Taking a Close Look at Larry Summers

PRESS RELEASE

Taking a Close Look at Larry Summers

March 22, 2009 (EIRNS)—As Lyndon LaRouche indicated in his webcast remarks March 21, and New York Times columnist Frank Rich notes in his March 22 column, the key problem in the Obama Administration's economic policy team is not Timothy Geithner, but the head of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers. LaRouche called for Summers to be removed from his post.

Rich doesn't go that far, but he points directly at some of the filth that Summers represents. We quote:

"An even dirtier secret is that a prime mover in keeping that stuff legal [the outrageous behavior by the likes of AIG, which Obama referred to in his Leno appearance—ed.] was Summers, who helped torpedo the regulation of derivatives while in the Clinton admnistration. His mentor Robert Rubin, no less, wrote in his 2003 memoir that Summers underestimated how the risk of derivatives might multiply "under extraordinary circumstances."

Rich also notes that Summers worked for a secretive hedge fund, D.E. Shaw, after he was kicked out of the Harvard presidency in 2006.

The LaRouche movement's own archives provide further incriminating evidence against Summers, who was Treasury Undersecretary for Clinton until 1999, when he replaced Rubin as Treasury Secretary:

His role in promoting genocidal shock therapy against the Russians, which has been widely attacked in that country, including by Professor Stanislav Menshikov.
His role in demanding expansion of IMF powers.
His role in demanding further deregulation by the Japanese in 1997.
His role in forcing Korea to raise interest rates, and cut its budget in the crisis of 1998.
His role in 2000, as the point man in defense of over-the-counter derivatives, which he described as "an important component of the American capital markets and a pwoerful symbol of the kind of innovation and technology that has made the American financial system as strong as it is today." [Indeed!]
And while that is hard to beat, we should note as well that Summers joined Greenspan and Ken Lay in muscling California's Gray Davis to reduce regulation of the California utilities, in 2000, thus aiding in the Enron swindle.