They've been going down because, essentially, the economy shifted radically throughout the
world, starting in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of England and
Ronald Reagan was elected president here, claiming to defend the capital of the Reagan
Bush administration in its 12 years quadrupled American debt by slashing taxes on the upper
brackets while sharply increasing taxes on labor.
They increased it largely by having Allen Greenspan create the Greenspan Commission to
look at social security, pushing the myth that social security had to be funded out
of pre-saving.
American labor was essentially taxed 11 percent between itself and the employers to pay social
security and this vast increase in social security taxes was used to lend to the government
to provide it with enough money to slash taxes on the rich.
And that was Greenspan's ploy and he was rewarded by being made head of the Federal Reserve
for his actual hatred of labor and his desire that you had to reduce living standards in
order to increase the profits of capital.
When I was on Wall Street, Greenspan was hired as part of a study I was doing on the
balance of payments in the oil industry and one day my boss, John Deaver, came into my
office and said he really worried about Greenspan being a part of this report because he was
known as a hack that always gave his clients what they wanted instead of something actual
and so he gave me Greenspan's figures on depreciation of oil producing refinery assets in Europe
and asked me to find out where the faking is.
He couldn't believe that Greenspan by himself wouldn't have just faked the figures and it
took me about a week to figure out where the faking of the figures came out and that was
Greenspan had simply picked up depreciation rates relative to output from the United States
and projected them on to Europe.
So I went over and talked to his assistant Lucille Wu and she said it's all implicit,
all implicit and I confronted her with it and she said yes that's what we did so Greenspan
was indeed chopped off the study.
We met John Deaver and David Rockefeller and myself and I was told that Greenspan was such
a little bastard that if they fired him he'd hold a grudge against Chase Manhattan for
years and they told me to be the guy to give him the news that we couldn't use his statistics
on it and I was a 25 year old economist at the time and he hardly knew me at all so I
was the guy who subsequently became known as the man who fired Alan Greenspan.
Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders'
equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief.
This is not an issue of credit rating.
The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money.
Used Shelley as a laboratory for the neoliberal ideas at gunpoint that then were applauded
by Margaret Thatcher in England and by Ronald Reagan in the United States.
Was that too violent?
Are they going to shoot me?
No.
