The Greatest Gift For All
By: Paul Craig Roberts|24 December, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Gift . Greatest
Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became…
Read more »Guilty When Charged
By: Paul Craig Roberts|21 December, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: american prisons . christmas season . conviction rates . felony indictments . police evidence . self incrimination . yale university law
While enjoying the Christmas season in the comfort of your home, take a minute to say a prayer for the wrongfully convicted. American prisons are full of wrongfully convicted persons. Many were coerced into admitting to crimes they did not commit by prosecutors’ threats to pile on more charges. Others were convicted by false testimony from criminals bribed by prosecutors,…
Read more »Rendition Unto Caesar
By: Paul Craig Roberts|11 December, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: american officials . american secretary . Bush Administration . extraordinary rendition . foreign countries . foreign nationals . illegal detention
The spectacle of an American Secretary of State being sent to Europe to reassure America’s allies that the US does not torture prisoners has brought an end to America’s moral grandeur. America stands revealed before the world as just another unaccountable police state. Condi Rice’s declaration that the Bush administration is too morally pure to engage in torture was just…
Read more »Condi to Europe: “Trust Me”
By: Paul Craig Roberts|06 December, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Condi . Europe: . Me
Secretary of State Condi Rice is off to Europe to neither confirm nor to deny that the US government in an operation known as rendition kidnaps people, often the wrong ones, and flies them to foreign countries to be tortured. “Trust me” is her line. According to Reuters, “Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern said Rice told him in Washington she…
Read more »Don't Confuse the Jobs Hype with the Facts
By: Paul Craig Roberts|02 December, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Confuse . Facts . Hype . Jobs
[See also National Data: November's Job Numbers: Good for immigrants; Bad for the Rest of Us] The November payrolls job report was announced Friday with the usual misleading hype. Spinmeisters made the most out of the 215,000 jobs. Looking beyond the glitter at the real facts, this is what we see. 21,000 of those jobs were government jobs supported by…
Read more »The Problem of Virtual Immigration
By: Paul Craig Roberts|28 November, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Immigration . Problem . Virtual
One must marvel at the campaign that a handful of neoconservatives were able to create around September 11. They were able to commit vast resources to a war based on falsified intelligence and to set aside in the interest of executive power the essential civil liberties that define America as a nation. A fabricated threat was all that was needed…
Read more »The Grave Threat Is The Bush Administration
According to news reports, at a US Naval Academy speech on Wednesday, President Bush will announce plans for withdrawing US troops from Iraq. It will be diverting to watch the propagandists at Fox “news” flip-flop with the White House line and explain that now is the time to cut and run after all. A month ago the administration’s line was…
Read more »Power Uber Alles
By: Paul Craig Roberts|12 November, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: british government . Bush Administration . indefinite detention . minister tony blair . prime minister tony blair
Perfidy loves company. George W. Bush instructed his British puppet, Prime Minister Tony Blair, to get moving on the detention issue so that he, Bush, would have company when he attacked the Constitution’s guarantee of habeas corpus. Habeas corpus prevents authorities from detaining a person indefinitely without charges; the guarantee of habeas corpus ensures that no one can imprison you…
Read more »Libby's Indictment: The Start Of A Counterrevolution?
Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to vice president Richard B. Cheney and assistant to the president, has been indicted for a cover up. As US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald made clear at the October 28 press conference announcing Libby’s indictment, he believes Libby “went before a federal grand jury and lied under oath repeatedly and fabricated a story about how…
Read more »How To End The War
George W. Bush is a natural born liar. He lied us into a war, and now he is lying to keep us there. In his October 6 self-congratulatory speech at that neoconservative shrine, the National Endowment for Democracy, the President of the United States said: “Today there are more than 80 Iraqi army battalions fighting the insurgency alongside our forces.”…
Read more »The Police State Is Closer Than You Think
Police states are easier to acquire than Americans appreciate. The hysterical aftermath of September 11 has put into place the main components of a police state. Habeas corpus is the greatest protection Americans have against a police state. Habeas corpus ensures that Americans can only be detained by law. They must be charged with offenses, given access to attorneys, and…
Read more »Balint Vazsonyi: Immigrant—Columnist—Patriot
By: Paul Craig Roberts|03 October, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: balint vazsonyi obituary
Balint Vazsonyi, who died in 2003, was a concert pianist and a historian. A person who had tasted life both under the Nazis and the Communists, Balint was a thoroughly assimilated non-hyphenated American. A devotee of the US Constitution, he spent the last years of his life rallying Americans to the appreciation and defense of the basis of their liberty. For…
Read more »“The Greatest Strategic Disaster In US History”
Capitol Hill Blue, the Washington DC publication that cultivates relationships with White House staffers, reports (September 28) one White House aide saying: “It’s like working in an insane asylum. People walk around like they’re in a trance. We’re the dance band on the Titanic, playing out our last songs to people who know the ship is sinking and none of…
Read more »America Has Fallen to a Jacobin Coup
By: Paul Craig Roberts|15 September, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: America . Coup . Fallen . Jacobin
The most important casualties of September 11 are respect for truth and American liberty. Propaganda has replaced deliberation based on objective assessment of fact. The resurrection of the Star Chamber has made moot the legal protections of liberty. The US invasion of Iraq was based on the deliberate suppression of fact. The invasion was not the result of mistaken intelligence.…
Read more »From Federal Failure Arises More Federal Power
By: Paul Craig Roberts|11 September, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Federal . Power
The New Orleans catastrophe is inexplicable. FEMA’s slow response is a mystery. Never before has federal funding for work by the US Corps of Engineers on the New Orleans levees and for the congressionally authorized Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA) been curtailed in the face of dire expert warnings of the consequence. The Department of Homeland Security and…
Read more »Thought For Labor Day: Conservative Dogma Pulling Marx Out of His Grave
By: Paul Craig Roberts|04 September, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: dogmatic thought about country
Libertarians and free trade economists don’t realize it, but they are pulling Marx out of his grave. Free traders are resurrecting class war, not because they are Marxists but because they confuse free trade with global labor arbitrage. Free traders turn cold shoulders to US job losses from offshore outsourcing, because they mistake the losses for the beneficial workings of…
Read more »How New Orleans Was Lost
By: Paul Craig Roberts|31 August, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: beautiful cities . city of new orleans . corp of engineers . hurricane katarina . mayor of new orleans . war on terrorism . world trade towers
Chalk up the city of New Orleans as a cost of Bush’s Iraq war. There were not enough helicopters to repair the breeched levees and rescue people trapped by rising water. Nor are there enough Louisiana National Guards available to help with rescue efforts and to patrol against looting. The situation is the same in Mississippi. The National Guard and…
Read more »America's Lost Hegemony
By: Paul Craig Roberts|22 August, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: protectionism paul craig roberts
The historian who chronicles America’s decline will lay the blame on free market ideology. I say this as a believer in the market. My books and scholarly articles demonstrate the superiority of market systems over government allocative schemes. The problem arises when market economics ceases to be thoughtful and becomes ideological or a dogma. A good example of the latter…
Read more »Corrupted Justice
By: Paul Craig Roberts|18 August, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Corrupted . Justice
Wonder of wonders! A Louisiana prosecutor has been disciplined by the Louisiana Supreme Court for withholding exculpatory evidence in order to get a death sentence for a 16-year old. The witness who obligingly picked the suspect out of a lineup had told the police that she was not wearing her glasses or contact lens at the time of the shooting,…
Read more »Get Ready for World War III
With every poll showing majorities of Americans both fed up with Bush’s war against Iraq and convinced that Bush’s invasion of Iraq has made Americans less safe, the White House moron proposes to start another war by attacking Iran. VP Cheney has already ordered the US Strategic Command to come up with plans to strike Iran with tactical nuclear weapons.…
Read more »Kelo's Implications are Horrendous
By: Paul Craig Roberts|04 August, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: constitutional rights . eminent domain authority . gm assembly plant . government intrusion . increase concentration
