The Dying Institutions Of Western Civilization
By: Paul Craig Roberts |
Judicial Branch Has Self-Abolished
The US no longer has a judiciary. This former branch of government has transitioned into an enabler of executive branch fascism.
Privacy is a civil liberty protected by
the US Constitution. The Constitution relies on courts to enforce its
prohibitions against intrusive government, but if the executive branch
claims (no proof required) “national security,” courts kiss the
Constitution good-bye.
Federal judges are chosen by the
executive branch. The senate can refuse to confirm, but that is rare.
The executive branch chooses judges who are friendly to executive power.
This is especially the case for the appeals courts and the Supreme
Court.
The Justice (sic) Department keeps tabs
on district court judges who rule against the government, and these
judges don’t make it to the higher courts. The result over time is to
erode civil liberty.
Recently a three-judge panel of the US
Appeals Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the National
Security Agency can continue its mass surveillance of the US population
without showing cause. The panel avoided the constitutional question by
ruling on procedural terms that NSA had a right to withhold the
information that would prove the plaintiffs’ case.
By refusing to extend the section of the
USA PATRIOT Act—a name that puts a patriotic sheen on Orwellian
totalitarianism—that gave carte blanche to the NSA and by passing the
USA Freedom Act, Congress attempted to give NSA’s spying a
constitutional patina.
The USA Freedom Act allows the telecom
companies to spy on us and collect all of our communications data and
for NSA to access the data by obtaining a warrant from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. The Freedom Act protects
constitutional procedures by requiring NSA to go through the motions,
but it does not prevent telecom companies from invading our privacy in
behalf of NSA.
No one has ever explained the supposed
threat that American citizens pose to themselves that requires all of
their communications to be collected and stored by Big Brother. If the
US Constitution was respected by the executive branch, Congress, the
judiciary, law schools and bar associations, there would have been a
public discussion about whether Americans are most threatened by the
supposed threat that requires universal surveillance or by the loss of
their constitutional protections. We all know what our Founding Fathers’
answer would be.
Florida Government Defies Voters, Misuses Earmarked Funds
By allocating funds set aside by law for
the purchase of land and wildlife habitat to other purposes, Florida
Republicans have negated the Water and Land Conservation Amendment that
Floridians passed with a 75% majority last November. The amendment
requires that one-third of the funds produced by real estate stamp taxes
be used for conservation purposes.
Conservation runs counter to the
interests of real estate developers and polluters who have done so much
to destroy Florida’s unique environment. Real estate developers and
polluters are major Republican contributors.
Faced with the people’s will, the
Republican government is claiming that proper uses of the fund are to
pay salaries for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer
Services, to teach best management practices for privately owned lands,
and to pay private agricultural operations to retain the pollution that
results from their operations on their own property.
In typical Republican fashion, money
legally mandated for purchasing public land is being used to pay state
salaries and to make payments to private land owners. This is a good
indication of the scant respect that American democracy has for the will
of the people.
A Robot Will Take Your Job
Several recent studies conclude that
robots are going to displace millions of human workers. An Oxford
University study found that 47 percent of jobs are at risk. Another
study concludes that one third of all jobs will be lost to robots during
the next 10 years. Some claim that the net job loss will not be so
large, because new jobs will be created in order to repair the robots,
at least until robots learn to do this also.
Perhaps you remember the claims by
economists Matthew Slaughter, Michael Porter, and other shills for jobs
offshoring that moving American jobs offshore would create better and
more jobs in the US. After many years I am still watching for any sign
of these promised new jobs.
Despite promises to the contrary, the US
economy has been halted in its tracks by jobs offshoring. US
corporations have moved middle class manufacturing jobs abroad. The high
speed Internet has made it possible for tradable professional skills,
such as software engineering, information technology, research, design,
and scan interpretations by medical doctors, to be performed offshore.
This enormous giveaway of American middle class jobs and GDP to foreign
countries has left the domestic economy with non-tradable service jobs.
Robotics is now attacking the remaining
domestic service jobs. Robots are becoming sales assistants, providing
room service to hotel guests, filling orders at delis, providing medical
diagnosis, cooking and serving meals, and becoming incorporated into
smart household appliances that reduce the need for electrical and
repair services. All of us are familiar with customer service robots. We
encounter them whenever we telephone about a bank or credit card
statement or utility bill.
The unaddressed problem is: what happens
to consumer demand, on which the economy depends, when humans are
replaced by robots? Robots don’t need a paycheck in order to purchase
food, clothes, shoes, entertainment, health care, go on vacations, or to
make car, utility, credit card, rent or mortgage payments.
