Re: [Marxism] Lawrence Summers earned millions from companies he is supposed to regulate

[A <esquincle@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Links on Lawrence Summers

Lawrence Summers has been the face of the Obama administration when it  
comes to the economy.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/17442.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/politics/politicalhotsheet/main503544.php?category=Face_The_Nation&dir=politics/politicalhotsheet

Highlights from Summers' record of "distinguished service" --

1982-1983:  member of the Council of Economic Advisors for President  
Ronald Reagan
1988:  chief economic advisor to the Dukakis campaign
1990:  advisor to Lithuinia

Mark Ames in The Nation:
"In 1990, Lithuania, a restive Soviet republic seeking independence,  
hired Summers to advise on that country's economic transformation.  
Poor Lithuania had no idea what it got itself into. This was Summers's  
first opportunity to tackle a country in economic crisis and put his  
wunderkind theories into practice. The results were literally  
suicidal: in 1990, when Summers first arrived, Lithuania's suicide  
rate was 26.1 per 100,000 and falling. Just five years after Summers  
got his hands on Lithuania's economy, life became so unbearable under  
the economic transition that the suicide rate nearly doubled to 45.6  
per 100,000, worse than any other ex-Soviet republic in transition. In  
fact, it was the highest suicide rate in the world, suggesting  
something particularly harsh and brutal about the economic transition  
in that country as opposed to the others, where suffering and pain  
were common. Things got so bad that in 1992, after just two years of  
Summers-nomics, the traumatized Lithuanians voted the communist party  
back into power, the first East European nation to do so."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081124/ames

1991-1993:  Chief Economist for the World Bank.

While Chief Economist at the World Bank Summers wrote an infamous  
memo, published in The Economist under the title "Let Them Eat  
Pollution" --
"Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more  
migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed  
Countries] ? I can think of three reasons: (1) The measurement of the  
costs of health-impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings  
from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a  
given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the  
country with the lowest cost, which will be the country of the lowest  
wages. 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... I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa  
are vastly underpolluted; their air quality is probably vastly  
inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. ..."
[full memo and comment by John Bellamy Foster available at
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_n8_v44/ai_13370984/ 
print ]

1993:  Undersecretary for International Affairs under Bill Clinton
1995:  Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton (Robert  
Rubin was Treasury Secretary)
1999:  Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton

During the Clinton administration in the late 1990s, with Greenspan  
and Rubin, Summers was celebrated, a triumphalist advocate on behalf  
of finance capital.  His accomplishments amounted to enhancing the  
transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.  Two specific measures  
Summers helped shepherd have recently gained further notoriety for  
accelerating the present Wall Street meltdown:

-- Under Clinton, Summers championed the repeal of the Glass-Seagall  
Act.  At the time Travelers Insurance and Citibank wanted to merge  
(reportedly spending $200 million in lobbying and $150 million in  
campaign contributions).  Here Summers blocked with Republican Phil  
Gramm, who led the charge.  (The Glass-Steagall Act was passed in 1933  
to separate investment corporations from savings and loan and mortgage  
banks in order to slow or avoid another banking collapse like the one  
of 1929-1933.)
http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2008/102008/10012008/412090

-- Under Clinton, Summers vigorously opposed regulation of financial  
derivatives, arguing loudly that financial institutions could best  
regulate themselves.
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19990215,00.html
http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=7&jumival=2852

2001-2006:  controversial President of Harvard University

-- In October 2001 Summers accused Harvard Professor Cornel West of  
neglecting his classes for three weeks, grade inflation, lack of  
scholarship and insinuated that a rap album by a professor was a  
disgrace to Harvard.  In fact, West had missed a single class to give  
a keynote address at a Harvard-sponsored AIDS conference, was popular  
among students, was author of 20 books at the time and had recently  
recorded a spoken words-over hip-hop tracks CD.  West left Harvard for  
Princeton.
http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i19/19a00801.htm

-- When 130 faculty, including 5 professors affiliated with Harvard  
who lived in Israel, signed a petition urging Harvard and M.I.T. to  
divest from Israel in 2002, Summers said "serious and thoughtful  
people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in  
their effect if not their intent."
http://newvoices.org/features/just-like-south-africa.html

-- At the January 2005 conference "Diversifying the Science &  
Engineering Workforce:  Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and Their  
S&E Careers" Summers made a memorably ignominious luncheon talk in  
which he asserted that women were underrepresented in science and  
engineering because motherhood disqualified women from putting in 80- 
hour workweeks, also asserting that women who did put in 80-hour  
workweeks received rewards identical to men who did so.  Each  
assertion contradicted ample scholarship well-known to his renowned  
audience.  He further suggested that gender discrimination must be  
innate because his daughter had once referred to her toys as "Daddy  
truck" and "Baby truck."  He went on to assert that women lacked the  
"intrinsic aptitude" that men possess for certain scientific fields!   
His remarks precipitated votes of censure and "lack of confidence" by  
the Harvard faculty.
http://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/news/LawrenceSummers_Response.pdf