Readers’ questions have prompted me to examine further the Supreme Court’s recent Kelo decision. Kelo is even worse than the calamity I declared it to be. Kelo does not mean the end of private property per se, but it does mean the end of anyone’s secure possession, be the owner an individual or a corporation. To the extent that Americans…
Read more »US Falling Behind Across the Board
By: Paul Craig Roberts|26 July, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Behind . Board . Falling . USA
Yesterday I reported that the US, formerly a superpower until afflicted with “new economy” syndrome, has lost so much manufacturing capability that it can scarcely produce one submarine every two years and one aircraft carrier every five years. US manufacturing capability is so reduced and shrinking so fast that the president of the American Shipbuilding Association recently said that in…
Read more »America's Descent Into The Third World
By: Paul Craig Roberts|15 July, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Descent . Into
The June payroll jobs report did not receive much attention due to the July 4 holiday, but the depressing 21st century job performance of the US economy continues unabated. Only 144,000 private sector jobs were created, each one of which was in domestic services. 56,000 jobs were created in professional and business services, about half of which are in administrative…
Read more »The No-Think Nation
Thought is not an American forte. Consider the speed with which our government got us trapped in two quagmires, Iraq and Afghanistan. The CIA says that Bush’s invasion of Iraq has created ideal conditions for training insurgents and terrorists. The longer we are there, the worse it gets. Our military is being worn down by a gratuitous war of no…
Read more »A Defeat Bred in Deceit
By: Paul Craig Roberts|27 June, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Bred . Deceit . Defeat
“Anyone who has proclaimed violence his method inexorably must choose lying as his principle.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn When Bush decided, prior to September 11, to attack Iraq, he committed himself to lies and deceit. As his British co-conspirators realized, only victory could save them from the consequences. On June 27, General George Casey, US commander of the “multinational coalition” in Iraq,…
Read more »Bush's War Against Iraq Ruining America
Last Friday the price of light sweet crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange for August delivery closed 16 cents short of $60/barrel—the highest price ever and an ironic outcome for the millions of Americans who believe that cheap oil was the reason for Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Equally shocking to Americans was the announcement that China has outbid…
Read more »US Labor Force: One Foot in the Third World
By: Paul Craig Roberts|03 June, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Foot . Force . Labor . USA
In May the Bush economy eked out a paltry 73,000 private sector jobs: 20,000 jobs in construction (primarily for Mexican immigrants), 21,000 jobs in wholesale and retail trade, and 32,500 jobs in health care and social assistance. Local government added 5,000 for a grand total of 78,000. Not a single one of these jobs produces an exportable good or service.…
Read more »Washington is the Source of Terror
By: Paul Craig Roberts|01 June, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Source . Washington
The US government gave the slave trade a boost by offering money for Al Qaida and Talaban fighters. Afghan and Pakistani war lords simply rounded up people who looked Arab or foreign and sold them to the Americans as captured fighters. The “fighters” apparently included relief workers, refugees, and Arab businessmen. The tribunals looking into the classification of Guantanamo prisoners…
Read more »Uncovering A Justice Department Cover-Up
By: Paul Craig Roberts|26 May, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: federal authorities . federal officials . jesse trentadue . kenneth trentadue . parole violation . prison authorities . u s department
[See also The Trentadue Case: A Coverup That Won't Stay Covered, December 02, 2003 ] In 1995, Kenneth Trentadue was murdered by federal agents in a federal prison in Oklahoma City. A cover-up immediately went into effect. Federal authorities claimed Trentadue, who was being held in a suicide-proof cell, had committed suicide by hanging himself, but the state coroner would…
Read more »Statement for US-China Commission Hearing, May 19, 2005
By: Paul Craig Roberts|20 May, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Commission . Hearing . May . Statement . US-China
Offshore outsourcing is misunderstood by economists and policymakers. The phenomenon is misperceived as an extension of the mutual benefits of comparative advantage-based trade. Comparative advantage has two necessary conditions, neither of which is met today. One condition is that capital is immobile internationally relative to traded goods. The other is that the trading countries have different opportunity costs of producing…
Read more »More Jobs Hype
By: Paul Craig Roberts|12 May, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: paul craig roberts low wage
Careless journalists and commentators are hyping the 274,000 new April payroll jobs as evidence of the health of the US economy. An examination of the details of the new jobs puts a different view on the matter. April’s job growth is consistent with the depressing pattern of US employment growth in the 21st century: The outsourced US economy can create…
Read more »Call Me Unaccountable: Woodrow Wilson and George Bush
By: Paul Craig Roberts|25 April, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Call . George . George Bush . Me . Unaccountable: . Wilson . Woodrow
The passage of time permits historians to be truthful in their assessments of presidents. Abe Lincoln, a Republican Party icon since 1865, was exposed in the 21st century as America’s first tyrant by Thomas DiLorenzo. Woodrow Wilson, a Democratic icon since the early 20th century, has now been knocked off his pedestal by Jim Powell in Wilson’s War: How Woodrow…
Read more »Outsourcing—A Greater Threat Than Terrorism?
