Tag Archives: Paul Krugman

Dear #MSM: #BernieSanders Is Not @SusanSarandon, @KillerMike isn’t @GloriaSteinem or @Madeleine Albright | Blog#42

Pro-Clinton media pundits are having a field day, painting Bernie Sanders supporters as evil Continue reading Dear #MSM: #BernieSanders Is Not @SusanSarandon, @KillerMike isn’t @GloriaSteinem or @Madeleine Albright | Blog#42

As #HillaryClinton Bungles, Angry Pundits Blame #BernieSanders! | #BlackLivesMatter on Blog#42

So, clearly, we’re all angry now. Paul Krugman is seething at Bernie Sanders Continue reading As #HillaryClinton Bungles, Angry Pundits Blame #BernieSanders! | #BlackLivesMatter on Blog#42

How The Unemployed Are Counted: Scoundrel Edition | #MSMBias on Blog#42

Mainstream media reporting is very frustrating this primary season, Continue reading How The Unemployed Are Counted: Scoundrel Edition | #MSMBias on Blog#42

As #BernieSanders Rises, So Does The Perfidy of Angry Pundits Like Paul Krugman | #Neoliberalism on Blog#42

As #BernieSanders Rises, So Does The Perfidy of Angry Pundits Like Paul Krugman
Continue reading As #BernieSanders Rises, So Does The Perfidy of Angry Pundits Like Paul Krugman | #Neoliberalism on Blog#42

#MSM #Neoliberal Bias Evident As Bernie Sanders Gains Prominence | #DemDebate Roundup on Blog#42

Tonight’s debate was full of examples where self-interest, generational and personal, clashed with leadership. But those clashes were hardly the only kinds. The media’s decidedly neoliberal bent was on full display during the debate, and now in the post-debate rush to publish analyses.

Andrea Mitchell’s tone with Sanders was particularly striking for its uncharacteristic antipathy:

and

Andrea Mitchell got what she deserved for asking improper questions of a candidate who has remained faithful to his promise to run a campaign that is focused on the issues. The second question, however, was a very poor attempt at discrediting single-payer healthcare by asking Sanders about the failure of some other politician? Surely, Mitchell knows that there is no overlap between the work of governors and US Senators? She has to, right?

Mitchell’s job at the debate was to ask questions that would elicit informational answers from the candidates and not, as she did with Sanders, include obviously biased assumptions about the candidate’s position. NBC should not have used her in the debate. Mitchell, as the spouse of former Fed chair, Alan Greenspan, has a huge conflict of interest when it comes to Sanders, and it showed tonight and in recent interviews she’s conducted with him.

But she’s hardly the only veteran reporter to bring bias to work. Matthew Yglesias at Vox has, along with a couple of their reporters, consistently been critical, if not derisive of Sanders. Within an hour of the end of the debate, begins his piece entitled, It’s time to start taking Bernie Sanders seriously, with:

Like most journalists, I’ve been covering Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary campaign as fundamentally more about making a point than about electing a president. He’s out there to talk about his issues, to shift the terms of the debate, and to force Hillary Clinton to commit herself to progressive causes.

And it’s been working.

I’ve followed Yglesias’ economic analysis work for some years now and I know for a fact that he is both capable of more serious efforts at extrapolation, and deeper analyses. This piece attempts neither, and begins with an assertion that is patently biased. While it is Yglesias’ right to cover Bernie Sanders any way he wishes, it isn’t a fact that Sanders has been running only to push Clinton to the left. In fact, we’ve known for some time that Sanders is running to win.

What is really egregious in Yglesias’ piece, is the fact that he makes demands of Sanders’ plan and calls it unserious for lack of details such as what happens when there is a shortage of medical equipment or whether chiropractor visits will be covered, when Clinton’s plan is about a quarter the text of Sanders’ and contains no facts or figures associated with her prescription for healthcare.

