There was time I used to look forward to Sundays; not so much to give thanks nor even because I was ready to worship at the national religion that is the NFL. No, what I looked forward to the most was the Sunday New York Times and my weekly reading of the punditry in their Op/Ed section. The New York Times was my bible in a way; whatever was printed on that “hallowed” paper was gold. Every week, I was able to simultaneously bleed my spleen cursing Republicans and immerse myself in the knowledge that overflowed from “the paper of record”.
Did you know that the good folk at the New York Times call themselves the paper of record? For the longest time I nodded to this marketing slogan believing every inch that was fit to print in “the Grey Lady”. People like Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni, David Brooks and Charles Blow were my oracles of Delphi as far as I was concerned. They at once echoed my ideology as they perpetuated the very dogma and partisan blinders that prevented me from actually thinking for myself. I hate to admit it, but I was a political parrot who kept spewing talking points and regurgitating what I read in Op/Ed sections as if I was spitting original knowledge.
It took a mean mugging from reality and a subsequent cognitive dissonance birthed by indigence and penury for me to finally shed my hackery and see the New York Times for who they are. Holy shit! I’ve been swallowing whole the drivel of the mainstream press for ages as I fed into the very divisiveness that I thought I was fighting against. I look back in disbelief when I used dismiss Fox News viewers as a herd of mindless cultists when I was every bit the cultist myself as I switched between Maddow, Chris Matthews, Joy Reid and the rest of the leftist toadies. Clarity! It takes struggles for people to finally see clearly without political blinders on.
It’s one thing to be a pundit and bloviate about politics. But there is another level of perniciousness that comes with pretending to be an objective analyst while peddling broken ideologies and policies that break the masses. So let me put aside my beef with vacuous writers such as Dowd and Bruni who were mum as church mice when Bush was pushing the Iraq war only to come out after the deed was done to feign outrage. Parenthetically, the New York Times is right back at it again as they are running interference for Donald Trump while he is slow walking humanity to the brink with his militaristic hubris. This was the same deafening silence they serenaded the empty suit Obama with as he was bombing Syria and Libya into the stone ages.
Let me focus instead on the supposed economists at the New York Times who give cover to monetary and fiscal policies which are destroying the fabric of this nation and bleeding the entire world for the sake of enriching a few among us. There are two particular economist who pretend to be scions of truth when in reality they are ideological imps. The two I am referring to are Thomas L. Freidman and Paul Krugman. Let this serve as notice that higher education does not mean higher morality; those who are drunk on power and fame never have the courage to actually speak truth to power and instead perpetuate injustice.
For anyone who wants to question my credentials and wants to disregard what I write because I do not have the titles and celebrity of Freidman and Krugman, let me get this out of the way. I have a Masters of Business Administration from Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School, I spent eight years as an Associate at one of the preeminent consulting companies in the world Booz Allen Hamilton, and I have spent decades reading books on theories of economies and capital from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations to John Maynard Keynes and this Keynesian principles.
But let me not peddle theories and principles here for that is precisely the problem with economist who keep seeing the world through the prism of hypothesis and don’t have the heart and the humanity to see how the current paradigm is breaking people. And when they do speak up for “the people”, they do so through partisan goggles and always nibble at the edge of iniquity instead of going at the root of the problem. This is the exact conundrum of Freidman and Krugman. I actually want to focus more on Krugman for Freidman has been known for years as a clown who rarely has anything of substance to say. It is Krugman who feigns some sort of mastery of economy and pretends to care about the real life consequences of economic policies while doing everything he can to give cover to the economic thievery of Wall Street.
This article was actually inspired a few weeks ago when I ran across an article that Krugman wrote titled “Can Trump Take Health Care Hostage”. To be honest, I could not read the whole thing because I see Krugman to be the morally bankrupt politician that he is. Krugman spent the entirety of the Obama years looking away and lending credibility to the immoral and depraved policies of the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury only to now speak up pretending to be outraged at the excesses of Trump.
This is a mix of piety and maliciousness, Krugman didn’t utter a word as the Obama administration shoveled $14 trillion dollars by way of Quantitative Easing, Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP), and endless bailouts to the same gnomes of Wall Street that bled this nation while refusing to lift a finger to bail out millions who lost their homes to foreclosures. If you want to know why there are record number of homeless people in a city near you, look towards the Obama and Janet Yellen policies of ZIRP and Quantitative Easing which Trump is now continuing–make America’s grave anon.
The irony of it all, Krugman is now speaking up about heath care while cheer leading Obamacare which effectively fed all of us to the leeches of the insurance industry. Remember how Obama promised that the cost curve of health care would be bent? Think again, the cost of health care is now bending and breaking more and more Americans. What Obamacare did was force all of us, under the threat of fees and coercion, to sign up to an already broken system that places primary importance on profits and tertiary value on patients and the people.
This should not be taken as an endorsement of the Republicans nor as some type of ratification of Donald Trump. I wish people would stop seeing everything through binary partisan lenses. Just because I hate spinach does not mean I love cucumbers–everything in this world is not based on narrow partisan ideology. Both Republicans and Democrats are equal crooks who speak grievance to their side while robbing all of us with their policies. The sooner we realize that we have two parties who are co-dependent larcenists working for their plutocrat pimps, the sooner we would be able to reclaim our nation from the grubby hands of globalist monsters.