-- Later in 2005, when Summers received a pay raise (he was making  
something like $500,000/year) the only African-American Harvard  
Corporation Board member publicly quit the board in protest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/education/02htext.html

-- Revelations of cronyism have been said to be the reason Summers  
resigned as President of Harvard.  Under scrutiny was Summers' support  
for his friend and colleague, the Jones professor of economics at  
Harvard, Andrei Shleifer.  The federal government brought a lawsuit  
against Harvard University, Professor Shleifer and others in September  
2000, over conflict-of-interest activity while advising Russia's  
economic privatization program.  In 2001, when he became Harvard  
President, Summers helped see that Shleifer was appointed to the  
endowed chair he still holds today.  The Harvard Crimson reported:   
"On June 28, 2004, a U.S. district court found Shleifer liable for  
conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government, and concluded that Harvard  
had breached its contract with the government."   Shleifer paid $2  
million and Harvard $26.5 million in a total settlement of $31 million  
-- in which no one admitted any wrongdoing.  No disciplinary action  
occurred at Harvard.  Shleifer and his wife, hedge-fund manager Nancy  
Zimmerman, had been accused of investing in new capitalist enterprises  
in Russia, something they had pledged not to do as advisors working  
for the Harvard Institute for International Development and the State  
Department's Agency for International Development.   Because Shleifer  
and Zimmerman were known to be close friends and vacation partners  
with Summers there is speculation that Summers knew what they were  
doing in Russia.  Summers is quoted telling Zimmerman in 1996: ""There  
might be a scandal, and you could become embroiled. You should make  
sure you're clear with everybody. People might want to make Andrei a  
problem some day. The world's a shitty place.""
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=511201
http://jboy.chaosnet.org/misc/docs/articles/shleifer.pdf
http://www.dailyii.com/images/31/otherContent/Did_an_Expose.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlkQAZGcmPU

As Mark Ames concluded in The Nation last November:
"And now there's talk that President-elect Obama may hand the keys to  
national treasury to Summers--meaning that he'll be in charge of  
overseeing a trillion-dollar taxpayer bailout of the entire financial  
industry, a process already rife with conflicts of interest, cronyism  
and corruption...  The bailout, as currently implemented, threatens to  
devastate America's economy much as Russia's and Lithuania's were  
devastated before. The idea that this is exactly the right time and  
place to put Larry Summers in charge of our economy's future is so  
frightening that it makes the Sarah Palin vice presidential choice  
seem almost quaint by comparison. Let's hope the rumors are wrong."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081124/ames

On the Sunday before Obama's inauguration, as incoming director of the  
National Economic Council, Summers dodged the question of repeal of  
the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy:
SUMMERS:  ... On net there is going to be a substantial tax cut for  
the American people. No one with an income of under $250,000 is going  
to see their taxes go up. Working families are all going to get  
$1,000. The Bush tax cuts, as you know, Bob, are scheduled to expire  
in two years, in any event, just by law. Just what the timing will be  
is something that is going to be worked out going forward.
SCHIEFFER: Well, are you...
(CROSSTALK)
SUMMERS: But the focus is really going to be on moving this economy  
forward by putting money in the hands of the people who need it the  
most, America’s middle class families.
SCHIEFFER: Well, let me get back to the question. Are you going to  
leave those tax cuts in place, or are you going to let (inaudible)  
expire?
SUMMERS: That’s going to be something that’ll get worked out in the  
legislative process. The focus right now for the president, I believe  
the focus for all Americans, should be on how we’re going to get this  
economy going. And that really goes to the question of what we’re  
going to do for middle class families.
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=1&docID=news-000003013029

In February, Forbes and other publications broke the story that the  
Harvard endowment had lost
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/20/harvard-endowment-summers-business_summers.html
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/20/harvard-endowment-failed-business_harvard.html

In March... "a contract is a contract,"  for the "rule of law" !
http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/story?id=7085991&page=1

A former quantitative analyst at Harvard Management Company, the  
university's once-vaunted endowment manager, tells the Harvard Crimson  
she was fired for voicing concern to then-university president Larry  
Summers' chief of staff about the money manager's risky use of  
derivatives the traders didn't understand.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/04/larry_summers_ignored_frightening_trading_practice.php#more
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