A recent and perhaps final article,
entitled “Goodbye: Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It,” by Paul
Craig Roberts, a distinguished economist, columnist and former assistant
secretary to the US treasury, is both informative and insightful and
perhaps brings home the concerns that many of us have with government
and bureaucracies that have grown far to big.
Enjoy the read:
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,
co-authored 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.
This isn’t of course restricted to the
United States. In one final pre-election hammer blow to taxpayers, every
UK MP quitting parliament is to collect an average of more than
£1million, according to an article in the Express.co.uk. 148, or 25% of
MPs, have already announced that they are quitting at the election,
which includes all those “named and shamed” in the expenses scandal. A
recent poll found that nearly half of voters believe this parliament is
the most corrupt of all time.
Power corrupts and it always has. We’ll end with a quote which is as apt
today as it was nearly 2000 years ago.
“The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled,
public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be
tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be
curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work,
instead of living on public assistance”
Marcus Tullius Cicero 55BC