What Yglesias seems to expect of Sanders is a piece of legislation – not a plan, and that simply isn’t how politicians typically publish planks. I’m pretty sure he knew that when he sat down to write his piece. In his piece, Yglesias saw fit to rename Sanders’ plan “Berniecare.” Why?

Then, he asks if Berniecare will cover abortion. I’m pretty sure Yglesias knows that just as Clinton has never talked about amending Obamacare to cover abortions as a part of repealing the Hyde Amendment, there should be no expectation that Sanders would get that deep into the details of what would be covered, much less announcing policy that would require the repeal of a law that is on the books. To characterize Yglesias’ work as intellectually-dishonest slop-think is to put it very mildly.

Which brings me to the one and only invocation of Bernie Sanders‘ name, for at least the last two years, in a Paul Krugman op-ed or blog post.

“But on the left, in particular, there are some people who, disappointed by the limits of what President Obama has accomplished, minimize the differences between the parties. Whoever the next president is, they assert — or at least, whoever it is if it’s not Bernie Sanders — things will remain pretty much the same, with the wealthy continuing to dominate the scene.”

Krugman’s assessment is in perfect alignment with Hillary Clinton’s healthcare debate answer in that we are limited in what we can do due to our political situation. The translation of Clinton’s answer is that because she failed to bring about universal healthcare in the 90’s and it was so difficult even with a democratically-controlled Congress, to agree to single-payer, we should not aspire to do more, and for good measure, she threw in the hand-grenade of losing what Obama accomplished, and healthcare as we know it:

But as Sanders explained, nothing would be undone and, what’s more important, how can we remain satisfied when 29 million Americans are left without, just so Big Insurance can continue to unjustifiably earn billions as useless middlemen?

Unsurprisingly, Paul Krugman’s op-ed for January 18th, echoes Clinton’s debate answers on healthcare, just as Yglesias attempted to bolster them. You shouldn’t do more because we already have more and pushing for the rest is risky. There is no sure thing in life, that’s for certain. But just as certain, is the moral imperative to do better for all of us, not be content with what only some of us have. Martin Luther King died because he did the right thing and didn’t stop at voting rights and civil rights. There was more to be done then, just as there is more to be done now.

Bernie Sanders, Cornel West, Killer Mike, and Nina Turner talk about Martin Luther King, 1.17/16

If Sanders is about fundamentally changing the way Americans value themselves in the way they vote, Clinton is about salvaging a status quo that everyone knows has failed. If Yglesias and Krugman are about convincing us that things can’t be done because they just can’t, poll after poll, achievement after achievement by what media has consistently billed as an impossible campaign has shown us that voters are of a completely different mindset than “conventional wisdom” dictates.

Media bias is changing with the circumstances. Pundits are now discouraging people by telling them that the political situation won’t allow, realistically, for sweeping change. Content yourselves with the bit you have, don’t try to work for more or better. Is that what America is now about? Whose interests does this kind of thinking serve?

Our movements, in this case the Liberal movement, has failed us by moving to the right of the needs of its people. Sanders is right. The DNC needs reform and that reform can only come with a political revolution of Democratic voters first, and the general electorate next.

I always tell my daughter never to let anyone discourage her from trying to reach higher. Please listen to me, don’t let anyone convince you we can’t do better. It is unnatural and un-American.


Tonight’s online polling declared Sanders the winner of the debate and, were the primary to be held today, its winner by a landslide. My modest Twitter poll yielded this as the result:


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Related:

When Bernie met Hillary

Long before challenging Clinton, Sanders reached out to her on health care. He got nowhere.

On a crisp Monday night earlier this month, Amtrak police at New York’s Penn Station escorted Bernie Sanders off the train from Washington and into ClubAcela. The just-declared presidential candidate, spotting a phalanx of body guards, asked his escort what VIP was in their midst.

“You could have the primary debate right now,” came the response. It was Hillary Clinton.

Sanders passed along a note asking if he could come say hello, she said yes, and the two passed 10 cordial minutes.

