Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and op-ed columnist for the New York Times. Professor of Economics at Princeton University and Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics. Author of numerous books, including The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. His new book “End this Depression Now!” has just been published.

NOAA has run OSCURS (Ocean Surface Current Simulator), a numeric model for ocean surface currents, to predict the movement of marine debris generated by the Japan tsunami over five years. The results are shown here. Year 1 = red; Year 2 = orange; Year 3 = yellow; Year 4 = light blue; Year 5 = violet. The OCSURS model is used to measure the movement of surface currents over time, as well as the movement of what is in or on the water. Map courtesy of J. Churnside (NOAA OAR) and created through Google.

A year ago last March it wasn’t just Japan that was exposed to the nightmare of modern civilization, but the whole world. When Mother Nature exposed the dangers of nuclear energy by sending an earthquake and tsunami to damage the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the fallout would go beyond Japan.

But over at the New York Times you would hardly know things are as bad as they are.

Browsing through articles from the last 30 days there were eleven on the Japanese nuclear power plant. And while the article “Japan to Nationalize Fukushima Utility” which was published on May 9 notes that, “The Fukushima Daiichi plant was heavily damaged by a powerful earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, which eventually led to multiple meltdowns at the site and a huge radiation leak that forced tens of thousands from their homes,” there is nothing else mentioned on the fallout. As if the worst of the incident was evacuated homes, and the compensation of the displaced.

Other than that there is no more mention of the effects of the nuclear disaster for the thirty-day period.

What there is mention of is how there is a large public response to the central governments attempts to restart some of the plants. But this comes across as contemptous for grassroots democracy.

In “Last Reactor of 50 in Japan Is Shut Down” published on May 5, journalist Martin Fackler tells Times readers that “last year’s nuclear disaster forced the nation to at least temporarily do without atomic power for the first time in 42 years.” Fackler goes on to report that,

Desperate to avert possible power shortages this summer, the government has tried to convince the public to allow some of the reactors to be restarted. It has conducted simulated stress tests to show whether reactors can withstand the sort of immense earthquake and tsunami that knocked out the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

The problem is that “the public has not accepted the tests, which were conducted largely behind closed doors,” and that, “About 300 protesters gathered Saturday in front of the Trade Ministry to celebrate the temporary shutdown of the nation’s nuclear program, and to call for a permanent end.”

Two days prior to the above article Fackler wrote a more lengthy article, “Japan’s Leaders, Pressed by Public, Fret as Nuclear Shutdown Nears,” on the struggle between the central government and local leaders backed by the public:

Japan’s leaders have made increasingly desperate attempts in recent months to avoid just such a scenario, trying to restart plants shut for routine maintenance and kept that way while they tried to convince a skittish public that the reactors were safe in the wake of last year’s nuclear catastrophe. But the government has run up against a crippling public distrust that recently found a powerful voice in local leaders who are orchestrating a rare challenge to Tokyo’s centralized power.

In discussing the efforts of a young mayor battling the central government to keep the plants closed, Fackler assures his audience that, “There is no guarantee that Mr. Hashimoto’s revolt will last past the summer, when the notion of life without nuclear power will become more real in a nation that relied on reactors to fuel its powerful postwar economy.”

Again the crisis at the Times is the energy crisis, not the environmental and health crisis that our high levels of energy consumption create.

And it’s not just Fackler’s pieces. In a Bloomberg News article published by the New York Times (“Japan’s Idling of Nuclear Plants Is Complete“) we read that,

Japan has had at least some electricity from nuclear plants since May 1970. And before last March, 50 nuclear facilities provided 30 percent of its electricity.

Now, however, the utilities powering the world’s third-biggest economy, behind China and the United States, have been forced to turn to coal, oil and gas-fired plants to keep factories, offices and households supplied with electricity.

Buying and importing those fuels is driving up costs and may lead to higher electricity bills and a further drag on an economy that has contracted in three of the past four years.

Quite simply, these articles read like propaganda put out by the nuclear industry. Because, again, the focus is on hyping concerns of an energy crisis, not our levels of consumption, or the risks nuclear energy poses to our health and the environment.

And beyond the last thirty days, that trend becomes more apparent when you do a simple query using the Times search engine. Look up “Fukushima nuclear” and you get 1,380 articles. Add the word “fallout” and it’s reduced to 143 articles.

But if you look elsewhere you find very serious concerns of fallout.

A BBC article in late March 2012 (“Probe finds high radiation in damaged Fukushima reactor“) reports that, “The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has said damage to one of the reactors is much worse than previously thought,” while also saying, “Radiation was up to 10 times the fatal dose, the highest yet recorded at the plant.”

