For years he has raked many of the major policies of the Clinton, Bush II and Obama regimes over the coals (with complete justification) while repeatedly assailing his own (Paul Craig Robert's) critics, declaiming high praises of the Ronald Reagan regime and his role in formulating Reagan's economic policy; at the same time saying little to nothing about George Herbert Walker Bush (Bush I), most especially not in any negative sense, and saying comparatively little about the 200 years of USSA political, military and economic history that preceded the Reagan and Bush I regimes.
And that is where I have to pick a bone with Paul Craig Roberts. As much as I agree with quite a lot that he says, he is found wanting in what he conspicuously does not say. In effect, I find his entire shtick to be a classic, limited hang out. Is Paul Craig Roberts unconsciously glossing over the historical record of the USSA government and his own participation in it during the Reagan regime? Or is he, in fact, aware of the things I will lay out in this blog post, and prefers not to mention them, for a variety of professional and personal reasons? In other words, does Paul Craig implicitly still fundamentally support the essential elements of the corrupt USSA regime, even as he would have all of us to think that he is making a radical critique of it?
As I will shortly show, neither when Paul Craig Roberts was in the government, nor now, when he is out of it, has he ever addressed the root causes of what ails the political economy of the USSA government, and indeed, of most of the rest of the world.
But first, how about a musical interlude from one of my favorite singers, Chris Rea, to set the mood?
She closed her eyes
And let the walls of her prison fall away
The walls which ached with a timeless wait
They had become her walls of this modern TV life
She closed her eyes
And let them fall away
And in her dreams she is standing by an ocean
She is gazing out to sea
She can remember with just a fleeting glimpse
That she was once free
So long ago now, so long it was as if it had never been
Was it a holiday
She thinks it could have been, ah yes, Italy ...
And he closes his eyes
And he is gone far away
Gone from all his confusion
Gone from the pain
He can easily see what a pointless waste
His modern life has become
Chasing the gravy grain
Chasing the dollar
Chasing the clock
Chasing his male friends
Chasing the boss
Chasing it like it was everything
It was nothing
Only the sound of his own breathing was all he really had
At the end of the day
And reasons to wonder, reasons to cry
Too late for this selfish sinner who never asked why
... and now, back to hard economic reality.
In the USSA Only Silver and Gold Are Constitutional Money
The United States Constitution is unambiguously clear that only gold and silver coin shall be legal tender. It states:
No state shall ... make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts. (Article I, Section 10, Clause 1)
It is also very clear that the Congress has the power to issue the nation's money:
The Congress shall have power ... To coin money, regulate the value thereof ... (Article I, Section 8, Clause 5)
The United States constitution is also unambiguously clear that all executive officers of the United States are bound by oath or affirmation, to support the U.S. Constitution. Please see:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution ... (Article VI, Clause 3)
Why does this matter?
Well, because when Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan years he simply ignored these clauses of the Constitution that set out who is to issue the nation's money, and that that money is to be silver and gold coin, and nothing else. In other words, he swore to support the Constitution and then turned right around and, as a matter of high level policy, participated in a blatantly unconstitutional, ongoing repudiation of the spirit and letter of the Constitution.
And now for years he has been running around the Internet constantly blogging about how concerned he is about the direction of the USSA political system, and its blatant disregard for the law.
When he was able to do something about the deeply fraudulent character of the so-called "money" of the USSA, he merely reshuffled the deck chairs on the sinking ship of state and loudly announced that he had reformed the national economy.
But, no, he did nothing of the sort, not really.
How About a Little Context
That is because in 1971 Richard Nixon, in consultation with Treasury Secretary John Connally, Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Arthur Burns and Undersecretary for International Monetary Affairs, Paul Volcker, undertook to remove the USSA dollar from convertibility to gold, effectively creating the 100% fiat currency we have today, that is willy-nilly conjured up right out of thin air by the billions and trillions and lent into circulation at interest.
