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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

Political Observer comments.

The first three paragraphs of this essay wallows in a retelling of a History, that is still unfolding. But the very canny Mr. Friedman lets his ‘reader’ know that he is aware of the various political actors in this Real Life Melodrama, and that he has not been beguiled by the machinations of those toxic actors? Yet Friedman is a Zionist! How might a Zionist approach such fraught political/moral territory ?

One of my ironclad rules of reporting in the Middle East is that sometimes you need to rereport a story to see things even more clearly than you did earlier. I’m having that experience with the Iran-Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war, which could soon draw in the United States. It could not be more clear now that, while Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7 was triggered in part by reckless Israeli settlement expansions, brutal treatment of Palestinian prisoners and encroachments on Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem, the terrorist assault was also part of a broader Iranian campaign to drive America out of the Middle East and America’s Arab and Israeli allies into a corner — before they could corner Iran.

Which is why if the current tit-for-tat conflict between Israel and Iran and Iran’s proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis) escalates into a full-scale war — one that Israel could not fight for very long alone — President Biden could face the most fateful decision of his presidency: whether to go to war with Iran, alongside Israel, and take out Tehran’s nuclear program, which is the keystone of Iran’s strategic network in the region. Iran has been building that network to supplant America as the most powerful force in the Middle East and to bleed Israel to death by a thousand cuts inflicted by its proxies.

But America must always be wary about what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is up to. As a former Israeli diplomat, Alon Pinkas, observed in Haaretz on Thursday, one has to wonder why Netanyahu chose now to assassinate the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran — in the middle of delicate hostage talks.

The Reader finds herself in the uncomfortable position, of confronting 1,205 more of Friedman’s words: that should cement in her mind, his mastery of the vexing complications of Netanyahu’s Political/Moral Universe, and the real possibility of nuclear war, as a possible outcome?

Editor: I’ll sample some of Freidman’s self-serving chatter , that in his mind demonstrates ‘mastery’. Poor Mr. Friedman is not Walter Lippmann!

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In Netanyahu’s nearly 17 years in power, Bibi has both aided and undermined American interests in the region.

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But honesty also requires me to acknowledge that some things are true even if Netanyahu believes them.

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No leader in any of these Arab states today can make decisions hostile to Iran’s interests without fear of being killed.

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Lebanon and Syria had to observe three days of mourning after Iran’s president died in a helicopter crash. Yup, three days of mourning for another country’s president. There is a name for that: Iranian imperialism.

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IMEC was designed to foster tighter trade and energy supply links between the European Union and India — via U.S. allies on the Persian Gulf.

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The founding IMEC partners are the U.S., the E.U., Saudi Arabia, India, the U.A.E., France, Germany and Italy.

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Iran knew it had to prevent this Saudi-U.S.-Israel deal or be strategically isolated.

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Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei said that Muslim countries that are normalizing with Israel are “betting on a losing horse,” state-run media reported Tuesday, as regional rival Saudi Arabia moves toward establishing ties with Jerusalem. Khamenei also predicted Israel would soon be eradicated, in an address to government officials and ambassadors from Muslim countries. …

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How, though, will it end?

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 “In a network, everyone is No. 2.” Successors always emerge, often worse than their predecessors.

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With that one chess move — embracing the Palestinian Authority — Netanyahu could cement the U.S.-Israeli-Arab alliance, put in place a Palestinian governing structure in Gaza that would not threaten Israel and isolate Iran and its proxies militarily and politically, making their bet on Hamas’s war an utter waste of lives and money. But Bibi would have to risk his governing coalition to do it, because his extremist far-right messianic partners oppose any deal with any credible Palestinians.

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 What is not at all clear is what Bibi will do. Whose interests will he serve? His, Israel’s, America’s or Iran’s?

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Iran has long been happy to let Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Iraqis and Syrians die “for Palestine” but never risk Iranians if it could avoid that. The crocodile tears shed by Iran’s clerical leaders for Palestinians are all a fraud — all just a cover for Tehran’s regional imperialist adventure.

Netanyahu can now pull back the curtain on the whole cynical play. But that would require him to put Israel’s interests ahead of his own political survival. Will he?

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Political Observer

Political Observer offers a brief commentary on Propaganda vs. Reportage!

stephenkmacksd.com/

Jul 30, 2024

Reporting from Semafor Flagship:

From Anya Parampil on twitter:

Don’t turn off your critical thinking skills just because you have been told Venezuela is “socialist” your whole life. The Venezuelan opposition have claimed fraud and contested virtually every election that they have lost since Chávez came to power. Yet they can never provide evidence, and that is because Venezuela’s electoral process is far more secure than what we have in the United States. I describe the voting process in the country, which I have observed firsthand, in my book, Corporate Coup:

“In Venezuela, voting machines were activated through a two-step verification process consisting of a physical check of the voter’s national identity card and a digital scan of their fingerprint. After casting their vote, the voter received a physical receipt of their ballot which they then personally dropped in a secure box on site. The voter then signed their name and stamped their thumbprint on a physical electoral registry to certify their participation. When polls closed, authorities assuaged fears of digital vote tampering by checking their final electronic tally against a random sampling of 54 percent of the physical ballot receipts submitted by voters at polling stations.”

