I think I have to go line by line on Krugman's article, Fall of the American Empire...
The appeal to Trump versus immigrant children...
Americans adopted, adopted, for better or worse, I say for the worse worse big picture and in the long run, thousands and thousands of Chinese girl infants, whom their Chinese parents and government and the Chinese people would otherwise have exposed.
But enough is enough latinos, having them all just pour over the border helter skelter. I say they are using bringing kids to get the kind of stupid sympathy they have gotten through deeply cynical pundits like Krugman.
What if the Chinese now said, observing carefully how we are handling the latinos, "Why not just send large boatloads of excess Chinese girls to America. Say 5 or 10 million, just for a start! They can't even stop us, baby! We can heavily destabilize, and Sinify, those motherfuckers, at the same time!"
You want to try to adopt some of them, even though they have a latino parent or parents? Knock yourselves out trying, and then good luck, with our stupid adoption laws favoring the latino parents over you, baby....
How bout adopting a Muslim female infant?
Lots of luck, if you are foolish and disoriented enough to want to do something like that, say to convert it to Christianity to save its soul!
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/mostlymuslim/2017/06/first-muslim-adoption-agency/
But let's move on. This is a work in progress, call it an improvisation...
According to Krugman, All Trump's diverse irrational and seemingly improvisational foibles somehow end up amounting to a systematic rejection of longstanding American values.
Now, just stop, for a moment, and think about that assertion, true or false.
Krugman is claiming that Trump is a systematic unAmerican.
Why would a supposedly smart guy like Krugman blunder into acknowledging Trump as a systematic right wing radical revolutionary? Why?
To build a radical left opposition out of more or less nothing? What is the point of this?
Krugman doesn't believe in a radical left opposition either!
But let's move on. Krugman's American values: freedom, human rights, and the rule of law.
About this assertion, Krugman and I disagree about one fundamental thing: There was nothing distinctively American about these principles.
We disagree on two more critical points he has conveniently overlooked: American values were based originally on equality, and it was global equality, not just equality among Americans.
The other principle he has left out is that Americans believed in what they called the brotherhood of man, all men everywhere, not just Americans. He says they stood for something larger than themselves. In fact it was very much larger than themselves, not just a little larger.
These principles were the common currency of radical Whig and European jacobin, leftist, and liberal political thought, from the late 18th Century onward. They are a cornerstone of economic thought.
They were not distinctively American values because they explicitly rejected the nation state, and embraced the universal globalist brotherhood of man, the liberty and equality of all so called classes, rejection of any established religion whatsoever including Christianity, and opposition to any social or economic hierarchy based on ancien regime Old European Order principles.
He even calls them universal principles. When you hear the term universal principle, watch out. Why? Not that there might not be such things, but they are not these. Had they been, all men would have held them as such, from the beginning. The original position, we hold these truths to be self evident, Locke, Rawls, etc etc etc. The so called Enlightenment...
But let's move on. Krugman asserts that it was these principles that made us great. My own view is that these principles undermined any real longterm chance we ever might have had for greatness, not least because they repudiated, ab initio, the very concept of nation state or imperial greatness itself.
But let's move on, Gunnar Myrdal and American flavor of enlightenment marred by American black white racism, the only kind folks like Krugman want to talk about, other than anti semitism (which they don't think is racism), so they miss most of the meaning of the term.
Their concept of racism is the Whig interpretation of racism. As if racism were as it were black and white. As if there were whites (people of no color), and all others, ranged against them: people of color.
I am going to tell you something shocking to the Whig conscience: the very concept of race and racialism, of eugenics, of selection by race, of the natural and medical science of so called racial distinctions, many of which are quite real, these are things that grew out of the enlightenment itself.
Call it the darkie side of the enlightenment! The enlightenment in spades. The side whose name no Whig pundit or historian will whisper, baby.
Eugenics, human or animal, and genetic modification, animal and plant, comparative characteristics, are enlightenment progressive notions, in spades.
