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.

More »

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.

More »

Paul Craig Roberts (A Short Comment)

Events in Ferguson unfolded as most aware Americans thought they would. A white prosecutor guided a grand jury to the decision that the white policeman who shot and killed a young black male had just cause and committed no crime.

The black majority but politically powerless community in Ferguson consists of Americans who are constantly harassed and abused by police. The black community responded predictably to the exoneration of the white policeman. The results were riots, looting, and the destruction of property.

This response hardened the whites in their view that black people are criminally inclined and a threat to the safety of the lives and properties of whites. The issue has been cast as white-black racism. Actually, the situation is far more serious than racism.

I can remember times when police in America were reliable. They had themselves under control and saw their role as helpful to citizens and investigators of crimes. They took care not to bring charges against innocent people and to kill citizens without cause. Police would put their lives on line in order to avoid making a mistake in the use of their power.

Those times are gone forever. The police have been militarized, especially after 9/11, but even before. Police are taught to regard the public, especially any suspect or traffic offender as a potential threat to the police. The new rule taught to police is to apply violence to the suspect or offender in order to protect the police officer, and to question suspects only after they are safely secured, it they are still alive after being beaten, tasered, or shot.

More »

Paul Craig Roberts (A Short Comment)

According to news reports, Washington has decided to arm Ukraine for renewed military assault on Russian ethnics in Donetsk and Luhansk.

A Russian foreign ministry official condemned Washington’s reckless decision to supply weapons to Kiev as a violation of agreements that would make a political resolution of the conflict less likely. This statement is perplexing. It implies that the Russian government has not yet figured out that Washington has no interest in resolving the conflict. Washington’s purpose is to use the hapless Ukrainians against Russia. The worse the conflict becomes, the happier Washington is.

The Russian government made a bet that Europe would come to its senses and the conflict would be peacefully resolved. The Russian government has lost that bet and must immediately move to preempt a worsening crisis by uniting the separatists provinces with Russia or by reading the riot act to Europe.

It would be a costly humiliation for the Russian government to abandon the ethnic Russians to a military assault. If Russia stands aside while Donetsk and Luhansk are destroyed, the next attack will be on Crimea. By the time Russia is forced to fight, Russia will face a better armed, better prepared, and more formidable foe.

More »

Costantino Ceoldo interviews Paul Craig Roberts

"Enough Americans Are Not Stupid" (rumproast.com)

I recently had the chance to interview Paul Craig Roberts. I remember briefly, for the uninitiated, that Dr. Roberts was a senior official of the US government, economic advisor to the President during the first term of Ronald Reagan. It is to him the creation of Reaganomics, the economic policy initiated by Reagan to revive the US economy, then stagnant. Dr. Roberts was also a member of a secret committee of control over the CIA, set up to verify the information provided by US intelligence on the continuation of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He has still now a profound understanding of the mechanisms of power in Washington and he’s distinguished for his political analysis, often discordant compared with that of the official mainstream.

Costantino Ceoldo – In one of your recent articles you said that there is an “establishment” within both the Republican Party and also the Democrats, voted to preserve the power and hostility to any independent and authoritative presidential figure. How is it that we have come now to a situation like this and it seems to have originated many decades ago?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts – Government’s ability to tax, borrow, and print money gives government command over private resources. The beneficiaries of these resources can be, in certain circumstances the people. More often, the beneficiaries are the profits of private interests who are allied with government. As time passes these interests harden and become an Establishment. In the US the Establishment consists of the private interest groups–such as the financial sector, the military/security complex, the Israel Lobby, the extractive industries, and agribusiness–that write the laws that government enacts. The political party in-groups serve these interests in exchange for the large political campaign donations that elect the government. The two political parties in the US compete to be the whore of the private interest groups, because the majority party can do more favors and thus receive more benefits. When political outsiders, such as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, who can be tolerated as long as they are limited to governorships in States, seize the presidential nomination from the Establishment candidates and get elected, they jeopardize the establishment’s control. For example, when the Democratic Establishment realized that Franklin D. Roosevelt would not survive his 4th term, they forced out his popular vice president, Henry Wallace, and installed the non-entity and easily controlled Harry Truman. They were able to use Truman to create the very profitable Cold War, which kept the military/security complex in the money for years.

More »

Paul Craig Roberts

As most Americans, if not the financial media, are aware, Quantitative Easing (a euphemism for printing money) has failed to bring back the US economy.

So why has Japan adopted the policy? Since the heavy duty money printing began in 2013, the Japanese yen has fallen 35% against the US dollar, a big cost for a country dependent on energy imports. Moreover, the Japanese economy has shown no growth in response to the QE stimulus to justify the rising price of imports.

