If you don't know or remember exactly who Larry Summers is, or how he is one of the architects behind the world's major authoritarians, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, fear not; all will be revealed if you read on.
source: Wikimedia Commons
Lawrence Summers is, without doubt, one of the major architects of the neoliberal world economy that has disenfranchised anyone who doesn't own a vacation home; he has a long and troubled history in American politics, starting in the Reagan administration as a senior staff economist. He then became Treasury secretary under President Clinton and finally he went on to become President Obama's chief economic adviser during the 2008 / 2009 financial crisis. The common theme throughout this man's political career is neoliberalism, deregulation and market-fundamentalism. A paragraph from a 2013 article in "The Atlantic" summarizes this common thread as follows:
As a government official, he helped author a series of ultimately disastrous or wrongheaded policies, from his big deregulatory moves as a Clinton administration apparatchik to his too-tepid response to the Great Recession as Obama's chief economic adviser. Summers pushed a stimulus that was too meek, and, along with his chief ally, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he helped to ensure that millions of desperate mortgage-holders would stay underwater by failing to support a "cramdown" that would have allowed federal bankruptcy judges to have banks reduce mortgage balances, cut interest rates, and lengthen the terms of loans. At the same time, he supported every bailout of financial firms.
source: The Atlantic - SEPTEMBER 13, 2013
Two major episodes are left out in this paragraph though, the first being that he indeed started as a Republican under Reagan; the Reagan administration was the first to fully embrace the belief that "markets know best" and that "government isn't the solution but the problem". Together with Margaret Thatcher it was under Reagan that the neoliberal world economy we all suffer under today really took off. The second missing episode is that Summers was one of the chief architects of the "economical liberation" of Russia. Larry Summers is a former Harvard economics professor and was appointed Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs in 1993; Harvard, Summers and the Clinton administration were all essential to the implementation of neoliberal policies in Russia, which we now know have left the majority of Russian people worse off economically. Here's the introductory paragraph from a 1998 "The Nation" article called "The Harvard Boys Do Russia":
After seven years of economic “reform” financed by billions of dollars in U.S. and other Western aid, subsidized loans and rescheduled debt, the majority of Russian people find themselves worse off economically. The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and plundered Russia’s wealth.
source: The Nation - MAY 14, 1998
I've often said that Donald Trump isn't the problem, but that he's rather a symptom of the deeper problem which is the neoliberal world economy; he's just one of the many right wing authoritarian populist nationalists that have risen to power in recent decades. And Putin is the same, a product of the world economy shaped by people like Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and so on. But Larry Summers deserves a special mention, as he is one of the constant factors in this failed world-experiment and one of it's main architects starting in the 1980s. So, when you watch the below linked video on the news that Summers is now advising Joe Biden's campaign on how to jumpstart the economic recovery after the coronavirus crisis passes, you now fully understand why all progressives, left and right, are worried, and why leftist activists oppose this move with every fiber in their body.
In a joint statement, Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement announced they are launching a petition asking Biden to disavow Summers, who the groups noted has a long history of advocating for harmful economic policies and a record of bigoted statements.
source: Common Dreams - April 24, 2020
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