Greatness and goodness, power and world trade. Both were both. As Krugman phrases it, hand in hand. This is a highly simplified fairy tale. What does he mean? For the last 70 years the US used its greatness, its power to promote good world trade.
We were a different kind of great power, one that inspired trust. What we most inspired were greed, theft, and bitter rivalry. Krugman paints a rather different picture. Certainly we intended for the liberal international system to benefit us more than others. That has not been at all how it has worked out.
Krugman wants desperately to distance himself and his profession from what I have been hammering home here for years: economics as the doomsday machine for the West.
How does he try to do it here? He ascribes the LIEO to others, to non economists, to Cordell Hull, a state department head. He mentions only the Marshall Plan, NATO, and GATT. He leaves out the rest of the overtly economics driven aspects of the LIEO.
But he lets slip that Hull believed that prosperous trade among nations was essential to building an enduring peace.
That of course is rather an economists' notion, isn't it, though mouthed by Hull, apparently.
He had been coached, shall we say. Where did the notion come from? It came from economists, such as Cobden, peace through free trade.
Remember what I said recently about certain very clever pundits, like Brooks and Krugman, who would never ever come clean, get caught dead to rights, confess that they had been wrong once or all along? Niall Ferguson actually affirmed this point about Krugman in a televised interview I watched recently... See also recent post:
Krugman wants to frame the outcome we are facing, and Trump is hopelessly fighting, as one created by anyone but economists.
He says you want to think of the post war political and economic institutions, GATT, Marshall Plan, NATO, as the brainchildren not of economists or of business interests.
He actually goes farther back, trying to exonerate the whole economics profession as well as business interests to whom they are beholden, going back a hundred or two hundred years (unless you read Wallerstein, even farther back):
The modern world trading system itself was largely the brainchild (when they say brainchild they usually mean that of a brain damaged child...) of Cordell Hull. This is an astounding and stupendous lie.
No more false, cynical, and self effacing account can possibly be imagined. I would have expected nothing whatever less than such a confection from Krugman, in this almost the last ditch.
What is one key error he avoided? Blaming globalization and the LIEO on one group or faction of economists. He senses the terrible danger in such a flawed approach. No. He needed to frame responsibility for the LIEO out of whole non economist cloth. The big lie.
"The first thing we do....let's kill all the economists...." Shakespeare paraphrase. This is of course just a compliment. See NYT below, 1990.
'''The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers,'' was stated by Dick the Butcher in ''Henry VI,'' Part II, act IV, Scene II, Line 73. Dick the Butcher was a follower of the rebel Jack Cade, who thought that if he disturbed law and order, he could become king. Shakespeare meant it as a compliment to attorneys and judges who instill justice in society.' NYT 1990
Back then, the NYT interpreted Shakespeare as complimenting lawyers. Was he? Think about it. The Florida Bar contends that it was a lawyer joke. I side with the Bar, not with the NYT.
But let's move on, we and our British allies had conquered a large part of the world.... This was never on the American constitutional agenda. Quite the contrary.
He says the Pax Americana was an empire of sorts, when in fact we forced a final end to our allies' colonial empires, especially including Britain's, which Krugman does not mention, at the same time that we allowed Soviet Russia to take over Eastern Europe, which he does.
He sees some parallels to ancient Rome, Pax Romana.
He is just one step from one of my favorite economists' assertions, the virtues of the greatest trading empire in history supposedly, the Pax Mongolica! (Terms search this blog: Pax Mongolica.)
Creating allies out of enemies has not at all turned out as America intended. Most democratic regimes thus created have not worked, and will not work going forward.
Most of what one really should call The World of Color fails to share our core values, (but wants all our material and intellectual stuff,) in fact the opposite, and has little interest in protecting them, because they rightly see them as a part of Krugman's hypocritical globalist White Christian and Jewish dominated LIEO.
It has been our founding ideals which were intended, and which have turned out, to keep us weak.
