around for pleasure.
Political Cynic tries to measure the political temperature of this Oxbridger Clique!
A bit of shopworn Political Melodrama begins this essay, without a mention of the behind the scenes maneuvering/blackmail that resulted in Biden’s withdrawal from the contest. The last paragraphs of Seymour Hersh’s reportage are revelatory:
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A key factor in the decision to force Biden out of office by invoking the 25th Amendment was a series of increasingly negative polls on the president’s standing against Trump that had been commissioned by the funders, the official said. “The downward slope was increasing.” Polling would also be important for the vice president, I was told, and it was agreed that if the polls did not continue to show her gaining traction, other options would be considered, including an open convention. I was unable to learn if Harris was aware of such considerations or whether she intends to abide by them.
The official, who has decades of experience in fundraising, told me that Obama emerged as the strongman throughout the negotiations. “He had an agenda and he wanted to seek it through to the end, and he wanted to have control over who would be elected.”
A few days after we talked, with Harris getting off to a solid start, Obama and his wife announced their endorsement of Harris and told her, over the phone in a staged TV event, that they would do all they could to campaign for her and to support her.
But she had better perform.
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The above too politically radioactive, for The Economist’s Oxbridger Clique, well connected to apparatus of the British National Security. The Reader might picture the Editor Zanny Minton Beddoes on the phone to MI6?
Editor: The Political Melodrama Begins, in its politically truncated form:
A few weeks ago the Democratic convention looked as if it would be a wake. Instead it has been a love-in. Delegates’ ebullience has been spiced with relief that their nominee has saved the party from almost-certain defeat.
Kamala Harris has accomplished this less because of who she is than who she is not. For a start she is not Joe Biden, who showed in a valedictory speech in Chicago that age has turned him into a scold. And neither is she Donald Trump. Now that President Biden is out of the race, the Republican nominee is the old man on the ballot, and he drives voters away with his petty insults and his dark obsessions.
However, Ms Harris needs more. Our forecast model has the race tied. In a bid to make her someone people actually want to vote for, the convention was all about her character and her life-story. Americans now know she worked at McDonald’s and that every year she teases her husband by playing the rambling voicemail he left asking her for a first date.
Unfortunately, how that would translate into a Harris presidency remains disconcertingly vague. She has reasons for building her campaign around personality: policy can be a liability, Mr Trump is no wonk and, with him as an opponent, character matters. Yet, worryingly, her tactics may also signal something more fundamental.
This part of the final quoted paragraph ‘a Harris presidency remains disconcertingly vague” is the very key to Harris’ political viability? Yet Musk and his Cadre of Billionaires are already …
Editor: Elon Musk is already scolding Harris for her Capital Gaines Tax ‘promise’ or ‘backs’ the Biden’s Tax Plans. Neo-Liberals adapt from political moment to political moment!
Editor: The Economist diagnoses Harris manifold political weaknesses:
Politically, Ms Harris is still an unknown quantity—and she is partly responsible for keeping it that way. In the Biden administration she was overshadowed, as vice-presidents usually are. She became the nominee without being tested in a primary. Since Mr Biden’s withdrawal, she has not given interviews and she has taken few questions from reporters. Her policy platform was mostly inherited from her boss, and it is even sparser than Mr Trump’s. When she takes positions—such as vowing to deal with corporate price-gouging—they may not be expressions of her political beliefs so much as campaign manoeuvres designed to placate voters worried about the cost of living.
Editor: Presenting the obvious as ‘insightful’, demonstrates trading in well worn cliches. It does not qualify as reportage!
Editor: More of the same… the briefing … : Repetition in longer form does not demonstrate insightful analysis, but ranks as self-reifying propaganda!
Our briefing this week sets out to make sense of all this—and Ms Harris’s record in the Senate and as a politician in California. She is not one of those whose career reveals a set of deep convictions or an inner core of beliefs. Instead, like Mr Biden, she positions herself slightly to the left of centre of her party and adjusts as it evolves. Worse than him, her policies on the economy and in foreign affairs seem to be unanchored.
Editor: some selective quotation of this essay might be a way to clear the way for The Reader to assert her critical faculties?
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Pragmatism has its virtues in a politician.
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Pragmatism also means that Ms Harris is open to other people’s ideas.
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But when pragmatism signals a lack of thought-through principles, it can spell danger.
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Likewise, without strong fundamental beliefs and a set of guiding priorities, a president can easily be blown off-course by events.
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Her overriding task is to defeat Mr Trump, and it is a vital one in which guile and cunning are permitted
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But there are reasons to press Ms Harris for more. One is that to do so could soon be in her political interest. Should personality lose its power to propel her campaign forward, policy could be one way to revive it.
