This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It can't happen without you...-Barack Obama, Nov 4 Victory Speech
In the spirit of doing our part, if you agree with the sentiment of the article below, follow the links at the end to sign the petitions. Make sure Obama knows we want the change we need, not more of the same.
Keep Larry Summers as Far as Possible from the U.S. Treasury
By Mark Ames, TheNation.com. Posted November 12, 2008.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/106553/keep_larry_summers_as_far_as_possible_from_the_u.s._treasury/(snip)
Summers was one of the key architects of our financial crisis -- hiring him to fix the economy makes as much sense as appointing Paul Wolfowitz to oversee the Iraq withdrawal. And when you look at the trail of economic destruction Summers left behind in other crisis-stricken countries who sought his advice in the past, then "terror" might be a more appropriate word than "disappointment."
(snip)
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.
(snip)
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. 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.... 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 -- even though just a year earlier Lithuanians actually died on the streets fighting communism.
(snip)
in 1991, the year he issued his famous let's-pollute-Africa memo. It was also the year that Summers, and his Harvard protg Andrei Schleifer (who worked with Summers on the Lithuania economic transformation), began their catastrophic "rescue" of Russia's crisis-ridden economy. It's a complicated story involving corruption, cronyism and economic devastation. But by the end of the 1990s, Russia's GDP had collapsed by more than 60 percent, its population was suffering the worst death-to-birth ratio of any industrialized nation in the twentieth century, and the financial markets that Summers and Schleifer helped create had collapsed in what was then the world's biggest debt default ever. The result was the rise of Vladmir Putin and a national aversion to free markets and anything associated with Western liberalism.
(more at link)
The article goes on the detail Summers and Schleifer's role in Russian corruption. He also has a bad track record with NAFTA and support for Phil Gramm and Enron (
http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=9759).
Obviously we have no way to know if he is being considered as strongly as the press suggests but there is no harm in expressing our wishes to the new President-elect.
The petitions:
http://action.openleft.com/page/petition/treasuryhttp://tinyurl.com/5kvz54Alternatives to Summers exist:
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=sheila_bair_for_treasury_secretary
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