TRANSCRIPT: PART ONE
Alex Jones (Infowars.com) interview with Dr. Paul Creig Roberts
(former Editor Wall Street Journal, Father of Reaganomics, Author Return of the Robber Barons column)
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 the National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.
Excerpted from podcast radio 8/7/2007
Roberts stated, “Martial Law (pre-2001/Bush) called National Emergency Act; would have been subject to Constitutional (Congressional/Supreme Court) – checks/oversight or less Draconian.”
Roberts stated, “Martial Law (post-2001/Bush) under new presidential orders/directives there is no role for congress/supreme court checks/oversight. There is no way to hold the President accountable. Without challenge to presidential decisions – Martial Law is a Dictatorship!”
Robert’s stated example: “Presently Bush/Cheney need only a “catastrophic emergency” (e.g.given) Hurricane Katrina, and the election can be suspended and Martial Law/Dictatorship will take over government.”
Robert’s stated example: “The ‘2-bit punk NeoCons’ are determined to attack Iran and depending on Iran’s response to being attacked could very easily produce a national emergency.”
About the Economy Roberts stated, “Latest government statistics on employment in the U.S. (a super power with a technologically-advanced economy) that -- ¼ of all private-sector jobs (1.6 million net) created from June 2006 to June 2007 were for waitresses and bar tenders, i.e. Pleasure/Hospitality accounted for 30% and education/health services accounted for 35% (100,000 education, 456,000 health care in social assistance/support staff), (i.e.) no high tech. employment and has been this way over the 7 years of the 21st C. (In sum) Over the entire year (2006-2007) the U.S. economy generated only 51,000 jobs in architectural and engineering services.”
About Inflation Roberts stated, “Is much higher than reported due to using schemes to belittle the figures, (e.g. stated) Core Inflation (does not measure (1) food and (2) energy), which leaves out the two biggest components in peoples’ budgets. Currently, in the 2nd quarter we (U.S.) are running at 3% points higher than reported.”
TRANSCRIPT: PART TWO
The following is an exceptional radio interview. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts (former Secretary of the Treasury) spoke, for about 1 ½ hours (2nd half of program).
Transcript Excerpted from podcast radio, Alex Jones (Infowars.com) interview with Dr. Paul Craig Roberts (8/10/07) (Former Editor Wall Street Journal, Father of Reaganomics, Syndicated Columnist).
Q: Break it down for us! What’s really going on?
A: Roberts stated, “World changed 2 days ago. When early in the morning two important spokespersons for the Chinese government announced, in their own way of course, that China controls the US interest rate, not The Federal Reserve. It took the people on Wall Street about 24 hours to comprehend, because they are so full of hubris and self-importance and we’re a super power and rah, rah and all that- that it was initially dismissed. As the Treasury Secretary Paulson said, ‘Utter nonsense’. But maybe it isn’t nonsense, because as the two Chinese spokesmen pointed out, the status of the US $ as reserve currency depends more than anything on the good will of China, because they are holding about a trillion in assets, heavily weighted with US treasury bonds, and their willingness to hold those financial instruments, even as the $ depreciates. And their willingness to continue buying them is the only reason the market for security bonds clears, otherwise the huge over-supply would drive down the price of the bonds, which means the interest rate rises, and if they were also to sell their great holdings of US $ in currency markets, the value of the $ would also head down. So a situation in the United States where the dollar was collapsing and interest rates were rising would be catastrophic. And instantly we would not be able to finance operations of federal government, because it is financed, its huge deficits are financed by foreign lending of which China is the biggest lender. So their announcement of 2 days ago that actually they control our interest rates was their way of telling us that (program break-away for ads)… they can trump any action that the Federal Reserve could could possibly take, or any other central bank, because of their vast holdings of treasury securities and American $s, both of which are looked at askance, because they are in excess supplies all over the world, due to American budget and trade deficits for so many years.
It’s actually cheaper for China to dump the bonds than to yield to our pressures. And you may know that Treasury Secretary Paulson is just back from Beijing where he ordered the Chinese to revalue their currency, immediately. Well! That was about the stupidest thing anybody could have done, because that was what provoked the Chinese to make their announcement. And their announcement is to let it be known that they’re not going to be bullied, and if US persists in thinking that it has control-over Chinese economic policy, the US is going to find itself in a financial crises much larger than the kind that people are worried about now, the housing, the prime derivatives and so on. So that is the big change in the world and it may be effecting the market. On the other hand, the market may not be smart enough to figure that out, and it may be that the market is only being effected by fears over sub-prime mortgages and derivatives. In which case, if the Chinese bombshell is still to be figured out by the market than it is going to get much worse! On the other hand, the Chinese announcement, if there is any sense in Washington and Wall Street, which you sometimes wonder, it will result in the US government quietly telling China, very quietly, we’ve re-thought this business of your revaluing your currency and we are very glad for your support of the US $. And that then would end this crisis! So if the crisis is to be ended by some commonsense, the like of which is rare or if there is this neo-conservative hedge enemy, super-power attitude, and we’re going to teach those Chinese--They’re going to get their asses kicked! And you are going to see a fantastic economic catastrophe. And so it depends on the intelligence in Washington.
