The United States has collapsed economically, socially, politically, legally, constitutionally, and environmentally. The country that exists today is not even a shell of the country into which I was born. In this article I will deal with America’s economic collapse. In subsequent articles, i will deal with other aspects of American collapse. Continue reading
The bumper sticker on the beat-up pickup truck read: “Friends don’t let friends vote Democrat.” Continue reading
In his report on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest jobs and unemployment report, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) writes: “The July employment and unemployment numbers published today, August 3rd, were worthless and likely misleading. . . . Suspecting at one time that the jobs numbers were being rigged against him by his own Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), President Richard M. Nixon proposed a new approach to reporting the numbers. Although the proposed changes never were implemented, several decades later the BLS adopted reporting methods that were somewhat parallel to the late president’s thinking.” Continue reading
The State Department has an office that hunts German war criminals. Bureaucracies being what they are, the office will exist into next century when any surviving German prison guards will be 200 years old. From time to time the State Department claims to have found a lowly German soldier who was assigned as a prison camp guard. The ancient personage, who had lived in the US for the past 50 or 60 years without doing harm to anyone, is then merciless persecuted, usually on the basis of hearsay. I have never understood what the State Department thinks the alleged prison guard was supposed to have done–freed the prisoners, resign his position?–when Prussian aristocrats, high-ranking German Army generals and Field Marshall and national hero Erwin Rommel were murdered for trying to overthrow Hitler. Continue reading
Readers ask me from time to time to recommend a book from which they can learn about economics. Continue reading
One wonders what Syrians are thinking as “rebels” vowing to “free Syria” take the country down the same road to destruction as “rebels” in Libya. Libya, under Gaddafi, a well run country whose oil revenues were shared with the Libyan people instead of monopolized by a princely class as in Saudi Arabia, now has no government and is in disarray with contending factions vying for power. Continue reading
What causes some people to feel compelled to make uninformed digs at President Reagan? Is it just that they are brainwashed or, if they are thoughtful people, just too involved with other matters to be well informed about Reagan? How many of the digs at Reagan are deflective activity by Clinton/Bush/Cheney/Obama shills diverting attention from the real causes of our woes? Continue reading
The article about the Libor scandal, coauthored with Nomi Prins, received much attention, with Internet repostings, foreign translation, and video interviews. To further clarify the situation, this article brings to the forefront implications that might not be obvious to those without insider experience and knowledge. Continue reading
The Russian government has finally caught on that its political opposition is being financed by the US taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy and other CIA/State Department fronts in an attempt to subvert the Russian government and install an American puppet state in the geographically largest country on earth, the one country with a nuclear arsenal sufficient to deter Washington’s aggression. Continue reading
In a recent column, “Can The World Survive Washington’s Hubris,” I promised to examine whether the US economy will collapse before Washington in its pursuit of world hegemony brings us into military confrontation with Russia and China. This is likely to be an ongoing subject on this site, so this column will not be the final word. Continue reading
Information has been leaked about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is being negotiated in secret by US Trade Representative Ron Kirk. Six hundred corporate “advisors” are in on the know, but not Congress or the media. Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate trade subcommittee that has jurisdiction over the TPP, has not been permitted to see the text or to know the content. Continue reading
When President Reagan nominated me as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, he told me that we had to restore the US economy, to rescue it from stagflation, in order to bring the full weight of a powerful economy to bear on the Soviet leadership, in order to convince them to negotiate the end of the cold war. Reagan said that there was no reason to live any longer under the threat of nuclear war. Continue reading
With her 1962 book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson got DDT and other synthetic pesticides banned and saved bird life. Today it is humans who are directly threatened by technologies designed to extract the maximum profit at the lowest private cost and the maximum social cost from natural resources. Continue reading
When neoconservatives, politicians, and high ranking military officers speak of a 30-year war against terrorism, there is no discussion about its affordability or whether the one significant attack (September 11, 2001) that is attributed, perhaps incorrectly, to Muslim terrorists justifies an open-ended war against a dozen countries. There is no discussion of the burden on future generations of the massive increase in the public debt in order to finance today’s wars. Continue reading
