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The Lies of Hiroshima
The Lies Of Hiroshima Are The Lies Of Today
By John Pilger
06/08/08 "ICH" -- - On the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, John Pilger describes the 'progression of lies' from the dust of that detonated city, to the wars of today - and the threatened attack on Iran.
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
www.johnpilger.com
The Secret History Of The Atomic Bomb
by Eustace C. Mullins
A NEW MISSION
When I returned to the United States, I knew1 had to unearth the sinister figures behind greatest of human catastrophes. It took many weeks of research to uncover what turned out to be the most far-reaching conspiracy of all time, the program of a few dedicated revolutionaries to seize control of the entire world, by inventing the powerful weapon ever unveiled.
The story begins in Germany. In the 1930s, Germany and Japan had a number of scientists icing on the development of nuclear fission. In both of these countries, their leaders sternly forbade them to continue their research. Adolf Hitler said he would never allow anyone in Germany to work to work on such an inhumane weapon.
The Emperor of Japan let his scientists know that he would never approve such a weapon. At that time the United States had no one working on nuclear fission. The disgruntled German scientists contacted friends in the United States, and were told that there was a possibility of government support for their work here. As Don Beyer tells these immigrants to the United States pushed their program. http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=39838
By John Pilger
06/08/08 "ICH" -- - On the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, John Pilger describes the 'progression of lies' from the dust of that detonated city, to the wars of today - and the threatened attack on Iran.
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
www.johnpilger.com
The Secret History Of The Atomic Bomb
by Eustace C. Mullins
A NEW MISSION
When I returned to the United States, I knew1 had to unearth the sinister figures behind greatest of human catastrophes. It took many weeks of research to uncover what turned out to be the most far-reaching conspiracy of all time, the program of a few dedicated revolutionaries to seize control of the entire world, by inventing the powerful weapon ever unveiled.
The story begins in Germany. In the 1930s, Germany and Japan had a number of scientists icing on the development of nuclear fission. In both of these countries, their leaders sternly forbade them to continue their research. Adolf Hitler said he would never allow anyone in Germany to work to work on such an inhumane weapon.
The Emperor of Japan let his scientists know that he would never approve such a weapon. At that time the United States had no one working on nuclear fission. The disgruntled German scientists contacted friends in the United States, and were told that there was a possibility of government support for their work here. As Don Beyer tells these immigrants to the United States pushed their program. http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=39838
Unfortunately for those in Hiroshima and later Nagasaki the Americans once again displayed their lack of morals and ethics, even in war time.
Alan Greenspan's Mea Culpa: The Torments of Contrition
By Frederic F. Clairmont
Global Research, October 27, 2008
I was stunned like many on hearing the news on the BBC at 22:00hrs on the 23 October that Greenspan had confessed in his lugubrious mea culpa to Congress that he was ‘shocked in disbelief’ by the sheer velocity and propagation of the demolition of the edifice of finance capitalism. His confession of contrition, whose transcript I have now read in its entirety, was not the act of a desperate shell-shocked shriveled creature that had seen the ravages wrought by his policies at the Federal Reserve, i.e. the central bank of the U S caste oligarchy. In those decades of public office, shuttling from Wall Street to Washington D C. as a transplant of Goldman Sachs, (the world’s largest investment bank) , he had deployed his exalted tenure for the collective enrichment of his discredited caste of financial cronies. Not to be excluded was his massively successful individual accumulation.
It was not fortuitous that these spasms of contrition transpired at a moment when the worlds’ stock markets , from New York to Tokyo , recorded triple digit declines . The rout of equity and commodity markets remains unstoppable. The despicable hedge funds in a state of disarray are selling (deleveraging is the ugly buzz word) every piece of office furniture they can grab to meet the payments of their lenders. Their paradisiacal days of short-selling and the carry-on trade and other unbridled speculative plunder of the big casino money machine have run into the mud. Even Federal backed government mortgages , hawked by blue-chip corporations, have joined the tumble; no banks, insurance companies, mutual and pension funds are immune from ruin; most of the quasi colonial so-called emergent markets are poised to default on their rocketing levels of debt; the scrambling of every rickety capitalist government to save its skin is on the top of the agenda.. In this cesspool of panic and collapse there is no haven for the bourgeois order to seek cover. Non-stop capital infusions (i.e. taxpayers money) by the manipulators of finance capital to the tune of trillions of dollars are impotent to resuscitate the semblance of a bygone era of normality. The dogmas and rotting institutional underpinnings of the bourgeois order that bamboozled many into believing that their creations were things of fixity and permanence have been irreversibly flung into the abyss of a deep black slump. What we are seeing in effect is the spectacle of the kingdom of swindledom run amuck.
