MAJOR NEWS: Greenspan, writing about the corporate accounting scandals, said: "There's been too much gaming of the system until it is broke. Capitalism is not working! There has been a corrupting of the system of capitalism."
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The book also quotes from a lengthy memo in February 2002, from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to O'Neill and a subsequent meeting at the Treasury.
Greenspan, writing about the corporate accounting scandals, said: "There's been too much gaming of the system until it is broke. Capitalism is not working! There has been a corrupting of the system of capitalism."
But O'Neill and Greenspan, opposed by Lawrence B. Lindsey, then the White House's top economic adviser, lost their bid to get more stringent corporate reforms. Lindsey suggested "there's always the option of doing nothing," the book says.
O'Neill suggests that he and other moderates in the administration -- Christine Todd Whitman, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- "may have been there, in large part, as cover." On the decision to back away from a strong plan to fight global warming, O'Neill said the decision was cynically grounded on the notion that "the [conservative political] base likes this, and who the hell knows anyway?"
Cheney, who brought O'Neill to Bush's attention, fired him after O'Neill objected to a third round of tax cuts. After telling O'Neill he was being dismissed, Cheney reportedly asked O'Neill to say it was his own decision to step down.
"I'm too old to begin telling lies now," O'Neill says he told Cheney. O'Neill says some of his former colleagues "are nasty and they have a long memory."
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