Paul Craig Roberts

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Paul Craig Roberts (born April 3, 1939 ) is an American economist and publicist. He was assistant Treasury Secretary during the Reagan administration and is known as a co-founder of the Reagan administration's economic policy program (" Reaganomics "). He was an associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal , a columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service . He was asked for his expertise at 30 occasions on economic policy issues in Congress .

His criticism of the neoliberal economic policy, which in his opinion led to the financial crisis of 2008, was mainly presented in his work The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism and the Economic Erosion of the West (2012).

After the turn of the century, Roberts published frequently in Counterpunch , dealing with the Bush and Barack Obama's administrations regarding the War on Terror , which, in his opinion, restricted the civil rights of the United States ' constitution. In contrast to earlier party friends among the Republicans , he later rejected the War on Drugs as well as the War on Terror and also criticized Israel's policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

resume

Roberts is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology . He received his PhD from the University of Virginia . He then worked at the University of California, Berkeley , Merton College and the University of Oxford . His first scientific essay ( Classica et Mediaevalia ) was a reformulation of the Pirenne thesis .

In Alienation and the Soviet Economy (1971), Roberts argued that the Soviet economic system was the result of a conflict of pretended intentions and a reality opposite to them. It is not a real planned economy, but merely mirrors one in its institutions. In Marx's Theory of Exchange (1973) he also argued that Marx was an “organizational theorist” whose materialistic view of history left no room for ethically motivated drivers of change.

From 1975 to 1978, Roberts was a research fellow for the Congress. As Jack Kemp's economic advisor , he drafted the Kemp-Roth Act (from which the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 emerged ). He played a leading role in bipartisan support for supply-side economic policies . Through his influential article about the tax burden in Harper's in 1978, at the time in which he Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah consulted, offered him the publisher of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Robert L. Bartley , a possibility its views on publish. He published for the WSJ until 1980. At the same time he worked as a research assistant for political economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies , at that time part of Georgetown University .

From 1981 to 1982 Roberts was Secretary of the Treasury responsible for economic policy ( w: en: Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy ) under President Ronald Reagan . Secretary of State Donald Regan assigned him an important role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 , for which he received the Award for Outstanding Achievement in US Economic Policy. "

Roberts resigned in January 1982 to be the first to take up the Chair of Economic Policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies . He held this position until 1993. The main work of this time is The Supply-Side Revolution (1984) , which reformulated the macroeconomic theories that he had put into practice under Reagan.

From 1993 to 1996 he worked at the Cato Institute . He was also a professor at the Hoover Institution .

In The New Color Line (1995), Roberts argued that bureaucrats failed to apply the civil rights law in its sense. The law is used to establish privileges and threatens the principle of equality of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution , in whose name it was passed. In The Tyranny of Good Intentions (2000), Roberts explained how those eighteenth-century legal principles dating back to the British William Blackstone , which were intended to ensure that the law was a protection of the weak and not a weapon in the hands of the government, were being undermined.

Roberts was a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society , but announced his resignation in August 2008.

Awards

In 1987 he was accepted as an honorary member of the Légion d'honneur by the French government for his renewal of economics and economic policy . Premier Édouard Balladur traveled to the USA to deliver the medal to Roberts. President Reagan sent Jim Miller with a letter of congratulations on the celebration.

In 1992, Roberts received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism from the American Legislative Exchange Council . In 1993 Forbes Media Guide ranked him among the top seven journalists in the United States.

Positions

Criticism of the Bush administration

Roberts opposed the 2003 Iraq war and on May 18, 2005 called for Bush's impeachment for misleading Congress as to the cause of the war.

Roberts also criticized war plans against Iran . This seemed to bring him closer to the American left. In fact, Roberts justified himself with a specifically adapted interpretation of Ronald Reagan's dual strategy - both, namely to end stagflation and the Cold War. In Roberts' opinion, the “real” Conservatives were the first victims of the Bush administration's neoconservatives. Bush's supporters are his "brown shirts, with the same low intellectual and moral level as Hitler's enthusiastic supporters."

Israel

Roberts criticized the Israeli government and warned against confusing criticism of the Zionist government with criticism of Judaism . In his January 2005 column “What Became of Western Morality?” He pointed out that it was the newspapers in Israel, not the American ones, who were protesting against the “atrocities” of the Israeli government against the Palestinians.

In an article for CounterPunch , "Pirates of the Mediterranean," Roberts wrote that Israel had been repeating "land theft" by American settlers from indigenous people for 60 years. The Gaza Strip is the "largest concentration camp in the world", populated by people who were driven from Palestine so that Israel could steal their land from them. He called the US State Department a "puppet" of Israel and the US a "puppet state". He concluded that there was no money for California , for the US health care system, or for the homeless because Israel needed that money. "

The Anti-Defamation League criticized Roberts as a promoter of anti-Semitism , since since 2007 his columns have increasingly focused on criticizing Israel and the Jews and making publications popular on the left and right. Roberts proposed the Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper for the Nobel Peace Prize .

