StephenKMackSD's Blog

Political Observer wonders at Brooks’ ineptness!

David Brooks considers himself to be a ‘Political Sage’, and as such he offers a seven point evaluation, of Kamala Harris’ worthiness to hold the office of President. Should The Reader recall Brook’s ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ of April 28, 2003 War Mongering, and utterly dull-witted apologetic for the Iraq War! Some Political Crimes are not forgivable, however Mr. Brooks lives in the ever malleable political present of New York Times propaganda:

Editor: Let me offer evaluations of Brooks Chatter, from his categories.

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Toughness:

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If playful aggression is a thing, she projects it.

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Editor: Brooks likes Kamala’s Showmanship!

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Leadership and management skills:

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On the other hand, from her time as the San Francisco district attorney straight through her time as vice president, Harris has earned a reputation for degrading underlings and burning through staff.

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Editor: Mr. Brooks willfully forgets Harris’ jailing of the parents of truant children and her de facto pardon on Steven Mnuchin of One West Bank!

Mnuchin Again Denies Robo-Signing, Despite Yet More Evidence He Is Lying

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Analytical abilities:

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“My bias has always been to speak factually, to speak accurately, to speak precisely about issues and matters that have potentially great consequence,” she told The Times last fall. “I find it off-putting to just engage in platitudes. I much prefer to deconstruct an issue and speak of it in a way that hopefully elevates public discourse and educates the public.”

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Editor: The Self-Praise of Kamala Harris fall under the rubric of ‘Analytical Abilities’, in the political vocabulary of David Brooks? Or is this just comic relief ?

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Vision: C.

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She hasn’t shown that she has the kind of coherent worldview — the way, say, Biden does — you need to be a good decision maker in the White House. Over the past few years, when Harris has been asked to articulate her overall philosophy, she often produces a meaningless word salad, ripe for ridicule.

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So in interviews she gave during her 2020 run she would often revert to positions that some progressives loved, even though they were politically suicidal in the swing states. She said she wanted to ban fracking, decriminalize illegal immigration, end the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal and eliminate private health insurance. Republicans are now making hay out of these statements, but it’s not clear how much she believes what she claimed to believe back then.

Editor: Kamala Harris is a political opportunist!

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Relatability: B.

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Her larger problem of course is that she’s a member of the progressive educated elite from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her father was a Stanford professor and her mother was a cancer researcher. She has lived her life in a very unusual slice of America. This is not an ideal background if your job is to win over working-class voters in western Pennsylvania, small-town Michigan and suburban Georgia.

Editor: Harris is part of an out of touch Elite.

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Composure: C.

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In 2021, after she was tasked with finding the root causes of the immigration crisis, NBC’s Lester Holt asked her if she would visit the U.S.-Mexico border. She replied, “At some point, you know, I — we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So this whole, this whole — this whole thing about the border. We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.” Holt reminded her that in fact she hadn’t yet visited the border. Harris cut back on media interviews after that humiliating encounter.

Editor: In sum Harris is not simply inept, but clueless!

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Overall reputation: C

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In February of 2023, my Times colleagues Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Katie Rogers and Peter Baker surveyed Democratic views on Harris. Here is the core of their reporting:

“The painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country. Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her,” they wrote.

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Editor: this would-be defence of Harris falls apart from within itself! Though there are 237 words left.

Political Observer

Political Cynic explores the many faces of @NYT political mendacity: July 25, 2024.

Political Cynic

Political Reporter quotes the last five paragraphs of this Editorial.

Headline: In his immoral absolutism, JD Vance outflanks even Donald Trump

Sub-headline: Editorial: On everything from abortion rights to the future of Ukraine, the Republicans’ pick for vice-president could prove even more fundamentalist and isolationist than his boss

Tuesday 16 July 2024

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/donald-trump-jd-vance-vice-president-b2580786.html?lid=3vlivezpuhtx

Editor: J.D. Vance upsets the political/moral equilibrium of The Independent, yet this polemic seems to exercise a kind of political restraint, though no without it’s moments of political paranoia.

