- A number of readers have asked me when
did I undergo my epiphany, abandon right-wing Reaganism and become an
apostle of truth and justice.
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- I appreciate the friendly sentiment,
but there is a great deal of misconception in the question.
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- When I saw that the neoconservative
response to 9/11 was to turn a war against stateless terrorism into military
attacks on Muslim states, I realized that the Bush administration was
committing a strategic blunder with open-ended disastrous consequences
for the US that, in the end, would destroy Bush, the Republican Party,
and the conservative movement.
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- My warning was not prompted by an effort
to save Bush's bacon. I have never been any party's political or ideological
servant. I used my positions in the congressional staff and the Reagan
administration to change the economic policy of the United States. In
my efforts, I found more allies among influential Democrats, such as Senate
Finance Committee Chairman Russell Long, Joint Economic Committee Chairman
Lloyd Bentsen and my Georgia Tech fraternity brother Sam Nunn, than I
did among traditional Republicans who were only concerned about the budget
deficit.
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- My goals were to reverse the Keynesian
policy mix that caused worsening "Phillips curve" trade-offs
between employment and inflation and to cure the stagflation that destroyed
Jimmy Carter's presidency. No one has seen a "Phillips curve"
trade-off or experienced stagflation since the supply-side policy was
implemented. (These gains are now being eroded by the labor arbitrage
that is replacing American workers with foreign ones. In January 2004
I teamed up with Democratic Senator Charles Schumer in the New York Times
and at a Brookings Institution conference in a joint effort to call attention
to the erosion of the US economy and Americans' job prospects by outsourcing.)
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- The supply-side policy used reductions
in the marginal rate of taxation on additional income to create incentives
to expand production so that consumer demand would result in increased
real output instead of higher prices. No doubt, the rich benefitted, but
ordinary people were no longer faced simultaneously with rising inflation
and lost jobs. Employment expanded for the remainder of the century without
having to pay for it with high and rising rates of inflation. Don't ever
forget that Reagan was elected and re-elected by blue collar Democrats.
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- The left-wing's demonization of Ronald
Reagan owes much to the Republican Establishment. The Republican Establishment
regarded Reagan as a threat to its hegemony over the party. They saw Jack
Kemp the same way. Kemp, a professional football star quarterback, represented
an essentially Democratic district. Kemp was aggressive in challenging
Republican orthodoxy. Both Reagan and Kemp spoke to ordinary people. As
a high official in the Reagan administration, I was battered by the Republican
Establishment, which wanted enough Reagan success so as not to jeopardize
the party's "lock on the presidency" but enough failure so as
to block the succession to another outsider. Anyone who reads my book,
The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1984) will see what
the real issues were.
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- If I had time to research my writings
over the past 30 years, I could find examples of partisan articles in
behalf of Republicans and against Democrats. However, political partisanship
is not the corpus of my writings. I had a 16-year stint as Business Week's
first outside columnist, despite hostility within the magazine and from
the editor's New York social set, because the editor regarded me as the
most trenchant critic of the George H.W. Bush administration in the business.
The White House felt the same way and lobbied to have me removed from
the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies.
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- Earlier when I resigned from the Reagan
administration to accept appointment to the new chair, CSIS was part of
Georgetown University. The University's liberal president, Timothy Healy,
objected to having anyone from the Reagan administration in a chair affiliated
with Georgetown University. CSIS had to defuse the situation by appointing
a distinguished panel of scholars from outside universities, including
Harvard, to ratify my appointment.
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- I can truly say that at one time or
the other both sides have tried to shut me down. I have experienced the
same from "free thinking" libertarians, who are free thinking
only inside their own box.
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- In Reagan's time we did not recognize
that neoconservatives had a Jacobin frame of mind. Perhaps we were not
paying close enough attention. We saw neoconservatives as former left-wingers
who had realized that the Soviet Union might be a threat after all. We
regarded them as allies against Henry Kissinger's inclination to reach
an unfavorable accommodation with the Soviet Union. Kissinger thought,
or was believed to think, that Americans had no stomach for a drawn-out
contest and that he needed to strike a deal before the Soviets staked
the future on a lack of American resolution.
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- Reagan was certainly no neoconservative.