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If it is the first time she tries to unspool a single thread running through her life, her principles and her policies, she is unlikely to do her best.
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Editor: The final paragraph of this essay resorts to practiced political cliche, not a surprise, given this publication’s history of platitudinous, in fact, obsequious political conformity!
The other, more important reason to press Ms Harris is that being a politician is about more than campaigning. Governing matters, too. And, for a party that wants to strengthen democracy, governing is better if its winning mandate contains a programme. You can be desperate for Ms Harris to defeat Mr Trump and still wonder how good she will be in office. As the vice-president in a one-term administration, she might be tempted to govern with victory in 2028 as a focus. Unless she is clearer about what she wants to do with power, her term will be dominated by campaigning—with all its vices.
-can Will Lewis survive at the Post – slow down the British takeover of American newsrooms?- peak Substack?- the BBC under a Labour government?–season two of Succession get the Murdochs so right- that columnist at the FT?- A rash hire, wasn’t it?
Editor: notice that Ganesh includes himself in this collection. But note Ganesh’s warning:
When journalists convene, some or all of these matters get an airing, which is an excellent reason to be elsewhere. The challenge is to build and maintain that alternative circle.
Editor: Note that Ganesh is not Frank O’Hara, his chatty poems, riffing on themes were once the rage, of another time and place , unknown to Ganesh? This just an aside. The next paragraph offers something like an uncanny riff on O’Hara in an ominous tonality.
Even the greatest cities on Earth fail to honour their central promise: that of wide-ranging human contact. Urbanites live near a jumble of different people but, in the absence of strenuous effort, end up in the social swim of their own and adjacent professions. This ghettoisation sets in during those hard-working years after university. By 30, it is difficult to undo. So — and here I address the young, chiefly those starting work this autumn — avoid this trap from the beginning. For it is a double curse. First, it creates a single point of failure. If your job goes, much of your social life goes with it.
Editor: Ganesh broaches the subject :
…of Nassim Nicholas Taleb – who clocked that the great moderns — Darwin, Marx, Freud and the Einstein of the annus mirabilis —
That is, each had enough exposure to life outside their specialism to produce unlikely swoops of thought. (Taleb might have added Keynes, who was in and out of Cambridge.) For the rest of us, toiling at a humdrum level, the point still holds. No writer, management consultant or engineer should consort too much with their own. Employers half-understand this. It has become Leadership 101 to drag in high performers from alien fields to disclose their “insights” for staff. But it won’t do. You have to socialise with them at length. You want their patterns of thought, not so much their thoughts.
Editor: it doesn’t take much to provoke Ganesh’s political imagination
Tim Walz is the first person on either the top or bottom half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who did not attend law school. That is 20 individuals across 10 elections over 40 years who pursued a JD or LLB. Not one of the four Republican presidents over the period had a legal background.
Editor: Ganesh describes America Liberalism, failing to recognize that it is dead!
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Law is a great subject and career. I’ve come to know it a little bit for a side project. But all professions have their deforming effects. And those of law are all over modern American liberalism.
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An exhausting primness about words and their use. (A good thing in a contract dispute. Less so in a conversation with the electorate about gender and other.
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The right was quicker than the left to spot that something had changed in the public mood in those years after the 2008 crash. Because it was cleverer? No. But perhaps because it was less bovine and insular.
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Editor: That Black & White photograph of John Updike, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller finally figures in the most oblique way in the Ganesh essay!
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It is yours to find and retain friends of diverse kens in your own life. One needn’t emulate the twenty-something John Updike, who quit New York for Ipswich, Massachusetts, in part to meet people who “aren’t in [his] game”. But no effort at all, and even that game is lost.
Editor: Updike was another sexually obsessed heterosexual, in a very crowed and boring field of American Literary Writers. He also wrote Bech: A Book reviewed here.The Reader might look to Joan Didion’s ‘Play It as It Lays’ of 1970, Kate Millets Sexual Politics of 1970 , and Eva Figes Patriarchal Attitudes also of 1970! In furtherance of educating one’s self !
The title of Colvile’s latest contemptuous rant reeks of disdain, of the kind, modeled after the pretentious fop Joseph Rees-Mogg! Surely a bit of hyperbole, but not by much! The title of his latest essay, please note the use of the royal we!
If train driver pay irks you, look at the perks we’ve let them keep.
Well, that worked well. On Thursday Louise Haigh announced that as part of her policy to “move fast and fix things”, train drivers from the Aslef union would be getting bumper pay rises to end two years of industrial disruption. On Friday, fresh walkouts on the east coast mainline were announced by … the Aslef union.