Common Dreams reported yesterday that “Radioactive cesium measured in samples of silt taken from Tokyo Bay has increased to 1.5-13 times the amount detected in similar samples last August, according to a survey conducted by Kinki University.”

Not even a month after the disaster Forbes magazine reported that, “Radiation from Japan has been detected in drinking water in 13 more American cities, and cesium-137 has been found in American milk—in Montpelier, Vermont—for the first time since the Japan nuclear disaster began.”

A week ago Digital Journal informed its readers in an op-ed piece that,

The Fukushima facility has many fuel rods still filled with unspent fuel. If the fuel is radioactive MOX, there would be enough radiation in just one rod to kill millions of people. Worst case scenario involves the integrity and safety of the rods, which are made of low quality materials accompanied with poor maintenance. This situation means that any major earthquake could cause massive damage to the rods. Additionally, if all of the rods rupture simultaneously, this cataclysmic disaster could mean the annihilation of many life forms on planet Earth.

And in an article published in the International Journal of Health Services last December, a study found that,

Deaths rose 4.46 percent from 2010 to 2011 in the 14 weeks after the arrival of Japanese fallout, compared with a 2.34 percent increase in the prior 14 weeks. The number of infant deaths after Fukushima rose 1.80 percent, compared with a previous 8.37 percent decrease. Projecting these figures for the entire United States yields 13,983 total deaths and 822 infant deaths in excess of the expected.

The authors of the study then go on to say that, “This result suggested that radiation from Japan may have harmed Americans, thus meriting more research.”

Readers of the New York Times should be very concerned that they are getting a distorted picture of the Fukushima nuclear disaster at the “paper of record.” We should be looking into why it is that the energy concern is “all the news fit to print,” and not the environmental and health risks. Considering the powerful influence of lobbies with the media, the prospects of the nuclear energy industry influencing articles, and thus manipulating the opinions of viewers, is a serious concern. Rather than focusing on the concern of energy bills, we need a more serious and sustained focus on our consumption levels, their link to the global capitalist system, and more details on the health and environmental risks of not just nuclear energy, but a wide array of other issues relevant to our production and consumption trends. Unfortunately, the Times has come nowhere close to delivering this level of quality journalism.

The NYT had an article reporting the fact that whites did not constitute a majority of births in the United States for the first time in the 12 months from July 2010 to July 2011. While this is interesting, it is important to note that the concept of “white” is not well-defined. In the late 19th century, many people of northern European ancestry would not have considered people from the southern Europe and eastern Europe to be of the same racial group. This hostility was put into law in immigration acts passed in 1921 and 1924 that were consciously designed to restrict immigration from these regions.

It is virtually certain that many of the people from groups not currently viewed as “white” will be in subsequent decades. This is especially likely as intermarriage between these groups increase.

The piece also bizarrely tells readers that:

“A more diverse young population forms the basis of a generational divide with the country’s elderly, a group that is largely white and grew up in a world that was too.

The contrast raises important policy questions. The United States has a spotty record educating minority youth; will older Americans balk at paying to educate a younger generation that looks less like themselves?”

While it is true that the older population is much more white than the younger population, the wealthy are also much more white than the younger population. Since the wealthy have a hugely disproportionate share of political power and do pay a disproportionate share of taxes, it is likely to matter much more to the non-white young whether wealthy whites as a group care about their future rather than if elderly whites do.

By Aaron McQuade:

In response to criticism from the LGBT community and allies over its coverage of a fire that killed a transgender woman this weekend, the New York Times released a statement that reveals a lack of understanding of how serious this problem is.

New York Times Metro Editor Carolyn Ryan stated: “We typically try to capture the personal stories of those whose lives are lost in a fire, and we sought to do so in this case. We certainly did not mean any disrespect to the victim or those who knew her. But, in retrospect, we should have shown more care in our choice of words.”

Unfortunately, the problem with the Times’ article on the death of Lorena Escalera, a transgender woman of color, is bigger than their “choice of words” or with their attempt to “capture” her story. It’s their failure to recognize trans women as women.

The decision by writers Al Baker and Nate Schweber to call her “curvaceous” in the first sentence was not a poor choice of words. It was a poor choice of focus. The way this entire article is framed comes directly from an idea that transgender women are curiosities. That they’re other. That they should be treated differently than other people.  Saying that Lorena was “called” Lorena, even though that is exactly how police identified her, was not a poor choice of words. It was a disrespectful jab at her identity as a trans woman, by implying that she wasn’t really Lorena.

Lorena was a daughter. She was a friend. She was a beloved member of a community. But the only elements of her story that writers Al Baker and Nate Schweber seemed concerned with were; what she looked like, what her neighbors thought she looked like, and whether any items that would typically belong to a woman were in her apartment when it burned. Very little of this is relevant to the actual personal story of Lorena Escalera’s life. It seems very clear that this personal information was included in order to “spice up” the story by exploiting Lorena’s status as a transgender woman – not to actually inform readers about her life.

