Banker elite Alan Greenspan is 90 and fabulously wealthy. Why he wants to cut your Social Security.

Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman, current hubby of Andrea Mitchell (Hillary Clinton’s talking head at NBC), and long-time member of the Trilateral Commission, has a big problem

Populism!

Al isn’t mad at the “pop” in pop-out-of-the-cake by some former girlfriend, like Barbara Walters. He sees a dangerous “pop”, the worst kind  – the potential revolt of what he might call the “vast unwashed multitude of the deplorable and nonredeemable.”

Google identifies the threat to Al this way:

At its root, populism is a belief in the power of regular people, and in their right to have control over their government rather than a small group of political insiders or a wealthy elite. The word populism comes from the Latin word for “people,” populus.

Al just spoke at a Washington D.C. shindig, sponsored by Stanford University and the University of Chicago. His theme was the usual technocratic arrogance that only the best people can decide how the rest of us should live. (He actually gets money for these talks, despite his record as a Fed economist.)

There was something ironic and deeply sad about this old man ranting about average voters knowing nothing. You might expect some humility from the “genius”, whose low interest rate policies brought on the global Great Recession of 2008 – 2011.

To this day, Al has never acknowledged that unbridled corporate cronyism, lies by big banks, and his allegiance to Ayn Randian theories of financially rewarding only the intellectual elites of society, have all combined with Al’s somewhat limited cognitive skills to destroy millions of families’ home values and jobs.

He has become the symbol of unrestricted trade, no taxes for the rich, slashing Social Security and Medicare, no minimum wage, no labor unions.

Al is worth about $10 million, which puts him in the top 1%.

At his address to the financial wizards, Al said that increased government spending on social security and healthcare is crowding out private investment and leading to slower economic growth. He moaned that neither presidential candidate was talking about reining in those expenditures.

“Nobody wants to discuss it” for fear of a political backlash, he said.

Al pretends that Social Security is not fully funded, because he knows that raising the wage cap on contributions would eliminate future shortfalls, especially combined with a growing economy, not the stagflation from Fed policies.

In a very strange tirade Greenspan traced the rise of populism in the U.S. all the way back to 1896, when William Jennings Bryan gave his “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic Party national convention, opposing the gold standard.

Al also said that the U.S. economic and political system may be undermined by Americans he called “crazies.”

Al wasn’t always what he is today. Back in the early 1940s at George Washington High in NYC, Al played clarinet and saxophone along with classmate Stan Getz. Most biographies also say he played briefly with the famed Woody Herman band.

In 2007 Al wrote what may be his epitaph:

To this day, the bathtub is where I get many of my best ideas. My assistants have gotten used to typing from drafts scrawled on damp yellow pads–a chore that got much easier once we found a kind of pen whose ink doesn’t run. Immersed in my bath, I’m as happy as Archimedes as I contemplate the world.

It’s safe to say that while some of Al’s ideas may have originated in the bathroom tub, more than a few of them probably emerged while sitting on his bathroom throne.