UK BANNED Press TV
has conducted an interview with Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant
Secretary of US treasury, Florida about the status of the US economy
with almost 50 million Americans on food stamps.
The following is an approximate transcript of the interview.
Press TV: What do you think about what our other
guest Mr. Stewart Stogel said about the closeness, if I understood him
correctly, between the legislators and the corruptions or the lawmakers
and the corporations. Is that playing a factor into this?
Roberts: The main cause I believe is the offshoring
of the middle class jobs that’s been going on for about 15 years. It
began in earnest with the collapse of the Soviet Union when China and
India rethought their economic approach and opened their markets to
foreign capital.
So we had first the move offshore of the well paid manufacturing jobs
and then with the rise of high speed internet this was followed by the
off shore movement of professional service jobs such as information
technology, software engineer and so this sort of obliterated the
ladders of upward mobility in American society that had kept a somewhat
more equal income distribution.
And the other main contributor was the deregulation of the financial
system. When that was de-regulated the banks were simply able to highly
leverage equity with massive debt to drain more and more of income, fees
and interest payments.
So, the income distribution has been severely hurt.