Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: I'm Afshin Ratansi. Welcome back to Going Underground, broadcasting all around the world from the UAE as US Israeli military aggression is felt around this region and the world. An economically beleaguered Britain has now entered the war in Yemen and Trump has ordered 10,000 more troops and a third aircraft carrier strike group, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which will arrive here in the gulf soon. Today is UN Day, marking 81 years since the so called UN Charter began to be repeatedly violated by the USA. Weaponized by NATO nations, it has been used against Russia for liberating the Donbass from neo Nazi proxy Kiev conscripts. The charter has been useless from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria to Iran, let alone Latin America. From Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba to Venezuela, millions killed, wounded and displaced with total impunity. And I haven't even mentioned Gaza. Today also marks 1929's Black Thursday. The Wall Street CR when a giant asset bubble burst over a hollowed out US Economy, catalyzing the Great Depression. This time any NATO nation Great Depression will parallel the creation of a new order, as seen at this week's Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tajikistan where Russia, China, India and Iran pledged solidarity. Joining me again from Florida is the former US Assistant Secretary of the treasury for economic policy under Ronald Reagan and former Associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Professor Paul Craig Roberts. Professor, thanks so much for coming back. Ongoing underground. Aside from all the uprisings in Western Europe, I got to say that 10 years ago, ongoing underground, you said Trump might mean better relations between the United States and Russia. What do you think now, given the United States is, you know, still supplying intelligence to kill Russians.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: I think that was his intention, but he overestimated the power of the presidency.
The United States military security complex is extremely powerful. It needs an enemy.
And of course, Russia continued in the tradition of the Soviet Union in the minds of the American people. And so it was the convenient enemy and the big one, the dangerous one. And he simply wasn't able to escape the power of the campaign contributions of an interest group such as the military security complex.
I think also he was trapped by the neoconservative dominance of American foreign policy, which emphasizes American world hegemony.
So getting rid of Russia fits that foreign policy.
It did not fit Trump's agenda. And of course there was no one he could appoint who would, who represented his agenda because the neo conservatives have had since the George W. Bush period a very firm hold on American foreign policy and therefore the agenda of American foreign policy. So that's what happened to Trump.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: He could have appointed you, you could have come out of retirement. I mean, is he a bad organizer in the sense that rather than choosing a former Treas official like yourself, he appointed people that would constantly undermine him? It's all right. Witkoff going to the, to Russia and saying he thinks Putin is a humanitarian, but underneath it, John Ratcliffe, Marco Rubio, all these figures are undermining him every step of the way.
[00:03:46] Speaker B: Well, see, he didn't know Washington.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: He didn't really know he'd already been president once. In fairness, Professor.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Well, he didn't know it then either. He undermined himself at that time with his appointments.
If you don't know, if you're an outsider and you don't understand the situation, you become easily captured.
And his advisors, the people he knew, they all represented the established interest groups, and so that's what happened to him.
[00:04:24] Speaker A: So what do you, it's common.
What do you, what do you think about NATO protege, the corrupt dictator of Ukraine, Zelensky? Do you think, as we see the demonstrations in Western Europe, right across Western Europe, whose populations are in clear distress, destroyed economically and so forth, do you think Zelenskyy is finished?
[00:04:52] Speaker B: I think he probably is, yes.
The, the last effort of the Europeans to round up some more money for him was not successful. They didn't come to an agreement to do that.
And two of the members of the EU said, if you try to do that, we will veto it.
So it looks like his time in the sun is over.
And also I think Putin is feeling more and more pressure from Russian nationalists, from the Russian military to bring this four and a half year old joke of a war to an end.
And so he has permitted recently stronger attacks that are the right kind in the sense of terminating Ukraine's ability to continue the conflict.
So between those two pressures, I think the Zelenskyy day is over.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: And so there was, of course, the diesel deal that across Western Europe is being criticized.
How hard do you think Trump had to fight for that?
And what happens now, given that Trump did succeed in getting that diesel deal through, despite all the pressures that you just told me about on him by the military industrial complex in the US which presumably did not want him to do the deal? I mean, your assumption would be someone like Marco Rubio was against the diesel deal, if he even knew about it before it was talked about?
[00:06:41] Speaker B: Well, we're yet to actually see this diesel deal in operation. We've heard some talk about it.
For Trump, what he's trying to do is to find some sources of supply to take the pressure off the energy prices due to the fact that Iran controls the Strait and the Houthis have cut off the Saudi pipeline that runs to the Red Sea. And so the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf area is very low, and Trump faces this election.
I read in the New York Times that there is now a gasoline service station in California on the coast, big surviving.
And the price of a gallon of gasoline is $10.
Well, if you are an American who commutes to work, you're in trouble.
So I think that's what the diesel deal is about.
Trump has finally understood that all these sanctions on Russia is hurting everyone but Russia.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: And just explain.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: So he's rolling forward.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: Just explain his former treasury official, because pro Zielinski fascists are saying, oh, it only provides nine days of diesel for the United States or whatever. This is about getting diesel into global markets and lowering global prices of diesel. It's nothing to do necessarily with just supplying the United States with diesel, clearly.
[00:08:26] Speaker B: Yes, obviously, that's right. That's right. And of course, it depends on the amounts.
Allegedly, it's to be 4.8 million tons.
So we'll see. You know, a lot of this is just talk because the talk filters to the population. And it looks like Trump is trying to do something about the energy price, and that's the only real meaning of it.
So how real it is, in a real sense, we don't know.
But it could be politically effective.
It shows the President is tending to the energy crisis, and so there's some hope.
And it also works to hold down the futures price of oil, because they say, well, Trump's loosening things up, things will get better.
And so if the futures price of oil stays down, that helps to hold down the price of the pump.
So a lot of it is just political maneuvering.
For example, when I was in the Treasury, Reagan wanted to reduce across the board the tax rates by 25, 30%.
His chief of staff said, oh, no, we must. All we need to do is 5%, because that'll show we did something. And of course, I told him the 5% will have no effect. He'll be wiped out by inflation before it goes into effect.
He says it matter. It's the political message. It's the political image that we create.
So a lot of the things, that's what they're serving. It's, it's, that's the manipulation of attitudes
[00:10:23] Speaker A: aside.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: So that's for the politician.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: Yeah. But aside from the smoke and mirrors, of course, all of that will be destroyed if he goes to war with Iran. Again, I presuming by the time this is broadcast he hasn't. And Trump endorsed Netanyahu publicly. I noticed his poll rating for the midterms went down. And the poll rating for Zelensky. No, Netanyahu went down as well simultaneously when he issued that truth Social.
What do you think if he's really worried about the prices at the pump for United States consumers as regards probability of a pickaxe mountain strike?
[00:11:06] Speaker B: Well, I think where Trump went wrong was when the Iranians, for reasons I don't understand, offered him reelection of the Republicans on a silver platter.
They said it was two weeks before the midterm elections in the United States and they told Trump we can open the strait in one week. All you have to do is stop the war and accept that we have the right to control our waterways.
Well, if he had accepted it, the headlines would have been war, War is over. Oil price falling, inflation expectations falling. He would have got the Republicans reelected. But he said no and he talks about bombing them.
So either he's so egotistical he can't accept the offer that the Iranians made him a very gracious offer, or he's so much under Israel's control he doesn't dare accept it.
Or most likely both reasons.
So he threw away the opportunity to reassure everybody in the United States it was all over. He had done the right thing. The prices were coming down, they could pay their bills and he missed the opportunity. So there you see a guy who's either too egotistical or too much in that nayu's pocket to save his own skin.
That's the only way you can explain it.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: Paul Craig Roberts, I'll stop you there. More from the former U.S. assistant Treasury Secretary, former Associate editor of the Wall Street Journal after this break.
