[Interesting. Alexander Cockburn concurs ... for different reasons:]
Paul Krugman: Part of the Problem
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Enter the world of Paul Krugman, a world either dark (the eras of Bush One and Bush Two), or bathed in light (when Bill was king). "What do you think of the French revolution?" someone is supposed to have asked Chou En Lai. "Too soon to tell", Chou laconically riposted. Krugman entertains no such prudence. Near the beginning of his collection of columns, The Great Unravelling, Krugman looks back on Clinton-time. A throb enters his voice. He becomes a Hesiod, basking in the golden age.
"At the beginning of the new millennium, then, it seemed that the United States was blessed with mature, skillful economic leaders, who in a pinch would do what had to be done. They would insist on responsible fiscal policies; they would act quickly and effectively to prevent a repeat of the jobless recovery of the early 90s, let alone a slide into Japanese-style stagnation. Even those of us who considered ourselves pessimists were basically optimists: we thought that bullish investors might face a rude awakening, but that it would all have a happy ending." A few lines later: "What happened to the good years?" A couple of hundred pages later: "How did we get here? How did the American political system, which produced such reasonable economic leadership during the 1990s, lead us into our current morass of dishonesty and irresponsibility?"
Across the past three years Krugman has become the Democrats' Clark Kent. A couple of times each week he bursts onto the New York Times op-ed in his blue jumpsuit, shoulders aside the Geneva Conventions and whacks the bad guys. For an economist he writes pretty good basic English. He lays about him with simple words like "liar", as applied to the Bush crowd, from the president on down. He makes liberals feel good, the way William Safire returned right-wingers their sense of self-esteem after Watergate.
Krugman paints himself as a homely Will Rogers type, speakin' truth to the power elite from his virtuous perch far outside the Beltway: "Why did I see what others failed to see?" he asks, apropos his swiftness in pinning the Liars label on the Bush administration. "I'm not part of the gang," he answers. "I work from central New Jersey, and continue to live the life of a college professor--so I never bought into the shared assumptions. I don't need to be in the good graces of top officials, so I also have no need to display the deference that characterizes many journalists."
All of which is self-serving hooey. The homely perch is Princeton. Krugman shares, with no serious demur, all the central assumptions of the neo-liberal creed that has governed the prime institutions of the world capitalist system for the past generation and driven much of the world deeper, ever deeper into extreme distress. ...
<http://www.counterpunch.org/>
Carl
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