StephenKMackSD's Blog

Mr. Long’s unsurprisingly inauspicious opening paragraph, in regards to Pedro Francke:

Pedro Francke has been called many things in recent weeks: a moderate in a radical leftwing government, a Marxist who will wreck Peru’s standout free-market economy and a turncoat for accepting the finance minister job in President Pedro Castillo’s administration after initially refusing

Mr. Long in his fifth paragraph is the briefest examination of Peru’s Economy:

While Peru’s economy has been one of Latin America’s success stories in the 21st century, recent political instability has taken the shine off. The country has also been hit hard by coronavirus: it has the highest per capita death rate in the world, and gross domestic product fell 11.1 per cent last year.

Here is an alternative view to Mr. Long’s enthusiasm:

…

Peru’s strongest interest groups were its business confederations. The most powerful was the Confederation of Private Entrepreneurial Institutions (Confiep), founded in 1984. By the 2010s, Confiep comprised more than 20 business organizations, including the especially influential associations representing extractive industries and financial services. Confiep enjoyed powerful support networks in public relations firms, the media, and think tanks, and influenced key government appointments.

By contrast, grassroots organizations were atomized; they were often strong at the local level but were rarely able to collaborate and develop national-level organizations (Vergara, 2015). One exception was the Indigenous Association for the Development of the Peruvian Amazon (AIDESEP), representing the Amazonian indigenous people. Yet, even AIDESEP remained unconnected to any political party (Gustafsson, 2018, p. 53). The challenges to national-level popular organizations in Peru included the withdrawal of collective rights in Peru’s 1993 constitution and the Shining Path’s assassination of leftist leaders and its discredit of leftist ideologies.

Another important force was illegal: the drug trade. Since the 1980s, Peru and Colombia have vied as the world’s largest cultivators of coca. In Peru, most coca is grown on the eastern slopes of the Andean mountains; in the 2010s, the area of greatest cultivation has been the Valley of the Apurímac, Ene, and Mantaro Rivers (VRAEM), on the eastern slopes of Peru’s central and southern highlands. In United Nations estimates, the area under cultivation between 2010 and 2015 was between 40,000 and 60,000 hectares (UNODC, 2016). Peru’s coca and cocaine are shipped out of Peru through its ports, headed north to the United States, or by air or land east to Bolivia, Brazil, and Europe. Revenues were immense. For example, in 2012, just one of many money launderers active in the VRAEM was charged with laundering more than $100 million (Bajak & Salazar, 2012).

…

https://oxfordre.com/politics/politics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-1706

The reader might arrive at an inconvenient conclusion, that Confiep , AIDESEP and VRAEM share political power and influence beyond the reach of any party or faction?

More of ‘hard left hysteria’, to play on the political fears of the very exclusive readership of The Financial Times. The available numbers are 1.1 million: 960,000 digital and 140,000 print. It’s competitor The Economist 909,476 print , this, combined with its digital presence, runs to over 1.6 million.

Castillo’s election on a hard-left ticket rattled financial markets and sent capital fleeing, pushing Peru’s currency, the sol, to record lows against the dollar. The day after a hardline leftist, Guido Bellido, was named prime minister it registered its biggest one-day drop in seven years. It has since stabilised but not rebounded.

The condition of the sol, must be in the ‘rebound’ column rather than the ‘stabilised’ column?

The Castillo government has set up a “special commission” to reverse that trend, and Francke said he expected the sol to recover. “I think we’re going to see greater calm on the markets,” he said. “If I had to make a recommendation to investors, I’d tell them they shouldn’t sell sols to buy dollars. It seems to me they [dollars] are a bit expensive.”

The question of who Pedro Francke is before the readers gaze, in the above quote and below:

Francke prefers the terms “modern leftist” or “moderate leftist”.

“I’m a leftist who believes that reducing inequality is absolutely fundamental and perfectly compatible with reasonable macroeconomic management,” he told the Financial Times. “The two things can go hand in hand.”

‘A former World Bank economist’ is the ally of Castillo and Bellido: at sixty Francke will make the leap from Left-Wing Social Democrat to what? Marxist or ‘Hard-Line Leftist’? Or is he more likely a follower of Piketty, or simply his attentive reader?

Francke’s revelatory quotations speak for themselves: (In italics)

“If it’s not broken don’t fix it,” Francke said. “We have enough problems in Peru to start fixing things that are working well.”

“How can it be that a Chilean, a Chinese or an American comes to Peru and has the same rights as a Peruvian on economic issues?” he asks. “This doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.”

Asked about the comments, Francke said they reflected his personal opinions but “I am now in another role”.

“I’m answering as the minister of economy and finances in August 2021,” he said. He also acknowledged the new government could “only work within the political space we have” — a tacit acceptance it might be thwarted by congress, where Castillo’s party has only 37 out of 130 seats.

Mr. Long attaches an political comment to Francke answer: ‘— a tacit acceptance it might be thwarted by congress, where Castillo’s party has only 37 out of 130 seats.’

