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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: paret who wrote (41045)	8/21/2005 8:47:02 PM
From: sandintoes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93284

PAUL KRUGMAN By Jonah Goldberg April 5, 2005 New York Times columnist Princeton University economics professor and advocate of bigger government Former $50,000 per year advisor and booster of corrupt Enron Corporation, where he said he served on "an advisory panel that had no function that I was aware of" "If Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth - Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round." -- Paul Krugman Paul Krugman writes a twice-weekly column in the New York Times. He is a Professor of International Trade and International Economics at Princeton University. Paul Robin Krugman was born in 1953 on Long Island, New York, and grew up there. His father was an insurance company manager. Krugman graduated from Yale University in 1974 and earned his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977. He was one of a group of MIT graduate students who worked for the central bank of Portugal and developed his passion for international macroeconomics by helping develop policies for this unstable socialist nation. Krugman taught economics at Yale, MIT and Stanford University. As one of the founders of the "new trade theory" in international economics, he won the American Economic Association's 1991 John Bates Clark medal, a prize given to "that economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic knowledge." His academic research is focused on economic and currency crises. In 1982-83 Krugman took a leave of absence from teaching at MIT to serve as chief staffer for international economics of the Council of Economic Advisors in President Ronald Reagan's Administration. "As a defender of the welfare state, Krugman's views were directly opposed to the majority in the administration," wrote one biographer. But during the experience Krugman "observed that policy decisions in Washington tend to be based on the advice of advisors who generate a comfort level, rather than that of 'those who force them to think hard. That is, those who really manage to influence policy are usually the best courtiers, not the best analysts.' Krugman considers himself a good analyst, but a bad courtier. He wrote much of the 1983 Economic Report of the President." During the 1990s Krugman wrote books whose popularity reached beyond academe. Among these were Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations (Norton, 1994), The Self-Organizing Economy (Blackwell, 1995), Pop Internationalism (MIT Press, 1996) and The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science (Norton 1998). By 1998 Krugman was writing monthly columns for Fortune Magazine and the online magazine Slate. In January 2000 Krugman became a columnist for the opinion, not business, pages of the New York Times. His columns have dealt frequently with politics and been harshly critical of Republican President George W. Bush. "These days I often find myself accused of being a knee-jerk liberal, even a socialist," wrote Krugman in his book The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (Norton, 2003). "But just a few years ago the real knee-jerk liberals didn't like me at all - one magazine even devoted a cover story to an attack on me for my pro-capitalist views, and I still have the angry letter Ralph Nader sent me when I criticized his attacks on globalization. "If I have ended up more often than not writing pieces that attack the right wing, it's because the right wing now rules - and rules badly," Krugman continued. "I began pointing out the outrageous dishonesty of the Bush administration long before most of the rest of the punditocracy." Speaking of dishonesty, in 1999 Krugman was part of an Enron Corporation board that Krugman himself in a 2001 column described as "an advisory panel that had no function that I was aware of." Why? Because, as became public knowledge, Enron paid Krugman $50,000. And in 1999, as journalist Andrew Sullivan reported, Krugman wrote an article praising Enron's free-wheeling entrepreneurial structure. Enron would later collapse amid scandal and charges of financial wrongdoing. In 2004 one biographer wrote that "Krugman has been mentioned as a possible contender for a top economic post" in the new administration if Senator John Kerry was elected president. ("When Bill Clinton came into office in 1992, it was expected that Krugman would be given a leading post," wrote this biographer, "but he was passed over for various reasons.") Like the long-undisclosed $50,000 Krugman pocketed from Enron, a secret promise from Kerry's inner circle of a top government job controlling U.S. economic policy might be part of Krugman's motive behind his harsh New York Times attacks against President Bush. As Krugman himself said, "those who really manage to influence policy are usually the best courtiers, not the best analysts." Have Krugman's anti-Bush columns been his self-serving way of playing courtier to curry favor with a future Democratic Administration? "The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias," wrote Krugman. "And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed…. If Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth - Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round." Krugman's controversial columns have spawned a "truth squad" of critics who challenge the accuracy of his statements. One such critic is economist Donald Luskin, who assails Krugman frequently on his web site and has published article after article in National Review deconstructing Krugman's craftily-worded claims. "I'm not a socialist," said Krugman in an August 2004 debate with Fox News host Bill O'Reilly moderated by NBC Washington Bureau chief Tim Russert. "You know, that's a slander…. I'm nowhere close to that." O'Reilly responded by repeating his view that Krugman is a "quasi-socialist."