Recent Items

2:00PM Water Cooler 9/15/2015

Posted on by

READERS, this will be an unusually short WATER copying and pasting Water Cooler, because as you can see, something has gone horribly wrong with the shift keys on my powerbook

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

IN CASE I CAN”T GET TO MY BACKUP MAc — thanks — hine, fight my way through the router problem, and into my mail, and into the nc backstage over there, here is the corbysteria tweet that wins the internet today–

* * *

windows box na ga happen

when computers fail they fail not as single spies but in battalions

it is truly remarkable how many tasks require the shift key

who am i e.e. cummings question mark

talk amongst yourselves multiple exclamation points

* * *

2016

good news, finally i know what biden’s qualifications are. i had been wondering david sirota, business insider

Despite opposition from Wellstone and other liberals, Biden became a prominent Democratic supporter of legislation in 2000 to further restrict bankruptcy protections. The initiative was backed by one of Biden’s top supporters: Delaware-based credit card titan MBNA. Not only had the company’s employees collectively become one of his largest campaign contributors, the firm had employed Biden’s son Hunter right out of law school and later paid Hunter Biden consulting fees while his father pushed the bankruptcy bill. MBNA’s top executive had purchased Biden’s Delaware home for a price that Biden’s political opponents depicted as a sweetheart deal to a powerful legislator.

honestly, i just don’t see how clinton can top this demonstration of fealty and clientelism. ka-ching.

headline — 43 States Will Have Machines At Least 10 Years Old, Could Lead to Long Lines and Lost Votes brennan center for justice or a lot worse than quote lost unquote

headline — A Pro-Clinton Super PAC Is Going Negative On Bernie Sanders HUFFPO DAMMIT i don’t mind david brock being a mercenary who switched sides, but a mercenary who switches sides and then backs candidates is a different kettle of ka-ching. quote media matters unquote not quote hillary matters quote eh question mark

headline — The threat of Jeremy Corbyn’s radically anti-American agenda wapo and by quote anti-american the post editorial board means anti-israel, what a shocker. i would have thought that agita in the city would translate to agita on wall street, but i suppose shoving the knife in via proxy is safer and cleaner

because headline — Labour Names Opponent of BOE Independence as Finance Spokesman bloomberg say no more say no more

headline — Twitter offers new cash stream for presidential candidates ap so why not everyone question mark so tired of paypal

headline — Wall Street’s latest panic: Trump could win politico because the candidate who is both wall street friendly, not sociopathic, and sane would be… would be… would be….

stats

Empire State Mfg Survey, quote colon paste — The shocking weakness in August was no fluke as the Empire State index came in far below expectations — econoday

Industrial Production, quote — A reversal in the auto sector pulled down industrial production in August — econoday and quote excluding motor vehicle production, however, industrial production was unchanged

Business Inventories, quote — slightly on the heavy side — econoday and quote don’t look to be a make-or-break factor for production or employment.

the fed, headline tim duy, bloomberg quote The Federal Reserve is looking for a time with minimal downside risks to raise interest rates. The wavering global economy is likely creating enough downside risk to defer that first hike to a later meeting end quote. so mr market had a pre-sad and that did the trick

europe — quote Industrial production in the eurozone rose by 1.9% in the year to July, beating forecasts by some distance business insider cheap euro, say i

headline — The Year 2015 Is Shaping Up to Be Another Time When Everything Moves in Tandem bloomberg with handy chart showing asset movements over time. so if in a crisis things correlate, is this a crisis, i ask

headline — The 27 scariest moments of the financial crisis business insider more charts, scareeeee!

* * *

Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. And here’s today’s plant from kurt–

Sweet-100

If you enjoy Water Cooler, please consider tipping and click the hat. Winter is coming, I want to buy a few books, and I need to keep my server up, too.

Donate

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

This entry was posted in Guest Post, Water Cooler on by .

About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

Subscribe to Post Comments
71 comments

  1. Llewelyn Moss

    Re: My Shift Key Won’t Work
    Lambert, You could use the Windows Accessories > Ease Of Access > On Screen Keyboard.

    Although “Ease Of Access” is a relative term in this case. Good luck.

