Destroyer of masses feeds richer: lauding,
lambasting Clinton Harvard Obama sweetheart
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guess the president’s
judgment is why his figures are falling. Americans who are paying attention are
finally seeing a leader who is just talk, a good reader of teleprompters; but substantively,
seriously and dangerously inept
Editing, brief comment by Carolyn Bennett
(Reagan) Clinton to Obama via pyramid schemes, Ivy Leagues
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| Clinton, Summers, Rubin |
American economist Lawrence Henry (Larry) Summers was the
William Jefferson Clinton administration’s U. S. Secretary of the Treasury (1999
to 2001)
Summers was a leading voice within
the Clinton Administration arguing against American leadership in greenhouse
gas reductions and against U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol (ref. internal
documents made public in 2009)
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| Geithner Summers |
Damaging deregulation: Summers advises Congress
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| Obama Summers Bernanke |
On May 7, 1998, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission
(CFTC) issued a Concept Release soliciting input from regulators, academics, and
practitioners to determine ‘how best to maintain adequate regulatory safeguards
without impairing the ability of the OTC (Over-the-counter) derivatives market
to grow and the ability of U.S. entities to remain competitive in the global
financial marketplace.’
On July 30, 1998, then-Deputy Secretary of the Treasury
Summers testified before the U.S. Congress that ‘the parties to these kinds of
contract are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to
be eminently capable of
protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies.’
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| Rubin Greenspan Summers |
Summers, like Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan
(Reagan to 2006, tenure described as “a
leading cause of the subprime mortgage crisis”) and Robert Rubin (U. S. Secretary
of the Treasury in first and second Clinton administrations, veteran of Goldman
Sachs, director/senior counselor of Citigroup) who also opposed the concept
release, offered no proof that the contracts would not be misused by financial
institutions. Instead, Summers stated that ‘to date there has been no clear
evidence of a need for additional regulation of the institutional OTC
derivatives market, and we would submit that proponents of such regulation must
bear the burden of demonstrating that need.’
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| Obama Summers |
In
1999, Summers endorsed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which removed the separation
between investment and commercial banks, saying ‘With this bill, the American
financial system takes a major step forward towards the 21st Century.’
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rom 2001 to 2006, Lawrence Summers was President of Harvard
University and resigned this position “in the wake of a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty.”
Deregulation, Disestablishment, Destruction
While president of Harvard and in that position a member of
the Harvard Corporation (which bears ‘the school’s ultimate fiduciary
responsibility’) Summers approved the decision to enter into the swap contracts
and the University entered into a series (totaling $3.52 billion) of interest
rate swaps, financial derivatives that can be used for either hedging or
speculation. The decision to enter into the swap positions attributed to
Summers has been termed a ‘massive interest-rate gamble’ that ended badly.
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| Harvard's Summers |
By late 2008, those positions had lost approximately $1 billion in value, a setback which forced Harvard to borrow significant sums in distressed market conditions to meet margin calls on the swaps.
In the end, Harvard paid $497.6 million in
termination fees to investment banks and has agreed to pay another $425 million
over 30–40 years.
In the Charles H. Ferguson-directed 2010 documentary film “Inside
Job” about the late-2000s financial crisis ─ ‘the systemic corruption of the
United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that
systemic corruption’ ─ Lawrence Summers is presented as one of the key figures
behind the late-2000s financial crisis. Ferguson points out the economist’s role
in what he characterizes as the deregulation of many domains of the financial
sector. The film explores how changes in the policy environment and banking
practices helped create the financial crisis.
2010 on
In 2010 Summers, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy
School of Government, was the Barack Obama administration’s Director of the
White House United States National Economic Council.
In June 2011, Summers joined the board of directors of
Square, a company developing an electronic payment service and became a special
adviser at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In 2012, Summers joined
the board of person-to-person lending company Lending Club.
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s the Obama government in the summer of 2013 ponders a loser
who, at the expense of the masses, has been rewarded for being a loser, Al
Lewis writes at the Wall Street Journal:
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| The FED |
Mr. Summers is a master at ‘failing
up.’
