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10-03-04, 09:45 AM | #1 | |
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Pilger on the US and terrorism
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10-03-04, 11:33 AM | #2 |
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Pilger is a tool, applauding and encouraging the death of your own countrymen is just sad and another example of the anti-war losers disconnection with reality or common sense.
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10-03-04, 12:27 PM | #3 |
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Pilger misses Saddam Hear that Iraqis? Your future depends not on the coalition rebuilding your infrastructure, or the signing of your new constitution, but rather on psychos like Pilger, Wilkie and other peace-creeps lending their support to the people who are setting off car bombs in your streets. EDIT---Andrew Wilkie said, "I want to back up the people who've spoken of the need to keep talking, to keep speaking out, to keep getting out on the streets, to really support the 20 March rally. "The people of Iraq really do need us to do this for them because they just can't 'move on' from this."
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11-03-04, 12:07 PM | #4 |
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TONY JONES: Well, the US is not just labouring under a record trade deficit, there are warnings tonight that its budget deficit could precipitate a Latin American style financial crisis.
Influential economist Paul Krugman says the US will face a severe downturn before the end of the decade unless the $500 billion fiscal debt is rectified. In his latest book, The Great Unravelling, the Princeton University economist is calling on President Bush to abandon his program of trillion dollar tax cuts, otherwise, he claims, there may not be enough funds to pay for the waves of baby boomers who will soon retire. I spoke to Paul Krugman a short time ago. TONY JONES: Paul Krugman, history proved your predictions right over the Asian financial crisis. You're now warning essentially that the engine of the world economy, the United States itself, is heading for a South American style financial crisis. What's the evidence for that? PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN, PRINCETON ECONOMIST: Well, basically we have a world-class budget deficit not just as in absolute terms of course - it's the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world - but it's a budget deficit that as a share of GDP is right up there. It's comparable to the worst we've ever seen in this country. It's biggest than Argentina in 2001. Which is not cyclical, there's only a little bit that's because the economy is depressed. Mostly it's because, fundamentally, the Government isn't taking in enough money to pay for the programs and we have no strategy of dealing with it. So, if you take a look, the only thing that sustains the US right now is the fact that people say, "Well America's a mature, advanced country and mature, advanced countries always, you know, get their financial house in order," but there's not a hint that that's on the political horizon, so I think we're looking for a collapse of confidence some time in the not-too-distant future. TONY JONES: When you say the not-too-distant future, what does that mean? We know there may be a crisis in paying, for example, in social security... PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: What I envision is that at some point, we have about 10 years now until the baby boomers hit the United States. The US even more than other advanced countries has a welfare state that's primarily a welfare state for retirees. We have the huge bulge in the population that starts to collect benefits and earn the next decade. If there isn't a clear path towards fiscal sanity well before that, then I think the financial markets are going to say, "Well, gee, where is this going?" I think, where in that 10 years the crunch comes, I don't know. I think there's a real possibility that next year or one or two years from now, when they see that actually the same irresponsible tax cuts as the solution to everything continue, we might have a crisis that soon but more likely towards the end of the decade. TONY JONES: Let me ask you this - just in the short-term, given today's policy settings and the ones that are going to prevail, we assume, through the election period, what's likely to happen to interest rates? PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: Right now, long-term interest rates, short-term interest rates, I think, are going to stay where there are, which is not far above zero, right through the election and probably beyond because that's directly under the control of the Federal Reserve. The economy is weak for the time being. Job creation is essentially non-existent. Long-term interest rates which should reflect all these things are actually quite low right now and it's an interesting thing when you try to talk to people in the bond market, why, you ask, doesn't the deficit worry you? Don't you wonder that there's going to be a financing crunch? And they say: "Well, we believe that next year Bush or whoever is in the White House is going to get responsible." And you ask them: "What evidence do you have for that?" And they say: "Well, I don't know but it's always happened before." So right now again, the bond market is reflecting the credit built up in previous responsible governments. TONY JONES: Actually the bond market's quite interesting because for the present moment there seems to be a huge influence on the US economy from the Asian central banks. Is that risky? PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: Well sure. Although, I'm not sure that it's particularly riskier than a lot of other things. But yeah, we have this, I didn't say this, but we've got twin deficits. We've got a huge budget deficit and an equally large current account deficit. And if you ask, "How are we financing the current account deficit?", well that's a story. A few years ago it was foreigners investing in the United States. It was Daimler buying Chrysler, it was people investing in the strength of the US economy. These days it's Asian central banks buying up US Government debt because they're trying to keep their currencies weak against