Thank God and Harvard–Larry Summers is going away. But not before doing extraordinary damage to America’s middle class and to the man who hired him. Summers, chief architect of Barack Obama’s squirrelly Wall Street policies, says he’ll move on at the end of the year.
Among his credits are:
- The decision to allow the Wall Street banksters who crashed our economy to keep their jobs and fat bonus payments;
- A Wall Street reform package that leaves the disastrous too-big-to-fail banks bigger than ever, with no requirement that they start investing in grassroots businesses to rebuild our economy; and
- The administration’s rejection of a big, bold, FDR-style approach to America’s jobless crisis, thus leaving millions of working families mired in what Summers blithely admits is “a jobless recovery.”
Heck of a job, Larry. His sorry tenure just shows that having a Ph.D. doesn’t mean you can do the J.O.B.
Actually, we shouldn’t be surprised that this Harvard professor served Wall Street rather than our streets. As a top Treasury official in the Clinton years, Summers was one of the “brilliant ones” who preached and implemented the financial deregulatory hokum that caused the 2007 banking collapse.
Prior to the collapse, Summers was both a trusted favorite of the financial barons and one of their hirelings, having pocketed nearly $8 million in fees from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. After the collapse–and with Obama coming to power–they moved him into the White House to sit right next to the new president.
Having done his job for the Street, Summers is leaving America and Obama stuck in a jobs depression that is both economically and politically disastrous. He’s returning to the cushy confines of his tenured professorship at Harvard–and undoubtedly to more of those lucrative fees from his grateful friends on Wall Street.