Radicalization of the view of the Second World War and the Holocaust

Since 2019, Roberts’s increasingly polemical criticism of Israel increased to an increasingly conspiratorial ideological view of Jews overall to such an extent that he publicly took historical revisionist positions on the Holocaust and the beginning of the Second World War. This turn began with an article in the Foreign Policy Journal extolling the story of convicted Holocaust denier David Irving:

"Irving, without any doubt the best historian of the European part of World War II, learned at his great expense that challenging myths does not go unpunished ... I will avoid the story of how this came to be, but, yes, you guessed it, it was the Zionists ”.

In a series of articles on the website of the historical revisionist journalist Ron Unz, Roberts explicitly describes the National Socialist genocide of European Jews as a web of lies devised by the victorious powers to discredit the government of Adolf Hitler, which was allegedly only striving to eliminate the injustices of the Versailles Treaty:

“The aims of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, a mass movement that came to power legally in Germany, to correct the unemployment caused by unjust reparations forced on Germany by a starvation policy imposed by the British following World War I and to put Germany , dismembered by the unjust and demonic Versailles Treaty, back together, has been demonized and its intentions mischaracterized by most Western historians. [...] And over the decades, considerable evidence has accumulated that the Gas Chambers and the Jewish Holocaust — the central elements of today's Nazi “Black Legend” —were just as fictional as all those other items. "

At the same time, denying the character of the Barbarossa enterprise as a genuine war of robbery and annihilation, Roberts goes so far that he declares the Jews, declared to be a conspiratorial collective subject, to be the perpetrators of the war, in keeping with the Nazi ideology, which the unwilling British Prime Minister Churchill and the US Had forced President Roosevelt into a plot of war in order to obtain a weighty pretext for the establishment of the State of Israel:

"This fake news story of German aggression was used to build the case that Germany, which was merely recovering its national territory and rescuing German people from persecution in Czechoslovakia and Poland, was an aggressor with world conquest as its goal. The American people and in Britain the Chamberlain government resisted this false story for a long time, but as historians have revealed the British and American press was controlled by Zionist Jews, and these Jews had all the entrances they needed into Churchill and Roosevelt. "

In the series of three articles, Roberts makes use of all the arguments of right-wing extremist Holocaust deniers that have been known and refuted for decades.

South Ossetia

In an August 27, 2008 interview on The Alex Jones Show , Roberts said he believed influential neoconservatives associated with the government would lead the US into a nuclear war with Russia . He assumed a high degree of probability and a period of two to three years if John McCain won the presidential election.

Protests in Iran during the 2009–2010 election

In CounterPunch , Roberts stated on the protests after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election that the demonstrations, despite the many honest supporters of the protests, bore the hallmarks of the demonstrations orchestrated by the CIA in Georgia and Ukraine.

Attack on the World Trade Center

In his opinion, the report of the “ 9/11 Commission ” contained errors. For him, the collapse of the towers could not be scientifically explained in the presentation of the commission alone. (See also: Conspiracy theories on September 11, 2001 ).

In November 2012, Roberts described Al Qaeda’s role in the attack as unproven.

Anwar al-Awlaki

Anwar al-Awlaki's guilt for the attacks on the World Trade Center was also unproven, in Roberts' opinion.

US media

Roberts claimed that the Bush administration "de facto" established a ministry of propaganda. The “uniformity” of the media has become so strong since the 1990s through concentration processes that their independence no longer exists.

Drug war

Roberts initially supported Reagan's "zero tolerance" policy towards illegal drugs. In 2007, however, he criticized the excesses of the drug war, which had led to the "militarization" of the police authorities.

War on terror

Roberts asked if the war on terror was "a bad joke" - it killed, maimed, uprooted and widowed and orphaned millions of Muslims in six countries. He called the attacks “naked aggression” against the civilian population and the infrastructure, which equates to war crimes.

Republican Party

Roberts is a staunch opponent of the Republicans' alleged "disregard for the Constitution". He regretted working for them and said that if he had known what this was going to lead to, he would not have worked on Reagan's reforms. He also criticized the Democrats with the utmost severity because Obama was violating the constitution far more than Bush.

oligarchy

Roberts criticizes the dismantling of democracy in the USA and other Western countries. In 2011 he said in an interview that oligarchs ruled these countries:

The West proudly presents itself as the standard for the world, as a democracy. But nowhere do you see democratic results, neither in Greece, nor in Ireland, nor in Great Britain, nor here in the USA. The results are always the same, the innocent are punished and the guilty are rewarded. And that's why the Greeks protest on the streets. We see this all over the world. There is no democracy, there are oligarchies, some of these smaller countries in Europe are not even run by their own governments, but by Wall Street ... There is probably more democracy in China than in the West. Revolution is the only answer ... We are facing a strange situation. All over the western world we think we have a democracy, we place ourselves very high above the others, demonize China, talk about the Russian mafia state, we talk about the Arabs, but where is democracy here with us?

