Stephen Lendman

Good tidings and cheer at Christmas and throughout the year are for America's privileged alone. No joy to the world for most others. Washington is the grinch that stole Christmas. Bah Humbug defines its agenda.

America's criminal class is bipartisan. Responsible for growing human misery. Unprecedented in modern times. Privileged Americans never had it better. Ordinary ones face lump of coal harshness. Hard times keep getting harder. Reflected in institutionalized inequality. Growing poverty.

High unemployment. Multiples higher than phony Labor Department numbers. An epidemic of underemployment persists. Jobs paying poverty or sub-poverty wages. With few or no benefits. Households need two or three to get by.

Growing millions face "one impossible choice after another," according to Poverty USA. "(B)etween food and medicine(s), getting to work or paying the heating bill." Census data show around half the population living in poverty or bordering it. In the world's richest country. Affecting nearly 60% of children. America has a higher percent of working poor than any other industrialized country.

Human suffering is real. Neo-liberal harshness is official policy. Force-fed austerity reflects it. Social injustice is rife. Bipartisan complicity supports it. Ordinary people are increasingly on their own out of luck. America's social contact is targeted for elimination. Disappearing when most needed. Monied interests alone are served. Inequality is appalling. A race to the bottom persists. Class warfare defines it.

Most working Americans get by from paycheck to paycheck. One missed one away from possible homelessness, hunger and despair. Inflation adjusted median household income keeps dropping. Americans have less to spend on increasingly more expensive goods and services. People [need to] eat. Drive cars. Pay rent. Service mortgages. Have medical expenses. Heat and/or air-condition residences. Have children in college. Pay transportation costs.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Christmas Column, December 24, 2014

Dear Readers, thank you for your support in 2014. Although you have kept me working yet another year past retirement age, I find it encouraging that there are some Americans who can think independently and who want to know. As Margaret Mead said, it only takes a few determined people to change the world. Perhaps some of you will be those people.

My traditional Christmas column goes back to sometime in the 1990s when I was a newspaper columnist. It has been widely reprinted at home and abroad. Every year two or three readers write to educate me that religion is the source of wars and persecutions. These readers confuse religion with mankind’s abuse of institutions, religious or otherwise. The United States has democratic institutions and legal institutions to protect civil liberties. Nevertheless, we now have a police state. Shall I argue that democracy and civil liberty are the causes of police states?

Some readers also are confused about hypocrisy. There is a vast difference between proclaiming moral principles that one might fail to live up to and proclaiming immoral principles that are all too easy to keep.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Financial Imperialists Attack Russia

A dangerous new trend is the successful manipulation of the financial markets by the Federal Reserve, other central banks, private banks, and the US Treasury. The Federal Reserve reduced real interest rates on US government debt obligations first to zero and then pushed real interest rates into negative territory. Today the government charges you for the privilege of purchasing its bonds.

People pay to park their money in Treasury debt obligations, because they do not trust the banks and they know that the government can print the money to pay off the bonds. Today Treasury bond investors pay a fee in order to guarantee that they will receive the nominal face value (minus the fee) of their investment in government debt instruments.

The fee is paid in a premium, which raises the cost of the debt instrument above its face value and is paid again in accepting a negative rate of return, as the interest rate is less than the inflation rate.

Think about this for a minute. Allegedly the US is experiencing economic recovery. Normally with rising economic activity interest rates rise as consumers and investors bid for credit. But not in this “recovery.”

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Craig Murray, Former British Ambassador To Uzbekistan

Former UK Ambassador Describes What Happens to People with Integrity Who Have the Misfortune to End Up in Government Positions - Paul Craig Roberts

In the summer of 2004, I warned Tony Blair’s Foreign Office that Britain was using intelligence material which had been obtained by the CIA under torture. Two months later I was sacked as the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan on the orders of Downing Street, bringing to an end my 20-year diplomatic career.

When I then went public with the news that Uzbek territory was part of a global CIA torture programme, I was dismissed as a fantasist by Mr Blair’s henchmen. Now finally, a decade later, I have been vindicated by last week’s shocking Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Over 500 pages it details the CIA’s brutal abuse of Al Qaeda suspects, who were flown around the world to be tortured in a network of secret prisons. One of these was in Uzbekistan, where the US had an air base.

The CIA programme included both torture they conducted themselves and torture conducted for them by allies. Shamefully, the torture-by-proxy details remain classified to protect America’s gruesome ‘allies’.

The CIA were flying people to Uzbekistan to be tortured, usually via their secret prison at Szymany in Poland. The Uzbeks were doing the actual torture, sometimes with CIA members in the room.

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Paul Craig Roberts

On occasion a reader will ask if I can give readers some good news. The answer is: not unless I lie to you like “your” government and the mainstream media do. If you want faked “good news,” you need to retreat into The Matrix. In exchange for less stress and worry, you will be led unknowingly into financial ruin and nuclear armageddon.

If you want to be forewarned, and possibly prepared, for what “your” government is bringing you, and have some small chance of redirecting the course of events, read and support this site. It is your site. I already know these things. I write for you.

The neoconservatives, a small group of warmongers strongly allied with the military/industrial complex and Israel, gave us Granada and the Contras affair in Nicaragua. President Reagan fired them, and they were prosecuted, but subsequently pardoned by Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush.

Ensconced in think tanks and protected by Israeli and military/security complex money, the neoconservatives reemerged in the Clinton administration and engineered the breakup of Yugoslavia, the war against Serbia, and the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders.