That we came to be so called leaders of a so called free world was strictly a result of factors like luck, geography, natural resources wealth, indecision, helter skelter market capitalist industrialization, and political confusion, not the result of effects flowing from our universalist constitutional principles, which called for us to be, and to remain, a weak but highly democratic, proselytizing anti imperialist, post colonial, big dumb diverse large country, in the Western Hemisphere.
The Krugmanesque globalist economist wants all tariffs and all other restraints on trade discarded, and let the global market chips, the Davos Party chips, the LIEO chips, fall where they may, baby!
That is fundamentally what has really got him and his constituency ticked, but they can't say that. They have to play the human rights card even here at home re illegal migration, like Samantha Power did abroad, ramming human rights up the ass of anyone who stands in her global market capitalist kind of Democrat's way.
But let's move on...He says America isn't nearly as dominant, his words not mine, a power as it was 70 years. 70 years is most of the duration of Krugman's, all economists', and the West's LIEO.
If the LIEO, as he admits, even though he also falsely asserts it wasn't the economists' doing, has resulted in America being not nearly as dominant as it was a mere 70 years ago, and during a time when he also admits we fought no major war and when we had what he calls a Pax Americana, why would he now support such a gross loser order, going forward, unless he is bent on committing national and civilizational suicide?
Krugman's LIEO has raised up a multitude of countries, both erstwhile allies, former and current enemies, and so called new but fallen away allies.
He says Trump is delusional if he thinks they will back down from US repudiation of its own LIEO. Of course Trump is delusional if he thinks that.
But Krugman is delusional if he thinks that the picture he has painted of relentless decline, under his own economic regime, should continue along the same course.
Krugman raises the bogey of millions of workers being displaced. Notably, he does not mention where these workers work. Most of our workers here have already been displaced by Krugman's LIEO. That is the dirty little secret he wants to keep from you. He wants global convergence, and global consolidation as much as Leonhardt does, but he can't frame the issue that way for cashiered and increasingly impoverished American middle and lower income workers and readers. Leonhardt can make the faux nationalist economics argument about ATT consolidation; Krugman probably will stay out of that pundit fight. Good Leonhardt nationalist economic cop, bad Krugman globalist economic cop.
What does self interest mean, when you are a globalist economist? Increasing relative national decline?
What do being good by being great by promoting free trade amount to?
If relative decline is his answer, and it is, why have bothered in the first place? Why continue along that path?
Answer: There is no longer any alternative. Bingo!
Krugman says Trump is turning us into an ineffectual bully.
We bullied our own Western Great Power allies out of their own Empires, at the very outset of the 70 year period Krugman refers to....
Bully for us, and for the West now, and going forward, baby!
Why not say a few words about trade deals. I suggest you all read Prestowitz' old book Trading Places, for example, (Termss search thiss blog: trading places) to get a real flavor for what Krugman may be talking about when he says our smart trade deals were also about more than dollars and cents. They were, as he says admiringly, about a whole helluva lot more than dollars and cents, baby! But hey, doesn't that idea itself violate the most sacrosanct principle of global market economics? Forget I mentioned it.
But if they did make America richer, over a long period of time, say 70 years, then why are we, as he says, not nearly as dominant a power as we were 70 years ago? Granted the Marshall Plan enabled former allies and enemies to catch up, but the theory was predicated also on the idea that this very freer trade process would further enrich America in relative terms over time. The opposite has happened.
It would be more accurate, and far more important, to point out that Trump represents not merely the Fall of the so called American Empire, really a species of misnomer, but rather more or less the next to last ditch in the long fall of the West, to which America itself has contributed so much:
"Only one thing could have prolonged the existence of the European Empires---the continuing approval and support of the United States. It was the denial of that support that spelled the end of the old European Empires. The citizens of the United States had not joined in the Second World War to prop up a system of imperial domination against which they had been the first people to revolt. And it has been with genuine bewilderment that they find themselves today so generally reviled as its inheritor....." Sir Michael Howard
The appeal to Trump versus immigrant children...
Americans adopted, adopted, for better or worse, I say for the worse worse big picture and in the long run, thousands and thousands of Chinese girl infants, whom their Chinese parents and government and the Chinese people would otherwise have exposed.
