Tapsearch Com EditorGreenspan from the trenches (LINK)
December 17th 2007 21:10
Bizarre Politics Reports:
Alan Greenspan from the Trenches
I read Alan Greenspan's Age of Turbulence at the same time I read a new book about Mother Theresa. This perspective tells me the trickle down economy doesn't trickle. Workers have no voice in the process of Globalization and Free Trade and workers are just units of work outside of any discussions relating to human dignity, the common good and societies. Greenspan uses Adam Smith in his defense of the Free Market system but Adam Smith held labor as the core of societies. Smith held labor as something sacred. Labor is the very thing that is sacrificed on the altar of the Globalist Free Traders. Owners and workers are separated from each other with investments depending on this separation. It should also be noted that Adam Smith died in 1790 and knew very little about the industrial revolution that was still to come. His comparisons were primarily based on mercantile ventures. In present times, it is obvious the working poor retail level class need government and private assistance to survive. They are running in place with no where to go upward. They replaced a production workers middle class that died with the advent of Free Trade and Globalization.
My own conclusions come from the trenches being raised in a small food business and working in several factories while attending college full time. I found a vast void between the factory floors and the college class rooms especially when it comes to economics. Economists call an economy good or bad based on measurements that do not stand the tests of the streets where everything is happening. In recent times, as exemplied by the Clinton years, everything depends on personal interpretation without any real standards fo judgment. Very few took Clinton to task when he said everything depends on what your own definition of "is" is. This was spoken in the context of his conduct in office but it can also be applied to most everything else in our times. People like Alan Greenspan and Thomas Friedman from the New York Times do the same when it come to economics.
Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans exposed a silent depression and a vast underclass in the USA outside of any economic context related to the measurements Greenspan and others used in the labeling of a "good economy".
In his book, Greenspan uses the example of New Harmony, a workers' community started by Robert Owens in the early 1880s to show how utopian concepts do not work. He describes it as a failure and why Free Market economies accomodate many different approaches and cultures while moral righteous approaches are too limited to adapt to human nature. Robert Owens contested Adam Smith's theories. He believed laissez-faire by its nature would lead to poverty and disease. ( When you look around the world today, it proves he was right. His communual experiment lasted only a few years and disolved into various factions. I was assigned New Harmony as my topical paper as a history major in college. Being from a small business background and factory work, I disliked the subject from the beginning. Utopian experiments have short life spans. Why Greenspan picked this example is beyond me in his defense of the Free Market economies. New Harmony was just a small experiment and had just attracted a few people compared to the giant corporations of our times that went down the drain quickly.
Several of the corporations where I worked were much larger in scope than New Harmony and none have survived. They all had different corporate personalities. Globalization and Free Trade squashed hundreds if not thousands of these large companies as if they were just tiny bugs. Greenspan never talks about things like this. He does not say anything about the most massive dislocation of jobs in U.S. history including the Great Depression. Millions have lost their jobs in the past twenty years and Greenspan does not account for these losses as if they never existed. If he did, he probably would explain it by an evolution of technology. However, the industrial revolution is not over. It is as strong as ever. The only difference is the location of where the products are produced. Free Trade is all about moving production from place to place for the sake of cheap labor.
The counter culture of Greenspan theories has been successful with the Catholic Workers founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin surving more than a hundred years. Economics and the workday is a core of their focus. Catholic Workers are active across the USA and in many countries in the world. They believed in decentralized societies in contrast with the bigness centralized government, industry, education, health care and agriculture. They encourage famil farms, rural and urban land trusts, workers ownership and management of small factories - an unmentionable in Greenspan's view of the world -, homesteading projects, food, housing and other cooperatives - any effort in which money can one more become merely a medium of exchange, and human beings are no longer commodities as they are with Free Trade and Globalization.
( Greenspan from the trenches will continue - see next post - Greenspan does not even use or have the term Free Enterprise in his index of his book. )
My own conclusions come from the trenches being raised in a small food business and working in several factories while attending college full time. I found a vast void between the factory floors and the college class rooms especially when it comes to economics. Economists call an economy good or bad based on measurements that do not stand the tests of the streets where everything is happening. In recent times, as exemplied by the Clinton years, everything depends on personal interpretation without any real standards fo judgment. Very few took Clinton to task when he said everything depends on what your own definition of "is" is. This was spoken in the context of his conduct in office but it can also be applied to most everything else in our times. People like Alan Greenspan and Thomas Friedman from the New York Times do the same when it come to economics.
Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans exposed a silent depression and a vast underclass in the USA outside of any economic context related to the measurements Greenspan and others used in the labeling of a "good economy".
In his book, Greenspan uses the example of New Harmony, a workers' community started by Robert Owens in the early 1880s to show how utopian concepts do not work. He describes it as a failure and why Free Market economies accomodate many different approaches and cultures while moral righteous approaches are too limited to adapt to human nature. Robert Owens contested Adam Smith's theories. He believed laissez-faire by its nature would lead to poverty and disease. ( When you look around the world today, it proves he was right. His communual experiment lasted only a few years and disolved into various factions. I was assigned New Harmony as my topical paper as a history major in college. Being from a small business background and factory work, I disliked the subject from the beginning. Utopian experiments have short life spans. Why Greenspan picked this example is beyond me in his defense of the Free Market economies. New Harmony was just a small experiment and had just attracted a few people compared to the giant corporations of our times that went down the drain quickly.
Several of the corporations where I worked were much larger in scope than New Harmony and none have survived. They all had different corporate personalities. Globalization and Free Trade squashed hundreds if not thousands of these large companies as if they were just tiny bugs. Greenspan never talks about things like this. He does not say anything about the most massive dislocation of jobs in U.S. history including the Great Depression. Millions have lost their jobs in the past twenty years and Greenspan does not account for these losses as if they never existed. If he did, he probably would explain it by an evolution of technology. However, the industrial revolution is not over. It is as strong as ever. The only difference is the location of where the products are produced. Free Trade is all about moving production from place to place for the sake of cheap labor.
The counter culture of Greenspan theories has been successful with the Catholic Workers founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin surving more than a hundred years. Economics and the workday is a core of their focus. Catholic Workers are active across the USA and in many countries in the world. They believed in decentralized societies in contrast with the bigness centralized government, industry, education, health care and agriculture. They encourage famil farms, rural and urban land trusts, workers ownership and management of small factories - an unmentionable in Greenspan's view of the world -, homesteading projects, food, housing and other cooperatives - any effort in which money can one more become merely a medium of exchange, and human beings are no longer commodities as they are with Free Trade and Globalization.
( Greenspan from the trenches will continue - see next post - Greenspan does not even use or have the term Free Enterprise in his index of his book. )
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