“As my city’s and our nation’s paper of record, I would expect the New York Times to treat any subject, regardless of their path in life, with dignity,” said trans advocate and journalist Janet Mock. “In Lorena Escalera’s life she was so much more than the demeaning, sexist portrait they painted of girls like us. It goes beyond a ‘choice of words.’ According to the Times’ limiting, harmful portrait of Lorena, she was nothing more than a ‘curvaceous’ bombshell for men to gawk at. That is not the ‘personal’ story of any woman, and until we treat trans women like human beings – in life and death – with dignity, families and struggles, our society will never see us beyond pariahs in our communities.

Unfortunately, many Americans, including members of the media, do view transgender people – and trans women of color in particular – as curiosities at best, or not deserving of basic human dignity at worst. And very few Americans know any trans people in their day-to-day lives, so this viewpoint is never dispelled.  This is why extra care must be taken when reporting on a story that involves a transgender person, especially if that person is no longer able to speak for themselves, as is the case here. Writers and editors alike must be made aware of how common this underlying bias is, and make a conscious effort to remove it when they see it.

This is where the Times’ statement truly fails. Not only does it not show an understanding of what the problem with the original article was, it also makes no assurances to the community that it will educate its writers and editors about how to report on transgender people in the future. There’s nothing forward-looking in the Times statement.

GLAAD did ask the Times to detail what steps will be taken in the future to ensure this doesn’t happen again. We were told that this statement “will be all there is from us on this.”

But this statement is not good enough.  The New York Times has highlighted the personal and inspiring stories of transgender people in the recent past, including an article on Harmony Santana, Laverne Cox and other transgender actresses, a piece on triathlete Chris Mosier and one on classical pianist Sara Davis Buechner. We can be almost certain that the New York Times does understand the problems with its piece on Lorena, and is embarrassed that it ran. Now it’s time for them to say so publicly, and to tell its readers that steps are being taken to ensure that an article like this won’t be printed again.  We thank members of the LGBT community, including trans leaders like Janet Mock, Autumn Sandeen, Laverne Cox, and Jennifer Finney Boylan, trans author and New York Times contributing writer, as well as Colorlines andFeministing, for bringing attention to this story. We hope to continue putting pressure on the Times until they offer assurances that changes will be made.

President Obama doled out the most shocking stream of commencement cliches to the graduating class of Barnard College Monday. To offer just a taste:

“The question is not whether things will get better — they always do… The question is whether together, we can muster the will — in our own lives, in our common institutions, in our politics — to bring about the changes we need. I’m convinced your generation possesses that will.”

Whatever else they possess, the class of 2012 possesses an enormous amount of debt. Heavy borrowing’s not only for graduate students or drop outs from for-profit colleges any more. It’s also for Barnard alums. Forty eight per cent of those graduating this year from Barnard (where the price tag of an education stands at $58,078 ) have taken out loans to pay for their bachelor’s degree. As the New York Times recently pointed out, “Nationally, ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education — up from 45 percent in 1993.”  For these students things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse.  Their will has nothing to do with it.

Standing at $1 trillion and rising fast, outstanding student debt is a bubble set to burst. The New York Times report compiled shocking numbers: “For all borrowers, the average debt in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000.”  Not just the students but also their parents are borrowing. Loans to parents for the college education of children have jumped 75 percent since the 2005-2006, according to the Times.

Just like that first home, millions spent on marketing have made a college education seem like an American must-have. Yet ever since the early 1980s, college tuition has risen faster than wages, and public education spending’s been cut back. As the Times reports: “If the trends continue through 2016, the average cost of a public college will have more than doubled in just 15 years,” even as this year, “state and local spending per college student, adjusted for inflation, reached a 25-year low.”

If you liked the mortgage crisis, you’re going to love the education debacle.  College admissions officers, like mortgage  loan officers, tend to urge borrowers not to worry about the costs. Students have always defaulted. The federal government’s pre-approved the bail-out.  Today, nearly one in ten students default within two years –  about twice what it was five years back. Consumer bankruptcy lawyers have been raising an alarm for a while.

“Take it from those of us on the frontline of economic distress in America,” said William E. Brewer Jr. of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys earlier this year.  “This could very well be the next debt bomb for the U.S. economy.”

Except it’s a different sort of debt bomb. It the sort that individuals have to carry about. Thanks to federal law, there’s no declaring bankruptcy on student loans and there’s no debt relief. There’s no getting a refund for an education that did you no good. At the end of the day those payments can be drawn directly out of your social security check. Pam Brown, a Columbia college graduate student, is working with the OWS based group, Occupy Student Debt. “The system is a predatory one,” she says. “There’s an assumption students won’t be able to pay their debts. Refinance, take out an expensive private loan and the interest rates compound fast.”  As Brown says: “the government and the banks both had their hands in this pot.”