the dollar and this can't go on forever. TONY JONES: Your detractors - and there are quite a few of them on the Republican side of the equation - they're accusing you of scare mongering? PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: The first thing to say is to look at what some of those same people were saying in the middle of the Clinton years when the deficit was substantially smaller as a proportion of GDP and they were carrying on about what a bad thing it was. The other thing is the comparison. The only time post war that the United States has had anything like these deficits is the middle Reagan years and that was with unemployment close to 10 per cent. A lot of that was a cyclical thing which would go away when the economy recovered. Also the baby boomers were 20 years younger than they are today. If you look at the actual fiscal situation, it's much, much worse than it was even at its worst during the Reagan years. One way to say this is we have social security which is a retirement program which viewed on its own is running a surplus. If you take that out of the budget then we're running at a deficit of more than 6 per cent of GDP and that is unprecedented. TONY JONES: One of your fiercest critics, Donald Luskin, seems to fear you because of your very credibility and your plausibility. As he puts it, you're the most "dangerous liberal commentator in the United States". He says he once admired you but now he actually runs a website called the Krugman Truth Squad? PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: Yeah. Well, look this is good. Something I used - let them hate as long as they fear. I think the point is, let me quote Harry Truman: "I give them the truth and they think it's hell." I don't think I've been saying anything that isn't quite straight forward. It's just arithmetic but it's been stuff that a lot of, very few journalists have been willing or able to say. TONY JONES: It's a bit more than arithmetic though, isn't it? Would you agree with the proposition that you're slowly transforming yourself, in a way, from a pure economist into also something of a political activist? PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: Well, yeah, I mean, it's not what I intended. But I came in writing as a journalist, writing occasional columns in the 90s, mostly about economical fears with a political tinge. I came to the New York Times intending to do pretty much the same thing. But then it became clear very early on that the President of the United States was irresponsible and dishonest on matters economic and it turned out that what I learned there was true of other kind of policies as well. So, I was forced, if you like, just by the arithmetic of understanding how the budget works into a much broader critique of this really kind of scary thing that's happening to my country. TONY JONES: Let's look a little bit at that broader critique that you outline in The Great Unravelling, your new book. You claim that President Bush is part of the radical right and that America has become a revolutionary power. How did you come to those conclusions? PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: If you look at the policies and in a variety of areas, they're not within the range of normal partisan divides. That is, Republicans always want lower taxes and Democrats a bigger state. There are always disagreements about how strong environmental policies should be, but we're really way outside that now. We're talking about repeated tax cuts in the face of enormous deficits and in the face of war. Never done that before. We're talking about a shift towards unilateralist foreign policy. We've just gone to war without significant allies other than the UK to destroy weapons that didn't exist. This is something that's kind of unique. We're seeing a radical breakdown of the separation of church and state in a lot of policy issues. This is something that's really outside normal politics and then if you just look at the political history, where do these people come from - you discover that there is a network of think tanks, organisations, funding sources, radical activists - which really, it's more than just an ordinary swing of the political pendulum. If you like, the vast right-wing conspiracy isn't a theory, it's quite clearly visible to anyone who takes a little care to do his home work. TONY JONES: One of those think tanks, of course, is the Heritage Foundation which was set up in a way to boost a series of ideological positions on the economy, on the social front and is now, you say, virtually running, to some degree, a lot of economic policy and one of the things they say, for example, is that social security and Medicare are violations of basic principals? PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: That's right. Heritage is central. Heritage is in the middle of everything. Almost every - if you like, the WAPs, the policy types such as they are, as opposed to the politicos - but the WAPs in this administration are almost all connected with Heritage or American Enterprise Institute but one or both of those. And Heritage very clearly in its letters to fund raisers reminds them that our goal is to get rid of these programs, that we need to get rid of the legacy of the new deal on the great society and that means social security and Medicare. TONY JONES: Now here's another quote from your book: "A revolutionary power does not accept the legitimacy of the state." PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: There's a very hardline view. There was actually a kind of revealing moment recently - Bush gave an interview, was more or less dragooned into an interview on Meet The Press and the interviewer said: "Well, what if you lose the election?" And he said: "I'm not going to lose the election." And the interviewer said: "But what if you do lose?" He said: "I'm not going lose the election." The possibility that they just would not regard it as a legitimate thing if someone else were to take power. Quite a few people as part of the Republican movement have said that God chose Bush to be President. I don't know whether they would accept the idea that mere mortal men should choose for him not to be President for another four years. TONY JONES: You also link the personal fortunes of George Bush and Dick Cheney to what you called the