StephenKMackSD's Blog

Almost Marx …

After last weeks column:

Headline: At the Tory conference Boris Johnson bemoaned the lack of heckling. Well, it may come soon enough

At my first Tory conference, in 2006, I was given a very simple instruction by the Telegraph politics team: find Boris Johnson and follow him. It wasn’t hard. There he was, urging parents to push pies through school railings if they didn’t want their kids following the Jamie Oliver diet. Or warning that localism could lead to sharia law in Tower Hamlets, or criticising new rules on car seats for children (“When I was growing up, we all bounced around like peas in a rattle — did it do us any harm?”). When an elderly audience member fainted at the Telegraph fringe meeting, perhaps overcome by the sheer thrill of Johnsonian proximity, he swept from the stage to pick her up, chair and all, and carry her outside. At one point he spent an hour hiding in the party press office as the media laid siege outside. He was where the news was.

Fifteen years later Boris was again the dominant figure of Tory conference. In fact its entire architecture was shaped around him. Because of Covid uncertainty, his ministers were confined to a temporary auditorium, separated from the main exhibition hall by a set of black curtains. For Johnson’s big speech on Wednesday, however, the cameras and banners were moved to a larger, grander, purpose-built space — a crowded, adoring BozzaDrome. And whereas the prime minister had time to quote poetry and riff on the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, his colleagues got a much briefer moment in the spotlight, with a choice between a seven-minute speech and a 20-minute discussion. A few, such as the chancellor, had a little longer, but even they were frequently competing with the hubbub from the main hall.

Naturally, party conferences usually focus on their leaders. At that 2006 conference David Cameron delivered not one keynote but two, and our system has only got grown more presidential since then.

…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/at-the-tory-conference-boris-johnson-bemoaned-the-lack-of-heckling-well-it-may-come-soon-enough-hwwwcq5t2

A combination of a ‘Life Report’, on his journalistic beginnings at the Telegraph, and his reportage, that is a pastiche of Trollope’s ‘long carpeted hallways’? if I recall this reference correctly? Or perhaps a critical evaluation of C.P. Snow’s novels, that is etched into memory ? The past wedded to his musings on Boris Johnsons, longing for a bit more political melodrama, featuring himself, in the present.

The regular reader of Mr. Colvile must give him his due as a political writer/commentator, who relishes politics as practiced, in all its inglorious particulars.

Mr. Colvile’s essay of October 16, 2021 and his self-presentation is at best failed comedy:

Headline: Faith in the state? It only took a short call from Test and Trace to disillusion me all over again

In the face of it the headlines about soaring Covid case numbers are deeply alarming. But they miss out something important. Covid has, against all expectations, become a disease of the young. There are still tens of thousands of cases a day. But among those over 18 prevalence of the disease has barely budged since summer. What is fuelling the numbers is cases in schools, with 8.1 per cent of secondary-age children and 3.1 per cent of primary estimated to have been infected as of October 9 — both far, far higher than in any other demographic.

For me, data turned into anecdote last week. Having escaped the Tory party conference moshpit with barely even a cold, I got an email from school on Monday: the six-year-old’s teacher and her assistant had both tested positive. The lateral flow test gave my son the double line, the PCR test confirmed it and then it was back to the familiar routine of self-isolation, Zoom classrooms, masked deliveries at the door and trying not to breathe in at night as two coughing, mildly feverish children clamped themselves to my side.

I thought the worst part of it would be persuading the kids to have testing swabs stuck up their noses not once but twice, including an honest-to-God wrestling match at the testing centre. But then I got the call from NHS Test and Trace. It wasn’t just that the sound faded out every two seconds. Or that the on-screen script froze, so the caller had to put me on hold for ten minutes while they reset the computer. It’s that the entire process seemed to have been designed without any consideration of what it would be like to deliver or listen to the script.

…

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/faith-in-the-state-it-only-took-a-short-call-from-test-and-trace-to-disillusion-me-all-over-again-fvxhclbdx

The political melodrama continues, with Mr. Colvile as the victim of a bureaucrat asking inane questions about his children. Eventually aided by Cass Sunstein, whose new book is called ‘Sludge’.

This is a textbook example of what the US academic Cass Sunstein calls “sludge” in his new book of the same name: dispiriting, dehumanising, time-swallowing bureaucracy that actively makes people’s lives worse.