      1. lambert strether

        Thanks for the tip, but the keyboard is my basic working tool. I don’t want workarounds. But I am starting to think that the Mac hardware plus increasingly iOS-inflected operating system is just too fragile. I use this machine hard, but a costly problem in less than a year is not acceptable. I love the light weight, which is also good for my back and shoulders, but the Mac isn’t Apple’s main product line any more, I think that’s starting to show, and if I can find a slick *nix that “just works,” and a lightweight pc laptop that doesn’t cost the earth, I might give apostasy some serious thought.

        1. Jim Haygood

          If you are like me and never use the caps lock key, it could be remapped (somewhat logically) to function as a Shift key.

        2. Carolinian

          I’m a great fan of linux and your operating system can be carried on a thumb drive that plugs into any handy 386/pc computer. This is what Snowden is demonstrating to Greenwald in Citizen Four.

          Windows 10 is not bad although the spyware accusations are disturbing.

        3. YankeeFrank

          Lambert, the command key on my macbook pro went a few months ago and then some other keys too. It wasn’t just the key but the works behind it as well, so I couldn’t just swap in new keys. I replaced the entire keyboard and backlight myself using some special screwdrivers and a magnifying glass. You basically have to remove almost every piece inside the laptop in order to get the old keyboard/backlight out and swap in the new ones, and there are literally 60 tiny screws that hold the keyboard in place, but I managed it and it only cost about, IIRC, $60 for parts and a couple hours labor. Well worth it IMO as although my macbook is about 4 years old now, it works well and with the new keyboard should give me another few years with any luck. Here’s the tutorial link I used for my particular machine, they have them for other models as well: http://www.insidemylaptop.com/replacing-keyboard-on-macbook-pro-13-inch-late-2011-laptop/.

        4. Daryl

          I had a Macbook for years, nice computer. Spilled some water on it, bought a $250 Chromebook and installed Linux on it without a second thought. Come on in, the apostasy water’s great!

          1. Edward Downie

            I’ve been wondering which Chromebooks can be loaded with Linux. I run Crunchbang Linux on my Asus Netbook.

            2. Daryl

              I believe crouton will run Ubuntu or Debian on just about any Chromebook and work fairly well. I have an HP Chromebook 14.

        5. flora

          do both shift-keys, right and left, fail to function?
          if you attach a usb external keyboard to your Mac do either/both of its shift keys work?
          (trying to narrow the problem down)
          if the Mac less than a year old it may be covered by warranty

    2. laughingsong

      Or if MAC supports it, the ALT+keypad Decimal values of characters as expressed in the ASCII table:
      http://www.asciitable.com/

      For example a question mark is ALT+63. Only the keypad works for this, not the main keyboard number keys.

  2. shinola

    Perhaps someone in the NC readership could ‘splain to me why Wall Streeters seem to have their panties in a wad over a 0.25% rate hike. (That’s 1/4 of 1%).
    I mean aren’t we supposed to be in in recovery mode? Are things so fragile that a piddly fraction of 1% might derail the whole economy?
    Is someone exposed to huge bets (they may not be able to cover) made on the timing of a hike? A bunch of CDS related to this out there maybe?
    Maybe I’m just dense, but I just don’t get the all the weeny-whining going on about this.

    1. Jim Haygood

      It’s not the magnitude; it’s the change of direction (easing to tightening). That’s a big deal.

      Moreover, the Fed is entering into a new regime for setting the policy rate. In the past, they could control the Fed Funds rate by making reserves more or less scarce. That is now impossible, with vast quantities of excess reserves owing to QEx.

      Now the Fed will implement its policy rate via the IOER (Interest On Excess Reserves) rate. Money market funds (which were temporarily guaranteed by the Treasury during the 2008 crisis owing to their systemic importance) are expecting a shake-up, in which government money market funds will benefit at the expense of others.

      Maybe this regime change will work fine. But it’s new and untested. Implementing systemic changes on a “hot swap” basis is always fraught with risk.

      1. Llewelyn Moss

        So in a cruel twist of irony, the New Normal is that the Fed will now pay Billions to the banks to stop loaning $$$ to people. And I suppose we can’t call this Bailout II, because Bailout I and ZIRP has already made the banks fabulously wealthy.

        Is there no end to the wealth transfer schemes of TPTB? I suppose when we all live under bridges and are eating insects, that might do it.

