Here's a link to a rather silly article on the Philippines by Paul Krugman, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist, (I always see him and Maureen Dowd and Bob Herbert as the foil to the three-headed hydra that is William Safire). Some of you may know that he was all over NPR and the New York Times Sunday Magazine last weekend promoting his book The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. (Krugman was part of a UNDP team sent to the Philippines in 1990. He says he "should write more about the experience someday," and he should. Maybe a little less condescendingly next time, but I liked his description of Jose Concepcion. And he also has a short piece on Bush's "crony capitalism".)
But the more important quotation is the one below, from a recent interview on Buzzflash:
BUZZFLASH: As a professor, if you were giving a lecture and you had to define the economic policy of the Bush administration, could you get your arms around it? How would you define it?KRUGMAN: There is no economic policy. That's really important to say. The general modus operandi of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway. So there is no policy to deal with the lack of jobs. There really isn't even a policy to deal with terrorism. It's all about how can we spin what's happening out there to do what we want to do.
Check out his book; check out his "blog". (Better yet, buy his book through Buzzflash; I'm about to put my order in myself.)
Posted by the wily filipino at September 18, 2003 11:51 AM