Despite the economy’s lack of response to the stimulus, last month the Bank of Japan announced a 60% increase in quantitative easing–from 50 to 80 trillion yen annually. Albert Edwards, a strategist at Societe Generale, predicts that the Japanese printing press will drive the yen down from 115 yen to the dollar to 145.

This is a prediction, but why risk the reality? What does Japan have to gain from currency depreciation? What is the thinking behind the policy? An easy explanation is that Japan is being ordered to destroy its currency in order to protect the over-printed US dollar. As a vassal state, Japan suffers under US political and financial hegemony and is powerless to resist Washington’s pressure.

More »

Nomi Prins

Nomi Prins in the article below addresses the destruction of the market-based Western financial system and its replacement with a casino underwritten by taxpayers.

The recent spike in global political-financial volatility that was temporarily soothed by European Central Bank (ECB) covered bond buying reveals another crack in the six-year-old throw-money-at-the-banks strategies of politicians and central bankers. The premise of using banks as credit portals to transport public funds from the government to citizens is as inefficient as it is not happening. The power elite may exude belabored moans about slow growth and rising inequality in speeches and press releases, but they continue to find ways to provide liquidity, sustenance and comfort to financial institutions, not to populations.

More »

Paul Craig Roberts

RT, one of my favorite news sources, has fallen for a fake story put out by the Pentagon to support the fantasy story that a SEAL team killed Osama bin Laden, who died a second time in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a decade after his first death from illness and disease.

This fake story together with the fake movie and the fake book by an alleged SEAL team member is the way the fake story of bin Laden’s murder is perpetrated. Bin Laden’s alleged demise at the hands of a SEAL team was a propaganda orchestration, the purpose of which was to give Obama a hero’s laurels and deep six Democratic talk of challenging his nomination for a second term.

Osama bin Laden died in December 2001 of renal failure and other health problems, having denied in his last recorded video any responsibility for 9/11, instead directing Americans to look inside their own government. The FBI itself has stated that there is no evidence that Osama bin Laden is responsible for 9/11. Bin Laden’s obituary appeared in numerous foreign and Arabic press, and also on Fox News. No one can survive renal failure for a decade, and no dialysis machine was found in the alleged Abbottabad compound of bin Laden, who allegedly was murdered by SEALs a decade after his obituary notices.

Additionally, no one among the crew of the ship from which the White House reported bin Laden was buried at sea saw any such burial, and the sailors sent messages home to that effect. Somehow a burial was held onboard a ship on which there are constant watches and crew on alert at all hours, and no one witnessed it.

More »

Paul Craig Roberts

If you require more evidence that the United States is a dysfunctional society, observe American elections. Election season is slander season. Each party’s attack teams focus on misrepresenting, defaming, and ridiculing the opposing party’s candidates. Attack ads have replaced debates and any discussion of what the issues are, or should be, and how candidates perceive the public’s interest. Each attack team tells lies designed to enrage various voters about the other team’s candidate.

Whoever is elected is indebted not to voters but to the special interests that provided the campaign money. Once elected the official serves the private interest groups that put the official in office. In America the government can be bought and sold just like everything else. In its Citizens United ruling, a Republican Supreme Court put its stamp of approval on the right of corporations to purchase the US government.

Each state has its own dominant interest groups that win every election. In Florida real estate developers routinely defeat the environment and local communities. Developers have even been known to form organizations that pose as conservation supporters in order to misrepresent and defeat conservation measures.

Yet, despite their long string of losses to special interests, voters still participate in elections. I once read a theory that elections are a form of entertainment. President Clinton’s encounter with the young woman on MTV–”boxers or briefs”–is one indication of the lack of seriousness that Americans bring to politics.

Perhaps the lighter moment of a young woman’s interest in the president’s underwear should be cherished. The Clinton years will be remembered as scandal after scandal with dark events unresolved and covered up. The Clinton years were transformative. For those who don’t remember and those too young at the time to be aware, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories (1997), will be an eye-opener. Perhaps the Democrats should read the book before nominating Hillary as the party’s presidential candidate.

More »

Paul Craig Roberts

The federal government has announced that thousands of additional US soldiers are being sent to Liberia. General Gary Volesky said the troops would “stamp out” ebola. The official story is that combat troops are being sent to build treatment structures for those infected with ebola.

Why combat troops? Why not send a construction outfit such as an engineer battalion if it has to be military? Why not do what the government usually does and contract with a construction company to build the treatment units? “Additional thousands of troops” results in a very large inexperienced construction crew for 17 treatment units. It doesn’t make sense.

America’s Weaponization of Ebola
Could Ebola have escaped from a US bio-war laboratory?
Evidence of US Development and Testing of Airborne Ebola

Stories that don’t make sense and that are not explained naturally arouse suspicions, such as: Are US soldiers being used to test ebola vaccines and cures, or more darkly are they being used to bring more ebola back to the US?

More »