Greenspan was the impresario of an El Dorado of incomparable pickings that would have made even Warren Hastings and the East India Company, and their subsequent emulators in occupied India, ( that escalated into the mass genocide in the subsequent century) appear like a bunch of miserable petty pickpockets. A theme that I elaborated in my researches on The Rise and Fall Economic Liberalism: The Making of the Economic Gulag.
His mea culpa is an act of immense historical significance, yet in perspective it is nothing but a morsel of trivial apologetics. The criminal tale of his abject confessions of the system’s delirium tremens told us nothing that we had not known before. What was startling, however, was that this death rattle came from a stricken soul that could no longer coexist with his burden of guilt. What we have witnessed is the unfolding of the personal tragedy of a sordidly bankrupt and corrupt human being who sees the approaching finality of finance capitalism and its failures as the system meandered from upheaval to upheaval during his reign.
His confessions came at that propitious moment when the world stock markets without exception were wallowing in the excrement of the most ignoble economic collapse that our planet has ever seen, easily surpassing in its horrors and intensity that of 1929. Trillions of dollars were scrubbed from the world’s panic stricken bourses in days and hours – a movement that shows no signs of abating . The revulsion that millions experienced on seeing this debacle on their television screens and reading the agonizing media headlines also demonstrated to the world that the savings and assets of tens of millions of working peoples – the creators of wealth – had been blatantly swindled at the throw of a gambler’s toss.
Greenspan was the criminal prime mover that abetted the lethal rise and rise of derivative markets presently topping $155 trillion dollars, almost four times the size of our planet’s wealth. The criminality of his policies was matched by his intellectual impoverishment perceived in his tortured lingo that “ the whole intellectual edifice collapsed in the summer of last year [ August 2007] because the data inputted (sic)into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria.”.
Stripped of its jargon this meant that sub-prime loans were chopped, diced and packaged into toxic mortgage-backed securities and other derivatives that were marketed at prodigious profits the world over. The trough was brimming. It was the grand extravaganza of capitalist internationalism. This gimcrack house of cards ignominiously crumbled as US borrowers defaulted on mortgage payments in droves, and as house prices slumped. Never mind that his utterance is ambiguous – markets thrive on ambiguity and double talk. Of which Greenspan is an unrivaled practitioner.
Note the conjuror’s hand of this financial swindler; it is deemed an intellectual edifice. We are sedulously invited to believe that we are not dealing with the pitiless world of class power and exploitation. What transpired in the markets was all an immense error of the intellect. Capitalism’s destructive convulsion generated by the juggernaut of capital itself is thus reduced to a crisis of the intellect. The swindlers that hawked these death-dealing derivatives do not really exist. It is a fantasy. All of this was nothing more than an intellectual shortfall. This brings us to the pivotal issue: capitalism is not an exploitative engine; there is nothing within it that is engineered to exploit any one. It transcends social classes. Competitive markets and the law of supply and demand ensure that there are neither winners or losers. Markets are thus the grand equalizers. Capitalism and the market forces through which it functions thus becomes the supreme expression of democratic choice ; its raison d’etre is rooted in the infallible concatenation of social change. All that matters, as Greenspan teaches, is that we were misguided by the wrong models.. In sum, by the powers of intellect that were fleetingly irrational.
Listen again to this bit of sanctimonious babbling that reveals his propensity for the soothing nostrum of models. “ I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works. That’s precisely the reason I was shocked…I still do not fully understand why it happened, and obviously to the extent that I figure where it happened and why, I will change my views.” It would not be a waste of our time to remind him that his dogmas , like his persona, have already been torn to shreds. In much the same manner as the shattered fortunes of his political master in the White House he served so obsequiously.
No doubt by the choice of the appropriate model he means the selection of the sharpest butcher’s knife. To be sure, Greenspan’s cold blooded policies were deliberately designed to enrich a specific parasitical class, knowing full well that prices do not soar infinitely into the celestial spheres.; ultimately their descent is precipitous. The boom is metamorphosed into a bubble and the bubble implodes into a bust. The rich and the mega rich would not be affected by what he designates as the Tsunami.
The world’s biggest bubble had burst in August 2007. And its horrendous reverberations on the lives of millions who had been bulldozed out of their homes – the American Dream - were merely one facet of capital’s self-inflicted agony. His maudlin prattle unmasks, however, the extent of his impotence and indubitably, I daresay, the magnitude of the criminality of international capitalism in its period of irreversible putrescence. This is what Saramago, the combative Nobel prize laureate, no doubt means when he trenchantly said that the crash , and the ensuing economic and social holocaust that trailed in its wake, is one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever recorded.
