Paul Krugman, Witness to the Great Unraveling of America

[Guest guest]

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/08/int04041.html

 

August 6, 2004

 

Paul Krugman, Witness to the Great Unraveling of

America

 

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

 

This is our second interview with the only journalist

in America who doesn't appear to need an eyeglass

prescription (see also " Paul Krugman, New York Times

Columnist and Author of The Great Unraveling: Losing

Our Way in the New Century " ). Next to him, the

self-infatuated television pundits and many news

columnists appear to be wandering around with a highly

distorted vision of America under Bush. But Krugman,

almost alone among them, sees that the emperor is

wearing no clothes.

 

Krugman would be the last to lay claim to any heroic

insight into the radical, incompetent Bush

administration. In fact, he is constantly amazed that

others don't see through the impostors in the White

House.

 

Coming upon a Krugman column in The New York Times

reassures us that there are some sane people out there

in the mainstream media who deviate from the

Kafkaesque enabling of the dangerous ship of fools

currently at the helm of America. Maybe it helps that

Krugman is not a journalist by training. He's an

economics professor at Princeton, which allows him to

be so lucid in his analysis. Maybe it's because he

doesn't rely on the White House to spoon feed him

information, which is how to best describe the

Washington press corps. Maybe he's not reliant on the

corporate media to support him, since he always has

his " day job " as an academic.

 

All we know is that Krugman sees the light, while so

many others stumble around in a befuddled state of

confusion. America is well-served by his courageous

columns at a time when a person who tells the truth is

looked upon with much suspicion.

 

Krugman's bestselling collection of columns, The Great

Unraveling, has just been released in an expanded

paperback edition.

 

* * *

 

BuzzFlash: In the preface to the hardcover edition of

The Great Unraveling: Losing our Way in the New

Century, you make ironic use of Henry Kissinger’s

Ph.D. thesis at Harvard as a way to understand the

radicalism of the Bush Administration. Could you

explain that a bit more?

 

Paul Krugman: Well, it’s really good for explaining

how reasonable people can’t bring themselves to see

that they’re actually facing a threat from a radical

movement. Kissinger talked about the time of the

French Revolution, and pretty obviously he also was

thinking about the 1930s. He argued that, when you

have a revolutionary power, somebody who really wants

to tear apart the system -- doesn’t believe in any of

the rules -- reasonable people who’ve been accustomed

to stability just say, " Oh, you know, they may say

that, but they don’t really mean it. " And, " This is

just tactical, and let’s not get too excited. " Anyone

who claims that these guys really are as radical as

their own statements suggest is, you know, " shrill. "

Kissinger suggests they'd be considered alarmists. And

those who say, “Don’t worry. It’s not a big deal,”are

considered sane and reasonable.

 

Well, that’s exactly what’s been happening. For four

years now, some of us have been saying, whether or not

you think they’re bad guys, they’re certainly radical.

They don’t play by the rules. You can’t take anything

that you’ve regarded as normal from previous U.S.

political experience as applying to Bush and the

people around him. They will say things and do things

that would not previously have made any sense -- you

know, would have been previously considered out of

bounds. And for all of that period, the critics have

been told: " Oh, you know, you’re overreacting, and

there’s something wrong with you. "

 

We just saw it with the increased level of terror

alerts. Among those of us who had made a judgment

about what kind of people we’re dealing with, the

reaction was, this timing was awfully convenient.

After all, they’ve done this sort of thing before. Of

course, this was criticized as completely unreasonable

to say -- after all, this time we’ve got " specifics. "

But here we are with this morning’s headlines: Oh,

it’s all three-year-old information.

 

BuzzFlash: Headlines in mostly The Washington Post and

The New York Times revealed the information predated

9/11.

 

Paul Krugman: Right.

 

BuzzFlash: There was an article, as you know, in The

New Republic, which said the Bush Administration had

put pressure on the Pakistani government to come up

with a " high-profile al Qaeda target " in the last two

weeks of July, and preferably during the Democratic

Convention. That article was met with a lot of

skepticism, although it was quite detailed and written

by three people for a prestigious publication. And

indeed, what has happened is it has been announced

that a high-target al Qaeda individual was arrested by

the Pakistanis. He had actually been arrested the

Saturday before the Democratic Convention, but it was

only announced, I believe, on Wednesday or Thursday.

