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Israel is an unnatural state. It was created by terror that was accommodated by craven British and US “diplomacy”. Israel exists for one reason only: the US government provides the money, weapons, and diplomatic protection. Any other government that murdered thousands of civilians in other countries, as Israel does routinely in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, would have its entire government and military on trial before the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. Israelis have no worst enemy than their own government. Every time the rest of the world tries to hold the Israeli government accountable for its crimes, the US vetoes the UN resolution. America has become the enabler of the Zionist-hijacked Israeli government. And the Israeli government knows it. Israeli government leaders have publicly bragged for decades about their control over the US government. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

The American economic and political leadership has used its power to serve its own interests at the expense of the American people and their economic prospects. By enriching themselves in the short-run, banksters and politicians have driven the U.S. economy into the ground. The U.S. is on a path to becoming a Third World economy. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

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. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

The “cakewalk war” in Iraq has lasted 7 years instead of the promised 6 weeks, and the violence is still ongoing with Iraqis killed and maimed nearly every day. The reason Americans are still in Iraq is because the Iraqis hate each other more than they hate the American invader. The vast majority of the violence in “the Iraq war” was committed between Iraqi Sunnis and Iraqi Shi’ites as they cleansed one another from neighborhoods. The majority Shi’ites regarded the American invasion of Iraq as an opportunity to gain power over the minority Sunnis, who ruled under Saddam Hussein. Therefore, the Shi’ites never engaged the American invading forces. The minority Sunnis (20 percent of the population) gave most of their effort to fighting the Shi’ite majority, but in their spare time a few thousand Sunnis were able to inflict serious losses on the American superpower. Finally realizing the power of lucre in the Arab world, the Americans put 80,000 Sunnis on the U.S. military payroll and paid them to stop killing Americans. This is how the U.S. won the war in Iraq. Iraqis sold out their independence for American dollars. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

Indications are that Joseph Stack was sane. Like Palestinians faced with Israeli jet fighters, helicopter gunships, tanks, missiles and poison gas, Stack realized that he was powerless. A suicide attack was the only weapon left to him. Stack targeted the IRS, the federal agency that had gratuitously ruined him. He flew his airplane into an office building occupied by 200 members of the IRS. This deliberate plan and the written explanation he left behind segregate him from deranged people who randomly shoot up a Post Office or university campus. The government and its propaganda ministry do not want to call Stack a terrorist. “Terrorist” is a term the government reserves for Muslims who do not like what Israel does to Palestinians and the U.S. government does to Muslim countries. But Stack experienced the same frustrations and emotions as Muslims who can’t take it any longer and strap on a suicide vest. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

The “New Economy” is a hoax like most everything else the bought-and-paid-for-media feeds to Americans. There is no new economy. There is an unemployed economy. The headlined unemployment rate is just over 10 per cent. The real unemployment rate, as measured by the current methodology is 17 per cent. The unemployment rate as measured by the methodology of 1980 is 22 per cent. If jobs offshoring is a benefit to America, as the hired pimps of the transnational corporations claim, why is more than one-fifth of the U.S. work force unemployed? Why does the U.S. have the largest trade deficits in world history? Why is the U.S. dollar losing value over time to other tradable currencies? Paul Craig Roberts (via kvasir) ☀

It is a different situation today. Layoffs result from the jobs being moved offshore and from corporations replacing their domestic work forces with foreigners brought in on H-1B, L-1 and other work visas. The US labor force is being separated from the incomes associated with the goods and services that it consumes. With the rise of offshoring, layoffs are not only due to restrictive monetary policy and inventory buildup. They are also the result of the substitution of cheaper foreign labor for US labor by American corporations. Americans cannot be called back to work to jobs that have been moved abroad. In the New Economy, layoffs can continue despite low interest rates and government stimulus programs. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

The real American crisis is the offshoring of US manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs such as software engineering and information technology. Jobs offshoring was initiated by Wall Street pressures on corporations for higher earnings and by performance-related bonuses becoming the main form of managerial compensation. Corporate executives increased profits and obtained bonuses by substituting cheaper foreign labor for US labor in the production of goods and services marketed in the US Jobs offshoring is destroying the ladders of upward mobility that made the US an opportunity society and eroding the value of a university education. For the first decade of the 21st century, the US economy has been able to create net new jobs only in domestic nontradable services, such as waitresses, bartenders, sales, health and social assistance and, prior to the real estate collapse, construction. These jobs are lower paid than the jobs were that have been offshored, and these jobs do not produce goods and services for export. Jobs offshoring has increased the US trade deficit, putting more pressure on the dollar’s role as reserve currency. When offshored goods and services return to the US, they add to imports, thus worsening the trade imbalance. The policy of jobs offshoring is insane. It is shifting US GDP growth to the offshored locations, such as China, thus halting growth in US consumer incomes. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

