Paul Craig Roberts and James Petras: Is US empire collapsing?

Broadcast Thursday 10/17/13 10-11 a.m. Central (1500 GMT) on NoLiesRadio.org, archived here. Note: TruthJihad.com subscribers can listen to shows on-demand before they are broadcast - and also get free downloads! When you see the show posted here, that means it is already available to subscribers. If you are a subscriber, just log in to the members area of TruthJihad.com and go to the "Private Blog" to get early access to the shows.

Guests: Paul Craig Roberts and James Petras.

Paul Craig Roberts is a leading political economist who has taught at Stanford, Georgetown, and other universities.

In this interview, Dr. Roberts says America's underlying economic crisis behind the shutdown debacle, on top of Obama's failure to have his way with Syria, signals a collapse of the American empire. Future historians, he suggests, will say that this moment - the autumn of 2013 - was when it happened. The blame for the implosion of America (and the West) into a stinking morass of lies, corruption, and looting, he adds, falls largely on the shoulders of the neoconservatives - mendacious Israel-firsters whose utter amorality and unhinged extremism pushed the US over the cliff.

Considered by some "the father of Reaganomics" for helping develop supply-side approaches when he was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Dr. Roberts has been a regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and other publications. He has been inducted into the French Legion of Honor, among many other honors and awards, for his historic contributions to political economics. His new book is The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West.

James Petras, like Paul Craig Roberts, is at the top of his academic field - in this case, sociology. And like Roberts, Petras agrees that the US empire has fallen on hard times:

"Obama’s rhetorical exercise in ‘peace talk’ at the United Nations General Assembly impressed few delegations and even fewer Americans: Far more eloquent are his five years of wars, military interventions, cyber-spying, drone murders, military coups and the merciless prosecution of patriotic truth tellers."  (-"Fifteen Minutes an American President")

And like Paul Craig Roberts, James Petras agrees that the neocons (and the rest of the Zionist Power Configuration) have been a key factor in America's decline.

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University. He is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals. He is the author of many books including the groundbreaking Power of Israel in the United States and the new Imperialism and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. A System in Crisis.





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