 

Paul Krugman: It was Thursday, a few hours before

Kerry’s speech.

 

BuzzFlash: So exactly what had been foretold, but

dismissed by some as a conspiratorial theory, was

proven to be true. On top of that,it was

three-year-old information, the pre-9/11 information,

that was the primary basis, even the Administration

admits, for the so-called specific terror alerts.

(They said " specific, " even though the information was

more than three years old.) The information came from

the computer of this high-target al Qaeda figure who

was captured by the Pakistanis at the request of the

Bush Administration, basically, to drown out the

message of the Democratic Convention.

 

Paul Krugman: Well, you know, just about a year ago,

in one of the new columns in my book, I said that the

stakes are very high for the Bushies, because we all

know that there are terrible suppressed scandals. And

that was before we even had any hint about Abu Ghraib.

They will do anything to win. You have to expect that

it’s going to be the dirtiest campaign in American

history, and so it’s proving. We probably ain’t seen

nothing yet. Over and over again, the people who made

a judgment about the motives of the Administration,

and assessed the facts on the basis of that judgment,

have proved again and again to be getting it right in

interpreting the latest story. People who keep on

clinging to the belief that these are reasonable

people who behave like a conventional government have

been snookered.

 

BuzzFlash: I want to talk about the media a bit.

You’ve had some recent columns on the media, including

one that caused a bit of a dust-up with CBS. But do

you think the two articles that appeared in The New

York Times and Washington Post regarding the terrorist

information being three years old are, for lack of a

better word, a sign of progress in the media?

 

Paul Krugman: Yes. Something has happened, although

I’m not entirely sure how much it’s the media and how

much it's the intelligence professionals who were

responsible.

 

BuzzFlash: Yes, one newspaper cited 12 different

intelligence sources that anonymously said this was

dated information.

 

Paul Krugman: I think maybe a year ago, the Times and

the Post wouldn’t even have published this, despite

that. No, between the dismay of the public and

professionals and the fact that the media are wising

up a little bit, there’s progress. But, boy, take a

look at what happened when Howard Dean said something

completely reasonable on Sunday. He was totally

trashed for questioning the timing of Ridge's

announcement. But there’s complete vindication for

what he said. And let’s see if we have any apologies

from cable news.

 

BuzzFlash: Well, and he also had said, before, that

we’re not any safer since Saddam was captured. He got

trashed for that, and it took a reporter from Irish

television to bring it to the attention of Bush --

that indeed we have had more terrorist attacks since

9/11 than before. American reporters scoffed at Dean,

and yet an Irish reporter was the only one to confront

Bush with this information -- which is factual.

 

Paul Krugman: Yes.

 

BuzzFlash: Let me ask you about the media. Today you

have a column about the Democratic Convention

coverage, or lack thereof. And you got in a tussle

with CBS because you accused them of not really...

 

Paul Krugman: I just talked about the thinness of

coverage of issues. I said there had been no account

on major TV networks that I could find that gave an

adequate account of Kerry’s health care plan, which is

his principal, his core domestic proposal. And CBS --

I think that was one guy acting on his own, actually

-- he just...

 

BuzzFlash: He was a producer?

 

Paul Krugman: Yes. He went into this weird thing

misrepresenting what I said in the column, framing

that I had said there had never been any issue

coverage, which I didn’t say. And it was really one of

those things where the words were all in capital

letters and so on. And of course, it wasn’t what I

said.

 

CBS actually is the best, if you take a look at the

coverage. CBS is the best, but it’s still pretty

pathetic. I have looked at their report on the

competing health care plans, and I don’t think there’s

any way that a viewer who didn’t come into that with a

lot of knowledge could have figured out what Kerry is

proposing, how it differs from Bush. And they would

have come out with one definitely false impression,

which was that Kerry’s plan was unfunded, because the

report quoted Bush saying it’ll break the bank, and

didn’t explain that Kerry has a plan to pay for it by

rolling back some of the tax cuts.

 

BuzzFlash: I want to ask a couple specific questions

about the media. Let’s put aside certain

conspiratorial theories like you read on sites like

ours, that there’s a corporate media, and that

reporters know they have to report within a narrow

frame because it’s much safer if they’re not too hard

on the Bush Administration. Let’s put that theory

aside for a second. Let’s just ask about the

technology of television.