Who can forget Cass Sunstein’ s other political interventions? Here Jeremy Waldron reviews Soft-Core Authoritarian Sunstein’s ‘Nudge’:

It’s All for Your Own Good

And my own comment on @gilliantettFinancial Times essay of June 9, 2021

…

Cass Sunstein, a leading behavioural scientist who helped to popularise the concept of the “nudge”, a policy technique that steers people towards certain actions, has written that Biden’s plan to embrace evidence-based policymaking incorporates “an explicit endorsement of behavioural science — and it calls for much more of it”. Sunstein himself has been hired by the Department of Homeland Security.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/7d3cac49-6d2a-4770-86f2-3e80797c528c

The sad news is that Mr. Sunstein is a lawyer, not a ‘a leading behavioral scientist’ ! See my essay for the particulars

@gilliantett frames her latest essay via Soft-Core Authoritarian Cass Sunstein. Political Skeptic comments.

Mr. Colvile, as Thatcherite, chatters about the virtues of the ‘Free Market’, that utterly collapsed in 2008, and destroyed both the Working Class and the Middle Class. The Question that Mr. Colvile fails to address, in his advocacy for that ‘Free Market’: where is the Radiant Economic Prosperity, that Thatcherism and its folk hero Hayek thought to be axiomatic? Perhaps not enough of the cleansing bath of ‘Austerity’?

…

Even a Thatcherite like me wouldn’t argue that we should have a free-market flourish in testing and tracing, with firms giving a special discount on self-isolation for choosing their services. But my experience cuts against the narrative of the pandemic offered by government.

…

The conscious destroyers of the Welfare State, Mr. Colvile and his fellow travelers, and its institutions: @CPSThinkTank continue their War against the Welfare State, as if their ignominious past, and present, has been subject to a viable erasure. The Welfare State’s raison d’être was/is the care and maintenance of the Public Welfare. Not the propping up of a Capital, stepped in political mendacity, that exalts ‘The Market’ as the sine qua non of human aspiration!

Almost Marx

Political Realist comments.

That the Anti-Imperialism, in the Islamic World, should embrace leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr, should come as no surprise. That the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have ended in ignominious defeat, for an America, now utterly disenchanted, with the lies of the Neo-Conservative political toxin, is also unsurprising. Especially after Trump, and a Pandemic that remains a frightening reality, coupled with a loss of faith in Science and its Institutions.

As informative as Chloe Cornish essay is, it follows the Party Line on Political Islam! To commit a Political Heresy : If Zionism is legitimate, then Political Islam is equally legitimate!

How surprising for Chloe Cornish to quote a writer/journalist on the actual ‘Left’ , no matter how brief… ‘Patrick Cockburn, author of Moqtada al-Sadr and the Battle for the Future of Iraq.’.

Like all politicians Moqtada al-Sadr seeks to grow and institutionalize his political power! That seem axiomatic …

Political Realist

https://www.ft.com/content/98c8a27b-4dfc-40d8-ae4d-a859f9cf3250

Political Skeptic comments.

Who better to proclaim the viability of ‘Supply Chains’ than the redoubtable Jamie Diamon? The Economic Utopianism of the twins of Globalism/Neo-Liberalism have experienced collapse, that date from 2008, with catastrophic consequences for ‘we’ lesser beings of the planet. Yet in the attempt of this report/essay to construct a carefully confected History Made to Measure , reads like what it is a wan apologetic for the failure of that Globalism/Neo-Liberalism.

Mr. Diamon issues this economic proclamation:

“This will not be an issue next year at all,” said Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase chief executive, at the Institute of International Finance conference this week. “This is the worst part of it and the great market system will adjust for it.” 

Followed by Brian Moynihan:

“Six months ago when this was raised to me by clients around the country . . . you never would have thought it would have gotten so much worse since then,” said Brian Moynihan, Bank of America chief executive, on Tuesday.

More from fellow traveler Charlie Scharf:

Charlie Scharf, Wells Fargo chief executive, expressed similar surprise at the extent of the disruptions, but said he believed the problems were “transitory”.

The barrage of propaganda never stops:

…

I think we understand the intricate interconnectedness of the global supply chain and in ways that . . . people more broadly probably don’t,” Scharf said. “What we just have to protect against is people making decisions that exacerbate the problem, which is trying to add to inventories too quickly.”

…

Moynihan said it was too soon to say whether or not the shortages would lead to price increases that make goods unaffordable: “That’s the grave concern right now.”

