StephenKMackSD's Blog

Political Observer’s political archology.

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.

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/if-train-driver-pay-irks-you-look-at-the-perks-weve-let-them-keep-bht0sp7zz

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?

Political Observer

Political Observer reports!

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 office vowing 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!

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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:

Is the West finally seeing through Hamas’s lies?

14 August 2024

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-the-west-finally-seeing-through-hamass-lies

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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.

Political Observer

Political Observer shares his thoughts!

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.

https://www.ft.com/content/74a9645c-bf47-4c99-8e30-829a93a9f0ba

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!

Political Observer

Political Observer(AKA StephenKMackSD)

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!

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Today’s context is different.

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This should create more political space for creative thinking

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Things Labour is ready to consider include a visa scheme for EU nationals aged 18 to 30 — an early priority for Brussels.

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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.

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While Starmer will not accept all of the elements of the single market, such as free movement of labour, he will accept some.

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The geopolitical context also points to the need for more European ambition.

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More security and defence collaboration between the EU and UK, including over defence industrial policy, makes perfect sense. 

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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.  

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No one in Europe is keen on a formal renegotiation:

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Starmer and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen should prepare an ambitious political declaration for their first summit in the coming weeks.

Political Observer

Political Observer.

American Provincial quotes just enough of Michel Hazanavicius ennui inducing essay…

Why do so many young, pink-assed, Nike-wearing French people want to be revolutionaries and fierce defenders of the weakest with a one-dimensional reading of the issue? And why do we want to make Muslims my antagonists here in France, when in fact they’re not? Why did I spend my youth with Arabs, without it being an issue, and now we want it to be more complicated than that?

How can we fail to see that words form ideas, and that after ideas come acts? Why is it so complicated to hate no one and hope that no one hates us? At least to an acceptable extent? Without things getting out of hand? 

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And why do I get the feeling that more and more people have a problem with even talking about the Jewish genocide?

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Why do I get the feeling that a dull force is trying to break the last dam that imposed a ban?

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And why is it that Jews are too often asked to talk about anti-Jewish hatred, when we’re probably not the most representative in the field?

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Why do I so often wish I weren’t Jewish so that I could defend them without my word being automatically nullified? And why are we all so silent? Are we really sure that our silence will be louder than their screams?

Editor: Michel Hazanavicius is not François Truffaut!

American Provincial

Political Observer comments from 2015 & 2024.

Here is a portion of Tett’s essay from January 16, 2015, the whole essay is more than worthy of your attention!

Headline: A debt to history?

Sub-headline: To some, Germany faces a moral duty to help Greece, given the aid that it has previously enjoyed 

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Last summer I found myself in that spot for a conference, having dinner with a collection of central bank governors. It was a gracious, majestic affair, peppered with high-minded conversation. And as coffee was served, in bone-china crockery (of course), Benjamin Friedman, the esteemed economic historian, stood up to give an after-dinner address.

The mandarins settled comfortably into their chairs, expecting a soothing intellectual discourse on esoteric monetary policy. But Friedman lobbed a grenade.

“We meet at an unsettled time in the economic and political trajectory of many parts of the world, Europe certainly included,” he began in a strikingly flat monotone (I quote from the version of his speech that is now posted online, since I wasn’t allowed to take notes then.) Carefully, he explained that he intended to read his speech from a script, verbatim, to ensure that he got every single word correct. Uneasily, the audience sat up.

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https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0

Editor: Let me quote from selected paragraphs of Jillian Tett’s latest essay at The Financial Times of August 8, 2024

Opinion: The QE retreat

Market gyrations reflect fears about the unwinding of QE

The yen carry trade is a symptom not a cause of investor anxiety

https://www.ft.com/content/c6596fdd-d184-4dee-b6ff-f70c7081003a

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There are two lessons here. The first is that not even ultra-well-paid financiers — be they hedgies, private equity players or bankers — can really forecast the precise moments of market meltdowns. Yes, fundamental strains and cracks can be identified. But judging when these will cause a market earthquake is as hard as real geology; humility is required. And doubly so given that the rise of algorithmic trading is creating dramatically more price volatility and feedback loops.

Second, this week’s market rout was driven not so much by panic around the “real” economy as by financial dynamics. Or, as Bridgewater wrote in a client letter: “We view the widespread deleveraging firmly as a market event and not an economic one,” since “periods of structurally low volatility have always been fertile ground for the accumulation of outsize positioning” — and eventually they unwind.

