Free Republic

The U.S. economy continues its slow death before our eyes, but economists, policymakers and most of the public are blind to the tottering fabled land of opportunity. In August, jobs in goods-producing industries declined by 64,000. The U.S. economy lost 4,000 jobs overall. The private sector created a mere 24,000 jobs, all of which could be attributed to the 24,100 new jobs for waitresses and bartenders, and the government sector lost 28,000 jobs. In the 21st century, the U.S. economy has ceased to create jobs in export industries and in industries that compete with imports. U.S. job growth has...

White House preparing to stage new September 11 - Reagan official 13:58 | 20/ 07/ 2007 WASHINGTON, July 20 (RIA Novosti) - A former Reagan official has issued a public warning that the Bush administration is preparing to orchestrate a staged terrorist attack in the United States, transform the country into a dictatorship and launch a war with Iran within a year. Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, blasted Thursday a new Executive Order, released July 17, allowing the White House to seize the assets of anyone who interferes with its Iraq policies and giving the...

In her historical mystery, "The Daughter of Time," Josephine Tey (a pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh) has Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, while confined to his hospital bed, solve the 15th century murder of the two York princes in the Tower of London. The princes were murdered by Henry VII, and the crime was blamed on Richard III in order to justify the upstart Tudor's violent seizure of the English throne. Tey makes the point that if a 20th century mystery writer can detect the truth about a 15th century murder, historians have no excuse to persist in writing in...

It only took six years for Americans to comprehend George Bush and the Republican Party and to realize that the Republicans were not leading America in any promising directions. Exit polls and interviews with voters across the country by CNN political analyst Bill Schneider show that the November 2006 election was a vote against both Bush and the war in Iraq. Schneider reports that voters did not even know the name of the Democrats for whom they voted. Voters said: "I am going to vote Democrat because I don't like Bush, I don't like the war. I want to make...

Last July, in response to Bush the Evil's enabling of Israel's gratuitous slaughter of thousands of Lebanese civilians and destruction of the country's infrastructure, I wrote about "the shame of being an American." With the ongoing slaughter of our troops and Iraqi civilians in Bush's war in Iraq, it is time to revisit that theme. As the Iraqi civil war (euphemistically termed "sectarian violence") intensifies, both U.S. and Iraqi casualties have sharply increased. Thirty-five U.S. troops have been killed in the first week of December. Iraqis are dying at each other's hands at about 100 per day, with many more...

Compared to current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's former President Muhammad Khatami is regarded in Western foreign affairs circles as a moderate. When Khatami visited the United States in September, he called on the America and Iran to stop verbally assaulting each other in the interest of dialogue that could build trust and eliminate the frictions between the two countries. Khatami said that the precondition for dialogue was "to eliminate the language of threat." In an attempt to "resolve conflicts by talking, rather than by aggression," the venerable Scottish University of St. Andrews invited Khatami to the United Kingdom for...

During my professional lifetime, liberals and the left wing have focused on failures and misdeeds of the private sector, while libertarians and conservatives have focused on the failures and misdeeds of the public sector or government. It turns out that both sides are right. The Enron case and the other accounting scandals of this new century are testimony to misdeeds driven by private sector greed, just as the unjustifiable war in Iraq is testimony to the abusive behavior of government. Justice demands that we be always on guard against a prosecutor's case. However, the devastation wrought by fraud committed by...

When does "collateral damage" so dwarf combatant deaths that war becomes genocide? Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq has cost 655,000 Iraqis their lives. That is the conclusion of a study financed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies and conducted by physicians under the direction of Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists. These are deaths over and above the pre-invasion mortality rate. Bush's illegal invasion raised Iraq's mortality rate from 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people per year to 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The study is published by the distinguished British medical journal The Lancet and is...

In one month, we will know if Americans understand the danger of the Bush administration's fanatical preoccupation with terrorism combined with one-party control of the executive and legislative branches. If voters let pass the opportunity in the November election to take Congress out of Republican hands, America will experience a more rapid descent into a police state. The Bush administration's response to 9-11, an event about which we have incomplete and unreliable information, has been to trample important civil liberties such as habeas corpus, the attorney-client privilege, privacy, due process and prohibition against self-incrimination. Today, "detainees" incarcerated by U.S. government...

A number of experts have concluded that despite the Bush administration's desire to attack Iran, the aggression would be too rash and the consequences too dire even for the irrational Bush administration. Military experts point out that at a time when generals are calling for more troops for Afghanistan and Iraq, it would be ill-advised for Bush to add Iran to the war theater. Experts note that Iran is well armed with missiles capable of attacking U.S. ships and oil facilities throughout the Middle East. Then, Iran can direct its Shiite allies in Iraq to assault U.S. troops there and...

