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February
13
2017

Has The American Establishment Opted for Thermo-Nuclear War?
Paul Craig Roberts

If you want to be an American TV talking head or a Western presstitute, you are required to be braindead and integrity-challenged like Bill O’Reilly, CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and all the rest.

In an interview with President Donald Trump, O’Reilly said: “Putin is a killer.”

O’Reilly is indifferent to the fact that thermo-nuclear war is a killer of planet Earth. For O’Reilly, President Trump’s desire to normalize relations with Russia is an indication that the President of the US is comfortable making deals with killers, as if America’s last three presidents have not been mass killers comfortable with their destruction in whole or part of many countries and millions of peoples.

President Trump’s response to O’Reilly’s was: “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think – our country’s so innocent?”

The only thing wrong with President Trump’s response is that it implicitly accepts that Putin is no different from Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Yet there is no evidence that Putin is a “killer.” This accusation is an assertion from those who prosper from having a “Russian threat” to keep the money and power flowing to themselves.

As Finian Cunningham shows, Trump should have reprimanded O’Reilly for his unsupported and undiplomatic accusation against the president of a country with which President Trump hopes to restore normal relations. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/02/06/trump-apology-for-killer-putin-wrongheaded.html

President Trump’s statement of an obvious fact was quickly branded “defense of a killer” by congressional Republicans, Hillary Democrats, the liberal, progressive, left-wing, and the Western presstitutes.

Even online sites, such as politico.com, jumped in to criticize “Donald Trump’s defense of Vladimir Putin’s homicidal history.” Allegations of “Putin’s homicidal history” are astonishing after 24 years of Washington’s genocide against Muslins in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria, and non-Muslims in Yugoslavia and the Russian regions of Ukraine. Washington ranks as one of the worst mass murderers in human history, but the Western presstitutes brand Putin as the one who is homicidal.

Listen to these members of Congress who represent Americans in Washington:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, Ky) said referring to the thrice elected President of Russia: “He’s a thug.” McConnell has gone along with Washington’s mass murder of peoples for 15 years, and this accomplice to mass murder said that Washington’s murder of countless millions, which have sent refugees all over the Western world, are not evidence against America. In his response to Trump’s statement, McConnell actually said: “We don’t operate in any way the way the Russians do. I think there’s a clear distinction here that all Americans understand, and I would not have characterized it that way.” http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/republicans-denounce-trumps-defense-of-killer-putin-234665

The Republican senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, said: “We are not the same as Putin.” Of course we aren’t. We are mass murderers.

The Republican senator from Nebraska, Ben Sasse, said, and this is a level of ignorance hard to believe even for Americans, that “Putin is an enemy of political dissent. The U.S. celebrates political dissent and the right for people to argue free from violence about places or ideas that are in conflict [as at Cal Berkeley]. There is no moral equivalency between the United States of America, the greatest freedom loving nation in the history of the world, and the murderous thugs that are in Putin’s defense of his cronyism.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens said: “Trump puts US on moral par with Putin’s Russia. Never in history has a President slandered his country like this.”

No Bret, you have it backwards. No US president has ever slandered Russia like this. There is no moral equivalency between Washington and Moscow. Washington is totally devoid of all morality. Russia is not. It is not Russia that has murdered, maimed, and displaced peoples in at least 9 countries in the last 15 years, sending refugees all over the Western world, some of whom no doubt bear legitimate grudges.

Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, rushed to tell NBC that Trump didn’t mean that Washington is not morally superior to Putin’s Russia. Of course the US is morally superior to everyone. The millions of peoples we kill and dislocate are proof of our unquestioned moral superiority. Every time we bomb a wedding, a funeral of the wedding guests, a children’s soccer game, innumerable hospitals and medical centers, schools, farms, public transportation, we exceptional and indispensable Americans are demonstrating our moral superiority over the Earth. Only the morally superior can commit vast crimes against humanity without being held accountable.

Normal relations with Russia do not seem to be in the cards. The demonization and lies will continue. The New Cold War is too important to the ruling establishment, and to the members of the House and Senate who are dependent on military/security campaign donations, for Trump to be allowed to normalize relations with Russia.

Everything that Reagan and Gorbachev achieved has been undone. The material interest of a few has again placed humanity at risk.

“The greatest freedom loving nation in the history of the world” can’t even have a debate about it, because a debate is Putin apologetics and moral equivalency.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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