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Editor: Tett broaches the telling subject of Quantitative Easing :

Or, to put it another way, these events can be viewed as (yet another) aftershock from the unwinding of that extraordinary monetary policy experiment known as quantitative easing and zero interest rates. For while investors have normalised cheap money in recent years — and to such a degree that they barely notice the distortions this has caused — they are now belatedly realising how odd it was. In that sense, then, the dramas have been thoroughly beneficial — even if electronic trading has made that lesson more dramatic than it might have been.

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The immediate display of this is the yen carry trade — the practice of borrowing short in cheap yen to buy higher-yielding assets such as US tech stocks. Cheap yen loans have fuelled global finance ever since the Bank of Japan embarked on QE in the late 1990s, albeit to a degree that has fluctuated, depending on US and European rates. But the carry trade appears to have exploded after late 2021, when the US moved away from QE and zero rates. Then, when the BoJ (finally) also started to tighten earlier this year, the rationale waned.

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Editor : Instead of completely scavenging her insights, let me offer some selective quotations that might better evoke portions of her essay.

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UBS and JPMorgan also think that about half of these have been unwound.

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Either way, the key point is that insofar as free(ish) money was fuelling asset inflation in America and Japan, this is coming to an end.

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Unsurprisingly, this leaves some investors hunting for other long-ignored QE distortions that could also unwind.

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Unsurprisingly, this leaves some investors hunting for other long-ignored QE distortions that could also unwind.

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My answer is “not now”. Although these holdings look odd by historical standards, the BoJ insists it will not sell soon. But what is most interesting is that non-Japanese investors are waking up to this issue, after ignoring — that is to say, normalising — it for years.

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But this confidence — or complacency — has been reinforced by the Federal Reserve acting as a buyer of last resort for bonds during QE.

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Editor: The final paragraphs:

A cynic might retort that all this mental readjustment may yet turn out to be unnecessary: if markets truly swoon, central banks will be pressured into propping up them up — yet again. Thus on Wednesday, the BoJ deputy governor pledged to “maintain current levels of monetary easing”, contradicting hints from the BoJ governor last week that more rises loom.

But the key point is this: bountiful free money is not a “normal” state of affairs, and the sooner investors realise this the better — whether they are mom’n’pop savers, private equity luminaries, hedge funders or those central bankers.

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Julian Tett manifests integrity in both these essays!

Political Observer

Just look at the political actors, players, walk-ons in Ganesh’ s latest Historical Re -Write its like crewel embroidery aided by gusts of Hot Air .

Editor: Paragraph 1:

…the American left…, …Defund the Police…,…White Fragility…, Politics being downstream of culture,…, Dave Chappelle making sport of them…,

Editor: Paragraph 2: Ganesh switches tracks & provides what passes for diagnosis, but still enmeshed in disarray.

How Republicans have allowed this state of affairs to flip since then should be the subject of an inquest. And it might start in Palo Alto. If Donald Trump loses the presidential election, his courting of the tech world, or its embrace of him, won’t seem the masterstroke that it did at the time. However lavish the campaign donations from that quarter, much of the Republicans’ perceived abnormality stems from the same place.

Editor: Paragraph 3: Ganesh resorts to jitter-bug cadences: a not so subtle attack on ‘tech bros’? Is Ganesh an Oxbridger?

Tech weirdness tends to consist of two things. One is intellectual obsession. The favoured issues of tech bros are often good ones — demographic decline is serious, free speech is threatened — but get much too much prominence for the median voter’s tastes. The other component is tonal. Rife in tech is an almost teenage eagerness to provoke that jars outside of podcasts and internet chat rooms.

Editor: Paragraph 4: Enter JD Vance & Peter Thiel and Mike Pence, offered in the highlighted comic sentience. Ganesh attempt to construct a viable argument by way of Pence reads like the non sequitur it is!

Both glitches come together in the person of JD Vance, the Peter Thiel mentee who it is hard to imagine as running mate before the tech-Trump entente. What the GOP ticket needed was another Mike Pence, another reassuring emissary to suburban moderates. What emerged was someone on whom Trump is the restraining influence. If this unnerves enough voters in enough states, no donation was worth it.

Editor: Paragraph 5 : Ganesh compares The Palo Alto cast of mind, with that of the Wall Street cast of mind: they are not actually explored, but mentioned, alluded to, this is, at best riffing on already established themes of Ganesh. The ‘as if’ is just that, it has no rhetorical weight … it is almost Straussian in its potted history of investors ,financial hubs and the casual dishonesty of political conformists of all stripes?

