"Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.
So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.
We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world."
Well, maybe money can't buy you love but it can, apparently, buy you an election, a POTUS, the most powerful elected official in the world, Lusk contributing over $250m to Grump's campaign, and which is way too much power to give to any spurned lover, I might add.
Krugman is hanging it up at the NY Times. This is his last column. Way too much the apologist for mainstream economics for my tastes but one of the few on a mainstream media platform even willing to challenge out loud how the capital order-- voodoo economics, confidence fairy, zombie ideas, etc-- doesn't always add up. Those of us who care about economic and social justice will miss him.
Hold the press: Krugman is retiring and jumping ship on the NY Times but reactivating a dormant substack account, which he's calling "Krugman wonks out," and in the first two posts at any rate, resemble more his longer wonking out posts at the Times, which get more into the numbers than his regular word-limited columns.
This first post, very promising, does a post-by-post takedown of the DOGE's performative crusade against "waste, fraud, and abuse":
In sum: Half the problem with "Muskaswamy" (the Krugmeister has still got it, right?) is where they go in the federal budget actually isn't where the big money is and they don't even recognize what is actual federal spending and what is local spending, school teachers, police officers, and public health workers, budget items controlled by local governments. And the other half the problem with their so-called "budget analysis" is the excessive overhead in health care spending they call out, relative to health systems in other developed economies, is almost all attributable to private for profit insurers in the US, when of course a major goal of Muskaswamy is to privatize as much of the federal government as they can. Anyway, Krugman wonks out on the DOGE clown show. Check it out.
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