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).

PROGRESSIVE DEMS: PURGE the DLC/Blue Dogs or SURGE out the door?

Surge out the door into a new progressive democratic party that is.

Progressives in the Democratic Party are faced with a serious dilemma. While it is clear that at least the majority of elected Democrats in Congress are progressives, the Blue Dog/DLC wing is more than willing to sabotage any progressive change by siding with the Republicans on all issues that have to do with money: health care insurance reform, war, the nature of any economic stimulus, Wall Street bailouts, trade, privatizing government functions to reward cronies, and after giving away the store to corporate America, claiming that spending on education, health care, social security and the like are breaking our budget (not the corporate welfare of defense spending and now direct cash surrenders to Wall Street).

Compounding this problem is that though progressives seem to be a majority of Democrats, the leadership of the Senate is not, and the leadership of the House, while nominally progressive, seems to follow their lead in many priorities.

The fact that corporate owned politicians are the functional majority even while the Democratic Party (which we wrongly assume means progressive) is the majority on paper partly explains some of the worst and otherwise inexplicable actions of the Democrats like compromising more than half way on any legislation BEFORE THEY EVEN INTRODUCE IT, which inevitably leads to negotiating a halfway okay policy down to nothing. For example, the public option was a compromise to begin with. If Congress was really interested in providing the most cost effective option, they would have started with single payer and negotiated down to a public OPTION.

They must do this because though progressives are the majority of Democrats, the DLC/Blue Dogs do not care about the success of progressive goals or even the Democratic Party--they care about who's writing the checks, now as donations and later as their employers.

In the 90s, the Republicans purged their ranks of those who wouldn't reliably vote for certain core principles. While that led to horrible policy when they were in power, if someone voted for them, they could at least know that certain things were going to happen: taxes for the rich and corporations would be lowered, businesses would be deregulated, wars would be started.

What does anyone expect when the Democrats win? That essentially the same foreign and economic policies will be pursued with a friendlier face, and maybe some modest social programs will be implemented to salve the pain of deindustrialization and outsourcing our jobs, and the maimed veterans of the corporate wars will actually get the care and benefits they were promised?

So one temptation is to try the purge, take over the party structure, favor more progressive candidates in primaries, etc. There are a couple of problems with this: the corporate candidates will always have the money and friendlier media coverage. Another is that the purge in the GOP was from less reliably corporate to MORE reliably corporate, so the money and power was on the side of the purge. That all of the replacements parrot a religious right line as well is simply a matter of sticking to a marketing strategy that worked for a couple of decades (they are probably frantically pitching new images to focus groups, like their Ayn Rand, selfish superman one). Our purge would not be guaranteed success.

A surge out the door of the party to form a new party, possibly combining with some of the smaller progressive parties of the left like the Greens, would have it's own set of problems. One is that some progressives would stay in the Democratic Pary out of inertia. Another is where the corporatist Democrats would go--to the GOP. They would not tolerate being in a powerless micro-minority party. That is not what they are paid to do. Even if a similar schism occurred in the GOP, with the teabagger know-nothings leaving the corporatists, creating a three or even four party system, the gullibility of the teabaggers shows that they will be swayed into alliances with the corporatists most of the time if a policy can be sold with fear, racism, get-rich-quick, anti-intellectual, or violent themes. And of course the corporate Dems, whether in a rump Democratic Party or as Republicans would vote with them as well, leaving us about where we are now.

I think I laid out the negatives of both options, and would definitely like to hear the problems with that analysis.

PROGRESSIVE DEMS: PURGE (the DLC/Blue Dogs) or SURGE (out the door into a PROGRESSIVE PARTY)
	PURGE (the DLC/Blue Dogs)
	SURGE (out the door into a PROGRESSIVE PARTY)
	SUBMERGE and hope the corporatists throw us a bone if we keep quiet
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Neutering trust fund babies will not make America safer

Given the epic financial damage caused by Wall Street and the presidency of George W. Bush, scientists and security experts have been studying how to limit the damage trust fund babies can do to America but concluded that sterilizing them will not solve the problem.

"Trust fund babies were once thought to be a benign species because of their small numbers," said forensic psychologist Craig McCann. "However, recent history has shown otherwise, and we are beginning to understand why. They grow up without having to wonder how they will pay their rent or how they will afford to take their kids to the doctor. Their nagging subconscious awareness of their pampered incompetence leads them to act out with their money asself-appointed "masters of the universe" hoping to prove their self-worth by accumulating more than their distance ancestors who actually had to work to make the original family fortune."

