Delusional America
By Paul Craig Roberts
February 01, 2015 "ICH"
- Robert Parry is one of my favorite
columnists. He is truthful, has a sense of
justice, and delivers a firm punch. He used
to be a “mainstream journalist,” like me,
but we were too truthful for them. They
kicked us out.
I can’t say Parry has
always been one of my favorite journalists.
During the 1980s he spent a lot of time on
Reagan’s case. Having been on corporate
boards, I know that CEOs seldom know
everything that is going on in the company.
There are just too many people and too many
programs representing too many agendas. For
presidents of countries with governments as
large as the US government, there is far
more going on than a president has time to
learn about even if he could get accurate
information.
In my day Assistant
Secretaries and chiefs of staff were the
most important people, because they
controlled the flow of information.
Presidents have to focus on fund raising for
their reelection and for their party. More
time and energy is used up with formalities
and meetings with dignitaries and media
events. At the most there are two or three
issues on which a president can attempt
leadership. If an organized clique such as
the neoconservatives get into varied
positions of authority, they can actually
“create the reality” and take the government
away from the president.
As I have reported on many
occasions, my experience with Reagan left me
with the conclusion that he was interested
in two big issues. He wanted to stop the
stagflation for which only the supply-side
economists had a solution, and he wanted to
end, not win, the cold war.
Both of these agendas put
Reagan at odds with two of the most powerful
of the private interest groups: Wall Street
and the military/security complex.
Wall Street for the most
part opposed Reagan’s economic program. They
opposed it because they understood it as
Keynesian deficit pump-priming that would
cause an already high inflation rate to
explode, which would drive down bond and
stock prices.
The CIA and the military
opposed any ending of the Cold War because
of the obvious impact on their power and
budget.
Left-wing journalists
never picked up on this, and neither did
right-wing journalists.
The left could not get
beyond Reagan’s rhetoric. For the left,
Reagan was trickle-down economics,
Iran/Contra, and the fired air traffic
controllers.
The right-wing liked
Reagan’s rhetoric and blamed him for not
delivering on it.
For the left, the Reagan
years were a traumatic time. Robert Parry
has never recovered from them. He can
scarcely write a column about events today,
which are horrific in comparison, without
dragging Reagan into it. Parry doesn’t
realize it, but if it is all Reagan’s fault,
little wonder it has been impossible to hold
Clinton, Bush 1 and 2, and Obama
accountable.
Having written these
lines, I already detect the denunciations
coming my way for again attempting to
“rehabilitate Ronald Ray-Gun.” Reagan does
not need rehabilitating. This column is not
about Reagan, and it is not a criticism of
Parry. It is praise for Parry’s column,
“‘Group-thinking’ the World into a New War.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/01/30/group-thinking-the-world-into-a-new-war/
Read it.
The pattern since
Milosevic (and before) has been to demonize
a foreign head of state and to take the US
to war to get rid of him. That way the
secret agenda is achieved under the cover of
the necessity of deposing a bad or dangerous
ruler.
Parry describes this well.
Group-Think plays the important role of
preventing any dissent, any suspicion of the
case against the demonized person, and any
examination of the real agenda that is being
pursued.
Now it is Russian
President Vladimir Putin who is being
demonized. As Parry and I and Stephen F.
Cohen, the most knowledgeable of the Russian
experts, appreciate, Putin is not Saddam
Hussein and Russia is not Iraq, Libya,
Syria, Serbia, or Iran. To foment conflict
with Russia that could lead to war is worse
than irresponsible. Yet, as Parry writes,
“from the start of the Ukraine crisis in
fall 2013, the New York Times, the
Washington Post and virtually every
mainstream U.S. news outlet have behaved as
dishonestly as they did during the run-up to
war with Iraq.”
When Professor Cohen
pointed out, correctly, that the lies about
Russia, Ukraine, and Putin were hot and
heavy, the propagandists had to get rid of
the man with the facts. The New Republic, a
hang-out for low IQ fools, called America’s
leading Russian expert “Putin’s American
toady.”
From Parry’s reporting, it
appears that Group-Think has spread from the
media and foreign policy community into the
Association for Slavic, East European and
Eurasian Studies, which has decided that
academic careers require adherence to the
government’s propaganda line, which means
the neoconservatives’ line.
As I have written on a
number of occasions, facts no longer play a
role in American political life. Fact-based
analysis is also disappearing from academic
life and no longer plays a role in official
economic reporting. A matrix has been
created, an artificial reality that channels
the energies and resources of the country
into secret agendas that serve the interests
of the ruling private interest groups and
neoconservative ideology.
The United States
government and the American people cannot
contend with reality, because they do not
know what the reality is.
In America’s make-believe
world, neoconservative toadies such as New
York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, set
the Group-Think tone, while knowledgeable
experts such as Stephen Cohen are tuned out.
In effect, America is both
blind and deaf. It lives in delusions.
Consequently, it will destroy itself and
perhaps the world.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for
Economic Policy and associate editor of the
Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for
Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service,
and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet
columns have attracted a worldwide
following. Roberts' latest books are
The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and
Economic Dissolution of the West and
How America Was Lost.