It is well to let Greenspan, now wriggling in his state of apoplexy, babble on: “Those of us who have who looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity – myself especially – are now a state of shocked disbelief”. Why should he be shocked? He has lost nothing but his wretched illusions. His fortunes are unimpaired. His officially estimated net worth is $15 billion , and presumably that does not include his treasure ensconced in Caribbean tax havens and of which he is one of its most ferocious protagonists. Those who are traumatized to the marrow are the workers in Pittsburg and Detroit and Cleveland and the nation’s industrial heartland now transmogrified into a toxic wasteland. On this misery is superimposed the outsourcing of millions of jobs.
During his stewardship the soaring inequalities that his caste and his policies spawned had surpassed those of the Gilded Age [1890-1914], and the abysmally corrupt regimes of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover in the twenties. As for his bellicose support for the $3 trillion colonial war in Mesopotamia comment is superfluous. As the once sanctified apparatchik of world money and credit markets he framed monetary and fiscal policy that enriched the cronies of his irredeemably debased caste oligarchy. He did what his class interests dictated he should have done. In this respect, his ideology and his policies were flawlessly meshed.
Greenspan enshrined the reality and aspirational drives of the ruling caste oligarchy in The Fortune 500. He remains its prime exemplar. Capital must never be understood as an impersonal force; it is embedded in the complex workings of accumulation. Here was the divinity worshipped by the profiteers of the world’s money engines in every niche and cranny of big-moneyed finance the world over for decades; the paltriest of his pronouncements were sifted and scrutinized , as in the mutterings of the Delphic Oracle, for the rich offerings they were assumed to possess.
He incarnated the triumphalism of neo-liberalism,; he extolled the intoxicating magic of the market place, the glories of privatization, the Washington consensus, the conquests and ruthless pillage of foreign markets masquerading under the innocuous alibi of globalization whose ultimate quest, as Greenspan sees it, is the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. The American economy that he presided was dependent however on the world’s savings. By its very nature this jerry-built structure proved ephemeral, jacked up by borrowed money and borrowed time.
The driving force of imperialism and the laws of its causality found no home in his desiccated ideological apparatus. He was at once a master of corporate capitalism that had amassed his fortune in Goldman Sachs subsequently catapulting his carcass to the highest reaches of the corporate Gulag’s state apparatus where his thrust for personal enrichment sustained its remorseless strides. In his view, the goals of the public and private sectors could not be grasped as autonomous entities; they were interpenetrative and his ideological praxis confirmed it.
I shall say no more at this juncture but let me add, in conclusion, that we must be grateful for the trivia that he has bequeathed us. A sewer needs no advertisement and the personal class trajectory of his advance lucidly exemplifies this truth. His tearful contrition delivered in that Sanctum Sanctorum of capital’s entrenched power has served to smash the foundations of the empire’s ruling class economics, preached by such servile sycophants as Samuelson and his tribe of neo-liberals. His mumblings in the sanctuary of the caste oligarchy have undermined the institutional foundations of corporate capitalism and its works. His mea culpa was not part of this design. Yet irrespective of the forces that impelled him to perform his act of contrition we must render him our thanks infinite.
Frederic F. Clairmont is a prominent Canadian academic who for many years was a permanent senior economics affairs officer at the United Nations Economics Commission for Africa and the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
He taught at the University of Kings College and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. His classic work is The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism and his latest book is: Cuba and Venezuela: The Nemeses of Imperialism published by Citizens International in Penang, Malaysia. He is a a frequent contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique and The Economic and Political Weekly.
By Frederic F. Clairmont
Global Research, October 27, 2008
I was stunned like many on hearing the news on the BBC at 22:00hrs on the 23 October that Greenspan had confessed in his lugubrious mea culpa to Congress that he was ‘shocked in disbelief’ by the sheer velocity and propagation of the demolition of the edifice of finance capitalism. His confession of contrition, whose transcript I have now read in its entirety, was not the act of a desperate shell-shocked shriveled creature that had seen the ravages wrought by his policies at the Federal Reserve, i.e. the central bank of the U S caste oligarchy. In those decades of public office, shuttling from Wall Street to Washington D C. as a transplant of Goldman Sachs, (the world’s largest investment bank) , he had deployed his exalted tenure for the collective enrichment of his discredited caste of financial cronies. Not to be excluded was his massively successful individual accumulation.