It turns one’s stomach to watch libertarians and “free market economists” defend bureaucratized impersonal health care as “free market medicine.” There is no free market present. Corporate lobbies and campaign contributions use government power to create bureaucratized monopolies that destroy medicine for the practitioner and the patient. Wall Street pushes for greater shareholder earnings, which are achieved by denying care. Just as independent businesses have been destroyed by corporate chains from Wal-Mart to auto parts to fast food, medicine is being destroyed by monopoly capital. The risks of starting a private business today are many times higher than they were a half century ago. Chains have turned Americans who once were independent business men and women into employees. The fate of the health care bill demonstrates the power of private lobbies. What was to be health care for Americans was instantly transformed into 30 million new patients for the private health insurance industry. The “solution” to tens of millions of Americans being unable to afford health care is a law that requires them to purchase a private health care policy or be annually fined. As most of these uninsured Americans cannot afford to purchase a private policy, the plan is for the federal government to use taxpayers’ money to subsidize their purchase of a policy from private companies. In other words, tax money is being diverted to the pockets of private businesses. This is par for the course in “capitalist” America. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

According to reports, the US Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way. While the US government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor third world peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks. America’s cities, towns, and states are suffering from the costs of economic dislocations and the reduction in tax revenues from the economy’s decline. Yet, Obama has sent more troops to Afghanistan, a country half way around the world that is not a threat to America. It costs $750,000 per year for each soldier we have in Afghanistan. The soldiers, who are at risk of life and limb, are paid a pittance, but all of the privatized services to the military are rolling in excess profits. One of the great frauds perpetuated on the American people was the privatization of services that the US military traditionally performed for itself. “Our” elected leaders could not resist any opportunity to create at taxpayers’ expense private wealth that could be recycled to politicians in campaign contributions. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

While the U.S. speeds plans for the ultimate bunker-buster bomb and President Obama prepares to send another 45,000 troops into Afghanistan, 44,789 Americans die every year from lack of medical treatment. National Guardsmen say they would rather face the Taliban than the U.S. economy. Little wonder. In the midst of the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, US corporations continue to offshore jobs and to replace their remaining US employees with lower paid foreigners on work visas. The offshoring of jobs, the bailout of rich banksters and war deficits are destroying the value of the U.S. dollar. Since last spring, the U.S. dollar has been rapidly losing value. The currency of the hegemonic superpower has declined 14 percent against the Botswana pula, 22 percent against Brazil’s real and 11 percent against the Russian ruble. Once the dollar loses its reserve currency status, the U.S. will be unable to pay for its imports or finance its government budget deficits. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

I have asked on several occasions and have never had an answer, which does not mean that there isn’t one, how millions of pieces of unburnt, uncharred paper can be floating over lower Manhattan from the destruction of the WTC towers when the official explanation of the destruction is fires so hot and evenly distributed that they caused the massive steel structures to weaken and fail simultaneously so that the buildings fell in free fall time just as they would if they had been brought down by controlled demolition.  What is the explanation of fires so hot that steel fails but paper does not combust? People don’t even notice the contradictions.  Recently, an international team of scientists, who studied for 18 months dust samples produced by the twin towers’ destruction collected from three separate sources, reported their finding of nano-thermite  in the dust.  The US government had scientists dependent on the US government to debunk the finding on the grounds that the authenticity of custody of the samples could not be verified.  In other words, someone had tampered with the samples and added the nano-thermite. This is all it took to discredit the finding, despite the obvious fact that access to thermite is strictly controlled and NO ONE except the US military and possibly Israel has access to nano-thermite. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

We are now into the third presidential term in which the US government remains mired in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Inheriting two wars didn’t stop Obama from starting a third one in Pakistan and from threatening more wars. These wars bring no benefits to American citizens, only high costs, but the wars bring political contributions to the politicians from the interest groups that profit from the wars. Where is the World War I, World War II, and Korean War excess-profits tax? The answer is that instead of paying the US Treasury, the war profiteers pay the politicians. Paul Craig Roberts ☀