Paul Craig Roberts

File:Paul craig roberts.jpg

Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father of Reaganomics". He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service. He is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology and he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He was a post-graduate at the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States .

His writings frequently appear on Antiwar.com, VDARE.com. Lew Rockwell's web site, NewsMax, and CounterPunch.

Biography

Roberts has been a critic of both Democratic and Republican administrations. Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has authored or coauthored eight books, contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship. He has testified before congressional committees on 30 occasions on issues of economic policy. He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. He was a former Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor on March 20, 1987. The French Minister of Economics and Finance, Edouard Balladur came from France to present the medal to Dr. Roberts at a ceremony at the French Ambassador's residence in Washington, D.C. President Reagan sent OMB Director Jim Miller to the ceremony with a letter of congratulation.

Roberts opposed the Iraq War, and writes frequently on the subject. On May 18, 2005, in response to the publication of the "Downing Street memo," Roberts wrote an article calling for Bush's impeachment for lying to Congress about the case for war.

Roberts is also a critic of a potential Bush administration attack on Iran. In an August 15, 2005 article, he states "Bush...dismisses all facts and assurances and is willing to attack Iran based on nothing but Israel's paranoia."

Although his criticisms of Bush often seem to align him with the political left, Roberts continues to praise Ronald Reagan and to endorse many of Reagan's policies, arguing that "true conservatives" were the "first victims" of the neoconized Bush administration . He has said that many supporters of George W. Bush "are brownshirts with the same low intelligence and morals as Hitler's enthusiastic supporters."

• In "Alienation and the Soviet Economy" (1971), Roberts explained the Soviet economy as the outcome of a struggle between inordinate aspirations and a refractory reality. He showed that the Soviet economy was not centrally planned, but that its institutions, such as material supply, reflected the original Marxist aspirations to establish a non-market mode of production.

• In "Marx's Theory of Exchange" (1973), Roberts showed that Marx was an organizational theorist whose materialist conception of history ruled out good will as an effective force for change.

• In "The Supply-Side Revolution" (1984), Roberts explained the reformulation of macroeconomic theory and policy that he had helped to achieve.

• In "The New Color Line" (1995), Roberts showed that the Civil Rights Act was subverted by the bureaucrats who applied it and, by being used to create status-based privileges, became a threat to the Fourteenth Amendment in whose name it was passed.

• In "The Tyranny of Good Intentions" (2000), Roberts documented the erosion of the Blackstonian legal principles that ensure that law is a shield of the innocent and not a weapon in the hands of government.

• His first scholarly article (Classica et Mediaevalia) was a reformulation of "The Pirenne Thesis."

Recent views

September 11, 2001 attacks

Of the 9/11 Commission Report he wrote in 2006, "One would think that if the report could stand analysis, there would not be a taboo against calling attention to the inadequacy of its explanations." (see Criticisms of the 9/11 Commission Report). He has reported what he says are findings by experts that conclude there is a large energy deficit in the official account of the collapse of the three WTC buildings, and says that this deficit remains unexplained.

Roberts, a supply-side economist, comments on the "scientific impossibility" of the official explanation for the events on 9/11 and says those engineers and physicists who accept this theory are wrong. On August 18, 2006, he wrote:

I will begin by stating what we know to be a solid incontrovertible scientific fact. We know that it is strictly impossible for any building, much less steel columned buildings, to “pancake” at free fall speed. Therefore, it is a non-controversial fact that the official explanation of the collapse of the WTC buildings is false... Since the damning incontrovertible fact has not been investigated, speculation and “conspiracy theories” have filled the void. Some of the speculation is based on circumstantial evidence and is plausible. Other of the speculation is untenable, and it is used to protect the official explanation by branding all skeptics “conspiracy theorists.” The Popular Mechanics article and the TV documentary are obviously false since they both endorse the official explanation that the WTC buildings “pancaked” at free fall speed, an obvious scientific impossibility.

On September 14, 2006, he wrote:

The explanation that the three WTC buildings collapsed as a result of damage and fire is a mere assertion. The assertion is not backed up with scientific calculation to demonstrate that the energy from the airliners, fire, and gravity were sufficient to collapse the buildings. A number of independent authorities believe that there is a very large energy deficit in the official account of the collapse of the buildings. Until this issue is resolved, the official explanation is merely an assertion no matter who believes it.

On September 7, 2006,he wrote:

I do not know what happened on 9/11, and I don’t expect to ever find out. Neither government nor media show any interest in providing us with anything except a political commission’s report.

On the (back) cover of Debunking 9/11 Debunking (2007) he is quoted:

Professor Griffin is the nemesis of the 9/11 cover-up. This new book destroys the credibility of the NIST and Popular Mechanics reports and annihilates his critics.Book Cover Quote

Threats from Bush Administration in 2007 and 2008:

Roberts on the Thom Hartmann radio program in July of 2007 issued a public warning that he believes the Bush administration is preparing to orchestrate a staged terrorist attack in the United States, to transform the country into a dictatorship and launch a war with Iran within the next year.