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Long before that, though, America would be lumbered with a slavishly loyal yes-man of a vice-president, with no more interest in building consensus and protecting the constitution than his boss. The most immediate danger is Mr Vance’s almost sadistic attitude to any woman seeking an abortion, again outflanking even Mr Trump in his immoral absolutism.

So far as the wider world is concerned, Mr Vance seems even more fundamentalist and isolationist than Mr Trump. Carelessly, or possibly not, he told the National Conservatism Conference last week that Britain is perhaps now the world’s first truly Islamist nation with nuclear weapons, “after Labour took over”.

More dangerously, Mr Vance is openly prepared to reward Vladimir Putin for his war of aggression against Ukraine, with huge tracts of this sovereign state to be ceded to Russia or some puppet statelets of the Kremlin. This, presumably, would be after Mr Trump had made the deal with Vladimir Putin, and presented it as a fait accompli to Volodymyr Zelensky. The echoes of the Munich Agreement of 1938 are as clear as they are chilling.

The only possible saving grace in the case of Mr Vance is that the opinions he holds at any given time seem to be entirely conditional on his own self-interest. After all, the man who he now claims to venerate he once derided as “America’s Hitler”: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this, I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.” It is possible that pressure of events, changed circumstances or, most likely, self-interest would cause Mr Vance to change his mind once more. But there are no guarantees.

God does, indeed, want better for America than what Mr Vance and Mr Trump seem set to be offering this November. With the current disarray in the Democratic Party, however, God and mankind will be disappointed once again, and the most sinister vice-president in American history, carrying a metaphorical bucket of warm bile, looks set to be sworn in next January.

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Compare the above, with this Financial Times essay written by Timothy Snyder.

Opinion US politics & policy

Headline: The Republican blueprint for power contains the seeds of its own demise

Sub-headline: It is not too late to stop the descent of the American political order into tyranny, oligarchy or anarchy

https://www.ft.com/content/a7eea0af-bf9f-4635-812b-271c30620e72

This week, Republicans reminded us of the alternatives to republics, hosting a convention that showed how the American one could be brought down. They summoned up three variants of collapse: tyranny, oligarchy and anarchy. 

A tyrant emerges through a system that he breaks. Long before the assassination attempt on him last weekend, Donald Trump had transformed the Republican party into a cult of personality. As a convicted criminal running for office, he undoes the expectation of any rule of law. He has challenged the principle of succession in the US by encouraging the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He claims to be winner of all elections, regardless of the vote, and that he should be allowed to remain president indefinitely. His vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, endorses his defiance of vote counts, past and present. Trump promises mass deportations, detention camps and military tribunals, actions that would change the American regime type.

Yet the tyrant might be less important than the oligarchs behind him. Whereas Trump can slip through the gaps of the legal system, his backers waltz through the cellophane barrier between money and politics. The right metric for predicting Trump’s vice-presidential pick was simple: what do these supporters want?

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Political Reporter

Political Observer on the Snyder’s programmatic chatter!

Opinion US politics & policy

Headline: The Republican blueprint for power contains the seeds of its own demise

Sub-headline: It is not too late to stop the descent of the American political order into tyranny, oligarchy or anarchy

https://www.ft.com/content/a7eea0af-bf9f-4635-812b-271c30620e72

Regular readers of Mr. Snyder can’t forget this propaganda intervention for the 2014 Ukrainian Coup :

(https://www.eurozine.com/UserFiles/docs/Kyiv_2014/Programme_Public_EN.pdf)

Editor:

The Ukrainian Coup was the work of may hands: Victoria Nuland, Jeffrey Pyatt, The E.U., in the deep background Barack Obama, George Soros, NATO. The reader need only check the participants, the bad faith actors of Western Imperialism circa 2014, in the link to the program: Timothy Snyder, Leon Wieseltier, Bernard-Henri Lévy and many others.

