Tag Archives: Paul Krugman

08/11/15

Krugman and the Times Still Spinning Obama’s Legacy

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

In the view of The New York Times and other beacons of the liberal media, President Barack Obama’s policies are a resounding success and he rarely makes a misstep. The harmful effects of his policies, as well as his many scandals, must be ignored or covered up with misleading statistics and deceitful reporting that preserve his radical, left-wing legacy, and even make it sound mainstream.

Members of the media often follow the lead of the Times in choosing the angles for their own reporting. And, as we noted last year, Paul Krugman’s columns for that paper, while opinion pieces, reflect the Times’ underlying perspective and political agenda.

Just as last summer Krugman triumphantly announced that 2014 would go down in history as “as one of those years when America took a major turn in the right direction,” his August 10 column seeks to demonstrate how Republican presidential candidates are unable to confront Obama’s “failure to fail,” despite all the dire conservative warnings. In other words, Krugman has once again penned a defense of President Obama’s agenda, particularly Obamacare and America’s economic growth.

“Talk to right-wingers, and they will inevitably assert that it [Obamacare] has been a disaster,” he claims. “But ask exactly what form this disaster has taken, and at best you get unverified anecdotes about rate hikes and declining quality.”

Those “unverified anecdotes” were considered so credible that Krugman’s own paper dedicated a front-page article last October to the crisis facing Americans who could no longer pay for their rising deductibles and their medical expenses under Obamacare: “About 7.3 million Americans are enrolled in private coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces,” wrote the Times, “and more than 80 percent qualified for federal subsidies to help with the cost of their monthly premiums. But many are still on the hook for deductibles that can top $5,000 for individuals and $10,000 for families—the trade-off, insurers say, for keeping premiums for the marketplace plans relatively low.”

But the Times’ reporting on this issue was a short-term divergence from its, and other papers,’ long-term campaign to demonstrate that Obamacare has been successful regardless of the evidence demonstrating that it has damaged Americans’ ability to pay for their health care. Any objective analysis—one not secretly swayed by hidden political and familial connections—would conclude that Obamacare has been an abject failure marked by rising costs and declining care.

“Obamacare was supposed to be a job-killer…” writes Krugman, criticizing Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio (R-FL). Krugman writes that “in the year and a half since Obamacare went fully into effect, the U.S. economy has added an average of 237,000 private-sector jobs per month” and labels this a better performance than any “since the 1990s,” better even when compared with President Ronald Reagan’s term in office.

“Many employers cut workers’ hours to avoid the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to provide health insurance to anyone working 30 hours a week or more,” wrote Mortimer Zuckerman for The Wall Street Journal last year. “The unintended consequence of President Obama’s ‘signature legislation’? Fewer full-time workers. In many cases two people are working the same number of hours that one had previously worked.”

Zuckerman broke down the employment figures from the previous month, another one of those months with an increase of about a quarter million people in private-sector jobs: “Full-time jobs last month plunged by 523,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. What has increased are part-time jobs. They soared by about 800,000 to more than 28 million. Just think of all those Americans working part time, no doubt glad to have the work but also contending with lower pay, diminished benefits and little job security.” That is the America that Obamacare and the Obama economy are creating.

The Hill’s Vicki Needham reported on August 7 that “wage growth remains stagnant even as the labor market makes gains.” Despite this, Needham describes the current “improving” economy as a “boon for President Obama.”

This is an economic shell game, pure and simple. As a Princeton economics professor, and former Enron consultant, Krugman must know better. He does acknowledge that there are “many reasons to qualify” the low unemployment rate, “notably the fact that measured unemployment is low in part because of a decline in the percentage of Americans in the labor force.” But that huge understatement was it as far as balance goes.

The labor participation rate is actually stuck at around 62.6 percent, comparable to the 1970s. That’s more than three percent less labor participation by Americans than there was in January 2009 when President Obama took office, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That translates to approximately 90 million people, depending on how you count them, who either aren’t working or aren’t looking for work.

When such inconvenient facts don’t provide support for Obamacare, amnesty, or additional climate change regulations in the service of Obama’s progressive agenda, journalists try to divert the public’s attention by manufacturing supportive headlines.

CNN reported on August 7 that African Americans now have an unemployment rate below 10 percent, at 9.1 percent as of this July, with the headline, “Black unemployment rate falls to lowest in 7 years.” This is “especially encouraging” because “unemployment for African-Americans was 11.4% last July,” it reports.

Glassdoor Chief Economist Andrew Chamberlain tells CNN Money that “The unemployment rate can fall for good reasons—people find jobs—or bad reasons like people who couldn’t find jobs leave the labor force.”

“Unfortunately, I think [this month] it’s more being driven by people leaving the labor market,” he continued.

