The Third Estate Sunday Review focuses on politics and culture. We're an online magazine. We don't play nice and we don't kiss butt. In the words of Tuesday Weld: "I do not ever want to be a huge star. Do you think I want a success? I refused "Bonnie and Clyde" because I was nursing at the time but also because deep down I knew that it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of "Bob and Carol and Fred and Sue" or whatever it was called. It reeked of success."
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Truest statement of the week II
The 2012 election campaign demonstrates the complete bankruptcy of the US two-party system, as far as the working class is concerned. Five years into the deepest economic slump since the 1930s, the US political system is incapable of enacting or even proposing any measure to create jobs or alleviate the widening conditions of social misery. Obama and Romney, and the various Senate and House candidates, vie with each other in proposing measures to attack the working class through cuts in social spending and handouts for corporations and the super-rich.
When Krugman pleads with Obama to “do a Harry Truman” and “run against a ‘do-nothing’ Republican Congress,” he covers up one essential fact: it is both parties that are attacking the working class.
There is nothing innocent or naïve about Krugman’s political role. In recent weeks he has emerged as an aggressive media apologist for Obama’s economic policies, writing in the Times, in the New York Review of Books, interviewed in the German Der Spiegel and on the front page of the British Guardian.
-- Patrick Martin takes the economist over his knee in "Paul Krugman shills for Obama and capitalism" (WSWS).