Editor: Under the rubric of ‘Particle Solidarity’ there is this:

This gathering was the initiative of Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic and Timothy Snyder of Yale University and was made possible by the willingness of colleagues to heed their call and agree to participate in great haste, and by the creativity and hard work of Tatiana Zhurzhenko and Oksana Forostyna. A number of partner institutions helped transform an idea into an event: the Batory Foundation, the Embassy of Canada, the Embassy of France, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Embassy of the Republic of Poland, the Embassy of the United States of America, the European Endowment for Democracy, the European Forum for Ukraine, the Network of European Cultural Journals Eurozine, the Goethe-Institut, the Institut Français d’Ukraine, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), the International Renaissance Foundation, the Ukrainian cultural journal Krytyka, the National University “Kyiv Mohyla Academy,” the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the National Endowment for Democracy, The New Republic, the Open Ukraine Foundation, the PinchukArtCentre, the Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies “Tkuma,” the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, and the Visual Culture Research Center.

Editor: for questions about Ukraine and its Political History rely on:

Ivan Katchanovski

University of Ottawa | Université d’Ottawa, School of Political Studies, Department Member

https://uottawa.academia.edu/IvanKatchanovski

Given the above, Mr. Snyder’s first three paragraphs sets the tone of his essay, wan polemic that metastasizes into hysteria mongering.

This week, Republicans reminded us of the alternatives to republics, hosting a convention that showed how the American one could be brought down. They summoned up three variants of collapse: tyranny, oligarchy and anarchy. 

A tyrant emerges through a system that he breaks. Long before the assassination attempt on him last weekend, Donald Trump had transformed the Republican party into a cult of personality. As a convicted criminal running for office, he undoes the expectation of any rule of law. He has challenged the principle of succession in the US by encouraging the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He claims to be winner of all elections, regardless of the vote, and that he should be allowed to remain president indefinitely. His vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, endorses his defiance of vote counts, past and present. Trump promises mass deportations, detention camps and military tribunals, actions that would change the American regime type.

Yet the tyrant might be less important than the oligarchs behind him. Whereas Trump can slip through the gaps of the legal system, his backers waltz through the cellophane barrier between money and politics. The right metric for predicting Trump’s vice-presidential pick was simple: what do these supporters want?

Editor: What escapes Mr. Snyder’s historical grasp is that the Tea Party utterly changed, in deed radicalized the Republican Party, from it’s base in the House of Representatives: this Tea Party clique primaried those thought to be insufficiently radical : The Proud Boys, Trump & January 6 were its issue, to be reductive. While the New Democrats, in the person of Hillary Clinton, called out ‘the deplorables’, demonstrating her contempt, for those who don’t share her highfalutin sense of self, and her position as political arbiter, mired in class bias.

Editor: Mr. Snyder names the Trump Fellow Travelers:

The most important is Vladimir Putin, whose propagandists adore Trump and celebrate Vance. David Sacks, a Silicon Valley investor, included Russian propaganda tropes in his speech at the convention. Like Elon Musk, whose changes to X, his social media platform, have helped the Russian cause, Sacks supported Vance. In the background is Peter Thiel, without whom Vance would not have become a wealthy politician.

Editor: Snyder names the very people who read The Financial Times, that usually acts as apologists for the predations of Capital. The Reader has to wonder at Snyder and The Financial Time’s lack of – while The New Democrats can’t quite bring themselves to jettison Joe Biden: The Trump/Vance ticket is of such toxic magnitude as presented by Snyder … Name this trading on Political Chaos! Reader there are only 625 words left in this diatribe, I will engage in some self-serving pruning!

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These oligarchs’ own platform is anarchy.

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The war in Ukraine, an atrocity in itself, is also a test case for the aspiring global anarchists.

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Ukraine also defends the international order in a broader, geopolitical sense, demonstrating that major offensive operations are difficult

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By defying a nuclear power, Ukraine is also making nuclear proliferation and thus nuclear war much less likely.