        1. Jim Haygood

          ON RRP (Overnight Reverse Repurchases) are the heart of the new policy, as explained by a Federal Reserve paper from Feb. 2015:

          Historically, the Federal Reserve conducted RRP (and repo) operations with primary dealer counterparties. However, in 2009, in anticipation of the potential need for large-scale RRPs, the Desk began to expand its set of counterparties for RRP operations. The Federal Reserve currently has 164 RRP counterparties, including primary dealers, banks, MMFs, and GSEs.

          The ON RRP rate set by the FOMC would be expected to establish a floor on short-term interest rates.

          http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2015/files/2015010pap.pdf

          If IOER (currently 0.25%) rises to 0.50% after a rate hike, a new ON RRP rate of 0.25% has to do the heavy lifting of actually making the policy rate rise off the floor to a new range of 0.25 to 0.50%.

        2. MikeNY

          Is there no end to the wealth transfer schemes of TPTB?

          No — not under this regime. Because “trickle-down”.

    3. alex morfesis

      the real ??? is why in 2015 central banks are not using basis points instead of 1/4 points for a move ? the disruptive jolt an ancient spread of 25 basis points in a world of micro basis seems a rather anachronistic way of running the show…like white shoe firms(pertee red soles there fella) and closing the bank at 3 pm…the world has changed a bit folks at BIS central planning land…mayhaps ye shall change too… the world does not operate at 25 basis point changes anymore…time to make the donuts…363 uber alles…or ueber allen

  3. Clive

    Re: Corbynsteria. My mother-in-law has just asked me, I wish I was joking, whether she should take her money out of pensioner bonds (ugh, don’t ask, but if you really want to know, these are a shameless bribe to older people with savings who were complaining that thanks to the ZIRP to bail out the banks they couldn’t get risk free returns any more so the government paid retirees — not the poor ones with no money, but the ones with it — to buy sovereign debt at in effect discount prices in the form of above market yield) in case for some unspecified reason there’s a snap election and Corbyn gets elected and Labour form a government.

    After which event, according to my mother-in-law the U.S. (the U.S. is my mother-in-law’s default choice of capricious unpredictable actor on the world stage with enough power to actually cause mischief and, in her imaination, is like a slightly psychotic friend who is nice most of the time but every so often goes round the supermarket brandishing a machete and threatening the Camembert cheese for no apparent reason — so please don’t take it personally) will “sell the pound” (how many? and who to? I asked her, alas I did not get a satisfactory answer) thus causing her financial ruin.

    So, another triumph for Lynton Cosby’s wonderful legacy and the conservative party’s continuing mission to target the electorate.

    Can I emigrate somewhere more sensible? Like Louisiana maybe? How hard is it to get a green card these days?

      1. ambrit

        It is also one of the most unapologetically pragmatic places. To us, (my wife is from there and I lived there twenty years or more,) corruption is a fact of life and the social system has adapted to that. Like Mexico without the Narcos. (We have the Petroleos.) As an added bonus, Louisiana is the model and test bed for the upcoming Neo Liberal Promised Land. (We used to laugh that Louisiana was the Northernmost Bananna Republic. Little did we know that we were the Vanguard of the Oligarchiate.)

      2. Clive

        I got a postcard once from a friend who was holidaying there — it had a picture of a giant whiskey barrel, which looked like it was made out of fiberglass. I think people paid to have their photo taken alongside it. That, I thought to myself, is a state which has its priorities right.

        1. craazyman

          OK, I see your point.

          I’ve never been there myself. I only know what I read on the internet and what i remember from tennessee williams characters, in his plays. they were mostly crazy lunatics.

        2. alex morfesis

          greencards are easy in america…if you want to work have the misses buy a biz for at least 150 grand and poof…

          two weeks later…congratz and welcome to the bayou state…

          would you like me to frame your photo with just the top of your head or would you perhaps like the shot with you more centered next to the whisky barrel thing…

          1. ambrit

            Mississippi had a scam going a few years ago where predominantly Asian investors put their money into a solar film factory, (which we haven’t seen hide nor hair of,) and received a green card good for the whole family. Who says we don’t get family values?