This particular bubble doesn’t burst on Wall St. “It oozes over a generation,” says Brown. “In a sense it’s a pre-approved government bailout. The government protects the college, but each debtor is paying so much throughout their lives that it’s impossible to live a regular life.” Says Brown.

One last turn of the knife: predatory lending patterns are re-inscribing the racial divides that President Obama’s happy talk about social change would let so many Americans forget.

“Whenever you feel that creeping cynicism, whenever you hear those voices say you can’t make a difference, whenever somebody tells you to set your sights lower — the trajectory of this country should give you hope.” Said the president.

The reality is, today’s trajectory is towards ever greater divergence, rural from urban, the very rich from the rest, but especially black from white.

ColorLines fills in what the New York Times leaves out: whereas about one in four white Americans graduate with debt less than $12,000; one in three African Americans owes more than $38,000. (The Barnard graduating class is just 4.5 percent African American.) The same phenomenon we saw in the housing crisis prevails in education: it’s perilous to be “borrowing while Black.”

Just as black borrowers were more likely than whites to be offered risky, sub-prime mortgages (even when they could afford regular sort) so too, Black students are more likely than any other group to take out high-risk private loans for college. Private loans (which are on the rise) come with none of the deferments for unemployment, income-based repayment, or loan forgiveness options attached to federal student debt. According to the Project on Student Debt the percentage of African-American undergraduates who took out private loans quadrupled between 2003-04 and 2007-08, from 4% to 17%. The next batch of numbers are sure to be worse. Suffice to say, having lost all the wealth they gained subsequent to the Civil War in the housing disaster, the options for the next African American generation are quite literally being cut off.

Barack Obama said at Barnard:

“If you’re willing to do your part now, if you’re willing to reach up and close that gap between what America is and what America should be, I want you to know that I will be right there with you. If you are ready to fight for that brilliant, radically simple idea of America that no matter who you are or what you look like, no matter who you love or what God you worship, you can still pursue your own happiness, I will join you every step of the way.”

Sometimes commencement cliches are just dull. At other times they hurt.  “Joining with” today’s graduating class requires forgiving student debt. For all our sakes. Nothing else counts.

LAURA FLANDERS is the host of The Laura Flanders Show coming to public television stations later this year. She was the host and founder of GRITtv.org. Follow her on Twitter: @GRITlaura. 

Last Thursday the New York Times published a story about a young woman who was found dead after her apartment building was engulfed in flames but instead of focusing on the fire investigation the writers focused on the victims gender and her alleged sex life.

“She was 25 and curvaceous, and she often drew admiring glances in the gritty Brooklyn neighborhood where she was known to invite men for visits to her apartment, her neighbors and the authorities said,” read the first line of the story written by Al Baker and Nate Schweber. The story went on identify the victim as someone “called Lorena,” as opposed to saying she was “named Lorena” or that she simply was Lorena.

The 25-year old who was found dead was a transgender woman and LGBTQ advocates say the sexualized coverage of the incidents is “exploitative.”

Aaron McQuade, GLAAD’s Director of News and Field Media questioned how the Times would have covered the story if the word “transgender” was out of the equation. In a blog post on Glaad.org McQuade went on to say his organization had reached out to the NY Times to ensure this didn’t happen again.

GLAAD published a statement from NY Times Metro Editor Carolyn Ryan that offered a lukewarm apology:

“We typically try to capture the personal stories of those whose lives are lost in a fire, and we sought to do so in this case. We certainly did not mean any disrespect to the victim or those who knew her. But, in retrospect, we should have shown more care in our choice of words.”

McQuade says the Times’ statement reveals a lack of understanding of how serious this problem is.

“Unfortunately, the problem with the Times’ article on the death of Lorena Escalera, a transgender woman of color, is bigger than their “choice of words” or with their attempt to “capture” her story. It’s their failure to recognize trans women as women,” McQuade said in a follow up story Tuesday.

“At a time when anti-trans sentiment is high and sexualization of trans people still means they are denied basic civil rights, this is not good enough,” writes Steve Williams, Care2 Causes Blogger, who started a petition that calls on the NYT to publish an apology.

Williams’ petition demands “the NYT to print an apology acknowledging why the story was so deeply offensive, and to highlight the prejudice and discrimination trans people face in all spheres of life.”

On housing policy, the New York Times has a knack of getting to the nub of the issue on a bit of a time delay. Weeks after the publication of the foreclosure fraud settlement, they figured out that the settlement would allow banks to get credit for things they already do in the normal course of affairs. Today, they’re out with the bombshell that states are diverting the hard dollar funds from the settlement, money meant to go to help homeowners, to fill budget gaps. Only this has been happening almost immediately since the announcement of the settlement back in February. I am pleased that the NYT gets to the point, but they could quicken the pace.