Way too many of us keep seeing injustice through partisan blinders and refuse to see our common struggle. This paradigm is pushed and perpetuated by the elites who sip lattes in ivory towers. Elitists like Krugman, Freidman and the rest of the pundits and politicians get afforded status, fame and fortunes as long as they splinter and divide us. Economists inhabit a special place among these double-dealing demagogues; they pretend to be referees keeping the system in check when in reality they are using their authority that their titles confer to them in order to spread disinformation and state propaganda.
Just because they use big words does not make them the wiser or a definitive sources of knowledge. To be honest, your antennas should be raised when people start dropping million dollar words–more than likely you are speaking to a broken record who is regurgitating information while pretending to be Imhotep reincarnated. These type of people remind me of the jerk in Good Will Hunting who was droning on and spitting out drivel that he memorized from books as if he wrote them. This is what most economist do, they read books about theories written by men who perished long ago and then swear they are Einstein reinvented. Krugman and his ilk are nothing but a village of circle jerks who read each other’s books and thoroughly blinded by a mix of group think and bias.
There are two cams of economists, the supply-side worshipers and the Keynesian adherents. For the longest time, I counted myself as a Keynesian believing that government had a duty to step in during times of recessions in order to stimulate the economy. Hindsight is the greatest educator known to mankind. I now realize that both camps are bankrupt and full of bunk for neither side has the courage to speak about the very essence of our fractional reserve system that is at the core of poverty in America and throughout the world. If you want to know why the middle-class is vanishing and why you are feeling a constant pang of economic anxiety, it’s because our economic system depends on transferring wealth from the masses to the few by way of monetary and fiscal policies.
Imagine a tooth paste tube; inflation is the pressure point that incrementally rolls up the tube from the bottom in order to squeeze up wealth to those who reside at the top. Our nation is one big pyramid scheme as the 1% continue to get more and more at the cost of the rest of the people. Fractional reserve is the foundation that the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury is built upon whereby our government lends money to private banks at X rate and then the banks get to lend the same money at Y rate to the people. Except now the Federal Reserve is shoveling money to the banks at 0 percent (now you know what ZIRP is) and then the banks make billions by lending us the same free money on an APR basis while charging us outrageous penalties.
The banks have hijacked our government in order to get free money only to turn around and charge us interest and fees in order to bury us in perpetual debt–debt is the 21st century slavery and politicians, pundits and economists are the overseers. Did you know, by the way, that the Federal Reserve is not a government agency? Oh you didn’t? Well end me an ear, the Fed is a private entity that is wholly owned by the banks and the Board of Governors are comprised of banking executives. Our nation is nothing more than a corporate entity whereby our government has been turned into a police element in order to trickle money from the 99% to the godlessly wealthy aristocracy. It has been this way since John Rockefeller effectively initiated a hostile takeover of America by inducing a banking crisis then creating the Federal Reserve through his puppet Woodrow Wilson.
It’s sad, the fourth estate was supposed to be the the guardians of justice and the last check against the excesses of those who have power. Instead, the “free press” has been inverted on its head as journalists and reporters in newsrooms have besmirched the profession of journalism in order to get more followers. Following leads is dead and truth speaking has been annihilated by a fatuous bunch of reporters who are too busy wining it up and dinning with the very same powerful people they are supposed to be keeping in check. They don’t keep anything in check, instead they are just inflating their checking accounts by dishonoring a virtuous profession for the sake of fame and fortunes. Corporate journalists, for that is exactly what they are, are nothing more than a collection self-aggrandizing jackasses.
This is what the crooks at the New York Times refuse to speak against and instead fight over politics in order to divert our attention from the root of our misfortune. Krugman is nothing more than a crook with a fancy title who can spit out big words and economic theories whose heart and soul is nonetheless desolate. I am reminded of the scene in Training Day when Denzel Washington was reading the paper in the restaurant at the start of the movie. When Ethan Hawk interrupted his morning routine, Denzel said:
This is a newspaper. It’s 90 percent bullshit, but it’s entertaining. That’s why I read it, because it entertains me.
Denzel was being kind, the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media is 100% bullshit. They are nothing more than partisan hacks in expensive suits who are giving leeway and allowance to the very same injustices they pretend to be writing against. The feature picture for this article says it all; the New York Times has the blood of 500,000 Iraqi lives on their hands for being the main cheerleaders of Bush’s war of choice. The more things change, the more they are the same. Once again they are looking away as Trump is going about perpetuating the same broken policies of Obama and Bush before him.
There is nothing entertaining about the New York Times and the rest of mainstream media who are intentionally splintering us as a people in order to distract us. The same applies to the duplicitous pundits in the Op/Ed sections who are too busy chasing re-tweets and getting paid by their corporate masters to actually tell us the truth. At the top of this list is Paul Krugman, a policy guru who is actually a pugnacious pundit blinded by theories and his own ego. This is what happens when one works at the paper of drivel; “the grey lady” is actually yellow and their reporters are nothing more than a collection of crooks. #PaperOfDrivel
“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” ~ Adam Smith
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Check out the Ghion Cast below, it’s talking about the injustice that is mugging my native home Ethiopia but in reality what is bleeding Ethiopia is the same blueprint of greed and fractional reserve larceny that is bleeding the rest of humanity.
Forget the The New York Times, a paper of broken ideological record, the Ghion Journal is the paper of standard. Book mark this site and come back often; we don’t do corporate agenda here, we speak truth against the greedy and the powerful.
Teodrose Fikremariam
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- Ethiopia’s Choice: Poverty through Grievance or Prosperity through Unity - September 9, 2019
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