As an economist I have never had much patience with Paul Krugman's economics, stuck as he is in 1940s-era Keynesian demand-side economics. I have sometimes concluded that Krugman had rather denounce Ronald Reagan that to acknowledge that supply-side economists have established that fiscal policy has supply-side, not just demand-side, effects.
However, Krugman does display at times a moral conscience. He did so on September 11 in his New York Times column, "The Years of Shame."
Krugman wrote that 9/11 was hijacked by "fake heros" who used the event "to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight" and that "our professional pundits" lent their support to the misuse of the event.
The stuck pigs, of course, squealed loudly. The war criminal, Donald Rumsfeld, publicly cancelled his New York Times subscription, and the complicit presstitutes in Washington's wars of aggression jumped on Krugman with spikes and hatchets.
Perhaps Krugman meant to use the plural and say "unrelated wars." The US government has made war on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, resulting in massive destruction of homes, infrastructure, and lives of civilians, all in the name of one lie or the other. In addition, the US government is conducting military operations against the populations of three more Muslim countries—Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, with extensive loss of civilian life in Pakistan, a US ally. Drones are sent in week after week that blow up schools, medical centers, and farm communities, and each time Washington announces that they have killed "militants," "al Qaeda," "Taliban leaders."
Thanks to what Krugman calls "our professional pundits" and Gerald Celente calls "presstitutes," the American people know little if anything about the murder of countless civilians and displacement of millions of others in these six Muslim countries, which the Bush/Obama governments regard as "security threats," or habitats of small elements that are "security threats," to the single super-power.
Before I continue, think for a minute about the level of threat posed by these Muslim countries that lack internal unity, an air force, a navy, a modern army, and nuclear ICBMs. Compare this "threat" to the Soviet threat, which, at least, was potentially real. The Soviets had the Red Army, which had defeated Hitler and his high-class war machine. The Soviet Union had an amazing array of extremely powerful ICBMs with single and multiple nuclear warheads, and nuclear submarines outfitted with nuclear-armed missiles.
Somehow we survived 46 years of this threat without going to war. But Iraq, which all but the most stupid people on earth now know had no "weapons of mass destruction," was such a threat that the US government felt not only compelled to invade but also justified to lie to the United Nations in order to attack and destroy a country that had done nothing whatsoever to us and posed no threat whatsoever.
The same for Afghanistan. The Taliban posed no threat whatsoever to the United States or its European allies.
Pakistan is a US ally; yet, Washington has murdered thousands of Pakistani civilians. The liars in Washington and the presstitute media always claim that murdered civilians are "al Qaeda terrorists."
Every time Washington blows up a hospital, a farmer's home, a school, Washington issues a report that it has just killed some al Qaeda leader. Some of these leaders have been reported killed multiple times.
I'm not surprised that this does not sit well with Paul Krugman. The best thing in the Keynesians' resume is not their economics—although it was better, perhaps, than the economics that could not explain the Great Depression—but their moral conscience. Keynesian economists, for the most part, cared about people and what happened to them. I knew many of the Keynesians and debated before university and professional audiences a handful of Keynesian Nobel prize-winners. I never thought that they were callous people. I never expected to miss them.
To return to Krugman: His message comes across most powerfully in the presstitute pundits' response to him. Michelle Malkin misinterpreted Krugman's courage as cowardice and called him a "smug coward."
"Coward" was an epithet that the presstitutes seized upon. A Washington Post writer, Erik Wimple, declared Krugman "cowardly."
After establishing Krugman to be a "coward," the presstitutes, who delight in murdering "towel-heads" in six countries, escalated their attack on Krugman. Peter Bella declared Krugman to be "vile" and to have "no conscience."
Bella's interpretation of a moral conscience as its antithesis is a typical presstitute response. It led to attacks on the New York Times for having a "cowardly," "bewildering," "arrogant," "vile," contributor who "has no conscience" as a columnist.
Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post declared the New York Times for publishing Krugman's column to be "a spiritual wasteland," this from a "newspaper" that many regard as a CIA asset.
In other words, shut Krugman up. Cancel his column. We don't want to hear anything from anyone that casts doubt on Washington's murder, maiming, and dislocation of millions of people because of a "threat" that is a total lie.
We are the exceptional nation. We are the light unto the world. Ordinary laws do not apply to us because we are exceptional. Laws are for underlings. We have "freedom and democracy." Anyone who doubts us is evil and a terrorist and a pinko-liberal-commie.
It will be interesting to see if Krugman's column survives his statement of truth. It will tell us whether America has succumbed totally to being the land of the liars, or whether a person of moral conscience still has a voice.
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Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary U.S. Treasury, Associate Editor Wall Street Journal, Columnist for Business Week, Senior Research Fellow Hoover Institution Stanford University, and William E. Simon Chair of Political Economy in the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com.
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