“If you look at the economic measures that President Castillo unveiled in his inauguration speech, none of them require a constitutional change,”

“It’s very negative that just one week into the new government, people are talking about impeaching the president or shutting down congress,” he said. “These are problems that come from the constitution.”

“This is a government of change and I understand that generates a certain lack of confidence, turbulence and misunderstanding.”

“But we absolutely respect private property and we’re absolutely opposed to any proposal for exchange rate controls and price controls. We have a clear policy of fiscal responsibility.”

https://www.ft.com/content/69eae055-3903-4806-8389-82ffe0afa0f6

I have copied directly from the Long’s essay. I have attempted to quote Francke’s own words, as presented, without the ideological interpolations the writer supplies.

Old Socialist

A selective list of the actors, players in this Financial Times political melodrama:

Alexander Tocas

leftist president Pedro Castillo

Alfredo Thorne, a former finance minister

The stock market slumped nearly 6 per cent.

a hardline leftist, Guido Bellido

Free Peru, the Marxist-Leninist party

global advisory company Teneo noted.

former World Bank economist Pedro Francke.

Julio Velarde, the long-serving and respected head of the central bank,

The reader could construct an essay, that might rival, but be quite similar to Gideon Long ‘news story’, based in an ideological fixation, that afflicts this newspaper and it’s reporters, or rather its opinion writers. In sum, The Left in its various iterations is a political/economic toxin!

Simone Bolivar, Liberation Theology, The Sandinistas, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales are the precursors and possible models for Castillo and Bellido? The utterly unsurprising indictment of the new president:  

Castillo, a rural primary school teacher turned crusader for the
poor, is in thrall to Free Peru’s Marxist ideologues, and cannot be
trusted with the economy.
 

The leaders of the opposition, wedded to some speculations, of that opposition to Castillo:

Keiko Fujimori

Peru’s close-knit, Lima-centric business community is deeply worried,

The chief executive of one Peruvian company

Pablo Secada, a Peruvian economist and politician,

Other government opponents propose a less incendiary strategy.

“That, I think, is a more advisable path to follow,” the senior
business leader said.

How many times, in the years that I have read this newspaper… It’s almost ‘as if’ a template exists, that offers step by step instructions, as to how to write an attack against any, and all, ‘Leftist Politicians’. Jeremy Corbyn being the most glaring example in recent memory. Hugo Chavez, Nicolás Maduro, Evo Morales in a southern American context! The reader might note that Castillo, in the view of Gideon Long, is subject to what reads like unsurprising Oxbridger class bias: ‘a rural primary school teacher turned crusader’.

Old Socialist


https://www.ft.com/content/9adb386e-0a8e-4851-9b20-311ccc84545a

Here is the opening paragraph from Francis Mulhern’s review of Ferdinand Mount’s ‘English Voices: Lives, Landscapes, Laments’ :

‘By the time Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister’, Ferdinand Mount has reported, he ‘had long ago abandoned any thought of a political career and had happily settled for a life of writing anything that came to hand or mind’. English Voices is the book of that prospectus: only one among the score he has published, including novels and works of history and political advocacy too—for as it turned out, politics had not altogether done with him—but the one that answers most readily to this light sketch of a career in the world of letters. Ranging across thirty years from 1985, it gathers up some fifty-three substantial book reviews, half of them from the Spectator, where Mount has written since the 1970s, most of the rest coming from the Times Literary Supplement, which he edited for much of the 80s and early 90s, and the London Review of Books, which bulks larger in the more recent work. A compilation on this scale does not lend itself to conventional synopsis—the number of books discussed is greater still, totalling more than sixty. The title and subtitle of the volume are designed more to accommodate its diverse materials than to define them or to indicate binding themes. An introductory discussion of Englishness stresses the mongrel historical constitution of its people, taking a cue from Defoe’s well-known satire—and motivating the indefinite plural ‘voices’. But the appeals to shared legacies of common law, and a language both rich and loose-limbed—with echoes of Tennyson and Orwell respectively—have no follow-through in the preambles that sub-divide the contents, or in the essays themselves. However, there are other ways of characterizing it.

…

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii105/articles/3239?token=PEaoCC92X68U

Here is Mount, a bit later in Mulhurn’s essay:

…

The subject that speaks in English Voices is recognizably the older self of Ferdy Mount in Cold Cream, at ease and engaged across a wide range of matters, convivially learned, with a sharp eye and an attentive ear and a particular knack for correcting the blunders of writers less inward than he is with the usages of the titled classes. The novelist is never very far away. Mount is droll, affectionate at times, with a mild suggestion of decadence—the word delicious has an improbably wide range of attachments in these pages, most of them not normally edible. ‘Sheer delight’ was the response of the Times Literary Supplement, pursuing the metaphor of consumption; ‘lovely’, said the London Evening Standard. Yet it cannot be a great surprise to find him, in the early 60s, working in the Conservative Research Department, on the way, he hoped, to a parliamentary seat, without any evident prior process of political acculturation; or to find him, twenty years later, in 10 Downing Street, where he had been invited—just like that—to head an independent policy unit for Margaret Thatcher. True to form, it seems, he had been always-already a Tory, and by 1979, after an instructive stay in the United States, he was done with ‘convictionless, wind-blown politicians’. Writing in the Spectator in the days after Thatcher’s electoral ‘triumph’, he hailed her ‘individualist and populist Toryism’ and concluded: ‘A cautious half-glass of good ordinary claret may safely be raised to the future.’