Just to sum this off. I have this to say. That the Americans have been too full of super-power hubris too long. And now Americans are going to have to learn how to live and think in the real world. Not in the delusional world in which they have been living. That time is over and if they can’t wise up and learn to behave intelligently, they’re going to come to a very fast end. …
Strategic thinkers, looking at China’s action are reading more into it. They’re saying that China could care less about American pressures to revalue their currency and that what this warning is really all about is – Don’t you dare attack Iran: Don’t you dare start any more wars, especially when we have energy interests in Iran and when our growing economy manifests from our trade with Iran and the pipelines that we are investing in. Don’t you dare! If you do we are going to pull the plug. The neo-cons have made it clear that they think that we are going to impose hegemony on China. So China and Russia this week formed a military alliance and now there are joint military manoeuvres just as we speak and if the US military can’t occupy Baghdad and Iraq, it damn sure can’t occupy China and Russia. So the kind of war that the neo-cons are pushing for would be a nuclear war. …
Q: The neo-cons are a bunch of chicken-necked cowards. I mean you look at their m.o. A lot of them aren’t really that smart. They’ve always gotten away with whatever they are doing. What do you think is wrong with Israel? What do you think is wrong with the neo-cons? What is wrong even with England? Now they’re starting to back off a little bit, to where – I mean do they think that they can start WWIII and that they’re going to win it? I mean. Why are they so confident when they don’t have anything to be confident about?
A: They’re not smart like our bosses used to be. They’re dumb. They have the mentality of brown-shirts. You know. Why did Hitler march off into Russia? I mean, it didn’t make any sense. So that’s the problem. They aren’t smart.
The trouble with Israel is the violence there, which are a minority and they bully the rest of the Israeli population and scare ‘em to death by provoking terrorist incidences and control the population in that way. And they’re paranoid! And they think that they have to rely on coercion and violence because the Arabs hate them and they can’t make peace with people who hate us we can only fight them. So that’s the huge mistake that Israel has made for half of a century. Here, they have been very effective in controlling the explanation of the Israeli/Arab conflict, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. They have been very effective as fund raisers in being able to elect or defeat whoever they want, whatever Senator, whoever they want in Congress.
Q: But that’s only here. The BS only goes so far?
A: Well! Why does Britain do it? Well! Because we pay them. They’re dependent upon us. Tony Blair probably is being paid in many ways. He’ll be put on many boards. He’ll be protected from the International Criminal Court for his war crimes, because you know he did sign that war crimes agreement. So he would be vulnerable. We offer all kinds of protections and moneys to people. We control Pakistan because we pay the President over there and the same in Egypt. We pay them. We give them money. I don’t mean for their country. We do, do that, but they personally get paid. So we control a lot of people in that way. So if the $ loses its reserve currency status because we monkey too much with the Chinese and they decide to give us a deserved come-uppance, we won’t be able to buy these people. Because the $ won’t be the almighty anymore. It’s almighty because it’s a reserve currency.
Q: If you had to project forward, what do you think is likely?
A: It depends so much on whether there is any intelligence in Washington. And you know - You have to wonder how many times they step on the king cobra before they decide not to step on him again. And so it could all just end without any more trouble. I mean they could wise up and say, hey! You know what, we’ve overestimated our clout. We didn’t realise how vulnerable we are. We’re going to have to get a long with people. We can’t any longer say that we are a super power, unchecked by anything. We don’t have to pay any attention to public opinion here or anywhere else in the world. If they give all that up, then all this could be stabilised and nothing really much happens, other than those bad sub-prime mortgages, a lot of them are going to fail.
Q: But if they don’t?
A: But if they don’t, they are going to provoke the destruction of the US government’s credit. They won’t be able to borrow. They won’t be able to fund the government. They’re going to destroy the $, its reserve currency. We’ll be like any other country. We won’t have the ability to run red ink indefinitely in trade deficits and budget deficits. That will all end immediately. We will probably provoke a war that could develop into the use of nuclear weapons. So it is a very dangerous situation! Given the current stupidity of our government logic.
Alex Jones asked, “Is it stupidity or is it just arrogant, nihilistic, wanton bloodlust?”