He went along with some of their schemes, but when neoconservatives went
too far, he fired them. George W. Bush promotes them. The left-wing might
object that the offending neocons in the Reagan administration were later
pardoned, but there was sincere objection to criminalizing what was seen,
rightly or wrongly, as stalwartness in standing up to communism.
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- Neoconservatives were disappointed with
Reagan. Reagan's goal was to END the cold war, not to WIN it. He made
common purpose with Gorbachev and ENDED the cold war. It is the new Jacobins,
the neoconservatives, who have exploited this victory by taking military
bases to Russian borders.
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- I have always objected to injustice.
My writings about prosecutorial abuse have put me at odds with "law
and order conservatives." I have written extensively about wrongful
convictions, both of the rich and famous and the poor and unknown. My
thirty-odd columns on the frame-up of 26 innocent people in the Wenatchee,
Washington, child sex abuse witch hunt played a role in the eventual overturning
of the wrongful convictions.
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- My book, with Lawrence Stratton, The
Tyranny of Good Intentions, details the erosion of the legal rights that
make law a shield of the innocent instead of a weapon in the hands of government.
Without the protection of law, rich and poor alike are at the mercy of
government. In their hatred of "the rich," the left-wing overlooks
that in the 20th century the rich were the class most persecuted by government.
The class genocide of the 20th century is the greatest genocide in history.
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- Americans have forgotten what it takes
to remain free. Instead, every ideology, every group is determined to
use government to advance its agenda. As the government's power grows,
the people are eclipsed.
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- We have reached a point where the Bush
administration is determined to totally eclipse the people. Bewitched
by neoconservatives and lustful for power, the Bush administration and
the Republican Party are aligning themselves firmly against the American
people. Their first victims, of course, were the true conservatives. Having
eliminated internal opposition, the Bush administration is now using blackmail
obtained through illegal spying on American citizens to silence the media
and the opposition party.
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- Before flinching at my assertion of
blackmail, ask yourself why President Bush refuses to obey the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act. The purpose of the FISA court is to ensure
that administrations do not spy for partisan political reasons. The warrant
requirement is to ensure that a panel of independent federal judges hears
a legitimate reason for the spying, thus protecting a president from the
temptation to abuse the powers of government. The only reason for the
Bush administration to evade the court is that the Bush administration
had no legitimate reasons for its spying. This should be obvious even
to a naif.
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- The United States is undergoing a coup
against the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, civil liberties, and democracy
itself. The "liberal press" has been co-opted. As everyone must
know by now, the New York Times has totally failed its First Amendment
obligations, allowing Judith Miller to make war propaganda for the Bush
administration, suppressing for an entire year the news that the Bush
administration was illegally spying on American citizens, and denying
coverage to Al Gore's speech that challenged the criminal deeds of the
Bush administration.
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- The TV networks mimic Fox News' faux
patriotism. Anyone who depends on print, TV, or right-wing talk radio
media is totally misinformed. The Bush administration has achieved a de
facto Ministry of Propaganda.
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- The years of illegal spying have given
the Bush administration power over the media and the opposition. Journalists
and Democratic politicians don't want to have their adulterous affairs
broadcast over television or to see their favorite online porn sites revealed
in headlines in the local press with their names attached. Only people
willing to risk such disclosures can stand up for the country.
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- Homeland Security and the Patriot Act
are not our protectors. They undermine our protection by trashing the
Constitution and the civil liberties it guarantees. Those with a tyrannical
turn of mind have always used fear and hysteria to overcome obstacles
to their power and to gain new means of silencing opposition.
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- Consider the no-fly list. This list
has no purpose whatsoever but to harass and disrupt the livelihoods of
Bush's critics. If a known terrorist were to show up at check-in, he would
be arrested and taken into custody, not told that he could not fly. What
sense does it make to tell someone who is not subject to arrest and who
has cleared screening that he or she cannot fly? How is this person any
more dangerous than any other passenger?
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- If Senator Ted Kennedy, a famous senator
with two martyred brothers, can be put on a no-fly list, as he was for
several weeks, anyone can be put on the list. The list has no accountability.
People on the list cannot even find out why they are on the list. There
is no recourse, no procedure for correcting mistakes.
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- I am certain that there are more Bush
critics on the list than there are terrorists. According to reports, the
list now comprises 80,000 names! This number must greatly dwarf the total
number of terrorists in the world and certainly the number of known terrorists.