The story does link to a formal study on this phenomenon, from Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing group. They find that 27 of the 50 states are using their funds wholly for housing, while the other 22 are either using part or all of the money for other purposes, or haven’t made a decision (I know there are 50 states; Oklahoma didn’t participate in the settlement). This survey was taken before California Governor Jerry Brown announced that he would divert all the settlement money, over the course of two years, into the General Fund.

Only 10 of the states have completely decided how to use the funds; the other 40 are in the process of deciding, so there is still time for this outlook to improve, or get worse. Of the ten states that have completed the process – Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska and Utah – six of them siphoned off some or all of the settlement money (Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Maine, Nebraska and Utah). The next closest state to completing the process, Missouri, would siphon all the money away to their General Fund; that proposal has passed their state House. The best outcome so far came from Minnesota, which will simply distribute their $41 million to “qualifying homeowners.”

Even many of the purposes that nominally go toward “housing” in the states hardly reflect the intended purpose of the money. In Ohio, much of the funds will go toward bulldozing homes, for example. In North Dakota, they will spend it on housing police officers in counties that have grown in population during the state’s oil boom.

The bottom line is that, with big states like California and Texas likely to siphon off the funds, and many more moving in that direction, we could end up with a situation where almost half, if not more, of the $2.5 billion penalty, distributed to states for crimes against homeowners, doesn’t get anywhere near those homeowners who need help.

And keep in mind, this $2.5 billion penalty, a portion of the overall settlement, is but a drop in the bucket compared to the damage inflicted by the foreclosure crisis and the fraudulent activities of the mortgage industry.

Hitting from left and right, New York Times columnists Paul Krugman and Ross Douthat smacked down their colleague Tom Friedman yesterday. Of course it would have been bad form (and reputedly against Times policy) to mention Friedman by name, so Krugman and Douthat did not.

The occasion for the joyous friedmanfreude:

Americans Elect, the deep-pocketed nonprofit group that set out to nominate a centrist third-party presidential ticket, admitted early Tuesday that its ballyhooed online nominating process had failed…. Just after a midnight deadline Monday, the group acknowledged that its complicated online nominating process had failed to generate sufficient interest to push any of the candidates who had declared an interest in its nomination over the threshold in its rules. – Ken Vogel of Politico

Friedman has been the head cheerleader for Americans Elect, a fake centrist group “funded by leveraged-buyout tycoon Peter Ackerman and other deep-pocketed centrists.” Friedman has been advocating for a third-party presidential candidate since at least April 2006. He began flakking for Americans Elect last July in a column titled “Make Way for the Radical Center.” As recently as last month, Friedman was still urging New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to take up the mantle, partly because Friedman was of the impression that a president who had been a big-city mayor would know how to fix the potholes in front of Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. (The so-called potholes which jolted Friedman on his way to Amtrak’s Acela, were not potholes at all, but the result of road improvements already underway, a little detail which escaped Friedman’s notice. As Steve Benen of “The Rachel Maddow Show” remarked, “… the road is in bad shape because that traffic circle is currently under construction – it’s being repaired as part of the kind of infrastructure investment Friedman ostensibly supports.”)

Back in February of this year, Friedman’s favorite Americans Elect candidate was his friend David Walker, a protege and former employee of deficit-hawk billionaire Pete Peterson, who has, as Ryan Grim and Paul Blumenthal write in today’s Huffington Post, “spent nearly half a billion in Washington targeting Social Security and Medicare.” Walker’s last known sighting was arguing with Paul Krugman on a silly ABC News panel on economic challenges. In a post-panel post titled “We’re Doomed,” Krugman snarked, “Everything makes David Walker think of the need for entitlement reform.”

When Friedman went on Joe Scarborough’s MSNBC “Morning Joe” show, he attempted to recruit Scarborough to take the job. Alec MacGillis of The New Republic found Friedman’s search for a third-party candidate so amusing that he suggested Friedman pull a Dick Cheney and conclude that his exhaustive search has revealed that the best “third-choice savior” should be – Tom Friedman. Ed Kilgore of Washington Monthly still thinks Friedman for President would be a good idea:

Under AE’s elaborate rules, [Friedman would] presumably have to disclose a party affiliation and then choose a running-mate from a different party. But he could certainly self-identify as a member of the Friedman Party, and then choose a running-mate from the Party of Richard Cohen or the Party of Robert Samuelson or the Party of David Brooks. It would be a Very Serious Ticket.

