I've never liked Allan Greenspan, and I've never liked the Federal Reserve. It seems to me that if someone is going to be in charge of something as important as interest rates that it should be the government, rather than a collection of private banks with little obligation towards the public. But our system sometimes empowers the unelected and the unaccountable, so in a little publicized move, President Clinton renominated Ronald Reagan's appointee Allan Greenspan as chair of the Federal Reserve System. Greenspan has bee considered something of a god for letting unemployment slip below 6% while keeping wages down (Greenspan believes that increased wages means increased prices for goods which means increased inflation which negates the increased wages).

The result? Wages haven't grown nearly fast enough in the 1990s. Sure people are becoming billionaires through investment but no one who works for a living is really getting rich. Notice the strikes in recent years: UPS, the near strike by the New York City transit workers, teacher's unions across the country, workers in the telecom industry, and the protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle all speak to the problem of low wages. If workers are unhappy because they're poorly paid, the chairman of the Federal Reserve should be held responsible and should not be reappointed.

We don't need inflation control through wage control we need inflation control through price control. It's not that paying workers more costs company's more money and leads to higher priced goods. It's that companies want to pay their executives terribly well, their employees terribly, and still reap the benefits. So if they have to pay their employees any more than terribly well they jack up the prices and make up the loss at the expense of the average consumer which includes the group of people they've had to pay more in the first place so, as you can see, corporations giveth and they taketh away and what does the Federal Reserve Board do?

Under Greenspan the Federal Reserve has managed the economy with enough panache that our corporations can get away with their thievery without damaging the economy too badly. I have never heard Allan Greenspan say any of the following:

1) American workers deserve better pay. They work long hours without adequate compensation.

2) All able Americans deserve good jobs.

3) All working Americans should have a comfortable standard of living.

4) The gap between executive and employee salaries is bad for business and for society.

5) Corporations could afford a cut in their profit margins to increase the minimum wage and offer across the board wages for their employees without raising the prices of their products. It's okay for a corporation to net a little less in order to adequately pay its employees.

6) Corporations should be run in the interests of the employees, not the shareholders.

It's okay that Greenspan hasn't said all of that. But he hasn't said any of it, not even once. How can you preside over the U.S. economy and not have the basic thought that our workers are getting stiffed, that they are not being well compensated for the hours and days and weeks and years which they devote to their work. Americans work harder and longer than other industrialized nations. The Germans and the French think we're stupid for taking less than a month off each year.

No one who doesn't think that the American worker deserves better than they are currently being offered should be considered to helm the Fed. Greenspan apparently thinks the American worker takes too much and that is a truly offensive notion.

Michael Maiello doesn't think we're entering a century which will sport an empowered labor movement.