…

https://www.ft.com/content/0dd1622d-883a-44a8-80c4-079fc5e90fab#comments-anchor

The collapse of the myth of ‘Supply Chains’, in the Age of Pandemics, present an imperative: the reestablishment of indigenous manufacturing bases, within the individual Nation States of the world. As a founding principal to replace the utterly failed, misbegotten Globalism/Neo-Liberalism Mythology!

Political Skeptic

Political Cynic comments on this unfolding Political Melodrama!

‘The Show Trial’ of Georgieva continues in this newspaper. Yet even Luce’s Bill of Attainder lost what political force, it might have had, in its last two paragraphs. But what The Hegemon, America, wants it will get! The IMF and The World Bank are the public relations defenders of Toxic Capital. Quoting the mendacious Jeffery Sachs as a ‘Progressive Economist’ followed by Stiglitz leads the reader to what conclusion? 

The New Cold War with China, and numerous others, makes this reader wonder at the inexhaustible treasuries, and the political will of America, as the Afghanistan Defeat still bedevils its hegemonic self conception.

Here is the lynch-pin of this essay, after all the speculation and political temperature taking: the high placed anonymous source: ’A former division chief at the IMF’

A former division chief at the IMF said the extent of the board’s disagreements over Georgieva’s fate had already undermined her ability to lead going forward, leaving few alternatives beyond her being replaced.

“Such openly divided and at best modestly enthusiastic support for its managing director risks hobbling the institution’s effectiveness, both in terms of its policy advice and credibility of its analysis,” said the former IMF official. “Even if she weathers this storm, it will be difficult for Ms Georgieva to continue as an effective leader of the institution for much longer.”

The political melodrama continues, as Georgieva’s ‘Deviationism’ must be firmly established in the Public Mind!

Anne Krueger, a former World Bank chief economist and deputy managing director of the IMF, said the affair left her “worried about the future in general”.

“I’m worried that if indeed this is somehow permitted to pass, we will have more pressure for more governments to change more numbers in more favourable directions,” she said. “Not everybody . . .[will] give in but there are some staff or management who will, and the situation will get out of hand if it isn’t already.”

Like any effective melodrama, drawing on a Tradition that dates from Ancient Times, a member of Economic Royalty appears, as the deus ex machina:

Paul Romer, a Nobel laureate who was World Bank chief economist under Georgieva and worked with her and Djankov, said the latter’s alleged actions “should be interpreted as being done with the knowledge and at the behest of Kristalina”.

https://www.ft.com/content/a0cfb7d5-ad32-4aa1-9e08-952accde5b44

Political Cynic

Radical Socialist comments…

Read just the first two paragraphs of Luce’s essay, or should it be referred to as his wan Bill of Attainder, against Kristalina Georgieva?

Kristalina Georgieva’s alleged sins may look trifling to some. The IMF’s managing director is accused of having manipulated the World Bank’s Doing Business index in 2018, when she was the institution’s CEO, to give China a higher ranking than it merited. Compared to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, one of her predecessors, who in 2011 was accused of sexual assault in New York, or Rodrigo Rato, an earlier occupant, who was jailed for embezzlement, Georgieva’s clerical meddling looks like a victimless misdemeanour. Yet in geopolitical terms, her fate will be of far greater consequence.

An independent report published last month claims Georgieva interfered heavily in the Doing Business ranking to appease China in the midst of trying to secure a capital increase from Beijing. It is doubtful this would have generated anything like this fuss had Georgieva interfered on behalf of any other country, let alone kept its ranking at a paltry 78th rather than let it drop a few rungs.

The next paragraph makes a reference to the ‘Thucydidean world’! Mr. Luce, like the late Mario Buatta, is addicted to chinch, of the rhetorical variety.

Yet we inhabit a Thucydidean world in which today’s hegemon, the United States, which has dominated the Bretton Woods system since it began in 1944, faces a challenger, China, that is knocking with growing conviction at the door. How could such a damning report land without a thud?

Evidence of the penetration of Graham Allison’s artfully marketed ‘best-seller’, as an answer to a World dominated by unpredictability/uncertainty ? That offers a convenient ‘catch phrase’ ,in lieu of actual thought, on the part of those who quote him. Here is a condensed version of Mr. Allison’s essay via Foreign Policy:

Headline: The Thucydides Trap

Sub-headline: When one great power threatens to displace another, war is almost always the result — but it doesn’t have to be.

