paulcraigroberts

Hesham Tillawi: Without any further ado, I’d like to go directly to Dr. Roberts, good evening sir, and thank you for joining us, we appreciate it. Dr. Roberts. we’re going to talk a lot about politics, but I’d like to start with the economy first. I guess that both subjects are related, you can’t really separate the two because they are so interlocked and inter-related. I know you are not a big fan of globalization and outsourcing. I have read some of your articles where you say that globalization is not good for America. Can you tell us why you think this?

Paul Craig Roberts: What globalization permits is the substitution of American labor for foreign labor in the production of goods and services for the American market. It essentially lets the corporations to dump their American employees and replace them with foreign employees, either from job-offshoring or by bringing foreign employees in on work visas so that you end up with the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility in American society as well as the polarization of rich and poor. This of course is a recipe for political instability and social strife.

Tillawi: We live in a free-enterprise system, and if a company can make the same product in India for half or less than half of what it costs to do it here, what is wrong that?

Roberts: Well what it means is the impoverishment of the American labor force.

Tillawi: yes, but is that the responsibility of companies though?

Roberts: yes, if they are American companies.

Tillawi: okay, so you are taking it a step beyond just being an issue of profits.

Roberts: listen, the case for free trade is very specific and is based upon the idea of mutual benefit. Free trade is supposed to permit each country in the trading partnership to specialize in those fields where each is most productive and to trade with the other country for its products. But this is not what globalization is. In its essence globalization is the desertion of a high-wage country by that country’s capital and technology to a low-wage country where the same capital and technology is employing labor at a fraction of the labor cost so that these products can be sent back to its home market. This bears no relationship to any case ever made for free trade, and it is certainly true that if a country wants to destroy itself it can do that. This is what happens and it is self-destruction for the United States to participate in globalization. It is a form of labor arbitrage and is a substitution of American labor for foreign labor.

Tillawi: I thought that our trade with China was that we were buying little toys and tee-shirts, but what you are saying is that we are also buying hi-tech equipment, not just Wal Mart items?

Roberts: well, it’s not that we buy from them, we aren’t even trading with them. What is happening is that the American firms build their factories there, take the capital and technology there and employ Chinese labor and then these American firms send the products back here to America to be sold. It’s not trade, it’s labor arbitrage in which American firms make the products with Chinese labor that they then sell to Americans. That is not trade. Now this can work only in the short run until enough of the Americans have been displaced from the higher paying jobs and forced into unemployment or underemployment and the consumer market gradually dies.

Tillawi: you wrote an article entitled ‘Who owns the dollar?’. are we borrowing money from China as well?

Roberts: oh, yes, we borrow tremendous amounts of money from them, they are probably our most active banker, the Japanese I think are still the largest. without the Chinese and the Japanese and to some extent the south Koreans we wouldn’t be able to operate because they finance the US budget and trade deficits. The so called ‘American superpower’ is not a superpower, we are totally in the hands of our Asian bankers and any one of them could destroy the united states within a matter of minutes just by dumping their holdings of dollar assets.

Tillawi: when you say that we are borrowing money, is it like that we are going to a bank and that the US is borrowing actual money?

Roberts: we borrow money in the following ways; 1 when we when we run a $400 billion dollar budget deficits the fed government is doing at this present time, the government has to find a source of money from somewhere when it is that much in the red. In days long ago, Americans would buy the bonds as part of their investments and as part of their retirement plans, but the American savings rate now is negative, and so the money is lent by foreigners who have surplus dollars from the trade relationships that maintain with the United states. For example, both Japan and China have very large trade surpluses with the US. Japan has had one for perhaps longer than 20 years, and so they have these large accumulations that they have to purchase our debt.

Now, the question obviously is, ‘why do they do it?’ Well, they do it for a variety of reasons. The Japanese do it so that the Japanese Yen doesn’t rise too rapidly against the dollar that would interfere with their penetration into our markets, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to sell their cars and other products. The Chinese do it because they have pegged their currency to the dollar and want to maintain their currency’s value. So you see, it serves their interests to lend us this money, but at some point they won’t need to serve their interests in that way and we will then be very vulnerable should they decide not to lend to us anymore. Unless of course we take some actions to put our own house in order.

