Weekend Edition
April 9 - 11, 2010He Dissembles, He Fingerpoints, He Passes the Buck ... Alan Greenspan put in another Oscar winning performance before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on Wednesday. The ex-Fed chairman showcased the full-range of his abilities. He was alternately condescending, professorial, combative, engaging, and acerbic. It was vintage Greenspan with all that entails; the tedious jabber, the crusty rejoinders, the endless excuse-making. At 80, Maestro still hasn't lost a step. No one laid a glove on him, which is precisely the problem.
It's galling that, after everything that's happened, Greenspan is still treated like royalty; still given a platform so he can run-circles around his critics and make them look like fools. That's not what the public wants, another playful sparring-match with Alan Flim-flam. They want to see him grilled, interrogated, badgered, threatened and humiliated. And they want to see some trifling sign of remorse for the ruin he's brought on the country. But there was no remorse; no restless fidgeting, no flickering look of self-doubt, no sudden outburst of regret. Nothing at all. Just the brazen buck-passing of a self-admiring codger trying to pluck his reputation from the scrapheap.
No one person is more responsible for the financial crisis than Alan Greenspan. He can say whatever he likes, but the 8.5 million people who spend their days shuffling in unemployment lines, have him to thank. And that's doubly true for the 300,000 families who lose their homes every month, or the millions of people now scrimping by on food stamps. They can blame Maestro for the mess they're in.
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney04092010.html
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