On Apr 29, 2008, at 8:16 AM, Alex Hogan wrote:
> I remember when she was on Democracy Now debating Greenspan is she
> got creamed as she tossed some blood curdling rhetoric at the man
> (this was Democracy Now after all, you need to mention torutre or
> death squads at least once in a segment),blaming him personally for
> Pinochet and shock theapy in Eastern Europe -- neither in which he
> was involved.
>
> She could have nailed him over a million more mundane issues like
> subprime mortages or hedge funds, but that dosen't quite have the
> same reverberations with Amy's audience like military dictators or
> the Iraq war.
That was a sad moment. Neither of them knew enough to ask Greenspan an interesting or challenging question. Naomi Klein aske AG if he knew the invasion of Iraq violated international law. Goodman asked him if he knew where all that currency that disappeared in Iraq had gone. They both asked him about tax cuts and Social Security privatization - relevant, but hardly the burning issue of the moment last September as the subprime mortgage market was blowing up. When she finally did get around to subprime, she interrupted his answer.
> AMY GOODMAN: The sub-prime crisis that we are seeing today, many
> saying that you seriously contributed to this, laid the foundation
> with keeping the interest rates low.
>
> ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, the sub-prime crisis did occur as a result of
> lower interest rates. The lower interest rates, however, are, if
> one takes a look at the whole context of rising home prices
> throughout the world, is clearly a global issue. It is the result
> of fundamental changes that occurred as a consequence of the end of
> the Cold War, and that housing bubbles appear in more than two
> dozen countries around the world, which screams for an explanation
> that is global, not individual. So we in the United States—
>
> AMY GOODMAN: I know that you’re going to have to leave soon.
>
> ALAN GREENSPAN: May I just finish?
>
>
And then there was this odd exchange:
> NAOMI KLEIN: Well, how about this: in 2003, when you were head of
> the Federal Reserve, the US government handed out 3,500 contracts
> to companies to perform security functions. In 2006, the year that
> you left the Federal Reserve, they handed out 115,000 such
> contracts. It seems to me that it is becoming a dominant force.
>
> ALAN GREENSPAN: Are you talking about the contracts that the
> Federal Reserve put out?
>
> NAOMI KLEIN: I’m talking about the crony capitalist system of a
> Republican government handing out an extraordinary level of
> contracts to private companies, who then support these politicians
> with the political favors that you’re describing in your book, in
> your definition of crony capitalism.
>
> ALAN GREENSPAN: [inaudible] Federal Reserve is doing this or the
> government?
>
> NAOMI KLEIN: You’ve overseen an explosion of the contract economy.
>
This was not the best use of a chance to interview Alan Greenspan.
Doug