Well, there are still some older people who have an idea of what the police are supposed to be and do. There are still some restraints from the past that the police may no longer believe, but those restraints haven't actually been over-thrown though, increasingly, they are over-thrown by practice, where they break in peoples' homes without warrants, and brutalize them, and shoot the family dogs. But still there is some outcry about it. So it is sort of arrested for a little bit. And then it happens again. But it's not to the point where it can happen everywhere without outcry, but it will get there. So those are the kind of things that kind of hold things, though I think they're very weak.
I recently went with a friend to his gun club. He had some very old, lever-action Winchesters. They are beautiful things, and he was going to let me shoot them. These are the kind the cowboys had in the cowboy movies I grew up with. We went there, and it was a very nice facility. They have all kinds of safety rules and requirements, and also the police are allowed to use the ranges. Otherwise they think the police will harass them as they go to and from the club and stop them and question them about the guns, so the police get to use the ranges. The police were out in force. There were about forty or fifty of them, with automatic weapons, in some kind of an action course concentrating fire. It sounded like a war. And this was a police force from a very small, rich, entirely white community. I think the average income in the community is $300,000 or $400,000. And there are no blacks in the community, no Hispanics, no gangs, no criminals, and yet this police force was essentially a paramilitary force, practicing mass concentrated fire that could have no police purpose. And so, they are totally militarized. They are prepared to suppress their own populations.
Rob Kall:
Did you see them in Pittsburgh at the world economic summit meeting of the (G20, formerly G8)?
click here
click here
Paul Craig Roberts:
Yes, that's where they used the noise machines to attack crowds that weren't doing anything, and then went on the campus and attacked the students, who weren't doing anything. In other words, there were no protestors, so they had to go use their force against people who weren't even protesting. Yeah, I saw that. You covered that on your site, I think.
Rob Kall:
Yes.
These are things that should make progressives think about the power of government, and how it has been unleashed. It's totally unleashed, and it is going to apply to them as well as the right wing. When people use power, they don't exclude anybody. It just falls on whomever. And look at all this torture stuff. It turns out there have been numerous reports that the Americans doing the torturing were getting their jollies. They were enjoying it. They were having a great time abusing fellow humans who had done nothing who had done nothing. But they were having a great time. It was fun, just like little boys torturing animals, tying tin cans on the tails of dogs and cats, and doing all the other terrible things that some cruel people do to animals. And that's what was happening with American troops and CIA, and psychologists, were doing to Muslim captives. The captives were people who were sold to the Americans by war lords.
Rob Kall:
The hopeful thing is that there are people like Josh Stieber the fellow I interviewed on Friday, who stood up and refused to do it, and ultimately applied for conscientious objector status, and got it.
http://vimeo.com/6031077
click here ,
Paul Craig Roberts:
Yep. But Rob, yes I know there are always some good people. I'm not saying there are not any good people left. There are, but they are helpless, and very few people will do what he did because, first of all, they will be scared of what is going to happen to them, and second, they don't want to be rejected by their peers. Most people are part of whatever is going on. Parents used to know that. Parents would know how easily a kid could get in trouble because he didn't want to go against his peers. So if his peers were doing something bad, he would do it, too, and they would all get in trouble and parents used to warn kids about that. They would warn us that the minute you see something (wrong), run, get out of there, leave. Don't be part of it. I don't know that this message gets made any more. I think on the whole there won't be many people who will object.
Rob Kall:
I agree, unfortunately. So, another question for you: Yesterday I wrote a piece suggesting that it might be productive to try to find common ground between progressives and tea-partyers; that since we are both dealing with
a duopoly, two parties that are really not addressing our interests or needs, there might be some way to come together. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Paul Craig Roberts:
Well, I'm all in favor of trying. But like I said earlier, I think the tea-party is a diffuse force. It's not people reacting to the same things. It's a whole bunch of people angry about different things.
Rob Kall:
Right.
