The United States has collapsed economically, socially, politically, legally, constitutionally, and

very interesting article about the U.S. economy appeared on the site:www.paulcraigroberts.org...

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.

Wow. An article that casts the right wing in a bad light, adresses the absurdity of a lack of regulation and insinuates that the poor aren't to blame for all our problems.

This should go over like a lead balloon.

(For the record, I think this is spot-on. Thanks for posting.)

Its a great artical. Just a tip OP, you will gather more viewers if you take snips of the artical and post it on ATS instead of just a link.

great artical all the same.

Thank you for the link, leosnake. That was one of the best, most truthfully written articles I have ever read. It was short, to-the-point and accurate.

This is exactly what went wrong with America and all the conservative demagoguery in the world won't change it.

reply to post by leosnake

So why did your last thread on this get yanked?

I was just trying to find a home for this...


www.youtube.com...


Journalism and Free-speech tend to go hand in hand.... The US ( the corrupt in the US) is playing...dirty w/ journalist so the truth doesn't get out.

The only thing I wonder at this point is if we can defeat our own ‘military’…

I'm not at all impressed with Craig roberts article. For a former Reaganite, he seems pretty focused on the same old Democrat class warfare. Although he is correct about the low wages and the disparity between rich and poor, he does not explain how it got that way to my satisfaction. He will have to ask to audit the fed and stop printing money to pay for entitlements and other overspending by Congress to get my approval, as this is a direct correlation to why inflationary prices are higher than our wages can sustain. The war on the middle class is waged also by raising taxes, so don't be thinking that raising taxes will fix it. You have to cut spending first, because raising taxes just gives the govt more money to spend.

The only thing he forgot to say was 'tax cuts for the wealthy". That is the typical ruse Democrats use to make people accept the progressive income tax, which already taxes people in higher income brackets a higher percentage. The progressive income tax is a tool of communism incidentally.

Incidentally I cannot understand why a Reaganite is bashing free market economy. Let him recite Milton Friedman and I will take him seriously. Now he just sounds like a Democrat who followed Reagan and Kirkpatrick into the Republican party and now feels economic and social justice is necessary to fix things.

Originally posted by ConspiracyBuff
The only thing I wonder at this point is if we can defeat our own ‘military’…

Since Eisenhower, every Secretary of Defense hs been CFR. CFR is comprised of many people from both Republican and Democrat Party CFR runs Washington and foreign policy. Reagan was not CFR but many people around him were. Many CFR came from the ranks of Skull and Bones. The Order runs things. This is so systemic that getting rid of one arm of it will do almost nothing.

reply to post by leosnake


I'll help with some excerpts..

“Low-wage work is pandemic.” Today in “freedom and democracy” America, “the world’s only superpower,” one fourth of the work force is employed in jobs that pay less than $22,000, the poverty line for a family of four.

............

In my opinion as an economist, the official poverty line is long out of date. The prospect of three people living on $19,000 per year is farfetched. Considering the prices of rent, electricity, water, bread and fast food, one person cannot live in the US on $6,333.33 per year. In Thailand, perhaps, until the dollar collapses, it might be done, but not in the US.

............

As Dan Ariely (Duke University) and Mike Norton (Harvard University) have shown empirically,

40% of the US population, the 40% less well off, own 0.3%, that is, three-tenths of one percent, of America’s personal wealth.

Who owns the other 99.7%?

The top 20% have 84% of the country’s wealth.

Those Americans in the third and fourth quintiles--essentially America’s middle class--have only 15.7% of the nation’s wealth.

Such an unequal distribution of income is unprecedented in the economically developed world.

..........

The Republicans believe that the suffering of poor Americans is not helping the rich enough. Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are committed to abolishing every program that addresses needs of what Republicans deride as “useless eaters.”

The “useless eaters” are the working poor and the former middle class whose jobs were offshored so that corporate executives could receive multi-millions of dollars in performance pay compensation and their shareholders could make millions of dollars on capital gains. While a handful of executives enjoy yachts and Playboy playmates, tens of millions of Americans barely get by.

reply to post by ThirdEyeofHorus

I'm not at all impressed with Craig roberts article. For a former Reaganite, he seems pretty focused on the same old Democrat class warfare. Although he is correct about the low wages and the disparity between rich and poor, he does not explain how it got that way to my satisfaction. He will have to ask to audit the fed and stop printing money to pay for entitlements and other overspending by Congress to get my approval, as this is a direct correlation to why inflationary prices are higher than our wages can sustain. The war on the middle class is waged also by raising taxes, so don't be thinking that raising taxes will fix it. You have to cut spending first, because raising taxes just gives the govt more money to spend.

May I ask, why is it you blame entitlement programs for our financial problems? I am just curious about that because I see the MSM blaming entitlement programs for our debt problems and they have bastardized the word "entitlement" to make people believe it is a hand out, when it is in fact something that people have paid into....

So is it the fault of "entitlement programs" or is it the fault of a corrupt government who has allowed the banks and corporations to funnel Americans wealth into their own bank accounts? I think you and I both know that the answer is the latter...

Therefore, why do we the people choose the cowardly way out, and blame those who are receiving said benefits instead of standing up bravely and demanding that our government officials answer for their crimes??