The consumer economy has suffered from
incomes lost to jobs offshoring. If robots replace yet more Americans,
where does the income come from to purchase the products of the robots’
work? Any one firm’s owners and managers can benefit from lowering costs
by replacing a human workforce with robots, but all firms cannot. If
all firms replace their work forces with robots, the rate of
unemployment becomes astronomical, and consumer demand collapses pulling
down the economy.
Economists call what works in the
singular but not in the plural the fallacy of composition. Keynesian
macroeconomists teach that if everyone in society is thrifty with the
consequence that savers save more than investors want to invest,
aggregate demand falls, and with it incomes and savings. Thus, by trying
to save more, savers end up with less.
With the advent of jobs offshoring and
financial deregulation, the US has one of the most unequal distributions
of income and wealth. As robotics patents are held by a mere handful of
people, the concentration of income and wealth at the top will
increase.
What kind of society would result? Will
governments nationalize robotics or heavily tax the incomes of owners in
order to issue monthly payments to people with which to purchase the
work product of robots? What would a population living off the work of
robots do with itself? Would population growth be tolerated? Or would
the powerful owners of robotics use the governments that they control to
reduce the surplus population?
Free market economists with their heads
forever in the sand will say, “No worry, people thought that the
industrial revolution would destroy the demand for labor, but industry
employed ever more people.”
A former MIT professor who has gone into
business producing robots says robots will bring the jobs lost to
offshoring home to America. But will they be jobs for humans or for
robots? I am waiting to hear how robotics will expand the demand for
human labor beyond a few repairmen to fix robots. And I am still waiting
for the new and better jobs that offshoring promised. By the time they
get here, if ever, robots will take them away.
Stock Market Supported By Corporate Buybacks
Pension funds purchase corporate bonds,
and the corporations use the money to buy back their own stocks, thus
driving up the price, enriching executives with bonuses and shareholders
with capital gains, but leaving the company in debt.
One study found that last year 95
percent of all corporate earnings were used either to pay dividends or
to buy back the company’s stock. Read Mike Whitney’s report in
CounterPunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/28/looting-made-easy-the-2-trillion-buyback-binge/
The Ship Did It
The presence of The White Lady, a
four-masted Chilean sailing ship, at the Tall Ships Festival in England
is being protested. Protestors believe the ship is guilty of human
rights violations as the ship was allegedly the site of torture
inflicted by the Pinochet government as it put down the terrorism that
followed the overthrow of the Allende government. Just as guns murder,
ships torture.
The torture alleged to have occurred
aboard The White Lady sounds like a small town performance of the
torture sanctioned by Washington and London at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo,
and numerous secret sites. How are the American and British democracies
superior to Chilean military dictatorship if the former out-tortures the
latter?
To my knowledge, the Pinochet regime,
unlike the Bush regime, never had John Yoo write a legal memo making
torture legal. This is probably why, prior to stepping down and
returning Chile to constitutional democracy, Pinochet issued pardons
both to the military government and to the terrorists.
Demand for Silver Outstripping Supply But Price Is Falling
On numerous occasions Dave Kranzler and I
have pointed out that despite high and rising demand for physical
bullion and constrained supply, the prices of gold and silver are forced
down by concerted manipulation in the futures market. Silver supplies
are so tight that both the US and Canadian mints have had to suspend the
production and sale of silver coins.
Despite supply constraints, in the
manipulated futures market the price of silver has been falling, but in
the physical market the price of silver coins has risen with premiums
over spot raising coin prices as much as 30 percent. Regulatory
authorities have brought no action against the obvious manipulation in
the futures market.
It is important to the value of the fiat
currencies that are being printed in profusion that gold and silver be
discredited as hedges against currency depreciation. Thus, authorities
turn a blind eye to the obvious manipulation, the purpose of which is to
show that inflating fiat paper currencies are gaining in value relative
to gold and silver.
I am awaiting the explanation from the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) why it is normal for
inflating fiat currencies to gain value in relation to gold and silver
bullion. Kranzler and I, supported by individuals thoroughly acquainted
with the bullion market, have written to the CFTC asking how it is
possible for price to fall when demand is rising and supply is
constrained.
We will see if a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury can get an answer.
Good-bye To Cash
If all this isn’t enough, government now
wants to deprive us of cash in order to deprive us of private and
unreported payments and savings. The Financial Times, Britain’s
equivalent to the Wall Street Journal, has published an anonymous
article advocating that cash be abolished and all transactions be
digital so that authorities can know and completely control our
behavior. Clearly a big push in this direction is in the works. If the
authorities succeed, we will have a situation in which the privacy
guaranteed by the US Constitution becomes a myth that slowly fades from
memory.
Paul Craig Roberts,
former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of
the Wall Street Journal, has held numerous university appointments. He
is a frequent contributor to The Real Agenda News. Dr. Roberts can be
reached at http://paulcraigroberts.org.
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