Michelle Malkin | Snortalicious: Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman joins progs’ war on “plutocrats” «

Snortalicious: Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman joins progs’ war on “plutocrats”

By Michelle Malkin • October 10, 2011 10:58 AM

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman is the perfect cheerleader for the high-tech-toting Kamp Alinsky crusaders against capitalism.

Just perfect.

The lead paragraph of his glowing Occupy Wall Street paean today:

Panic of the Plutocrats
By PAUL KRUGMAN

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

The man who grabbed every opportunity to mock the Right and the Tea Party as an “insane,” fringe mob inciting violence now whitewashes the nutballs of Occupy Wall Street and explains the reaction of sane, working people to the entitled grievance-mongers stinking up the streets this way:

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

That’s rich. Paul Krugman, man of the people. Snort.

Flashback:

In 1999 Paul Krugman was paid $50,000 by Enron as a consultant on its “advisory board,” and that same year he wrote a glowing article about Enron for Fortune magazine. But he would change his tune. After Enron collapsed in 2001, Krugman wrote several columns excoriating the company. (One featured what may be the most absurd howler in the history of op-ed journalism: “I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.”) In most of these columns Krugman worked hard to link Enron to the Bush administration, and in one he actually blamed Enron’s consultants for the company’s collapse — while neglecting to mention that he, too, had been an Enron consultant.

Daniel Okrent, while ombudsman for the New York Times, wrote that “Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers.” Indeed. But Krugman’s distortions were so rampant, and his unwillingness to correct them so intransigent, that Okrent — no doubt pressured into service by my Krugman Truth Squad column for NRO — did something about it. Okrent forced the Times op-ed page to adopt for the first time a corrections policy for op-ed columnists. That was in 2004. Later, when Krugman flouted that policy, the Krugman Truth Squad went to work on Okrent’s successor, Byron Calame, who pressed for the adoption of a new, more stringent policy in 2005.

Flashback:

Paul Krugman, an editorial columnist for The New York Times, said he was also paid $50,000 to serve on an Enron advisory board in 1999. He disclosed his connection in a Jan. 24, 2001, column about Enron.

“This was an advisory panel that had no function that I was aware of,” Mr. Krugman said today. “My later interpretation is that it was all part of the way they built an image. All in all, I was just another brick in the wall.”

A willing tool for the plutocrats. Until it was no longer politically expedient, that is.

Just like the fair-weather protest mobs shaking one fist at “corporations” — with the other fist wrapped around an evil corporate product or two…