Summers
It would be challenging to find a Democratic Party figure I loathe more than Larry Summers. There are so many reasons. Here’s one more:
Prior to joining the Obama administration as the director of the White House National Economic Council, Larry Summers faced a barrage of criticism after it was exposed that he received hundreds of thousands of dollars from major banks for a series of speeches he gave in in 2008. Despite this conflict of interest, the administration expressed full confidence in Summers’ role as a chief economic adviser to President Obama, telling the public that he was primarily interested in crafting economic policies that help “families across America.”
Summers has since left the administration, and is once again on the corporate speaking circuit. Last June, he appeared at the 2011 World BPO/ITO (Business Process Outsourcing/Information Technology Outsourcing) Forum, which took place in Jersey City, New Jersey. The Forum featured participation, attendance, and/or lectures from executives from many of the world’s top corporations — including AT&T, Pfizer, Coca Cola, Home Depot, and Morgan Stanley — in a number of meetings and presentations about outsourcing labor services.
….
With the unemployment rate at 9.4 percent, Summers compared critics of the outsourcing of American jobs to “luddites who took axes to machinery early in England’s industrial revolution.” Unfortunately, the full of text of Summers’ remarks is mysteriously missing from the website — particularly odd given the fact that most of the other keynotes are posted online.
Of course, Summers doesn’t understand what the Luddites actually believed in any more than the average person on the street, but that’s hardly surprising. Equally unsurprising is his pompous dismissal of the United States’ millions of unemployed people who might hesitate at a global labor policy that has enriched the world’s 0.1% at the expense of the rest of us.
But I’ll tell you, it sure is inspiring to have a man with views so sympathetic to working-class people as the head of President Obama’s White House National Economic Council. If Summers does get appointed to head the World Bank, well, for working-class Americans happy days are here again! And the world too, since this is a man who once signed a memo saying “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” Your 2012 Democratic Party!!!!
In conclusion, girls are dumb.
And Andrei Shleifer is as honest as the day is long.
IMHO the Shleifer thing was much worse than the girls are dumb. And an incident where he claimed the divest-from-Israel folks at Harvard were closet anti-Semites was also worse.
<emWhile those promoting “free trade” speak for the bankers, financiers and more globally competitive sections of capital, there is a definite constituency for protectionism among less competitive industries. The whipping up of economic nationalism also serves a vital ideological function in diverting the anger of working people over job losses and the precipitous decline in living standards outwards rather than at the real source of the crisis—the profit system itself.
</emThose who push this reactionary poison in the working class are the trade unions and their various middle class radical allies. Far from defending jobs and conditions, economic nationalism goes hand-in-hand with the continuing impoverishment of working people. Whether in the US, Europe or any other country, the same union bureaucrats who have presided over the decimation of manufacturing industry over the past three decades now insist on the further sacrifice of wages and conditions as part of the protectionist packages to defend American or European companies…
http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/pers-j30.shtml
Seems like the unions are the ones being decimated for the last 30 years, starting w/Reagan’s attack on the FAA union. The economy was strongest when unions were strongest, and much, much better for the working class.
Dude, you do not want to argue with that guy.
Now here’s the Summers of our discontent, making inglorious winter because he’s a smug corporatist prick.
PS thanks for standing up for the sons of Ned Ludd. In a world with a sane view of the capitalist/worker balance they would be remembered as, at worst, vigilantes doing wrong in a just cause, not as backwards bumpkins resisting the virtuous march of progress.
Obligatory.
“Having a profound unwillingness to give up elements of faith to an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing” is such a useful and necessary strain of political discourse. Of course it never gets articulated, except to be demonized.
Summers is the Democrat’s version of Greenspan.
I thought that was Rubin. Summers is to big a jackass to have any followers.
Sort of. Except Clinton rehired Greenspan, so I kinda think of Greenspan as the bipartisan version of Greenspan.
Aren’t you the guy who refuses to use self check-out lanes because they “destroy jobs”? That sounds pretty damn Luddite to me.
It would be challenging to find a Democratic Party figure I loathe more than Larry Summers.
I just knew there we had some common ground. Summers prefers socialism and thinks it creates wealth.
Good luck with that, Larry!