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If it becomes weak enough, it can, like Russia, become an oligarchy in which a few rich men can openly call the shots. A failing state will not regulate social media, which will make it easier for the digital oligarchs to profit by anarchising our daily lives.

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The anarchy can seem fun, at least for a while. With some luck, chaos can bring political fruit.

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 The strongman act of Trump and Vance distracts from their blatant dependence on the wealthy. Their threat to deport migrants shrouds the reality that none of the relevant oligarchs was born in the US, that Trump married two migrants and that Vance married the daughter of migrants.

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As the billionaires claim power ever more openly (oligarchy), they put pressure on the aspiring authoritarians who are supposed to be the strongmen (tyranny). The people who want a strongman don’t want him to be a puppet. Signs of strain were certainly evident at the convention.

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Political Observer

Political Observer comments.

The Financial Times:

Opinion: European Union

Headline : Starmer has a golden opportunity to reset relations with Europe

Sub-headline: Hosting the EPC summit at Blenheim, the prime minister can make good on his manifesto pledge

https://www.ft.com/content/71d20269-cf50-47f9-9ae4-edb891defddf

The Financial Times hired Anand Menon, the director of UK in a Changing Europe to provide a rather colorless apologetic for Starmer’s newly elected government:

If you’re as old as me, you’ll remember it well. A new prime minister, beaming from ear to ear, charming fellow European leaders and beating them all as they cycled through the streets of Amsterdam. Tony Blair’s diplomatic debut was an unalloyed triumph. Twenty-seven years on, another new Labour prime minister has a chance to shine among his neighbours, this time on home soil. 

The European Political Community — that travelling circus of 47 European states — arrives at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire on Thursday. Sir Keir Starmer will be chairing it.

Editor: some selective quotation of Menon’s essay:

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The meeting will give Starmer a chance to showcase a “reset” of UK relations with its neighbours.

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Tone matters, and it will be striking — and perhaps a little discombobulating — to watch the interactions with his European peers of a prime minister who does not see the relationship with the EU as inherently competitive or zero sum.

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Domestically, Starmer rules supreme. While the machinations of Conservative leadership candidates provide some light relief, they matter not a jot for national policy.

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The devil will be in the detail: can the UK persuade the EU to relax rules blocking British participation in schemes such as the European Defence Fund that are intended to foster greater collaboration in the development of military capabilities? 

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Will talks over a veterinary agreement drag on as the European Commission haggles over minutiae? Will the EU’s mantra of “strategic autonomy” continue to force it to view the UK as a competitor and a rival? 

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For all his charm, Blair ultimately failed the latter test… he promised to run a campaign to persuade the British public of the benefits of EU membership. This never materialised, and we are living with the consequences.

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Editor: Anand Menon trades in political clichés:

Blenheim represents a golden opportunity to begin Labour’s reset with the EU. But a change in tone, while welcome, is merely the precursor to the real work. Winning the bike race is not enough.

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Editor: the question that Anand Menon misses is that of Mariana Mazzucato  and her political cadre’s very strong twitter presence. And their collective political imperative of re-branding Neo-Liberalism!

Mission-oriented industrial strategy: global insights | policy report no. 2024/09

Authors:

• Mariana Mazzucato : Founding Director and Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value | UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)
• Sarah Doyle : Director’s Chief of Staff / Director’s Head of Policy | UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)
• Luca Kuehn von Burgsdorff : Senior Policy Advisor to Professor Mariana Mazzucato | UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)

Summery

Industrial strategy is experiencing a renaissance. Getting the details right matter. Mission-oriented industrial strategy needs to be more than words if we want to avoid missions becoming part of the problem, not the solution. This report is based on research conducted over the past several years, led by Professor Mazzucato and her team at IIPP. It offers practical insights gained from work with governments around the world – on opportunities ranging from healthy and sustainable housing estates in our local Camden Council to the ecological transition in Brazil – that are advancing new approaches to bring economic, social, and environmental policy goals into alignment at the centre of their growth strategies. The report offers a one-stop-shop for how to design, implement, and govern mission-oriented industrial strategies and examines the tools, institutions, partnerships, and capabilities governments need to deliver transformative change.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2024/jul/mission-oriented-industrial-strategy-global-insights

Political Observer

Political Observer comments.