Citizen and international observers are present throughout this process. Do not fall for claims of fraud unless hard evidence is produced. Especially because further escalation in Venezuela will only result in civil conflict and perhaps even regional war in the Western hemisphere. You think our border looks bad now? Wait until Washington turns up the heat on Caracas. Oh—and the Russian military has strong military ties with Venezuela and a presence within the country. We are not only talking about regional war here, but an expansion of the World War currently raging against Russia and its allied rising powers. Are you ready for that war to hit “Washington’s backyard”?

One more point: the vast majority of Venezuela’s economy—hotels, restaurants, stores—are privately owned and operated. Venezuela’s “socialism” is largely defined by the fact its industries, including its oil sector and precious mineral reserves, are nationally operated. This makes Venezuela comparable to Russia and many other modern states that consider the natural resources stored within the nation to be the property of the Republic rather than a few at the top. Venezuela is an obsession in Washington because before Chávez, US and European companies practically owned the country and the IMF set its domestic economic agenda. Venezuela is home to the largest oil and untapped gold reserves in the world. This is why Americans have been inundated with propaganda about Venezuela since it began the process of asserting sovereign ownership over that natural wealth. That is what their “socialism” is primarily about.

8:28 AM · Jul 29, 2024 329K Views

The reader need only compare the ‘Semafor Flagship’ to the Time Magazine approach of Henry Luce’s political methodology, of another time and place! Reportage in it’s carefully reduced state of a collection of political villains aligned with Maduro’s ‘Leftism’, as a continuing threat to American Hegemony! The Venezuelan Oligarchs allied with Uncle Sam covet the abundant Oil Reserves that Maduro controls.

The Reader can only wonder at Anya Parampil fact based reporting on the election! Never to have a place in American Corporate Media, nor the subject of any debate, on Political Talk Shows: that wallow self-congratulation, as their audiences continue to decline at high speed. Anya Parampil, in the tradition of I.F. Stone, provide fact based dissent, on the teetering and totally corrupt Technocrats, who continue to produce American National Security State propaganda!

Political Reporter

* https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/07/30/2024/semafor-flagship-tension-and-triumph

Old Socialist attempts…

The title @rcolvile’s latest of attack on Keir Starmer political motives leaves The Reader in the dark confronting ‘The problem with a tax regime built on golden geese is that they can fly away’ the burning question is, who are these Golden Geese? Could this be what Colevile is attempting to describe?

9 Jul 202410.15 EDT

Closing summary

The vacuum cleaner and air-filter maker Dyson is cutting about 1,000 jobs in the UK as part of a global restructure, reducing its British workforce by more than a quarter.

Staff were told on Tuesday morning about the cuts as part of moves to reduce the business’s 15,000-strong workforce around the world amid a wider cost-cutting drive.

Dyson, which is known for its bagless vacuum cleaner as well as hand-dryers and bladeless fans, has 3,500 UK employees, with offices in Wiltshire, Bristol and London. The review that led to the decision began some time before the general election was announced in May.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2024/jul/09/thames-water-results-ftse-100-federal-reserve-jerome-powell-bank-of-england-japan-nikkei-record-business-live

Or could the culprit be Mariana Mazzucato : Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London where she is the founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.

Her work challenges orthodox thinking about the role of the state and the private sector in driving innovation; how economic value is created, measured and shared; and how market-shaping policy can be designed in a ‘mission oriented way’ to solve the grand challenges facing humanity. She is winner of international prizes including the 2020 John von Neumann Award and the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.

History tells us that innovation is an outcome of a massive collective effort – not just from a narrow group of young white men in California. If we want to solve the world’s biggest problems, we better understand that.

Mariana Mazzucato, Wired interview

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In these paragraphs Colvile riffs on themes of @Jacob_Rees_Mogg , in sum of Rich Men as the perpetual victims of political opportunists!

In the face of Tory harassment during the campaign, Labour ruled out increasing all manner of taxes on “working people” — although its definition of “working people” turned out to exclude quite a large chunk of the population, not least those who pay for their own children’s education. And if you rule out “working people”, that just leaves “the rich”.

But that’s a problem, because our tax system rests on an incredibly narrow base. The latest statistics, published a few days before the election, show that the top 1 per cent of earners pay an astonishing 28 per cent of income tax. That comes to £85 billion, or roughly three times the amount paid by the entire bottom half of the workforce. Indeed, for all the stereotypes about the Tories, in their 14 years they steadily took more of high earners’ salaries, and less from that bottom half, than Labour ever did.

The problem with a tax regime built around golden geese, however, is that they can always fly away. And pretty much all of the rumoured tax rises are ones that might prompt them to do so. Capital gains. Inheritance tax. High-earners’ pensions. Making it harder to pass companies to the next generation.

