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June
14
2022

The Continuing Collapse
Paul Craig Roberts

Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi are America’s best journalists. They are not talking heads on CNN or voices on NPR and they are not permitted to write for the New York Times. Moreover, they are both men of the left, so how can they be America’s best journalists? The answer is that they are honest. They respect truth. 

In Greenwald’s latest, “Joe Biden’s Submissive and Highly Revealing Embrace of Saudi Despots,” he contrasts the Democrats, Biden and the whore media’s denunciation of Trump for not holding Saudi Arabia accountable with the Biden regime’s failure to hold Saudi Arabia accountable. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/joe-bidens-submissive-and-highly?s=r 

It is difficult to know which country Biden and the Democrats pay the most homage, Israel or Saudi Arabia. Israel uses the billions of dollars the American taxpayers are fleeced out of so that Israel can buy American elections and make sure the House, Senate, and President serve Israel’s interest rather than that of American citizens. The Saudis support Washington’s trade and budget deficits and the US dollar by investing their oil revenues in US Treasury bonds. It is difficult to choose one over the other, which is why Washington has been working to bring the two in under the same umbrella.

As Greenwald puts it:

“In sum, no hyperbole is required to observe that the Obama/Biden White House — along with their junior British counterparts — was singularly responsible for the ability of the Saudi regime to survive and to wage this devastating war in Yemen. But that is nothing new. The centerpiece of U.S. policy in the Middle East for decades has been to prop up Saudi despots with weapons and diplomatic protection in exchange for the Saudis serving U.S. interests with their oil supply and ensuring the use of the American dollar as the reserve currency on the oil market.

“That is what made the hysterical reaction to Trump’s reaffirmation of that relationship so nonsensical and deliberately deceitful. Trump was not deviating from U.S. policy by embracing Saudi tyrants but simply continuing long-standing U.S. policy of embracing all sorts of savage despots all over the world whenever doing so advanced U.S. interests. Indeed, what angered the permanent ruling class in Washington was not Trump’s policy of embracing the ruling Saudi monarchs, but rather his honesty and candor about why he was doing so. American presidents are not supposed to admit explicitly that they are overlooking the human rights abuses of their allies due to the benefits that relationship provides, even though that amoral, self-interested approach is and for decades has been exactly the foundational ideological premise of the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy class.

“But this has been the core propagandistic framework employed by the DC ruling class since Trump was inaugurated. They routinely depicted him as an unprecedentedly monstrous figure who has vandalized American values in ways that would have been unthinkable for prior American presidents when, in fact, he was doing nothing more than affirming decades-old policy, albeit with greater candor, without the obfuscating mask used by American presidents to deceive the public about how Washington functions.”

Any time you come across an article by Greenwald or Taibbi read it. They are not always correct, no one is. But you can rely on them to inform you or to make you think, if with your American education you are capable of thinking. Fewer and fewer Americans are. In America, education consists of brainwashing into the narratives that serve the financial and power interests of our ruling elites.

The founders of the United States tried to build a country that avoided foreign entanglements and focused on building unity within its domestic domain. This goal was defeated when the Northern states acquired the votes to impose the cost of northern industrialization on the South. It was the South’s rejection of its enserfment to the North that resulted in Lincoln’s war of aggression against the Southern states. 

As every honest historian during the long era when there actually were honest historians whose research outcome was not predetermined by the required virture-signalling of our untruthful times knows, slavery played an almost non-existent role in what is called, incorrectly, a civil war. 

A civil war is when opposing forces content for control over the government. No such thing happened between the North and South during 1861-65. The war was an effort of the North to conquer the Confederacy and to bring the secessionist states back into the United States where the North had the votes to force the South to pay for the North’s industrialization and financial dominance, thus keeping the South poor for decades.

In America today, a historian who tells the truth is run out of the university by ignorant and ideological woke elements. Wokeism flourishes among university administrators who impose whatever is the ruling ideology on the university faculty. The faculty has go go along with the lies or be dismissed. As centers of free thought and expression, American and western universities have been destroyed. Wokeism has spread into the wider society. Recently a NFL coach was fined $100,000 for referring to what the Democrats say was an insurrection as a “dustup,” an insufficiently supportive word for the fake news narrative. 

When I was educated in the Atlanta public schools, there was no such thing as an education degree. My history teacher had a history degree, my math teacher had a math degree, my English teacher had an English degree. It was the same during my high school years. How does a teacher educate a student when the teacher does not know the subject?

People taught acceptance easily submit to tyranny whenever the government speaks. “Put on your masks,” and the people do. “Lockdown your businesses,” and the people do. “Take the death shot,” and the people do.”

Just as Rome came to an end as the result of the corruption of its people, the Western world is approaching its end as the strength that comes from independent thought and expression is emptied out of it. A patriot who respects his country is a Trump Deplorable and a January 6 “insurrectionist.” An American patriot who objects to stolen elections is prosecuted for supporting a coup.

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: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

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