But enough is enough latinos, having them all just pour over the border helter skelter. I say they are using bringing kids to get the kind of stupid sympathy they have gotten through deeply cynical pundits like Krugman.
What if the Chinese now said, observing carefully how we are handling the latinos, "Why not just send large boatloads of excess Chinese girls to America. Say 5 or 10 million, just for a start! They can't even stop us, baby! We can heavily destabilize, and Sinify, those motherfuckers, at the same time!"
You want to try to adopt some of them, even though they have a latino parent or parents? Knock yourselves out trying, and then good luck, with our stupid adoption laws favoring the latino parents over you, baby....
How bout adopting a Muslim female infant?
Lots of luck, if you are foolish and disoriented enough to want to do something like that, say to convert it to Christianity to save its soul!
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/mostlymuslim/2017/06/first-muslim-adoption-agency/
But let's move on. This is a work in progress, call it an improvisation...
According to Krugman, All Trump's diverse irrational and seemingly improvisational foibles somehow end up amounting to a systematic rejection of longstanding American values.
Now, just stop, for a moment, and think about that assertion, true or false.
Krugman is claiming that Trump is a systematic unAmerican.
Why would a supposedly smart guy like Krugman blunder into acknowledging Trump as a systematic right wing radical revolutionary? Why?
To build a radical left opposition out of more or less nothing? What is the point of this?
Krugman doesn't believe in a radical left opposition either!
But let's move on. Krugman's American values: freedom, human rights, and the rule of law.
About this assertion, Krugman and I disagree about one fundamental thing: There was nothing distinctively American about these principles.
We disagree on two more critical points he has conveniently overlooked: American values were based originally on equality, and it was global equality, not just equality among Americans.
The other principle he has left out is that Americans believed in what they called the brotherhood of man, all men everywhere, not just Americans. He says they stood for something larger than themselves. In fact it was very much larger than themselves, not just a little larger.
These principles were the common currency of radical Whig and European jacobin, leftist, and liberal political thought, from the late 18th Century onward. They are a cornerstone of economic thought.
They were not distinctively American values because they explicitly rejected the nation state, and embraced the universal globalist brotherhood of man, the liberty and equality of all so called classes, rejection of any established religion whatsoever including Christianity, and opposition to any social or economic hierarchy based on ancien regime Old European Order principles.
He even calls them universal principles. When you hear the term universal principle, watch out. Why? Not that there might not be such things, but they are not these. Had they been, all men would have held them as such, from the beginning. The original position, we hold these truths to be self evident, Locke, Rawls, etc etc etc. The so called Enlightenment...
But let's move on. Krugman asserts that it was these principles that made us great. My own view is that these principles undermined any real longterm chance we ever might have had for greatness, not least because they repudiated, ab initio, the very concept of nation state or imperial greatness itself.
But let's move on, Gunnar Myrdal and American flavor of enlightenment marred by American black white racism, the only kind folks like Krugman want to talk about, other than anti semitism (which they don't think is racism), so they miss most of the meaning of the term.
Their concept of racism is the Whig interpretation of racism. As if racism were as it were black and white. As if there were whites (people of no color), and all others, ranged against them: people of color.
I am going to tell you something shocking to the Whig conscience: the very concept of race and racialism, of eugenics, of selection by race, of the natural and medical science of so called racial distinctions, many of which are quite real, these are things that grew out of the enlightenment itself.
Call it the darkie side of the enlightenment! The enlightenment in spades. The side whose name no Whig pundit or historian will whisper, baby.
Eugenics, human or animal, and genetic modification, animal and plant, comparative characteristics, are enlightenment progressive notions, in spades.
Greatness and goodness, power and world trade. Both were both. As Krugman phrases it, hand in hand. This is a highly simplified fairy tale. What does he mean? For the last 70 years the US used its greatness, its power to promote good world trade.