 

Is there something about the television medium, beyond

the bias that a network may have, or an individual

reporter, to kind of go with the Administration and be

tough on the Democrats? Is it a bias in the modern

technology that you’ve just got these news cycles?

Basically on television, what you get is just surfing

the headlines -- the technology is such that you just

get news nuggets. You don’t get paragraphs. You get

one-sentence headlines, and you kind of surf those.

And even on CBS, for instance, a long report there is

two minutes or two-and-a-half minutes. What can you

really explain about Kerry’s health care policy in two

minutes?

 

Paul Krugman: I’m not going to let them off that easy.

Actually, there were a lot of little details in their

story, but they weren’t the ones that you needed to

know. There was no reason why they had to say Bush

says it will break the bank. Why wasn’t there the

follow-up sentence: " ...but Kerry says he can pay for

it by rolling back tax cuts for people making more

than $200,000 a year. " They didn’t include that

following clause.

 

BuzzFlash: Why, do you think?

 

Paul Krugman: I think it was more sloppiness than

anything else, but there’s a bias in the sloppiness.

Reporters and producers know very well that if they do

anything that can be construed as an unfavorable

misrepresentation of Republican positions, there will

be hell to pay, while misrepresenting what Democrats

say is cost-free. Historically, there has been no

punishment. Specific examples are not all necessarily

cases of deliberate slanting of the news, but they

sometimes are. For the most part, it’s simply

asymmetric threats -- it’s safe to be snarky about

Democrats, but to play it safe, you have to be

extremely respectful towards Republicans.

 

BuzzFlash: Professionally, you’re an academic who

studies the economy, a mystery to most of the world.

Certainly, among economists, there is a wide-range of

viewpoints -- from the Milton Friedman school to the

Galbraith school and so forth. It’s as open-ended in

viewpoints as political outlook.

 

Paul Krugman: No, it isn’t really. The spread of ideas

is exaggerated.

 

BuzzFlash: Then let’s just say it’s a complicated

field. Can television, which is what codes information

to most Americans today -- can those short cycles

possibly explain academic theory and what’s happening

with economics?

 

Paul Krugman: Well, some things are going to be hard,

but some things are not. Again, take a look and you

see misrepresentation of things where it’s not

necessary. For example, during the 2000 campaign, when

Bush was touting the Social Security privatization, he

was saying, you know, you can get 4% by putting your

money in bonds, and you only get 2% in Social

Security. That's a totally bogus comparison, because

Social Security has got to pay for the current

retirees.

 

Well, I would have thought that TV could try to

explain that fact. But I saw a couple of news shows

that actually had graphics -- you know, bar charts --

of return on Social Security versus return on a bond

-- 2% versus 4%. They were actively aiding this

garbage comparison. That was not a case of the subject

being too complicated. This was active -- they thought

that people could understand a bar chart, but they

chose to use their bar chart to support a bogus

right-wing position.

 

BuzzFlash: Moving on to another issue, you have in

your book a quotation from Tom DeLay from a speech at

the National Press Club -- and he’s been quite open

about this -- that his role is to insure that his

Biblical world view is reflected in the United States

government. That was the reason he went after Clinton,

because Clinton was, in essence, an infidel. He wasn’t

a follower of DeLay’s Christian world view. You also

quote DeLay, and then paraphrase him again, that it’s

our duty in a war to reduce taxes. How does this sort

of economic policy fit in with his Biblical world

view? Where does that come from in the Bible?

 

Paul Krugman: Well, I don’t know if you can say. The

fundamental fact of American politics -- and I’ve

sharpened my view on this since last year and the

hardcover edition of the book -- is that we’ve got an

alliance between the religious right and the

accumulators of great wealth. Those are the people who

are running things. And then the question would be,

how is it that these things go together so well? What

happened to the streak in Christianity that is

reveling and populist? Why has that been completely

eliminated? George Lakoff has written about a

conservative world view that you can kind of make

sense of. It doesn’t work by the numbers, but it does

work, sort of, emotionally. There's a focus on

self-reliance, and therefore letting the wealthy get

wealthier, with this world view.

 

But I think a lot of it is a marriage of convenience.

The corporate insiders and the figures of the

religious right have found each other mutually useful.

