Good-Bye: Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It
By Paul Craig Roberts
URL of this article:www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18339
Global Research, March 26, 2010 Counterpunch - 2010-03-25
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 Colbys 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 wasnt 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 dont 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 governments 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 Weeks 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 Bushs 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.
Americas fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement
bought the governments 9/11 conspiracy theory. The governments
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
Washingtons deficits and threaten the U.S. dollars role as world
reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits
put on the dollars 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 Washingtons 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:
PaulCraigRobe...@yahoo.com
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Copyright Paul Craig Roberts, Counterpunch, 2010
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