…

Here is a link to Tessa Hadley’s review in the TLS, referred to in Mulhurn’s essay. The first two paragraph’s Hadley’s essay are indicative of the emeritus status of Mount? Begin with the title and subtitle:

Unblinking eye

This collection of Ferdinand Mount’s essays – on politicians and writers and a miscellany of characters and subjects, loosely connected by their Englishness – is sheer delight. Any sensible reader…

This collection of Ferdinand Mount’s essays – on politicians and writers and a miscellany of characters and subjects, loosely connected by their Englishness – is sheer delight. Any sensible reader would take the essays slowly, putting the book down between each one in order to savour its stories and digest them; but I found it difficult to resist temptation and kept leaping eagerly forwards into the next revelation, the next unexpected insight or novelistic portrait. The pieces – mostly written for the London Review of Books, the Spectator and the TLS – are a cornucopia of wonderful gossipy details, informed ­analysis, complex psychology: the deep seriousness is inextricable from the exuberant fun. I knew even as I couldn’t stop turning the pages that I was doomed to forget three-quarters of the new things I was finding out, even though as I happened on them they seemed like essential additions to understanding.

Mount’s thinking is satisfyingly thick with particulars; his history is a drama of lived moments and spoken words. It’s fleshly and tangible – and vividly audible. “‘What a thing it is to have Power’, Dickens told his wife Catherine.” “Hurting people’s feelings seems to be my prevailing vice”, worried Margot Asquith. Henry Kissinger wrote confidently to his President in 1975, “I don’t think Margaret Thatcher will last”; you can hear him growling it. Sir Robert Peel apparently had a slight Staffordshire accent: one “snobbish observer noticed that ‘Peel can be always sure of an H when it comes at the beginning of a word, but he is by no means sure when it comes in the middle’”.

…

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/unblinking-eye/

The former editor of the TLS enjoys the praise of a contributor!

Wooldridge and Mount are Oxbridgers, and both shared in the benefits of ‘The Meritocracy’, that Wooldridge extols in his ‘History’. Mount praises Bagehot and James Wilson:

Wooldridge is the political editor of the Economist and author of its “Bagehot” column. He is indeed a worthy successor to Walter Bagehot and to Bagehot’s father-in-law James Wilson, who founded the magazine and also devised India’s first income tax. The Aristocracy of Talent is unfailingly entertaining, effortlessly drawing on a wealth of anecdote and statistics. Wooldridge quotes liberally from the most scorching critiques of meritocracy: from Walter Lippmann’s indictment of IQ tests in the 1920s to Michael Young’s incomparable satire, The Rise of Meritocracy (1958), in which the word itself makes its debut, much like “Whig” and “Tory” first being deployed as pejoratives. He sets out Young’s exploration of what a fully realized meritocracy would mean for the losers, though he does not quote what seems to me the most telling passage:

Chapters One and Two of Alexander Zevin’s ‘Liberalism at Large: The World According to The Economist’ puts Mount’s praise of Wooldridge into proper historical perspective!

Let me defer to Pankaj Mishra’s review of ‘Liberalism at Large’, in the New Yorker, the first two paragraphs, just the opening salvo:

Liberalism made the modern world, but the modern world is turning against it,” an article in The Economist lamented last year, on the occasion of the magazine’s hundred-and-seventy-fifth anniversary. “Europe and America are in the throes of a popular rebellion against liberal élites, who are seen as self-serving and unable, or unwilling, to solve the problems of ordinary people,” even as authoritarian China is poised to become the world’s largest economy. For a publication that was founded “to campaign for liberalism,” all of this was “profoundly worrying.”

The crisis in liberalism has become received wisdom across the political spectrum. Barack Obama included Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018) in his annual list of recommended books; meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has gleefully pronounced liberalism “obsolete.” The right accuses liberals of promoting selfish individualism and crass materialism at the expense of social cohesion and cultural identity. Centrists claim that liberals’ obsession with political correctness and minority rights drove white voters to Donald Trump. For the newly resurgent left, the rise of demagoguery looks like payback for the small-government doctrines of technocratic neoliberalism—tax cuts, privatization, financial deregulation, antilabor legislation, cuts in Social Security—which have shaped policy in Europe and America since the eighties.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/11/liberalism-according-to-the-economist

Later, Mount attempts to demonstrate, to the reader, that he is not a captive to his status, as an unidentified member of a Class of Beneficiaries, that he and Woodridge share:

