Paul Craig
Roberts: They came up with this watered
down thing, which I don't think will have any effect. In fact, the regulators are the banks
themselves, and so they won't apply it to them, they'll apply it to the little
people! They'll go beat up on some
little mutual fund, or -- you see what I'm saying? The real villains are running the regulatory
agencies. So they're not going to then
apply it to them, anyhow. I think you
have to bring back Glass-Steagall, you have to bring back the position limits
on speculators, you have to have very strict regulation of debt leverage, and
what they really need to do is de-financialize the economy.
You see what happens now -- you know what the banks lend for? They lend for takeovers; they lend on real
estate to drive up real estate prices, because the real estate prices go up, so
do mortgages and interest payments and debt payments. So the whole thing is being run to maximize
the cash flow into the financial sector -- away from everybody else. Michael Hudson has made this perfectly
clear. So, you can't correct that -
Rob Kall: Paul?
Paul Craig
Roberts: Yeah?
Rob Kall: I call my show the Bottom Up Radio Show
because I believe that, in one good way, the internet has helped to catalyze a
move from a top down to a bottom up culture and way of seeing. I absolutely agree with you that the internet
has been incredibly destructive for the economy in terms of off-sourcing of
jobs, but I also believe that we have some positive hopes because of this
transition from a top down culture to a bottom up one. And I wonder, can you comment on - for
example, bottom up is decentralized, and it's less hierarchical. Do you see any positive way that this is
happening, or that it could happen, from your perspective?
Paul Craig
Roberts: I think the main advantage of
the internet has been to get some information flows free of the very strictly
controlled print and TV media. That's
something else that happened during Clinton: he allowed the concentration of
the media. It broke all our rules; it
broke our anti-trust rules, and it broke our long tradition of having a very
dispersed, independent media. The whole
media was bought up by five or six firms, so that's very easy for the
government to control: the value of the concentrated firms are the Federal
broadcast licenses. So the government
has them by the short hairs. The other
controlling fact is they're run by corporate advertising executives, and
they're concerned with advertising revenues, and so they don't want anything
that upsets anybody. All you get from
the print and TV media today is propaganda.
You get the government's propaganda and the corporation's
propaganda. That's it.
So the internet has given people the opportunity to get better
information. Of course the problem with
the internet is that they're so much on it.
So much of it is quackery and all the rest, and it takes a long time to
learn what it is you can trust and can't trust.
You can't -- you know, it used to be, you could pick up the New York
Times, and if there was a major story, it was probably pretty close to the
money. And so people kind of got
confidence in major news outlets, because they were run by journalists -- I
mean, I don't mean that they always told us the truth. They didn't.
They participated in a great many shams and wars we didn't need to have
that they helped to bring on and all the rest, but still you had some idea what
you were looking at.
On the internet, a new person comes in, he doesn't know whether what's
on Opednews is reliable, what's on Global Research is reliable; what's on
Counterpunch, what's on Information Clearinghouse, what's on wherever! They have no way of knowing. It takes a long time. And of course they all have their own biases
and prejudices, and they look for that; they look for something that's going to
tell them what they already think.
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