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March
21
2023

The Rise of Tyranny in the United States and the Western World
Paul Craig Roberts

In every country of the Western world freedom and civil liberty are being destroyed by governments, none of which represents the people.  One of America’s last remaining journalists, Glenn Greenwald, sees hope that people are catching on and the process can be stopped.  My fear is that Western peoples are too weak and uninvolved to reclaim their freedom and that they will accept tyranny with minimal opposition, thus committing all future generations to life under tyranny.  In contrast, the elite are determined and have demonstrated the power to discredit, to remove, and, it seems, to indict an elected President of the United States who attempted to represent the people against the elite.  Moreover, with control of the media, the elite were successful in turning Donald Trump into a hate figure for roughly half of the US population. The same will happen to anyone who attempts to restore government accountable to law, the Constitution, and the people.

Perhaps the most important lesson in Greenwald’s report, essentially a history of the development of the national security police state in the 21st century, is that no President regardless of political party or ideology, neither Bush nor Trump, Obama nor Biden, can refuse legislation that builds a police state in the name of national security. Those Democrats who once opposed police state measures now favor them because they are useful in getting rid of Donald Trump. In Congress, Republican patriots and leftwing Democrats rush to the support of legislation that destroys their own freedom and turns the US Constitution into a dead letter document.

“No matter how much you hate the corporate media, it’s not enough. It is literally impossible to overstate not only the damage that they do but the malice with which they do it. And by malice, I don’t mean that they’re evil masterminds. I mean malice in the sense of the “banality of evil.” The people who go and punch the clock every day, never question what they’re doing, but whose work is nonetheless incredibly toxic and harmful. They’re just basically sociopathic careerists. But no matter sometimes those people can be the most destructive. “  —  Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald is a rare honest media voice of our time.   Edward Snowden understood this and entrusted Greenwald with the documents that proved the Nazi National Security Agency was spying on all Americans in violation both of law and the US Constitution.  It was Snowden who was punished for telling us the truth about how far we were down the road to tyranny.  The NSA’s crimes were defended and covered up by the Corporate Media.  Congress and the White House did nothing to stop the NSA’s disregard for law and the US Constitution.  Indeed, they facilitated the NSA’s transgressions. 

In this long article, which is more than worth every minute it takes to read it, Greenwald shows the complete disrespect for truth constantly demonstrated by “our government” and the media whores who cover up for the rise of tyranny in the United States.

Greenwald, of course, is not perfect. In his transgender section at the end, he doesn’t point out the discrimination inherent in permitting women’s colleges but not men’s colleges, and he doesn’t note that women are permitted women’s spaces but men are not permitted men’s spaces.  Boy Scouts must have female members, and pro-football locker rooms are open to female reporters.  The real discrimination in American society is against men, especially white heterosexual men.

 

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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