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Weissman writes: "Love him or loathe him, the Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman has become a rock-star economist both here in Europe and in the United States, and one of the most important public intellectuals of our time."

Paul Krugman being interviewed by Bill Moyers. (photo: Moyers & Co.)
Paul Krugman being interviewed by Bill Moyers. (photo: Moyers & Co.)


Paul Krugman, Shame on You

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

25 August 14

 

ove him or loathe him, the Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman has become a rock-star economist both here in Europe and in the United States, and one of the most important public intellectuals of our time.

I happen to love Paul’s work, and have written enthusiastically about his popularization of British economist John Maynard Keynes. As I paraphrased their joint mantra for a rational economic policy:

When times are tough and the private sector pulls back, borrow or print money to stimulate demand. When growth returns, pay down the borrowing, an essential follow-through for both Keynes and Krugman. Timing is crucial, and now is the time to spend to promote growth, not to cut back in the name of austerity.

I was also inspired by Paul’s cut-glass opposition to the Bush-Cheney War on Iraq, and joined in spirit with Loudon Wainwright III in singing “The Krugman Blues.”

I read the New York Times, it’s where I get the news.
Paul Krugman’s on the op-ed page, that where I get the blues.

If only the Times had put Paul on the front page in the place of Judith Miller and her “journalistic” colleagues with their government sponsored hooey about Saddam Hussein’s long-gone Weapons of Mass Destruction.

All of which explains my “shock and awe” last week on reading Paul’s “Why We Fight Wars,” in which he expressed his thoughts on Ukraine.

“It’s only a guess,” he wrote, “but it seems likely that Vladimir Putin thought he could overthrow Ukraine’s government, or at least seize a large chunk of its territory, on the cheap – a bit of deniable aid to the rebels, and it would fall into his lap.”

Paul then echoed Justin Fox of the Harvard Business Review, who suggested that Putin may have gone to war to distract the attention of the Russian people from their slowing economic growth. Paul even added that Putin may escalate the War in Ukraine rather than lose face.

I would not put any of this past Putin, whom I see as a corrupt, kleptocratic, ultra-nationalistic and anti-democratic gay-basher more in line with Marine Le Pen and her Front National here in France than with anything that progressive Americans should ever support. But I find it absurd that one of America’s leading liberal thinkers could lay the entirety of the Ukrainian conflict at Putin’s feet without once mentioning some annoying bits of history. Whatever Putin does or does not think, he did not overthrow Ukraine’s legally elected government. Washington and its European allies did, as is documented in grim detail in “Meet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev” (Part I and Part II.)

This was the immediate situation to which Putin was reacting, and that has to be part of the story whether one approves or condemns the way he chose to react. In fact, the unspeakable Putin was responding rather predictably to decades of American and European provocation.

Would Krugman and those who repeat the same patter deny that president George H.W. Bush and German chancellor Helmut Kohl tried to soft-soap Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev into believing that they would not expand NATO into the former countries of the Warsaw Pact?

Or that President Bill Clinton led the move to expand NATO eastward toward Russia?

Or that President George W. Bush picked up on Clinton’s covert support for the popular uprising against Serbia strongman Slobodon Milosevic and organized “color revolutions” in Ukraine and other newly independent nations along the border of the former Soviet Union?

Or that the Obama administration – with active help from Bill and Hillary Clinton – put together what participants called a second “Orange Revolution” to bring Kiev closer to NATO and the EU?

In the first Cold War, too many well-meaning liberals like Krugman bought into the idea that Washington and its NATO allies were simply responding to the threat of Soviet expansion, initially under Josef Stalin. Most historians now admit that the story was far more complex, and Krugman surely understands better than most how a Pentagon-based Keynesianism built up the Military-Industrial Complex that encouraged American support for the Cold War.

Knowing our past mistakes will not allow us to predict the mistakes of our future. But it should at least motivate us to look at the American and European role in Ukraine before playing guessing games about Vladimir Putin.



A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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