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July
03
2017

Once Only Blacks Were Enslaved, Now We All Are
Paul Craig Roberts

The 4th of July is upon us. We will hear all sorts of patriotic BS about how wonderful we are and how thankful we are to our brave military who defends our liberty.

Not a word will be said about the destruction by the Bush and Obama regimes of the US Constitution, which once protected our liberty far better than any military action.

Not a word will be said about Washington’s 16 years of purely gratuitous war in the Middle East and North Africa that has destroyed in whole or part seven countries, sending millons of war refugees to overrun the Western World and change the quality of life for Western peoples.

Not a word will be said about Washington’s ongoing insane provocations of Russia and China and Iran and Syria and North Korea that are likely to end in nuclear Armageddon.

Speeches will celebrate “the exceptional, indispensable USA,” and fireworks will go off, preludes to the onrushing nuclear Armageddon.

While we listen to speeches of our wonderful fairy tale life, how lucky we are to be so beloved by our Great Democratic Government, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) has issued an all points bulletin urging its members to wake up and to urge their US Senators “to oppose the American Health Care Act passed by the House. This harmful bill gives billions of dollars to special interests while sticking ordinary Americans with huge premium hikes. It includes an age tax that would force older Americans to pay thousands of dollars more for their health insurance. it weakens Medicare and removes protections for people with pre-existing conditions. I urge you to represent my interests—not those of the drug and insurance companies.”

The last sentence astounded me. How is it possible that a lobby group for retired people can possibly believe that the House and Senate have any interest in serving the American people?

The House and Senate serve the people who have money, and those people are not the elderly. Thanks to the Federal Reserve, the elderly have not had any interest income on their savings for a decade.

Moreover, thanks to jobs offshoring, the middle class is shrinking, and grandparents are having to support out of their savings both children and grandchildren. Savings are being drawn down and used up. Retired Americans simply do not have the resources to compete in Washington with the pharmaceutical and insurance corporations who are determined to pillage the elderly.

In the USA money resides in the hands of the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby (US taxpayers give the money to them), Wall Street and the Banks Too Big To Fail, real estate and insurance, and environmental polluters such as energy, mining, electricy production, and agribusiness. No one else has any money. Therefore, these interest groups determine US domestic and foreign policy.

The policy of the US government is easy to sum up. It consists of driving the American population into the ground and fomenting war abroad. This is what serves the money interests that control the government.

Democracy does not exist in America. All the bombast you will hear on the 4th is designed to keep you locked in The Matrix.

The talk about “taking back your government” is nonsense. The government doesn’t belong to you. You can’t take it back.

Chris Hedges says that your only alternatives are to overthrow the criminal class in Washington or to accept your slavery.

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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