July 05, 2019
Published on Jul 3, 2019
Herland Report TV: “We are now back to robbery-capitalism. There are no countervailing powers and no media to constrain them,” says one of America’s leading political economists, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy, former editor of the Wall Street Journal, and a well known author of many books. He is also a regular contributor to the Herland Report news site as well as The Herland Report TV Show, awarded the Treasury Department’s Meritorious Service Award for “his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy.” Many of the leading Western philosophers over the years have spoken about the need for fearless speech and critical thinking and investigative journalism and independence from power structures.
About this, Dr. Roberts says:
“The reason Noam Chomsky and I can speak freely is because we don’t want anything from the establishment. We are not depended on them. If we were, we would be shut down. So, you have a situation in the West where there is hardly anybody who can afford to speak freely.”
“In society, there has to be countervailing powers. One power has to balance the other. If not, some group runs away with it all. In the US, all of these countervailing powers have been destroyed. For example, one of the main results of offshoring the middle class jobs, the manufacturing jobs, was to destroy the unions. So, there is no longer any constraint by the union as a workforce, or employers. We are now back to robbery-capitalism because the unions are gone. A few exist and they are in the public sector and they are now beginning to starve them out as well. No raises, cuts, they use all sorts of tactics. And there is no longer a media to constrain them. Where is that limit now? It is gone.”“The deterioration happened in a fairly short time. It was not a long drawn out procedure. If you think back to post World War II, we had a country that was a real country back then. We were unified, a people that believed in progress, there was goodwill. Where are these values now?”
“The pendulum has swung to robber-capitalism. The only mark of success is money. How you get it doesn’t matter anymore. I can remember when a billionaire was unknown, now everyone on the Forbes 400-list is a billionaire. We talk about individuals who have 100 billion dollars. That was the stats of the entirety of the Federal government when John F. Kennedy was president. So, now one person has a hundred billion dollars. You have a system that produces those results and yet the middle family income in the US are not grown in 20-30 years.”
“This is America. The majority population cannot raise 400 dollars cash without selling personal property, personal assets, their TV, their car, their ring. Yet, we have people worth 100 billion dollars.”
“I criticized globalism years ago and offshoring new jobs. I was accused to be against free trade, but it has nothing to do with free trade. So, what this does is it sends you to where labor is cheapest, where there is no regulation because then your profits are maximized. And those profits only go the management and the owners. But the cost of getting those profits is that you have destroyed the middle class.”
“In that sense, president Trump is right. The country has deserted its own and it is largely the reason for the rise of China. So, by doing this, we have created another power that is a constraint on American Unitarianism, which is China. They now know how to do thing that we do not know anymore.”
The Herland Report is a Scandinavian news site and TV channel on YouTube, reaching millions yearly, presenting leading intellectuals’ view on foreign policy, current affairs, the Middle East, Western decadence, featuring a variety of opinion and analysis from a number of commentators from across the political spectrum.
The Herland Report is founded and hosted by Hanne Nabintu Herland, a historian of comparative religions, bestselling author, commentator and TV producer, known from the media for sharp analysis and fearless speech.
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