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  1. Marley

    Dear Yves,

    I am getting a login page in order to view. Are we supposed to download the file then play?

    1. Marley

      … actually, right clicking on the link and attempting to download does not work for me either.

      1. Yves Smith Post author

        Bad link! There is a long standing bug on my end. When I try copying something new to the clipboard, it often does not take and I paste the wrong item in. Fixing now. Apologies.

  4. Greenspan Foreclosures

    “Saint Alan was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy.”

    1. steelhead23

      You may have hit upon Greedscam’s true skill – oratory obfuscation. I hope you note that what he said, in light of the absolute pasting labor has suffered, is enormously inflammatory. Yet, how many newspapers carried a headline: FED DECLARES WAR ON LABOR? Why? I would suggest that both in duration and delivery, Greedscam’s oratory could lull an insomniac to sleep. It is an under appreciated skill this lulling to somnolence and Greedscam is an absolute master. I suspect that I could have listened to that speech and wholly missed that tidbit.

      Might I suggest that when the guillotines arrive, the first tumbril be reserved for Greedscam.

    1. LucyLulu

      Check out David Collyer’s link above. No download necessary.

      P.S. Thanks David!

      1. nonclassical

        Collyer’s link doesn’t work now either-realize where internet documentation is headed; “controlling” the message…(“the magic christian is unseaworthy!”)-Ringo Starr, Peter Sellers..

  6. LucyLulu

    The man who fired Alan Greenspan! Though I’ve heard the story before, it was worth hearing again.

    Loved his last statement, too. “Was that too violent? Are they going to shoot me?”

    Michael seems like the kind of person who would be a lot of fun to invite to a dinner party!

  8. PaulArt

    Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! Made my day! Great job Yves, thanks for the post.

    1. Ray Duray

      Hi Christopher,

      You wrote: “link given above to the Real News Network is, I believe, an older interview.”

      Certainly it is a long-standing theme for Dr. Hudson, but the Real News interview is fresh. Dr. Hudson is discussing how French President-Elect Hollande has already been arm-wrestled by the finance boys into submission.

      1. Christopher Marks

        Hey Ray, thanks for letting me know! Obviously I did not actually watch the RNN clip :) I made an implicit assumption there that was clearly false (namely that the clip you posted was one I watched a while back!)

        Chris

    2. knowbuddhau

      Thanks for the link, CM. I can’t get enough of Prof. Hudson.

      It’s exactly things like this that make me wonder: just who are the Perkinsian economic hit men in the neighborhood?

      We all know the MO of Perkinsian EHM: fake the data in service to building the American empire with the power of weaponized economics. Perkins himself said his job was to induce the debts that were meant to enslave whole nations at a time, even if that meant corrupting, and in some places killing, democratically elected leaders.

      And as we all know, covert ops r US. And that goes for economic policy too. I’d sure like to know what role has been played by our “national” security apparatus in determining and implementing such blatant deception as practiced by Greenspan.

      He’s just the tip of the national security iceberg on which our ship of state has so disastrously foundered. As I like to put it, bogus holy war (in this case, against labor) for false profits is what we do.

      1. LeonovaBalletRusse

        Michael Hudson on http://www.TRNN.com re bank bribing in US & Europe, proposed either a third party OR assertively moving the Dems way back to the Left (which doesn’t exist in sold-out higher spheres any more). He drops the name, Kucinich, but isn’t it time to start the Democratic Draft and turn the Convention upside down? Let’s_draft_the following Democratic Slate:

        Michael Hudson: President 2012
        Jill Stein: Vice President
        Dennis Kucinich: Secretary of State
        Susan Webber: Secretary of the Treasury
        William K. Black: Attorney General
        Catherine Austin Fitts: Housing and Local Loans

        1. Ray Duray

          Julian Assange to head the National Security Agency
          Joseph Stiglitz, Chairman, Federal Reserve Bank
          Dean Baker, head of the New York Fed
          Bill Moyers, White House Press Secretary
          Medea Benjamin, Secretary of Defense
          Ann Wright, Director, Central Intelligence Agency
          Sibel Edmonds, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation
          Russ Feingold, Chairman, Federal Election Commission
          Lawrence Lessig, Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
          Brooksley Born, Chair, CFTC
          Eliot Spitzer, Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission
          Barack Obama, retired, writing his third memoir at present

          Gee, Leonova, this appointments pipe dream is fun! :)

    3. Yves Smith Post author

      OK, this is now not my fault.

      1. I changed to the correct link in the middle of the night.

      2. The people hosting the video changed the URL!!!!

      It is finally correct. Sorry!