We were a different kind of great power, one that inspired trust. What we most inspired were greed, theft, and bitter rivalry. Krugman paints a rather different picture. Certainly we intended for the liberal international system to benefit us more than others. That has not been at all how it has worked out.
Krugman wants desperately to distance himself and his profession from what I have been hammering home here for years: economics as the doomsday machine for the West.
How does he try to do it here? He ascribes the LIEO to others, to non economists, to Cordell Hull, a state department head. He mentions only the Marshall Plan, NATO, and GATT. He leaves out the rest of the overtly economics driven aspects of the LIEO.
But he lets slip that Hull believed that prosperous trade among nations was essential to building an enduring peace.
That of course is rather an economists' notion, isn't it, though mouthed by Hull, apparently.
He had been coached, shall we say. Where did the notion come from? It came from economists, such as Cobden, peace through free trade.
Remember what I said recently about certain very clever pundits, like Brooks and Krugman, who would never ever come clean, get caught dead to rights, confess that they had been wrong once or all along? Niall Ferguson actually affirmed this point about Krugman in a televised interview I watched recently... See also recent post:
"Saturday, June 9, 2018
He says you want to think of the post war political and economic institutions, GATT, Marshall Plan, NATO, as the brainchildren not of economists or of business interests.
He actually goes farther back, trying to exonerate the whole economics profession as well as business interests to whom they are beholden, going back a hundred or two hundred years (unless you read Wallerstein, even farther back):
The modern world trading system itself was largely the brainchild (when they say brainchild they usually mean that of a brain damaged child...) of Cordell Hull. This is an astounding and stupendous lie.
No more false, cynical, and self effacing account can possibly be imagined. I would have expected nothing whatever less than such a confection from Krugman, in this almost the last ditch.
What is one key error he avoided? Blaming globalization and the LIEO on one group or faction of economists. He senses the terrible danger in such a flawed approach. No. He needed to frame responsibility for the LIEO out of whole non economist cloth. The big lie.
"The first thing we do....let's kill all the economists...." Shakespeare paraphrase. This is of course just a compliment. See NYT below, 1990.
'''The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers,'' was stated by Dick the Butcher in ''Henry VI,'' Part II, act IV, Scene II, Line 73. Dick the Butcher was a follower of the rebel Jack Cade, who thought that if he disturbed law and order, he could become king. Shakespeare meant it as a compliment to attorneys and judges who instill justice in society.' NYT 1990
Back then, the NYT interpreted Shakespeare as complimenting lawyers. Was he? Think about it. The Florida Bar contends that it was a lawyer joke. I side with the Bar, not with the NYT.
But let's move on, we and our British allies had conquered a large part of the world.... This was never on the American constitutional agenda. Quite the contrary.
He says the Pax Americana was an empire of sorts, when in fact we forced a final end to our allies' colonial empires, especially including Britain's, which Krugman does not mention, at the same time that we allowed Soviet Russia to take over Eastern Europe, which he does.
He sees some parallels to ancient Rome, Pax Romana.
He is just one step from one of my favorite economists' assertions, the virtues of the greatest trading empire in history supposedly, the Pax Mongolica! (Terms search this blog: Pax Mongolica.)
Creating allies out of enemies has not at all turned out as America intended. Most democratic regimes thus created have not worked, and will not work going forward.
Most of what one really should call The World of Color fails to share our core values, (but wants all our material and intellectual stuff,) in fact the opposite, and has little interest in protecting them, because they rightly see them as a part of Krugman's hypocritical globalist White Christian and Jewish dominated LIEO.
It has been our founding ideals which were intended, and which have turned out, to keep us weak.
That we came to be so called leaders of a so called free world was strictly a result of factors like luck, geography, natural resources wealth, indecision, helter skelter market capitalist industrialization, and political confusion, not the result of effects flowing from our universalist constitutional principles, which called for us to be, and to remain, a weak but highly democratic, proselytizing anti imperialist, post colonial, big dumb diverse large country, in the Western Hemisphere.