…

Wooldridge admits that meritocrats can be not only intolerably smug and conceited but also blind to the practical disadvantages of their wheezes – nowhere more so than in the case of the golden generation of the McNamaras and Bundys who brought us the Vietnam War and were so excoriated in David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest (1972). There are occasions, though, where the author lets off the cocksure meritocrats too lightly. He praises Thomas Babington Macaulay and Macaulay’s brother-in-law Charles Trevelyan for introducing meritocracy to the civil service in India and Britain, without mentioning Trevelyan’s wilful negligence during the Great Famine, during which his almost religious belief in the free market condemned millions of Irishmen to starvation or emigration. Wooldridge does, however, mention Macaulay’s notorious “Minute” of 1835, which proposed to educate an elite that would be “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” – surely the apogee of imperial arrogance. And he seems unduly admiring, too, of the meritocratic revolutions of Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte. The carrière ouverte aux talents is a splendid principle but the actual legacies of all this social mobilizing were millions of dead across Europe and a political instability so profound that it could end only in the restoration of a revamped ancien régime.

Not that Wooldridge and Micklethwait began their tandem writing careers with this collection of books : ‘The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus’, of 1996, ‘A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization ‘ of 2000, ‘The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea’ of 2003, ‘The Right Nation: Why America is Different’ of 2004, ‘God is Back’ of 2009, ‘The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State’ of 2014, ‘The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West – and how to Fix it’ of 2020.

As a reader of The Economist from the early 1990’s till sometime in 2007: the editors decided to remove, and expunge the record of the comments section. I spoke at length to an Economist Sales Rep. about why I stopped subscribing!

I can comment on portions of ‘The Right Nation’. Every page of this book, that I read – I had a feeling of déjà vu. As if I had read it before, in another iteration: call this unsettling!

The last two paragraphs of Mount’s essay almost resembles critique of a very particular kind.

At the very least, we need to reflect on the complexity of political action. Meritocracy is an admirable principle but it is not the only game in town. Businesses thrive on competition but they also depend on intricate networks of co-operation. Societies flourish not just on capitalism’s famous waves of creative destruction but also on the steadiness provided by the rule of law and by institutions that strengthen the sense of community. These other values are not “alternative”, as Wooldridge calls them, but complementary and intertwined. Unless you want a ruthless rat race, equality of opportunity cannot rule on its own without going hand-in-hand with other sorts of equality, of access to justice, to healthcare and education, social arrangements designed to suit us all as we are, not merely as vehicles to speed the fortunate few to their proper destination. Wooldridge quotes Donald Trump’s boast, “I love the poorly educated”, which is creepy and cynical, especially coming from someone who regularly denounces those who disagree with him as “losers”. All the same, the thought does offer something of a challenge to the self-absorption of the meritocrats. If you can’t love the losers, why should they love you?

The Aristocracy of Talent is a serious treat from first to last. Not the least of its pleasures are the possibilities of disagreement that it provokes.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-aristocracy-of-talent-adrian-wooldridge-book-review-ferdinand-mount/

Political Cynic

Mr. Ganesh’s utter lack of knowledge, of the history of Joe Biden, enables his extemporaneous – free imaginative variation- riff on his political career re-imagined?

Joe is and was a stunning political mediocrity! Who is not a pol ‘who anchored the New Deal alliance in the middle of the last century’ ! Joe is a Neo-Liberal ! His notoriously draconian ‘Crime Bill’, and his dire warnings of the morally/politically un-anchored ‘Predators’ was the Party Line of the New Democrats, like Hillary Clinton in the years of the ascendency of those ‘Democrats’. They were the plangent echo of Reagan’s ‘Welfare Queens Driving Cadillac’s’ of ’76 & ’80 ! Not to forget New Cold Warrior Joe:

In his ramble Mr. Ganesh fails the recognize the fact that this is Joe’s ‘Last Act’ or more appropriately his ‘Last Hurrah’!

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo22213372.html

Joe’s pastiche of ‘The New Deal’ is just that! Its is the political monument to his status as that ‘political mediocrity‘!

Who can forget Joe’s performance at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings , or his weak attempt at self-rescue, in the matter of Anita Hill ?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-joe-biden-hasnt-owned-up-to-about-anita-hill

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/ac275a8d-fe8d-48ee-83ac-57a25eb331c3

From May 4, 2021 by Michael McCaul and Ryan C. Crocker

Headline: Here’s What Biden Must Do Before We Leave Afghanistan

Last month, President Biden announced a complete withdrawal of all United States troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the day terrorists killed almost 3,000 people.

Many in the defense and intelligence communities oppose the move. A complete withdrawal based on an arbitrary deadline, rather than conditions on the ground, threatens our long-term national security. After all, it was the decision to rapidly pull out of Iraq, creating a power vacuum that allowed the Islamic State to grow, that ultimately forced our return to Iraq, prolonging the war.

We cannot allow history to repeat itself.

It’s foolish to think the Taliban will engage in good faith with the Afghan government or abide by the commitments made to the previous administration after we’ve departed. In response to the withdrawal announcement, the Taliban tellingly announced they would not participate in a peace conference planned to start late last month in Turkey and refused to commit to a date in the future, effectively ending the already fragile peace process. The Taliban clearly does not want peace.

