Naomi Klein: Mr. Shock Therapy (Alan Greenspan's crusade for state intervention to save the rich)

[marmar]

from NOW Toronto:



Mr. Shock Therapy
Alan Greenspan's free market crusade was just a cover for state intervention to save rich
By NAOMI KLEIN

Since I began touring with my book The Shock Doctrine, I have had a number of exchanges revolving around the same basic question: when hard-right political leaders and their advisers apply brutal economic shock therapy, do they honestly believe the trickle-down effects will build equitable societies or are they deliberately creating the conditions for yet another corporate feeding frenzy?

A definitive answer would require reading the minds of men like Dick Cheney and Paul Bremer, so I tend to dodge. Unfortunately, this rarely satisfies graduate students looking for deeper meaning. Thankfully, I now have a new escape hatch: quoting Alan Greenspan.

His autobiography, The Age Of Turbulence, has been marketed as a mystery solved: the man who bit his tongue for 18 years as head of the U.S. Federal Reserve was finally going to tell the world what he really believed. And Greenspan has delivered.

Using his book as a platform for his "libertarian Republican" ideology, Greenspan chides George W. Bush for abandoning the crusade for small government and reveals that he became a policy-maker because he thought he could advance his radical ideology more effectively "as an insider, rather than as a critical pamphleteer."

Yet what is most interesting about Greenspan's story is what it reveals about the ambiguous role of ideas in the free-market crusade. Given that Greenspan is perhaps the world's most powerful living free-market ideologue, it is significant that his commitment to ideology seems rather thin and perfunctory less zealous belief than convenient cover story.

Much of the debate about Greenspan's legacy has focused on the matter of hypocrisy, of a man preaching laissez-faire who repeatedly intervened in the market to save its wealthiest players. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2007-10-11/news_story7.php

[Me.]

1. Alan Greenspan = Ayn Rand

Power to the people, the very richest people

[november3rd]

2. Public Takeover

Let's shock them back. They've created a "Frankenstein," a newly animated We The People!

[Lisa]

3. "this man who preaches the doctrine of personal responsibility refuses to take any at all"

An apt description, not just of Greenspan, but of the entire Bush administration ...