The Krugmanesque globalist economist wants all tariffs and all other restraints on trade discarded, and let the global market chips, the Davos Party chips, the LIEO chips, fall where they may, baby!
That is fundamentally what has really got him and his constituency ticked, but they can't say that. They have to play the human rights card even here at home re illegal migration, like Samantha Power did abroad, ramming human rights up the ass of anyone who stands in her global market capitalist kind of Democrat's way.
But let's move on...He says America isn't nearly as dominant, his words not mine, a power as it was 70 years. 70 years is most of the duration of Krugman's, all economists', and the West's LIEO.
If the LIEO, as he admits, even though he also falsely asserts it wasn't the economists' doing, has resulted in America being not nearly as dominant as it was a mere 70 years ago, and during a time when he also admits we fought no major war and when we had what he calls a Pax Americana, why would he now support such a gross loser order, going forward, unless he is bent on committing national and civilizational suicide?
Krugman's LIEO has raised up a multitude of countries, both erstwhile allies, former and current enemies, and so called new but fallen away allies.
He says Trump is delusional if he thinks they will back down from US repudiation of its own LIEO. Of course Trump is delusional if he thinks that.
But Krugman is delusional if he thinks that the picture he has painted of relentless decline, under his own economic regime, should continue along the same course.
Krugman raises the bogey of millions of workers being displaced. Notably, he does not mention where these workers work. Most of our workers here have already been displaced by Krugman's LIEO. That is the dirty little secret he wants to keep from you. He wants global convergence, and global consolidation as much as Leonhardt does, but he can't frame the issue that way for cashiered and increasingly impoverished American middle and lower income workers and readers. Leonhardt can make the faux nationalist economics argument about ATT consolidation; Krugman probably will stay out of that pundit fight. Good Leonhardt nationalist economic cop, bad Krugman globalist economic cop.
What does self interest mean, when you are a globalist economist? Increasing relative national decline?
What do being good by being great by promoting free trade amount to?
If relative decline is his answer, and it is, why have bothered in the first place? Why continue along that path?
Answer: There is no longer any alternative. Bingo!
Krugman says Trump is turning us into an ineffectual bully.
We bullied our own Western Great Power allies out of their own Empires, at the very outset of the 70 year period Krugman refers to....
Bully for us, and for the West now, and going forward, baby!
Why not say a few words about trade deals. I suggest you all read Prestowitz' old book Trading Places, for example, (Termss search thiss blog: trading places) to get a real flavor for what Krugman may be talking about when he says our smart trade deals were also about more than dollars and cents. They were, as he says admiringly, about a whole helluva lot more than dollars and cents, baby! But hey, doesn't that idea itself violate the most sacrosanct principle of global market economics? Forget I mentioned it.
But if they did make America richer, over a long period of time, say 70 years, then why are we, as he says, not nearly as dominant a power as we were 70 years ago? Granted the Marshall Plan enabled former allies and enemies to catch up, but the theory was predicated also on the idea that this very freer trade process would further enrich America in relative terms over time. The opposite has happened.
It would be more accurate, and far more important, to point out that Trump represents not merely the Fall of the so called American Empire, really a species of misnomer, but rather more or less the next to last ditch in the long fall of the West, to which America itself has contributed so much:
"Only one thing could have prolonged the existence of the European Empires---the continuing approval and support of the United States. It was the denial of that support that spelled the end of the old European Empires. The citizens of the United States had not joined in the Second World War to prop up a system of imperial domination against which they had been the first people to revolt. And it has been with genuine bewilderment that they find themselves today so generally reviled as its inheritor....." Sir Michael Howard
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
SOME THINGS TRUE EVEN IF TRUMP SAYS THEMSunday, March 20, 2011
RE MERCILESS GLOBAL MARKETS THOMAS FRIEDMAN PICKING WINNERS THE WAR WITH NO NAME BEHIND THE COLD WAR HAS NOW BEEN LOST
...
Flipping flipping pundits on unflipped pundits....
Flipping Friedman on Krugman....
Thank you Paul Krugman for setting us all straight on Trump, and on us.
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