It would be churlish to suggest that a transport secretary who describes herself as a “proud trade unionist”, who used to be a shop steward for the Unite trade union, and whose uncle and grandfather were trade union officials, was anything less than ruthless at the negotiating table. But it’s not exactly a great look. Just like when Rachel Reeves told us that the country’s finances were in a hideous mess, and that many pensioners would lose their winter fuel payment, without acknowledging that much of this “black hole” derived from her decision to accept above-inflation pay rises for teachers and NHS staff, on top of a separate, extremely generous settlement with junior doctors.
Already the signs are that these deals won’t be the end of it. GPs recently voted to take collective action for the first time in 60 years, despite a Labour offer of a 6 per cent pay uplift. The RMT rail union has said that it wants the same deal as Aslef. Then there’s the border force. Police. Fire brigades.
Editor: Reader not to fear, Mr. Colvile hasn’t yet reached a brisk saunter!
It’s easy to be envious of the generosity of these settlements — especially when you’re one of those whose taxes are going to go up to cover them. It’s also easy to worry about the consequences. In Scotland, the SNP has just been forced to impose emergency spending controls to pay for strikingly similar public sector pay deals. The SNP being the SNP, it has blamed this on Whitehall. But it has more to do with Holyrood’s habit of granting very generous pay settlements, not least to show it is nicer than those nasty Tories. Until the gravy train crashed, the typical public sector worker in Scotland was getting around £1,500 more than the UK average (up from £400 before the pandemic), even as private sector employees earned £700 less.
Editor: Mr. Colvile does a volte-face?
If you ignore the impact on the public finances — and inflation — there is actually a decent case for many state employees to ask for more. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies says, public sector pay has risen more slowly than private in recent years. Nurses, doctors and teachers have all seen their earnings lag behind inflation. And many public services do have retention problems, which higher pay might help with. Teacher vacancies, for example, are up sharply since the pandemic.
Set against that, the average public sector worker has long earned more than their private sector counterpart, has far greater job security, and can look forward to a massively higher pension. In the latest government accounts, the liability for public sector pensions stood at £2.6 trillion — roughly equivalent to the national debt, and increasing far more quickly.
Editor: This was a mere political feint, as his next paragraphs return to standard Thatcherite Procedures, carefully massaged for the political present.
But in fact, the real issue isn’t about pay at all. The public sector headcount has been rising rapidly. Yet shockingly, the bits of public sector productivity that we actually measure — ie, the estimates for how much we as taxpayers get for the many billions we spend — show that we are getting worse value for money than we did in 1997. The most egregious example of this is in the NHS, where the Tories hired huge numbers of staff after the pandemic, without any apparent impact on the number of patients being seen or operations carried out.
Editor :Thatcherite Procedures are about mis-characterizing the grasping Lower Orders, who seek through blackmail, via strikes to rob the Tax Payer! Yet that ‘Lower Order’ also pays Taxes! Reader with 533 words left to this diatribe, I will engage in some selective pruning of Mr. Colvile’s ‘essay’!
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On Times Radio last week, the Labour veteran Lord McConnell said that what took him aback about Haigh’s deal with the train drivers — who aren’t technically in the public sector, but very soon will be — wasn’t the money, but the lack of conditions.
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Some of the more ridiculous perks and privileges enjoyed by train drivers, beyond the £70,000 salaries, were doing the rounds last week — guaranteed medical appointments in case of exposure to microwave ovens, or the right to reset the clock on your work break if your boss interrupts it to say hello.
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Yet the unions have consistently fought a rearguard action against innovation, including such ideas as automated ticket offices or driverless trains.
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By settling with drivers without reforming working practices, Haigh has left the taxpayer on the hook for huge subsidies — as well as continued disruption, given that Aslef will continue its work-to-rule practices, and that drivers receiving three years’ worth of pay rises just before Christmas may not exactly feel the need to sign up for weekend shifts.
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Almost every week, a job ad does the rounds along the lines of, “Head of AI safety policy, HM government, must have world-class tech expertise, starting salary £33,000 plus discount in the canteen”.
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Editor: This last sentence fragment means what: A riff on Derrida’s signifier? Or just misbegotten class bias, tinctured in Russophobia? ‘which is progressive and compassionate, but a right bugger when you are trying to recruit world-class talent to run NHS trusts or thwart Russian cyberattacks’
For all the talk of “public sector fat cats”, it is state employees at the upper end of the pay scale who have seen the toughest wage constraints in recent years, while salaries have risen substantially for those at the bottom — which is progressive and compassionate, but a right bugger when you are trying to recruit world-class talent to run NHS trusts or thwart Russian cyberattacks.