Tillawi: Okay. Now, on about 30 different occasions you were involved in congressional hearings, one of them being the United States China Economic and Security review, and what you said in your statement was that ‘what we are witnessing in part is the loss of a sense of national identity. Many things have brought about this loss of identity--open borders, massive immigration by 3rd-world peoples, attacks on American identity by cultural Marxists...many things are eroding our sense of cohesiveness and a tower of Babel is not a country.’ What do you mean by this?

Roberts: What I am saying is that the elites of America are not patriotic, that they have very short term personal and economic interests which do not work in the best interests of the country. In Japan and China for example, their leadership is very forward-looking and considers what is best for them 10, 20, or 30 years down the road. The Japanese think of themselves as Japanese, the Chinese think of themselves as Chinese, whereas the American elite see themselves as part of some global persons with global interests that are separate and independent from the interests of the United States. Therefore, no one from among the American elite is asking the question ‘where will the US be in 10, 20 or 30 years?’

Tillawi: Okay. Now, who do you mean when you say attacks on American identity by Cultural Marxists?

Roberts: Cultural Marxists are one of the most dominant intellectual elements in American universities and have been very effective in undermining the sense of American cohesiveness. They have been very effective at discrediting American values or accomplishments things that in other ways give meaning to a country. The way that I put it is that they like to ‘unmask the myths’ and replace them with denunciations and you see that the strongest friendship existing with these Cultural Marxists are the so called ‘Neo-cons’ or Neo-conservatives who have been successful in taking over the former conservative movement and republican party by representing themselves as being the opposition to the Cultural Marxists.

Tillawi: When you use the term Cultural Marxists are you referring to a particular group of people?

Roberts: it’s a very well known term and there is a tremendous amount of scholarly writings about it. They are an intellectual force and have been around for many decades. The Neo-cons were able to assume a leadership role among conservatives by presenting themselves as the opponents of the Cultural Marxists. As far as I am concerned both movements, Neo-Conservative and Cultural Marxists are inimical to the best interests of the United States and both movements stand outside our traditions. It’s a very sorry state of affairs when the two most influential movements in the US are both outside our American tradition.

Tillawi: Okay. Now, what I would like to discuss is the issue of the media. You once wrote that ‘much of the problem is the media itself which serves as an agency of disinformation for the Bush administration. Fox news and right-wing talk radio are the worst, but all of the media is affected to some degree.’ Are you saying that the media is nothing but a propaganda arm for the Bush administration?

Roberts: yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Fox news is nothing but a propaganda arm for the Bush administration.

Tillawi: So, in other words, Hitler had a propaganda ministry and Bush’s ministry of propaganda is the mainstream media?

Roberts: Bush does not need a propaganda ministry, it works for him naturally and for a variety of reasons. One is that during the 1990’s the fed government broke with its traditions and permitted a tremendous amount of media concentration and conglomeration to take place so that 4 or 5 megafirms now own the entirety of what we would call the mainstream media in the US. Since the broadcasts licenses are owned by the fed government, these media outlets are not interested in annoying the government by revealing embarrassing information. The other reason is that since the media is so highly concentrated and is a corporate enterprise it is not interested in bringing the news as much as it is interested in the bottom line, which is determined by advertising. revenues. And so they are very careful not to be controversial or to do anything that would lead to boycotts or protests or anything that would otherwise damage their flow of revenue. So, the media finds itself walking hand-in-hand with whatever the conventional wisdom seems to be., and whatever the line from the government seems to be, that is the line you will hear coming from the media.

Tillawi: You have also written about 911 and you said that the Neo-con response to it was to ‘turn a war against stateless terrorism into military attacks on Muslim states, and that you realized that ‘the Bush administration was committing a strategic blunder with open-ended disastrous consequences for the United States that in the end will destroy both the Republican party and the conservative movement.’

Now, what would you have done differently in response to 9/11 Dr. Roberts?