The Thucydides Trap

Read the short version of Mr. Allison’s CV :

Graham Allison is a professor of government at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was the founding dean. He is a former U.S. assistant defense secretary and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Twitter: @GrahamTAllison

Mr. Allison is a member of a very exclusive club of Foreign Policy Technocrats, who has served in government. The question is wheatear Luce takes full advantage of Mr. Allison’s expertise/experience, or is just following the ‘Buatta Stratagem’? Its infectious!

The next sentence gives Luce’s game away:

The sharpest contrast between today’s emerging cold war and the one between the US and the Soviet Union is that China is deeply integrated into the global economy.

There is no ‘emerging Cold War’, but there is, in fact, a Cold War on simmer on many fronts, in in the political present:

Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and the vexing defeats of America in Iraq and Afghanistan! The list is very long.

The reader need only look to the status of The World Bank and the IMF as IGO’s , Inter-governmental Agencies. That offer Capitalism, as practiced in the West, and its hangers-on, to construct a viable self-apologetic, for the ravages inflicted upon populations, across the world, under the banner of an ‘Enlightened Capital’.

Our point of arrival in Mr. Luce’s essay, concludes with two almost contradictory paragraphs, swimming in realpolitik, that renders Luce’s attempt at melodramatic fireworks moot!

America faces a choice between relaxing its grip on global bodies to encourage Beijing to stay in the game, or refusing to acknowledge China’s rise and risk it exiting parts of the system altogether. Beijing has already created parallel tracks, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Belt and Road Initiative. Given that China, along with the US, is one of the five veto-wielding members of the UN security council, it is unlikely to reduce its presence there. But it takes little imagination to picture China losing interest in bodies such as the IMF if it does not receive its due as one of the world’s two great powers. It is surely not in the west’s interests to discard key tools for engaging China in an increasingly bifurcated world.

Where does this leave the IMF’s Georgieva? America is being lobbied by poorer members in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere to retain her. She has won plaudits for responding nimbly to the pandemic and retooling the world’s lender of last resort to address threats such as climate change. Yet US hawks now depict her as irredeemably pliable to China. A reputation for fearless probity will come at a rising premium amid the battle for the future of the big global bodies. The worst of both worlds would be to keep Georgieva in place without having banished doubts about her neutrality.

https://www.ft.com/content/de0f9916-8de2-4ba8-b97e-f514bd5da511

StephenKMackSD

Almost Marx scoffs!

Headline: Nato expels 8 Russians for spying

Sub-headline: Maximum size of Moscow delegation to Brussels headquarters halved as east-west relations deteriorate

https://www.ft.com/content/a3c24aea-8db8-44ad-bbc4-6acbb77a93da

The New Cold War reaches one of its many denouements! NATO had once outlived its usefulness with the fall of the Soviet Union. And the American Project of administering the ‘shock therapy’ of the Free Market, upon the misbegotten citizens of the once Enemy. Administered, after the election of Clinton, by Strobe Talbott, Jeffrey Sachs (now in a state of pathetic, comic denial) and one of his minions Zanny Minton Beddoes, now editor-in-chief of The Economist.

But the propaganda arm of NATO ,The Atlantic Council, has become a stepping stone for young aspirants, to enter the Foreign Policy Technocracy. No critics of that powerful coterie, will ever come from inside this hive of political conformists.

One very pressing question might be, how many operatives of the American National Security are employed by NATO. Or is that simply a naïve query , that fails to recognize NATO as just one more arm of American Imperialism. Born of the first Cold War, as an instrument to blunt/confront Soviet revanchism?

Although FDR and Churchill’s bargain with Stalin, is a fact, that can never be faced by respectable bourgeois commentators: posing as experts/technocrats in possession of a ‘knowledge’ not available to the ordinary reader?

Almost Marx

Political Cynic’s thought experiment.

If Bret Stephens had appeared in ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’, book by Laura Z. Hobson, screen play by Moss Heart, and an uncredited revision by Elia Kazan, he would have appeared as one of a collection of bigots , both Jewish and Gentile, that made this political melodrama so compelling to watch. Kazan after his movie ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ in 1945, and before his being a ‘Friendly Witness’ ,was a Broadway and Hollywood Golden Boy.

