The Krugman Scam

Guillaume Durocher
Occidental Observer
February 19, 2016

Paul Krugman is one of the leading intellectuals of the Left in the United States. He writes a regular column for the New York Times, won the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, and is perhaps the single most influential social-democratic pundit in the American ruling establishment. Krugman is a (self-)righteous liberal. He sharply condemned the Iraq War during the Bush years and has continuously ridiculed those in America or Europe who oppose redistributive welfare spending to equalize outcomes or stimulus programs designed to keep the economy going through government deficit spending.

But Krugman really is extremely narrow in his center-leftism. He recentlywrote on his blog that all those who supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton were not “serious”:

Meanwhile, the Sanders skepticism of the wonks continues: Paul Starr lays out the case. As far as I can tell, every serious progressive policy expert on either health care or financial reform who has weighed in on the primary seems to lean Hillary.

This is very strange for the more consistent kind of (overwhelmingly White) liberals who find the socialist peace activist Sanders to be much more in line with their ideals than the banker-funded warmonger Hillary Clinton. This is rather ironic given that the values of Sanders-supporting young White liberals were inculcated precisely by leftist intellectuals like Krugman, as well as Jon Stewart Liebowitz, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn, among others.

Glenn Greenwald, a Jewish libertarian writer (who has problematic views on immigration, but is a powerful critic of the Democratic and Republican establishments), was quick to point out the hypocrisy of Krugman’s claim:

For years, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has repeatedly complained about the D.C. orthodoxy-enforcing tactic of labeling only those who subscribe to Washington pieties as “Very Serious People,” or “VSPs.” It’s a term Krugman borrowed (with credit) from the liberal blogger Atrios, who first coined it to illustrate how Iraq War opponents were instantly marginalized in establishment discourse and only war advocates were deemed to be Serious. Krugman mockingly uses it so often that the New York Times created a special tag for the term. The primary purpose of the “VSP” tactic is to malign anyone who dissents from D.C. establishment pieties as non-Serious or un-Serious, thus demeaning the person as someone who can (and should) be ignored as residing on the fringe, unworthy of engagement or a real platform regardless of the merits of their position.

Yesterday, one of the purest and most noxious examples of this tactic was invoked — by Paul Krugman. [. . .] As so often happens, those who fancy themselves dissident gate-crashers (which apparently can include someone who is a Nobel Prize-winning tenured economics professor, at Princeton until somewhat recently; an advisory board member of the nation’s largest corporations; and effectively, a life-tenured New York Times columnist) quickly assume the role of vigilantly guarding the gate once they realize they were admitted all along. So congratulations to Paul Krugman on his power of decreeing who is a Serious Expert and announcing that the label applies only to those who want Hillary Clinton be the next president, but not Bernie Sanders.

Note the vitriol. Krugman and Greenwald really are of a kind as culture warriors, shaping the boundaries of acceptable discourse through ridicule and righteous moralizing.

Krugman is an anointed thought-leader of the American and global ruling elites. But why is that? What exactly is his agenda, his narrative?

Paul Krugman is an open borders tax-and-spend liberal, one who particularly likes the idea of deficit spending in general. He has otherwise consistently supported policies which have increased economic inequality and concentrated ever more wealth and power in the hands of a tiny plutocratic and financial elite. He has supported free trade to outsource American jobs to China and has supported indefinite immigration from the Third World. These open borders policies have dramatically hurt the (White) working class, enriched the so-called “one percent,” and massively increased inequality.

Furthermore, Krugman has never been fundamentally critical of the American financial system, either before or after the 2008 banking crisis. As he recently wrote: “Most of us argued long before there was a Sanders candidacy that the focus on Glass-Steagall [financial regulation] and too-big-to-fail was misguided. In fact, I argued that position very early in the Obama years.”

None of this is problematic for the “egalitarian” and “neo-Keynesian” social democrat Paul Krugman. His solution? The empowerment of the federal government. All economic problems can basically be addressed through a massive expansion of the redistributive welfare state and constant stimulus spending and soft money, printed at the discretion of the tiny clique that runs the Federal Reserve.

The bad guys in Krugman’s narrative are the Republicans. He is not particularly vitriolic on Donald Trump, as Krugman considers the entire Republican Party to be bad, infinitely worse than a “serious” Democratic candidate, such as Hillary Clinton. He recently wrote: “Trump isn’t a problem for Republicans; he’s a symptom of the problems Republicans have.”

Krugman’s solution to the evil Republicans is the reduction of White America to minorityhood, and hence, her subjection to a permanent non-White Democrat majority. As he told a Norwegian reporter in 2014:

[The craziness of American politics] is not a permanent condition. The craziness really comes more from cultural-ethnic issues than anything else. A lot of the real craziness comes from rural White Americans who feel that they are losing their country, they are losing ownership of the country. They’re right. We are becoming more diverse, more multicultural, and they are, in the end, not in the future. The power they still have will go away but it’s a very difficult time until then. The future is Mayor De Blasio of New York, but Ted Cruz of Texas is still out there with the ability to do a lot of damage.

