Good Bye.......

Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. 

High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”

The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.

The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.

And there is the global warming scandal, in which  NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting  a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.

I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders.  In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.

When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion  alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government. 

As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.

Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.

Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.

Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.

Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”

For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American corporate media does not serve the truth.  It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.  His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Let The Sun Shine In......

How the Permanent Power Structure Is Trying to Stop Obama

Published on Sunday, March 15, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Is the Hunter Being Captured by the Game?

by Danny Schechter

Some things don't change. Obama may be in the White House, shuffling between the safety of the center and the language of change ("changeguage?"), firm in his commitment to the doctrine of neo-prog pragmatism which all too often requires the abandonment of ideas and ideals that could offend both the right and wrong people.

He is in office, but is he in power?

The mistake that many make is to confuse the trappings of symbolic power with the exercise of real power. Truth be told, real power is exercised mostly by unchecked private interests, lobbyists and our media. They have the power to obstruct policies, stir up controversies and orchestrate pressure to kill measures they don't like. They are well-funded minority and work skillfully in the shadows and through highly paid PR practitioners.

(I know what you're thinking.....'Oh, God....there they go again....the conspiracy theorists." Take a minute. Think. It is as we have been saying for years...."The politicians are just, for the most part, middlemen/women. When there were powerful monarchies, there were no elected officials, only nobility. Nobility and the Church stood between the beaten down masses and the Royals, as the middle class and the politicians do today. The middle class is disappearing.... splitting....splitting into 1)those who see themselves as being a part of the modern-day "nobility," making six-figure incomes. living in gated communities or grand apartments in security buildings and who have great health insurance and 2) those who know longer see themselves as middle class, are no longer in denial about their fate after the intentional demolition of the economics and security of this nation.)

Every politician knows that these non-elected power centers often have more power than elected decision-makers. They know that Congress is a swamp of competing interests catering to provincial needs. Remember the debate over "earmarks" during the campaign? McCain raised it but then Obama agreed with him. What happened?

Both parties promote them. They are, apparently, a permanent part of the system. South Carolina's Lindsay Graham thunders against them until it involves money for a convention center in Myrtle Beach SC. And etc.

AP says of the President: "He criticized pork barrel spending in the form of "earmarks," urging changes in the way that Congress adopts the spending proposals. Then he signed a spending bill that contains nearly 9,000 of them, some that members of his own staff shoved in last year when they were still members of Congress."

True, but! Like many press reports this is totally context-free, even in our Republic of Pork. These earmarks represented 2% of the budget and got 98% of the coverage.

That's because the media are in the perception-forming business, and despite some liberal (but rarely left) voices, tilts center-right when it is not blatantly serving a right-wing agenda.

Is this a conspiracy theory? I don't think so based on thirty years inside the media world.

(I sure as hell don't think this is a conspiracy theory. Many of us know this is true for other reasons other than working inside the ACNM.)

Former AP reporter Robert Parry, now Editor of Consortiumnews.com, sums up this part of the problem, "Less than two months into Barack Obama's presidency, it has become clear that the top threat to his ability to accomplish his goals - from reversing the recession to reforming health care to building a greener economy - is not just an obstructionist Republican Party but a U.S. news media that remains largely tilted to the Right.

There is the powerful right-wing media - with its many outlets in print, radio, TV and the Internet - but also a mainstream/corporate media that can't escape the old dynamic of framing stories negatively about Democrats and granting Republicans every benefit of the doubt."

This phenomenon is obvious to anyone that looks closely but few among the Democrats mention it less they be marginalized or stripped of access to the airwaves for an occasional sound bite. Even fewer try to build and support independent media like Parry's organization or our own.

Politics remains a battleground and it's not just Rush and his ditto heads who help steer or undercut the agenda. Conservative democrats are not fully on board Obama's express.

Powerful lobbies from two private sector complexes and one country have disproportionate clout. There's the long-standing military-industrial complex, there's the financialized credit and loan complex and there are the bully boys of Israeli hegemony.

The first two want to suck off the budget and deregulate when possible; the third wants money too-and gets far more than its fair share-but also to control the discourse and even name the officials who are part of it.

Example, President Obama appointed Dennis Blair Director of National Intelligence. Blair wanted to have an advisory group and reached out to a former US ambassador Charles Freeman considered to be an outspoken and outside the box thinker. Like Obama, Blair wanted some diversity of views among his advisors, and to understand a region that has largely turned against us.

What happened? Freeman who dared criticize Israeli policy was targeted by the Israeli Lobby. Rumors were floated; his record was distorted. Right wing pundits went to work painting Freeman as an enemy of the United States. He was forced to withdraw. Ironically part of this noxious campaign was steered by an AIPAC operative who is himself accused of spying for Israel.

Ray McGovern, a veteran CIA man notes that Freeman himself revealed that his character assassination was orchestrated by the Israel Lobby.

"The outrageous agitation ... will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues. [It casts] doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government...

"The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views ... and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those it [the Lobby] favors."

It is almost as if every government, Republican and Democrat are required or intimidated into supporting Israel's every policy even when blatantly reactionary, racist, or even self-destructive. Are we now supposed to rubber-stamp every decision by its new ultra-right government that won power with electoral maneuvers and blatant appeals to chauvinism and fanaticism?

Obama stayed silent when his own appointee was bashed into resigning by agents of a foreign power, even if they don't cop to that description?

Has the president lost his tongue, or his courage? Must he lay down with the lions to stay in power or do the people who put him into office have to get back into action and stand up for the values and spirit that turned so many on?

As we said before the election, the battle will not be one on election days even if Obama wins. He cannot do what we want him to do without our support, whatever it takes.

Yes, he's better than Bush even if some of his recent pronouncements sound Bush-lite. We have to understand the nature or the terrain he's fighting in---and then press him to do what's right, not offer rationalizations.

We also have to anticipate what my former government professor at Cornell, Theodore Lowi is now saying, that he expects Obama too will inevitably be targeted and go through a downward spiral.

"If you check out the rhetoric on the front pages of papers and magazines and TV, you'll see how personalized references are: ‘Can he deliver? When will he deliver?' ....

"The reality is that all the powers in the world could not make it possible for him to do what's expected. That's what makes me so sad. Obama excels in all that we require in a president and he'll fail, precisely because he's president. I know this sounds like an awful contradiction or conundrum, but that's the presidency."

Mediachannel’s News Dissector Danny Schechter investigates the origins of the economic crisis in his new book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal (Cosimo Books via Amazon). Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

Let The Sun Shine In......