      1. LeonovaBalletRusse

        Thanks for going to the trouble to fix the link, Yves. “Firing Alan Greenspan” is wonderful. Michael Hudson is, like you and William K. Black, a patriotic hero not afraid to exercise freedom of speech and of the press, and a great leader of the People. Will you consider the Democratic Draft above?

        “Are they going to shoot me?” Michael Hudson as Thomas Paine.

  11. knowbuddhau

    What Americans can Learn from Eurocrisis
    http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8300

    JAY: Now, in one of your recent pieces, you wrote that the kind of grab, wealth grab, I guess, that’s going on right now is something akin to the way feudalism developed. What did you mean by that?

    HUDSON: The—1,000 years ago, it took a military army to come in and conquer a country and grab the land and charge the people rent, to take control of the monopolies and charge people huge markups from the monopolies, and to essentially shift the taxes off the wealthy, onto the population that was conquered. Now, in today’s world, they can’t afford an army anymore. The Vietnam War showed that no country can afford a military occupation anymore. So finance today is the means of conquering a country and getting what in the past took an army. Financial conquest is how you shift the taxes onto the population to pay the financial sector, how you load a population down with debt and make a population pay interest and amortization and penalties on debt service, you make a population pay for schooling instead of getting it free or a low price as used to be the case, you make a population take on a lifetime of debt in order to get a home that used to be affordable, you make the governments go into debt for the banks, so that in Europe governments can’t—don’t have a central bank to monetize their own deficits but actually have to borrow money from banks. You achieve—you essentially empty out an economy, and you take its economic surplus financially without an army, just by trying to promote what really is junk economics and junk politics, if the economics of Rubinomics in America under Clinton and Rubenomics in America under George Bush, and now with a vengeance under Obama—.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    John Perkins on “The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption”
    http://www.democracynow.org/2007/6/5/john_perkins_on_the_secret_history

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, before we go further, “economic hit men” — for those who haven’t heard you describe this, let alone describe yourself as this, what do you mean?

    JOHN PERKINS: Well, really, I think it’s fair to say that since World War II, we economic hit men have managed to create the world’s first truly global empire, and we’ve done it primarily without the military, unlike other empires in history. We’ve done it through economics very subtly.

    We work many different ways, but perhaps the most common one is that we will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations covet, such as oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. The money never actually goes to the country. It goes instead to US corporations, who build big infrastructure projects — power grids, industrial parks, harbors, highways — things that benefit a few very rich people but do not reach the poor at all. The poor aren’t connected to the power grids. They don’t have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks. But they and the whole country are left holding this huge debt, and it’s such a big bet that the country can’t possibly repay it. So at some point in time, we economic hit men go back to the country and say, “Look, you know, you owe us a lot of money. You can’t pay your debt, so you’ve got to give us a pound of flesh.”

    AMY GOODMAN: And explain your history. What made you an economic hit man?

    JOHN PERKINS: Well, when I graduated from business school at Boston University, I was recruited by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and perhaps most secretive spy organization.

    AMY GOODMAN: People sometimes think the CIA is that, but the NSA, many times larger.

    JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it is larger. It’s much larger. At least it was in those days. And it’s very, very secretive. We all — there’s a lot of rumors. We know quite a lot about the CIA, I think, but we know very, very little about the NSA. It claims to only work in a cryptography, you know, encoding and decoding messages, but in fact we all know that they’re the people who have been listening in on our telephone conversations. That’s come out recently. And they’re a very, very secretive organization.

    What’s the difference? Aren’t Hudson and Perkins talking about the same MO?

    1. LeonovaBalletRusse

      knowbuddhau, please include within your frame:

      Josef Vogl: “Sovereignty Effects” (INET Conference Berlin, April 12, 2012, Panel: Which Way Forward?) — Prof. Vogl draws our attention to a timely, critical study of 1639 by Gabriel Naude: “Considerations politiques sue les Coup D’Etats” — http://www.ineteconomics.org for speech and paper;

      “THE DUAL STATE: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship” by Ernst Fraenkel, translated from the German by E.A. Shils in collaboration with Edith Lowenstein and Klaus Knorr (copyright 1941 by Oxford University Press, New York, Inc. – reprinted by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., Clark, N.J., 2006) — which leads to crucial insights into today’s rulers “above the law.”

      “Veblen’s Testament and the End of Dissent” in “Chapter 9: True Power: The End of Dissent, Iran/Iraq, and the War on Terror” of “THE IDEOLOGY OF TYRANNY: Bataille, Foucault, and the Postmodern Corruption of Political Dissent” by Guido Giacomo Preparata (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

  12. Total Cynicism

    All the corporations: CREDO, Van Jones, MoveOn, CommonDreams, DailyKOS are fawning over Ofraud’s carefully calculated gay epiphany. Oh, there was that schizo who got beaten to death by the cops. Remember, when a neo liberal says schizo, they mean the poor and unemployed people whom the economy has failed should be under the care of Roche, Eli Lilly et al. This differs slightly from their farther right comrades who think the poor should be jailed.
    To these D front groups, Greenspan isn’t discussed, they still love Klanton, since he got them rich.