Yet, despite Chamberlain’s comments, the article maintains that “experts say the trend over the past year is positive.”

But according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, 51 percent of black high school graduates between the age of 17 and 20 are underemployed, meaning unemployed or working part time, but wanting to work full time.

However, the real dereliction of duty by the mainstream media has been with the ongoing underreported or misreported stories that they don’t dare to touch. From the FAA hiring scandal, to the IRS scandal, to Fast & Furious and the Benghazi scandals, the media run faster and harder every day to dream up new stories about trivial events to fill their papers with anything—any diversion that doesn’t implicate the Obama administration for its widespread and growing malfeasance. This week the diversion is Donald Trump vs. Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, after their debate confrontation last Thursday night, plus the subsequent comments Trump made on CNN.

Reporters won’t admit that Hillary Clinton’s ongoing email scandal involving the misuse of classified information, lies, and stonewalling, is, in fact, a State Department scandal. After all, the State Department knew about then-Secretary of State Clinton’s use of private email, and allowed her to do all of her business on a private email server, leaving it vulnerable to sophisticated hackers such as those operating in China, Russia, and North Korea. NBC News reported on Monday that “China’s cyber spies have accessed the private emails of ‘many’ top Obama administration officials, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official and a top secret document obtained by NBC News, and have been doing so since at least April 2010.”

President Obama has admitted that he exchanged emails with Secretary Clinton at her private address, but still maintains that he didn’t know “the details” about her private server, or that she did all of her government business on it. He had originally said he learned about Hillary’s “private email address use through recent news reports, [at] ‘the same time everybody else learned it.’”

That was the same lie he initially told about how he learned about the IRS targeting of conservative groups.

David Axelrod, the former senior advisor to President Obama, said back in February, during his book tour, “And I’m proud of the fact that, basically, you’ve had an administration that’s been in place for six years in which there hasn’t been a major scandal.”

The only reason these scandals aren’t labeled as such can be blamed on a Krugman-like syndrome: an absolute refusal by these reporters to connect the dots from debacles such as Fast & Furious and the Benghazi scandals back to their real source, the Obama White House. Responsibility for these scandals flows from the top down. Since the Justice Department refuses to seriously investigate these scandals, it is left up to Congress and the media, neither of which have the authority to indict anyone, nor, apparently, the appetite or guts to pursue them.

02/13/15

Media’s Lack of Curiosity About Killer of Muslims in North Carolina

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Was the brutal murder of three Muslims in North Carolina this week a case of “random violence,” or were the three targeted because of their Muslim faith? And why, of all the murders committed across the country this week, did these three grab so much national media attention? The FBI has now joined the investigation.

Perhaps the lessons learned from Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in January of 2011 could inform the answers to these questions, and serve as a reminder of the dangers of biased reporting on murder cases. But, unfortunately, the mainstream media continue to perpetuate a confusing double standard when it comes to reporting on the deaths of innocents.

Why, for example, did the deaths of three Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina gain traction at The Washington Post, Reuters, and many other media outlets which speculated that it was a possible hate crime, while this black teen murdering a white classmate and taking a selfie with the corpse didn’t receive anywhere near the same treatment? And what about the murders occurring in Chicago every day? Don’t those deserve headlines, and candlelight vigils too?

“However, I do think it’s fair to say that attributing political motives to individual killings is much more of a phenomenon on the left than on the right,” argues Mark Hemingway for The Weekly Standard in a column regarding the recent execution-style shootings of Deah Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha.

The alleged shooter, Craig Stephen Hicks, liked the “Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye ‘The Science Guy,’ Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gay Marriage groups and similar progressive pages” on Facebook, notes Hemingway. Maddow didn’t mention any of that on her show when talking about the incident.

Hicks displayed a habit of posting snarky pictures with slogans like, “Democrats aren’t perfect but at least they haven’t been shoving poor Jesus up my c—ch and Ronald Reagan down my throat.” Another picture he promoted reads, “So Rick Santorum thinks that when people get educated they stop believing in God? Best advertisement for Atheism I’ve ever heard.”

And Hicks commented on Ground Zero: “Seems an overwhelming majority of Christians in this country feel that the Muslims are using the Ground Zero Mosque plans to’mark their conquest’ [sic] Bunch of hypocrites, everywhere I’ve been in this country there are churches marking the Christian conquest of this country from the Native Americans. Funny thing is the Christians did that while defying our Constitution, and got away with it!!”

“It was logical for some people to hear about the shootings and wonder if recent news involving the Islamic State—including the deaths of a Jordanian pilot and an American hostage—could lead to some sort of reprisal against Muslims, said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” reported the Post regarding the three deaths on February 11.

