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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
Israel Rules
On Christmas eve when Christians were celebrating the Prince of Peace, the New York Times delivered forth a call for war. “There’s only one way to stop Iran,” declared Alan J. Kuperman, and that is “military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.” [There's Only One Way to Stop Iran, December 23, 2009 ] Kuperman is described as the “director of…
Read more »Americans Are Hell-Bent on Tyranny
Obama’s dwindling band of true believers has taken heart that their man has finally delivered on one of his many promises—the closing of the Guantanamo prison. But the prison is not being closed. It is being moved to Illinois, if the Republicans permit. In truth, Obama has handed his supporters another defeat. Closing Guantanamo meant ceasing to hold people in…
Read more »For Palestinians, Every Day Is Kristallnacht
< height='433' width='650' /> “Settlers attack West Bank mosque and burn holy Muslim books” was a London Times headline on December 11, 2009. These attacks, together with the demolition of Palestinian homes, the uprooting of Palestinians’ olive groves, the innumerable checkpoints that prevent Palestinians from accessing schools, work, and medical care, the Israeli Wall that denies Palestinians access to…
Read more »Fool Me Once, Shame On You; Fool Me Twice Shame On Me
Goldman Sachs senior executives are arming themselves with New York gun permits, according to Alice Schroeder on Bloomberg.com. The banksters “are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.” One can understand why the banksters are worried. The company, now known as Gold Sacks, has a large responsibility for the financial crisis and the…
Read more »Obama—Israel's Puppet
It didn’t take the Israel Lobby very long to bring President Obama to heel regarding his prohibition against further illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Obama discovered that a mere American president is powerless when confronted by the Israel Lobby and that the United States simply is not allowed a Middle East policy separate from Israel’s. Obama also found…
Read more »Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's Trial Will Convict Us All
Republican members of Congress and what masquerades as a “conservative” media are outraged that the Obama administration intends to try in federal court Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, and four alleged co-conspirators. The Republican and right-wing rant that a trial is too good for these people proves what I have written for a number of years: Republicans…
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Myths of Our Time
morality vs. material interests It is conventional wisdom that it was the draft that ended the Vietnam war. According to this explanation, cowardly college students subject to the draft and their unpatriotic families, forced an end to the war. This is Karl Marx’s explanation. Material interests, not empty morality, are said to have brought the war to an end. …
Read more »Israel Lobby Routs Obama As Dollar Dies
It did not take the Israel Lobby long to make mincemeat out of the Obama administration’s “no new settlements“ position. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is bragging about Israel’s latest victory over the US government as Israel continues to build illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. In May President Obama read the Israelis the riot act, telling the Israeli government that…
Read more »Does US-Israeli Missile Defense War Game Signal Israeli Attack on Iran?
There’s no word in the Western press, but Aljazeera reports that the US and Israel are conducting tests of the high altitude missile defense system that the US has provided to Israel. The anti-missile system is useless against the short range rockets of Hamas and Hezbollah. Its purpose is to protect Israel from longer range Iranian missiles. Everyone understands that…
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Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?
The Financo-State Evidence that the US is a failed state is piling up faster than I can record it. One conclusive hallmark of a failed state is that the crooks are inside the government, using government to protect and to advance their private interests. Another conclusive hallmark is rising income inequality as the insiders manipulate economic policy for their…
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US Joins Ranks Of Failed States
The US has every characteristic of a failed state. The US government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation. Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the US relies on terrorism and military aggression. Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized…
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The Rich Have Stolen the Economy
Bloomberg reports that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and other Wall Street firms. Bloomberg reports that none of these aides faced Senate confirmation. Yet, they are overseeing the handout of hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds to their former employers. The gifts of billions of dollars…
Read more »War Criminals Are Becoming The Arbiters Of Law
The double standard under which the Israeli government operates is too much for everyone except the brainwashed Americans. Even a columnist in the very Israeli Jerusalem Post can see the double standard displayed by “all of Israel now speaking in one voice against the Goldstone report”: “This is the Israeli notion of a fair deal: We’re entitled to do…
Read more »Warmonger Wins Peace Prize
It took 25 years longer than George Orwell thought for the slogans of 1984 to become reality. “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength.” I would add, “Lie is Truth.” The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama, the person who started a new war in Pakistan, upped the war in Afghanistan, and continues…
Read more »Letter to the Editor
This article appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of The Independent Review Paul R. Gregory’s account of Lenin’s suppression of dissident voices (“The Ship of Philosophers,” The Independent Review 13, no. 4 [spring 2009]: 485–92) offers no explanation except that dictators fear dissent. Lenin, however, had an additional reason to brook no dissent. In 1917, he had startled the Marxist world when he…
Read more »Growing Up In America Series – Privilege Displaces Equality
Privilege Displaces Equality was published in CHRONICLES, October 2009 None of us growing up in Atlanta in the 1940s were under the delusion that we were equal. We were aware of a myriad of differences that had nothing to do with race or gender. Some were better football players. Others were better baseball players. Some could run faster. Others were…
