29 March 2010
By Paul Craig
Roberts There
was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword.
That was a time when people believed in truth and
regarded truth as an independent power and not as an
auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological,
personal, or financial interest.
Today Americans
are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard
for truth, little access to it, and little ability to
recognize it.
Truth is an
unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits.
Those who speak it run the risk of being branded
“anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy
theorist.”
Truth is an
inconvenience for government and for the interest
groups whose campaign contributions control
government.
Truth is an
inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions,
not the discovery of innocence or guilt.
Truth is
inconvenient for ideologues.
Today many whose
goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid
handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are
paid to sell offshoring to the American people.
High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are
denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from
long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has
been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy
that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs
in which Americans innovate and finance activities
that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to
participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees
from Ivy League universities, and then they will work
on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.
Economists who
were once respectable took money to contribute to this
myth of “the New Economy.”
And not only
economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently
we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money,
have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted
“studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced
by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the
“studies.”
The Council of
Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in
hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain
billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.
The media helped
the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in
Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000
under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not
urban but a collection of village farms.
And there is the
global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and
the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a
doomsday scenario in order to create profit in
pollution.
Wherever one
looks, truth has fallen to money.
Wherever money
is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance,
propaganda, and short memories finish the job.
I remember when,
following CIA director William Colby’s testimony
before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s,
presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued
executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op
groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010
the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of
national intelligence, that the US now assassinates
its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.
When Blair told
the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no
longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and
convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on
suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t
impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened.
There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the
CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today
it is American citizens who are on the hit list.
Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any
weight. No one in government is in any trouble over
the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S.
government.
As an economist,
I am astonished that the American economics profession
has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has
been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to
overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of
absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum
CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production
of goods and services marketed to Americans to China,
India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists
describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative
advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or
integrity in the American economics profession.
Intelligence and
integrity have been purchased by money. The
transnational or global U.S. corporations pay
multi-million dollar compensation packages to top
managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by
replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While
Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall
Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills
destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of
millions of Americans.
Americans, or
most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of
the police state.
Americans have
bought into the government’s claim that security
requires the suspension of civil liberties and
accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or
most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as
habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,”
and not themselves. Many also believe that the
Constitution is a tired old document that prevents
government from exercising the kind of police state
powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.
Most Americans
are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them
any different.
I was associate
editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I
was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a
position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a
decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300
newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times
and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a
magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New
York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles
Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the
American “mainstream media.”
For the last six
years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.”
My last column in the New York Times appeared in
January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator
Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed
the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article
produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in
Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate
was launched. No such thing could happen today.
For years I was
a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing
credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week
columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and
former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But
when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression,
the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my
column.
The American
corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves
the government and the interest groups that empower
the government.
America’s fate
was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement
bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The
government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much
evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our
time, which has launched the US on interminable wars
of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo
topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless
to complain of war and a police state when one accepts
the premise upon which they are based.
These trillion
dollar wars have created financing problems for
Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s
role as world reserve currency. The wars and the
pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s
value have put Social Security and Medicare on the
chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S.
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these
protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is
also after them. The Republicans are after them as
well. These protections are called “entitlements” as
if they are some sort of welfare that people have not
paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.
With over 21 per
cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of
1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having
been given to China and India, with war being
Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar
over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed
to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of
the American people have been thrown into the trash
bin of history.
The militarism
of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and
corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen
is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing
off.
Paul Craig Roberts
was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an
Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest
book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been
published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached
at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com Comments 💬 التعليقات |