“She genuinely seemed happy to see him,” said Richard Sugarman, Sanders’ close friend and former roommate, to whom he relayed the story of their chance encounter. “He said it was almost impossible not to feel for her — how isolated she was, and how insulated she was. And he came away from that saying, ‘What can I tell you. It’s not easy being her.’ ”

This wasn’t the first time Sanders has reached out to Clinton. He’s been doing that for more than 20 years. As one of Congress’s most liberal members in the 1990s, Sanders went back and forth between clashing with Bill Clinton and warily embracing the leader of the centrist New Democrats. But even before the Clintons were in the White House, Bernie was playing the role of pragmatic progressive, making overtures directly to Hillary and working to pull her to the left.

Read the rest at Politico.com

Keeping the record fair and straight: Denmark and who said what | Blog#42

Late Saturday (10/18,) in a blog post entitled “Danish Doldrums,” Paul Krugman wrote this:

“Bernie Sanders said he wants America to become like Denmark; Hillary Clinton was a bit skeptical, but agreed that Denmark is a good role model.”

Hillary Clinton actually said:

“I think what Senator Sanders is saying certainly makes sense in the terms of the inequality that we have. But we are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America and it’s our job to rein in the excess of the capitalism so that it doesn’t run amok and doesn’t cause the kinds of inequities we are seeing in our economic system but we would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in the history of the world.”

Hillary wasn’t skeptical at all. She was  downright negative on changing anything. In fact, she told us, right before Sanders was asked his question, that capitalism only needs a reset every so often. That doesn’t square with adopting a different model:

“We are the United States of America and it’s our job to rein in the excess of the capitalism so that it doesn’t run amok and doesn’t cause the kinds of inequities we are seeing in our economic system but we would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in the history of the world.” Hillary Clinton

The translation from Clintonese is not a political revolution. It is not the capitalism reset called for by Joseph Stiglitz in his economic plan. It is not a reform of Wall Street that bears any resemblance to what either Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley propose. Whatever it is, however, bears very close resemblance to what Ben Bernanke has been saying and wrote in his book about the Fed having enough in place to step in and break up the banks if there is a need. But as Martin O’Malley pointed out during the debate:

The big banks, once we repealed Glass-Steagall back in the late 1999’s [sic], the big banks went from control of, what, 15% of our GDP to now 65% of our GDP

Mrs. Clinton’s position on regulating the banks is basically to, again, trust the instincts of those watching to seize the banks before another disaster and, in the meantime, not focus on the banks themselves, but the other financial institutions as, in her view, they’re the ones most likely to be the cause of a future failure:

“But we have to worry about some of the other players. AIG, a big insurance company. Lehman Brothers, an investment bank – there’s this whole area called shadow banking. That’s where the experts tell me the next potential problem could come from. So, I’m with both Senator Sanders and Governor O’Malley in putting a lot of attention onto the banks and the plan that I have put forward would actually empower regulators to break up big banks if we thought they posed a risk, but I want to make sure we’re gonna cover everybody – not what caused a problem last time, but what could cause it next time.”

and

“…But I’m telling you, I will say it tonight, if only you look at the big banks, you may be missing the forest for the trees. We want to look at all the other financial institutions.”

I will remind everyone reading this that Lehman Brothers has been dead, kilt dead, deader than a door nail since 2008. AIG, of course, is still around.

Clinton’s answers on banking  sounded an awful lot like Ben Bernanke testifying to Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2013. That goes to show how far apart from a newly former Republican the presumptive (self-styled progressive) nominee is on economic doctrine. The distance between his moderate conservatism and her neoliberalism can be measured in inches.

In an earlier piece, I wrote about the basis for Hillary Clinton’s economic policy. It was supposed to be based on the work of Joseph Stiglitz and his “Rewriting the Rules” at the Roosevelt Institute. “Based on” is the operative term here. Clinton is advised by Lawrence Summers. In an interview of Joseph Stiglitz in the UK’s conservative paper the Spectator, ‘The problem isn’t that we’ve been slaves to free markets,’ Liam Halligan writes:

“Unlike Thomas Piketty, whose recent bestseller Capital in the 21st Century argues that capitalism makes rising inequality inevitable, Stiglitz insists the system can be fixed. ‘Widening and deepening inequality isn’t driven by immutable economic laws,’ he says. ‘A well-functioning market economy doesn’t only create jobs, but should also generate increases in income that are shared.’