I have always been intrigued by the Battle of Bull Run, the opening battle of the US Civil War, known to southerners as the War of Northern Aggression. Extreme hubris characterized both sides, the North before the battle and the South afterwards. Continue reading
Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and quantitative easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy. Without the artificially low interest rates, the debt service on the national debt would be so large that it would raise questions about the US Treasury’s credit rating and the viability of the dollar, and the trillions of dollars in Interest Rate Swaps and other derivatives would come unglued. Continue reading
The US government is the second worst human rights abuser on the planet and the sole enabler of the worst—Israel. But this doesn’t hamper Washington from pointing the finger elsewhere. Continue reading
The US financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, like the police, no longer serves a useful social purpose. Continue reading
In response to the question in the title, I can report that most of my readers are. Almost everyone got the point of the last column. They see the absurdity of the government’s claim that the identity of the tough, macho Navy SEALs, who allegedly murdered Osama bin Laden, has to be kept secret in order to protect our fierce warriors from reprisals from Muslim terrorists, while those government officials responsible for the torture and deaths of large numbers of Muslims can walk around, identity known, unprotected and safe. Continue reading
If there were any real terrorists, Jose Rodriguez would be dead. Continue reading
Living in America is becoming very difficult for anyone with a moral conscience, a sense of justice, or a lick of intelligence. Continue reading
Some readers have come to the erroneous conclusion that the Matrix consists of Republican Party disinformation as if there is no disinformation from the left. Others think that propaganda is the business of Obama and the Democrats. In fact, propaganda from the right, the left and the middle are all part of the disinformation fed to Americans. Continue reading
Washington has pressured the Philippines, whose government it owns, into conducting joint military exercises in the South China Sea. Washington’s excuse is that China has territorial disputes with the Philippines, Indonesia, and other countries concerning island and sea rights in the South China Sea. Washington asserts that China’s territorial disputes with the like of Indonesia and the Philippines are a matter of United States’ national interests. Continue reading
Andy Worthington is a superb reporter who has specialized in providing the facts of the US government’s illegal abuse of “detainees,” against whom no evidence exists. In an effort to create evidence, the US government has illegally resorted to torture. Torture produces false confessions, plea bargains, and false testimony against others in order to escape further torture. Continue reading
Americans, the British, and Western Europeans are accustomed to thinking of themselves as the representatives of freedom, democracy, and morality in the world. Continue reading
The US government pretends to live under the rule of law, to respect human rights, and to provide freedom and democracy to citizens. Washington’s pretense and the stark reality are diametrically opposed. Continue reading
Growing up in the post-war era (after the Second World War), I never expected to live in the strange Kafkaesque world that exists today. The US government can assassinate any US citizen that the executive branch thinks could possibly be a “threat” to the US government, or throw the hapless citizen into a dungeon for the rest of his or her life without presenting any evidence to a court or obtaining a conviction of any crime, or send the “threat” to a puppet foreign state to be tortured until the “threat” confesses to a crime that never occurred or dies at the hands of “freedom and democracy” while professing innocence. Continue reading
Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources. Continue reading
One of the great economic myths is that markets are rational. Not a day passes without this myth being disproved scores of times, but the myth persists. Continue reading
Today (March 9, 2012), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that 227,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created by the economy during February. Is the government’s claim true? Continue reading
RSS
Ecuadorian President Rafael “We Are Not A Colony” Correa stands up to the jackbooted British Gestapo
Posted on August 21, 2012 by Paul Craig Roberts
The once proud British government, now reduced to Washington’s servile whore, put on its Gestapo Jackboots and declared that if the Ecuadorean Embassy in London did not hand over WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, British storm troopers would invade the embassy with military force and drag Assange out. Ecuador stood its ground. “We want to be very clear, we are not a British colony,” declared Ecuador’s Foreign Minister. Far from being intimidated the President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, replied to the threat by granting Assange political asylum. Continue reading →