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To give managers the most basic tools used by their private sector counterparts to incentivise and motivate their staff.
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The government is handing over the quid. But where’s the quo?
The Reader has to give credit to Zionist Shill Bret Stephen, for his August 13, 2024 essay in in which he devotes his commentary to Naftali Bennett:
Naftali Bennett Needs to Topple Two Regimes
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The opportunity with Iran, as Bennett sees it, is that “the head of the octopus is much weaker, much more vulnerable and feeble, than its arms. So how foolish are we to engage in war with the arms when we could engage with the head?” That would mean a resumption of serious economic sanctions — thanks to administration waivers, Iran today exports nearly four times as much oil as it did four years ago — and empowering Iran’s powerful opposition movement, particularly with communications gear.
That’s an effort only an American president can lead. What about the immediate crisis with Iran?
I asked Bennett about the timing of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran. After a long pause, he replied, “It’s very hard to cherry-pick particular actions if there’s no broad strategy.” But he also warned Iran that it had “huge vulnerabilities, especially in its energy sector, which is highly concentrated in a few bottlenecks that can be dealt with. They should be afraid right now and not the 10 million Israelis. This whole passive method in which our enemies take the lead is not the Israeli way.”
Bennett left the prime minister’s officevowing to stay away from politics for at least a decade. He left me with little doubt that he’s on the verge of getting back in, with the aim of toppling the ruling coalition through parliamentary maneuvers this year and going for elections. He pledged a thorough housecleaning that could help unite Israelis once again.
“All the senior leadership of Israel, political and military, needs to be replaced,” he said. To defeat one regime, another one must first be beaten.
Editor: Mr. Stephens has given up on Netanyahu, and as cover he now is placing his bet on Bennet, after a bit of scolding: Stephens is a Zionist in his heart and mind!
Editor: Reader, as counterpoint to Stephen’s political reconnoiter, I’ll almost recommend Jake Wallis Simons latest in The Spectator. It is steeped in Zionist Propaganda straight from Head-Quarters:
For the jihadis of Gaza, the war is starting to look like a miscalculation. Israel is wounded but showing intimidating levels of resolve and military might, with much more held in reserve. For this Hamas brought itself to the brink of destruction? For this it brought such suffering upon the heads of its own people? In launching the October savagery, it aimed to drag Iran and Hezbollah into a regional conflict that would herald the fall of Jerusalem. But its allies held back from the fray and have shown no sign of changing their minds. An Iranian reprisal for the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran will come. But most analysts expect it to be calibrated to fall beneath the threshold for open war.
Small wonder. In April, after hundreds of Iranian projectiles had been fired into Israeli skies, the Jewish state showed its superiority by destroying a key strategic target with just two missiles. Last month, it clinically assassinated both Mohammad Deif in Gaza and Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, as well as Hezbollah’s number two, Fuad Shukr, in southern Lebanon. These were men who had been hunted for decades and not just by the Israelis. Jerusalem has also let it be known that any attack by Iran and Hezbollah will meet with a response commensurate to its scale rather than its effectiveness. This time, the message is clear: launch another 300 missiles at us and – even if every last one is intercepted – you’ll get pain, not fear, in response.
Guerilla warfare in Gaza will likely drag on for a long time. But Hamas is losing badly. Whereas Israeli troops can be rotated out for rest and recuperation, no such luxury is afforded the terrorist butchers as they squat in their own filth underground. Major challenges lie ahead for Israel in the form of Hezbollah and Iran. But Netanyahu’s boot is on the windpipe of Hamas and the world is starting not to care.
What does Miss Haversham’s wedding cake have to do with Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay? Telling question? Miss Haversham was left at the alter, and her life ended is a moment of betrayal, that metastasized into a lifetime. The Reader need only look to Dickens literary motive, for this characters appearance of love’s betrayal and its costs to the victim.
I might argue that Ganesh exalts in the what Dickens used so tellingly in the character of Miss Haversham, as refracted through the eyes of Pip? Ganesh’s talent is to riff on themes, gathered from all and sundry sources, the first paragraphs of his essay trades on the literary/political talent of a master, of that usable past? It could have been borrowed from Balzac or Walter Scott ? Or The Reader can look to Ganesh’s literary enthusiasm for the American Silver-Fork novelist Tom Wolfe?
Editor: Question: a bit too showy?
A month has passed since the near-assassination of the 45th and, who knows, 47th US president. When did you last think or talk about it? When did you last see the photo of Donald Trump’s raised and defiant hand, which promised at the time to be one of those icons that cross so deep into mass culture that a Warholian silkscreen might be made of it?
