Paul Craig Roberts defends the "Real Economy"

Roberts argues that the crisis has hardly begun and that we better get our priorities in order:

GM’s divisions in Canada and Germany are asking those governments for help. It will be something if Canada and Germany come through for the American automaker and the American government doesn’t.

Conservative talking heads are saying GM is a “failed business model” unworthy of a $25 billion bailout. These are the same talking heads who favored pouring $700 billion into a failed financial model.

The head of the FDIC is trying to get $25 billion--a measly 3.5 percent of the $700 billion for the banksters--with which to refinance the mortgages of 2 million of the banksters’ victims, and Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury Paulson says no. Why aren’t the Democrats all over this, too?

Apparently, the Democrats still think they are the minority party or else their aim is to supplant the Republicans as the party of the rich.

Any bailout has its downsides. But if America loses its auto industry, it will lose the suppliers as well and will cease to have a manufacturing sector. For years no-think economists have been writing off America’s manufacturing jobs, while deluding themselves and the public with propaganda about a New Economy based on finance.

A country that doesn’t make anything doesn’t need a financial sector as there is nothing to finance.

...

Budget deficits from 6 years of pointless wars and from unsustainable levels of military spending have helped to flood the world with dollars and to drive down the dollar’s exchange value. Consumers themselves are drowning in debt and can provide no lift to the economy. Millions of the best jobs have been moved offshore, and research, design, and innovation have followed them.

...

Paulson should rethink the automakers’ and FDIC’s proposals. A bank produces nothing but paper. Automakers produce real things that can be sold. Occupied homes are worth more then empty ones.

Paulson’s inability to see this is the logical outcome of Wall Street thinking that highly values deals made over pieces of paper at the expense of the real economy.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

The Best Weather Report in the Country

Fair Notes

by Bruce Anderson on Sep 23rd, 2010

A big weekend with rain everywhere but here.

A dismayed caller assessed the first rains this way: “Did you know that the government seeds the clouds this time every year to wreck the pot crop?”

No, we didn’t know the government’s big bag of tricks included the unleashing of inclement weather on Mendocino County’s marijuana fields, but these particu lar paranoids, the globally threatened ones, tend to monologue, and sure enough this very, very concerned citizen veered off into a multiplicity of menaces, which included contrails, PG&E’s smart meters, genetically altered salmon, peanut butter allergies, and secret surveillances everywhere, all of it aimed specifically at him. Just as we were about to recommend the only known prophylactic — a do-it-yourself tinfoil hat — the besieged man got off the line and we got back to geneti cally altered ballplayers and the Giants game.

...

There were tensions where, in ordinary elections in Mendocino County, there is usually only a kind of qui etly resigned despair, that the incumbents will only make everything worse and the challengers are crazy.

The Roberts-Hamburg race for 5th District Supervi sor is as bitter and apparently embittering as any we can remember. You’d have to go back to the early 1970s when Norman de Vall took on incumbent Ted Galletti, a very good supervisor and a very nice man. But the hip pies viewed Galletti as, well, not a hippie, and certainly not a liberal of the lockstep variety ever since dominant in much of Mendocino County. Galletti planned a huge development on Cameron Road, a straight up fabrication that Galletti never could beat back. de Vall won. And won again, and again.

But de Vall never generated the pure hatred that candi date Hamburg engenders among the County’s Ukiah-based rightwing, an entirely irrational hatred impossible to reconcile with the real life Hamburg, a modest, good-natured fellow seemingly devoid of mal ice. But to hear his opponents tell it Hamburg’s a cross between Fidel Castro and some kind of mega-hippie.

Hamburg’s opponent, Wendy Roberts of Mendo cino, is personally appalled by Hamburg. A bright, tire less, conventional woman of middle-years, Mrs. Roberts has mobilized those sectors of Mendocino County’s seething population who view Hamburg as the representative of everything that has gone wrong with the County over the past 40 years.

...

Larry Carr Sr., the mayor of Yorkville, stopped by the booth to say his family claimed he was senile. I con soled Larry with the information that I’d had to fight off the same accusations. “Larry, my friend of these many years, as soon as you nod off at the dinner table they start nudging each other and saying stuff like, ‘Well, he’s always had selective hearing but now he’s deaf and won’t get a hearing aide. He’ll be in diapers soon.’

Paul Craig Roberts: Spinning Unemployment in a Collapsing Empire

Paul Craig Roberts: Spinning Unemployment in a Collapsing Empire

Paul Craig Roberts on Empire

Paul Craig Roberts: by far the best Asst. Sec of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration on the push for war on Iran and on the collapse of American power

Economic links

On tax rates and wealth distribution:
http://empirestudies.blogspot.com/2008/11/who-rules-america.html

Michael Hudson on Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/5/new_600b_fed_stimulus_fuels_fears

Michael Whitney on inflation and other things:
http://empirestudies.blogspot.com/search?q=Whitney

Paul Craig Roberts:
http://empirestudies.blogspot.com/search?q=roberts

Game Plan for a Flat Tax, Social Security Cutbacks and Austerity: Obama's Sellout on Taxes
By MICHAEL HUDSON (Dec 8, 2010)
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson12082010.html

The Endless Thanksgiving: Next Up: a "Flat Tax" for the Rich
By MICHAEL HUDSON (Nov 25, 2010)
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson11252010.html

David Cay Johnson on Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/18/free_lunch_how_the_wealthiest_americans

Wealth for the Common Good:
 http://wealthforcommongood.org/resources/tax-fact-sheet/

“Shifting Responsibility: How 50 Years of Tax Cuts Benefited the Wealthiest Americans,” Chuck Collins, Alison Goldberg, and Sam Pizzigati (Wealth for the Common Good, April 2010)
www.ips-dc.org/files/1675/ShiftingResponsibility.pdf

Chuck Collins, “Reverse the Great Tax Shift”
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/04/07/reverse-the-great-tax-shift/

Death by Globalism

Economists Haven't Got a Clue

Death By Globalism

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09012010.html

"The Krugman Keynesian school is just as deluded. Neither side in “The Great Stimulus Debate” has a clue that the problem for the U.S. is that a large chunk of U.S. GDP and the jobs, incomes, and careers associated with it, have been moved offshore and given to Chinese, Indians, and others with low wage rates. Profits have soared on Wall Street, while job prospects for the middle class have been eliminated."

Paul Craig Roberts on Freeman

The Charles Freeman Ordeal and the Decline of American Power

A Green Revolution in Iran?

Moussavi's "Green Revolution" as a US-backed psychological operation? Paul Craig Roberts thinks so:

Why the US Wants to Delegitimize the Iranian Elections:

Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran?

Get ready for Obama and Netanyahu to begin ramping up pressure for "regime change."

The Real Economy

People of Color and the Depression:

Our Collapsing Economy

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Real unemployment rate is closer to 18%