All of these men knew what they were doing was unconstitutional. They did it anyway.
Ten years later, Paul Craig Roberts, then Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, set about remedying the problem of stagflation by introducing so-called supply side economics, which ostensibly solved the nation's economic woes.
In reality, without addressing the underlying issue of unfettered issuance of astronomical amounts of fiat currency the economic system cannot possibly function to the benefit of the citizenry at large, because it will always be out of equilibrium. And what is out of equilibrium and unbalanced will always crash. It's inevitable. In fact, the economic system is highly unstable and beginning to crash right now.
The USSA national debt really began to explode under Ronald Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts' boss. The printing presses were turned on in a big way, and continue to hum at a feverish pitch, right to the present day. Under Reagan the national debt leaped upward by $1.412 trillion, a 142% increase in just 8 years, more than 5 times the size of the debt that Reagan inherited from his predecessor, Jimmy Carter.
Interestingly, Roberts has often criticized various aspects of the USSA Federal Reserve Banks' policies, but has never directly challenged the existence of the Federal Reserve itself, which he certainly knows is nowhere authorized by the Constitution, and which is therefore, a blatant abrogation of the Congress's power to issue constitutionally mandated gold and silver money.
He is certainly aware of the fact that the so-called "money" of the USSA is in reality a debt instrument, the individual notes of which carry the words: "This note is legal tender for all debts public and private." He knows that the notes are issued by the Federal Reserve Bank and are not actually constitutional money; he knows all of this and yet he publicly says nothing about it.
Nor to my knowledge has he ever pointed out the peculiar tax status of the Federal Reserve bank under the USSA national legal code:
Federal reserve banks, including the capital stock and surplus therein and the income derived therefrom shall be exempt from Federal, State, and local taxation, except taxes upon real estate.
Got that? The Federal Reserve creates money out of thin air, just churns it out by the many trillions of dollars, lends it out and collects interest on it, but pays no tax on any of that massive economic activity - - just a comparatively trivial tax on its real estate.
You, by comparison, are taxed in many ways on most of your economic activity. Which raises the question as to why? If the point of taxation is to raise funds that the government must have to function, then why doesn't the government simply use the constitutional money power vested in the Congress to issue into circulation the money that it needs to function? Since the government creates all the money that is in circulation in the first place, why must it obtain money from you, when it can simply create all the money that it requires, on its own authority?
All of which calls to mind another peculiarity: neither the Federal Reserve Bank nor the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are listed in the USSA national legal code as agencies or bureaus of the United States Treasury Department.
Though the IRS is often referred to, most especially in Title 28 of the federal code, it is never specifically listed as a Treasury Department agency, and yet it acts as a national tax collection agency for the Treasury Department. How can this be? Note that there is a United States Mint and a Bureau of Printing and Engraving, as well as a Fiscal Service, a Treasury of the United States, a Federal Financing Bank and an Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. And yet the Federal Reserve Bank which is nowhere listed as an agency of the Treasury Department, and which is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution as having any authority to issue the national money, has taken over the issuing of the national money. Do you see the problem?
Paul Craig Roberts skates over all of this without even mentioning the obvious legal and constitutional issues, all the while claiming to be a stalwart defender of the USSA.
31 U.S. Code Chapter 3, Subchapter I - ORGANIZATION
- § 301. Department of the Treasury
- § 302. Treasury of the United States
- § 303. Bureau of Engraving and Printing
- § 304. United States Mint
- § 305. Federal Financing Bank
- § 306. Fiscal Service
- § 307. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
- § 308. United States Customs Service
- § 309. Office of Thrift Supervision
- § 310. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
- § 311. Office of Intelligence and Analysis
- § 312. Terrorism and financial intelligence
- § 313. Federal Insurance Office
- § 314. Covered agreements
- § 315. Continuing in office
But Paul Craig Roberts digs himself an even deeper hole. In recent years, he has often bemoaned the multiple, international free trade agreements that various USSA presidential regimes have been negotiating, on the grounds that they usurp the authority of the government, and deliver too much economic and political control to corporate interests, thereby effectively stripping the government of its sovereign, constitutional power.