How does this factor into Mr. Stephen’s latest broadside against Joe Biden? Should we look to the phalanx of Neo-Cons, who were the ‘masterminds’ of the Afghan Crime? Stephens is a moral/political conformist , so his position might just be viewed as self-evident? Not to speak of the parade of political conformists who fell into line! Another way of thinking about Stephens’ not too carefully considered hysterical polemic, is his addiction to maladroitly realized political melodrama, in his interventions. At the very least Hobson, Heart, Kazan were competent, even rational writers and dramaturges.

The opening paragraphs of his essay are revelatory:

Headline: An Ethically Challenged Presidency

There should be little doubt that President Biden was not being truthful when, days after the Taliban’s victory, he told ABC News that his senior military advisers had not urged him to keep some 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. The president’s claim was flatly contradicted last week in sworn testimony from Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., the head of U.S. Central Command.

During the generals’ testimony, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, sought to defend her boss by pointing to a line in Biden’s interview in which he appeared to suggest that the military’s advice “was split.”

Another whopper. What split? As The Times’s Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and David Sanger reported in April, right after Lloyd Austin was sworn in as secretary of defense in January, he and his top generals “were in lock step in recommending that about 3,000 to 4,500 troops stay in Afghanistan.” Asked whether there were top military advisers who argued otherwise, Psaki evaded the question.

Biden’s dissembling, regarding the worst-executed major foreign policy decision in years, would be a scandal in any presidency. It’s worse coming from the man who campaigned for office by insisting that he stood “for honor and telling the truth.”

…

Is the reader, in the rhetorical thrall of the Stephens polemic, well within the elastic parameters of ‘Treason’ ?

The remainder the Stephens essay reports on the undeniable facts of the Biden ménage’s political corruption.

A pressing question presents itself, that seems outside Stephens’ grasp, when in History has a President lied?

Political Cynic

Political Observer scoffs!

Here are the opening paragraphs of Mr. Caldwell’s funeral oration for the Enlightened Merkel Rule:

The drubbing inflicted on Germany’s Christian Democratic Union in the country’s recent elections is a sign that, alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 16-year stint in power, something larger is coming to an end.

Aside from NATO, the Christian Democratic Union is the most venerable postwar political institution in continental Europe. It has led Germany, usually in coalition, for all but 20 years of the country’s post-Nazi political history. Focused on economic growth, Christian traditions, anti-Communism and maintenance of the Atlantic alliance, the party was a guarantee to Germany’s allies that Europe’s largest, richest country would be stable and dependable. With the measly 24 percent of the vote that Ms. Merkel’s successor, Armin Laschet, managed to win, the C.D.U. can no longer play that role. A pillar of the European order has collapsed.

The C.D.U.’s decline has been underway since at least the turn of the century. While Ms. Merkel managed to disguise it, she showed little aptitude for reversing it. In the five elections since 2005, when she took power, her party’s vote share fell in all but one.

Perhaps not every country needs a “people’s party” of the center-right. Big gainers in this election included Greens worried about climate change and Free Democrats worried about supply chains — two preoccupations that didn’t exist at the time of the C.D.U.’s founding. But there has always been more at stake for the party than an up-to-date servicing to voter preferences. In light of Germany’s Nazi past, it fell to the C.D.U. to play a moderating role — to speak to the patriotic longings of ordinary Germans in a way that would dissuade them from drifting to the political fringes.

This role was almost constitutional. Half a century ago, Franz Josef Strauss, leader of the C.D.U.’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, justified his own rock-ribbed conservatism by saying it came with a guarantee that “no legitimate political party” could exist to his party’s right. Many felt they could trust Mr. Strauss to police the country’s rightmost ideological boundary.

Only if someone had been asleep, could this essay by Jillian Tett, from the Financial Times of January 16, 2015 have been ignored:

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

As the crucial election looms in Greece later this month, newspapers have been full of pictures of demonstrations (or riots) in Athens. But there is another image hovering in my mind: an elegant dining hall on the shores of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland.

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.

For a couple of minutes Friedman then offered a brief review of western financial history, highlighting the unprecedented nature of Europe’s single currency experiment, and offering a description of sovereign and local government defaults in the 20th century. Then, with an edge to his voice, Friedman pointed out that one of the great beneficiaries of debt forgiveness throughout the last century was Germany: on multiple occasions (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953), the western allies had restructured German debt.

So why couldn’t Germany do the same for others? “There is ample precedent within Europe for both debt relief and debt restructuring . . . There is no economic ground for Germany to be the only European country in modern times to be granted official debt relief on a massive scale and certainly no moral ground either.