Editor: reader start with the titles and subtitles of each of theses political interventions.

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The Economist:

Leaders | Lord, make us proportional—but not yet

Britain’s skewed election reinforces the case for voting reform. After 2029

The new government has more important things to deal with first

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/07/11/britains-skewed-election-reinforces-the-case-for-voting-reform-after-2029?utm_medium=social-media.content.np&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_content=discovery.content

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Fraser Nelson:

Labour’s Potemkin landslide

5 July 2024, 7:35am

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labours-potemkin-landslide

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Editor: By sheer literary finesse, wedded to historical sophistication Mr. Nelson renders moot the Oxbridger Cult, at The Economist? Or something closely akin to it!

Reader Editor: The Economist first two paragraphs :

Among the questions prompted by Labour’s huge victory on July 4th is whether Britain’s electoral system needs overhauling. The party won 63% of the seats on only a third of the vote, prompting complaints from some smaller parties, and a few smarting Conservatives, that the result was unfair. The case for reforming the country’s first-past-the-post (fptp) system, in which the candidate who wins the most votes in a constituency takes that seat, is becoming ever stronger. But it should not be a priority.

Measured by the difference between share of the votes and share of the seats in Parliament, this election was the most skewed result in British history, and second in Western democracies only to a French parliamentary election in 1993. Because its voters were efficiently distributed around the country, Labour needed fewer than 24,000 votes for each of its seats. Reform uk, in contrast, needed well over 800,000. Under the Scottish system of proportional representation (pr), Labour would have won 236 seats, not 411; Reform uk would have had 94 mps instead of five.

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https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/07/11/britains-skewed-election-reinforces-the-case-for-voting-reform-after-2029?utm_medium=social-media.content.np&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_content=discovery.content

Editor: Fraser Nelson of The Spectator offers this:

Something pretty big is missing from Labour’s historic landslide: the voters. Keir Starmer has won 63 per cent of the seats on just 33.8 per cent of the votes, the smallest vote share of any modern PM. Lower than any of the (many) pollsters predicted. So Labour in 2024 managed just 1.6 percentage points higher than the Jeremy Corbyn calamity in 2019 – and less than Corbyn managed in 2017. ‘But for the rise of the Labour party in Scotland,’ says Professor John Curtice, ‘we would be reporting that basically Labour’s vote has not changed from what it was in 2019.’ And that’s on the second-lowest turnout in democratic history. So where, then, is the supposed Starmer tsunami?

There certainly has been a Tory meltdown. Their vote share dropped from 44 to 24 per cent – by far the lowest in the party’s history. But remarkably, almost none of this seems to have gone to Labour. It mainly went to parties that had no chance of winning seats outright (like Reform) which makes Labour a beneficiary. But the level of enthusiasm for Labour is – well, let’s look at the share of the vote claimed by election-winning parties.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labours-potemkin-landslide

Editor : I’ll skip ahead, The Economist eventually answers the question it asked in its first paragraph: ‘But it should not be a priority’.

But the main reason to be judicious is that other things matter more. Labour came to power promising stability: the last thing Britain needs right now is another round of constitutional change. Time and political energy are better spent on the party’s overriding mission of souping up growth. The new government has made a decent start, most notably with a series of measures to liberalise planning, but these are early days. Big battles lie ahead—not just over building, but also over Europe and public services.

Voting reform was not in Labour’s manifesto; it is not likely to feature in its first term. Good. But the election does reinforce the case for a more proportional system. By the time the country next votes, it will be almost 20 years since the av referendum. The two main parties should put commitments to electoral reform in their platforms in 2029.

