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).