Neoconservatives dominated the George W. Bush regime. They controlled the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the Office of the Vice President, and much else. Neoconservatives gave us 9/11 and its coverup, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the beginning of the destabilizations of Pakistan and Yemen, the U.S. Africa Command, the invasion of South Ossetia by Georgia, the demise of the anti-ABM Treaty, unconstitutional and illegal spying on American citizens without warrants, loss of constitutional protections, torture, and the unaccountability of the executive branch to law, Congress, and the judiciary.

In short, the neoconservatives laid the foundation for dictatorship and for WW III.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Readers have asked for my take on the CIA torture report. There is so much information and commentary available that it is unnecessary.

Igor Volsky provides a concise summary. President George W. Bush signed off on torture and then told the gullible people that “this government does not torture people.” The torture was horrific. The CIA even tortured its own informers.

Two American psychologists who designed the torture program were paid $81 million. CIA torturers received cash awards for “consistently superior work” when their innocent victims died.

The US government involved 54 countries in its torture program. The rendition program sent detainees to other countries where they were tortured in secret “black sites". Former president of Poland admits that Poland hosted a CIA torture prison.

Obama tortures also. Those Americans who committed crimes as horrific as any in history have been given a pass by Obama. No accountability for their crimes.

This finishes off the rule of law in America, which was already on life support.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Update: Tyler Durden points out that income and payroll tax receipts do not support the job claims made for the 2014 economy.

Friday’s payroll jobs report is another government fairy tale or, to avoid polite euphemisms, another packet of lies just like the House of Representatives Resolution against Russia and every other statement that comes out of Washington.

Washington is averse to truth. Washington can only lie.

First let’s pretend that the 321,000 new jobs that the government claims the economy created in November are true, and let’s see where these jobs are.

Specialty trade contractors, which I think are home and office remodelers, accounted for 20,000 jobs. I doubt that people are putting money into houses and buildings that are worth less than the mortgage.

Manufacturing accounted for 28,000–a very high monthly figure for recent years, one that is unbelievable in view of the rise in the trade deficit and declines in consumer spending on furniture (-3.8%), major appliances (-8.3%), women’s apparel (-17.7%), and household textiles such as towels and sheets (-26.5%), and when US business investment consists of corporations repurchasing their own stocks.

The rest of the claimed jobs are in private domestic services, that is, they are third world jobs. Retail trade claims 50,200 and transportation and warehousing claims 16,700. These numbers are impossible to believe in view of the closings of middle class department stores and Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales flops.

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Paul Craig Roberts

"The Russian government and the Russian people–indeed all the peoples of the earth–should understand that Russia has no partners in the West. Russia only has enemies."

The US House of Representatives has joined Hillary Clinton, Obama, the neoconservatives, Washington’s vassals, and the American and European presstitutes in demonizing Russia and President Putin. The House resolution against Russia is a packet of lies, but that did not stop the resolution from passing by a vote of 411 for and 10 against.

The entire world should take note that the American people are capable of electing only ten intelligent representatives. Ten people out of 435 is 2 percent. And yet Washington declares itself to be the “exceptional,” “indispensable” country empowered to exercise hegemony over the world!

No one should be surprised to see Washington, its presstitutes and European vassal states using the same propagandistic lies against Russia and Putin as were used against Iraq and Saddam Hussein, Libya and Gaddafi, Syria and Assad, Afghanistan and the Taliban, and Iran. Washington is fearful of the rise of Russia and China, of the leadership demonstrated by Vladimir Putin, of the formation of new organizations independent of Washington, such as the BRICS. While the George W. Bush regime was sidetracked by its “six week, $70 billion war,” which turned out to be, so far, a multi-trillion dollar 13-year losing operation, Putin kicked out some of the American agents who were contaminating Russian sovereignty and rebuilt the country.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Another goon thug gratuitous murderer has been let off by a grand jury and a prosecutor.

Read the condolences offered by NY mayor Bill de Blasio, officer Pantaleo and the Obama Puppet. They are so sorry about the collateral damage of protecting the public from criminals and terrorists.

But would our society collapse if people are allowed to sell untaxed individual cigarettes out of a pack on the street?

Without the death of innocents, would none of us be safe?

Does our safety depended on the NYPD murder of Eric Garner, a father of six, who was a threat to no one?

Another police murder of a US citizen who was no threat to anyone–just more collateral damage–as the US military calls it when US forces blow up kids’ soccer games, weddings, funerals, and birthday parties. Any concentration of people, regardless of what they are doing, is considered to be an enemy force and legitimate target. This includes people picking their crops in fields.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Few, if any, of the correct questions were asked in the grand jury hearing to decide whether policeman Darren Wilson would be indicted for killing Michael Brown.

The most important unexamined question is whether police are trained to use force immediately as a first resort before they assess a situation or determine if they are at the correct address. Are the police trained that the lives of police officers are so much more valuable than the lives of possible suspects, or a houseful of people into whose residence a heavily armed SWAT team enters, that police officers must not accept the risk of judicious behavior when encountering citizens? If this is the case as all evidence indicates that it is, then the police when they gratuitously murder members of the public are merely doing what they have been trained to do. As police are trained to use violence as a first resort, the police cannot be held accountable when they do.

There are a large number of videos available online that show that the first thing that police do when they arrive is to use force.

No sooner is Michael Brown in the grave than Cleveland cops kill a 12-year old boy who has a toy gun that shoots plastic pellets. The child is threatening no one–indeed there is no one else present. The boy seems to be playing a fantasy game in his head. A busy body calls the police. The police arrive and instantly shoot the kid down.

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