Financial crisis

Roberts argued that the Libor scandal confirmed the picture that public and private financial institutions manipulated interest rates in order to control securities trading. The goals of the US Federal Reserve System , the Bank of England and other American and British banks are coordinated, their strategies are mutually reinforcing and bring them advantages. The manipulation of the Libor is another sign of this interaction. " Roberts therefore recommends strict banking regulation and a thorough reform of the Bundesbank.

Entry into Russian state media

Thanks to his statements critical of the USA, Roberts is often featured in Russian state media; in the magazine "Sputnik" he declared that the democracy movements in Hong Kong and Russia are Washington-controlled fifth columns .

He was quoted on the shooting down of flight MH17 in Ukraine with a statement that the USA did not give out all information, while on his own homepage he went one step further by claiming that the shooting down was a "Washington plan" ( convinces me that the Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine was a plot hatched in Washington in order to blame Russia ).

Monographs

Notes and sources

  1. ^ Roberts, Paul Craig (June 10, 2004). "The Real Reagan Record" , National Review , August 31, 1992, Retrieved on February 27, 2010
  2. ^ Paul Craig Robert: America's Shame . Archived from the original on August 18, 2013. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved January 16, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.paulcraigroberts.org
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Biography - Paul Craig Roberts. Archived from the original on November 17, 2001 ; accessed on November 27, 2015 .
  4. ↑ a b The Bulletin , January 30, 1981, "Roberts nominated"
  5. ^ Paul Craig Roberts, " Disguising the tax burden: Little-known facts beneath the rhetoric of reform, " Harper's , March 1978
  6. ↑ Bruce Bartlett, Human Events , January 28, 2002, "Rich 'Pay More Than What's Fair.", 58 (4), p. 14th
  7. ^ Paul Craig Roberts, Washington Times . "Two who made a difference"
  8. ↑ Toledo Blade , January 19, 1982, "Treasury Dept. Economist Quits Post: Advocate of Tax-Cut Plan Going To Georgetown U"
  9. ↑ https://www.lewrockwell.com/2008/08/paul-craig-roberts/i-resign-from-the-mont-pelerin-society/
  10. ^ Paul Craig Roberts: "Who Will Save America?" Archived from the original on February 8, 2006 ; accessed on November 27, 2015 . , CounterPunch
  11. ^ Paul Craig Roberts, "The Reality Beneath the Flag-Waving." Retrieved November 27, 2015 . , NewsMax
  12. ^ "Pirates of the Mediterranean". Archived from the original on July 4, 2009 ; accessed on November 27, 2015 . , Counterpunch
  13. ^ Syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts Promotes Anti-Semitism. Archived from the original on December 25, 2010 ; accessed on November 27, 2015 .
  14. ↑ [1]
  15. ↑ [2]
  16. ↑ [3]
  17. ↑ [4] cf. also [5]
  18. ↑ [6]
  19. ↑ Infowars
  20. ↑ Paul Craig Roberts, "Is This the Culmination of Two Years of Destabilization" , Counterpunch
  21. ^ Paul Craig Roberts: What we know and don't know about 9/11 . In: Information Clearing House , August 16, 2006. Retrieved December 6, 2007. 
  22. ^ "The Osama bin Laden Myth" , Paul Craig Roberts website
  23. ↑ the day america died. Archived from the original on October 5, 2011 ; accessed on November 27, 2015 .
  24. ^ Paul Craig Roberts: Who Will Save America? Archived from the original on February 15, 2008 ; accessed on November 27, 2015 .
  25. ^ "What We Know And Don't Know About 9/11". Archived from the original on October 19, 2006 ; accessed on November 27, 2015 . Paul Craig Roberts, VDARE.com, August 16, 2006
  26. ^ A b "Drug War Has Militarized Your Local Police". Archived from the original on February 7, 2007 ; accessed on November 27, 2015 . Paul Craig Roberts, VDare
  27. ↑ "The mother of all messes". Archived from the original on July 24, 2008 ; accessed on November 27, 2015 .
  28. ↑ Co-Founder Of Reaganomics Paul Craig Roberts, "There Is Probably More Democracy In China Than There Is In The West," SeroHedge, Video Interview, May 2011
  29. ^ Paul Craig Roberts and Nomi Prins: The Real Libor Scandal . In: Paul Craig Roberts , July 14, 2012. Retrieved August 28, 2013. 
  30. ↑ Washington's Fifth Columns Inside Russia and China , Sputnik (en), July 31, 2015
  31. ↑ Who Shot Down MH-17? - Paul Craig Roberts , Roberts homepage July 30, 2015
  32. ↑ MH17 Report Not Released As It Proves Russia Not Responsible for Crash , Sputnik, August 1, 2015

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Roberts, Paul Craig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 3, 1939