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- How long before members of the opposition
party, should there be one, find that they cannot return to Washington
for important votes, because they have been placed on the no-fly list?
What oversight does Congress or a panel of federal judges exercise over
the list to make sure there are valid reasons for placing people on the
list?
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- If the government can have a no-fly
list, it can have a no-drive list. The Iraqi resistance has demonstrated
the destructive potential of car bombs. If we are to believe the government's
story about the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City, Timothy
McVeigh showed that a rental truck bomb could destroy a large office building.
Indeed, what is to prevent the government from having a list of people
who are not allowed to leave their homes? If the Bush administration
can continue its policy of picking up people anywhere in the world and
detaining them indefinitely without having to show any evidence for their
detention, it can do whatever it wishes.
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- Many readers have told me, some gleefully,
that I will be placed on the no-fly list along with all other outspoken
critics of the growth in unaccountable executive power and war based on
lies and deception. It is just a matter of time. Unchecked, unaccountable
power grows more audacious by the day. As one reader recently wrote, "when
the president of the United States can openly brag about being a felon,
without fear of the consequences, the game is all but over."
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- Congress and the media have no fight
in them, and neither, apparently, do the American people. Considering the
feebleness of the opposition, perhaps the best strategy is for the opposition
to shut up, not merely for our own safety but, more importantly, to remove
any impediments to Bush administration self-destruction. The sooner the
Bush administration realizes its goals of attacking Iran, Syria, and the
Shia militias in Lebanon, the more likely the administration will collapse
in the maelstrom before it achieves a viable police state. Hamas' victory
in the recent Palestinian elections indicates that Muslim outrage over
further US aggression in the Middle East has the potential to produce
uprisings in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Not even Karl
Rove and Fox "News" could spin Bush out of the catastrophe.
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- Perhaps we should go further and join
the neocon chorus, urging on invasions of Iran and Syria and sending in
the Marines to disarm Hizbullah in Lebanon. Not even plots of the German
High Command could get rid of Hitler, but when Hitler marched German armies
into Russia he destroyed himself. If Iraq hasn't beat the hubris out of
what Gordon Prather aptly terms the "neo-crazies," US military
adventures against Iran and Hizbullah will teach humility to the neo-crazies.
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- Many patriotic readers have written
to me expressing their frustration that fact and common sense cannot gain
a toehold in a debate guided by hysteria and disinformation. Other readers
write that 9/11 shields Bush from accountability, They challenge me to
explain why three World Trade Center buildings on one day collapsed into
their own footprints at free fall speed, an event outside the laws of
physics except under conditions of controlled demolition. They insist
that there is no stopping war and a police state as long as the government's
story on 9/11 remains unchallenged.
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- They could be right. There are not many
editors eager for writers to explore the glaring defects of the 9/11 Commission
Report. One would think that if the report could stand analysis, there
would not be a taboo against calling attention to the inadequacy of its
explanations. We know the government lied about Iraqi WMD, but we believe
the government told the truth about 9/11.
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- Debate is dead in America for two reasons:
One is that the media concentration permitted in the 1990s has put news
and opinion in the hands of a few corporate executives who do not dare
risk their broadcasting licenses by getting on the wrong side of government,
or their advertising revenues by becoming "controversial." The
media follows a safe line and purveys only politically correct information.
The other reason is that Americans today are no longer enthralled by
debate. They just want to hear what they want to hear. The right-wing,
left-wing, and libertarians alike preach to the faithful. Democracy cannot
succeed when there is no debate.
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- Americans need to understand that many
interests are using the "war on terror" to achieve their agendas.
The Federalist Society is using the "war on terror" to achieve
its agenda of concentrating power in the executive and packing the Supreme
Court to this effect. The neocons are using the war to achieve their agenda
of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. Police agencies are using the
war to remove constraints on their powers and to make themselves less
accountable. Republicans are using the war to achieve one-party rule--theirs.
The Bush administration is using the war to avoid accountability and evade
constraints on executive powers. Arms industries, or what President Eisenhower
called the "military-industrial complex," are using the war
to fatten profits. Terrorism experts are using the war to gain visibility.
Security firms are using it to gain customers. Readers can add to this
list at will. The lack of debate gives carte blanche to these agendas.
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- One certainty prevails. Bush is committing
America to a path of violence and coercion, and he is getting away with
it.
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- Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary
of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor
of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of
National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can
be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
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