It might be useful to compare the Palo Alto cast of mind with that of Wall Street, that other funder and shaper of US politics. If only because financial markets are sensitive to events — an oil shock, a foreign coup, a crop blight — those who work in them have to be at least somewhat tethered to practical reality. There is little profit in abstract thought, and not much time for it either. (Hedge funds being a partial exception.) Reinforcing this hard-headedness is the fact that financial hubs are situated in big cities, where human contact is constant and the messiness of life part of the furniture.

Editor: I’ll just quote portions from the remaining paragraphs in order. Ganesh’s chatter loses its ability to charm the reader, after a barrage of self-congratulation, masquerading as political insight, that reveals itself as wan propaganda aided by his myopic view from afar !

Editor: Paragraph 6:

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Pour in thousands of first-class mathematicians and engineers, and it would be strange if a sort of brilliant unworldliness didn’t take root. As a generator of wealth, US tech is phenomenal. As an actor in politics, it can be maladroit.

Editor: Paragraph 7:

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No, the problem is absolutism: the taking of ideas, left or right, to the nth degree. Riots in the UK? “Civil war is inevitable”, judges Elon Musk, of a nation that didn’t have a civil war over the Corn Laws, the Somme or the loss of empire. This very Northern Californian millenarianism is weird, not to say wrong and often unfalsifiable.

Editor : Paragraph 8:

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 To judge by some tweeted reactions from tech moguls to the Vance appointment (“WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE. GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH BABY”) the right is now the self-high-fiving in-group with no clue how it comes across to uncommitted voters.

Editor: Paragraph 9:

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You can be weird and win, of course. The Democrats strike me as about as overconfident as the Republicans of a month ago. The question is whether Trump’s chances are better or worse as a result of his much-celebrated support from the Valley. On balance, worse, I think. The Apprentice started airing in the pre-streaming Arcadia we call 2004. A man who owes his political breakthrough to linear television never needed his pioneering but odd new friends.

Political Observer

Myra Breckenridge comments upon ‘“Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes”’ by Alissa Wilkinson, in The New York Times.

As the creature of Gore Vidal’s vivid, and at times perverse sexual imagination, I’m probably not the right semi-plagiarist, and pretender, to rifle through Alissa Wilkinson review of ‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Tapes’ in the New York Times ? Like any pretender, I can’t resist the lure of a possible audience! (Recall Charles Pierce as ‘Drag Queen’ ?) The last three paragraphs of her ‘review’ reek of ‘Hollywood Vomit’ , as Raymond Chandler once called it!

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“Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” also documents, with a harrowing frankness, the precise moment when the public’s interest in celebrities tipped over from worshiping their glittering lives to feeding on their scandals. As the film frames it, Taylor’s split from her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher, after she fell in love with her “Cleopatra” co-star Richard Burton, prompted the birth of the paparazzi: photographers who would chase stars tirelessly to get a juicy shot they could sell. One commentator in the film says they weren’t coming for glamour anymore — they were coming for the destruction of glamour.

Taylor, in her own retelling, says that she decided at some point that it was fruitless to try to “fix” her public image. “People have a set image they want to believe, either the good or the bad,” she says. “If you try to explain, then you lose yourself along the way.” Of course, a series of high-profile fallouts with Burton, substance-abuse issues and her aging appearance were all reliable tabloid fodder. And it pained her, until she found a third act as an AIDS activist.

But “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” suggests that in her own way, Taylor, who died in 2011, paved the path for future generations of stars who would have to deal with celebrity. So it’s not just a fascinating glimpse into a woman who spent her whole life in the spotlight. It’s a chronicle of a moment when everything changed, and a sobering reminder that we often think we know who public figures are, but we rarely really understand.

Yours,

Myra Breckenridge

Political Observer comments & supplies ‘a selective reading’ of Conradi’s polemic!

Mr. Conradi’s feature story begin as just that:

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When Holly-Rose Clegg was beginning her acting career in Paris, a job at Starbucks helped pay her bills. Almost a decade later, she has a successful career on stage and screen and in adverts — but it is now the French state, rather than serving coffee, that keeps her going in the inevitable gap between engagements.

Every month, Clegg logs onto an official website to input the jobs she has done and how much she has earned and is paid for the days on which she has not been working — in her case, typically €1,600 (£1,350) a month.

“It’s amazing because France is the only country that pays us like a salary every month,” said Clegg, 33, who was born in London to British parents and moved to France when she was eight. “They give it to actors, singers, dancers, musicians, even technical people who work on movie sets or do the sound. Even if you’re a foreigner, you can still have it if you work here, which is really cool. It’s not just for French people.”

Clegg is among more than 300,000 intermittents du spectacle — people employed on a casual basis in the French entertainment industry — who are entitled to receive money from the state provided they satisfy certain criteria, including a minimum number of performances or hours a year.