Read more »Marx and Lenin Revisited
“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Karl Marx If Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin were alive today, they would be leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in economics. Marx predicted the growing misery of working people, and Lenin foresaw the subordination of the production…
Read more »How the Feds Imprison the Innocent: New Book Confirms Tyranny of Good Intentions Thesis
Authors of serious books seldom have cause to celebrate, but Larry Stratton and I have two reasons to open the champagne. Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, has announced a second printing of the second edition of The Tyranny of Good Intentions, and the noted civil libertarian and defense attorney, Harvey Silverglate, has just published a book covering many of…
Read more »Another War in the Works
Does anyone remember all the lies that they were told by President Bush and the “Main Stream Media” about the grave threat to America from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? These lies were repeated endlessly in the print and TV media despite the reports from the weapons inspectors, who had been sent to Iraq, that no such weapons existed.…
Read more »More Lies, More Deception
“What does imperialism mean? It means the assertion of absolute force over others.” Robert Lowe 1878 The G-20 ministers declared their meeting in Pittsburgh a success, but as Rob Kall reports in OpEdNews.com, the meeting’s main success was to turn Pittsburgh into “a ghost-town, emptied of workers and the usual pedestrians, but filled to overflowing with over 12,000 swat cops…
Read more »The Economy is a Lie, too
Americans cannot get any truth out of their government about anything, the economy included. Americans are being driven into the ground economically, with one million school children now homeless, while Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announces that the recession is over. The spin that masquerades as news is becoming more delusional. Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. It…
Read more »Health Care Deceit
The current health care “debate” shows how far gone representative government is in the United States. Members of Congress represent the powerful interest groups that fill their campaign coffers, not the people who vote for them. The health care bill is not about health care. It is about protecting and increasing the profits of the insurance companies. The main feature…
Read more »Europe's Complicity in Evil
[An address by Hon.
Read more »From Citizen to Serf in 200 Years
America is a strange place. Liberals get emotionally distraught that the Founding Fathers stuck Second Amendment rights in the Constitution. For American citizens to possess firearms is considered to be dangerous. Yet it is quite alright for Americans to possess deadly green mambas. Mambas are large, fast, and very poisonous African snakes whose bite is usually fatal. Their venom is…
Read more »Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs
“In a little time [there will be] no middling sort. We shall have a few, and but a very few Lords, and all the rest beggars.”—R.L. Bushman “Rapidly you are dividing into two classes–extreme rich and extreme poor.”—”Brutus” Americans think that they have “freedom and democracy” and that politicians are held accountable by elections. The fact of the matter…
Read more »Spinning the Economic News
Last Friday, a Bloomberg.com headline read: “U.S. Stocks Gain, Treasuries Drop as Unemployment Rate Declines.” Let’s have a look at the reported decline in the rate of unemployment. Do you believe that the U.S. auto industry added 28,000 jobs in July amidst the GM bankruptcy, sell-off and close-down of GM auto divisions, and demise of GM suppliers? No? Well, that’s…
Read more »Growing Up In America Series – Measuring Decline By Prices
In 1939, the year I was born, gasoline was ten cents per gallon. A new car cost $700. A new house cost $3,850, and the average rent was $28 per month. Harvard tuition was $420 annually. A loaf of bread from the bakery was eight cents. Hamburger was 14¢ per pound, eggs were 19¢ per dozen, coffee was 40¢ per…
Read more »The Expiring Economy
Tent cities springing up all over America are filling with the homeless unemployed from the worst economy since the 1930s. While Americans live in tents, the Obama government has embarked on a $1 billion crash program to build a mega-embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, to rival the one the Bush government built in Baghdad, Iraq. Hard times have now afflicted Americans…
Read more »Statistical Deceptions
Last week on NPR a professor in the Sloan School of Management at MIT explained that what is really at stake in the health care bill is the US government’s ability to borrow. In other words, the bill is about cutting health care costs, not about providing hard-pressed Americans with health care. The professor said that if we didn’t get…
Read more »In An Impotent World Even The Bankrupt Can Prevail
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Japan did not spend years preparing her public case and demonstrating her deployment of forces for the attack. Japan did not make a world issue out of her view that the US was denying Japan her role in the Pacific by hindering Japan’s access to raw materials and energy. Similarly, when Hitler attacked Russia, he…
Read more »Obama Helps Banksters Loot American Economy
There is no economy left to recover. The US manufacturing economy was lost to offshoring and free trade ideology. It was replaced by a mythical “New Economy.” The “New Economy” was based on services. Its artificial life was fed by the Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates, which produced a real estate bubble, and by “free market” financial deregulation, which…
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The Big Whorehouse On The Potomac
As Americans celebrate July 4th, they can contemplate that the union of “free and independent states,” like the former British colonial power, has evolved into its final manifestation–a complete whore house. While Members of Parliament in London charge their expense accounts with every personal expenditure, including the rental of adult xxx-rated films, an American newspaper put the reporting of public…
Read more »Pirates of the Mediterranean
On June 30, the government of Israel committed an act of piracy when the Israeli Navy in international waters illegally boarded the “Spirit of Humanity,” kidnapped its 21-person crew from 11 countries, including former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and Nobel Laureate Mairead MaGuire, and confiscated the cargo of medical supplies, olive trees, reconstruction materials, and children’s toys that were on…
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