…

From June 13, 2021 in The New York Times, by Robert M. Gates

Headline: We Cannot Afford to Turn Our Backs on Afghanistan By Robert Gates

Within a few weeks, the last U.S. troops will leave Afghanistan, ending a military engagement that began 20 years ago this October. More than 2,300 of our finest have been killed, and more than 20,000 were wounded. More than 71,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians have died as a direct result of the war. We have spent much blood and much treasure.

Most Americans just want to close this painful chapter, but we cannot completely abandon Afghanistan. It would be a disservice to our troops, to our Afghan partners and, most important, it would not be in the U.S. national interest.

It may be hard to remember now, but it took just two months in late 2001 for the United States to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan and rout Al Qaeda in one of the shortest military campaigns in American history. On the diplomatic front, the Bonn Agreement in December 2001 forged consensus among Afghan factions and international parties on the formation of an interim government in Kabul. It called for the establishment of a “broad-based, gender-sensitive, multiethnic and fully representative government” that avoided corruption and placed armed groups under government control.

…

From August 2, 2021 New York Times by Kai Eide and Tadamichi Yamamoto

Headline: We Cannot Stand By and Watch Afghanistan Collapse

The past few months in Afghanistan, even by the standards set by two decades of war, have been especially calamitous.

Since April, when President Biden announced the withdrawal of United States forces from the country, violence has escalated at a terrifying rate. Emboldened, the Taliban have advanced across the country and now surround major cities, including Kandahar, the second largest. The toll has been terrible: Vital infrastructure has been destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, and the number of people killed or injured has reached record levels. As the United States and its allies complete their withdrawal, Afghanistan, so long devastated by conflict, could be on the brink of something much worse.

It doesn’t have to be this way: Peace is still a possibility. For too long, there was a belief that the conflict could be resolved militarily. Throughout that time, the United Nations was too hesitant to step in. We should know: Between 2008 and 2020, across six years, we served as U.N. envoys to Afghanistan. In those years, the U.N. endeavored to create openings for the peace process but could not get one underway. Though last year’s agreement between the United States and the Taliban made possible the withdrawal of international forces, it sadly did not create conditions conducive to peace.

…

Bush The Younger, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their Neo-Conservative coterie commenced ‘The ‘War On Terror’ with Afghanistan! The utterly stark historical object lessons of the British and the Soviets was subject to their self-willed ignorance, and offered an opportunity to make real Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ , as American Policy: the lesser beings of Planet Earth must be subject to the power and the will of The Hegemon, to engage in rhetorical foreshortening.

The New York Times offers another stark object lesson about the watershed of this hubris:

Sept. 8, 2020 by John Ismay

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.

…

Afghanistan was succeeded by Iraq, Bush began his war mongering regarding Iraq with the United Nations? His speech :

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/12/iraq.usa3

The whole political melodrama: one of it’s many denouements, like Colin Powell’s U. N. speech. Or Judith Miller’s pro-war lies in the New York Times. etc., etc., …

Political Reporter

Colin Burrow’s essay on Empson’s ‘Some Versions of the Pastoral’ and ‘The Structures of Complex Words’ was unexpected in its lack of reverence for Empson. Having read Michael Wood’s ‘On Empson’ as my introduction to this writer: this led me to read ‘7 Types of Ambiguity’ ,and to my surprise I found it to be enjoyable reading. These two books led me to C.C. Norris’s ‘William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism’.

The title of Burrow’s essay is The Terrifying Vrooom , a surprising metaphor steeped in the mechanistic , but revelatory none the less. I had highlighted, in my print copy, some of the more telling, not to speak of revelatory, portions of Burrow’s essay:

…

Those flashes of strategic vagueness are vital elements in Empson’s style. They encourage his readers to believe that literary texts can take them beyond the limits of their own perceptions, and that, although generating lists of variant senses is one aspect of reading, jumping across a void is what it’s really all about. Empson described his own practice when he said Pope’s Essay in Criticism implied ‘that all a critic can do is to suggest a hierarchy with inadequate language; that to do it so well with such very inadequate language is to offer a kind of diagram of how it must always be done’. This can certainly generate frustrations, since he was quite capable of creating an interminable taxonomy of interpretative possibilities and then throwing it up in the air as inadequate in a way that would drive a philosopher nuts. He could even do that with entire books. The Structure of Complex Words (1951) concludes with the sentence: ‘All I should claim for this chapter is that it gives a sort of final canter round the field’ – as though he is no more than a stable lad giving the horses a spin. But he was among other things a master of the critical blur. As he put it in an essay on Paradise Lost, ‘it is a delicate piece of brushwork such as seems blurred until you step back.’

…

Double plots, in which one group of people were thematically connected with another in a subplot, were also ‘pastoral’, because a plot that’s echoed in a subplot implicitly suggests that different social groups replicate or parody aspects of one another. The concern in metaphysical poetry with relationships between the ‘one and the many’ was ‘pastoral’ too, according to Empson, since here a single instance could stand for a range of examples and so bring the complexity of the whole into the single simple thing.