“The supposed ability of today’s most heavily indebted European countries to reduce their obligations over time, even in relation to the scale of their economies, is likely yet another fiction,” he continued, warning of political unrest if this situation continued.

…

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

A valuable link to Prof. Benjamin Friedman essay:

Click to access friedman.pdf

Some sample paragraphs, from the closing of Mr. Caldwell’s essay, proves that it isn’t just Germans who resort to the exercise of a History Made to Measure!

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Certainly some traditional German conservatives deplore Ms. Merkel’s legacy. But there was one sense in which she was mostly in continuity with her predecessors — her resistance to utopianism. Germany’s society, economy and (since Covid-19) health care system have lately performed more efficiently than those of its neighbors. The great achievement of Ms. Merkel was to understand that in the global economy, efficiency is often a synonym for vulnerability. Like a lot of its best machinery, Germany is both high-functioning and delicate.

…

Overindulging a country’s virtues can be as dangerous as overindulging its vices. More than her predecessors Ms. Merkel ran the risk of exposing Germany to instability — in her case, to an American-style class conflict between the beneficiaries and the outcasts of the global economy. She avoided the worst. But she had some close calls, and the shrinking of Germany’s great, stabilizing bourgeois party is bound to reduce her successors’ room for error.

Political Observer

Old Socialist offers some selected paragraphs.

Note the collection of Topic Sentences, carefully brought to vivid life by our Adrift Thatcherite …

On Inter-connectedness :

The past two years have taught us a brutal lesson in how interconnected the modern world is: when a pangolin in Wuhan sneezes, we all catch something rather more serious than a cold. But the aftershocks are making the case clearer still. What is being referred to in Downing Street as the “Effing crisis” — the shortage of energy, food and fuel — is the inevitable outcome of switching off much of the world economy for almost a year.

The Yellow Peril in its most soft-peddled iteration, allied to a scolding about the World Economy, that had no choice but to recognize the Pandemic Reality as ineluctable!

On Supply Chains:

As the engine judders back into life, demand is surging — hence rising inflation — but supply channels are still choked or diverted. For example, when the Covid crisis hit, everyone cancelled orders for semiconductors. When the economy recovered, they all reordered at once. But you can’t pump out a year’s worth of chips in a few months. So now you can’t buy a new car for love or money.

The Supply Cain malfunction makes the argument for a revitalized indigenous manufacturing sector, as a question of survival.

On beyond the government’s control:

One of the dirty secrets of Westminster is quite how many things are entirely beyond the government’s control. For example, if the inflation we are seeing turns out to be permanent rather than transitory, it is alarmingly difficult to see what we could do. The traditional response would be to raise interest rates. But since the financial crisis, the West has signed a devil’s bargain to keep interest rates at or near zero — another huge economic factor that is largely out of ministers’ hands.

Inflation is the enemy of any possible attempt to ameliorate the Pandemic’s economic consequences, on the welfare of its citizens? The Neo-Liberal Swindle sees the Free Market, as the only valuable form of ‘knowledge’– its sine qua non.

On ‘Evergrande’

Which brings us back to Evergrande. After Xi Jinping’s decision to tighten lending rules, the company found itself attempting to pay down more than £200 billion in debt. As it slowly goes bankrupt, it is sending tremors through the financial system. Yet at the same time the end of the Chinese property boom may help break the fever in the commodity markets, with prices for iron ore in particular slumping. So Evergrande may end up hitting British growth— or saving us from the spectre of inflation.

Chinese Capital doesn’t just stumble …

On Surfing these global waves

Surfing these global waves is a tricky task for any government, especially post pandemic. But it is a particular challenge in the wake of the Brexit vote and the totemic promise to take back control.

Again, the lesson of The Pandemic demonstrates the necessity of the Nation State as the guardian of the welfare of its citizens! No matter how retrograde it appears to that Globalist Cadre.

On Immigration

Consider the issue of migration. With the end of free movement, we have moved to a points-based system for new arrivals. But what to do about those crossing the Channel in defiance of the rules?

Well, we can toughen enforcement or bribe the French to build camps on their side of the water. We can reduce the appeal of coming here by quashing any talk of amnesties or giving illegal arrivals the right to work. We could quietly relax checks on lorries to nudge migrants into taking a less dangerous route across. But ultimately there is no plan a home secretary can announce in the House of Commons that will halt the global flow of migrants or stop Britain, by virtue of its very success, being an attractive destination.