            1. alex morfesis

              yes…but wild wild west eb-5’s you describe are capped at about 3 thousand visas per year…e-2 program I was talking about above is unlimited (but not available to mainland chinese, russian or brazilian parties)…and you control your own destiny…no need to hope and pray the eb-5 regional center did not price the deal at three times its real value…

              1. ambrit

                Ah. I am amazed at how ‘creative’ our ‘governmental facilitators’ can get.
                It’s really funny to see the Brazilians lumped in with ‘traditional’ adversaries like Russians and Han Chinese. We have any die hard Peronistas in the State Department?
                America! The land of Talking Money!

        1. Liz

          We would certainly welcome you in Louisiana, but be prepared to forfeit any attachment to working infrastructure.

    3. efschumacher

      Re: Corbisteria: I look forward to a re-working of “Reds Under the Bed” and “Reefer Madness” in imminent issues of the WaPo. They just parrotted a string of the worst Daily Mailisms, they didn’t even apply a modicum of subtlety by using some of the more joined-up anti-Corbyn articles from the Grauniad and fellow travellers in the BBC.

      Oddly, WaPo was even more scared by Jeremy Corbyn than they seem to be by Bernie Sanders, who is basically the same thing.

  4. different clue

    To the best of my limited knowledge, many EuroBrit leftists are indeed antiAmericanitic culture-racist antiAmericanites. So what? If they could gain power throughout Europe and Britain, it could lead America to a New Birth of Isolationism. I suppose some would call that a bad thing . . . .

  5. Carolinian

    The case for BIden: great teeth. He’d have the best Presidential teeth since Carter.

    And Politico:

    The latest frightening broadside for the Wall Street class came on Sunday when Trump said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that executive pay in America is “a complete joke” and promised to raise taxes on “the hedge fund guys.” In a statement sent to POLITICO on Monday from his campaign, Trump relished in the attacks from Wall Street, singling out both Bush and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, another favorite on Wall Street.

    I believe Trump can win the GOP nom given the feeble opposition. Those oppo boys better get to work if it’s likely to do them any good. Clearly Hillary, at this point, is Wall Street’s great white hope.

    1. optimader

      The case for BIden: great teeth. He’d have the best Presidential teeth since Carter.
      all the genuineness of caps and hairplugs.

      Think Herb Tarlek.

      What would complete Biden’s ensemble is a plaid sport coat and white loafers with the brass blingbling thingies

    2. Vatch

      It would be surreal if President Trump were to convince the Congress to reform the carried interest tax loophole! Heck, it’s surreal and scary just saying “President Trump”!

    3. Raj

      If we’ve learned anything from the Obama era, we should understand that we can’t take presidential candidates seriously. I have no reason to believe anything Trump says or promises. The one bright side to Trump is he’s making anti-establishment statements, even if he doesn’t believe in them.

  7. optimader

    windows box na ga happen
    when computers fail they fail not as single spies but in battalions
    it is truly remarkable how many tasks require the shift key

    rmbr telxs
    th bran accmdtes ltrs tht r nt thr

  9. allan

    Big Brother Not Watching The Watching One They Should Be:

    Reuters: Homeland Security websites vulnerable to cyber attack

    The U.S. department charged with protecting government computers needs to secure its own information systems better, according to an audit released on Tuesday that showed lapses in internal systems used by the Secret Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. …

    The report focused on ICE, Secret Service and the National Protection and Programs Directorate, which is charged with protecting government computers and the nation’s critical infrastructure from cyber attack. Responsibilities of ICE and the Secret Service include money laundering, financial and commercial fraud, bank and credit card fraud and identity theft.

    What could possibly go wrong?

  10. DJG

    Well, I hope that the shift key returns to the land of the living. Your reference to e. e. cummings reminded me that I may still have PTSD from some of his efforts, especially In [Just-

    spring, with its typographic monstrosities and the goatfooted balloon man (how symbolic) and
    blahblah
    b
    l
    a
    h
    [Old e.e. may have redeemed himself with The Enormous Room, his memoir of being imprisoned for being insufficiently reverent toward The War to End All Wars. Otherwise, he seems to have been all ego all the time.]

  12. ewmayer

    @Lambert [I know you said you don’t want workarounds, but in case of emergency]:

    I try to avoid unneeded shift-key usage simply because I’m a lazy typist and a ‘content over form’ guy. Some tips you may find handy in that vein until you find yourself suitably shifty again:

    o Use ” or `’ instead of double-quotes;
    o Use [] in place of (), and {};
    o Use a text editor that allows case-toggling of selected text [of course that needs ctrl-something, but if your shift key is broken but ctrl-key ain’t…].