    1. G3

      OFraud – Nice. LoL :-).
      Yes, those proles who can’t be “profit centers” to the 1% will be condemned to death. Market Gods. YEAH !

  13. Jah Runns

    Obama – “I know these bankers – they’re my friends they are savvy businessmen”

    The poor, they have no bread? Then let them eat gay marriage!

  14. Bam_Man

    Greenspan was and is a complete fraud and political hack.
    A complete failure as an economist, demonstrated perfectly by the track record of his own consulting firm which went out of business by losing every single one of its clients. What to do at that point? Why, go to work for the government of course. That such a charlatan and political hack could become Fed Chairman tells you all you need to know about how the Government works. And why “big government” is the world-wide disaster that it is.

    1. sd

      Alan Greenspan worshipped Ayn Rand whose ideal man was a homicidal sociopath.

      That so many of the mentally ill are granted positions of power just because they have ‘confidence’ speaks volumes of our own low opinion of ourselves as a nation. We have nothing to be proud of any more. We have achieved nothing of significance for decades now.

      1. Procopius

        Hell, I don’t know why it isn’t more widely discussed. There’s a bunch of information out there. Greenspan was one of the first half-dozen members of her Objectivist cult, the “Class of ’43.” Apparently he managed to avoid the taint of heresy, which would probably be an interesting story in itself. Summary at http://www.mclemee.com/id39.html. I was quite surprised to find that libertarian icon Murray Rothbard loathed the Objectivists (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard23.html}. The more I learn about Greenspan, the more I wonder what goes on at that level of government, how do guys like this get themselves into these positions where they are able to reap millions and millions of dollars. And I well remember, in the early 2000s Greenspan was idolized, nearly worshipped, as a genius who tamed the business cycle. At the time I didn’t know any better, but there should have been lots of people who did.

        1. Procopius

          After I posted the above, I remembered a question that has come to my mind often during discussions of Objectivism. This is wildly off topic, but does anybody know: In Galt’s Gulch, who cooked the meals? Who did the laundry? Who swept the floors? Were there very many of them? Who mined the ore and coal to produce metal? Who spread manure on the fields to produce food? Heck, who did the work? I’m sorry to say, I’m NOT going to re-read Atlas Shrugged to see if my question is answered there.

    2. LeonovaBalletRusse

      Thanks, Jesse, I always enjoy your unique site. This is significant information. Greenspan failed in a Capitalist Business, yet his reward was great for preaching the Neocon Randian party line and working the system for the 1% as their secret Agent for the 1% while in Office.

      In a corrupt, despotic environment where only the 1% Party hacks prospered, Greenspan “did his duty” to the 1% Neocon Beneficiaries (Neocon New Fascist Finance + Neolib New Fascist Politics), the way Hjalmar Schacht “did his duty” to “Hitler’s Beneficiaries” [book by Goetz Aly] decades before. We can conclude that it was the same 1% Reich in evolution: Conquest over people and resources in Reich III through physical armies, Conquest in Reich IV through Finance armies. it’s like vaudeville with a twist: same act in different venues.

      Greenspan must get his just due: Shame, shame, shame forever. “Treason” was his gift to the nation.

      Please continue to “feed the hungry” at Jesse’s Cafe Americain. I appreciate your good works.

  16. Enraged

    Our economy sucks and many, many jobs have been lost. I don’t believe that we can get them back at this juncture, nor that it is part of the big picture: manufacturing plants have been moved to Asia and our jobs feed people who, like us, need to eat and feed their own kids. India has not suffered a major famine in many, many years. China’s standard of living has greatly improved.

    What if… foreclosing here and razing perfectly good houses was one way our officials have found to create jobs that cannot be outsourced? What if the idea was to create artificially a housing crisis requiring a serious construction boost? What if throwing millions in the street by any possible means in a country with some kind of a safety nest was the way to accomplish it? What if our officials were, in fact, looking at England and Germany after WWII and considering how rebuilding their country was THE way they had resolved unemployment and had restarted their own economies and how artificially recreating similar conditions without engaging in wars might improve the lot of humanity as a whole…?

    Internet and telecommunication has made it impossible for any of us to ignore the fact that almost 2 billion people do not have one meal each day and live in abject poverty while others have more than plenty and can afford to obscenely waste food and earth limited resources. I grew up looking for 50 years at horrible famines in India, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Somalia, etc. It has been never ending.