By: Paul Craig Roberts|18 April, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: forbeseroding US as superpower because of outsourcing
Is offshore outsourcing good or harmful for America? To convince Americans of outsourcing’s benefits, corporate outsourcers sponsor misleading one-sided “studies.” Only a small handful of people have looked objectively at the issue. These few and the large number of Americans whose careers have been destroyed by outsourcing have a different view of outsourcing’s impact. But so far there has been…
Read more »Job Drought Continues
By: Paul Craig Roberts|04 April, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: paul craig roberts outsourcing arbitrage ron paul
In March the US economy created a paltry 111,000 private sector jobs, half the expected amount. Following a well-established pattern, US job growth was concentrated in domestic services: waitresses and bartenders, construction, administrative and waste services, and health care and social assistance. In the 21st century the US economy has ceased to create jobs in knowledge industries or information technology…
Read more »Here It Comes: Draft Now Getting Democratic Support
By: Paul Craig Roberts|27 March, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Comes: . Democratic . Draft . Getting . Here . Now . Support
One of the favorite fantasies of right-wing talk radio and Fox “News” is that only Bush-hating liberals oppose the Iraq war and additional US military incursions into the Middle East or wherever. Yet, it is the March issue of the Washington Monthly, a magazine with a liberal Democratic audience, which makes a case for the draft as the only way…
Read more »Immigration, Outsourcing, Our Incipient Police State—Greater Threats Than Terrorism
Delusion has settled over America. Washington cannot tell fact from fantasy. Neither can a sycophantic media nor nothink economists. The Bush administration is the first government in history to initiate a war based entirely on fantasy—fantasy about nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction,” fantasy about nonexistent “terrorist links,” fantasy about “liberating” a people from their culture, fantasy about a “cakewalk” invasion,…
Read more »America's Has-Been Economy
By: Paul Craig Roberts|15 March, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: U.S is eroding as a superpower because of outsourcing
A country cannot be a superpower without a high tech economy, and America’s high tech economy is eroding as I write. The erosion began when US corporations outsourced manufacturing. Today many US companies are little more than a brand name selling goods made in Asia. Corporate outsourcers and their apologists presented the loss of manufacturing capability as a positive development.…
Read more »Bush Plunging Into Syrian Swamp
By: Paul Craig Roberts|07 March, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: George Bush . Into . Plunging . Swamp . Syrian
How much longer can American prestige survive the embarrassments inflicted by President Bush? Bush’s demand that Syria immediately withdraw its troops from Lebanon is a ricochet demand. If Lebanon cannot have free elections while under foreign military occupation, how, asks the rest of the world, does Iraq have free elections when it is under US military occupation? Bush’s latest guffaw…
Read more »America's Superpower Status Coming To An End
By: Paul Craig Roberts|28 February, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: america's pressure with super power
The U.S. economy is headed toward crisis, and the political leadership of the country—if it can be called leadership—is preoccupied with nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. The U.S. economy is failing. The afflictions are serious. They could be fatal even if diagnosed and treated. America is losing the purchasing power of its currency and its ability…
Read more »Bush Outfoxed By Bin Laden
By: Paul Craig Roberts|21 February, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: George Bush . Laden . Outfoxed
President Bush’s invasion has turned Iraq into a recruiting and training ground for anti-US terrorists, according to CIA director Porter Goss in testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 16. Goss’ report was supported by Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Jacoby told the committee that “our policies in the Middle East fuel…
