Krugman Watch 11/15: The Austerity-Mongering is On

 

“What’s going on here? I don’t think you can resort to class war arguments.”

 

I would have that be seen as the defining quote of Krugman’s career. True, there’s competition from the likes of “In Praise of Cheap Labor”, but I think this best sums up Krugman’s role as corporate liberal astroturfer. He epitomizes the historical mission of system liberals: When the going gets tough for the criminal elites, and there’s some risk of their facing real resistance, their first choice is to bring in the liberals as consultants, agents of misdirection, astroturfers. (The second choice is fascism, if the liberals fail.)

 

To come in and say things like, “I don’t think you can resort to class war arguments.”

 

I called my shot on Krugman a long time ago, in posts like Schizoid Krugman and Krugman Watch on Sarajevo Day. I said he didn’t really oppose the Austerity offensive in principle, but only questioned its tactical tempo, and perhaps the vehicles being proposed. He thought they were jumping the gun.

 

I said then and I still say that in the end he’ll support the gutting of Social Security. You just watch.

 

Now we’re starting to see Krugman’s maneuver in that direction. Before I get to his current advocacy of death panels and regressive taxation, let’s first go over today’s column. It’s a typical batch of Thugman nonsense and lies, and I don’t normally bother, but since we’re already here…..

 

On Wednesday David Axelrod, President Obama’s top political adviser, appeared to signal that the White House was ready to cave on tax cuts — to give in to Republican demands that tax cuts be extended for the wealthy as well as the middle class. “We have to deal with the world as we find it,” he declared…..

But the bitter irony goes deeper than that: the main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn’t.

 

Krugman correctly calls out Axelrod’s crackpot pragmatism. Let’s be clear about what pragmatism really is, as opposed to Orwellian “pragmatism”.

 

If you have the nominal power to push through your agenda, but you unilaterally scale down your goals because of the merely political resistance of the enemy, and perhaps the disapproval of the MSM, you’re already a coward. Then there’s the fact that the historical record proves that the enemy won’t credit any of your concessions, but instead will treat your self-diminished position as the outrageous primal extreme.

 

If, under those conditions, you still seek appeasement and compromise, then cowardice has escalated into morbid stupidity. No rational, modestly self-respecting person under those conditions would do anything other than use his power to ram through his entire agenda, knowing that there will be no political reward for doing anything less. Not to mention that there may very well be a tremendous reward for aggressively doing it all, that you’d galvanize your base and compel the respect and even admiration of many who hadn’t previously supported you.

 

What really happens, assuming the alleged “progressives” are really at all progressive in intent, is that if their only options are to either give up their goals or to force their way through to their goals, but in such a way that they’d have to endure being shrieked at by their enemies to the right, that’s too much for them to endure. That’s the elemental cravenness which goes into defining the progressive “character”. And out of that, by way of self-justification, arises the rationally absurd crackpot “pragmatism”, which is the least pragmatic course of action from the point of view of reality.

 

All of that assumes that the “progressive” is somewhat sincere in his own mind. Of course that’s seldom the case with system elites, who are for the most part conscious criminals who use crackpot pragmatism in an Orwellian way, to pseudo-justify their liberal lies and help astroturf the well-meaning but cowardly base.

 

In retrospect, the roots of current Democratic despond go all the way back to the way Mr. Obama ran for president. Again and again, he defined America’s problem as one of process, not substance — we were in trouble not because we had been governed by people with the wrong ideas, but because partisan divisions and politics as usual had prevented men and women of good will from coming together to solve our problems. And he promised to transcend those partisan divisions.

 

Crackpot pragmatism is a good complement for the liberal “process” mentality. They both serve the parallel goals of camouflaging liberal corporatism and psychologically consoling the feckless rank and file, keeping them in the fold. Obama knew what he was doing during the campaign.

 

Of course, here we see the core Krugman lie: He pretends Obama is one of the feckless, rather than one of the criminals.

 

But the fact is that Obama is a perfect example of those who rule with “the wrong ideas”. That is, a criminal. (It’s also a core part of Krugman’s project to represent all elite criminals, even the Republicans, as merely misguided or crazy. After all, “I don’t think you can resort to class-warfare arguments.”)

