After three decades of creating ruin and disaster across the globe, Larry Summers is finally being pushed from the lofty heights of power and prestige.
The proximate cause of his downfall are recently released emails between Summers and suicided arms dealer/sex trafficker/intelligence asset/money launderer Jeffrey Epstein.
The emails show the married, middle-aged Summers going to Epstein for advice on how best to manipulate a woman he claimed to be mentoring into a sexual relationship.
Summers comes off like a complete putz in the exchange:
Summers: We talked on the phone. Then “I can’t talk later”. Dint think I can talk tomorrow”. I said what are you up to. She said “I’m busy”. I said awfully coy u are. And then I said. Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming” She said no his schedule changed after we changed our plans. I said ok I got to go call me when u feel like it. Tone was not of good feeling. I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.
Epstein: shes smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.
While it’s nice to finally see Summers pushed off the world stage (we hope!), Matt Stoller, Rudy Havenstein and others are pointing out that Summers’ loathsome exchange with Epstein is the least of his sins.
Surely it’s more important that Summers was “wrong on the big important stuff for most of his career” as Stoller put it than that he was a creep who looked to a monster for advice on attempted adultery.
Politico sums up Summers’ prodigious rise in politics, for which he abandoned his Harvard tenure:
Summers would never achieve the type of intellectual breakthroughs that his uncles had. Perhaps he was too attracted to — too distracted by — the more muscular life of political power and influence that he first experienced in 1981, when he went to Washington to work with Feldstein, Ronald Reagan’s chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The year after winning the Clark medal, Summers headed to the capital again to work at the World Bank, then joined Lloyd Bentsen’s Treasury Department in the new Clinton administration.
…
(Summers) would become Robert Rubin’s deputy when Rubin took over from Bentsen in 1995. Their work together on the international debt crises of the 1990s made Summers famous; in February 1999, TIME magazine put him, Rubin and Fed chair Alan Greenspan on its cover, with the headline “The Committee to Save the World.” A few months later, Summers succeeded Rubin as Treasury Secretary, serving until the end of the Clinton presidency.
Havenstein recommends (among other excellent pieces) this 2010 Charles Ferguson take down of Summers from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some highlights:
…rarely has one individual embodied so much of what is wrong with economics, with academe, and indeed with the American economy.
…
As a rising economist at Harvard and at the World Bank, Summers argued for privatization and deregulation in many domains, including finance. Later, as deputy secretary of the treasury and then treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, he implemented those policies. Summers oversaw passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed Glass-Steagall, permitted the previously illegal merger that created Citigroup, and allowed further consolidation in the financial sector. He also successfully fought attempts by Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton administration, to regulate the financial derivatives that would cause so much damage in the housing bubble and the 2008 economic crisis. He then oversaw passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned all regulation of derivatives, including exempting them from state antigambling laws.
Summers didn’t just lay the groundwork for the economic crash of the 2000s, he actively mocked those who warned it was coming:
When other economists began warning of abuses and systemic risk in the financial system deriving from the environment that Summers, Greenspan, and Rubin had created, Summers mocked and dismissed those warnings. In 2005, at the annual Jackson Hole, Wyo., conference of the world’s leading central bankers, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Raghuram Rajan, presented a brilliant paper that constituted the first prominent warning of the coming crisis. Rajan pointed out that the structure of financial-sector compensation, in combination with complex financial products, gave bankers huge cash incentives to take risks with other people’s money, while imposing no penalties for any subsequent losses. Rajan warned that this bonus culture rewarded bankers for actions that could destroy their own institutions, or even the entire system, and that this could generate a “full-blown financial crisis” and a “catastrophic meltdown.”
When Rajan finished speaking, Summers rose up from the audience and attacked him, calling him a “Luddite,” dismissing his concerns, and warning that increased regulation would reduce the productivity of the financial sector.
But the punchline came when Summers was put in charge of the Obama administration’s response to the very crash his policies created:
after the 2008 financial crisis and its consequent recession, Summers was placed in charge of coordinating U.S. economic policy, deftly marginalizing others who challenged him. Under the stewardship of Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke, the Obama administration adopted policies as favorable toward the financial sector as those of the Clinton and Bush administrations—quite a feat. Never once has Summers publicly apologized or admitted any responsibility for causing the crisis.
Incredibly, before the release of his Epstein correspondence Summers had been playing a leading role in formulating the Center for American Progress’s Project 2029, intended to guide the policy for a potential Democratic administration to follow Trump 2.0.
The highest-profile think tank on the center-left, the Center for American Progress (CAP), has assigned several high-profile policy types to lead an effort that documents show was internally described as “Project 2029.”
According to two people with knowledge of the arrangement and a member of CAP, one of the leads on the economic policy plank for this project is Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers…
They also said that Summers was the final sign-off on a CAP housing policy paper set to be released next week.
Could it be any clearer that the Democratic party and all its policy apparatchiks are enemies of the people and must be completely purged from the party for it to have any chance on delivering positive results for the American people?
No matter how vast the conspiracies of Jeffrey Epstein, no matter how deeply tied he was to American and Israeli intelligence (and Drop Site News has proven Epstein was both), Larry Summers ruined vastly more lives, caused more death and suffering, and did more harm in his public roles as an economics advisor to two Democratic U.S. Presidents.
It’s also important to note that he started his political career working for the Republican Reagan administration and seamlessly transitioned to the Democratic Clinton and Obama administrations to complete the neoliberal economic transformation begun under Reagan.
Now that the U.S. economy is completely hollowed out and its days as a global hegemon are rapidly coming to a close, Summers is finally being pushed from his high seats at Harvard, Open AI, and the Center for American Progress.
Too bad it came at least 20 years too late.