On Friday, the Fiscal Times published an excellent David Dayen takedown of Paul Krugman’s Clinton campaign-inspired propaganda on Bernie Sanders proposal to support Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 21st Century Glass-Steagall bill...
What the Liberal Attacks on Bernie Sanders Are Really AboutBy David Dayen Fiscal Times January 22, 2016
Self-styled liberal wonks and opinion writers decided to turn their guns on Bernie Sanders this week, deriding him as myopic, unrealistic and even wrong on the merits of his arguments on behalf of single-payer healthcare and systemic financial reform. But at least on financial reform, they weren’t actually attacking Bernie. They were attacking Elizabeth Warren. It’s Warren, not Sanders, who represents the leftward pole in the intra-Democratic debate over how deeply to reform the financial sector. Warren, not Sanders, manifests part of her vision in the bill she wrote — the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, named for the two Depression-era lawmakers who initially separated commercial and investment banking. When Hillary Clinton and her supporters in the media dismiss Glass-Steagall as unnecessary and dangerous, they dismiss a consensus in most developed nations about the need to break interconnections in finance. The radicals in this debate, in other words, are those protecting the deregulatory status quo. Here’s one such radical: Paul Krugman, who derided the restoration of Glass-Steagall as “nowhere near solving the real problems.” As manycommentators do, Krugman takes a detour into identifying whether the investment/commercial bank firewall caused the 2008 crisis, an irrelevant parlour game, unless you think the next financial crash will occur in precisely the same way. He is wedded to the idea that the rise of shadow banking — non-bank institutions performing bank-like activities outside the regulatory perimeter — represents the real threat. This runs counter to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s report and a host of financial experts, all of whom list banks’ “too big to fail” status as a central factor. But beyond that, it’s clear to me that Krugman has never read the bill, Elizabeth Warren’s 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, which he’s criticizing…
Dayen’s just getting started. His hammering of sacred cow Krugman, et al, is priceless! You really should take the time to read it!
Long story short: Krugman truly screwed the pooch. Now he’s got nowhere to turn except to make it 110% political...and personal, against Bernie and his supporters. Does this sound like an all-too-familiar m.o.?
You’re damn skippy: Krugman virtually ripped it right out of the pages of the “newly-revised Clinton campaign propaganda/disinformation playbook.”
But, at least Larry Summers—also with his overinflated ego up his ass--made it sound like he had at least (barely) glanced at Warren’s bill (see my cross-post at DKos by Yves Smith, from less than two weeks ago: Yves Smith: “Why Larry Summers is Wrong and Bernie Sanders is Right on Glass Steagall”) prior to writing about it.
So, given Krugman’s propagandizing against Sanders on behalf of Team Clinton, of late on other matters (SEE: “Some Experts, Like Krugman, Supported Single-Payer Until Bernie Sanders Put It In His Platform”), it’s self-evident that Krugman’s reaping what he has sown.
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