Paul Craig Roberts:
And I think they will be exploited by the powers that be. Karl Rove and the Republican Party will probably have a better chance of taking them over than any body else. The frustrations that most people have are blind. They don't really know the cause of it, or they think the cause is something that it's not. They think, "Obama's a Muslim and he's working against me," or they've got some crazy idea like that, you see. So even though they're frustrated and they are upset and prone to action, they don't know why they are or what to do. So somebody comes and gives them an explanation, and they say, "OK!" and off they go. So, it will be whoever gives them the best explanation and appeals to the emotions. Not to their reason, or facts, because they are too ignorant to know how to judge a fact, or they lack the information to see cause and effect. And so it will be emotional responses. And, of course, that is unpredictable and it's dangerous. I don't know what will come out of it. I think that certainly progressives should try to make people aware of what the situation really is, and how they need to band together, but I'm not even sure the progressives have a good take on it, as we discussed in this conversation. I'm not sure who has a good take on it. I mean you obviously have some take on it. You have a good site, and it gives information, but it's not like we have a group of people who have got it all figured out. That's just not there. I for years thought I could help people figure it out, and we could get a group, but I just kind of gave up on that. I don't think you can.
For fifteen or sixteen years, I was Business Week's first outside columnist, and I was able to hold onto that despite opposition within the magazine because I was bi-partisan in my attacks. I went after George Herbert Walker Bush as strongly as I did Clinton, and so on. In my last column, I said that and I had already detected this, a decade or more ago I said that reason was failing, and that emotion and emotional responses were replacing reason as a basis for decision-making. And I think in the decade or so since I wrote that, that's even more the case now. It's even more the case that emotional responses are replacing reasoned, analytically-based responses. So that's another reason it's difficult. So whoever can organize the blind emotions of a dissatisfied population will prevail. And I don't know who that'll be.
Rob Kall:
Well, that's an interesting question, who's better at harnessing the blind emotions. Somehow I get the feeling it's not usually the good guys.
Paul Craig Roberts:
[laughs] Right, because the good guys, to the extent there are any, are truth-motivated.
Rob Kall:
Right. We're going to wind this down, but I've got three last questions I've got to ask you. What' your take on the "health reform legislation" that went through Congress which I call the "health insurance gift legislation."
Paul Craig Roberts:
Well, Rob, as you may know, I wrote about the original bill proposal. You had it on your site, and I did not follow it after that. I don't know what they did to it, or if they changed it at all, but the original bill was clearly written by the insurance companies to create thirty million new clients for themselves at the expanse of Medicare and the existing insured people. And that's what the bill was. Now, whether it in any way was altered or changed, I don't know, because after I looked at it and wrote that, I was busy with other things, and I never went back to it. So I don't know what the final result was. Usually it's not much different, and it's very difficult to pass a bill that's against the interests of the powerful lobby group that it affects. So, I imagine it's something that creates advantages for private insurance companies at the expense of Medicare and the existing insured, but I don't know.
Rob Kall:
OK. Wrapping down, another question: Who are your heroes, living heroes, people that you respect as heroes?
Paul Craig Roberts:
I think John Pilger. I think Harvey Silverglate...
Rob Kall:
Who's he?
Paul Craig Roberts:
He was the head of the Massachusetts ACLU. He's a noted defense attorney. He recently wrote a book exposing the total corruption of the United States Department of Justice. It is simply a gang of organized criminals.
I think Bill Anderson, William Anderson. He's an economics professor at some small college in Maryland who has taken on cases of wrongful prosecution and exposed them. He was instrumental in opposing the wrongful prosecution in the Duke lacrosse case, where the black stripper claimed she was raped and the guys were being railroaded by a totally corrupt prosecutor named Nifong.
http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/lacrosseincident/
Anderson's investigations and exposes ended in Nifong being disbarred as a common criminal, which is what he was. (Anderson) is currently writing about the attempted frame-up of another woman on a false child abuse charge which is a pay-back from an enemy of long ago, who has brought false charges. He's exposing that, and I think it takes a tremendous amount of heroism, determination, and fortitude because I myself have written about a number of these wrongful prosecution cases. It just really drains you when you see the brutality of prosecutors and judges against people they know are totally innocent, and yet they are determined to destroy them. I just found out one of the most draining things it is to cover those cases. Now Bill Anderson does it, and does a fantastic job. He defends the wrongfully accused. Now, obviously, you can't defend them all. [laughs] There's an endless number of them. I'm sure I've got other heroes. If you asked me this in advance and I could sit down and think, I probably would come up with others - but there are three people right there.
Rob Kall:
Who is John Pilger? Could you describe a little bit about who he is and why he is a hero for you?
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