During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act~~George Orwell
There was a time when the
pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth
and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for
government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial
interest.
Today Americans are ruled
by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and
little ability to recognize it.
Truth is an unwelcome
entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of
being branded "anti-American," "anti-semite" or "conspiracy
theorist."
Truth is an inconvenience
for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control
government.
Truth is an inconvenience
for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or
guilt.
Truth is inconvenient for
ideologues.
Today many whose goal once
was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. "Free market
economists" are paid to sell offshoring to the American people.
High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old
industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place
has been taken by "the New Economy," a mythical economy that allegedly consists
of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance
activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in
this "new economy" are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then
they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.
Economists who were once
respectable took money to contribute to this myth of "the New
Economy."
And not only economists
sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical
doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted
"studies" that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical
companies that paid for the "studies."
The Council of Europe is
investigating big pharma's role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to
gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.
The media helped the US
military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a
city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a
collection of village farms.
And there is the global
warming scandal, in which climate scientists, financed by Wall Street and
corporations anxious to get their mitts on "cap and trade" and by a U.N. agency
anxious to redistribute income from rich to poor countries, concocted a doomsday
scenario in order to create profit in pollution.
Wherever one looks, truth
has fallen to money.
Wherever money is
insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish
the job.
I remember when, following
CIA director William Colby's testimony before the Church Committee in the
mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders
preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders.
In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence,
that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign
leaders.
When Blair told the House
Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested,
charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion
alone of being a "threat," he wasn't impeached. No investigation pursued.
Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got
into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on
the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don't carry any weight. No one
in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the
U.S. government.
As an economist, I am
astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever
that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to
overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or
lowest labor costs and maximum CEO "performance bonuses," have moved the
production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and
elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based
on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity
in the American economics profession.
Intelligence and integrity
have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay
multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these
"performance awards" by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While
Washington worries about "the Muslim threat," Wall Street, U.S. corporations and
"free market" shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of
millions of Americans.
Americans, or most of
them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police
state.
Americans have bought into
the government's claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties
and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe
that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect
"terrorists," and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a
tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police
state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.
Most Americans are
unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any
different.
I was associate editor and
columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week's first outside
columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for
Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for
the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine
in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in
the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American
"mainstream media."
For the last six years I
have been banned from the "mainstream media." My last column in the New York
Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles
Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our
op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington,
D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could
happen today.
For years I was a mainstay
at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a
Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant
Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush's wars of
aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my
column.
The American media does
not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that
empower the government.
America's fate was sealed
when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government's 9/11
conspiracy theory. The government's account of 9/11 is contradicted by much
evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the
U.S. on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo
topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a
police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are
based.
These trillion dollar wars
have created financing problems for Washington's deficits and threaten the U.S.
dollar's role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the
budget deficits put on the dollar's value have put Social Security and Medicare
on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary
Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke
is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections
are called "entitlements" as if they are some sort of welfare that people have
not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.
With over 21 percent
unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP,
and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington's
greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty
sacrificed to the "war on terror," the liberty and prosperity of the American
people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.
The militarism of the U.S.
and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their
course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing
off.
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