    What if our economic crisis was only one step in the global redistribution of wealth? In the light of the clip below, it would start making a lot of sense. Obama’s push on disarming and getting rid of nuclear power, along with other nuclear countries’ cooperation (Japan among them) would indicate that big powers do not want WWIII. Big powers know that, should there be a world war, our species will not survive.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/

    latest banks and finance

    Fed lets Chinese banks take stakes in US banks

    The Federal Reserve has approved applications by three big Chinese government-controlled banks to set up branches and take stakes in US banks after deciding they were adequately regulated in their home market.

    09 May 2012

    What if we were in the midst of the largest cooperation movement and effort worldwide, of which we should not be afraid but that we should, instead, embrace? What if that movement had started right out WWII and has been following its course eversince?

    There is a Big Scheme of Things. I think we’re in the middle of it.

    1. LeonovaBalletRusse

      Enraged: “Our economy sucks” — Why not start a “mockery” campaign, putting such stark slang to use: e.g. Goldman Sucks, JP Morgue, Schmuckbook. We the People are nothing by marks to these grifters, and they have even “made the market” in suckering your friends/clients as marks in their “Stings”–their long cons. Maybe re can ridicule them into oblivion.

      Why should anyone “invest in them” as a mark on the wrong side of the market? “Marketing to Marks” is their “innovative” gift to humanity. We honor them?

    2. LeonovaBalletRusse

      Enraged, anent Chinese bank ownership of US banks. Don’t you suppose they are “squaring the circle” on Treason and Tyranny here? China is the Bad Cop for enforcement, so that America’s 1% can play Good Cop.

      Cant’ you see “Tianenmen Square” coming to the Homeland sometime soon?

      1. LeonovaBalletRusse

        StateCommieCapitalism – “StateSocialism” – “StateXYZ” = Absolute Despotism

        Umberto Eco: “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” in “AMERICAN FASCISTS: The Christian Right and the War on America” by Chris Hedges (New York, Free Press, 2006).

        This is “Capitalist Fascist Totalitarianism” by any name. Mussolini and Ezra Pound would be proud that the USA finally did “get it.”

        1. Enraged

          It goes way beyond devisive words people use without even understanding their meaning and the concepts behind them. It is not about ideologies which, all, have, at some point in history, fulfilled a need and become obsolete or destructive when pushed to their extreme. It is not about politics and parties, countries and cultures. it is not about you or me. It is about the future of humanity as a species. It isn’t even about earth: earth is a big girl. She had in her to clean herself if we mess her up.

          It is about us: if we were going to become extinct place, and by our own hands, what was the point in the first place? Breating oxygen and taking up space?

          I am now fully satisfied that I have the answer I needed all along and I will no longer be afraid. It doesn’t mean that I won’t fight, on the contrary. What it means is that now, I know why. And I know what. Humanity doesn’t live in a vacuum. We are simply witnessing the end of “Me first. After me the big flood.”

          1. LeonovaBalletRusse

            Bravissimo! Let us know when you begin your revolt. The “dream” is done.

  17. Justicia

    Bloomberg busy burnishing Bernanke’s bum:

    Bernanke Gets 75% Approval From Investors in Global Poll

    [From the same Investors who thought Greenspan was god, no doubt.]

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/michael-hudson-on-greenspans-hackery.html

    You gotta love how far the bum-kissing reporter had to bend to spin this one:

    “More than two in five polled say the U.S. economy is improving. While that’s down from half who said that in January, it’s still markedly better than the euro region’s economy, which more than four in five describe as “deteriorating.” ”

    So, 3 in 5 of those polled did not think the U.S. economy improving, up from half who thought so in January. We’re not told how many polled described the U.S. economy as “deteriorating” but it was less than 80% (the number who said this about Europe).

  18. Ray Phenicie

    I don’t accept Hudson’s statement about taxes paying for social security-taxes do not pay for anything. I can agree that the SS taxes on employers and workers impoverished millions for nothing. Modern Money Theory shows that taxes only work to enforce a monetary unit across the interior of the sovereign’s borders (the U. S Government, in order to rule, has to dictate we all use Federal Reserve notes)and to decrease the spending ability of the private sector. That last use is almost never a good thing unless the economy is in inflationary mode and prices are going up to fast in relation to stocks of available goods and services. In the time frame from 1987 until today the world economy generally speaking, was not in that situation. The taxed citizens, at least the bottom 92%, who do most of the spending on consumer items, found themselves seeking debt services to obtain needed goods like housing, clothes, food, gasoline and cars. This debt servicing factor worked like an additional tax on top of the government tax.

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