Why did Huffington post failed economic advisor Larry "Jabba the Hutt" Summers?

I've long admired Arianna Huffington's writing and frequently visit Huffington Post for political news, opinion, humor, and more, so I was surprised to see a column on her website entitled "Relief for Middle Class Families" by President Obama's economic advisor, Larry Summers. If you know this guy's resume, he cares about the middle class the way Jeffrey Dahmer cared about people he ate.


When he worked for the Clinton administration, he backed or applauded every one of the middle class and even upper middle class killing initiatives of conservatives like deregulating Wall Street, and trade policies that not only managed to decimate our manufacturing base, but actually made people poorer in other countries too.

In the case of backing neo-liberal shock therapy for Russia, that not only made the Russians worse off than they were under communism and shortened their average life expectancy, he made the world a less safe place since Russia has since figured out that we were trying to make them a Third World nation.

And in spite of their economic problems, Russia does still have nukes.

Larry Summers is the lowest form of moral filth.

If a poor person robs a liquor store and kills someone, they might have at least been doing it out of economic desperation or because they were driven by a drug habit. People like Summers coolly and calmly plan the poverty and death of millions and even billions, not to survive themselves and feed their families, but to have bragging rights at the country club, the financial elite's equivalent of whipping it out to see who's is bigger. He and his friends could live comfortably for their rest of their lives on the wealth they have now, and so could their descendants for ten generations before one would have to think of getting a job.

Summers presence in the Obama administration, along with Robert Rubin, and failed regulator Tim Geithner, is an indictment of the failure of our democracy, and undermines the credibility of the Obama and administration and the Democratic congress when they talk about reforming Wall Street and Banking.

We do not fight rapists, child molesters, and serial killers by putting the criminals in charge of writing the laws to punish and prevent those crimes. If we did, we would rightly expect that the law would require the police to deliver their victims to the criminals, clean up the crime scene, and dispose of the bodies for them at taxpayer expense--sort of like what happened with health care reform.

Worse, their presence in the Obama administration and the continuation of much of the same policies makes me wonder if this or any president is actually in charge, or if they are helpless shopkeepers in Wall Street mafia bust out of America.

I am not opposed to Larry Summers expressing his opinions on Huffington Post. But he should pay a price: endure and answer the questions and follow up questions of the toughest critics of the policies he has advocated and the damage they have done to middle class (like Naomi Klein, Greg Palast, Elizabeth Warren, or David Sirota to name a few) and the most important question would be what he has EVER done in the past that would make us think he will protect and advance the interests of the middle class.

Then he submit to a polygraph, forensic accounting, and make restitution for his economic crimes against working and middle class people around the world.

Once all that has occurred, I would like to hear what he has to say about helping the middle class.

Until then, Arianna needs to hold the Obama administration accountable for putting these Wall Street economic terrorists in charge of our economy that they broke instead of giving them a forum to pretend like they care about their victims (while they are still eating our livers prepared by their private chefs).

Which will end up having shorter reign: soviet style communism or Friedman's free market extremism?

I'm reading THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, and the ''free market'' scam of forced debt, privatization, deregulation, and dissolving of government services looks scarcely less destructive than what Bush is doing with bombs and bullets in Iraq.

I'm no fan of communism. I think the Keynesian balance between business and government is good enough though euro social democracy would be better.

What the corporate elite have done to the rest of the world the last couple of decades and has finally tried to turn on the US in full force after 9/11 has more in common with Mao's Great Leap Forward or Pol Pot chasing everybody out of the cities into the fields in Cambodia than it does with any rebalancing of the business/government relationship in the West.

The three that really haunt me are Poland, Russia, and South Africa because each had that moment of hope and triumph of democracy and that victory was snatched away from them by these free market extremists. Infant morality, income inequality, and unemployment all went up and life expectancy went down.

In the case of Russia, they not only crushed the hopes of those people, they destabilized and antagonized a nuclear power, keeping the possibility of a nuclear holocaust alive.