The Toxic of Myth of Growth, and the imperative to liberalise planning are the standard tropes of an utterly failed Neo-Liberalism. Note that Voting Reform is not, nor will it ever be a priority of Neo-Liberals! @MazzucatoM had yet to appear on the political scene and her: “mission-driven government’’…

Most people won’t know the name Mariana Mazzucato. Yet the economist is about to have a significant impact on their lives.

The University College London (UCL) academic’s signature idea – “mission-driven” government – is about to be put into practise by Sir Keir Starmer following Labour’s landslide election victory.

The new Prime Minister has set out five “missions” across energy, health, crime, education and the economy. Achieving goals across each category will be at the heart of his new government.

Starmer was inspired by Mazzucato, a Left-leaning academic who has spent the past decade championing this “mission” driven approach through lectures, numerous papers and four books – with a fifth one in the works.

She believes governments must tap into the spirit of the Apollo programme – where US space agency Nasa marshalled the private sector to put a man on the Moon – to tackle the biggest issues of the day.

That means a more muscular state that is willing to intervene in a host of industries, an approach that remains controversial among many of Mazzucato’s peers.

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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/07/07/mariana-mazzucato-star-economist-inspired-starmer-missions/Editor :

Editor: Fraser Nelson offers these enlightening, indeed sobering final paragraphs!

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Anyway, none of that matters now. Vote share will not be part of the conversation. But it is relevant in understanding how illusory Starmer’s majority is: a Potemkin landslide which looks impressive but, upon inspection, does not have very much behind it. And this has implications. It is often said that Britain is an anomaly, parliament swinging to the left when Europe moves to the right. But have the British voters, really, moved left? The Lib Dems have more seats (71) than Reform (5) but Ed Davey’s men won fewer votes (3.5 million) that those of Nigel Farage (4.1 million). So it would be deeply misleading to take this parliament as a proxy for UK public opinion.

I expected Starmer to win a big majority, but neither I nor anyone else expected how low the Labour support would be. This time yesterday, I thought that Labour would be in for ten years. Today, seeing the shallowness of Starmer’s support, I think there is all to play for next time around. The voters have turned away from the Tories but did emphatically not turn towards Labour. Never in a century of elections have the two main parties had a lower combined vote share. All told, the next five years in British politics will be thrillingly unpredictable.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/labours-potemkin-landslide

Political Observer

Can Macron’s Anti-democratic ‘retirement age’ be revoked, expunged, etc.? Political Observer speculates!

On paper, the proposal looks simple, but the conditions for its implementation are the subject of intense debate. A few minutes after the initial estimates of the outcome of the legislative elections were released, leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon forcefully reaffirmed on Sunday, July 7, that the statutory retirement age, which was introduced in 2023, will be abolished by decree “as early as this summer” if the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance governs the country. However, the statement by the leader of the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party is open to scrutiny, with many experts believing that a law is needed to abolish the provision which is as emblematic as it is unpopular.

This is one of the actes de rupture (“acts of separation”) that the NFP pledges to carry out in the “first fortnight” to “respond to the social emergency” if it takes power. It wants to cancel the “implementation decrees of Emmanuel Macron’s reform” which raised the retirement age from 62 to 64. The left-wing parties’ program focuses on Article 10 of the April 14, 2023 law, which made significant changes to France’s system. It’s worth noting that the article in question also includes a provision for extending the length of employment time required to obtain a full-rate pension for certain generations. Strangely, the NFP has not said whether it also intends to put an end to this provision which could mean additional efforts for the age groups concerned.

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https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2024/07/11/french-elections-can-the-left-repeal-the-pension-reform-if-it-comes-to-power_6681110_5.html

Editor: On the question of ‘Legality’

Michel Borgetto, a professor emeritus at the University of Paris-II Panthéon-Assas, shared this view, stating that, “A decree cannot go back on the provision of the law gradually raising the legal retirement age to 64, as such a modification or repeal can only come from the law.”

