Motives of those in power are always difficult to guess (and impossible to know for cetain), and for that reason one cannot (except very speculatively) ground an analysis on such guesses. But I'll speculate a bit, for what it is worth.
I believe Doug and others have argued that the period from 1929 to 1975 was an "aberration" in the hisotry of capitalism, both in respec to the depth of the depression and the height of the boom that followd, and that neither is apt to be repeated (at last soon). We are returnng to the conditions of the 19th century: which for the mass of the population means a sort of permanent economic hardship, only occasionally somewhat alleviated by short booms. (I probably don't have this quite right, but I presume someone will correct me.) Now suppose that something like this is the 'private' analysis arrived at by high-level members of the elite. Greenspan's argtument, then, presupposes that things are going to be fairly grim for largemasses of the population, and that it is impossible and for various reasons undesirable to attempt to change those expected conditions. After all, neither gorvernments nor capitalists made sucheffors in the 19th-c. And of course the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, and the War on Terrorism have allowed the building up of a quite efficient repressive machinery to control undesirable side-effects of such a permanent state of bad times. Within a context something like that, is Greenspan and idiot? Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
