Paul Craig Roberts

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other persons named Paul Roberts, see Paul Roberts (disambiguation).

Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts (born April 3, 1939, in Atlanta, Georgia) 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.^[1]

His writings frequently appear on OpEdNews.com, Antiwar.com, VDARE.com. Lew Rockwell's web site, CounterPunch, and the American Free Press.

[edit] Biography

Roberts has been a critic of both Democratic and Republican administrations. He has written or co-written 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 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, 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 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.^[2] He has said that many supporters of George W. Bush "are brownshirts with the same low intelligence and morals as Hitler's enthusiastic supporters."^[3]

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."

[edit] Recent views

[edit] Bush Neocons pushing towards Nuclear Armageddon in the next two or three years

In an interview on August 27, 2008 on Alex Jones Radio broadcast, Paul Craig Roberts claims Bush neocons are leading the United States into a nuclear confrontation with Russia over the situation in Georgia and South Ossetia. Roberts gives the conflict “almost total certainty if John McCain gets in office… this is not something that will happen in the next fifty years, it’s going to happen in the next two or three years.” Bush Neocons pushing towards Nuclear Armageddon in the next two or three years. August 27, 2008

[edit] 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 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.^[4]

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

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."

[edit] National 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."^[5]
"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."^[6]

[edit] 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."^[5]

[edit] Outsourcing jobs

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.

[edit] War on Drugs

Though Roberts worked for the Reagan administration, which implemented a "zero tolerance" and "Just Say No" policy on illegal drugs and increased spending to combat drugs, in 2007, he penned an article criticizing the excess of the War on Drugs which he termed the "militarization of local police".^[7]

[edit] Republican Party

Roberts is seriously dismayed by what he considers the Republican Party's disregard for the US constitution. He has even voiced his regret that he ever worked for it, avowing that, had he known what it would become, he would never have contributed to the Reagan Revolution.^[8]

[edit] Published works

[edit] Books

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
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