    HTML markup is alas a horse of a different color, so there – I should note I am almost exclusively a manual-HTML-er, [including this technical page where I deployed some nontrivial math formulae, of the kind that actually behave as text, e.g. w.r.to page-resize, using nothing more that old-fashioned HTML; scroll down from that URL-bookmark a few panes to see the real fun begin] – I often use [] in place of as I’m composing and then do a global-replace once done.

  13. craazyboy

    “europe — quote Industrial production in the eurozone rose by 1.9% in the year to July, beating forecasts by some distance business insider cheap euro, say I”

    Sounds about right. Hope they didn’t bugger any of their neighbors for it. But I think internal growth should pick up in coming months, what with all the new folk showing up.

  15. OIFVet

    Grandmaster of the Great Game.

    After six years of silent, sometimes secret preparations, the Obama White House has recently unveiled some bold diplomatic initiatives whose sum is nothing less than a tri-continental strategy to check Beijing’s rise. As these moves unfold, Obama is revealing himself as one of those rare grandmasters who appear every generation or two with an ability to go beyond mere foreign policy and play that ruthless global game called geopolitics.

    Gagging yet? Wait, there is more!

    But let’s give credit where it’s due. Without proclaiming a presumptuously labeled policy such as “triangulation,” “the Nixon Doctrine,” or even a “freedom agenda,” Obama has moved step-by-step to repair the damage caused by a plethora of Washington foreign policy debacles, old and new, and then maneuvered deftly to rebuild America’s fading global influence.

    Viewed historically, Obama has set out to correct past foreign policy excesses and disasters, largely the product of imperial overreach, that can be traced to several generations of American leaders bent on the exercise of unilateral power. Within the spectrum of American state power, he has slowly shifted from the coercion of war, occupation, torture, and other forms of unilateral military action toward the more cooperative realm of trade, diplomacy, and mutual security — all in search of a new version of American supremacy.

    In his determined pursuit of this grand strategy, Obama has revealed himself as one of the few U.S. leaders since America’s rise to world power in 1898 who can play this particular great game of imperial domination with the requisite balance of vision and ruthlessness

    Wow. I am not sure that the Nobel folks considered “ruthless” as a necessary quality of any Peace Prize winner, but whatever. All I want to know is, what the heck was the good perfesser McCoy smoking while writing this?

    1. JCC

      Professor McCoy is partially right in his description of the (hopefully) easing of tensions and re-establishment of economic and diplomatic relations with Iran and Cuba, but in all other regards this article seemed pretty bad to me.

      Admittedly I stopped reading it when I finished the section on how wonderfully brilliant the TTP and TTIP is. Ruthless, yes, a ruthless sacrifice of the American people to Corporatacracy.

      The sycophantic comments and replies to this article were, if possible, worse.

      1. OIFVet

        You mostly describe my reaction, too. Let’s suppose McCoy turns out to be correct and Grandmaster Barry O manages to extend American hegemony for another generation or two. My questions then are: At what cost? Who pays that cost? Who benefits? As McCoy shyly mentions, the TTP and TTIP have certain…costs. To both the US and its “Partners”, or at least the underclasses. For its “non-partners,” the “shift” from “coercion” to [what McCoy must view as non-coercive] regime changes, color revolutions, and air bombing campaigns [non-coercive bombs! yay!] is paying handsome [non-coercive] dividends everywhere from North Africa through Ukraine to Afghanistan in the form of very coercive violence. Sounds absurd but that’s what McCoy’s definition of Obama’s shift to the “cooperative realm” amounts to. So who benefits from all this? Well, it sure ain’t us common people. We get stuck with paying the costs while the elites collect their imperial tributes. So why in the world does McCoy think that Grandmaster Barry O’s such an unmitigated, runaway geostrategic success? Beats me.

  16. Tom Denman

    “honestly, i just don’t see how clinton can top [Joe and Hunter Biden’s] demonstration of fealty and clientelism [toward MBNA]. ka-ching.”

    There’s no excusing the Bidens deed, but in 2013 Madame Clinton took $400,000 from Goldman Sachs for giving two speeches [http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hillary-clinton-rakes-big-money-two-goldman-sachs-speeches-one-week]. I’m not sure what financial insights she had to offer that would warrant such a princely sum.

