Let 'em eat Pollution: Summers is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

[amborin]

Perhaps someone can look up the quote from about 10 yrs ago or so, when Summers wanted to ship toxic waste from the developed world to low wage nations whose average life expectancy was fairly low. His logic was that, because the folks would die young, they would have died before reaching the age when they'd develop cancer from the carcinogenic toxic waste.

This raised the spector of Marie Antoinette, only in much more dastardly form.

Now, from The Nation, on why Summers is such a lousy option:

<snip>

"Those first years in the Reagan administration were crucial in the right-wing war against New Deal regulation of the banking system and financial markets--a war that Reagan's team won, and that we're all paying for today. Although Summers eventually identified himself with the Democratic Party--albeit the right wing of that party--nevertheless, as the New York Times's Peter T. Kilborn wrote in 1988:

He worked for 10 months as a top analyst in President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers when his mentor, Martin S. Feldstein, was running it, and his colleagues don't recall him venting anti-Reagan heresies then....

blockquote"> "One of the ironies of this business is that Summers's economics are quite close to Feldstein's," said William A. Niskanen, who was a member of the Feldstein council.

It's ironic if you expected Summers to be a liberal Democrat--but par for the course in the context of Summers's real record. Some fifteen years after Summers's stint in the Reaganomics war room, he reappears as one of the key villains fighting to suppress the regulatory efforts of a top official, Brooksley Born, who was trying to call attention to the dangers of the unregulated derivatives, such as credit swap defaults, which today are considered the key to the current economic crisis.

But let's return to the Summers timeline. After his stint in the Reaganomics brain trust, he returned to Harvard to serve as one of the university's youngest professors. In 1988, he was Michael Dukakis's chief economic advisor, but when that campaign failed to bring Summers to power, he turned to America's great rival, the former Soviet Union, to try out his economic experiments."

<snip>

<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081124/ames>

[yardwork]

1. Summers is an ass.

[truedelphi]

2. It's hard to accept how quickly the disappointment is setting in

Some of my Fellow DU'ers, when finding out that the CEO at GM makes abt three thousand a day, offered to head the company for far far less.

Maybe one of them could nominate themselves for the position Summers might have handed to him.
Giving this guy a plum set in the Cabinet as Treasury Secretary makes about as much sense as having one of the Sopranos head the FBI!

[amborin]

3. kick

[ErinBerin84]

4. for what it's worth

Tom Brokaw said on Morning Joe that he talked to lots of Obama people over the weekend, and it sounds as if Summers is lower down on the list than he would have been last week, because he is bringing too much drama.

[amborin]

5. that's good

even if Summers didn't have all that baggage from the more distant past, his remarks about women's capabilities have tainted him.

[ensho]

6. NO to Summers - he is not good for women

nt