Editor: Legal avenues

However, other experts have a different view. Laure Camaji, a lecturer in labor law at Lyon-II University, argued that “a decree can immediately freeze the increase in the retirement age.” Emilien Quinart, a lecturer in public law at the University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne, went even further, observing that from 1985 to 2010, the retirement age appeared in the regulatory part of the Social Security Code, before being inserted in the legislative component following a reform enacted under former conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy.

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The prime minister could then ask the Constitutional Council, which rules on the constitutionality of laws, to “delegalize” the retirement age, in other words, to downgrade it and restore its regulatory status, as it was before 2010.

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The option of referring the matter to Parliament remains. Socialist leader Olivier Faure mentioned it on Franceinfo broadcaster on Monday. He suggested that “a bill is needed, which we will table in the Assemblée” and that “the Assemblée will have to make a decision.”

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Editor: Reader pay attention to where Bertrand Bissuel ends his speculations, about possible means to an end, the repeal of the retirement age, that appears to be the strategy adopted by Macon, turned against it-self ? Or should it be named the political nihilism of the long discarded ‘Jupertarian Politics’, as Neo-Liberal chicanery collapsing upon itself ?

In this context, Faure explained that it would be possible to resort to Article 49.3 of the Constitution, an article that allows the government to pass laws without a vote. “Everyone [would] understand,” he argued, pointing out that “80% of the French” were opposed to the 2023 reform, which was passed with the use of Article 49.3.

There is yet another way: the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), which is also against retirement at 64, could add its votes to those of the NFP. RN lawmaker Laure Lavalette told BFM-TV on Monday that her party would “vote for the repeal.”

Political Observer

Political Observer comments.

The first three paragraphs of the Ganesh essay are carefully assembled with Ireland as the key state, in fact, the paradigmatic case for NATO. His talent as a Story Teller is not quite the same as his sometime, once, talent as author of beguiling aperçus! The periphery of NATO becomes in the ‘thought’ of Ganesh its very virtue, in propaganda terms! These three paragraphs reminds this reader of his literary Hero Tom Wolfe Silver Fork fictions.

To Dublin, where “triple lock” has an altogether different meaning. In Britain, it is a rule that protects the real value of the public pension. In Ireland, it is a set of tests the government must pass to send armed forces abroad. If unpicking the British lock is too provocative for politicians to consider, imagine fiddling with the Irish one, bound up as it is with the republic’s non-belligerent self-image.

Yet the government proposes change. Allies have long nudged Ireland to do more, noting that democratic Europe has enemies who might not exempt a “neutral” state from their menaces. (Subsea cables near the Irish coast are candidates for sabotage.) And while Nato membership isn’t even a remote prospect, Ireland has signed up to a new co-operation scheme with the alliance.

In fact, Ireland, where support for EU membership amounts to a near consensus, is a good spot from which to observe one of the under-told stories in the world: the resilience of the west’s two most important institutions. Having been diagnosed “brain-dead” in 2019 by no less an eminence than the president of France, Nato is now wider, in that Sweden and Finland have joined, and deeper, in that member states are spending more on defence. Some are even mulling the revival of conscription. Whatever is missing from the alliance that convenes in Washington this week — a vigorous US president, for example — it isn’t a raison d’être. The Kremlin has seen to that.

Editor: The cast of characters from Irish seedlings, to The Kremlin ( Putin The Terrible), follows in its meandering way of Western Corporate Press hysteria! Ganesh produces a very particular kind of political confection! I’ll proved some selective quotation, of the remainder of this obvious propaganda:

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And Nato might be the second most resilient Brussels-headquartered entity.

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The EU is popular. And has become more so in recent times. Readers who find this implausible should take it up with various polling companies.

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Editor: Ganesh offers irreputable polling data? Yet the Polling Data, is bought and paid for by Political Operatives, of many Parties, that use this ‘data’ to secure by the publication of such ‘information’ to ‘massage’ political outcomes. This seems to this writer to be axiomatic!