epidemic of corporate malfeasance. Are you suggesting that, in a way, their business ethics somehow leaked out into the rest of the corporate world or that they're just representative of it? PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: Oh no, they're representative of it. Let's be clear. Most of the explosion of corporate malfeasance really took place during the 90s. It took place with Clinton in the White House, which is not to say that he caused it. In fact, you could say a lot of it happened despite some mild efforts on the part of Clinton to stop it. But the point is that you ask when Bush says, "I want to reform corporations," is he credible? Well, you have to look back and say, "Gee his own personal fortune arose, in large part, through deals that look an awful like Enron." TONY JONES: Nor do you spare Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Fed Reserve. I always thought under the Clinton years or during the Clinton years he was the steady hand on the tiller. You seem to refer to him these days as a partisan hack? PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: Well, here's a special case. I mean, the governor of the central bank has a terribly important job, enormous responsibility and power. He's not an elected official. This is an agreement that we've all reached - that this is a good thing to do because monetary policy is too easily politicised. Best to have it in a technocrat. In his role as a technocrat Greenspan has done a good job, not as stellar a job as his admirers will tell you but he's done a very good job. There's an obligation that goes with this which is to stand above and outside the political fray. Greenspan did that during the 90s. But no sooner was Bush in office than Greenspan threw his weight behind tax cuts. He actually went to Congress and argued that we need tax cuts because otherwise we're going to run excessively large budget surpluses and pay down our debt too quickly. Which he shouldn't have done in the first place. This was violating the role. Then, of course, when it turned out to be completely wrong. Instead we've plunged from surpluses into huge deficits, he has now said, "Well, I don't think we should rescind the tax cut, instead we need to talk about cutting social security benefits." That's injecting himself into politics in a very partisan fashion. TONY JONES: You essentially claiming the Fed is no longer independent? PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: Well Mr Greenspan is acting as a partisan figure. He is acting as somebody who is doing whatever he can to support the agenda of this right-wing movement that is now running a large part of the Government. I think that the star at the Fed is as good as ever. My belief is that if you were to promote one of the other governors to chairman of the Fed we would be back to business as we've had it before. I don't think everybody has been corrupted but I do think that Mr Greenspan has gone very far - basically has abused in his position, in a way, that's no longer recoverable. TONY JONES: We will have to leave it there. Paul Krugman, we thank you very much for taking the time to come and join us tonight. PROFESSOR PAUL KRUGMAN: Well, thank you. another good interview this week.. |
11-03-04, 06:18 PM | #5 |
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wow multi...pilger and krugman in the same thread. what a treat! who's next..chomsky? molly ivins?
geez..why don't you just post the bush-haters handbook?
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12-03-04, 12:54 AM | #6 |
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fuck off..
there are millions that hate bush for what he has turned the modern world into... dont whine on about terrorisim u retards..its the US and british and the israelis that have provoked it from the onset.. the islamic terrorist is supplied and trained and inspired by the west...and you expect everyone just to take on board the blind judgement that the west and democracy is the victim its a mind fuck thats is just bullshit and MOST people can see right through it.. to label people bush haters and terrorist supporters is just weak rhetoric...without very much substance or thought.. the right are so up them selves they just think everyone is stupid..and will fall for their broken record style of slandering others... |
12-03-04, 01:03 AM | #7 | ||
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Quote:
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12-03-04, 01:28 AM | #8 |
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lame..
and that waste of a post proves what?
(ok hates a prety strong emotion..i guess i mean disapprove) people should be proud disapprove of him and his tactics..ffs he has done the main damage not the terrorists.. but you the media and the other brainwashed...all cry foul at this idea.. its all about programming and desensitizing.. some like to buy it hook line and sinker.. this war on terrorisim only causes more terrorisim? ofcourse it does..its exactly what its designed to do... (oh look theres another car with islamic paraphenalia found near the seen of more carnage..) anyway thats another story.. |
12-03-04, 02:23 AM | #9 | ||
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Re: lame..
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But Spanish Interior Minister Angel Acebes said authorities were investigating a van found in the town of Alcala de Henares, outside Madrid, with at least seven detonators and an Arabic tape with Koranic teachings. Quote:
thats the problem America spells competition, join us in our blind ambition Get yourself a brand new motor car Someday soon we'll stop to ponder what on Earth's this spell we're under We made the grade and still we wonder who the hell we are... |
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12-03-04, 05:41 AM | #10 | |
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i said it before and i'll say it again, the extreme left is all in a uproar because they realize America is more like Bush than it is like them. you dolts are a minority, you just live in an echo chamber that makes you think you're not (see Howard Dean's "certain nomination" for more proof). |
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12-03-04, 10:42 AM | #11 | ||
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Re: lame..