Roberts replied, “It’s all of those things.”
Q: There’s a method to their madness. They want to bring order out of chaos. I agree that they’re nuts. It’s just like Carl Rove said. “We control reality.” Now obviously they don’t control reality after a certain point. And it’s this elite, psychopathic, power-trip sickness that they have, that elite’s get throughout history. But I mean. It looks like they want to go ahead and just start WWIII. It looks like they want to go ahead and have some kind of collapse. I mean. They think that a big enough crises will have them come out on top. Or do you disagree with that? Do you think that they just think the Chinese and everybody else are just going to roll over?
A: No. I agree with you. They want war and I also think that they think that everybody will just roll over and it be easy. The question is whether other people will let them. So far they have gotten away with things because no one has really opposed them, because 9/11…terror and all that. But as this thing has now escalated to a new level of realisation, there are a lot of powerful interests don’t want to be destroyed because of these fools. There are other countries, even the American people who might wake up. I mean, who knows what realisation might prevail. So they could be stopped regardless of their plan.
Now, let’s get onto your observation. You’re right. The Chinese did not make a threat. They simply said that they are not going to be bullied and that it wasn’t appropriate for the US to be giving orders to China, who goes out of its way to support the $ even though it has depreciated substantially. They have had huge losses by continuing to hold the $, which has declined dramatically against the British pound, the euro and everything else that’s tradable. And they say, here we are the mainstay of your special borrowing privileges as reserve currency – and you come over here and give us orders? So they’re just simply telling us that they are not going to be bullied. So the threat is not in China. The threat is in Washington. And if people in Washington persist, they’re going to find out that they have more than met their match. … They’re a rising power. They’re not going to be bullied by declining them. They also said that they have no intention of causing a financial crisis. But, if the US persists they can’t guarantee the US won’t cause one. …
So let’s get on from the immediate crises, which we have talked about – to the long-term crisis.
First of all: … It is the long-term crisis that produced China’s power to grab us by the short hairs. The long term crisis is because of the greed of American corporations, who have moved so much of their production of goods and services for the American market off-shore to China. They liquidated the career opportunities for the American population. They moved their power base to China where labour was cheaper, regulatory costs were cheaper, harassment costs were cheaper. … So what happened was – what used to be American gross domestic product was transformed into imports, because the American brand name goods that are sold to us in Wal-Mart and everywhere else are made by American firms who have located their production in China. So this meant that China’s exports went way up, because off-shore production that comes back into the country is considered an export and it meant that they had accumulated tremendous reserves as a creditor, because they had the trade surplus, we were the debtor. So that’s where the reserves came from, the reserves that China has now to give them control over America’s interest rates were created by the greedy American corporations and all the free-trade, free-market economists, who encouraged the movement of American production offshore to China. So that’s where their power came from. And this move also destroyed the ladders of upward mobility in the U.S. And we were taught many times, the jobs that were created here are waitresses/bartenders, hospital orderlies.
Q: In closing: Where do you see all this going? How do we avert what you were talking about with the debasing of the economy and with college students with masters degrees now bar tending?
A: I think that it’s for certain that the sub-prime mortgages are going to unwind. There’s going to be a lot of people losing their houses, several million. This will cause, you know, various financial pains in the system, but it shouldn’t really be effecting stock market interests – that’s why I think it could be this China-thing. Where is it going to go, other than that? That depends, as we said, on the intelligence in Washington. There’s a chance, I think, that even the neo-conservatives, even Cheney don’t have enough hubris and arrogance to think that they can take on China in a financial dispute at the same time that they attack Iran. That’s beyond them, I think, even their hubris. So it is entirely possible Cheney will tell Paulson to cool it with China, because Cheney wants to attack Iran. And so we will have to see whether other players in the system can block the insanity of attacking Iran.
Q: Why do they just love war?
A: One: When he was a young man in the Ford Whitehouse, Cheney was very much frustrated that the President couldn’t do anything, because the Democratic Congress was blocking them all the time and in foreign affairs the Soviets were blocking him. And he’s just tired of being blocked all his life. He’s frustrated. He wants to strike out and assert American power. So that could be one explanation. You know. Long, brewing resentments: Inability to let somebody feel the power.
Another one could be that he’s set, as he’s older and more mature he’s been associated with the defence industry and this is a chance for him to get stinking rich. And therefore he has a material interest. Yeah! And a cocktail of those together can explain it. And then of course, there’s all this neo-con ideology and you get people marching around thinking they’re Napoleon. So that could be that explanation of Dick Cheney.
