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KRUGMAN_FUNNIES
June 25, 2006
One of the few genuinely
funny jokes I've heard in
a long time is --
Oh, but wait, before that, let me make
sure you've got the background.
You all know who Paul Krugman is,
right? He's an economics prof at some
ivy or other who's been writing op eds
for the New York Times. Ah, Princeton.
Should've known.
His columns were originally The New York
fairly bland (as I remember Times is run by
it) but under the Bush a Princeton mafia.
administration he's been Something about
gradually sounding more like Bush Inc, I think,
Noam Chomsky. is giving a lot of
people a hard shove
Myself, I have my doubts toward the left.
that Krugman ever
would've been hired if he
was writing this kind of
stuff at the outset -- Indeed, you'll notice
that Chomsky does not
have an OpEd column...
Possibly this is because
Chomsky has a tendency to go
on about the New York Times
continually fucking up
(to take a polite
interpretation).
I heard a Paul Krugman talk on "Democracy Now":
"Paul Krugman on the New Class War in America" June 19th, 2006
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/19/1340247&mode=thread&tid=25
Krugman was talking about the
increasing gap between the
rich and poor in the United When I first heard
States. lefties talking
about this in the
early 1980s, I Just a blip,
shrugged it off. I figured.
Two decades
later, the
"blip" is
still there.
He was saying that while he likes
statistics, he also thinks it's
important to look at more
qualitative things, and one of
the things he likes to track is
real estate, particularly the
construction of large mansions:
he suspects we're returning
to the "Great Gatsby" days.
Then in support of this
point -- the joke is
coming up, get ready --
he says something like:
"There was a really good article
on this subject that appeared in
'Vanity Fair' -- by the way, isn't
it interesting that these days
most good reporting is not coming
from... um... (*pause, then
quickly*) 'The Washington Post'?!"
Okay, so I thought that was pretty funny,
and it pushed me over the line into thinking
that this Paul Krugman guy was okay, and it
was time I read one of his books.
So I went looking for his last book
("The Great Unraveling") at "Modern KRUGMAN_UNRAVELING
Times", but the cubboard was bare,
then I went looking at "City
Lights"... I glanced around, then "City Lights" is the kind of
gave up and asked the dude at the place that's sub-divided
counter. into a number of strange
sections that's good for
browsing, but difficult to
locate individual works.
He points me to the
"political science" My favorite is an "urban
section, I return issues" section that
with the book. includes "cyber-space" wonk
books, via some sort of
Then he comments "by metaphorical reasoning
the way, do you know about real and virtual
that Paul Krugman "places".
was on the board of
directors of Enron?"
"No, I didn't know that, it'll be
interesting to see if he says
anything about Enron at all..."
The guy adds "Yeah, someone asked
him about it once, he just said
something lame, I don't remember
what." Hm.
So I went off speculating about how
Krugman must have felt throughly
taken-in by Enron's management --
I sat down with the book and looked
up Enron in the index, then started In Washington
skimming all the Enron references. Square Park,
in North Beach,
Actually, Krugman talks about as long as I'm
Enron a lot. The main points being: name-dropping.
o The people who were in on the
Enron deal are still around.
o Enron may very well not be the
only hollow corporate shell
out there.
About two thirds of the way through
this book there's a mention of his
own "involvement" with Enron:
Krugman did some consulting for
them when he was just a college
professor, before he started
doing the OpEd columns, as he
puts it, back in the days when
he was in no position to do them
any favors.
And he mentions that recently
there had been a minor-smear What sense could
campaign where "the vast this accusation
right-wing conspiracy" was possibly make?
trying to make it sound like Krugman isn't
Krugman had been an insider on someone who
the take... jumped on the
anti-Enron
So: the dude working at bandwagon when
City Lights actually it was convenient:
swallowed a Swift Boat! he was one of the
guys who got the
"Board of directors", wagon rolling...
indeed...
"Comparative Advantage" By Nicholas Confessore
December 2002
"... the established storyline on California's energy
crisis was that Left Coasters had only themselves to
blame: the state had passed a flawed deregulation law,
which led its utilities to rely on the spot energy market
when prices were high. This neutral explanation came from
the supposedly competent and disinterested Federal Energy
Regulatory Committee, so reporters favored it. And while
the press gave plenty of column inches to the Bush
administration's preferred spin--that environmentalists
had stymied the construction of needed generation
capacity--few reporters gave credence to groups like
Public Citizen, who blamed the crisis on market
manipulation by energy companies, many of them based in
Texas and enjoying close ties to the administration. But
Krugman, noting that economists had long worried about the
vulnerability of California's trading system to
price-fixing, argued that market manipulation was the
obvious culprit; otherwise, he wrote in March 2001, the
power company executives "are either saints or very bad
businessmen." Krugman was ignored at the time. Twenty
months later--following the collapse of Enron, three
federal investigations into the California crisis, and a
passel of indictments against energy company
officials--Krugman has been proved right."
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0212.confessore.html
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