I Actually Miss Reagan

I’m going to do something a younger version of me never would have done.  I am going to praise a former architect of Reaganomics for his astute intelligence.  Paul Craig Roberts was Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury from 1981 to 1982. He went on to become an editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.  He is regarded as an economic expert who has testified before congressional committees on 30 occasions on issues of economic policy.  While he is a staunch proponent of supply-side economics, this hero of a Republican Party long-lost is now regarded to be so far out there by the current right-wing agenda he has been relegated to writing on the fringe.  He is grouped into the same whackadoo netherworld of the Internet as the Alex Jones and David Icke crowds.  This is the very same man named by Forbes in 1993 as one of the top seven journalists in America.

Why is that, you ask?  Is it because he believes there is a group of lizards who use mind-controlling sigil magic to control humanity?  As fun as that would be, sadly that is not the case.  No, Paul Craig Roberts has been blacklisted for many reasons, but none of them as otherworldly as what Alex Jones and David Icke proclaim.  No, Dr. Roberts has been denigrated and marginalized for his audacity to put most of the blame for our current global situation on the shoulders of Israel; specifically, the intensely right-wing Zionist regime in control of Israel.  For this crime of fact-based opinion, he has watched his star plummet from the upper-echelon of Wall Street to posting on a blog with the occasional guest submission to Alex Jones’ PrisonPlanet.com. 

You see, when faced with the decision of whether to cave into the pressure of the shifting opinion of the political landscape around him, or to remain true to his convictions, Dr. Roberts wrote column after column filled with truth.  He is credited as the first journalist to equate the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to the divide and conquer reservationism the United States perpetrated on the Native Americans.  He saw it as injustice.  He saw it as genocide.  And he said so.  This did not ingratiate him to the major players on Wall Street, nor to the Bush agenda as it took over the Republican Party from a decrepit and increasingly invalid Ronald Reagan.  But that didn’t stop him.

He became the most trenchant critic of George H. W. Bush’s economic policies of the early 90s.  The fact that he was using supply-side economics itself to refute those policies helped keep him afloat.  Of course, he was also still riding the tide of the Reagan era, and he had many friends in many high places.  He was able to throw darts from a relatively safe place.  As the economy went into recession just as he had predicted it would, Roberts was able to make the case that it was Bush, his advisers and their incredibly shortsighted policies that had led us there.  It is by no fluke that the American people elected a virtual unknown over Bush in the ensuing election.  It was the economy, stupid.

Unfortunately for Dr. Roberts, the Clinton Administration was not in the business of looking out for him in thanks.  In fact, while Slick Willie was failing to reform health care, dodging probes into his Whitewater dealings, and ramming NAFTA down our throats, a silent revolution was taking place in our media, and it sure as hell was not televised.  In the early to mid-nineties, the power of the press coalesced into the hands of five giant media conglomerates as federal regulations were relaxed in order to allow merger after merger and acquisition after acquisition.  Those conglomerates corporatized their holdings in such a way as to take journalists out of the equation.  Commercial advertising was the key method used in this objective.  A suit-and-tie was placed in charge of our fourth estate, and their job was to drive ratings while avoiding controversy so as to maximize advertising revenue.  It’s very simple and the natural progression of a capitalist society.  If your main priority is selling the news, then your main priority cannot be reporting the news.  Sometimes, reporters touch on subjects that might hurt their advertisers.  The suits eased off of those stories.  With a little twist and sleight-of-hand, dissenting voices were shifted from topics that the five main conglomerates disliked.  Focus was shifted to talking points and slotted into predetermined discussions.

Dr. Roberts didn’t fit in this new landscape, and his Reagan era protection began to slip.  The pro-Israeli agenda continued to roll unhindered in the mainstream media.  Roberts was no longer welcome in the press.  He, like most political masterminds, found employment in the mid-nineties with a few Reagan-centric think tanks, the Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution.  But as the years wore on, and his anti-Zionist opinion did not falter, he slipped out of the Republican Party altogether.  One of the framers of the Reagan era itself had become too far left for the party he’d reinvigorated 20 years hence.

For me, that was a blessing in disguise.  No longer fettered by the establishment, Dr. Roberts was free to write his true opinion and walk completely off of the Republican platform.  He has become a very vocal critic of the official explanation for 9/11.  He derides the American press as a virtual mouthpiece for pro-Zionist rhetoric.  And he continues to use supply-side economics to point out the insanity that is being allowed to go on in the global marketplace.  The thing is, once you read his very academic, highly rational and well-cited opinion, it is almost impossible to not see how our nation’s pro-Israel agenda is endangering our economy, our livelihood and our very lives.  Yet to say so in American culture is to be demonized as anti-Semitic.  Anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic are not the same thing.  In fact, Dr. Roberts nominated Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.  He is not against the Jewish people, but against an agenda that is constantly sending the globe to the verge of world war.

In the end, according to Roberts, it is the economic policies of pro-Zionist bankers and the politicians in their pockets that lead to conflict in the Middle East, terrorism abroad and economic strife at home.  This is done in order to further an agenda bent on nothing short of world domination and it is a maniacal goal whose ultimate ambition is the reduction of the world’s population under a one-world government: the vaunted New World Order.  This continued assertion by Roberts is what has landed him into the nutso clink with the reptile-truthers.  You will find no one more at odds with the Federal Reserve Bank and those that control it than Paul Craig Roberts.  Likely, that is also why you have never heard of him.