\tAny Democrat who still offers praise for Alan Greenspan after his latest propaganda supporting the Bush attack on Social Security should be dumped by the party and voters alike.\r\n
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\tGreenspan has always been a Republican agent at the Federal Reserve, even in the Clinton years, but his support for private Social Security funds, and his latest warning that cuts in benefits for retirees need to be considered are both scientifically unjustified and unsupported, and politically craven, especially coming from a man who himself is already collecting the maximum Social Security benefit and who stands to walk away with a $100,000\/year federal pension on top of that when he finally retires as Reserve Board chairman.\r\n
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\tDemocrats in Congress have largely gone along with the charade that the reserve board chairman is above politics and that his deliberately chimerical statements on interest rates and fiscal and monetary policy are received wisdom.\r\n
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\tIn fact, Greenspan contributed mightily to the collapse of the stock market following the popping of the Internet bubble, by failing to act to limit stock speculation in the mid and late 1990s--something he could have easily done without even touching interest rates, by simply increasing margin requirements on investors.\r\n
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\tHis pronouncements on the financial stability of the Social Security system are no more prescient or sound than his economic forecasting skills, which have been repeatedly found wanting.\r\n
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\tIt is probably worth remembering that when Greenspan left his private career as owner of a pension management firm, Townsend Greenspan, and went into government service, he left a company run into the ground because of his poor investment advice and market forecasting abilities. By the time he left, Townsend Greenspan had lost all its clients, who had all sought more capable advisers with better records.\r\n
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\tAmerican workers should remember all this when they read news reports quoting Greenspan as saying that the Social Security system cannot be expected to pay promised benefits to future retirees.\r\n
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For other articles by Dave Lindorff, please go (at no charge) to This Can't Be Happening! .\r\n
\r\n<\/p>\n","contact":"dlindorff@yahoo.com","link":"http:\/\/www.thiscantbehappening.net","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/html","summary":"He\u2019s a schill for the President, collects full Social Security benefits and a $200,000 salary, stands to collect another $100,000 a year in federal retirement benefits, and he wants to cut your Social Security benefits! Why should anyone listen to a guy with his lousy trackrecord as an economic and stockmarket forecaster anyway?\r\n\r\n\r\n","numcomment":1,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/","filesize":null,"article_url":"\/news\/2005\/03\/123293.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[{"id":124227,"heading":"Greenspan: Why is Anyone Still Listening to this Partisan Hack","article":"Recoment your readers take a closer look at the relationship between Alan and the architects of the Pinochet dictatorship that forced the SS privatization scheme on Chile.\r\n\r\n1. Alan helped elect, and worked for the administrations involved - Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush Sr. \r\n\r\n2. Alan had close personal relationships before, during and after the Pinochet era with key players. Kissinger was the most notorious, and Alan and Henry reportedly had joined forces to try to get high positions in Reagan's government.\r\n\r\n3. Economic tools were used to destablize the country in order to help it go to Pinochet\r\n\r\n4. Alan was consulting for US firms which may have had stakes in the economy of Chile.\r\n\r\n5. US and US trained economists who worked under Pinochet had close philosophical ties to the Ayn Rand views that Alan holds, as well as to other related anti-democratic views.\r\n\r\nUribe, Armando. The Black Book of American Intervention in Chile. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975. 163 pages. Translated from Spanish by Jonathan Casart. \r\nChile is a well-documented example of covert destabilization by the U.S., The CIA had been passing out money since 1964 to influence elections in Chile, but Salvador Allende won the presidency in 1970 anyway. Under orders from Nixon and Kissinger, a broad economic blockade was then launched in conjunction with U.S. multinationals (ITT, Kennecott, Anaconda) and banks (Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank). According to notes taken by CIA director Richard Helms at a 1970 meeting in the Oval Office, his orders were to "make the economy scream." Street demonstrations and various dirty tricks were paid for by the CIA over the next three years to increase the pressure. \r\nThe coup wasn't unexpected by the time it happened in September 1973, although the brutality of the junta surprised many because of Chile's democratic traditions. The major media in the U.S. ignored the issue of U.S. complicity until a year later, when Michael J. Harrington (D-MA) leaked details of secret Congressional testimony by William Colby. In late 1975, a Senate Committee headed by Frank Church released a report on "Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973." By then so much information on Chile was in the public domain that the CIA had decided to trade a "limited hangout" on Chile for the Church Committee's silence on covert operations in five other countries. \r\nISBN 0-8070-0247-X \r\n\r\n\r\nhttp:\/\/www.namebase.org\/sources\/BM.html\r\n\r\nLucy\r\nKomisar has a great piece here.\r\n\r\nKissinger Encouraged Chile's Brutal Repression, New\r\nDocuments Show \r\n\r\nhttp:\/\/www.monitor.net\/monitor\/9903a\/kissingerchile.html\r\n\r\n Greenspan soon became involved in Ford's 1976\r\nreelection campaign, too, reprising the role he had\r\nplayed for Nixon eight years earlier. Still\r\ntechnically chairman of the economic council, he began\r\nto spend a large portion of his time on the road with\r\nthe campaign, advising on both policy and strategy.\r\nFord had fallen thirty points behind Jimmy Carter by\r\nAugust of 1976, and Greenspan was part of the elite\r\ncircle of aides assigned to put the president back in\r\nthe race. Touring the country with Jim Baker, Dick\r\nCheney, and Ford, Greenspan was involved in virtually\r\nevery aspect of the campaign. "He was the substance\r\nguy on economic stuff,"says a source from the\r\ncampaign. "But there was also a feeling that he\r\nunderstood the politics. That's why he was on the\r\nplane." \r\n\r\n"I can assure you,"says Ford, "at Cabinet meetings,\r\nAlan expressed himself on any subject he had strong\r\nfeelings about." \r\n\r\n"As the 1980 presidential race approached and Ronald\r\nReagan seemed poised for the Republican nomination,\r\nGreenspan became an informal adviser to Reagan, but he\r\nalso engaged in a secret dialogue with Henry Kissinger\r\nto return Gerald Ford to office. To this day, opinion\r\nvaries on who conceived the idea for Reagan to\r\nnominate Ford as his running mate, but it was\r\nGreenspan and Kissinger who almost made it happen. "\r\n\r\n\r\nhttp:\/\/men.style.com\/gq\/features\/full?id=content_843&pageNum=7\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n","author":"Linder","parent_id":123293,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2005-03-25 18:23:37","modified":"2005-03-25 18:23:37","fileurl":""}]}