The much-lauded Alan Greenspan is no more than an ideological zealot, says alexander cockburn |
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Thirty years ago, when America was a lot more liberal than it is now, Alan Greenspan was widely derided as a Right-wing economic kook, blissed out on the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Then, in 1987, Reagan made him chairman of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan got respect at last. Congress fawned on him, as did the press. He learned to make headlines with quirky epigrams, like his crack about the "irrational exuberance" of markets in the late 1990s.
He quit in 2006, at the age of 80, sat down to write his memoirs and tossed in the words, "The Iraq war is largely about oil", no doubt calculating that the sentence would give the book a handy shove out of the gate. It did. The Age of Turbulence was released last weekend and there was "largely about oil" in the headlines, sending the book like a bullet up the Amazon rankings.
Greenspan's scarcely a pioneer with the oil |
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The words ‘The Iraq war is largely about oil’ gave his book a handy shove out of the gate
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motive, but leftists have fallen on his line like the children of Israel on manna, speedily installing it in their armoury of useful quotations, alongside Eisenhower's parting whack at the military-industrial complex. In respectable circles the remark has been less cordially received, since fighting wars for oil is something you don't talk about in front of the children, or indeed in the hearing of families who've lost kin in Iraq.
The White House is incandescent with rage, since many Americans think 'Bush', 'Cheney' and 'Big Oil' all mean the same thing. Greenspan has also been disobliging about Bush and the Republicans' delinquencies in running up the deficit. By contrast, Greenspan lavishes praise on Bill Clinton for far-sighted wisdom in taking his - Greenspan's - advice.
This irks Democrats, not least Mrs Clinton, since it does remind people that her husband did indeed heed Greenspan's counsel, which was to serve up Wall Street's menu while simultaneously trashing the welfare system.
His place on the bestseller lists and in the quotation dictionaries assured, Greenspan 
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Stagflation threatens to make a comeback
Dispatches from Alexander Cockburn
