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My Epiphany 
 
BY: Paul Craig Roberts - 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._ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076152553X/counterpunchmaga)  
 

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.
I appreciate the friendly sentiment, but there is a great  deal of 
misconception in the question.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One certainty prevails. Bush is committing America to a  path of violence and 
coercion, and he is getting away with  it.
 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._ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076152553X/counterpunchmaga)  

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