He also was critical of a new Executive Order, released July 17, allowing the White House to seize the assets of anyone who interferes with its Iraq policies and giving the government expanded police powers to exercise control in the country. "When Bush exercises this authority [under the new Executive Order], there's no check to it. So it really is a form of total, absolute, one-man rule. The American people don't really understand the danger that they face."

Roberts adding that the so-called neoconservatives intended to use a renewal of the fight against terrorism to rally the American people around the fading Republican Party. "The administration figures themselves and prominent Republican propagandists ... are preparing us for another 9/11 event or series of events," he said. "You have to count on the fact that if al Qaeda is not going to do it, it is going to be orchestrated."

Roberts suggested that in the absence of a massive popular outcry, only the federal bureaucracy and perhaps the military could put constraints on Bush's current drive for a fully-fledged dictatorship. "They may have had enough. They may not go along with it," he said.

The radio interview was a follow-up to Robert's latest column, in which he warned that "unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the U.S. could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran."

Mainstream media

• "Anyone who depends on print, TV, or right-wing talk radio media is totally misinformed. The Bush administration has achieved a de facto Ministry of Propaganda."
• "The uniformity of the US media has become much more complete since the days of the cold war. During the 1990s, the US government permitted an unconscionable concentration of print and broadcast media that terminated the independence of the media. Today the US media is owned by 5 giant companies in which pro-Zionist Jews have disproportionate influence. More importantly, the values of the conglomerates reside in the broadcast licenses, which are granted by the government, and the corporations are run by corporate executives—not by journalists—whose eyes are on advertising revenues and the avoidance of controversy that might produce boycotts or upset advertisers and subscribers. Americans who rely on the totally corrupt corporate media have no idea what is happening anywhere on earth, much less at home."

Society

"If I had time to research my writings over the past 30 years, I could find examples of partisan articles in behalf of Republicans and against Democrats. However, political partisanship is not the corpus of my writings. I had a 16-year stint as Business Week's first outside columnist, despite hostility within the magazine and from the editor's New York social set, because the editor regarded me as the most trenchant critic of the George H.W. Bush administration in the business. The White House felt the same way and lobbied to have me removed from the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies... In their hatred of "the rich," the left-wing overlooks that in the 20th century the rich were the class most persecuted by government. The class genocide of the 20th century is the greatest genocide in history."

Outsourcing Jobs

Dr. Roberts has testified before the US–China Commission and written many articles pointing out that the offshoring of high productivity, high value-added jobs in manufacturing and professional services is dismantling the ladders of upward mobility that made the U.S. an opportunity society.

Published works

Books

• The Supply Side Revolution: An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington (1984) ISBN 0-674-85620-1
• Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy (1990) ISBN 0-932790-80-1
• The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America (1997) ISBN 0-19-511176-1
• The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy (1995) ISBN 0-89526-423-4
• The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice (2000) ISBN 0-7615-2553-X
• "Alienation and the Soviet Economy" (1971, 1990) ISBN 0-8419-1247-5
• "Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation, and Crisis" (1973, 1983) ISBN 0-03-069791-3

Articles

Baltimore Chronicle:

• Bush Turns His Terror War on the Homeland - August 29, 2006

CounterPunch:

• One Big Reason Markets are Plunging China's Threat to the Dollar is Real August 9, 2007
• Uncle Sam, Your Banker Will See You Now... In the Hole to China August 8, 2007
• Or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy Impeach Now July 16, 2007
• As Jobs Leave America's Shores...The New Face of Class War September 30, 2006
• Bush Turns His Terror War on the Homeland August 29, 2006
• The Shame of Being An American July 22-23, 2006 regarding International reactions to the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict by Citizens.
• 'Who Will Save America? My Epiphany' Feb. 2006
• "The World is Uniting Against the Bush Imperium"
• "Endgame for the Constitution"
• "How Bush Brewed the Iran Crisis"
• "A Republic or an Empire?"
• "Who Will Save America??"

Information Clearing House:

• Gullible Americans - August 14, 2006
• What we know and don’t know about 9/11 - August 16, 2006
• Can Anything Be Done? - August 27, 2006
• The War Is Lost - September 04, 2006
• Five Years After and We Still Don’t Know - September 07, 2006
• Books are our salvation - September 08, 2006
• Is American Democracy Too Feeble To Deal With 9/11? - September 11, 2006

LewRockwell.com:

• Roberts's archive

Antiwar.com:

• Roberts's archive

VDARE:

• Impeach Bush—Stop Attack On Iran
• Roberts's Syndicated Columns
• Roberts's "The Missing Case for Free Trade" article.
• Thought For Labor Day: Conservative Dogma Pulling Marx Out of His Grave

External links

• Interview on The French Connection 2007 09 06
• Roberts' first article calling for Bush's impeachment
• [6]
• Chuck Harder Interviews Paul Craig Roberts
• A Brief Interview with Paul Craig Roberts
• Downloadable audio interview with Scott Horton
• Paul Craig Roberts and the Certifiable Right, an opposing, neoconservative view.