Keep in mind that Roberts is a PhD economist, a man who has worked at a very high level in the federal government, and who has taught at major universities and written for prominent newspapers.
He must know that the USSA government is itself a corporation, and has been for a very long time. The government has already been stripped of its sovereign, constitutional power, and long ago. But Paul Craig Roberts blithely skates over that fact, never mentioning it.
For those of my readers who for whatever reason still hold the charmingly quaint notion that they are a "citizen" (whatever that means) of a so-called "country" known as the "United States" let me disabuse you of that childish fantasy right now: you are the subordinate subject of a corporation known as the "United States". Please read and ponder this section from the USSA national legal code:
Title 28 - JUDICIARY AND JUDICIAL PROCEDURE
Part VI - PARTICULAR PROCEEDINGS
Chapter 176 - FEDERAL DEBT COLLECTION PROCEDURE
Subchapter A - DEFINITIONS AND GENERAL PROVISIONS
§ 3002 - Definitions(15)
(15) “United States” means—
(A) a Federal corporation;
(B) an agency, department, commission, board, or other entity of the United States; or
(C) an instrumentality of the United States.
(source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/3002)
"United States" means a Federal corporation ....
Could it be any clearer?
It All Has To Do With The Money
Paul Craig Roberts sings the praises of Reaganomics, but let's take a quick trip down memory lane to the 1980s and take a look at what really happened.
The crack cocaine explosion that devastated the inner cities of the USSA, and created a tidal wave of associated crime, was a consequence of Reagan's uncommonly ignorant Central American policy. It all had to do with Iran Contra, with trafficking arms to Iran, funneling payment for those arms to the paramilitary CIA Contra army fighting against the Nicaraguan government, and then flying back industrial quantities of cocaine on CIA and USSA military aircraft to the USSA, in particular to Arkansas, where Bill Clinton was then governor.
I lived in the Deep South at the time. I knew people in Arkansas and visited the state on multiple occasions. Even I heard stories from local people in Little Rock about USSA military C-130 airplanes flying in and out of Little Rock Air Force Base, taking weapons down to Central America and then returning to Arkansas with cocaine.
That's the way it worked. The airport in Mena, Arkansas was also a big hub for illegal weapons and cocaine smuggling in those years. Bill Clinton and members of Ronald Reagan's government were heavily in the know on these operations.
The cocaine was funneled into the black market in the USSA, creating a national societal crisis, the woeful effects of which persist to this day. Hundreds of billions of narco-dollars were laundered through a variety of banks and financial houses in Arkansas, Florida, Wall Street and elsewhere.
I certainly know about these events and their connection to Reagan's policies. But somehow, Paul Craig Roberts was in charge of federal economic policy and never noticed any of this. Never questioned or challenged any of it?
Narco-trafficking became a major component of the national economy under Ronald Reagan as a consequence of Iran-Contra but Paul Craig Roberts, then or now, has somehow never managed to connect any of the dots that lead right to Ronald Reagan's policies?
Roberts has stated in his blog that he was in charge of economic policy, not foreign policy, and so could hardly be expected to have poked his nose out of his economic bailiwick.
But his response is insufficient.
Reagan's cocaine trafficking Central American foreign policy that led to the crack cocaine explosion on the streets of the USSA had everything to do with a dramatic rise in imprisonment during the 1980s, with devastated inner city communities because of the CIA's massive narco-trafficking, and gutted urban landscapes and economies which directly fed the massive growth of the police state and prison-industrial complex that Roberts now says he opposes.
Paul Craig Roberts' response to all of these issues is quite simple: he mostly ignores them, all the while loudly declaiming the praises of Ronald Reagan.
And that raises questions about his highly selective memory and feigned ignorance of the most fundamental elements of USSA political economy.
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