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https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/economics/article/france-wins-gold-for-public-spending-but-the-largesse-bequeaths-a-toxic-legacy-brxkvq6w3

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Editor: But Conradi can’t resist the temptation that these introductory paragraphs offer, to become what be might be named a Thatcherite Scold, in a bespoke suit- this is The Times, with a history of not just Conservatism, but an Anglicized Neo-Liberalism, via that Iron Lady!

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The scheme, estimated to cost more than €1 billion a year, is typical of a unique economic model that has made the French state one of the largest and most generous in the world.

Such largesse comes at a cost, however: now at close to 57 per cent of GDP, government spending in France has long been way higher than in any of its G7 rivals; the equivalent figure for Britain is 44.2 per cent and for America 37.5 per cent. At the same time, tax rates are high, while social charges — the French equivalent of national insurance — are vast.

Yet, in recent years, successive governments have been finding it increasingly difficult to balance the books: the budget deficit is running at 5.5 per cent of GDP, which has helped push up French government debt to 110.8 per cent of GDP, third only to the figures for Greece (159.8 per cent) and Italy (137.7 per cent).

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https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/economics/article/france-wins-gold-for-public-spending-but-the-largesse-bequeaths-a-toxic-legacy-brxkvq6w3

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Editor: Mr. Conradi’s evidence as the above presents it, is well ‘alarming’? I’ll choose some telling fragments, of the remaining 969 words of the Conradi’s verbose polemic, that left the experience of Holly-Rose Clegg’s story as mere window dressing!

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the markets are getting nervous, the ratings agencies have downgraded French debt and the European Commission is demanding action.

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To further complicate matters, the country is still without a government almost a month after an inconclusive election in which the largest number of seats was won by the New Popular Front…

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“We are the world champions for public spending and the European champion for taxes, plus growth is mediocre at little more than 1 per cent,” said Benoît Perrin, director of Contribuables Associés, a campaigning group that is the French equivalent of Britain’s TaxPayers’ Alliance.

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The only way to balance the books is to cut public spending, but for 50 years, our governments have drugged the French with public money, and it is very difficult to wean them off it.”

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The situation is compounded, Perrin argues, by multiple levels of bureaucracy and an army of fonctionnaires (public sector workers), whose numbers have been growing year on year.

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Editor: The fact is that the Neo-Liberal Marcon has been a dismal failure, across the board : the non-vote on the retirement age was a demonstration of Macron’s cowardice!

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Paradoxically, France’s budgetary woes come despite a concerted drive by President Emmanuel Macron to open up the economy since he first came to power in 2017: labour laws have been made more flexible, taxes for business lowered and unemployment cut considerably.

Foreign investors have taken note and, for the fifth year running, put more money into France than they have into Germany or Britain…

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… and, when it comes to crises, Macron’s response, like that of his predecessors, has been to spend more public money, putting his country increasingly at odds with its neighbours and competitors.

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Bruno Le Maire, the outgoing finance minister, announced plans last month for €25 billion in budget cuts this year, with the aim of bringing the deficit down towards the level demanded by the EU: 3 per cent of GDP.

This was not enough to appease the Cour des comptes, the independent body that scrutinises France’s public spending. In a damning report, the auditors accused the government of failing to deliver sufficient cuts and described its debt-reduction promises for the future as “unrealistic”.

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The Council of Economic Analysis (CAE), an organisation attached to the French prime minister’s office, argued in a recent note that the government would have to cut spending by €112 billion over the next 7 to 12 years to generate a 1 per cent primary budget surplus necessary to bring down the debt.

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:spending by the French presidency last year was €125.5 million, a budget overshoot of €8.3 million, it was revealed last week. This included €474,851 for a lavish reception for King Charles at the Palace of Versailles during his state visit.

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Like Gabriel Attal, the prime minister, and other members of the government, he tendered his resignation following the election. It remains to be seen who will replace them.

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… the New Popular Front has staked its claim to the premiership, alarming financial markets with policies that include raising public sector wages, linking salaries to inflation, and cutting income tax and social security contributions for lower earners.

Notably, it has pledged to reverse a controversial law pushed through parliament last year by Macron to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, credited with saving the state an estimated €17 billion a year — and reduce it even further to just 60.

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…Lucie Castets, 37, a left-wing economist and senior civil servant, called for €150 billion more in taxes between now and 2027, largely levied on the better off and on companies, and said keeping to the EU’s 3 per cent limit would not be her “primary objective”.

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Unwilling to destabilise the country in the middle of the Olympics, he has said he will not do so until after the Games end next weekend. In the meantime, France’s debt looks set to continue ticking up.

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Political Observer