 

The fact is that Thugman himself is one of those who rule with criminal ideas. For the prime example, he supports the Bailout. While opposing the Bailout isn’t sufficient to signify that one has the right ideas, it is necessary. (He was also Hack #1 pied piping for the health racket bailout and austerity bill.) 

 

With that, we reach his call for death panels and regressive taxes:

 

So, what I said is that the eventual resolution of the deficit problem both will and should rely on “death panels and sales taxes”. What I meant is that

(a) health care costs will have to be controlled, which will surely require having Medicare and Medicaid decide what they’re willing to pay for — not really death panels, of course, but consideration of medical effectiveness and, at some point, how much we’re willing to spend for extreme care

(b) we’ll need more revenue — several percent of GDP — which might most plausibly come from a value-added tax

…But medical costs must be controlled somehow, or nothing works. And is a modest VAT really so much more implausible than ending the mortgage interest deduction?

 

1. What deficit problem? Why is Krugman suddenly echoing Republican talking points? Very interesting…

 

There’s certainly no deficit problem which can’t be helped most of all by ending the Krugman-supported bailout and restituting all the trillions stolen in the Krugman-supported looting binge.

 

2. Is there any fiscal problem at all? The solution is obvious:

 

Total Austerity for the Criminals, Not One Cent More from the People.

 

But of course, that would have to mean acknowledging the class war being waged upon us, and Krugman has decreed that we can’t resort to that. But that conveniently forestalls all the right ideas and leaves in place only “the wrong ideas”. The same bad ideas Krugman is always claiming to deplore through his crocodile tears.

 

3. As I’ve written before, no matter how good something like a VAT sounds in the good civic wonk textbooks, we know for a fact that under kleptocracy ALL government revenue represents nothing but wealth redistribution from the productive people to the corporate criminals. The same would be true of a VAT.

 

So when Krugman whips out the wonkery and calls for the good civics playbook, all he’s doing is advocating class war robbery by other means. Why does he recite conservative talking points and advocate a regressive tax on the same web page where he pretends to deplore the extension of the Bush tax cuts? That juxtaposition is no accident. It indicates that he supports regressive taxation as the primary revenue stream going forward, once profligate borrowing becomes impossible. (His incessant China-bashing is meanwhile meant to provide a scapegoat for the soon-to-come collapse of the dollar.)

 

4. Meanwhile the great advocate of the bailout for the “insurance” rackets is now echoing the NYT party line, that the only allowable path to cutting health care costs is to cut services for the non-rich. This is austerity with a vengeance. This criminal now regrets that he was so impolitic as to crack a joke about death panels (remember how under Bush he said we should revile anyone who laughs at our impoverishment and misery? so how should we regard your death panel joke, scumbag?), but the idea remains the same: In order to maintain the ability of the insurance racketeers to extract enough to remain luxuriantly “profitable”, the health care system will have to crush the people.

 

That’s the health racket bailout Krugman always consciously supported before, and that’s the bailout and austerity assault he supports now.

 

So Krugman now indicates that he sees the limits of the Bailout on the horizon, and that in order for the finance sector to maintain its extractions, it will need to move to more direct robbery methods. In a word, “austerity”.

 

Thugman is on schedule. He’s “waffling” (i.e. insidiously maneuvering) with regard to austerity itself, via the masked austerity of the regressive VAT which he advocates in the same breath that he sighs over the foregone conclusion of the extension of tax cuts for the super-rich. And he’s doing the same when he joins his home NYT in pushing for austerity via the health racket bailout when he attempts misdirection toward the provider side. The real goal, of course, is to force people to buy worthless “insurance policies” while those policies don’t actually pay for care. That’s the death panel Krugman advocates here.

 

What’s going on here? I think it’s clear to any honest, moral human being that we must resort to class war arguments. Paul Krugman is a class war criminal. That’s why every step of the way, from day one of the Obama administration, he has systematically advocated bailouts and austerity, while seeking to obfuscate the class war reality. As I said above, that’s the historical mission of system liberals. Krugman has been one of the best at his pernicious job, which makes him in reality and morality one of the worst.