Greenspan Dismantled, Finally!

Alan Greenspan gets the heave ho, from two critics who've done their research. You can do your own research, by just thinking back to 2008...Crooks & Liars:

Paul Krugman: … some people have asked me for reactions to this piece by Alan Greenspan (pdf) on how Obama’s activism is preventing economic recovery. Greenspan writes in characteristic form: other people may have their models, but he’s the wise oracle … Sorry, but he doesn’t get to do that anymore. 2011 is not 2006. Greenspan is an ex-Maestro; his reputation is pushing up the daisies, it’s gone to meet its maker, it’s joined the choir invisible. 

He’s no longer the Man Who Knows; he’s the man who presided over an economy careening to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — and who saw no evil, heard no evil, refused to do anything about subprime, insisted that derivatives made the financial system more stable, denied not only that there was a national housing bubble but that such a bubble was even possible … If he thinks he can still lecture us from his pedestal of wisdom, he’s wasting our time. 

You may remember when Rand Greenspan made a pretty shocking admission to Rep. Waxman

Waxman: Then where do you think you made a mistake?Greenspan: I made a mistake in the presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders...Waxman: Do you have any financial responsibility for the financial crisis? (On his ideology)Greenspan: ...to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not, and what I'm saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw.

Matt Taibbi's new book, Griftopia, on Greenspan:Greenspan met Rand in the early fifties after leaving Columbia, attending meetings at Rand's apartment with a circle of like-minded jerkoffs who called themselves by the ridiculous name of the Collective and who provided Greenspan the desired forum for social ascent. 

These meetings of The Collective would have an enormous impact on American culture by birthing a crackpot anti-theology dedicated to legitimizing self interest -- a grotesquerie called Objectivism that hit the Upper East Side cocktail party circuit hard in the fifties and sixties. 

It is important to spend some time of the seriously demented history of Objectivism, because this lunatic religion that should have choked to death in its sleep decades ago would go on, thanks in large part to Greenspan to provide the entire intellectual context for the financial disasters of the early 21st century.