More
Lies From The Corrupt Elite
Don’t
believe them
By
Paul Craig Roberts
July
23, 2018 "Information
Clearing House"
- For two decades the offshoring
of American jobs to Asia and Mexico has
destroyed the careers and incomes of tens of
millions of US citizens, the pension tax base
for state and local governments, the federal tax
base for Social Security and Medicare, and the
opportunity society that once characterized the
United States of America.
The
rise in corporate profits that resulted from
substituting foreign labor for American labor
rewarded corporate executives and boards, hedge
funds, large shareholders, and Wall Street with
profits at the expense of the American
population and the US economy.
The low
rates of economic growth claimed since the
alleged recovery from the 2008 financial crisis
that resulted from financial deregulation, a
huge mistake made by politicians in service to
capitalist greed, is based entirely on
under-measuring inflation. Allegedly, Americans
have suffered no inflation for a decade, but
anyone who buys anything knows that that is a
lie. What jobs offshoring did is to destroy the
growth in productivity based US consumer
purchasing power that drove the US economy. In
short, the short-sighted executives, boards, and
Wall Street have impaired aggregate demand in
the US.
The
corrupt Federal Reserve under the incompetent
Alan Greenspan ramped up consumer debt to take
the place of the missing growth in consumer
income. This works until consumers cannot carry
any more debt. The subsequent Federal Reserve
chairmen have kept the house of cards standing
by pumping trillions of dollars into the prices
of financial assets.
In my
day such inappropriate Federal Reserve behavior
would likely have been considered a felony. The
Federal Reserve chairmen would possibly have
been arrested and put on trial. In the least
they would have been forced to resign for
bailing out five banks at the expense of the US
population.
As
nothing was done, today we have financial asset
prices based on money printing by the Federal
Reserve and its accomplices—the Japanese central
bank, the EU central bank, and the Bank of
England. The financial criminality is worldwide.
As bad
as the situation is, it is about to get worse.
The same self-serving elites who told the
insouciant American people that jobs offshoring
would create more and better jobs for Americans
are now telling them the same thing about
robotics.
The
accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, has
been hired by someone to put out a “study” that
robots will create more new jobs for displaced
Americans then they will destroy. This lie will
be repeated endlessly by the neoliberal
economists and financial media, just as they
repeaded endlessly that jobs offshoring would do
the same.
Having
lost the manufacturing and professional skill
jobs such as software engineering, robotics
attacks the domestic service non-tradable jobs
that could not be offshored, although some of
them, such as nursing, could be filled by
bringing in nurses on work visas under the false
claim that there was a shortage of American
nurses. Domestic service jobs have been
approximately 90% or more of the new jobs for as
long as I have reported on the jobs statistics,
which is many years. Now, Americans are going to
lose many domestic service jobs to robots.
Artificial intelligence is not necessary for
robots to be programmed to do the domestic
service jobs that are now the bulk of US
employment. Moreover, the current level of
robotics imposes the cost of doing business on
the customer. If you doubt that, consider your
experience the last time you tried to contact a
service provider.
People
are being made irrelevant. Before long, they
won’t even know how to drive a car, because
self-driving cars will take that function also
away from them. The insouciant humans will sit
there in the car being brainwashed by the
propaganda from their video screens. They will
cease to experience a human existence, and,
thereby, will become disposable.
Other
than disposing of them, how else do you get rid
of millions of peoples who have no jobs to
support them, peoples whose support are likely
to be regarded as a dead-weight loss on the
profits of the rich?
Robotics cannot possibly work for a humane
society unless the means of production are
socialized. Unfortunately, Western peoples are
so brainwashed and insouciant that they are
incapable of revolution.
Do you
want to be erased? That is what American
Capitalism is doing to you.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was
columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News
Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns
have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts'
latest books are
The Failure of Laissez Faire
Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West,
How America Was Lost,
and
The Neoconservative Threat to
World Order.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