Friedman ended his first column on Americans Elect with this prediction:

Write it down: Americans Elect. What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies, Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated American political life – remove the barriers to real competition, flatten the incumbents and let the people in. Watch out.

This was the same prediction Friedman had made in an October 2010 New York Times column: “Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her – one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome.” Write that down. The next time Friedman makes a prediction, you’ll know not to write it down

Happily, most third-party efforts – like Americans Elect – fizzle before they create havoc. Remember Unity ’08? No Labels 2010? You don’t? No Surprise. Those that do get a presidential candidate on the November ballot never get a winning candidate. Instead, these third-party candidates act only as spoilers. See Gore v. Bush and Nader, 2000; Clinton v. Pappy Bush & Perot, 1992, etc. (Steven Taylor of Outside the Beltway, in response to one of Friedman’s third-party appeals, explained some of the institutional factors that mitigate third-party presidential candidates.) So it is not surprising that pundits left and right gleefully watched the demise of yet another third-party effort.

Besides, Americans Elect was a very suspect operation. As Steve Benen wrote yesterday,

Americans Elect talked about bold, democratic principles, but it collected tens of millions of dollars in secret donations, then built a series of ‘anti-democratic measures’ into Americans Elect’s structure: ‘the power of a board to set aside (subject to a veto override from “voters”) the People’s Choice in order to create a legitimately “balanced, centrist” ticket, whatever that means.’ When it came time for the convention, organizers found they were missing two rather important elements: candidates and voters.

Obama campaign guru David Axelrod once characterized Americans Elect as “uber-democracy meets back room bosses.”

Paul Krugman wrote in his eulogy for Americans Elect, “Basically, about seven people were actually excited about the venture – all of them political pundits.” Rebecca Elliot of BuzzFeed provides the name of the seven pundits in a post titled “7 Very Bad Predictions about Americans Elect.” At the top of her list: Tom Friedman’s July 2011 prediction cited above. Krugman published his post a few hours after Elliot’s post went up. Coincidence, no doubt. Krugman – as have many others – points out that the centrist president Friedman craves has all the same characteristics and policy positions as Barack Obama.

This is a point, I should add, that Friedman himself conceded when he rolled out his case for Americans Elect: “President Obama should dump the Democrats and run as an independent, which he is, at heart, anyway.” That’s right. Obama should abandon a party that would (mostly) stand behind his legislative agenda, to run as an independent so that not a single member of Congress would pay any attention to him. A brilliant strategy to get things done in Washington.

Krugman made the same point in a blogpost last September, and in that one he did name Friedman. Krugman wrote: “… the hypothetical position self-proclaimed centrists want somebody to take — Michael Bloomberg, a chastened Obama, whatever – is almost always the position actually held by the Democratic party. But to seem ‘balanced’, the pundits involved have to ignore that inconvenient fact.” Krugman goes on to cite one of Friedman’s numerous columns urging a deficit-reduction “Grand Bargain.” Of Friedman’s proposal, Krugman wrote,

… what Tom describes as the centrist position both parties know they should adopt, but refuse to do because of partisanship on both sides, is in fact the actually existing position of the Democratic party – a position that Republicans denounce as ‘socialist.’ I know that admitting that Barack Obama is already the candidate of centrists’ dreams would be awkward, would make it hard to adopt the stance that both sides are equally at fault. But that is the truth.

Krugman elaborated on that theme in his post yesterday, but since he didn’t specifically name Friedman, he was a bit more frank:

Because there exists in America a small class of professional centrists, whose stock in trade is denouncing the extremists in both parties and calling for a middle ground. And this class cannot, as a professional matter, admit that there already is a centrist party in America, the Democrats — that the extremism they decry is all coming from one side of the political fence. Because if they admitted that, they’d just be moderate Democrats, with no holier-than-thou pedestal to stand on. [Emphasis added.]

Swooping down from the right, Ross Douthat published a “Campaign Stops” post late last night which he began,

‘Third parties are like bees,’ the intellectual historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1955. ‘Once they have stung, they die.’ It’s an aphorism that aptly describes the anti-slavery and anti-immigrant parties of the mid-nineteenth century, the Populists and Progressives who ushered out the Gilded Age, as well as more recent third-party standard bearers, from George Wallace to Ross Perot. All of these movements and figures influenced American politics dramatically, before fading away and leaving the basic two-party duopoly intact. Of late, though, our potential third parties have been skipping the stinging part and going straight to the dying.

Douthat writes of Americans Elect: “From the (inarguable) premise that the public is wearied by the failures of the political and economic establishment, it leaped to the (preposterous) conclusion that the country is crying out for a presidential candidate who mostly represents the interests and values of exactly that same establishment.” You will, of course, Tom Friedman making precisely that claim Douthat dubs “preposterous.” Here is Friedman in his October 2, 2010 column:

There is a revolution brewing in the country, and it is not just on the right wing but inthe radical center. I know of at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, developing ‘third parties’ to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.