All so a very, very few could profit.

They deserve their own circle of hell, wiping the asses of other moral filth.

So how long will this last compared to the Soviet model's 70-ish years?

Short video on Shock Doctrine by director of Children of Men

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE

FREE MARKETS BY FORCE

A good brief summary of neoliberalism

How ''economic hit men'' set it up and enforce it

How Bush is plundering Iraq's OIL

Klein on the plunder of Iraq

Which will end up having shorter reign: soviet style communism or Friedman's free market extremism?
	Friedmanism is like gravity or evolution. It is just a law of the universe that will last forever
	It will be a thousand year reich like feudalism
	It won't be a thousand years, but given the rise of the surveillance state, it will be a long time before it's taken down
	It will last about as long as soviet communism then rot apart at the top
	The natives are already collecting their torches and pitchforks (they've already chased their Friedman overlords out of most of South America)
	I don't know what the fuck you are talking about
	I'm George W. Bush, and you should be worrying about yur family and terrist, and leave the worrying about money to people who have it
	I'm forwarding this poll to Homeland Security and the Chamber of Commerce. What size orange jumpsuit would you like at Gitmo?
	Jeeves! Turn on the electric fence! The serfs are trying to get in again.
Free polls from Pollhost.com

MUST READ: economic democracy crushed by tanks & coups again and again but keeps coming back stronger and stronger

This is simply breath-taking in tying together what has happened to us her in the US since the Reagan Revolution, what neoliberalism and resource wars like Iraq have done to the rest of the world, and most importantly, how people fought back again and again and could only be deterred by economic or military force.

This is partly why Hugo Chavez is so terrifying to the corporate world: not that he is so far left but because their usual tools failed to remove him or bring him to heel. When they called their bought off generals for a coup enough of the Venezuelan people and even enough of the military saw Chavez was looking out for their interests and the economic elite were not.

Whether the Democrats will really put the people before their corporate donors remains to be seen, but this is the direction we MUST push them in if we in the middle and working class don't want to end up living in a cardboard box in a Third World slum in the middle of North America.

EXCERPTS:











Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

Naomi Klein: From Think Tanks to Battle Tanks, "The Quest to Impose a Single World Market Has Casualties Now in the Millions"

This idea of our intellectual and ideological failure is the dominant narrative of our time. It’s embedded in all the catchphrases that we’ve been referring to. “There is no alternative,” said Thatcher. “History has ended,” said Fukuyama. The Washington Consensus: the thinking has already been done, the consensus is there. Now, the premise of all these proclamations was that capitalism, extreme capitalism, was conquering every corner of the globe because all other ideas had proven themselves disastrous. The only thing worse than capitalism, we were told, was the alternative.

Now, it’s worth remembering when these pronouncements were being made that what was failing was not Scandinavian social democracy, which was thriving, or a Canadian-style welfare state, which has produced the highest standard of living by UN measures in the world, or at least it did before my government started embracing some of these ideas. It wasn't the so-called Asian miracle that had been discredited, which in the ’80s and ’90s built the Asian “tiger” economies in South Korea and Malaysia using a combination of trade protections to nurture and develop national industry, even when that meant keeping American products out and preventing foreign ownership, as well as maintaining government control over key assets, like water and electricity. These policies did not create explosive growth concentrated at the very top, as we see today. But record levels of profit and a rapidly expanding middle class, that is what has been attacked in these past thirty years.

***
Now, I want to use the rest of my time just to say that this was not the first time, that this -- if we look back at the past thirty-five years, we see this slamming of the door on alternatives just as they are emerging repeating again and again. Many of you were here for the opening address from Ricardo Lagos, the former president of Chile, who talked about another September 11th, which was another one of those moments, a far more significant one, when a very important democratic alternative, the real third way, not Tony Blair's third way, but the real third way between totalitarian communism and extreme capitalism was being forged in Chile. And that was the great threat.

