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June
02
2018

Democracy Is Fighting to Survive the Rise of Western Authoritarianism
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

The European peoples whose governments were paid to sell out the sovereignty of their nations to the EU are experiencing great difficulties in being permitted to govern themselves.

As the result of Italians’ frustration with the self-serving elite who have ruled Italy for decades, the recent democratic elections in Italy brought to power two anti-establishment political parties, Five-Star and Lega (League), that have solid majorities in both houses. However, the Italian president, an operative for the EU, attempted to appoint the prime minister independently of the election results, tried to himself appoint a “technocratic cabinet” that would ignore the democratic outcome, and succeeded in blocking the anti-establishment winners of the election from forming a government for three months. 

EU official Gunther Oettinger said that it was “not acceptable” for Italians to vote for anti-establishment parties and threatened Italians with financial destabilization that would “teach them how to vote.”

Previously, in the wake of the international economic crisis brought on by the “banks too big to fail,” the Italians and the Greeks attempted to govern themselves democratically, but it was not permitted. The European Commission appointed Mario Monti, a banker, to be Italy’s prime minister. Monti, a member of Goldman Sachs Board of International Advisers, European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, and a member of the Bilderberg Group, was appointed by the elite, not elected by the people. His cabinet did not include a single elected politician.
(See my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism.)

Greece suffered the same fate of having an unelected banker appointed prime minister of Greece. Later when the Greeks succeeded in electing an anti-establishment government, the EU used economic threats and punishments to prevent the Greek government from governing. 

In the US the Democratic Party, presstitute media, and the security agencies have made a strenuous effort to overturn the election of Donald Trump. They have failed to evict him from office, but they have turned him away from his goal of normalizing relations with Russia and withdrawing militarily from the Middle East. In effect, Trump has been forced into the position of being the agent for what he campaigned against.

In the West and among Western funded NGOs that operate in Russia and China, there is mindless talk about Russian and Chinese authoritarianism. Yet, democracy is far more alive in Russia and within the Chinese Communist Party than it is in the West. 

Western democracy has been dying for a long time. In the course of forming the EU, populations in some countries voted down membership. The vote was not permitted to stand. After a period of propaganda to instill fear of being “excluded from Europe,” populations were made to vote again. In this way they were strong-armed into sacrificing sovereignty to the EU.

It remains to be seen if the British vote to exit the EU will actually be implemented. 

The Western elites despise democracy. They tolerate it only as a cover for their self-dealing when it can be manipulated to serve their interests. The Russians who want to join Western Democracy are clearly lacking in understanding.

Considering the seeds of crisis that the self-serving policies of the Western elites have sowed, the responses to the crises will be calls for and acceptance of authoritarian rule. It is entirely possible that the democratic era is approaching its end.

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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