You know, if you’re going to post here and make some claim about “socialism”, it behooves you to look the word up in a freaking dictionary, you dipshit.
Summers prefers socialism
I’ll have what he’s smoking.
I think it is toxic and kills brain cells. It would have to for anyone to believe that statement.
But isn’t that what many smoked intoxicants do?
While he might be using a mild hallucinagen, it seems to destroy inhibitions against self-humiliation, much like alcohol, only worse.
I really had strychnine or arsenic level toxic in mind, rather than alcohol or opium level.
My impression of the recent Ron Suskind book on Obama (I got 2/3 of the way through) is that Geithner makes Summers look good. Which is really saying something about Geithner.
They are two of the biggest issues I have with Obama.
Perhaps I’m remembering wrong, but was Summers’ point in making the statement about dumping waste in poor countries that purely economic arguments aren’t enough when considering policy?
Maybe, but in any case, he’s only right about the logic being impeccable if you use neo-classical orthodoxy that pretends politics has no place in economics and place no price on externalities — ie economics that has no relation tot he real world
I thought it was that purely economic arguments deserve more consideration. To wit, in this case, both the US and the dump-ee country gained by us sending our garbage there. (They gained because we pay them.)
So actually pretty much the opposite of what you’re saying.
Found it.
It is indeed a straightforward endorsement.
Maybe Mark Penn is more loathsome?
Pat Caddell?
The main one being that, since he understands economics, pretty much all of your ideas look stupid?
“Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization — of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad.
But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.”
Oh, wait; that’s not Summers; that’s lefty hero Paul Krugman.
LOL. Right. Like when he was among the biggest fans of Greenspan, pre-crash.
The stupid, it burns…
It pains me to have to repeat this over and over: Krugman is not now, nor has he ever been, a leftist of any kind. He’s a pretty middle-of-the-road economist; he’s fulminated against rent control and in favor of globalization.
The US media is so right-skewed that the center is now mistaken for Marxism.
In fairness, I think Krugman has moved slightly left over time.
I think he’s responded to evidence and to crazy people being crazy.
I agree.
I don’t, however, think that makes him more left-wing.
It’s made me more left wing. Why not him too?
Plus, as far as his economic work goes, I don’t think anything he would have prescribed would have led to much different circumstances than we are in today.
I didn’t say he was a leftist; I said he was a “lefty hero.” Perhaps ambiguous; I mean hero to the left, not that he himself was left.
The U.S. media is so left-skewed that socialism is now mistaken for the center.
In any case, I just wanted to point out, by quoting someone who couldn’t possibly be criticized as a right-wing hack (as Loomis is wont to do with everyone right of Fidel Castro) how dumb Loomis’s ideas about trade really are.
Just because Honorable Bob uses “socialism” to mean “things I don’t like,” you’re not obliged to follow suit.
Yes he is.
The ideas expressed in the post aren’t “dumb”. There are many economists who have a similar (albeit more fleshed out) take. They have been marginalized. Not because they are wrong –but because their views do not serve the purposes of the ruling elite.
This. In a sane world, Krugman and DeLong would be recognized as the technocratic conservatives that they fundamentally are (DeLong more than Krugman). An unwillingness to watch the world burn is now the “liberal” position.
More on Krugman and sweatshops.
Why must Krugman be the final word on all matters economic?
Milton Friedman wanted guaranteed income for everybody. I believe up to the poverty line.
You down with that, David? Or does liking some things a person says not result in an obligation to like everything that person says?
The main one being that, since he understands economics, pretty much all of your ideas look stupid?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Summers understands economics about as well as he understands women in science.
Go Google it, I can’t be bothered bringing your neanderthal ass up to speed.
The main one being that, since he understands economics, pretty much all of your ideas look stupid?
Proving once again that Neiporent does not understand anything about economics (or much of anything else), as his ideas on the subject are not merely stupid, but also insane. By the way, all the data say Keynes was right and your beloved Austrians were talking out their asses.
no one ever bothered asking mr. summers which “families across America.” he intended his economic policies to work for. had someone done so, the seeming “mystery” behind his ineptness would have immediately been cleared up: it was the families of the 1%.
From Malibu to Westport.
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