And the big problem is that so much of American production of goods and services for American markets is moved off-shore or is filled with foreigners here on work visas, so that the opportunities for college-educated Americans are declining dramatically. As I have told you before on this program, so far in the 21stC not a single net new job has been created in tradable goods and services. The jobs for professionals, you know, with engineers, computer engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers; all those jobs are disappearing, because all that stuffs moved off-shore. And so what we are doing is graduating all these people who have got no careers in front of them and they have got huge debt. So when you dismantle the ladders that create middle-class and upward mobility, you polarize the population – a few super rich now and then you’re going to have everybody else having a hard time making ends meet. Now that is a great threat to freedom, to democracy, to liberty. It’s a very politically unstable…
Q: How do we reverse that? Is there any levers left?
A: We can’t do anything until we get realisation. And I think that people may be more aware now that China has a certain amount of power to exercise and they are aware of what off-shoring has done to the U.S. and to the careers of future generations of Americans.
Q: So people have to get educated first and get mad and to really learn about the system before we are going to turn anything around?
A: Yeah! And even then it’s going to be hard. To run for President you have to raise 100 million $s. To run for Congress you gotta raise at least 20 million. There are only about 4 or 5 powerful big money interest groups that finance these campaigns. So they end up controlling the government. So that in one sense may be our salvation now. I’m not sure those big groups want to march into Armageddon in the Middle East and they don’t want to march into the destruction of the $ currency.
Q: We know from different globalist meetings, even public ones like … and Bilderberg that now about 65% of the elite do not like what’s happening and for the first time since Brenton Woods there are real fissues now – where they are actually screaming at each other?
A: They are threatened now by these idiot neo-cons and this moron in the Whitehouse and by this sicko vice-president. They are threatened by it and they now realise it. Who knows whether they can do anything about it. I don’t know if they can or not, but I do know that they realise it that it’s a threat to their …
Q: Why then did the elite let this bunch of neo-cons in control?
A: I think that they saw it as a way of increasing power in the Presidency, which they expected to control. And through increasing power of the Am. Presidency, increasing their power and hegemony over the rest of the world, I think that they saw the neo-cons as dupes and tools of their own strategies. But it turned out that the neo-cons were an independent force and are backed by Israel, which has its own purposes in the world and are independent of the Bilderbergs. And so it got to be a confusing situation. I think maybe that some elites… They don’t talk to me of course. They never let me join in on the organisation, but I think that they are aware that the situation developed differently than they hoped.
Q: There was a big story in the Philadelphia news yesterday. With the headline, you know, wishing for another 9-11. How another 9-11 could save America. And we’ve got all these former senators, members of congress, republican memos – saying that they need another 9-11. And now we’ve got actual front page and big editorial page saying: Another 9-11 would be good? I mean are they just going to come right out and just start admitting it or something? I mean. This is getting crazy?
A: (chuckle) Well! As we’ve talked the other day, the republican part desperately needs another 9-11 so it is not wiped out in the 08 election. And I think that if the terrorists don’t do one, then they will be inclined to do one themselves.
Q: Alex ran through the news pertinent to keeping the pressure up about going into Iran.
A: Iran: It depends in part on what Russia and China tell us. And if these strategic planners are correct that what I noted and pointed out really means that China is telling us to re-think Iran and hands off, that they don’t give a flying crap about the currency pressures, because they aren’t going to pay any attention to it anyhow and that this is really a message to control our foreign policy. If this was really an act by China to control our foreign policy, otherwise destroy us financially, without firing a shot. Now if that is true then we won’t be able to attack Iran, unless we are just so dense that we just don’t get the message. Now I don’t know if that was what China meant or not. If it is - It will become increasingly clear and also I think that the fact that Chinese and Russians are holding joint military manoeuvres and both have announced crash programs to upgrade their nuclear strike force. It’s just to remind us that we are vulnerable.
See. The Bush administration has fallen into the delusion that Hitler got into. That he is invulnerable - that a tiny country like Germany could occupy Russia. I mean, it’s madness. Everybody knew it was madness. His generals knew that it was madness. Nobody believed in that. Stalin thought that he was so mad that he didn’t even defend against it. Initially Hitler had great success because it was so audacious. Until the Russians said ok, now you’ve had it. You have gone in far enough that you can’t get out - alive. In WWII was lost to Stalingrad long before we ever got involved in Normandy. After that it didn’t matter.
You can look at it this way now. China has sucked us in for a decade in off-shoring. That’s where 1.3 trillion in US assets came from. That’s where their power over our interest rates came from. And you had all the American government’s aiding all the off-shoring to China, because it would mean cheap goods in Wal-Mart. And now we’re going to pay the price for those cheap goods.
No comments:
Post a Comment