AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'maketrans' while running cProfile

Using python 2.7 I get this error:

    Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/runpy.py", line 162, in _run_module_as_main
    "__main__", fname, loader, pkg_name)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/runpy.py", line 72, in _run_code
    exec code in run_globals
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/cProfile.py", line 199, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/cProfile.py", line 165, in main
    from optparse import OptionParser
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/optparse.py", line 77, in <module>
    import textwrap
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/textwrap.py", line 32, in <module>
    class TextWrapper:
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/textwrap.py", line 74, in TextWrapper
    whitespace_trans = string.maketrans(_whitespace, ' ' * len(_whitespace))
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'maketrans'

while running this simple code:

def blah():
    orig = ""
    for i in range(1000000):
        orig += "zim";
blah()

using this call:

$ python -m cProfile string.py

I'm using Ubuntu Natty Narwhal, and installed the package python-profiler (I don't know if this is necessary).