Screw up at one job, get a better
one.
He’s now considered a front-runner
to replace Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in January.
“Mr. Bernanke’s response to the financial crisis has been to
digitally print trillions of dollars and give most of it to the biggest banks
that caused the crisis,” Lewis writes. “This seems to have averted another
Great Depression, but at what cost?
“This task will be like defusing a roadside bomb—and the man
to do it is Larry Summers?”
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lso weighing in this week on a “loser” that just won’t go
away, columnist Robert Scheer writes, “The idea that Barack Obama would still
consider appointing Lawrence Summers to head the Federal Reserve ─ rather than
order an investigation into this former White House official’s Wall Street
payments, reported Friday by The Wall Street Journal ─ mocks the president’s
claimed concern for the disappearing middle class.
“Summers is in large measure responsible for that dismal
outcome; and twice now, after top level economic postings in both the Clinton
and Obama administrations, he has returned to gorge himself at the Wall Street
trough.”
Scheer recalls the Summers history then sums up the “trillions
… passed on to the banks to relieve them of the burden of the toxic derivatives
they created ─ derivatives that then-Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers
testified to Congress were no threat to the ‘thriving market’ that ‘has assumed
a major role in our own economy and become a magnet for derivative business
from around the world.’ No threat there because, ‘given the nature of the
underlying assets involved ... there would seem to be little scope for market
manipulation. ... ‘
“This is an idiotic statement,” Scheer charges, “by someone [U.S.
President Barack] Obama considers brilliant or, as the president put it when
Summers left the White House in September 2010 to get back into the big money
game:
‘I will always be grateful that at
a time of great peril for our country, a man of Larry’s brilliance, experience
and judgment was willing to answer the call and lead our economic team.’
“What leadership?” Scheer asks and answers, citing a most
recent McClatchy-Marist poll and an Associated Press survey showing:
54 percent of Americans think the U.S.
remains in a recession
60 percent of Americans see the country ‘going
in the wrong direction.’
‘Four out of five U.S. adults
struggle with joblessness, near-poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least
part of their lives ─ a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive
American dream.’ (AP)
Reasons cited for the deteriorating
economic security: ‘an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap
between rich and poor, the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs’ (AP)
“That,” Scheer concludes, “is what Obama conceded in his
speech last week [and] which underscores how outrageous it is that he would
consider bringing back ‘brilliant’ Larry ─ who caused so much of that misery.”
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ho will tell the president that it is time to end the corruption,
the incest, the destruction?
Who will show this president how? Who will instill in him the courage to do what
needs to be done for the public good? Or
is this just too much to ask of America’s “losers,” America's consumers, and America’s “brilliant”?
Sources and notes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Greenspan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rubin
“Larry Summers ‘Failing Up’ to the Fed ─ Mess Up at One Job,
Get a Better One (Al Lewis, columnist for Dow Jones Newswires in Denver, blogs
at tellittoal.com), July 27, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324564704578627891340892004.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
“Gag Me with Lawrence Summers” (by Robert Scheer), July 29,
2013, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/gag_me_with_lawrence_summers_20130729/
Robert Scheer
Author of The Great
American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall
Street While Mugging Main Street (published 2010).
Scheer has written seven other books including the
collection Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking
Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power; With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War; and America After Nixon: The Age of
Multinationals; The Five Biggest Lies
Bush Told Us About Iraq; Playing
President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton –
and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush; The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened
America.
An American journalist, Scheer has taught at Antioch
College, City College of New York, UC Irvine, UCLA and UC Berkeley; and is a
clinical professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School
for Communication; he appears weekly on the nationally syndicated political
analysis radio program “Left, Right & Center” produced at and syndicated by
public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica; he writes a column for Truthdig,
which is nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate. Scheer was born and
raised in the Bronx, New York City to a Russian Jewish mother and Protestant
father, both garment workers. After his formative schooling years in the Bronx,
Scheer took a degree in economics at City College of New York, studied at the
Maxwell School of Syracuse University then took graduate studies in economics at
the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scheer
Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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