Black People : Who is Larry Summers?

[Putney Swope]

This describes Summers to a T.
He is one of the top economic minds of his generation, a tenured professor at Harvard by the time he was 28, with plenty of real word experience -- ranging from heading the Treasury to heading a major university. But his core beliefs and assumptions helped lay the groundwork for the current crisis.
As Treasury Secretary under Clinton, Summers played an important role in convincing Congress in 1999 to pass the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed key portions of the Glass-Steagall Act and allowed commercial banks to get into the mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations game. The measure also created an oversight disaster, with supervision of banking conglomerates split among a host of different government agencies -- agencies that often failed to let each other know what they were doing and what they were uncovering.
At the signing of the bill, Summers hailed it as "a major step forward to the 21st Century."
Summers also backed Phil Gramm's other financial time bomb, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed financial derivatives to be traded without any oversight or regulation. So it was on his watch that the credit-default swaps warhead that has blown up our economy was launched.
Indeed, during a 1998 Senate hearing, Summers testified against the regulation of the derivatives market on the grounds that we could trust Wall Street. "The parties to these kinds of contract," he said, "are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies and most of which are already subject to basic safety and soundness regulation under existing banking and securities laws."

full article
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/larry-summers-brilliant-m_b_178956.html


the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_GS...-the-se_n_201557.html&feature=player_embedded

 

[Putney Swope]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veAOoQEy0PI

 

[Putney Swope]

He had this to say about the safety of folks in the Motherland

In 1994, by the way, virtually every other country in the world broke with Mr. Summers' Harvard-trained "economic logic" ruminations about dumping rich countries' poisons on their poorer neighbors, and agreed to ban the export of hazardous wastes from OECD to non-OECD countries under the Basel Convention. Five years later, the United States is one of the few countries that has yet to ratify the Basel Convention or the Basel Convention's Ban Amendment on the export of hazardous wastes from OECD to non-OECD countries.


Back on December 12, 1991, then the chief economist for the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, wrote an internal memo that was leaked to the environmental community, and we, in turn, publicized it. This memo remains relevant.


THE MEMO

"DATE: December 12, 1991
"TO: Distribution
"FR: Lawrence H. Summers
"Subject: GEP

"'Dirty' Industries: 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 measurements 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 with 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.

"2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

"3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

"The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization."

full article;
http://www.counterpunch.org/summers.html

 

[Putney Swope]

So the question remains

what would cause an intelligent young progressive Black Democrat , promising change,
appoint a low life creep like this as advisor within less then one month in office?

 

[Corvo]

what would cause an intelligent young progressive Black Democrat , promising change,
appoint a low life creep like this as advisor within less then one month in office?

Either that Obama is clueless as to who he listens to, or that he wants to hear what Summers has to say for guidance.