Preposterous! Douthat and Krugman agree. As Krugman wrote yesterday, “Actual voters couldn’t care less…. Outside that class [of professional centrists], the large number of people who believe in all the good stuff the centrists claim to favor are, you know, going to vote for Obama. The large number of people who don’t believe in any of that are going to vote for Romney.”

“What’s more,” Douthat writes, “given the record of the last decade, disaffected Americans have very good reasons to be suspicious when their elites promotes bipartisanship as an end unto itself.” After all, the Iraq War, the housing bubble and the “hated Wall Street bailouts” were all brought to you with wide bipartisan Congressional support, Douthat notes. “Why, then, would Americans fed up with the two party system entrust their loyalties to a nascent movement that promises that this time, this time, a high-minded, bipartisan elite will get things right?” Douthat notes that actual popular movements have flowered from the far-right and the far-left – the Tea Party and Occupy movements. Douthat envisions a candidate who could arouse these two groups would be a “disreputable,” “eccentric” demagogue: “(Pat Buchanan meets Ralph Nader),” definitely not the kind of Mike Bloomberggy, Olympia Snowesque candidate Friedman and Americans Elect had in mind.

When I linked the news of the Americans Elect fail on my Website Reality Chex, I wrote, “Somewhere in the world, Tom Friedman is weeping.” I was wrong. One pundit who did not comment on Americans Elect: Tom Friedman. Rather, he has moved effortlessly onto the next “radical” idea as if the last one never existed (not that he won’t revive it come the next election cycle). His New York Times column today is on “the college education revolution.”

Marie Burns blogs at RealityChex.com

The other day it was widely reported in the news that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was given a full pat down by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents who didn’t know who the famous statesman was. Even the New York Times briefly covered it in a 129-word blog by one of their editors, Juliet Lapidos.

Lapidos writes that, “TSA screeners have yet to catch a terrorist.”

This is a half-truth since apparently TSA let Henry Kissinger board the plane. Had the TSA agents detained Kissinger they would’ve arrested one of the most criminal terrorists in modern history; a man who once told a Congressional committee about the high crimes and misdemeanors he was intimately a part of: “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

The National Security Archive website over at George Washington University is filled with declassified examples. Nearly a dozen of them deal specifically with Kissinger.

There were plannings on terrorizing Chileans, and bringing Hell to the South American country if the citizens were to vote the wrong way. The people of Chile did vote the wrong way (at least by Nixon’s standards), and on September 11, 1973, the U.S. government did unleash terror on the population, which lasted for decades in what Chileans call “the first 9-11″.

Secretary Kissinger is quoted as telling Argentine generals that, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” There were, and they did. The results were deadly. The generals had quality teachers: Nazi’s who escaped Europe via the ratlines. And like their predecessors, the Argentine military rounded up tens of thousands of leftists and dissidents and summarily killed them.

Another publication has Kissinger quoted as telling the generals: “The quicker you succeed the better.”

In one of the biggest genocides in the last half of the 20the century—where roughly a quarter of the population was killed—we find it was President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who gave the “green light” for Indonesia to invade and occupy East Timor for a quarter century. Writing in his retrospective on the tragic affair, Noam Chomsky, noted that,

There was no need to threaten bombing or even sanctions. It would have sufficed for the US and its allies to withdraw their active participation, and inform their close associates in the Indonesian military command that the atrocities must be terminated and the territory granted the right of self-determination . . .

Chomsky was correct. A few years after noting the significance of U.S. support there was a truth commission, with documents supplied by The National Security Archive. The report concluded that U.S. “political and military support were fundamental to the Indonesian invasion and occupation” of East Timor.

Following the quick defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six-Day War in the summer of 1967, Israel used their military success to continue rejecting peace offers. And in 1971 when Egypt offered Israel peace, the latter rejected. It was this refusal to make peace that paved the way to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, which if it were not for last minute U.S. support, Israel would likely have been defeated. And it should come as no surprise that it was Henry Kissinger himself who gave the “green light” for Israel “to breach a cease-fire agreement arranged with the Soviet Union,” and carry out the major military offensive.

In probably the most incriminating piece of evidence, there is the occurrence where Kissinger followed President Nixon’s order to carry out a “massive bombing campaign” in Cambodia, which the President ordered the attack to target “anything that flys [or] anything that moves.” Just as the American war in Afghanistan is spilling over into neighboring Pakistan, the American war in Vietnam spread to Cambodia and Laos. In Cambodia, the U.S. took sides in a civil war, killing hundreds of thousands of people.

As for the last comment on Cambodia, the New York Times is well aware of it since they quoted it in a piece they published just shy of eight years ago: “Kissinger Tapes Describe Crises, War and Stark Photos of Abuse.”