I was in China when a July Harris Poll reported that 50 percent of Americans still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when Bush invaded that country and that 64 percent of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links with al-Qaida. The Chinese leaders and intellectuals with whom I was meeting were incredulous. How could a majority of the population in an allegedly free country with an allegedly free press be so totally misinformed? The only answer I could give the Chinese is that Americans would have been the perfect population for Mao and the Gang...

Readers want to know why I have not reported on the payroll jobs statistics for the past two months. Does this mean, they ask, that the situation has turned around and that the U.S. economy is again creating jobs in export and import-competitive sectors? Alas, no. I did not write about the past two payroll jobs data reports because it is the same distressing story that other readers say they are bored with hearing. The July report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics lists 113,000 new jobs, all of which are in services. "Leisure and hospitality" accounted for 42,000 jobs,...

Gentle reader, do you know that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon? Israel has ordered all the villagers to clear out. Israel then destroys their homes and murders the fleeing villagers. That way there is no one to come back and nothing to which to return, making it easier for Israel to grab the territory, just as Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians. Do you know that one-third of the Lebanese civilians murdered by Israel’s attacks on civilian residential districts are children? That is the report from Jan Egeland, the emergency relief coordinator for the...

Finding itself in Republican sights and with no Democratic power center to offer protection, National Public Radio is turning into an upscale version of Fox "News." Nevertheless, information still gets out if the listener is sufficiently attentive. On July 5, NPR's "All Things Considered" interviewed two warmongers for their views on the North Korean missile test. One was Ashton Carter, a Clinton administration assistant secretary of defense, now at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The other was Ambassador Christopher Hill, an assistant secretary of state in the Bush regime. The Clinton DoD assistant secretary is coauthor of a...

The old adage, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" does not apply to Americans, who have shown that they can be endlessly fooled. Neoconservatives deceived Americans into an illegal attack and debilitating war in Iraq. American neoconservatives are closely allied with Israel's Likud Party. In the past, some neocons lost their security clearances because of "mishandling" of classified information. According to Insight Magazine (online version, June 26, 2006), "the Pentagon has banned security clearance to Americans with relatives in Israel. Government sources and attorneys said the Pentagon has sought and succeeded in removing security...

John Bolton, a notorious neocon warmonger who could not be confirmed as America's ambassador to the United Nations by even the compliant and corrupt U.S. Senate, got the job as a recess appointment. He is using the platform to push America into war with Iran. Bolton told the Financial Times on June 9 that the Bush regime has no intention of reaching an agreement with Iran. Time is running out for diplomacy, Bolton said. Iran has a short time remaining in which it can give up its right under the nonproliferation treaty to enrich uranium for nuclear energy or be...

June 08, 2006 War Criminal Nation By Paul Craig Roberts Faced with mounting civilian carnage, both from war crimes committed by demoralized and broken US troops and from the raging civil war unleashed by Bush’s ill-fated illegal invasion of Iraq, the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee has decided to waste another $50 billion to continue the lost war for five more months. Our elected "representatives" are so in thrall to the powerful military- industrial complex that no amount of American shame, pariah status and military defeat can shut off the flow of taxpayers’ funds to the merchants of death. Bush’s wars...

The Death of U.S. Jobs Paul Craig Roberts Wednesday, June 7, 2006 The May payroll jobs report released June 2 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms the jobs pattern for the 21st century U.S. economy: Employment growth is limited to domestic services. In May, the economy created only 67,000 private sector jobs. Job estimates for the previous two months were reduced by 37,000. The new jobs are as follows: Professional and business services, 27,000; education and health services, 41,000; waitresses and bartenders, 10,000. Manufacturing lost 14,000 jobs. Total hours worked in the private sector declined in May. Manufacturing hours...

Evil in Our Government Paul Craig Roberts Tuesday, May 30, 2006 Is the Bush regime a state sponsor of terrorism? A powerful case can be made that it is. In the past three years, the Bush regime has murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and an unknown number of Afghan ones. U.S. Marines, members of our finest and proudest military force, are under criminal investigation for breaking into Iraqi homes and murdering entire families. In an unprecedented event, Gen. Michael Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant, has found it necessary to fly to Iraq to tell our best-trained troops to...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll jobs report released May 5 says the economy created 131,000 private sector jobs in April. Construction added 10,000 jobs; natural resources, mining and logging added 8,000 jobs; and manufacturing added 19,000. Despite this unusual gain, the economy has 10,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than a year ago. Most of the April job gain -- 72 percent -- is in domestic services, with education and health services (primarily health care and social assistance) and waitresses and bartenders accounting for 55,000 jobs, or 42 percent of the total job gain. Financial activities added 26,000 jobs, and professional...