In 2011 the SPLC’s Richard Cohen blamed the shooting of Rep. Giffords on Sarah Palin’s political rhetoric, citing the work of staffer Potok. The Discovery Channel plans to air a documentary, “Hate in America,” this month with the SPLC as a partner helping “examine the current realities of intolerance in America.”

The SPLC runs a hate crimes racket, and the media—desperate to promote headlines that fit their pre-existing left-wing narratives about race, inequality and religion—are quick to swallow their propaganda.

“I think it’s perfectly natural to guess that this is anti-Islamic,” Potok told the Post in the interview regarding the triple murder. “Not just because the three victims are Muslim, but because there has been so much terrible news in recent days about extremist Muslims.” Potok also appeared on MSNBC on the morning of February 13 with the news anchor Tamron Hall, and there was no mention of Hicks’ political leanings, which appear to be consistent with their own.

It is ironic that Hicks, himself, may have, at least in part, allowed the SPLC to fuel his own brand of hate—if it was hate, and not a longtime dispute over parking—that caused Hicks to allegedly kill three innocent people.

“We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was…But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers,” wrote Paul Krugman of The New York Times after the Loughner shooting.

“Keith Olbermann had a special edition of his ‘Countdown’ show on MSNBC the night of the shooting, in which he had a series of guests on who all specu­lated that Loughner was influenced by ‘right-wing extremists’ and that the Right was far more guilty of violent and hateful speech than the Left, creating a climate conducive for this sort of action,” I reported back in 2011.

Have the media learned from their past attempts to politicize violent shootings, or does the marked omission of similar rhetoric regarding the Hicks case simply indicate that the mainstream media hope that the progressive ideology of this alleged killer will not actually be used against them?

If Hicks was a champion of liberal causes such as gay rights and abortion, and one’s ideological background has any bearing on the decision to brutally murder someone, then why isn’t the media likewise exploring in depth Hicks’ motivations—his likes, dislikes, ideology, inspiration, etc.—as they did when they erroneously blamed the right for Loughner’s shooting of Giffords? Instead, the Post published a story on the “particular tensions between Islam and atheism” which allowed atheist groups to denounce and separate themselves from the killer. If Hicks had any deeper motivation rooted in progressivism, you wouldn’t find it there.

On February 11 The Washington Post authors quoted from the SPLC, then linked to Hicks’ Facebook page, and failed to inform their readers of Hicks’ admiration for this group.

And the motivation of the attack remains in dispute, despite the hate crime allegations. “This was not a dispute over a parking space; this was a hate crime,” said the victims’ father Mohammed Abu-Salha. His evidence: “This man had picked on my daughter and her husband a couple of times before, and he talked with them with his gun in his belt.”

More recent news reporting by the Associated Press indicates that when Hicks “talked with them with his gun in his belt,” as the father described, it was likely during a dispute over a visitor’s parking space. According to the AP, a resident of that condo “said Hicks complained about once a month that the two men were parking in a visitor’s space as well as their assigned spot.”

It continued: “He would come over to the door, knock on the door and then have a gun on his hip saying ‘you guys need to not park here,’ said Ahmad, a graduate student in chemistry at UNC-Chapel Hill. ‘He did it again after they got married.’”

The victims in the most recent case appear to be the type of Muslims whom many in America would embrace as fellow patriots, rather than as radical fundamentalists who prompt what some term “Islamophobia.” The murdered couple was active in charity efforts. “Barakat had recently posted about providing free dental supplies and food to dozens of homeless people in Durham, something he had done twice in recent months, buying toothpaste, brushes, floss and mouthwash that he put into individual bags for each homeless person,” reported the Post. And his wife had traveled to the Turkish border last year, not to join the Islamic State but to “deliver dental supplies to a Turkish town…”

But then again, Barakat and his wife met while helping to run North Carolina State’s Muslim Student Association (MSA) chapter. Perhaps they weren’t aware of the origins of that organization. The MSA is a Muslim Brotherhood front group, and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is the group that spawned al Qaeda and Hamas. President Obama has embraced the MB at home and abroad, and this is a subject that the media should thoroughly explore, while there is still a chance to diminish their influence. Unfortunately, very few in our media are willing to investigate the MB—or even acknowledge their influence—instead they treat them like some benign, charitable group such as the Kiwanis International.

While it would be convenient for the media, and its allies on the left, to proffer evidence of a violent Muslim backlash when speaking about the culture of hate in a world full of news reports about Islamic State militants beheading their captives, or the Charlie Hebdo murders, not every murder’s newsworthiness should be coldly calculated based on the race, faith, or the known ideology of its participants—or perpetrators. There is an average of about 40 murders a day in this country, most of which we never hear about until the media find one that fits a narrative for them. Or at least they think it does. And then it takes on a life of its own.