"Unfortunately, they have no real knowledge of how to make anything or provide any service, so they fall back on bookkeeping tricks they learned in their MBA programs to create the illusion of success. While this creates paper profits, when coupled with their lack of empathy for those who actually must work to survive, the effect on the real economy is equivalent to an ebola outbreak or dropping an atom bomb."

McCann and his colleagues thought neutering trust fund babies, possible by posing as servants at a country club and sneaking some pruning shears into the sauna, or even using scuba gear to lay in wait at the bottom of the jacuzzis, would get the job done.

There was just one problem: most trust fund babies are not the children of their legal fathers.

"We stumbled upon it quite by accident while examining a blood sample we took from one we shot with a tranquilizer dart and tagged for observation," McCann said. "We had a reference sample from some fraternity oath his grandfather had to sign with his own blood. They were not related."

To insure that this wasn't a fluke, they did paternity tests on all the samples they had taken in the past and found that 91% were not related to their legal fathers.

The culture of trust fund babies offers clues to why: most of them join exclusive secret societies in college that have homoerotic, sado-masochistic initiation rituals. Although the percentage that are actually gay is probably the same as the rest of society, since these "men" could use their wealth to buy the finest prostitutes and are used to being fawned over by less wealthy women, the furtive, forbidden violation of those initiations holds a lasting appeal to them and becomes their primary sexual outlet.

Their wives are left to mate with golf and tennis pros or even gardeners.

"While this avenue has proven to be a dead end," McCann said, "We will not give up, anymore than we would give up if a giant meteor was heading toward the earth. The fate of the world could depend on work."

We treated Post-Soviet Russia like Post-WW I Germany: why expect different outcome?

After World War I, the Allies imposed brutal terms on the defeated Germans, imposing not only reparations for war costs, but maintaining a starvation blockade AFTER surrender, and stripping Germany of territory.

After the Fall of the Soviet Union, we had a chance to steer Russia toward a stable, European-style social democracy.

Instead, the Wall Street types insisted that any economic aid come at the price of radical free market reforms that actually lowered the standard of living and even life expectancy compared to Soviet days.

Likewise, the breaking away of former Soviet Republics may have been inevitable, but their quick integration into NATO and America siding strongly with political candidates in those countries based on how quickly they would open up to foreign investments. shed their social safety net, and allow us to use their soil as a base for military operations was a continual slap in the face of the critically injured but not dead Russia.

There are, however, a couple of critical differences between Germany after WWI and Russia after Communism.

Germany was a great industrial power, which could make her a powerful military adversary but she was poor in the natural resource to power expansionist ambitions: oil. Hitler didn't seize enough oil-rich territory in time to fight the allies indefinitely and ran out of gas.

By contrast, Russia sits on the Caspian Sea Basin, where some of those oil reserves Hitler needed were, and American oil companies are trying to quietly pick them out of Russia's pocket, one former republic and pipeline at a time. One of those is in Georgia.

We have not only beaten Russia, we have taken their watch and are now trying to pry loose their fillings. How would you expect them to respond?

Russia also correctly sees us as trying to control all of the major oil producing countries in the Persian Gulf, adding occupied Iraq to our "ally" Saudi Arabia, and now Bush & Cheney are eying Iran's reserves as well. Would we allow Russia to gain control of so much of the world's oil and on top of that, cozying up to Mexico to suck oil from under our border?

Another way Russia is unlike Germany is Russia has about as many nuclear warheads as we do, and unlike the phantom menace from Iraq, Russia has the means to deliver them and a possible motive. This makes the Wall Street post-communist plan to belittle and plunder Russia suicidal. If you beat someone to pulp and keep pounding, if the only weapon he has to fight back is a hand grenade, he just might pull the pin even if it means killing himself as well as you.

Our Wall Street first foreign policy has led us into a costly war in Iraq, and if we attack Iran or make a misstep on Georgia, it could lead to World War that could cost billions of lives. And whichever corporations profit from the war, none of them will share the loot with average Americans anymore than they are sharing their massive profits from running up the price of oil with wars and threats of war.

The great flaw of the Wall Street first foreign policy is it expects people to respond like sheepish employees given the pink slip and escorted out of the office. But when you are being forcibly removed from your means of survival, as is the case in Iraq, and we are now seeing in Russia, people do not go quietly, and more innocent bystanders than guilty parties end up dead.

Peace with dignity and security for all parties involved may mean less short term profits for Wall Street speculators, but as we saw with the Marshall Plan after World War II, a well-fed and well-treated former adversary doesn't take up arms against you again, and both sides can prosper.

We must choose between modest profits for most, stability and life for all, or quick profits for a few, and war and death for everyone else.

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.
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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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