It was not fortuitous that these spasms of contrition transpired at a moment when the worlds’ stock markets , from New York to Tokyo , recorded triple digit declines . The rout of equity and commodity markets remains unstoppable. The despicable hedge funds in a state of disarray are selling (deleveraging is the ugly buzz word) every piece of office furniture they can grab to meet the payments of their lenders. Their paradisiacal days of short-selling and the carry-on trade and other unbridled speculative plunder of the big casino money machine have run into the mud. Even Federal backed government mortgages , hawked by blue-chip corporations, have joined the tumble; no banks, insurance companies, mutual and pension funds are immune from ruin; most of the quasi colonial so-called emergent markets are poised to default on their rocketing levels of debt; the scrambling of every rickety capitalist government to save its skin is on the top of the agenda.. In this cesspool of panic and collapse there is no haven for the bourgeois order to seek cover. Non-stop capital infusions (i.e. taxpayers money) by the manipulators of finance capital to the tune of trillions of dollars are impotent to resuscitate the semblance of a bygone era of normality. The dogmas and rotting institutional underpinnings of the bourgeois order that bamboozled many into believing that their creations were things of fixity and permanence have been irreversibly flung into the abyss of a deep black slump. What we are seeing in effect is the spectacle of the kingdom of swindledom run amuck.
Greenspan was the impresario of an El Dorado of incomparable pickings that would have made even Warren Hastings and the East India Company, and their subsequent emulators in occupied India, ( that escalated into the mass genocide in the subsequent century) appear like a bunch of miserable petty pickpockets. A theme that I elaborated in my researches on The Rise and Fall Economic Liberalism: The Making of the Economic Gulag.
His mea culpa is an act of immense historical significance, yet in perspective it is nothing but a morsel of trivial apologetics. The criminal tale of his abject confessions of the system’s delirium tremens told us nothing that we had not known before. What was startling, however, was that this death rattle came from a stricken soul that could no longer coexist with his burden of guilt. What we have witnessed is the unfolding of the personal tragedy of a sordidly bankrupt and corrupt human being who sees the approaching finality of finance capitalism and its failures as the system meandered from upheaval to upheaval during his reign.
His confessions came at that propitious moment when the world stock markets without exception were wallowing in the excrement of the most ignoble economic collapse that our planet has ever seen, easily surpassing in its horrors and intensity that of 1929. Trillions of dollars were scrubbed from the world’s panic stricken bourses in days and hours – a movement that shows no signs of abating . The revulsion that millions experienced on seeing this debacle on their television screens and reading the agonizing media headlines also demonstrated to the world that the savings and assets of tens of millions of working peoples – the creators of wealth – had been blatantly swindled at the throw of a gambler’s toss.
Greenspan was the criminal prime mover that abetted the lethal rise and rise of derivative markets presently topping $155 trillion dollars, almost four times the size of our planet’s wealth. The criminality of his policies was matched by his intellectual impoverishment perceived in his tortured lingo that “ the whole intellectual edifice collapsed in the summer of last year [ August 2007] because the data inputted (sic)into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria.”.
Stripped of its jargon this meant that sub-prime loans were chopped, diced and packaged into toxic mortgage-backed securities and other derivatives that were marketed at prodigious profits the world over. The trough was brimming. It was the grand extravaganza of capitalist internationalism. This gimcrack house of cards ignominiously crumbled as US borrowers defaulted on mortgage payments in droves, and as house prices slumped. Never mind that his utterance is ambiguous – markets thrive on ambiguity and double talk. Of which Greenspan is an unrivaled practitioner.
Note the conjuror’s hand of this financial swindler; it is deemed an intellectual edifice. We are sedulously invited to believe that we are not dealing with the pitiless world of class power and exploitation. What transpired in the markets was all an immense error of the intellect. Capitalism’s destructive convulsion generated by the juggernaut of capital itself is thus reduced to a crisis of the intellect. The swindlers that hawked these death-dealing derivatives do not really exist. It is a fantasy. All of this was nothing more than an intellectual shortfall. This brings us to the pivotal issue: capitalism is not an exploitative engine; there is nothing within it that is engineered to exploit any one. It transcends social classes. Competitive markets and the law of supply and demand ensure that there are neither winners or losers. Markets are thus the grand equalizers. Capitalism and the market forces through which it functions thus becomes the supreme expression of democratic choice ; its raison d’etre is rooted in the infallible concatenation of social change. All that matters, as Greenspan teaches, is that we were misguided by the wrong models.. In sum, by the powers of intellect that were fleetingly irrational.
Listen again to this bit of sanctimonious babbling that reveals his propensity for the soothing nostrum of models. “ I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works. That’s precisely the reason I was shocked…I still do not fully understand why it happened, and obviously to the extent that I figure where it happened and why, I will change my views.” It would not be a waste of our time to remind him that his dogmas , like his persona, have already been torn to shreds. In much the same manner as the shattered fortunes of his political master in the White House he served so obsequiously.