Roberts: Well, if I believed the government ‘s line, that it was done by a terrorist group known as Al Qaeda, then I would focus on them and them alone would have begun by asking the question ‘How in the world did some guy in a cave in Afghanistan manage to penetrate our defenses, despite all of our intelligence collection and satellite spying capabilities?’ I would first try to determine what failure had taken place in the government that would have allowed this to happen and correct that problem first. Then I would focus on tracking this person down, but what I would not do is to go an invade two countries that had nothing to do with the event itself. I would not have used 9/11 as an excuse to implement some other agenda that is totally unrelated to what took place.

Tillawi: So, from your point of view then as someone who used to be on the inside of government at what was a very high level, why did we invade Iraq then, and if Reagan had been President, would he have invaded Iraq?

Roberts: Of course not. The reasons that we have been given we now know were all false.

Tillawi: So who is running our country then, Dr. Roberts?

Roberts: That’s a very good question. I think to a great extent fear and hysteria are helping people run the country who should not be running it. It has now been proven beyond any doubt that the US government knew that there were no WMDs and that this was an orchestrated excuse for this war. They obviously knew that Saddam Hussein was a secularist who oppressed Islamic fundamentalist leaders and that he was not aligned with Al Qaeda. We have the top secret memos that were leaked by the British cabinet and in which the head of British intelligence says that the Americans first made up their mind to attack Iraq and that they then looked around for a reason that would justify it. But exactly why they did it we do not know. A lot of people give a lot of different reasons based upon their own speculation. Some say it was done for oil some say it was done for Israel, but the President is the only one who truly knows and he hasn’t told us yet. The things he has told us we now know are not true.

Tillawi: Doctor, let me ask you this question, if you are in such a position to know: How great is the opposition within the higher echelons of the government to what the Neo-Cons are doing?

Roberts: I think that it has to be very high, which is why I am puzzled. When I was in the government, it would have been impossible for the government to effectively go against the State department staff, you would have to convince them and to carry them along with your arguments, and yet this government has been able to run over the professional beaurocracy and to ignore it. We have now had several high-ranking officials within the CIA come forward and declare that the Bush administration was not interested whatsoever in their intelligence estimates, that they were being pressed to make up intelligence that fit with what it was that the White House wanted to do. So, this is the first time in my life that I have seen them run over the beaurocracy and the people who have blown the whistle on them have been fired or removed, and it crosses a long line of government fields, including those involved with securing government contracts. The woman who revealed that government contracts are not being bid properly and that favorites are being played and that the rules are being broken

gets fired for it. Congress has done nothing, no investigations, no resistance, no speaking up for the civil servants who have blown the whistle, whether it has been on the contracts or on the misuse of intelligence. I don’t know how they have managed to get away with this.

I think that the best answer as to why they have been able to get away with all of this is because of 9/11. Americans believe the government line that we as an innocent, upright country were ruthlessly attacked and that we are going to be attacked again and that a nuclear weapon is going to be set off in an American city. People are angry about that, some are fearful and hysterical and this I think is the cover that allows the Bush administration to evade the law and to do pretty much whatever it wants as if it were a dictatorship.

Tillawi: Dr. Roberts, let’ take a call, because we’ve had some people waiting for a while now. Tony on line 1, go ahead.

Caller: Dr. Roberts, could you please comment on this thing known as ‘The Project for a New American Century’ which I am led to believe is very tied up with the whole thing going on in the Middle East?

Roberts: The Project for a New American Century was a paper prepared by the Neo-cons some years ago that lays out the American invasion of the Middle East and justifies it partly in terms of Israel’s interests. It was done in close cooperation with the Likud party in Israel. Another paper is one entitled ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing the Realm’, prepared by the Neo-cons that pretty much says the same thing. It would be a good idea for the American people to get hold of these papers and to read them so that they can see for themselves how aggressive they are. The authors of these papers believe that the United States has a monopoly on virtue and righteousness and believe that the US has the right to force the rest of the world to do as we say and to copy our way of life.

Tillawi: Dr. Roberts, I have seen the names of those in the Neo-Conservative movement and most of the leaders happen to be Jewish. Is this movement a Jewish movement?

Roberts:; It’s broader than that, but you’re right in that the leaders of the movement are Jewish, and those holding the highest positions of power and influence in the Bush administration with the exception of John Bolton at the United Nations are Jewish as well. Scholars who have studied them say that they are partly Straussian and partly communist in the same vein as Trotsky.