The thing about the religious right is that it’s

actually relatively centralized. There are people who

can take their flock where they want to go. And they

have, in effect, made a deal with the people with

multi-million-dollar incomes. " I’ll scratch your back,

you scratch mine. " If this coalition gets the kind of

lock on power that it wants, the next phase is the

struggle between those two sides. As for Tom DeLay, he

is a fanatically religious person because that’s who

he is, and he’s a fanatical supporter of the interests

of the money, because that’s where the money is -- the

money and the political support.

 

BuzzFlash: You had written one or two columns on the

Thursday leak. We saw that, in between parts of the

Democratic Convention coverage, the Bush

Administration just sort of dropped on a Friday

afternoon that we had a record deficit. Then Bush went

campaigning in the Midwest saying we’re " turning the

corner " on the economy. What’s going on here?

 

Paul Krugman: They just believe -- correctly -- that

people don’t know their history. It really does sound

like Herbert Hoover, " Prosperity is around the

corner. " And now Bush is saying we’re turning the

corner.

 

Actually the deficit story is even funnier because

there is a little shadow play that went on, which

people who were following these things closely caught

six months ago. One of the things they’re saying is,

well, look, you know, six months ago, we were

projecting a deficit of $520 billion, and now it’s

only 440. And you see things are improving because of

the booming economy. But when they issued that 520

forecast back in February, that was way above anyone

else’s projection. Wall Street columnists were saying,

you know, it looks like about 450 to us. And the good

people at the Center on Budget Policy Priorities,

which is my favorite fiscal think tank, said flatly

this is a scam. They are deliberately issuing a wildly

high projection so that when the actual numbers come

in, even though they’re worse than the year before,

they can claim things are improving. So there they go.

The CBPP caught this budget thing, they told us what

was going to happen, and it played out exactly the way

they said it would.

 

BuzzFlash: Well, the Bush Administration and Karl Rove

have been masterful at playing this expectations game

in a variety of venues. They did that with Bush in

2000 by saying, oh, he’s going to be horrible and

terrible, and don’t expect much. Then if he performed

anything above that, they said, oh, God, you see, he’s

really quite something.

 

Paul Krugman: Quite so. But the economy has gone from

wild to “eh.”After one quarter of high growth, summer

of last year, it settled down to an ordinary pace, and

then to actually less than ordinary lately. It was

only 2% in the second quarter. And job growth is

barely ahead of population growth. But their plan now

is to just keep on saying how wonderful the economy

is, and to keep people confused through November.

 

BuzzFlash: Well, one of their credos, and Rove has

said this, is if you say a lie five times, it becomes

the truth.

 

Paul Krugman: Yes.

 

BuzzFlash: I guess the people who are jobless in Ohio

don’t necessarily agree with that. We’ll probably see

in November. But what does the term " jobless recovery "

mean in terms of the new economy?

 

Paul Krugman: Well, I wonder if this is starting to

become a pattern? The Bush I recession was followed by

a long stretch of pretty poor job performance,

although actually a lot better than we’ve seen with

the Bush II recession. And this time now, here we are

more than two-and-a-half years after the official end

of the recession, and we’re still well below, of

course, pre-Bush employment.

 

But more to the point, we’re well below any reasonable

projection of how many jobs the economy should have

generated by now. It’s pretty miserable. My favorite

response now, when people ask, " Well, aren’t we doing

well? What about those 1.5 million jobs since last

August? " is to say, well, look at the 2002 economic

report of the President, which is Bush’s own forecast

-- issued after 9/11, after their recession,so you

can’t claim that there was bad stuff no one could have

anticipated. It said that you would have 138 million

payroll jobs by now. And what we actually have is

about 131 million. So we’re really in pretty bad

shape. That’s a testament to ineffectual policies.

 

BuzzFlash: Is it true that it’s the worst job crash

and performance since Herbert Hoover?

 

Paul Krugman: Yes, by a large margin.

 

BuzzFlash: In the introduction to the new paperback

edition, and also in one of the 29 new columns

included in this expanded edition, you refer to how

the budget proposed by the White House included photos

for the first time -- in fact, 27 photos -- of our

" Commander in Chief. " It’s almost like we’re creating

a cult like the old Soviet-style cult of having the

picture of the leader everywhere, even in what used to

be the black-and-white Congressional budget.