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in one sentence you say "to label people bush haters and terrorist supporters is just weak rhetoric...without very much substance or thought." in another sentence you say "fuck off.. there are millions that hate bush for what he has turned the modern world into" by that, you just labled "millions" of people as bush-haters. so how can you see labeling people bush-haters as "weak rhetoric, without very much substance or thought" when that's exactly what you're doing? Quote:
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12-03-04, 02:06 PM | #12 |
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lol..
um ..but you started the bush haters stuff i was just responding your comment so you might understand..in the terms that you were using.. obviously went too far over your head... span you might be thinking we are minority...but everyday comments coming from people like you in the right help serve to push people just that little more to the left.. you really dont think people are smart enough to see terrorisim as the resistance efforts of the 3rd world...and that have been pushed by the west for over 150 years into this position .. this is a resistance that will carry on for generations...and all this war on terror bullshit will only help to etch it into the hearts and minds of those groups that are the most oppressed..its a war that both sides know can never be won.. and thats why its becoming an important tool for the propagandists in the the west that only represent the rich and the corporations..and the stock exchange..ect terrorisim will go to new levels with probably dirty bombs and bioweapons.. and then you will say ..good thing bush started that war on terrorisim when he did..because he stopped this from happening earlier.. but hopefully most will see by that time he had started similar type of situation to vietnam..unable backout and unable to be driven out.. but this time all of the western world would be the battlefield driven by some flimsy idea that its ok.. they are somehow reaping revenge for 911..or some sort of backward logic to that effect...(because anyone can see its not designed to actually STOP terrorisim) israel and the US(britan australia ..et al) are rich high-tech countries ..taking the moral high ground to have their way with the poor( they never attack the wealthy) islamics in the 3rd world...where they have bred and nurtured the politcal climate in the area for the last 50 years to serve their agenda of occupation .. its not just a handful of people that see this..many saw it all quite clearly and objected to the way bush was BULLSHITTING everyone so he could create this mess that is currently iraq.. i wont even mention afganistan.. (it was a ratings grabber when it started ..but its gone a little stale..) world has lost sadam and the taliban..?did i hear you say? yes and force is the only way to rid the the world of these people that we were all lead to believe to be the worst in the world..but why not fix some place in africa too ? plenty of real bad shit going down there for the last 30 years..(most of it also fueled by the west) because these 2 were yet another fuckup created by the US that had got out of hand..enough repeditive media over and over about it and never mention the part about how they were only in power because of the US.. after the cold war there was a tendancy to favor the dismantling of the various western armies...much to the horror of the political right..at that time there was this actor stooge and his vice-prez to craftily help along the flegling terrorist groups of the time..anyway the oppurtunity for that to ever even look like happening again is forever gone with the events post 2001.. thats if there really ever was 2 paths to go down.. |
12-03-04, 08:24 PM | #13 | |
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I guess that means if any fanatic (religious or otherwise) wants anything, all they have to do is threaten to blow up something and we should give them what they want. Don't count on that ever happening. I guess we did start it. We (the United States) formed a government based on liberty and freedom. A lot of blood was spilled in that process. Blood continues to be the price for maintaining those ideals. Terrorists will NEVER win. Iraqi resistance defeating the coalition military is about as likely as finding a gnat fart in a level 5 tornado.
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13-03-04, 03:11 AM | #14 |
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i dont believe that terrorisim can be ignored...
i also think that many the centuries of violent solutions for just about anything in the middle east and in the west...is really whats to blame for it.. looking at it that way only makes me think its a war between the modern culture of violence V's the ancient culture of violence except the modern one has all these powerful shiny toys to use against the other.. in the same fucked up way that medicine only deals with the condition caused by the dis-ease...(with the help of more fine programming by the media) this coalition seems to think that the surgical strikes and the occupation of their anti-biotic foot soldiers will get rid of terrorisim.. (like with antibiotics..this is creating a super-strain of the disease) its like when p2p gets attacked it only serves to strengthen it and drive it further underground...the current approach to terrorisim will do the same.. do i have a better one..? no the spanish tragedy is a shocking waste of life..my condolences go to all the spanish people of the world..and especialy to the people that have lost love ones.. please dont get me wrong here but as i have said before. i am all for preventing terrorisim..i would even almost advocate death penalty for people caught trying it..(its this martyr thing that bothers me..)..but throwing more money at keeping the public safe in large western cities and other potential targets and less money at the military overseas wich i can only see will help to create a stronger more advanced form of terrorisim for our future generations to deal with...is not much to offer but its about all i can come up with at the moment.. |
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