No doubt by the choice of the appropriate model he means the selection of the sharpest butcher’s knife. To be sure, Greenspan’s cold blooded policies were deliberately designed to enrich a specific parasitical class, knowing full well that prices do not soar infinitely into the celestial spheres.; ultimately their descent is precipitous. The boom is metamorphosed into a bubble and the bubble implodes into a bust. The rich and the mega rich would not be affected by what he designates as the Tsunami.
The world’s biggest bubble had burst in August 2007. And its horrendous reverberations on the lives of millions who had been bulldozed out of their homes – the American Dream - were merely one facet of capital’s self-inflicted agony. His maudlin prattle unmasks, however, the extent of his impotence and indubitably, I daresay, the magnitude of the criminality of international capitalism in its period of irreversible putrescence. This is what Saramago, the combative Nobel prize laureate, no doubt means when he trenchantly said that the crash , and the ensuing economic and social holocaust that trailed in its wake, is one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever recorded.
It is well to let Greenspan, now wriggling in his state of apoplexy, babble on: “Those of us who have who looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity – myself especially – are now a state of shocked disbelief”. Why should he be shocked? He has lost nothing but his wretched illusions. His fortunes are unimpaired. His officially estimated net worth is $15 billion , and presumably that does not include his treasure ensconced in Caribbean tax havens and of which he is one of its most ferocious protagonists. Those who are traumatized to the marrow are the workers in Pittsburg and Detroit and Cleveland and the nation’s industrial heartland now transmogrified into a toxic wasteland. On this misery is superimposed the outsourcing of millions of jobs.
During his stewardship the soaring inequalities that his caste and his policies spawned had surpassed those of the Gilded Age [1890-1914], and the abysmally corrupt regimes of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover in the twenties. As for his bellicose support for the $3 trillion colonial war in Mesopotamia comment is superfluous. As the once sanctified apparatchik of world money and credit markets he framed monetary and fiscal policy that enriched the cronies of his irredeemably debased caste oligarchy. He did what his class interests dictated he should have done. In this respect, his ideology and his policies were flawlessly meshed.
Greenspan enshrined the reality and aspirational drives of the ruling caste oligarchy in The Fortune 500. He remains its prime exemplar. Capital must never be understood as an impersonal force; it is embedded in the complex workings of accumulation. Here was the divinity worshipped by the profiteers of the world’s money engines in every niche and cranny of big-moneyed finance the world over for decades; the paltriest of his pronouncements were sifted and scrutinized , as in the mutterings of the Delphic Oracle, for the rich offerings they were assumed to possess.
He incarnated the triumphalism of neo-liberalism,; he extolled the intoxicating magic of the market place, the glories of privatization, the Washington consensus, the conquests and ruthless pillage of foreign markets masquerading under the innocuous alibi of globalization whose ultimate quest, as Greenspan sees it, is the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. The American economy that he presided was dependent however on the world’s savings. By its very nature this jerry-built structure proved ephemeral, jacked up by borrowed money and borrowed time.
The driving force of imperialism and the laws of its causality found no home in his desiccated ideological apparatus. He was at once a master of corporate capitalism that had amassed his fortune in Goldman Sachs subsequently catapulting his carcass to the highest reaches of the corporate Gulag’s state apparatus where his thrust for personal enrichment sustained its remorseless strides. In his view, the goals of the public and private sectors could not be grasped as autonomous entities; they were interpenetrative and his ideological praxis confirmed it.
I shall say no more at this juncture but let me add, in conclusion, that we must be grateful for the trivia that he has bequeathed us. A sewer needs no advertisement and the personal class trajectory of his advance lucidly exemplifies this truth. His tearful contrition delivered in that Sanctum Sanctorum of capital’s entrenched power has served to smash the foundations of the empire’s ruling class economics, preached by such servile sycophants as Samuelson and his tribe of neo-liberals. His mumblings in the sanctuary of the caste oligarchy have undermined the institutional foundations of corporate capitalism and its works. His mea culpa was not part of this design. Yet irrespective of the forces that impelled him to perform his act of contrition we must render him our thanks infinite.
Frederic F. Clairmont is a prominent Canadian academic who for many years was a permanent senior economics affairs officer at the United Nations Economics Commission for Africa and the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
He taught at the University of Kings College and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. His classic work is The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism and his latest book is: Cuba and Venezuela: The Nemeses of Imperialism published by Citizens International in Penang, Malaysia. He is a a frequent contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique and The Economic and Political Weekly.