According to YouGov last month, a referendum on membership would result in a crushing Remain win in each of the large EU democracies. German support for Leave is 18 per cent. In Spain, it is in the single digits. Eurobarometer, a pan-continental pulse check, finds that 74 per cent of respondents now “feel” like citizens of the EU, against 25 per cent who don’t. Those numbers were 59 and 40 around a decade ago. The Pew Research Center reports that supermajorities think well of the EU throughout Europe (save Greece) and as far afield as South Korea, having not always done so.

Survey after confounding survey reveals the same trend: a reputational slump for the EU in the mid-2010s, amid the sovereign debt crises, then a recovery to remarkable highs ever since. It explains some odd twists of events in national politics. To get as far as she has, which isn’t far enough to govern France, Marine Le Pen had to soften her line on Europe. The Italian premier, Giorgia Meloni, has been constructive with an EU that some expected her to fight. The return of Donald Tusk as Poland’s leader happened, in part, because his predecessors’ tiffs with Brussels sat ill with a pro-EU electorate. Across the continent, lots of voters with ultraconservative instincts on immigration, crime, net zero and, yes, Brussels, balk at EU exit, or anything close to it.

Editor: The spot diagnosis’s of the problem:

None of this assures the EU a serene future, or even a future. While populists didn’t sweep the European parliament elections last month, they did well enough to intensify their spoiling role.

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And the idea of an existential crisis for the EU on that front is much harder to stand up now than it was circa 2015, whatever the surge of anti-establishment politics since then. Because, in Britain, someone who is nationalist in general will be anti-EU in particular, the Anglo-American intelligentsia tends to assume the same of Europeans. In fact, millions are able to decouple the two things.

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Apart from its co-authorship of the single market in the 1980s, Brexit stands out as the UK’s kindest service to the European project. (Both happened under the Tories, which will gall that party to a degree that no landslide election defeat ever could.) What a parting gift. And how true, on such different levels, when Brussels says: “You shouldn’t have.”

Editor: How might The Reader look to Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in Britain or :

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2024/07/08/the-two-frances-of-july-7-the-relief-of-the-left-the-disillusionment-of-rn-supporters_6677295_5.html

Political Observer

Old Socialist comments

JUL 06, 2024

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Though not a subscriber to PUCK I keep getting this in my email. Now Puck must be the latest copy, on the once ascendent Vanity Fair, under perennial ass kisser Graydon Carter, now at AirMail, call it a dusty antique!

Though, Julia Ioffe is the strong clear voice of Neo-Conservatism, in its most hysterical  registers. No need to read the New York Times trio of @nytdavidbrooks, Bret Stephens or @tomfriedman, she is the most valuable commodity Zionism thrives upon:  the Zionist Fellow Traveler!

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Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory, a composite of the best new work at Puck.

It was another extraordinary, truly historic week here at Puck: Peter Hamby unearthed a ground-shifting Biden poll; John Heilemann captured the subterranean politics of the president’s darkest hour; Abby Livingston revealed Biden’s emerging horror on Capitol Hill; Julia Ioffe explained how this is all playing out among the G20 crowd; Rachel Strugatz reported on a $1 billion valuation trap; Lauren Sherman sorted through a Pinault re-org; Eriq Gardner and John Ourand parsed the NFL’s $15 billion nightmare; Marion Maneker discovered a Picasso surprise; and Dylan Byers got to the bottom of the latest Washington media scandal.

Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

Programming note: Next week, on July 10 in D.C., Peter Hamby will host an exclusive panel conversation focused on shifting voter dynamics ahead of the ’24 election—based on data revealed through Puck’s polling partnership with Echelon Insights—with a special emphasis on the outsize impact of women voters over the age of 50. Peter will be joined by Kristen Soltis Anderson from Echelon Insights, Margie Omero from GBAO, and Nancy LeaMond from AARP. To attend, click here to sign up for Puck, and email Fritz@puck.news for registration information.

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Yours, 

Old Socialist 

Mary Sarotte’s regret on the collapse of ‘the post-cold-war order’, in The Financial Times!