    Of course, she might have explained how someone could legitimately turn $1,000 into $100,000 in the cattle futures market over the course of ten months [http://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/30/us/hillary-clinton-turned-1000-into-99540-white-house-says.html]. In that case, she should have held out for more. Much more.

  17. Lambert Strether Post author

    I want to underline this:

    because headline — Labour Names Opponent of BOE Independence as Finance Spokesman bloomberg say no more say no more

    This would give both The City and Wall Street very good reason to get their knickers in a twist, and I wouldn’t put it past them to have declared open season on both Corbyn and Sanders. Normally, I deprecate the idea of the 0.01% picking up the phones and letting publishers know the score, because self-censorship, capture, and simple self- and class-interest are safer, more efficient, and more effective, but in a crisis, as we know, things correlate…

    1. ambrit

      Is it at all possible for the MSM to overplay their hand? (Serious question.) Yves has elucidated a desire to raise the critical thinking skills of this sites readership. Add that to the “enlightened leadership class” readership of this blog, and a strategy appears. Like the “?” percenters of pre WW2 fame, is there a threshold level where ‘influential eyes’ cease being a readership and become an advocacy group?
      If you can’t change the minds of the power cliques, then change the cliques. Sounds simple, doesn’t it.

      1. Clive

        Yes, I’d agree ambrit. Everyone I’ve spoken to about the Corbyn coverage (even my mother-in-law for cryin’ out loud, who is my go-to bell weather litmus test for when I want a reactionary narrow Middle England view of current affairs) says that it is just utterly ridiculous.

        “a storm in a teacup”, “making a big fuss about nothing”, “they’ve obviously got it in for him” are typical verbatim comments.

        Not sure about U.S. culture, but for the Brits, when you get a public figure relentlessly kicked and pilloried, it does tend here to have a boomerang effect fairly quickly, with the target of the media onslaught getting a counterbalanced sympathy vote. We are, by and large, still a reasonably tolerant lot, taken as a whole and like to at least give a nod to fair play and not picking on the underdog.

    2. Clive

      I’m with you in that one Lambert — normally any talk of “the elite” meeting in a woodland clearing to thrash out their plans for world domination has me reaching for my tin foil hat and chuckling in incredulity (what? Elon Musk is supposed to collaborate with Larry Ellison on screwing tech workers while also presumably be on the same sub committee as the Koch brothers working towards globalising union crushing ? I don’t think so. Sociopaths are not exactly known for their ability to work in teams towards common goals…)

      But so all-pervasive is the Corbynsteria — so many outlets (the Murdoch usual suspects naturally such as The Sun and The Times plus the Sky TV broadcasting network, The Daily Mail and Telegraph too of course, so surprise there; but et tu The Guardian ? And the BBC ?) It’s relentless. But it is also trivial — is mornings made-up-out-nothing nonsense story is about Corbyn not singing the National Anthem and it’s in all the new programmes, the radio, the papers too of course. I’ve never seen anything so concerted and certainly for my money, co-ordinated.

      1. MP

        Clive – I’m trying to figure out where I can get any decent perspective on Corbyn here in the UK. Right now, I feel like I can only go to The Jacobin and NC. Any thoughts for an American ex-Pat in London?

        1. ambrit

          Agreed. The closest social analogue I can think of quickly is; “Arrest the usual suspects.”
          The degree of undisguised hypocracy and, more importantly, ‘sneering contempt’ for the general public is at ‘let them eat cake’ levels.
          Clives’ response to my sub comment above is a clue. Even his center Right mother-in-law is outraged at this smear campaign.
          Now we sit back and see how long the MSM keeps this level of vituperation up. The lifespan of this example of Corbynsteria will tell us a lot.

      3. Rhondda

        “I’ve never seen anything so concerted and certainly for my money, co-ordinated.”

        The anti-Varousakis press was pretty bad for a while there. Until he was crushed, I mean.

        1. Lambert Strether Post author

          I think you’re confusing Syriza with the charismatic and duplicitous Varoufakis, whose harebrained schemes Tsipras sensibly rejected. and whom Corbyn should stay away from.

          The Syriza coverage was pretty bad, but this coverage is instant, across the board, and on both sides of the Atlantic; and the Daily Mail and the respectable press are hardly distinguishable. So I think it’s different.

Comments are closed.