…

Plurality was the key concept in his critical thinking, and it was a kind of plurality that allowed for a range of different voices and attitudes to exist within a single society, a single text, a single mind, or a single word. ‘Once you break into the godlike unity of the appreciator you find a microcosm of which the theatre is the macrocosm,’ he wrote. ‘The mind is complex and ill-connected like an audience, and it is surprising in the one case as the other that a sort of unity can be produced by a play.’

…

That is, in Some Versions of Pastoral Empson managed to develop the linguistic concerns of Seven Types of Ambiguity into a social vision, in which a single text could register the shifting and multiple attitudes not just of one mind but of an entire age.
Empson’s own mind was complex and ill-connected, and contained many different voices: the poet, the patrician mathematician, the joker, the shocker, the drinker, the social critic, as well as the seraph of vagueness. At one point in his essay on Donne he offers a kind of parody mathematical definition of how Donne treats a single person or thing as an embodiment of a wider whole: ‘This member of the class is the whole class, or its defining property: this man has a magical importance to all men.’ He goes on to relate this use of the representative figure to his own concept of pastoral: ‘If you choose an important member the result is heroic; if you choose an unimportant one it is pastoral.’ That’s the Empson of Some Versions of Pastoral in a nutshell. You have the terrifying vrooom as his foot goes to the floor and your mind can’t quite keep up with where it’s being pulled, and then, perhaps, a slight sense that some kind of magic (or is it trickery?) has happened. And it probably has: the master of ambiguity uses ‘class’ here in a mathematical sense (of a particular category of entities) but with overtones of the social sense (of distinct social groups).

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/colin-burrow/the-terrifying-vrooom

On the vexing question of Derrida for Empson :

British literary critics who wore the label ‘Empsonian’ with pride tended to follow their master in disliking the overtly theoretical forms that criticism took in the later 1970s and 1980s. In the lectures I went to in Cambridge in the 1980s by Ricks and some of his most brilliant pupils, Empsonising (maybe another one for the OED) was the establishment alternative to what we were taught to think of as the French disease of structuralism. Empson himself was no fan of Derrida, whom he referred to as ‘Nerrida’ in a letter. The principled reason for his hostility to structuralism and post-structuralism was his conviction that the meaning of words is both social and personal: words mean what they mean because this person is using this word in this way to or about this other person, and because this word has this particular history which may or may not complicate how this particular person uses it. That root interest in how people speak to people prejudiced Empson against any depersonalised account of language as a system. It also led to such work as Using Biography (1984), which starts from the sensible belief that people write in the way they do because of the experiences they have had, before travelling from there far into the realms of biographical fantasy.

…

After reading ‘The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968’ and the essays of Richard Rorty, like this Stanford essay titled ‘Richard Rorty: An appreciation of Jacques Derrida’, and his other essay on Derrida: there seems to me a very real propinquity, between Empson’s project, and Derrida’s, no matter the distance between these writers, and their utterly different world views and literary/philosophical traditions.

Philosophical Apprentice

Headline: Marxist congressman named as Peru’s prime minister

Sub-headline: Pedro Castillo alienates moderate allies by picking hardliner Guido Bellido

The reader need only look at who the Financial Times reporter quotes :

“Bellido is a disastrous appointment,” said Rodolfo Rojas, director of Sequoia, a political risk consultancy in Lima.

“In 24 hours, Castillo’s political capital has gone up in smoke. “You simply can’t touch the Shining Path nerve in Peru. It was a bloody terrorist sect and its actions are deeply embedded in the psychology of Peruvians,” he added.

Or how the financial sector and other ‘respectable’ economic actors have reacted:

…

Peru’s stock exchange and sol currency have plummeted since Castillo’s victory and analysts expect them to fall further on Friday because of increased political instability. Wealthy Peruvians have already shifted billions of dollars out of the country.

…

Pedro Francke, a former World Bank economist tipped to be Castillo’s finance minister, was not included in the cabinet and the position was left unfilled. Francke was spotted late on Thursday night walking away alone from the theatre where Castillo swore in his ministers. It was unclear whether he declined a role in government or failed to secure the job.

…

“The risks to Peru’s economic recovery are high as brinkmanship with congress will be extreme,” predicted Nicolás Saldías, Latin America analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, saying there was “a significant risk of capital flight leading to a currency depreciation in the coming days and weeks”.

…

Peru is the world’s second-biggest producer of copper, home to mines owned by foreign companies including Anglo American, Glencore, Southern Copper Corporation and MMG. On Thursday, Anglo American’s chief executive Mark Cutifani played down the threat of higher taxes and royalties under the new government, saying his dealings with Castillo and the new administration had been “pretty positive”.

https://www.ft.com/content/ddd6904c-7390-4d71-820c-7fbadda5e5d8

That copper is a valuable even strategic metal – how long before America, and its indigenous allies in Peru begin the project of subverting this government, with the help of ‘Paula Muñoz, a political scientist at the University of the Pacific in Lima‘. and Former interior minister Carlos Basombrio? ‘Many observers’ an anonymous collective of the concerned! Enter: Vladimir Cerrón, the shadowy leader of the Marxist-Leninist Free Peru party that propelled him to power. To heighten the Political Melodrama.