Reader there are still 339 words left ! I hope my summery offers some insights, that will make the remainder of your inquiry rewarding! I’ll provide a sampler of the remaining Covile’s examples of what Starmer’s misbegotten Economics presages for ‘British Economic Growth’ the great mirage of Neo-Liberalism and Thatcherism’s utter failure to connect to the singular idea of ‘Development’ of Manfred Max-Neef !

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371134298_Manfred_Max-Neef’s_Human_Scale_Development_and_Geoethics

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There is a paradox here. Labour’s economic strategy is built on attracting private investment, to deliver the state’s objectives on decarbonisation, housing and so on. But its taxes will fall on private investors.

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Indeed, there is widespread consensus in the City that the abolition of non-dom status amounts to a titanic act of self-harm. On the latest figures, the 37,800 non-doms paying on a “remittance” basis (ie, being taxed only on their UK income and assets) contributed £6.5 billion in taxes — to say nothing of the companies they ran or goods they bought. Yet significant numbers of the highest earners are already taking that cash elsewhere, to the point where you could go through The Sunday Times Rich List with a marker pen.

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The core problem for most is not the level of tax — many would be happy to stump up much more to stay in Britain — but Labour’s likely insistence that they pay inheritance tax on all their assets and investments, whether or not they have anything to do with the UK. As one put it to me: “We can afford to live here. We just can’t afford to die here.”

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They are the inevitable consequence of low growth, high inflation, excess borrowing, a global pandemic and an ageing population — in other words, a toxic combination of long-term pressures and temporary emergencies.

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As the new chancellor recognises, the only sustainable way to get us out of this mess is to drive up the rate of growth. The danger is that by targeting the wealthy as a short-term fix, she will make that even harder.

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Mr. Colvile is a Thatcherite Political Romantic and Propagandist, and has no interest in the Economic Utopianism of Manfred Max-Neef , nor of Jeremy Corbyn’s Left-Wing Social Democracy. Thatcherism was, is, and remains about the Primacy of The Market, as the singularity that defines the human endeavor.

Old Socialist

Re-Posting this February 17, 2020 commentary!

I saw a copy of this latest biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes by Stephen Budiansky, today, at my local library. I searched, out of curiosity, for the Buck vs. Bell case. This being a valid test of an actual biography of Holmes, warts and all, or just more of the same apologetics, for this misogynist and misanthrope, and one of the decisions that establishes without fail this American jurist’s reputation.

Here, from G. Edward White’s Oliver Wendell Holmes : Law and The Inner Self:

From pages 407 and 408 some telling information that has escaped Mr. Budiansky’s attention ?  That I recalled this portion of Prof. White’s biography can be attributed to the fact that Holmes was a very particular kind of American Monster!

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The second feature of Buck v. Bell is that it concerned a legislative “reform” about which Holmes did not have his customary skepticism. On the contrary, he was an enthusiast for population control devices, particularly those that promised to reduce “incompetence” in the population. He had no reason to doubt many of the assumptions of the eugenic reformers: that mental disabilities were inherited; that mental disability was linked to crime; that the very persons who were candidates for sterilization were the least likely to control their sexual impulses. He had written Pollock in 1920 that “I should be glad . . . if it could be arranged that death should precede life by provisions for a selected race,” because “every society rests on the death of men,”(130) and that “[y]our remark that the men fit for military service on the whole are the better type . . . is precisely the reflection that makes me believe that it would be possible to breed a race.”(131)

He had written Laski in 1923 that “I do not regard the great multiplication of the species as a benefit.”(132) and in 1925 that “I don’t believe in millennia and still less in the possibility of attaining one . . . while propagation is free and we do all we can to keep the products, however bad, alive.”(133) He wrote Lewis Einstein in 1927, after the Buck decision, that “establishing the constitutionality of a law permitting the sterilization of imbeciles . . . gave me pleasure.”(134) And he wrote Laski that when he wrote the opinion in the Buck case he “felt that I was getting near to the first principle of real reform.”(135)

It therefore proves too much to associate Holmes’ opinion in Buck v. Bell with a skeptical tolerance for “social legislation” of all sorts, which does not capture his attitude toward Virginia’s sterilization statute. The notoriety of Buck v. Bell has increasingly cut into Holmes’ image as a civil libertarian; it played an important part in the first major revision of that image by critics in the 1960s.(136) The question remains, however, how that image first surfaced, given Holmes’ repeated skepticism about the efficacy of “progressive” legislation, indifference toward civil rights claims, disinclination to grant aliens any rights against the state, and ultrapositivist theories of sovereignty.

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https://epdf.pub/justice-oliver-wendell-holmes-law-and-the-inner-self.html

Also see Law without Values : The Life, Work, And Legacy Of Justice Holmes by Albert W. Alschuler :  Chapter Five , Holmes’s Opinions pages 65, 66 and 67 that reiterates the historical evidence that White presents.

The Cult of Oliver Wendell Holmes is politically and civically toxic!  Mr. Budiansky is another Holmes acolyte.

American Writer

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