Interview: Paul Craig Roberts

An objective look at U.S. foreign policy

John Rachel

Dissident Voice | September 01, 2022

Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Paul Craig Roberts for his current thoughts.

Paul Craig Roberts is a widely renowned political analyst.  He was Ass. Secretary for Economic Policy under President Ronald Reagan, associate editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Ser vice.  His awe-inspiring insights, astute analysis, and developing views can be accessed at his Institute For Political Economy website.

We focus here on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time, specifically addressing the role of the U.S. in the tensions and its capacity to reduce them. We are looking for paradigm-shift ideas for improving the prospects for peace. His responses below are exactly as he provided.

Here is what Paul Craig Roberts had to say.

Creative Destruction

INTERVIEW 

An interview with Claudio Petruccioli

Claudio Petruccioli is an Italian politician who was president of the Italian national broadcast network RAI from 2005–2009.

Phenomenal World | February 04, 2021

Renato Birolli, Scythe on the farmyard, 1943.

Davide Ceccanti: What were your early ideological influences?

Claudio Petruccioli: I joined the Communist Party when I enrolled in university, in 1959. I didn’t belong to a leftist family, but it was a work- ing-class family. My grandfather was a worker, my father was a technician. The first in my family to attend university, I was born in a tradition of work but was drawn towards intellectual labor. If I think of the day in which I decided to be a communist, it was probably when I was fifteen and I went to the library in Umbria. I found a small book titled “Wage Labor and Capital” sitting on the table. They were lectures Marx had given to a worker’s club in London. I read the book in one sitting, and when I finished I felt like I had just understood precisely how the world works.

Empire, Socialism and November /w Leo Panitch

GEOPOLITICS 

 Socialist Project | December 20, 2020

https://socialism-in-the-time-of-corona.castos.com/episodes/e14-in-memoriam-leo-panitch-on-empire-socialism-and-november-1

Sanjiv Gupta interviewed Leo Panitch in early September 2020. They discussed two issues which Panitch has studied and written about for decades. First, whether the pandemic has fundamentally altered the geopolitical balance between the U.S. and other great powers, specifically China. And second, how socialists in the U.S. should approach the November elections. For Panitch, the two issues are intimately connected.

---

RIP Leo Panitch (1945 – 2020) was Professor Emeritus of Politics at York University in Toronto. He was co-editor of the Socialist Register and author of several books, most recently Searching for Socialism: The Project of the Labour New Left from Benn to Corbyn, co-authored with Colin Leys and published by Verso.

Sanjiv Gupta is the host of Socialism in the Time of Corona.

An Interview with Julia Bell

INTERVIEW ON BOOK

Fran Lock interviews Julia Bell

Culture Matters | October 28, 2020

Background

Julia Bell is a writer and Reader in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is the Course Director of the MA in Creative Writing. Her recent creative work includes poetry, lyric essays and short stories published in the Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, The White Review, Mal Journal, Comma Press, and recorded for the BBC. She is the author of three novels with Macmillan in the UK (Simon & Schuster in the US) and is co-editor of the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook (Macmillan) updated and re-issued in 2019.

She is interested in the intersection between the personal and the political, and believes that writing well takes courage, patience, attention and commitment. Radical Attention is Julia’s latest book and is available from Peninsula Press here.

How I Became A Revolutionary And Internationalist: Andre Vltchek

REMEMBRANCE

Binu Mathew, Editor of Countercurrents.org interviews Andre Vltchek

Countercurrents | December 04, 2018

how you came to be who you are? Can you tell us about your formative years?

AV: Formative years… There were many of them, and actually, I feel that I am still evolving, until now. People always do, I believe and hope.

I was born in the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, in an unbelievably beautiful city of Leningrad, built by insane Peter the Great and by a few no less insane Italian and French architects, on the shores of wide and powerful river Neva, right near the mosquito-infested swamps.

