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Police seldom, if ever, prevent a crime. Their job is to appear after a crime is committed and to investigate with a view to identifying the perpetrator. A large number of careful studies show that private gun ownership prevents far more crimes than police ever solve. Criminals are routinely deterred, apprehended, and sometimes killed, by armed private citizens. In contrast, police, especially the notorious SWAT teams, accidentally kill more law abiding citizens than they do criminals. If anyone should be disarmed, it is the police. When police become militarized, as they increasingly are in the US, their attitude toward the public changes from protective to hostile. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

…for years that American university graduates have had to take jobs as waitresses and bartenders. As over-indebted American consumers lose their jobs, they will visit restaurants and bars less frequently. Consequently, Americans with university degrees will not even have jobs waiting on tables and mixing drinks. US policymakers have ignored the fact that consumer demand in the 21st century has been driven, not by increases in real income, but by increased consumer indebtedness. This fact makes it pointless to try to stimulate the economy by bailing out banks so that they can lend more to consumers. The American consumers have no more capacity to borrow. With the decline in the values of their principal assets—their homes—with the destruction of half of their pension assets, and with joblessness facing them, Americans cannot and will not spend. Why bail out GM and Citibank when the firms are moving as many operations offshore as they possibly can? Paul Craig Roberts ☀

Why does Israel have a right to exist, but Palestine doesn’t? This is the question of our time. For sixty years Israelis have been stealing Palestine from Palestinians. There are maps available on the Internet and in Israeli publications showing the shrinkage over time of what was once Palestine into what Palestine is today—a small number of unconnected ghettos or bantustans. Palestine became “the occupied territory” from which Palestinians were ejected and Israeli settlements built for “settlers.” Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are full of refugee camps in which Palestinians driven off their lands by Israeli force have been living for decades. Driving people off their land is strictly illegal under international law, but Israel has been getting away with it for decades. Gaza is a concentration camp of 1.5 million Palestinians who were driven from their homes and villages and collected in the Gaza Ghetto. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

Perhaps the neoconservative project for world hegemony would have lasted a bit longer had the neocons possessed intellectual competence. On the war front, the incompetent neocons predicted that the Iraq war would be a six-week cakewalk, whose $70 billion cost would be paid out of Iraqi oil revenues. President Bush fired White House economist Larry Lindsey for estimating that the war would cost $200 billion. The current estimate by experts is that the Iraq war has cost American taxpayers between two and three trillion dollars. And the six-week war is now the six-year war. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

The bailout package is a result of panic and threats, not of analysis and understanding. Neither Congress nor the public knows the full story. If the problem is the mortgages, why does the bailout leave the mortgages unaddressed and focus instead on pouring vast amount of public money into private financial institutions? The purpose of regulation is to restrain greed and to prevent leveraged speculation from threatening the wider society. Congress needs to restore financial regulation, not reward those who caused the crisis. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

What is wrecking America is not conservatives, but a neoconservative ideology of US hegemony. What is wrecking America is the “impeachment-is-off-the-table” twins, Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers. What is wrecking America is the Democratic Party, which was put in control of the House and Senate in the 2006 congressional elections to stop the gratuitous wars and Gestapo police, but, instead, has continued to cooperate with the Cheney/Bush regime in behalf of war and police repression, such as we witnessed at the Republican National Convention. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

The real issues are suffocated by the media. The American middle class is being destroyed by jobs offshoring and work visas for foreigners, while the incomes of the super rich are soaring. The US dollar’s reserve currency status is eroded. The US is massively in debt at home and abroad. Health insurance is unaffordable for the vast majority of the population. Injured veterans are being nickeled and dimed, while Halliburton’s profits escalate. Americans are losing their homes, while the US government bails out banks. Wars with Iran, Russia, and China are being planned in order to secure US hegemony. Americans no longer have a government that is for the people and by the people. They have a government for and by special interests and an insane ideology. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

The Bush Regime stands against the truth. That is why it pretends to have the power to prevent executive branch officials wanted for questioning by Congress from appearing before the people’s representatives. Nothing could make clearer the contempt that the Bush Regime has for the American people and their elected representatives than its arrogant claim that it is unanswerable to them. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

If Americans return a Republican regime, Americans will validate the right of the president to violate with impunity US and international law. Americans will validate the use by the president of the United States of deception and lies in order to initiate wars of aggression, aggression that is a war crime under the Nuremburg standard established by the US. Americans will validate the infringement of US civil liberties in the name of “safety” and “national security.” Americans will disembowel the US Constitution and leave themselves at the total mercy of the government. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

The Republican Party is willing to fund war, but sees everything else as an extravagance. The neoconized war party is destroying the economic prospects of American citizens. Is “war abroad and poverty at home” the Republican campaign slogan for the November election? Paul Craig Roberts ☀

Amazing. The world’s greatest debtor is going to take on the two powerful countries with the largest trade surpluses. According to the World Factbook, an annual publication of the CIA, Russia’s 2007 current account surplus is $465 billion and China’s is $363 billion. In contrast, the US current account deficit is $987 billion—an amount larger that the total deficits of all other countries in the world combined. The out-of-pocket and already incurred future cost of Bush’s wars of aggression is between $3 and $5 trillion, every dollar of which must be borrowed. That comes on top of the unfunded liabilities of the US government totaling $53 trillion. By any account the US is the world’s worst credit risk. The “mighty” US relies on foreigners to finance its consumption, its wars, and the daily operations of its government. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

We know for a fact that the Bush regime created false evidence, lied, and deceived in order to attack Iraq. All the reasons given for the US invasion have proven to be false. The real agenda has never been declared. Yet, five years later the traitors in high office who deceived Americans into a war in behalf of a hidden agenda have not been held accountable. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

How can a moral conscience be reconciled with our continuing to tolerate our government which has invaded two countries on the basis of lies and deception, destroyed their civilian infrastructures and murdered hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children? Paul Craig Roberts ☀

With the Protect America Act, Bush and his brownshirts are trying to establish the independence of the executive branch from statutory law and the Constitution. The FISA law means that the president is accountable to federal judges for warrants. Bush and the brownshirt Republicans are striving to make the president independent of all accountability. The brownshirts insist that the leader knows best and can tolerate no interference from the law, the judiciary, the Congress, or the Constitution, and certainly not from the American people who, the brownshirts tell us, won’t be safe unless Bush is very powerful. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison saw it differently. The American people cannot be safe unless the president is accountable and under many restraints. Paul Craig Roberts ☀

In a McCain Regime, Cheney will be back in office with another stint as Secretary of War. Norman “Bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran” Podhoretz will be Undersecretary for Nuclear War with General John “Nuke them” Shalikashvili as his deputy. Rudy Giuliani will be the Minister of Interior in charge of Halliburton’s detention centers into which will be herded all critics of war and the police state. Billy kristol will be chief White House spokesliar. The whole gang will be back—Wolfowitz, Perle, Wurmster, Feith, Libby, Bolton. America will have a second chance to bomb the world into submission. Paul Craig Roberts ☀