And we know that now through all of the declassified documents. There’s a really revealing one: a correspondence between Henry Kissinger and Nixon, in which Kissinger says very bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election is not what they were saying publicly, which was that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was only pretending to be democratic, but that he was really going to impose a totalitarian system in Chile. That was the spin at the time. What he actually wrote was, “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on -- and even precedent value for -- other parts of the world…The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” So that alternative, that other world, had to be blasted out of the way, and extreme violence was used in order to accomplish that.

***

We who say we believe in this other world need to know that we are not losers. We did not lose the battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks. Now, most effective we have seen is when the army tanks and the think tanks team up. The quest to impose a single world market has casualties now in the millions, from Chile then to Iraq today. These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They're popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly. Understanding this history, understanding that we never lost the battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of dirty wars, is key to building the confidence that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need.

FULL TEXT

A good brief summary of neoliberalism

How "economic hit men" set it up and enforce it

How Bush is plundering Iraq's OIL

Klein on the plunder of Iraq

OIL THEFT motive for IRAQ WAR resources

Timeline of big oil
plans for Iraq Oil Theft

Best quick explanation of Iraq Oil Theft Law	In depth study compares Iraq Oil Theft Law with neighbors deals
News on Iraq Oil Theft from Iraqi point of view	Best investigative reporting on big oil & US gov't plans for Iraq oil

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Easy contact Congress on Oil Theft Law & broader oil issues

Current stories on oil on Professor Smartass

Detailed report on restructuring of Iraq's oil industry to benefit our oil companies


Greg Palast's timeline of Iraq oil meetings (with video interviews with the players)


Oil & Gas Journal, 2002: We need Iraq War to keep Saddam from pumping too much and lowering prices

***DSM: Bush assures Putin Iraq War won't lower oil prices***


Colin Powell's chief of staff on oil motive for Iraq War

Broader background on oil, war, and foreign policy

Naomi Klein on privatization and its effects in Iraq:

Economic war crimes in Geneva and Hague Conventions:

The Hague Convention of 1907 (IV) see articles 47, 53, 55

The Geneva Convention of 1949 (IV) we've broken almost every section of article 147, and Bush has personally broken article 148.

The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time

A good brief summary of neoliberalism:

How "economic hit men" set it up and enforce it:






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Bush running Sopranos scam with our tax dollars

Since Congress raised the debt ceiling to $9 TRillion, it's time to recap the "bust out" scam the Republicans are running with the help of many Democrats.

I have passed this on to friends who don't follow politics very closely, and they instantly understood the application to our politics.

Essentially, the mob gets a foothold in a business, runs up huge debts, sells everything, pockets the cash, then leaves the original business owner with the hollowed out shell of the business.

This has been our bipartisan foreign policy, called neoliberalism, for the last several decades. One of the guys who would set up the deals wrote a book about it called CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN.

What he would do is go to the leaders of Third World countries and make them this offer: If they took out gigantic loans their country could never repay, and use the money to buy construction projects from certain American companies like Halliburton and Bechtel, the leader himself would become fabulously wealthy. If he refused, we would support his political opponents. If that failed, we would support a coup. If that failed, we would kill him. If that failed, we would invade his country. Saddam was one of the few to require the full treatment in modern history. Once the deal was set up, and it was clear the country couldn't repay the loans, then we demand that they give up control of some natural resource, privatize and sell off essential services like electricity, phones, and even water for bargain basement prices, and of course enter these free trade agreements which make it difficult to impossible for countries to set their own labor and environmental standards.

This system has worked so well overseas, that the Republicans seem to be doing it to the United States right now. The debts Bush is running up aren't the result of poor planning, but of design. He is running a bust out, using our country to give tax cuts, defense, and rebuilding contracts to the very wealthy and charging it to our collective credit card. Iraq is clearly part of this. Even if the war went well, the benefits would flow to the few, not to the average American who is paying for whole thing.

We have already seen the results of the second half of the scam here in California with the privatization of our electricity: rolling blackouts to extort more money from the state and individual ratepayers. Things have gone even worse in places that have privatized water.