If Humanity is to Have Any Future At All

INTERVIEW 

John Bellamy Foster Interviewed by Ömur Şahin Keyif for BirGün (Istanbul)

MR Online | September 05, 2020

ÖŞK: The U.S. government is escalating the tension with China with the sanctions, consulate closures, harsher and more reckless rhetoric after the pandemic… According to a Pew Research Center poll, 73 percent of U.S. people say they have an unfavorable view of the country. Anti-China rhetoric is an election strategy for Republicans. Republicans are not alone in this. Democrats are racing with Republicans with their anti-China sentiment, blaming Trump for not being hard enough on China. Considering China’s success on innovation and improvement of the new technologies like 5G and its acceptance by West, what will be the future results of anti-China policies both inside and outside of the U.S.? There are reports suggesting that U.S. officials try to push the relations towards a point of ‘no return’. Would that be an outcome?

Mercenaries, pandemic and riots in Venezuela: A grassroots perspective

by Federico Fuentes and Atenea Jiménez

Green Left | May 08, 2020

Incidents of looting have occurred in some small- and medium-sized towns, such as Upata, Bolivar state.

Venezuela is confronting COVID-19 amid foreign sanctions and mercenary incursions. Complicating matters further is the explosive combination of deep recession and a nationwide lockdown, which has triggered incidents of looting and riots.

Green Left’s Federico Fuentes spoke to National Network of Commune Activists spokesperson Atenea Jiménez to get a sense of what is happening in the country.

***

Could you begin by talking about how the government has dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic?

Everyone recognises that the government acted quickly to implement all-encompassing measures.

Interview with Bill Fletcher, WPFW, April 10, 2020

by Michael Goldfield

[THIS IS POSTED HERE FOR NON-PROFIT, NON-COMMERCIAL, EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE.]

We started planning before first COVID-19 case was reported: Pinarayi Vijayan, Chief Minister of Kerala, India

Down to Earth spoke to Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to understand his government’s modus operandi.

by Jayanta Basu

Down To Earth | April 17, 2020

When the first case of a person testing positive to the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was reported in Kerala on January 30, 2020 — most of India knew about the ensuing disease (COVID-19) vaguely as an outbreak somewhere in China.

Kerala, however, was alert to prevent any spread of Nipah (outbreak in 2018) — which also traced back to bats, has no cure / vaccine and killed the state’s citizens (18 of them). The state’s handling of the situation earned it global recognition, including a certificate from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Covid-19 is a sign of our fate if we do not take radical action: Interview of Michael D. Yates

by Farooque Chowdhury and Michael D. Yates

MR Online | April 12, 2020

In the backdrop of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, Michael D. Yates, decades-long union activist, director of Monthly Review Press and former Associate Editor of Monthly Review magazine, discusses condition of the working people and steps required. The interview of Professor Michael Yates, whose academic fields include labor economics and the relationship between capital and labor, was taken on March 28, 2020 by Farooque Chowdhury.

For a long time, you have been working with unions, as an organizer, educator, and negotiator. Your works on class and labor are significant. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the working people in countries, from Thailand, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh to Italy, Spain, United States, in countries in Africa, have been paying the the price teh most. Already unemployment and uncertainties are staring in the faces of millions of the working people. We’ve seen the unprecedented exodus of hundreds of thousands of the working people running away in hoards, jumbling like animals, from Mumbai and New Delhi, from Dhaka. They stuffed trains in Mumbai, as if the people were goods being transported. They embarked on a hundreds of kilometers journey by walking starting from New Delhi. Among them were children, thirsty, tired. Later, authorities provided buses to carry them to their rural homes in the eastern parts of the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. They were fleeing from hunger, not from the pandemic. You are well aware of the condition the U.S. working classes are going through. In late-March, a teenage boy who tested positive for COVID-19 died in Lancaster, California, after being denied service at an urgent care center because he did not have health insurance. The system appears like a disjointed machine coming to a sudden, crushing halt. How do you find the condition of the working classes in this pandemic situation, when capital’s first job is to slaughter the working people?