Few statesmen in the world have this kind of easily accessible documentation showcasing their terror, aggression and criminality. Had this kind of evidence existed for Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević, or various Rwandan government and military officials—all subjected to victor’s justice—the trials would’ve been open and shut.

Rather than note the criminal background of Henry Kissinger, and how he has never been brought to justice, Lapidos illustrates the quality and integrity of a staff editor for one of the largest and most prestigious news sources when she takes a jab at the TSA for “patting down octogenarians.”

One well-respected writer who weighed in on the demise of Americans Elect – the suspicious effort to mount a third-party presidential candidate – was Yves Smith, who writes the Naked Capitalism blog. (“Yves Smith” is the nom-de-Internet of Susan Webber, who heads a management consulting firm.) Smith did not waste much time on Americans Elect, however. Instead she laid into Paul Krugman, who celebrated the end of Americans Elect’s 2012 shenanigans in a blogpost yesterday titled “Things Fall Apart.”

Smith is brutal: “Paul Krugman’s partisanship has become so shameless that we are giving him the inaugural Eric Schneiderman Decoy Award for his post…. The Schneiderman Decoy Award goes for exceptional achievement in turning one’s good name over to particularly rancid Obama Administration initiatives.” Her complaint is that Krugman did not lay out the true “orientation and aims” of Americans Elect, but pretended instead that it was a centrist organization. She notes that

Tom Ferguson, a political scientist who is widely considered the top expert on money in American politics, called out Americans Elect in March as a group out [to] promote a right-wing, anti-entitlement message as ‘centrist’ (for the record, polls regularly show majority votes in favor of preserving Social Security and Medicare).

Ferguson is right. That’s a point I have made here and elsewhere. But Smith is wrong. Krugman wrote a four-paragraph post, not a treatise on the political philosophy of Americans Elect. When he describes the group as “centrist,” he puts “centrist” in quotes, just so his readers will know that “centrist” is in the eye of the beholder. That really is all he needs to do.

Oddly, Smith complains about Krugman’s remark that centrists will vote for Obama. Obama is a centrist, a point Krugman makes in his post. So exactly what is wrong with that? The name of Krugman’s blog is “Conscience of a Liberal,” so it is safe to say that he does not see himself as a centrist. You don’t have to connect many dots to figure out that Krugman does not approve of Obama’s centrism (Me liberal/Obama centrist). Indeed, Krugman has written tens of posts and columns criticizing Obama’s moves to the right. In this particular post, he mentions only two political philosophies: center and right. Centrists will vote for Obama, he says; conservatives will vote for Romney. Krugman never addresses leftist, liberal, or progressive views, let alone his own. To the extent that he fingers Obama in particular and the Democratic party in general as centrists, as he does in this post, he is tacitly criticizing Obama and his party. There is no one in Washington, the post implies, representing the left – no one representing people like Krugman. Smith somehow reads this criticism of Democrats as praise. Her view seems rather bizarre.

Smith also charges that Krugman is guilty of “cringe-making fawning over Obama.” She doesn’t elaborate, but as far as I can tell Krugman’s “fawning” consists of his saying centrists will vote for Obama because Obama is a centrist. In case Smith is unaware of it, members of Congress who pass for centrists (Blue Dog Democrats, Olympia Snowe, Joe Lieberman) and the Democratic contingent of Very Serious People (a term coined by Krugman because the Times won’t let him write what he really thinks of this gang) all favor cutting spending on social safety net programs in the name of deficit reduction. Krugman has a mini-career of railing against them, of knocking down their ideas in general and in specific policy prescriptions. His blog is replete with little economist charts showing why deficit hawks are wrong. I think Smith knows that. Her arguments are petulant, but without substance.

Smith goes on to accuse Krugman of using a “sneaky bit” to “endorse … deficit reduction (at least in part) by spending cuts, rather than via increasing growth” and promote “austerity lite.” Oh, he does not. There is no way to read Krugman’s post and see it as an endorsement of spending cuts on social safety net programs. Smith is reading between lines that aren’t there. Her interpretation has at best the naïve quality of a fifth-grade book report, and at worst an air of screaming-mimi stupid. She concludes that “Krugman has taken some brave stands in the past, but this sort of shameless distortion of facts to make a case for Obama diminishes him, and won’t resonate with anyone other than Democrat loyalists. The sooner Krugman recognizes this fact and starts taking up more worthy causes, the better.”

Really, the only “shameless distortion” is Smith’s peculiar misreading of Krugman’s post. I found reading her screed sort of embarrassing. She should reread Krugman and apologize for being cranky. Or something.

Also see my related column here.

Marie Burns blogs at RealityChex.com