And this prediction

“He will struggle to pass legislation . . . meaning the proposals that markets most worry about are unlikely to become reality,” Oxford Economics predicted.

This whole report is formulaic, under the guise of reportage. It evoked in this reader a kind of  déjà vu. But the reader needs to note, that Evo Morales has welcomed Pedro Castillo, as part of the the rise of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas! Subcomandante Marcos, and Chiapas, Mexico was just a beginning, of the rise of The Indigenous as a political force. A subject unaddressed by Gideon Long’s reportage, but a fulfillment of the legacy of Simón Bolívar!

Political Observer

Headline: Capitalists can play a vital part in saving US democracy

Sub-headline: Asset owners such as pension funds and university endowments must speak out against voter suppression

The reader can hardly be surprised by The Financial Times publishing Katherine Venice moralizing polemic. Nor that Ms. Venice is the founder of The Ethical Capitalism Group. Or had the assistance of ‘James Leitner of Falcon Management and Paul Rissman, co-founder of Rights CoLab.’ A Capitalist and a ‘Human Rights activist’ who is just another Think Tank ‘co-founder’:

Rights CoLab advances human rights by fostering collaboration among experts across the fields of civil society, technology, business, and finance. Together we build new ways of organizing civic engagement and leveraging markets to improve the impact, resilience, and sustainability of human rights initiatives.

https://rightscolab.org/about/

Perhaps I’m being cynical? The Capitalism Ms. Venice describes is limited to ‘ pension funds and university endowments‘? Or is she offering two examples of less fraught forms of profit making?

Here is what this trio of Capitalist Reformers offer in the first three paragraphs of their essay framed by a question:

Can capitalism be made into a force to serve the greater good and solve society’s most urgent systemic problems? As former institutional investors, we believe it is time for capitalists, especially asset owners such as pension funds, university endowments, foundations and sovereign wealth funds, to stand up for democracy.

There are clear indicators that declining democratic rights are correlated with poorer investment returns, lower growth and economic instability. This issue should be front and centre for investors. Capitalism without democracy is oligarchy, with winners and losers determined by autocrats.

Asset owners and their investment managers can learn not only from 20th-century history, but from the warnings of academics that US democracy is in peril. Such capitalists should be better informed than the general public about investment risks, and given their responsibility for allocating capital, they must not ignore the dangers to their investments and the economy as a whole posed by the decline of American democracy.

https://www.ft.com/content/a16778cc-4eb4-46d1-875d-32f1872b9e6e

Who does The Trio offer as one of the central thinkers, that must be paid attention, but notorious Anti-Russian hysteric, not forgetting his role in the Ukrainian Coup of 2014, nor his status as New Cold Warrior, Timothy Snyder.

As Snyder explained in a recent interview: “The thing about these transitions is that you have to start acting right away.” By the time autocracy appears clearly, he added, “it’s already all over and you’re already in trouble; you have to start acting right away, even though you’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen”.

Snyder argued that now is our last chance to stop “system meltdown” in the 2024 presidential election, and warned of the urgency in convincing corporations to stop funding racially-targeted voter suppression through their support of political parties.

Next to enter stage right ‘Holocaust survivor Batsheva Dagan’ :

… last year asked at a memorial at Auschwitz: “Where was the world, who could see everything and yet did nothing?” A similar question will be asked by stakeholders and the public of the university endowments, foundations and pension funds that are some of the nation’s largest, most influential asset owners, if they do nothing to address the erosion of US democratic rights.

The Trio then offers this :

But corporations will not stop funding the legislators who are behind the voter suppression measures unless Wall Street investment managers ask them to, and investment managers will not take action unless asset owners ask them to. Politicians will not be able to save our democracy alone: asset holders can and must do their part.

To return to Dagan’s question, why do people fail to act? Part of the answer is that addressing the decline of democracy forces us to go beyond our normal patterns of activity at work and in our leisure hours. For a long time, we enjoyed the luxury of taking our freedoms for granted. But this must change. Those who spoke out in the past took far greater risks than asset holders must take now.

The Trio then offers this:

If we do not save our democracy, it will be much harder to solve other existential problems, such as climate change and economic inequality. In response to a US Supreme Court ruling that upheld discriminatory voting laws in Arizona, Stanley commented that it was “hard to see how even the semblance of democracy will survive”. And in that case all ESG will be off the table.

Its ‘as if’ The Trio has missed the fact that the Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, begat the Voting Law Crisis, with the evisceration of the ‘preclearance mandate’ in the Voting Rights Act!