I don’t mean to suggest that the world’s most famous outpatient has been somehow short-changed for his brush with death. The point is rather this: the transience and tenuousness of almost all political moments. Few excitements outlast the next batch of news stories. It is a warning the Democrats should hold on to in what is becoming, for them, a glorious but perhaps over-celebrated summer.
Editor: the following quotations offers Ganesh Chatter, stripped to its near essentials. The Reader might pick and choose her own ‘favorites’!
How might their moment in the sun go wrong?
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A lead of one or two points in national polls-of-polls, a tad more in some Midwestern states, a deficit in the south-west: none of this warrants either Democratic giddiness or Republican moping.
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If the Democrats surge ahead after their upcoming convention in Chicago, this warning will age badly.
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Americans were pessimistic enough about the economy as it was. Trying to square this with GDP growth that is the envy of the high-income world, some liberals have resorted to a theory of partisan bias: that is, Republican voters, consciously or not, are hamming up their struggles with inflation.
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A consistent 70 per cent or so of respondents are negative about “economic conditions” in the FT-Michigan Ross survey, which tallies with a similar Gallup question. There just aren’t enough Republicans in America to sustain numbers of such comprehensive badness.
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But an incumbent party’s ideal campaign line — don’t entrust your prosperity to the opposition — is less and less of an option.
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Like her line on criminal justice and the Israeli-Palestinian question, the dilemma can be fudged in these vacation months, when voters are half-watching at best.
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…all of this is clever and effective, not to mention true. But it also reeks of, well, August. When politics resumes in earnest in the autumn, the fundamentals of this race should come through.
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Above all, after almost a decade of chasing or holding the White House, Trump’s oddities are priced-in. Harris remains ill-defined and only half-tested.
For a sense of the evanescence of politics, remember that Biden’s State of the Union address was hailed for showing the vigour of a prime-age man. That was March. As she contemplates the light speed with which things are liable to change, his successor should take heart, but also fright.
Editor: the final paragraphs of Ganesh’s essay represent a carefully massaged chatter!
Mujtaba Rahman, Eurasia Group hireling, carefully chides The European Commission in the forth paragraph of his essay, as if ?
The European Commission’s “list of demands” that Sir Keir Starmer must address to improve the UK-EU bilateral relationship shows how much the bloc needs to rethink its approach to Britain and Brexit.
The Labour government has already done so. The European Political Community meeting at Blenheim Palace in July provided the perfect platform for Starmer to advance phase 1 of his EU “reset” — restoring trust after the antagonistic relationship with the Conservative government. Phase 2 involves scoping out policy areas of common interest and phase 3, hammering them out.
Senior Labour officials hope that a deal on a security pact, given the UK’s heft on defence and intelligence, will provide a big opening offer that allows the EU to respond by reducing trade barriers.
Editor: here is that forth paragraph: Mujtaba Rahman chiding turns into a scold! Is this The Economist?
In public, the EU welcomes Starmer’s constructive approach. There is appetite to co-operate on security and defence. Yet in private many senior EU officials remain stuck in 2016, emphasising the third-country status of the UK and the EU’s opposition to cherry picking and to mixing security and trade. This suggests an unwillingness to seize the opportunities of a Starmer-led Britain.
Editor: The Financial Times chooses its guest writers with care, and manicures their commentaries to fit the FT politics of the moment! My comment reflects reality not cynicism! For brevity’s sake I’ll just quote the topic sentences of the remaining 674 words: that seeks, like the well paid Technocrat like Mujtaba Rahman, to influence via Think Tank Propaganda actual Policy! In the long dead Age Of Print this chatter would have found it’s destiny in lining bird cages!
Today’s context is different.
This should create more political space for creative thinking
Things Labour is ready to consider include a visa scheme for EU nationals aged 18 to 30 — an early priority for Brussels.
These concessions should address the deep-seated reservations of France, one of the tougher member states, by showing that a Labour government is willing to give up some sovereignty to get closer to the EU.
While Starmer will not accept all of the elements of the single market, such as free movement of labour, he will accept some.
The geopolitical context also points to the need for more European ambition.
More security and defence collaboration between the EU and UK, including over defence industrial policy, makes perfect sense.
Poland and the Baltic and Nordic states, which see the existential threat to liberal democracy of the military crisis on Europe’s eastern border, need to help make this bigger case.
No one in Europe is keen on a formal renegotiation:
Starmer and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen should prepare an ambitious political declaration for their first summit in the coming weeks.
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