But as Tony Soprano says at the end of this piece, this is who they are, this is what they do.

KEY EXCERPTS:

United Scatinos of America
by Steven Hart

One of the things that redeemed the second season of "The Sopranos," which had gone all wobbly after a good start, was the unblinkingly cruel subplot about David Scatino, a boyhood friend of mobster Tony Soprano, who talks his way into one of Tony’s high-stakes poker games and almost instantly buries himself under an unpayable mountain of debts. It quickly turns out that Tony knew about Scatino’s compulsive gambling problem, but let him into the game anyway because Scatino and his wife own a successful sporting-goods store.

What follows is more frightening than any monster movie. After siphoning out Scatino’s bank account (including his son’s college fund), Tony and his cronies gorge themselves on the store’s credit lines, buying up easily resold big-ticket merchandise and leaving the store awash in hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills. The business dissolves into bankruptcy, taking with it Scatino’s marriage (his wife divorces him), his family (his son, cheated out of an Ivy League future, hates him) and a good portion of his sanity. In the end, as he prepares to embark on his new life as a drifter and day-laborer, Scatino asks Tony why he let him destroy himself. After all, haven’t they known each other since childhood? Tony replies with the story of the frog and the scorpion. "This is what I am," Tony says. "This is what I do."

What we’ve just seen is a variation on an old con called a bust-out. Usually it involves con men offering to buy a business, making a partial payment to gain access to the firm’s credit and name, and then hollowing out the company’s finances by running up the existing credit lines and opening new ones, all of which are maxed out to buy electronic gear and anything else that can be resold quickly at a fraction of its value. For the con men involved in the bust-out, it’s all gravy. The phony buyer –- usually a shell company with no discernible assets -– defaults and the business reverts to its original owner, by which time the once-thriving firm has been turned into a rotting hulk ready to have its bones picked clean by creditors.

The Bush family has often been referred to as the WASP version of the Corleones, but the Soprano clan makes for a much better comparison. At its best, "The Sopranos" is an acid mockery of the phony gravitas of the three "Godfather" movies. Where Michael Corleone is heroically evil, an international player who consorts with statesmen and the Vatican before succumbing to his tragic flaw, Tony Soprano is a sewer rat engaged in the grubby business of preying on human weakness and fear -– when his fall comes, it will be tragic only to himself. Until then, however, he’s going to make as much money as he can for himself and his buddies, and leave the rest of the world holding the bill.

I'm not just using hyperbole here. I do think that when honest historians assess the Bush administration, they will find it more useful to treat George II and his Republican cronies as a criminal organization rather than a political party. The best tool for analyzing Bush's policies is not historiography, but the procedures used by federal agents as they pursue a RICO investigation into a mobbed-up business.

***

This is what they are. This is what they do. Didn't they tell you?

***

Insane tax cuts for the wealthy. Delusion military ventures abroad. From the minute the Bushies took power, their biggest concern has been to break open the cash registers, empty the shelves and open the bank vaults. Stewardship is a joke to them. What we are witnessing may very well be the biggest bust-out in human history.

And if you, good citizen, are wondering where you fit into this picture, just cast your mind back to the last episode of the second season of "The Sopranos." One of the closing shots shows us David Scatino in an empty parking lot, tying some gear to the top of his car as he prepares to leave his ruined life behind him. He wanted to play poker with the big boys, so you can say he brought his troubles on himself. A majority of Americans voted for Bush in at least one of the last two elections, so you can say we brought this on ourselves. In Scatino's case, human weakness created a business opportunity for Tony Soprano. America's weakness created a business opportunity for the Republicans. With the national press at a historic low ebb, the Democratic Party flat on its back and the airwaves humming with wingnut propaganda, the pickings couldn't be any richer.

They saw their chance and they took it. That's what they are. That's what they do.

(Posted by Steven Hart, 8/2/05)

FULL TEXT:

http://www.theopinionmill.com/Scatino.html



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