So Stiglitz is no anti-capitalist. He stresses that ‘getting markets to work like markets’ is the core message of his book. The problem ‘isn’t that we’ve been slaves to free markets, but that we’ve usurped them… Too-big-to-fail banks that extort government bailouts and big monopoly corporations that use their power to restrict competition are anathema to the free-market model — and are a lot of the reason inequality has risen so fast.’”

and…

“Accepting that some inequality is ‘necessary to maintain economic incentives’, Stiglitz argues that wide income disparities eventually lead to a slowdown. ‘The US economy is in bad shape, with negative growth in the first quarter of this year and possibly the second quarter — so we may be in technical recession,’ he says.

‘One reason,’ he argues, ‘is that there’s so much inequality and people at the top spend a much lower share of their income than those at the bottom — so that kills aggregate demand.’ It’s a new twist on the traditional Keynesian case for government spending. ‘Inequality is both a symptom and a cause of a slowing economy.’”

Making mention of banksters who went unpunished makes for a great soundbite. What Stiglitz envisions is a reinvention of capitalism of FDR proportions to right the terrible wrongs that have accumulated since his tenure. At the basis of this reinvention is getting the proportion of GDP generated by Wall Street back down, closer to where it used to be. Clinton threw some red meat when she criticized the lack of prosecutions of Wall Street bankers.  Why red meat?  Making mention of banksters who went unpunished makes for a great soundbite. The boat for prosecuting individuals passed with the administration’s decision to fine firms rather than prosecute individuals. Secretary Clinton’s statement about reining in excess, breaking up banks only as deemed necessary by regulators and not reinstating Glass-Steagall, should signal a reluctance to diverge any further than she must from her husband’s economic philosophy.

Senator Sanders refuted that Clinton’s plan is tougher, and the back and forth related to that line of questioning ended up with Sanders’ best line of the night in response to Clinton’s recounting of a visit to Wall Street in which she admonished bankers to stop their behaviors:

Secretary Clinton, you do not – Congress does not regulate Wall Street. Wall Street regulates Congress, and we’ve got to break up these banks. Going to them and saying please do the right thing is kind of naive.” Bernie Sanders

Clinton, tries to build a progressive image by repeating a mantra filled with progressive buzzwords and crowd-pleasing expressions of regret that an administration she was a part of did not prosecute Wall Street robber barons, all the while making proposals that she characterizes as tougher than Bernie Sanders. But, upon examination, her platform really amounts to nothing more than the measures that are already in place and were deemed inadequate or just plain wrong by Sanders.

It is very disappointing to see a serious economics writer mis-characterize clearly divergent views on a topic that is easily fact-checked. Hillary Clinton did not in any way, shape, or form come even close to criticizing the current US economic model, much less concede that anyone else’s – Denmark, Sweden, or Iceland’s for that matter – would be a good model. Clinton will only go as far as reining in excesses while leaving current structures as they are, with little more, if any, additional regulations. That is a far cry from what a group of liberal economists have been calling for over the last seven years, including Paul Krugman, at times.

My advice to all is not only to re-watch the relevant portions of the debate, but read the transcript. Often times, the eye catches what the ear misses. Surely, that’s what happened to Paul Krugman today.


Sources and additional materials:

ABC This Week interview of Ben Bernanke:

ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos

My essay on Ben Bernanke‘s interview on ABC

Click here for videos and a transcript of select portions of the Democratic debate

Robert Reich Explains Why Bernie Sanders’ Policies Would Cost America Nothing (VIDEO)

Bernie Sanders Tells the Truth: Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich on His Surging Campaign

Matthew Yglesias | Vox | 9 questions about Denmark, Bernie Sanders’s favorite socialist utopia