The new permanent non-White majority would of course be informed and led by enlightened liberals like Paul Krugman.

The selectiveness of Krugman’s outrage is striking. Whereas he is very intolerant of those unenthusiastic about his particular brand of redistributive neo-Keynesianism, he poo-poos most other left-wing economic causes. Whereas he was vociferous in denouncing the consevative George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the wider War on Terror, he has been extremely circumspect on the constant wars and bombing in the Islamic World undertaken by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Indeed, Krugman supported Obama’s war for regime change in Libya, which was no less illegal under international law than the attack on Iraq. Like Iraq, it has also had disastrous consequences and resulted in political instability.

Whereas Krugman is withering in his denunciation of ethnocentrism among conservative Whites, he writes that “like many liberal American Jews — and most American Jews are still liberal — I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going.” (Philip Weiss has for his part criticized Krugman, calling him a“latent Zionist,” for consciously ignoring the issue of Israel.) In contrast, Krugman has been very generous in lending his column space to publish his colleague Kim Lane Scheppele’s repeated denunciations of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, despite Hungary’s version of ethnonationalism being at best a pale imitation of Israel’s (and despite Hungary, unlike Israel, being free of the minor details of oppressing another ethnic group, ethnic cleansing, etc.). Orbán is the first Western leader in generations to stand up for the vital interests of Europeans.[1]

The inescapable impression that emerges is of Paul Krugman as a shill of the Democratic establishment, global plutocracy, and continued massive non-White immigration. He merely wants the system to be a bit more socially sustainable and stable by keeping the increasingly non-White masses’ refrigerators full through a bit of wealth redistribution and neo-Keynesian pump priming. The result? Global corporations and oligarchs are empowered, the individual is made dependent on the growing welfare state, while the government itself, by getting into debt, makes itself dependent on financial markets (Wall Street) and the Federal Reserve.

Any genuine destruction of global plutocracy and the realization of any real equality would never be achieved anyway in Krugman’s system, and certainly not by “electable,” compromised center-left as embodied by Hillary Clinton. But Krugman would support her, claiming righteousness based on the conceit that Hillary Clinton is infinitely better than the mainstream Republican candidate — as though there are any real differences on the ultimate fate that the two ruling parties have reserved for the country.

There is nothing “democratic” in any noble sense about Krugman’s vision and there will not be any genuine “equality,” even in an economic sense. Above all, Krugman’s agenda would not eliminate ethnic inequality. It would no more increase Black and Hispanic academic achievement than it would reduce the achievement of Asians or Jews. And Krugman’s post-White America would be wracked by all the problems that afflict stratified multiethnic societies, especially a permanent loss of trust and social cohesion, as documented by Robert Putnam. There would intractable ethnic tensions and hatreds stemming from average differences in temperament and performance.

But Krugman is easily intelligent enough to know all this. Indeed, he is aware of the importance of a sense of nationhood to having a healthy polity. In the 1990s, Krugman built up his credentials as a pundit by poking fun at the European Union’s project for a common currency, correctly noting that the idea was deeply flawed due to Europe’s national diversity:

Euroland is anything but ready to think of itself as a nation. After all, the countries cannot even agree on a set of heroes to celebrate on their currency: where almost every money in the world bears the portraits of great men and women, the new euro notes will bear pictures of bridges, gates, and windows — not any actual bridges or gates, mind you, but imaginary bridges and gates that might come from any European country. (There was a minor scandal a few months ago when it turned out that one of the pictured bridges was actually, mein Gott, recognizably French. It was quickly replaced with something acceptably generic).

Despite understanding that a strong national identity is critical to having a good society, Krugman sings the praises of the demise of White America andObama’s grand project of replacing the nation with nothing more than “a hodgepodge of folks.” So nice to hear ethnic displacement phrased in such a folksy manner.

Does Paul Krugman really believe that “cultural-ethnic issues” will no longer drive “craziness” in American politics once Whites are a minority and the country’s demographics come to resemble a cross between Brazil and Yugoslavia? I really have hard time believing he is that stupid. I suspect that he thinks that, whatever the residual anger, the regime will have enough power to stifle any lingering hostility and resentment.

Krugman has also written on the “White death,” that is the stark increase in the death rate of White Americans (mainly due to various forms of substance abuse). He attributes this primarily to economic causes but concludes there are no obvious solutions. But could it be that White Americans are depressed and adrift after being ruled for decades by a hostile media-cultural elite which has, like Paul Krugman, systematically demonized them and organized the destruction of their historic nation? I have to think this has been at least a contributing factor.