Read more »Sycophantic Media Abandons Professional Standards
By: Paul Craig Roberts|15 February, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: arnold schwarzenegger . conservative media . financial scandal . hearts and minds . impeach president clinton . republican politicians . sensible person
The conservative media will never recover from its role as Chief Sycophant for the Bush administration. Journalists who demanded that Clinton be held accountable for a minor sex scandal (Monica Lewinsky) and a minor financial scandal (Whitewater) now serve as apologists and propagandists for the Bush administration’s major war scandals. The Republican House of Representatives saw fit to impeach President…
Read more »The Great American Job Sellout
Americans are being sold out on the jobs front. Americans’ employment opportunities are declining as a result of corporate outsourcing of US jobs, H-1B visas that import foreigners to displace Americans in their own country, and federal guest worker programs. President Bush and his Republican majority intend to legalize the aliens who hold down wages for construction companies and cleaning…
Read more »More Bad News On The Jobs Front
The January jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics continues the bad news of the past four years. During President Bush’s first term, the US economy had a net loss of three-quarters of a million private sector jobs. Despite three years of economic recovery, fewer Americans are employed in the private sector today than when Bush was first inaugurated…
Read more »Abandoning Liberty, Gaining Insecurity
By: Paul Craig Roberts|31 January, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Gaining . Insecurity . Liberty
Should Americans have to give up the Bill of Rights in order to be “safe” from terrorists? Actually, it doesn’t matter what Americans think. The trade has already been made—and without any input from the people. The “democracy” that America is exporting is in fact a Homeland Security State with more surveillance powers than Saddam Hussein. Americans no longer have…
Read more »War Without End—Bush Proclaims Jacobin Crusade
By: Paul Craig Roberts|24 January, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Crusade . End—Bush . Jacobin . Proclaims . Without
After listening to his inaugural speech, anyone who thinks President Bush and his handlers are sane needs to visit a psychiatrist. The hubris-filled megalomaniac in the Oval Office has promised the world war without end. Bush’s crazy talk has even upset rah-rah Republicans. One Republican called Bush’s speech “God-drenched.” It has begun to dawn on the formerly Grand Old Party…
Read more »How Americans Were Seduced by War
By: Paul Craig Roberts|17 January, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: Americans . Seduced . Were
Americans have been betrayed. Sooner or later Americans will realize that they have been led to defeat in a pointless war by political leaders who they inattentively trusted. They have been misinformed by a sycophantic corporate media too mindful of advertising revenues to risk reporting truths branded unpatriotic by the propagandistic slogan, “you are with us or against us.” What…
Read more »Dear Ken: About That Cakewalk…
By: Paul Craig Roberts|11 January, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns|Tags: flurazepam
Three years ago in the Washington Post Ken Adelman, formerly an assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, promised us “Cakewalk In Iraq.” I wonder how Mr. Adelman feels about his promise today. In his article, Adelman disparaged Brookings Institution military analysts and the redoubtable Edward Luttwak for “fear-mongering.” Adelman dismissed concerns about US casualties and unilateral action as misguided worries…
Read more »What Became of Western Morality?
By: Paul Craig Roberts|05 January, 2005|Categories: Articles & Columns
On the last day of the old year in the newsletter CounterPunch, two Israelis—Jeff Halper, who heads the Israeli peace movement ICAHD, and Neve Gordon, who is chairman of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University—asked, “Where’s the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?” “Not one of the nearly 450 presidents of American colleges and…
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