Undaunted The Trio offers another Capitalist Actor, who enters stage right:

In his book Citizens DisUnited, pioneering shareholder activist Robert Monks wrote that “our foundational democratic system [is] being wilfully shredded by far more than a handful of leading American corporations”. Of “the Great and Good of investing — there are not and cannot be any innocents . . . [To] have known vast harm was being done and to have had the power, standing and resources to intervene, and yet to have failed to act. That is a shame not easily overcome . . . The time is right; the need, great. This is the moment to decide.”

As the clear evidence of the self-serving mendacity of Capital, the reader need only look to the Financial Crisis of 2008, as the predictor of how ‘Capital’ will comport itself, regarding the set of imperatives that The Trio offers!

Almost Marx

It’s about a newspaper pundit, a would be Technocrat, wringing his hands over Afghanistan, as if the British and the Soviets abandoning their Colonial Projects were not the starkest kind of objects lessons? Not to speak of Reagan’s presenting the Mujahedeen as resembling ‘The Founding Fathers’!

But, sir, your pièce de résistance: ‘ Thick argument. “If you feel so strongly hospitals should exist, you become a hospital porter” e.g. argument by specious analogy. The strategy used by Antonin Scalia in such cases as Shelby County v. Holder. See page 734, here:

https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1688&context=wmborj&httpsredir=1&referer=

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/68283a90-0b40-43fa-9554-0b2ef76f23b5?commentID=dcc47af3-3316-4000-9128-d60b0996671d

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

My reply to Paul A. Myers

Mr. Myers thank you for your revelatory lessons, that history teaches to those willing to listen! But note that Nicholas Gilani finds your historical precise so inconvenient , the last sentence of his final comment, to your reply is unmistakable: 

‘The proper strategy is to create two zones of control for the two major ethnic groups, the Persian speaking Tajiks and the Shiite Hazara on the one hand; and the Sunni Pathans, on the other. This needs to be underwritten by Iran and Pakistan, respectively. This arrangement would then in turn be back-stopped by Russia, China and the US along with India.’

Is there ever a shortage of Arm-Chair Generals, like Mr. Gilani , or Mr. Rachman in a slightly etiolated version of such?  Mr. Gilani offers what resembles the position of a  Neo-Con Imperialist: ‘two zones of control for the two major ethnic groups,’ . In sum. the Afghans are to remain under the tutelage of others who know best? 

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/68283a90-0b40-43fa-9554-0b2ef76f23b5?commentID=fdf49283-81f0-410d-97ea-d9aee2c54191 

Mr. Colvile opens his polemic with this paragraph. Yet note the last sentence’s attempt at Oxbridger ‘humor’ of a kind?

It’s often said that the British civil service is incapable of acting at speed. That is horrendously unfair. When their summer holidays are on the line, its staff can act very quickly indeed. The last week of the parliamentary term before the summer recess is traditionally time for Whitehall to shovel out all the things it’s been sitting on, so that everyone can bunk off till September. But the past few days have taken that to the extreme. We’ve had big announcements, reports and/or speeches on green trade, innovation, regulation, prisons and justice, consumer protection, digital competition and NHS pay. We’ve had the new plan on the Northern Ireland protocol. We were going to have the social care plan, too, until Sajid Javid got the ’rona.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/all-this-sound-and-fury-before-summer-recess-betrays-a-disturbing-faith-in-big-government-z8t5b5llh

I offer a collection of revelatory, if selective quotation:

…

That tendency will be strengthened by a philosophy that runs through so much of what this government does: what is best described as a vaunting faith in the power of the state to remedy the ills of both society and the economy.

…

The new industrial interventionism, too, is informed by a conviction that government can successfully perform microsurgery on the economy. The state’s job is not just to set tax rates but also to identify favoured sectors; to use grants and tax breaks to nudge firms in a judicious direction.

…

In other words, the default assumption is that civil servants are better placed to rule on the economy’s day-to-day needs — and indeed individual companies’ needs — than the people who actually do the work.

It was Ronald Reagan who said that the most terrifying words in the English language were: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”. But one of the more striking aspects of the great transmogrification of conservatism in recent years is that this strain of healthy scepticism appears on the verge of extinction — replaced by a conviction that the government that governs best, governs most.

This reader had encountered anti-government politicking long before Mr. Colvile’s birth. From Mrs. Thatcher herself ,and the utterly vacuous Capitalist Magpie Reagan, in all his political incarnations: from the Free Speech Movement in 1964, to the ‘Welfare Queens Driving Cadillac’s’ of ’76 and ’80. Reagan’s well worn political cliché , tag line, was ‘Government is the Problem’.

Note that another American, Walter Lippmann, was not just an advocate for Technocrats, like Mr. Colvile, and his Think Tank cohort, but an outspoken advocate of the ‘Expert’ as a check against ‘too much democracy’. This book provides further insights into Walter Lippmann’s connection to Neo-Liberalism, along with Lippmann, both Friedrich Hayek Ludwig von Mises were in attendance.

The Walter Lippmann Colloquium: The Birth of Neo-Liberalism

https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319658841

Political Observer