Krugman has also rationalized the systematic left-wing bias of academia, absurdly claiming this is only because conservatives have shifted rightwards and because the Right supposedly rejects the theory of evolution. While many Republican politicians pander to evolution-rejecting Evangelicals, this is absolutely untrue for the philosophical Right more generally. What’s more, it is obvious that it is above all the Left — starting with the ethnically- and politically-motivated pseudoscience of the fraudsters Franz Boas and Stephen J. Gould — who have denied Darwinian evolution’s applicability to humans.

Krugman’s selectiveness is too convenient to be accidental or disinterested. No, I must accuse Paul Krugman, a Jew, of ethnocentrism, of racism against non-Jews and in particular against Whites. How else can we explain why an “egalitarian,” “neo-Keynesian,” and social-democratic peace activist like Paul Krugman would support the banker-funded warmonger Hillary Clinton with her neocon foreign policy advisors? Could he simply be very comfortable with a candidate like Hillary Clinton who is almost completely dependent on his co-ethnics for financing her campaign? (Amazingly, all seven of Clinton’s top campaign contributors are Jews.) Would Krugman consider Hillary the only “serious” candidate if she were entirely dependent on, say, pious Mormons or ethnically-conscious WASPs for her campaign money? I suspect he would be very critical, indeed hysterically so, and he has certainly written a great deal on the supposed corrupting influence of the gentile Koch brothers’ money, while ignoring the influence of of George Soros and Haim Saban in the Democratic Party (indeed, Krugman has written positively of Soros and ridiculed those critical of his influence as engaging in “conspiracy theory”). Krugman has been critical of Donald Trump who, being self-financed, is for  his part not dependent on Wall Street and Hollywood.

Is the “democratic” Paul Krugman comfortable with the very elitist economic system in the United States, in part, because of the staggering prominence of his co-ethnics in the Federal Reserve (three chairmen in a row over nearly 30 years!), Wall Street, and elite academic economics[2] generally?

Whether Krugman is conscious of his ethnic bias or not, this is all very convenient. He “just happens” to be comfortable advocating a system in which our people are systematically weakened and lose their historic homelands, while his people steadily build up their homeland in Israel and retain a position of staggering privilege and commanding influence in America. What a happy coincidence.

In any event, I take Krugman at his word: He wants America to look like Mayor Bill De Blasio’s New York City. New York, like virtually all “global cities,” is characterized by massive inequality and ethnic fragmentation bordering on outright segregation (even some liberals are uncomfortable at the degree ofracial segregation in the city’s schools). New York City’s prisons are chock full of Blacks and Hispanics because these groups commit most of the violent crime, making up an incredible of 97.5% those arrested for shootings for example. Meanwhile, a heavily Jewish and increasingly global oligarchy runs New York’s elite institutions, from the New York Times through the big Wall Street firms. This day-to-day reality  of ethnic stratification doesn’t seem to bother Paul Krugman, and only someone who is blind or a liar can claim that Bill De Blasio is going to bring anything like “equality” to the Big Apple. Affirmative Action laws may be on the books, but De Blasio will not be kicking out staggeringly-overrepresented Jews from the big Wall Street firms and replacing them with “underprivileged” Blacks and Hispanics any time soon.

This is the plan Krugman has for the world: A borderless ethnic chaos with shocking inequality and social-ethnic fragmentation, made up of rootless individuals and mutually-hostile tribes dependent on the state for sustenance, and run by people like Hillary Clinton and institutions like the Federal Reserve, who just happen to be in the pocket of Krugman’s co-ethnics. Very convenient. This world would be one of lies and hypocrisy, everyone having nothing but “anti-racism” and “equality” in their mouths, as they govern on behalf of a non-White majority. Meanwhile real power would be held by whoever can form the most powerful ethnic networks (e.g. Patrick Drahi).

Paul Krugman embodies the hypocrisy and selectiveness of the establishment Left. The Left likes to talk about the pervasiveness of White racism and of the so-called “corporate capture” of the American political process. But what about Jewish racism and what about ethnic capture of the intellectual, financial, and political high ground in the United States? There will be no real justice in the world and no future for Europeans worldwide unless these problems are frankly discussed and dealt with.

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[1] I have not been able to determine whether Scheppele is Jewish

[2] The prominence of Jews, 2% of the U.S. population, in elite academic economics is really quite astounding. They are incredibly overrepresented for instance in academic rankings of top economists. More generally they are extremely prominent, easily more so than even members of the White non-Jewish majority, in both top level government positions and in economic punditry. We can cite: Paul Krugman (top establishment liberal), Joseph Stiglitz (top “Third Worldist” liberal), Kenneth Rogoff, Martin Feldstein (former adviser to President Ronald Reagan), Barry Eichengreen (currency historian), Dani Rodrik (the defender of a kind of “national economics”), Jeffrey Sachs (the top “development economist”), and many more. I have also been very struck at observing the prominence and obvious networking of young Jewish liberal economists, who typically market themselves as “wonkish” experts, such as Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias.