Friday, September 22, 2017

Dani Rodrik, Barry Eichengreen and Paul Craig Roberts

Trump's UN speech

There are articles that you may like to read or read already such as these two by authors who belong to the FONDAD Network:

"Macron’s Labour Gambit" by Dani Rodrik At the end of August, French president Emmanuel Macron unveiled the labour-market overhaul that will make or break his presidency – and may well determine the future of the eurozone. His goal is to bring down France’s stubbornly high rate of unemployment, just a shade below 10%, and energize an economy that badly needs a […]
read more...

"The Euro’s Narrow Path" by Barry Eichengreen With Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election, and Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union enjoying a comfortable lead in opinion polls ahead of Germany’s general election on September 24, a window has opened for eurozone reform. The euro has always been a Franco-German project. With a dynamic new leader in one country and a […]
read more...

And there are also articles you are not interested in because they are authored by someone you do not know, mistrust or dismiss. This may be the case with Paul Graig Roberts. Do you know who he is and what articles and books he has published? If not, you may like to read one of his latest articles, Trump’s UN Speech.

If you don't like this article or disagree with it, I wonder why and on what facts your opinion is based.

I noticed that I tended to dismiss Paul Graig Roberts' opinion after I had read on internet certain things of and about him that give reason to dismiss his opinion. But I realized this is unfair because the fact that he has written articles I do not agree with is not a good reason to dismiss other, sensible, articles by him.

Many of the things Roberts says in his article about Trump's UN speech I find sensible. There are also some things I disagree with or wonder whether he is (fully) right such as his statement or suggestion that the US "war on terror" has resulted in 'tens of millions of slaughtered, maimed, and displaced persons'. 

However, it is interesting to investigate what is true and not true in this and other statements by Paul Graig Roberts.

One, positive, reviewer (Edward Curtin) of a recent book authored by Roberts, The Neoconservative Threat to World Order, says about him: A former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan administration and an editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Paul Craig Roberts has escaped all easy labels to become a public intellectual of the highest order. He is a prolific critic of U.S. foreign and domestic policies, with a special emphasis on the nefarious influence of the neoconservatives from the Reagan through the Obama administrations. A savage critic of the mainstream corporate media – he calls them “presstitutes” – he dissects their propaganda and disinformation like a truth surgeon and penetrates to the heart of issues in a flash.

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