Welcome back to Going Underground. I'm still here with Professor Paul Craig Roberts, former U.S. assistant Secretary of the treasury for Economic Policy and former Associate ed of the Wall Street Journal. Professor, we were talking about this constant refrain, actually ongoing underground in recent weeks about the influence of Israel over Trump ahead of the Israeli elections. I must ask you why you believe Netanyahu actually and the genocide continues in Gaza away from the so called mainstream media headlines. You believe that?
Definitely.
Netanyahu orchestrated October 7th.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: I don't see any other explanation.
There have been so many Israeli intelligence and military officials who have said you can't get close to the wall without the alarm going off and you can't possibly penetrate it without the alarm going off.
And there are constant patrols as well.
And so there's no other explanation than it was stood down.
So I think that the Israeli intelligence infiltrated Hamas, convinced them that they could turn the wall off and have a successful attack. And I think it was orchestrated because it led directly to the genocide in Gaza.
So I don't know any other explanation.
You know, it's goofy to have the position that that wall is that vulnerable and it's been there that long and that the Palestinians never took advantage of it.
It's just like the explanation for 911 in the United that a few Saudi Arabians box cutters outwitted the entire intelligent apparatus of the Western world, defeated airport security four times on the same morning the US Air Force can't get out fighter jets to intercept the plane.
None of this is believable.
You can't have a gigantic failure like that.
If the United States was that vulnerable, the Soviets would have destroyed us years ago.
[00:15:43] Speaker A: Well, the debate over 911 certainly, certainly goes on. More people arguably believe that October 7th was incredibly suspicious at the moment. Just remind us, though, did you fear for your boss, Ronald Reagan, when Reagan defied the Israeli lobby over Lebanon? You might have to remind us what exactly he did withdrawing troops, because you must have been aware even back then when you were a young treasury official, what happens to US Presidents when they defy Israel and the kind of Israeli infrastructure you have within the US Government there.
Were you surprised that Reagan defied him and just explain what he did to defy Israel.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: Well, I wasn't surprised because he was in a strong position. He was doing two things the people really wanted.
He was curing the stagflation, that is, the simultaneous rise in inflation and unemployment.
And he was working to end the Cold War of the Soviet Union.
And these were such gigantic undertakings, and they were so much appreciated that Reagan was essentially invulnerable.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: He was shot before then, wasn't he? He wasn't shot after he did that.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: That's right, it was before.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Just checking.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: And that remains suspicious, too.
But we were told not to say anything about it.
So I think on the whole, Reagan was just invulnerable.
And despite all the efforts of the American liberal press, they couldn't damage him.
And I think that's because he undertook the two big challenges and won both battles. So that's different. Plus, even then, Israel wasn't so strong. You know, Carter stood up to them in a way.
Once the neoconservatives took over foreign policy in the George W. Bush administration, that's when the President became Under the thumb of the Israeli government. All the president says, except for a period Obama, he tried to stand up to them. And you may remember what happened. The Congress invited Netanyahu to come to Washington to refute President Obama.
So I think the power that the Israelis have over the government has grown over our government has grown in the 21st century.
It wasn't that strong previously. It was there, but it's now just.
It's so strong, Trump can't even save himself.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: I don't want to get back too historical, but you did mention right at the beginning you weren't allowed to talk about the Reagan attempted assassination. Very briefly, though, what is it you weren't allowed to talk about? I mean, surely not another Israeli connection to the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: That's a dangerous topic.
At the time, there was some speculation among Reagan people that this was the Republican establishment, the Bush, the George Herbert Walker Bush establishment, getting rid of an outsider that threatened to take control of the party away from the establishment.
People don't really understand so much that within a political party there's a fight over who controls it.
And the establishment doesn't like challenges.
Reagan was an outsider.
And so there was speculation that. And he was a dangerous outsider because he was popular and because there were people like Representative Jack Kemp, who was popular, who also had a non establishment position.
And there was fear that eight years of Reagan would lead to eight years of Kemp.
And with the establishment in the will in this for 16 years, they couldn't make a comeback.
I can't attest to how truthful these speculations might be. But they existed and the decision was made, of course, not to make them, not to make an issue of it.
So that's about all I know about it. I think we should say something about what's going on in France.
And if you don't mind, I'd like to just briefly say that I think what we see here is not school children upset about the conditions of their classrooms.
I think we are watching people who have been neglected for decades by their own government.
Their needs have never been important. The government put everything in front and not just the French government, all of the Western European governments, the British and the American globalism, not the interest of the people, social programs for the immigrant invaders, not for truck droppers.
We've seen the, the people become convinced that the governments in Europe do not represent them.
And the frustration, you know, the lack of jobs for the young university graduates, the declining living standards, ethnic Europeans can't afford children, and yet they pay for the upkeep of immigrant invaders.
It's a feeling of alienation and it's, I think, separating the European ethnic peoples from their governments.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: I mean clearly France, France went into Libya, which aided the refugee crisis in Western Europe, but it's not that new. I mean, in 61 the French police were mass murdering Algerians on the streets of Paris, drowning them in the same.
So what about people who say that actually France will be okay? And most of these people anyway are French born and third generation French, it has to be said. And the refugee crisis? Well, every time one of these Western European countries goes to war, presumably they should be calculating the increase in the number of refugees. Just as, I don't know, during the Reagan administration they should have realized death squads in El Salvador would cause immigration into the U.S.
that's true.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: But when immigration reaches level that the French nation becomes diluted, then people feel they've lost their country.
So there has to be a limit to non indigenous, culturally indigenous immigration or people feel they're at a loss what's happened to my country.
And I think that that's been emphasized by the fact that the French, like all of the European countries, they supported globalism. Well, globalism helps a few giant corporations. It hurts the people.
Every kind of policy they've had has done nothing for the indigenous peoples. And their living standards are falling and the birth rates are falling. They're being replaced.
They can't maintain a sufficient real income to reproduce the population.
So this is a failure of public policy.
It's a complete failure of the government to serve the people.
And I think that this has reached the point where it's breaking these lootings of stores and burnings of historic buildings. This is not because the kids are dissatisfied with the conditions of the schoolrooms.
That's not at all well, you can't
[00:25:17] Speaker A: make a, can't make a revolution without breaking eggs. At the time of this recording, obviously Macron has not been executed by guillotine in the time we have left. I got to ask you, if the Democrats do secure the Senate as well as the House at the midterms, what that means for the chances of nuclear war, given that the Democrats, any success by them in Congress would mean presumably a rush to ramping up the war on Russia through Ukraine.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: Well, I think if the Democrats take control of the Congress, they're going to focus not on the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians, they're going to focus on the Republicans.
You see, it's not appreciated, but the Democratic Party is transitioning from a party of reform to a party of revolution.
The new leaders, they're not yet in leadership positions, but they're the leaders in terms of they're on the cutting edge. They're the ones causing the movement, the talk.
They're very radical.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: But, professor, they always sell out as soon as they get near the head of the dnc, don't they? They sell out those ideas very quickly.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Well, in the past, the fight was to join the establishment, but now we've got people who turn their back on the establishment and they want to overthrow society.
It's the way they speak.
It's the emphasis they make.
And they have discovered that law can be turned into a weapon to be used against your political opponents.
They tried it out with all the charges against Trump.
They recently described to a conference how these, how prosecutors could abuse law to destroy their political opponents.
So I think you're going to see more emphasis on internal fights in the United States than Democrats anxious to go to war with Russia. I don't think they are anxious to go to war with Russia. I think they want to overthrow this existing social institutions.
[00:27:38] Speaker A: You have to remember, professor, we're out of time.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: Decade.
[00:27:42] Speaker A: We're out of time. Alas, Professor Paul Greg Roberts, thank you.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: That's it for the show. Condolences to all those of you bereaved or affected by Washington's wars of aggression. We'll be back on Monday with Marxist economist Richard Wolf on how swift will be the fall of American empire. Until then, you can keep in touch via all our social media if it's not censored in your country. And head to our channel, goingundergrandtv on rumble.com to watch new and old episodes of Going Underground. See you Saturday.
