The Plutocrats Are Living It up: Larry Summers' Gilded Path to Money and Power

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/149525/the_plutocrats_are_living_it_up%3A_larry_summers%27_gilded_path_to_money_and_power_

Larry Summers’ shuffling from Harvard to the White House is symptomatic of a new American plutocracy that keeps the gears of corruption greased.

“So here is the evidence for an American plutocracy of a narrow and discrete but hardly harmless sort. Wall Street seduced the economics profession not through overt corruption, but by aligning the incentives of economists with its own. It was very easy for academic economists to move from universities to central banks to hedge funds — a tightly knit world in which everyone shared the same views about the self-regulating and beneficial effects of open capital markets. The alliance was enormously profitable for everyone: The academics got big consulting fees, and Wall Street got legitimacy. And it has kept the system going despite the enormous policy failures it has generated, not to exclude the recent crisis.”

—Francis Fukuyama, The American Interest, January 2011

Larry Summers’ path to the Obama administration, and his record within it, are symptomatic of a new American plutocracy, and his new job at Harvard will keep the gears of corruption greased.

Summers rose to power under the protective wing of Wall Street and Democratic Party mogul Robert Rubin. He aggressively advanced Rubin’s program of financial deregulation and faithfully rescued his cronies when deregulation went wrong. Despite the economic catastrophes these policies have contributed to, Summers and other Rubinites have continued their political ascendancy in recent years, filling top positions in the Obama administration.

Obama’s economic program, developed almost entirely by Rubin’s proteges, has received widespread popular condemnation for bailing out Wall Street while leaving Main Street out in the cold. Summers has become a defining symbol of the latest sold-out administration within a sold-out system of government. His departure from the White House is more a reflection of this public anger than a personal career choice.

MORE at the link --

[Disintermedia8]

1. I believe the price of Hillary Clinton's endorsement

was a pledge to leave the economic team in neoliberal paws. These are classical Shock Doctrinaires who, as Naomi Klein pointed out quite accurately, once they ran out of third world economies to exploit, they would turn on our own. The industrialized countries in Europe are suffering...there are no more economies left from which to extract wealth. The limit to economic growth has been reached in a physical and a metaphysical sense. The trillions that were sent to the world's bankers over the past two years was the final heist. Though they think that Social Security is still within reach, and as long as Obama gets re-elected it will be.