SCUMBAGS I HAVE KNOWN
THIS WEEK: ALAN GREENSCUM
By: Alan Stang
I first met Alan Greenspan in the Sixties. At the time, he ran a financial consulting company called Townsend Greenspan and was a Free Enterprise economist. He was also a disciple of Ayn Rand’s. Ayn, born in Tsarist Russia to a Jewish family, survived the Bolshevik Revolution, defected to the West, changed her name and became an atheist, migrated to Hollywood, where she became a screen writer, and later a novelist, and founded a school of thought called Objectivism.
A young man named Nathaniel Branden wrote a letter that impressed her, and eventually became her chief spokesman and interpreter as head of the Nathaniel Branden Institute in New York. At regular meetings of the Institute in the Roosevelt Hotel, Alan Greenspan offered a series of lectures on the Great Depression of 1929. In those lectures Greenspan brilliantly conveyed the teachings of Ludwig von Mises, the consummate genius of the Free Enterprise "Austrian school," and, with regard to the Depression, the findings of Mises disciple Professor Murray Rothbard.
Greenspan incisively skewered the Federal Reserve, showed how the Fed caused the Depression by expanding and then suddenly contracting the "money" supply, showed that the Fed prevented financial recovery by repeatedly bringing the economy to its knees, proved that paper "money" always will collapse and underlined the fact that gold and silver alone can be money. After these presentations, many of us in attendance stood speechless, dazed by the power and clarity of his insight. As I recall, Ayn Rand was often present, nodding with approval. So was Ludwig von Mises himself, at least once.
Next, we heard that Gerry Ford, appointed to the Presidency by the departing Richard "We are all Keynesians now" Nixon, had appointed Greenspan as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Need I add that there was considerable chortling among the Objectivists. Greenspan’s new job obviously meant that infinitely superior Objectivist ideas had won a foothold in Washington and now would begin to permeate the government. Ayn Herself was present in the unholy city when Greenspan was inducted, reveling at the sight. It was all happening as she had foretold.
Indeed, word now arrived that new Chairman Alan Greenspan had concocted a cure for inflation. Objectivists had expected no less and were generally enthralled. After all, how far wrong could you go if you subscribed to Ayn’s ideas? At the time, inflation was nowhere near as bad as it is today, but it was already a troubling problem. What was Greenspan’s cure for inflation?
It was called Whip Inflation Now (WIN). We would wear large buttons that said "Whip Inflation Now," or simply WIN. Those buttons would help combat Old Mr. Inflation, because he would see them and be afraid. The more buttons we wore, and the bigger they were, the more afraid he would be. The buttons would create public awareness that would shut inflation down. WIN kits turned up everywhere.
Another aspect of the Greenspan plan called for Americans to finish everything on their dinner plates. Because we were not doing that, inflation was getting worse. Indeed, there was even talk of teaching American women how to buy groceries. Your Intrepid Correspondent clearly recalls being unaware at the time, along with innumerable others, that American women are too stupid to buy groceries by themselves; the basis of the Greenspan scheme was that they are. According to Greenspanthink, they routinely buy the worst deals, the most expensive items on the shelves, with the predictable result that inflation is encouraged. In short, according to Greenspanthink, ignorant housewives cause inflation.
If memory serves, Ayn simply disappeared from the scene. Was she embarrassed? I don’t know. Did she revoke Greenspan’s status as an apostle? I recall thinking at the time that the inmates of Plan Nine From Outer Space, which many critics call the worst movie ever made, must have been holding him hostage, and that the man who thenceforth claimed to be Alan Greenspan was in fact a species of plant life, because there was no way the man who gave those lectures at NBI could have been the same man behind Whip Inflation Now.
But now here comes Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the very organization he condemned for causing the Great Depression, doing the same things he told us had caused it. By now, Ayn Rand was safely dead, another victim of the tobacco industry. Ayn had popularized the affectation of smoking cigarettes in long, black holders, and eventually turned up with lung cancer. One can only speculate about what she would have said of her disciple. Would she have read him out of the human race, as she did chief Objectivist spokesman and interpreter Nathaniel Branden?
To do so would have made her a two-time loser. For the whole, smelly story see Mrs. Branden’s revealing book, The Passion of Ayn Rand, and the movie of the same name. Along these lines, Barbara Branden apparently begged Ayn to urge her followers to stop smoking. Ayn refused. To do so would have made her a three-time loser, and it was philosophically inconceivable, let alone impossible, for the fountainhead of Objectivism to be wrong.
Because he was not Ayn Rand’s lover, and because she did not catch him in bed with still another, younger woman, Alan Greenscum is not in the movie, but he should be. As Fed Chairman, he has collaborated with his Trilateral Commission pals in Wall Street and the Clinton and Bush administrations (there is no basic difference), to create the biggest, speculative, financial bubble in the history of the world.
A putative Republican, he used it to re-elect Clinton in 1996, and of course to make billions for his Trilateral pals; which reminds me that I ran into Greenscum at a Republican National Convention and asked him about WIN, but Chairman Greenscum no longer was talking.
Now, the economy is starting to unravel. The stock market is tottering like a drunk. And Greenscum and Company are doing three things in a desperate attempt to save them: 1) He is lowering interest rates; he has already done that eleven times and it isn’t working. How much lower can they go? 2) He is expanding the "money" supply a couple or three trillion dollars a year, which isn’t working either, and is exactly what he denounced the Fed for doing in those lectures so many years ago. It is pushing the dollar toward demise, just as he warned it would. 3) Finally, he is persuading consumers to buy and borrow to save the system, just the opposite of what they should be doing to protect themselves. When real estate goes south, it will really get nasty.
Please remember that when the inevitable results of these machinations finally hit the fan, no man will be more responsible than Alan Greenscum, to whom even Presidents kowtow. Needless to say, most of this information and understanding is unavailable from the Prostitute National Press. Could one reason be the fact that Mrs. Alan Greenscum is network news correspondent Andrea Mitchell?
It is easy to dismiss Alan Greenscum as just another disgusting opportunist, but there is more here than just a putrid stench. Struggling to explain the Greenscum phenomenon, I cannot help but recall a conversation with Ayn Rand, in which I asked her a question about Ellsworth Tooey, the villain of The Fountainhead. I told her that in thought, in ideas, in methods and goals, even in appearance, Tooey reminded me strongly of Colonel Edward M. House. House would suggest a course of action so subtly to the man he had chosen to take it that later the man would think it his own. Tooey did something very similar. So, I asked Ayn Rand, "Is the character of Ellsworth Tooey in The Fountainhead based in some part on Colonel House?"
Ayn Rand looked up at me and replied, "Who is Colonel House?"
Thank God I was leaning against a wall when she said it, so I did not fall down, and was able to maintain some modicum of composure while I answered her question. She had never heard of one of the Twentieth Century’s most powerful members of the conspiracy for world government, the man who gave us the Federal Reserve, among other Marxist abominations, who lived in the White House with Woodrow Wilson and was his "alter ego."
There is something worse than ignorance. Belligerent ignorance. Know-it-all ignorance. Ayn pooh-poohed the possibility of conspiracy because she had not discovered it herself. She admitted its existence (she had to because she had testified against the Communists in Hollywood), but said it was not important. Had she admitted its power and influence, she would have had to admit that men like Robert Welch had been there long before her.
In short, she disregarded the Conspiracy, and Alan Greenscum, one of her top disciples, helps runs it. Are not these things closely related? In the language of Objectivism, Greenscum turns out to be a total second-hander, reminiscent of the foulest collectivists in her last novel, Atlas Shrugged.
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