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July
24
2018

More Lies From The Corrupt Elite... Don’t believe them
Paul Craig Roberts

For two decades the offshoring of American jobs to Asia and Mexico has destroyed the careers and incomes of tens of millions of US citizens, the pension tax base for state and local governments, the federal tax base for Social Security and Medicare, and the opportunity society that once characterized the United States of America.

The rise in corporate profits that resulted from substituting foreign labor for American labor rewarded corporate executives and boards, hedge funds, large shareholders, and Wall Street with profits at the expense of the American population and the US economy.

The low rates of economic growth claimed since the alleged recovery from the 2008 financial crisis that resulted from financial deregulation, a huge mistake made by politicians in service to capitalist greed, is based entirely on under-measuring inflation. Allegedly, Americans have suffered no inflation for a decade, but anyone who buys anything knows that that is a lie. What jobs offshoring did is to destroy the growth in productivity based US consumer purchasing power that drove the US economy. In short, the short-sighted executives, boards, and Wall Street have impaired aggregate demand in the US.

The corrupt Federal Reserve under the incompetent Alan Greenspan ramped up consumer debt to take the place of the missing growth in consumer income. This works until consumers cannot carry any more debt. The subsequent Federal Reserve chairmen have kept the house of cards standing by pumping trillions of dollars into the prices of financial assets. 

In my day such inappropriate Federal Reserve behavior would likely have been considered a felony. The Federal Reserve chairmen would possibly have been arrested and put on trial. In the least they would have been forced to resign for bailing out five banks at the expense of the US population. 

As nothing was done, today we have financial asset prices based on money printing by the Federal Reserve and its accomplices—the Japanese central bank, the EU central bank, and the Bank of England. The financial criminality is worldwide.

As bad as the situation is, it is about to get worse. The same self-serving elites who told the insouciant American people that jobs offshoring would create more and better jobs for Americans are now telling them the same thing about robotics. 

The accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, has been hired by someone to put out a “study” that robots will create more new jobs for displaced Americans then they will destroy. This lie will be repeated endlessly by the neoliberal economists and financial media, just as they repeated endlessly that jobs offshoring would do the same.

Having lost the manufacturing and professional skill jobs such as software engineering, robotics attacks the domestic service non-tradable jobs that could not be offshored, although some of them, such as nursing, could be filled by bringing in nurses on work visas under the false claim that there was a shortage of American nurses. Domestic service jobs have been approximately 90% or more of the new jobs for as long as I have reported on the jobs statistics, which is many years. Now, Americans are going to lose many domestic service jobs to robots.

Artificial intelligence is not necessary for robots to be programmed to do the domestic service jobs that are now the bulk of US employment. Moreover, the current level of robotics imposes the cost of doing business on the customer. If you doubt that, consider your experience the last time you tried to contact a service provider.

People are being made irrelevant. Before long, they won’t even know how to drive a car, because self-driving cars will take that function also away from them. The insouciant humans will sit there in the car being brainwashed by the propaganda from their video screens. They will cease to experience a human existence, and, thereby, will become disposable. 

Other than disposing of them, how else do you get rid of millions of peoples who have no jobs to support them, peoples whose support are likely to be regarded as a dead-weight loss on the profits of the rich?

Robotics cannot possibly work for a humane society unless the means of production are socialized. Unfortunately, Western peoples are so brainwashed and insouciant that they are incapable of revolution. 

Do you want to be erased? That is what American Capitalism is doing to you.

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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