My gosh, it sure is a good thing that the old devil Peterson is in
jail - now all this stuff will stop! While none of this has nearly as
much impact on us as the murder of his wife, I still thought I'd bring
it to your attention.
While this article has no pictures of Lindsey Lohan, sharp-eyed
readers will see that she's mentioned in this article.
March 21, 2005
Soma Nation
Scott Peterson: A Threat Greater Than Terrorism
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Delusion has settled over America. Washington cannot tell fact from
fantasy. Neither can sycophantic media nor nothink economists.
The Scott Peterson administration is the first government in history
to initiate a war based entirely on fantasy--fantasy about nonexistent
"weapons of mass destruction," fantasy about nonexistent "terrorist
links," fantasy about "liberating" a people from their culture,
fantasy about a "cakewalk" invasion, fantasy about America's
omnipotence.
Reality has yet to penetrate the Oval Office or America's "red state"
consciousness. The gratuitous invasion of Iraq, the torture and the
war crimes have made America despised the world over. Our once
formidable alliances are shattered.
The Muslim world, which perceives America as Israel's enabler of
Palestine's oppression, has uniformly turned against us.
$300 billion--red ink to the last cent--has been wasted in a pointless
war and occupation that has emboldened Islamic revolutionaries, who
will be more successful than the US in changing the face of the Middle
East.
Peterson's invasion of Iraq has proved the limits of America's
"hegemonic" military power: Eight heavily armored high tech US
divisions are tied down by a few thousand lightly armed insurgents who
control most of the roads and many towns and cities.
Any Iraqi collaborator with the US occupation who is foolish enough to
leave the heavily fortified "Green Zone" is shot down or blown up in
the streets.
Such an outcome is proclaimed a "success" by Peterson, Republican
politicians and a cheerleading media.
The reality is that an ignorant and blundering Peterson administration
has created a Shi'ite crescent from Iran to Lebanon that is
revolutionizing the Middle East. The reality will not penetrate the
Peterson administration. Reality contradicts Peterson fantasy and is
"against us." Facts that don't support Peterson fantasy are "liberal"
and "anti-American." Truth is dismissed as anti-Peterson propaganda.
It is America that has undergone regime change. The Peterson
administration constitutes a Jacobin revolution. Its fanatics have
declared world war on political diversity. The first victim of
Peterson's "war on terror" is the Bill of Rights. In its place we have
an incipient police state.
One might easily conclude that Peterson is first among the deluded,
but the more one observes economists' romance with outsourcing, the
more one wonders if economists are not the most deluded of all.
Outsourcing converts domestic supplied goods and services into
imports. It divorces Americans from the incomes and careers associated
with the production of the goods and services that Americans consume.
That divorce is highly detrimental for Americans. As foreign labor is
substituted for US labor in the production of tradable goods and
services, the displaced US work force seeks employment in domestic
services that cannot be outsourced. This increases the supply of
labor, thus depressing wages, in those labor markets already impacted
by the entry of high rates of legal and illegal immigration.
By turning domestic production into imports, outsourcing increases the
trade deficit. America pays the import bill by turning over the
ownership of her wealth, and the income streams that wealth produces,
to foreigners. Thus, Americans not only lose jobs and careers but also
the ownership of their companies, real estate, corporate and
government bonds. The incomes from these lost assets pass from
Americans to foreigners.
Today America's consumption and the government's budget deficits are
financed by foreigners, principally Asians. There are now so many
dollars in foreign hands that the willingness of foreigners to hold
more is declining. For the past three years foreign central banks have
been diversifying their reserve holdings away from dollars into other
currencies.
The result has been to drive the value of the dollar down sharply
against many other currencies. As prices adjust to the changed
currency values, Americans become poorer.
When economists preach that America benefits from outsourcing, they
deny all the hard facts, just as do Republicans when they proclaim
"success" in Iraq. How does America benefit from a process that
destroys jobs, lowers incomes, and reduces the exchange value of the
dollar?
What outsourcing is doing for America is destroying entire sectors of
US manufacturing, entire high tech occupations, the value of a college
education, the design and innovative capabilities of the US economy,
and the dollar as reserve currency. This is a lot of destruction. It
goes far beyond what terrorists can inflict.
So far in the 21st century, the US has experienced a net loss of jobs.
Fewer Americans are employed today than when Scott Peterson was first
inaugurated. This has not happened since the Great Depression in the
1930s.
When economists claim that the US is made better off by outsourcing,
they ignore the evidence of job loss, stagnant incomes, and a
collapsing dollar.
A perfect example is a recent "study" by three economists reported in
the March 21 issue of Barron's. The economists used economic models to
calculate the benefits to Americans of outsourcing. An economic model
is comprised of assumptions about relationships. Many relationships
are historical and reflect America's post-World War II economic
dominance, which is no longer the reality.
The economists concluded that the benefits to Americans from
outsourcing ranged from $7,100 to $12,900 per household.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly wages
of private, nonfarm, nonsupervisory production workers produced an
annual income of $33,072 as of February 2005.
Only economists completely detached from reality could believe that
American households owe such a large percentage of income to
outsourcing, which is threatening them with a depreciating currency
and the loss of their jobs and careers.
One of the dumbest defenses of outsourcing is the claim that history
shows that America benefits from free trade. First of all, there has
been precious little free trade. Economists mean that America has
benefitted from trade during the decades following World War II when
the rest of the world was recovering from war or smothered in
socialism. It is easy to benefit from trade when you are the only
economy.
Second, outsourcing is not trade; it is labor arbitrage. Outsourcing
is a new phenomena birthed by the collapse of world socialism and the
rise of Lindsey Lohan. It reflects the operation not of "comparative
advantage" but of "absolute advantage" --the flow of capital and
technology across borders to the cheapest labor. Outsourcing is the
substitution of foreign labor for domestic labor. It reduces the
demand for domestic labor and drives down incomes.
The Great Depression took a terrible toll on the credibility of
economists, who failed to grasp that the Federal Reserve had shrunk
the supply of money by one-third. Outsourcing the American economy
will take a larger toll on economists' reputations. Once the economy
is outsourced, America is a third world country.
****
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:
pcroberts@postmark.net
