Naomi Klein vs. Alan Greenspan on Inequality

[mmonk]

Run time: 03:14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGug8T53K-E   Posted on YouTube: September 24, 2007 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: January 24, 2009 By DU Member: mmonk Views on DU: 620

 

[whistle]

1. Greenspan just continues to worm his way around his responsibilities

...the man is liar and knows full well what his policies have caused. He doesn't give a rat's ass about social responsibility. He has sought throughout his career the enrichment of the privileged few at the expense of the masses.

Take a look at a book review published less than a year ago, especially the final five paragraphs:

<snip>
March 20, 2008
Chairman Greenspan's Legacy
By Benjamin M. Friedman
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
by Alan Greenspan
Penguin, 531 pp., $35.00

The US financial markets are suffering their rockiest period since the nation's savings and loan industry collapsed at the end of the 1980s. The economy either is on the verge of the first business recession since 2001 or is already in it. The Federal Reserve System is taking dramatic actions that reflect urgency at best and perhaps even a whiff of panic. In these circumstances, it is worth recalling that US monetary policy—broadly defined as the management of interest rates in order to control inflation and to maintain stable growth—has had a strikingly good run during the last two decades.
<MORE>

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21153

[mmonk]

2. Absolutely. The reason I posted this from 2007 is to show how right

Naomi was.

[ljm2002]

3. Love how he changed the subject...

...of both her questions.

On the first one, he just did not address his own responsibility for income inequality, vis a vis executive compensation; on the second one, it was "Let's not talk about Latin America, let's get back to the U.S." -- in both cases, obviously because he could not address the uncomfortable facts that Ms. Klein was bringing up.

Thanks for posting these!

[MedioGringo]

4. Actually....

as much as I hate Greenspan, he's mostly right on this point. Yeah tax policies have allowed the rich loopholes to get richer, but he's right that our horrible education system is mostly to blame. I did a bit a research on this topic and when you know the data it's pretty obvious. Only 1/3 of our kids graduate from college. There IS a huge demand for high tech jobs that pay high salaries. We simply aren't educating our kids in a way that allows them to succeed. Now, you can blame the right for allowing education to slip, and for making it unaccessible because of the insane costs, and for allowing the rich to take advantage of lax oversight to rip off investors and to get out of paying their fair share of taxes, but simply adjusting tax policy won't make a big dent in the separation of wealth. Unfortunately it's much more difficult than that. And just as unfortunately, this isn't something Obama seems to want to address head on. Education should be free or very inexpensive like it is in most other civilized nations- health care should be too. But Americans just don't see it that way.