The ‘mass migration’ is due to:

Headline: At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror

Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.

The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.

The report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.

Let me end my collection of quotations from Our Thatcherite with his version of political comedy:

Faced with empty petrol tanks, or a Christmas shortage of pigs in blankets, ministers may end up offering emergency visas to lorry drivers and butchers. But when the bakers and candlestick-makers come knocking, the government’s message is that they should do more to attract UK staff. As one insider puts it, “businesses have been drunk on cheap labour for decades”, and it’s time to sober up.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/they-couldnt-stop-this-effing-crisis-so-how-will-ministers-persuade-voters-they-can-fix-it-d63zblfr8

Old Socialist

P.S. Be sure to read Mr. Colvile’s essay at Politico Europe:

https://www.politico.eu/author/robert-colvile/

Political Observer comments on the ‘political transcendentalist’.

This newspaper employs one of the most interesting writers and political commentators, of the political present, in Janan Ganesh! I read many different publications on the internet, I spend my days reading! Conduct an interview with Mr. Ganesh, one of the real talents, to emerge from the Neo-Liberal Age gone bust! I will never agree with Mr. Ganesh’s politics, no matter how engagingly framed!

Define respectable bourgeois, jejune political chatter: The New York Times!

What  ‘we’ get in this interview from a New York Times regular contributor is the warmed-over political hysterics, of Mr. Thomas Chatterton Williams and its ensuing victimology melodrama:

In July 2020, Williams was one of the organisers of “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, an open letter signed by 152 scholars and writers, published in Harper’s magazine. It warned of an “intolerant climate that has set in on all sides” across cultural institutions and a “vogue for public shaming and ostracism”, and stressed the need “to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences”.

Although its authors were careful to not use the phrase “cancel culture”, it was obvious this was the letter’s target, and it provoked a backlash from the progressive left, who argued that such a culture does not exist — or at least is nothing new — and who criticised the choice of signatories, such as JK Rowling, who has been accused of being “anti-trans”.

“I lost a couple of people that I had been very good to on an interpersonal level because of the Harper’s letter — people who unfollowed me and blocked me with no explanation. They actually know me. That’s crazy,” says Williams, clearly upset by this. “The details of what’s right or wrong don’t matter, it’s that ‘you’re not with us’. I never thought ideas or writing were about signalling allegiance.”

…

https://www.ft.com/content/1bf6a540-0a7c-427f-9eea-b756acb81813

What appeals to the Financial Times is that Mr. Williams made ‘enemies’ of both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, he is a ‘political transcendentalist’ :

“I never thought ideas or writing were about signalling allegiance.”

This last quote is an astoundingly naïve assertion for a cosmopolitan, engaged in the endeavor of political/cultural commentary!

Political Observer

******************************

 Replying to Tench

On the question of ‘“I never thought ideas or writing were about signalling allegiance.” : I have four books on my desk. ‘Rorty and his critics’ published by Blackwell, ‘Statecraft as Soulcraft’ by George F. Will, published by Touchstone, ‘Homo Juridicus’ by Alain Supiot published by Verso. ‘Kant : Biography’ by Manfred Kuehn published by Cambridge University Press: Call all these ‘signalling allegiance’. Kant, in The Critique of Pure Reason: ‘Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit.’, pages 100/101 of the Cambridge Edition.

Mr. Chatterton knows were he is and where he is going, and he knows all about self-promotion. His special knowledge of these bad political actors enables him rebuff them, even though they possess a power, to shame the writer of Harry Potter, and commit other political felonies of bad etiquette. Chatterton lacks the ingrained paranoia of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, his self-conception of being a Cosmopolitan does not allow that political exercise.

As for :

‘that Jemima Kelly didn’t warm to Thomas Chatterton Williams, despite having much sympathy for the substance of his political and intellectual stance on these issues. She can write with great warmth (look up her interview with David Spiegelhalter) and that’s absent here.’

Or:

Yes, Janan Ganesh is always fun, but though I often find myself agreeing with his observations I do sometimes feel he’s a bit too by his own cleverness. Did you ever catch him writing movingly, or with palpable warmth?

Its almost ‘as if’ the Television/Radio Psychologist, armed with Neo-Freudian Kitsch hadn’t utterly disappeared!

Thank you for your comment,

StephenKMackSD