This man is absolutely brilliant and tells it right, he expresses views I had for years now, great satisfaction to have shared his article on LinkedIn

reply to post by ThirdEyeofHorus


The more you cut spending on people' s welfare in a country, the more people are not going to be able to spend because poor and hence more recession is going to come from it. Interesting enough there is enough money to keep the military industrial war machine in place, bail out the banks, feed the privately owned prisons. It is a vicious circle and people especially from the educated middle class need to speak up and point out the wrongs.

reply to post by leosnake


Don't be confusing the the U.S. voters with facts!
***********************************************************
brice

reply to post by seeker1963


I am not talking about programs that people "paid into". I am assuming you are referring to Social Security and Medicare.
But consider that Social Security and Medicare are both in big trouble. This is partly due to mismanagement and partly due to the fact that inflation has caused us to have to pay more out than was taken in. Please understand I referenced over spending in more ways than entitlements, but I really was talking about welfare programs. But we need to look at the reason for it. People want the US to take care of the world's problems and the world's poverty, but now we are so strapped with problems at home, it just doesn't make sense to keep it up. Now the UN wants the US to pay even more to help out third world countries, because liberals have told the world the US uses the most resources. Well, China has overtaken the States, so instead of borrowing money from China to give to the UN and also much foreign aid and other programs, let's rein it in a little, or a lot really. Defense spending, well why did Obama go into Libya without Congressional approval? Obama is as leftist and pro-welfare state and pro military/industrial establishment as anyone, but his agenda is to weaken the US, use up more of our resources and give foreign countries the advantage. Obama increased govt spending on the federal level by hiring more govt employees and paying them higher wages than similar jobs in the private sector. So don't whine to me about programs people paid into.
Obamacare guts Medicare to pay for his Obamacare programs which includes a huge amount of bureaucratic overhead. And you believe that is going to help our economy? You think the Rockefellers and the Soros's are going to pay for it? AThat's the big lie the Democrats are telling you, that Warren Buffet is really going to pay more taxes because the Obamalites are talking about raising taxes for anyone over $250,000. This is ludicrous at best.
Obama never stopped the baillouts of big corporations and Goldman Sachs and the bankers. If you think any of the regulations on the banking industry are going to help you, you have another thing coming. He just started a program of nationalizing it is all.
Did you whine about your taxpayer dollars going to Brazilian Petrobas Oil ? No, I thought not.Everything needs to be taken into account.
Give the govt a blank check and they will spend it then print more.
Do you understand how the Fed works? Do you understand how printing money devalues the dollar? If you don't, then read "The Creature From Jekyll Island" by G edward Griffin.
ok and then get back to me after


Also to clarify, I have been reading "The Shadow Party" by David Horowitz and Richard Poe. He explains how ACORN and other leftists organizations and people (spcifically Wade Rathke and Cloward and Piven) got people to flood the welfare rolls with more and more people and this is the Cloward and Piven strategy to overwhelm the system. After they did that, they began working on veter registration, and what they did was flood the voter rolls with fraudulent registrations, and also made it easier(read de-regulated) the voter registration controls by relaxing rules and allowing the DMV to invite people to register to vote without showing citizenship. Also mailing in votes was part of that. So now we have Republicans saying wait we have to regulate voting rules again and now Democrats who say they love regulation suddenly say no we cannot do this it's racist.

Originally posted by starseedflower
reply to post by ThirdEyeofHorus

 

The more you cut spending on people' s welfare in a country, the more people are not going to be able to spend because poor and hence more recession is going to come from it. Interesting enough there is enough money to keep the military industrial war machine in place, bail out the banks, feed the privately owned prisons. It is a vicious circle and people especially from the educated middle class need to speak up and point out the wrongs.

That's a nice argument and all, but very Keynesian, which allows for the welfare state as a method to increase the flow of money in the marketplace. Keynesian theory holds that when people stop spending, it causes contraction in the economy. A severe contraction can lead to depression. The Fed controls the contraction and the expansion of the money supply by raising and lowering interest rates and various other means. So the theory goes that if you give welfare to people, they will spend it. Ok, but the people will become poorer and poorer and more masses of people becoming poorer and the disappearance of the middle class because we can never keep up with inflation. They have to stop printing money, but they won't do that until we tell the govt to stop spending. Why does the Fed do this? Because they make money off the principle of the loans to the govt.

All the Obama admin is doing is growing bigger govt for which we have to pay ever more from either taxes or printing money, further devaluing the dollar.

Oh never mind, I shall not let the foolishness make me hate.
Serenity now, serenity now....

Another recent topic here on ATS about Paul Craig Roberts;
Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs by Paul Craig Roberts • August 19, 2009

Roberts was also Reagan's Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and is considered a "co-founder" of Reaganomics. So for him to now come out and refute "trickle-down" theory (actually he's been refuting it for a while) speaks volumes. at least he's awake to the poverty and debilitating effect of Reaganomics. Too bad the rest of the GOP still have greed as their prime motivator.

Obviously most of you do not understand the real cause of the problem.

I could explain it, but it would probably just confuse you.

Try the Creature from Jekyll Island for starters, as pointed out above.

Watch the Wizard of Oz and try to understand it.