 

Paul Krugman: It scares me sometimes how blind people

are. I first started talking about the Bush cult of

personality early last year, although it was sort of

obvious even before that. And I got slammed for that.

What are you talking about? You are crazy, descending

into madness, I think somebody wrote. And then, just a

few months later, we had Operation Flight Suit, which

was beyond anything even I thought they would try to

do.

 

BuzzFlash: You call it a Lenni Riefenstahl moment.

 

Paul Krugman: Actually, some elderly central European

refugee friends said that, in terms of the staging. It

is something Bush's team regrets now. But they

certainly did try to exploit that staging. And it was

deeply un-American. What we thought was the American

way of doing stuff, which was the exaltation of the

office, not the man, and the exaltation of civilian

authority over military, these people don’t believe

any of that.

 

BuzzFlash: We have a radical regime that has Biblical

world-view ideologues, as you’ve termed them --

although Tom DeLay is not officially part of the

Administration, he’s de facto, since he does their

bidding in Congress...

 

Paul Krugman: He’s the most powerful man in America

after Dick Cheney.

 

BuzzFlash: ...and we have the plutocrats, who probably

can be represented by Dick Cheney, who is more of a

money guy than a Biblical world-view guy. So you’ve

got ideologues of different bents. The neo-cons have

the foreign policy radicalism, of which Dick Cheney is

a part. And they seem impervious to facts. Facts come

up to contradict their ideological assumptions, and

they continue to proceed with the ideological

assumptions, just adapting their excuses. But let’s

say Bush were reelected. Doesn’t this have to hit the

wall at some point?

 

Paul Krugman: Yes. You could say that we’ve hit a

number of walls already. The thing is the United

States is a huge, wealthy, extremely powerful country,

which means that you can screw up very badly, and the

consequences take awhile before they become obvious.

 

If we weren’t America, those budget deficits would

already have led to a financial crisis. But, you know,

the markets say: Well, it’s America. They’ll get their

act together. And so we, the people, are still lending

money. If we weren’t the world loan superpower, the

ongoing disaster in Iraq would have been catastrophic

already. The army is coming apart at the seams -- but

slowly. This group of people have had the good luck,

or maybe the bad luck in the longer run, to seize

control of an institution that is capable of taking a

lot of punishment before it really disintegrates.

 

If you think about how far down we’ve come in this

short time, it’s actually pretty amazing. But I don’t

know what happens if they manage to hold on, one way

or another, in November. So far, every real-world

thing they turned their hands to, every real-world

issue, as opposed to politics, has turned to crud.

Afghanistan’s a mess. Iraq’s a mess. The economy’s a

mess. The budget’s a mess. Homeland Security is a

mess. Four more years of this, and I don’t know. It’s

going to be a pretty grim prospect.

 

BuzzFlash: Is it in the nature of the ideologue or the

radical that, when you encounter something that

contradicts your assumption, you don’t change your

assumption. You just continue rolling along and change

your rationale for the assumption?

 

Paul Krugman: It certainly seems to be true in this

case. We don’t have a lot of experience with this sort

of thing in this country. We never before had an

administration with as much freedom to act as this one

has managed to achieve, or one that’s been quite so

closed-minded. You know, Nixon was a " bad guy, " but,

what he did was actually quite pragmatic in actual

policies.

 

This is something completely new. We don’t have a lot

of experience with it. But it is amazing, if you look

at some of the ways they are willing to change policy,

not in fundamental ways, but in ways that help them

politically. If you read closely the reporting from

Iraq, what’s pretty clear is that our army has been

told to basically cede control of large swaths of the

country to the insurgents in order to hold the

casualty figures down until November. I guess you

could call that pragmatic, although what happens

afterwards, I don’t know. It was pretty clear that

Bush’s initial decision was to send the troops in and

level Fallujah. But after that didn’t work out too

well, the next reaction was, okay, let’s just try and

keep the troops on their bases, and see if we can

taper this off until the election.

 

BuzzFlash: Paul Krugman, thank you so much, and good

luck with the book. You are a great asset to this

nation as far as journalism is concerned and economic

analysis. Continue being as perspicacious as you have

been.

 

Paul Krugman: Thanks a lot.