Larry Summers, Obama's Chief Economic Advisor: Early Advocate of Reaganomics:

[amborin]

.........In 1982, while still a graduate student at Harvard, Summers was brought to Washington by his dissertation advisor Martin Feldstein, the supply-side economist, to serve on Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors. Those first years in the Reagan administration were crucial in the right-wing war against New Deal regulation of the banking system and financial markets--a war that Reagan's team won, and that we're all paying for today.

snip

After his stint in the Reaganomics brain trust........ In 1990, Lithuania, a restive Soviet republic seeking independence, hired Summers to advise on that country's economic transformation. Poor Lithuania had no idea what it got itself into. This was Summers's first opportunity to tackle a country in economic crisis and put his wunderkind theories into practice. The results were literally suicidal: in 1990, when Summers first arrived, Lithuania's suicide rate was 26.1 per 100,000 and falling.

Just five years after Summers got his hands on Lithuania's economy, life became so unbearable under the economic transition that the suicide rate nearly doubled to 45.6 per 100,000, worse than any other ex-Soviet republic in transition. In fact, it was the highest suicide rate in the world, suggesting something particularly harsh and brutal about the economic transition in that country as opposed to the others, where suffering and pain were common.

Things got so bad that in 1992, after just two years of Summers-nomics, the traumatized Lithuanians voted the communist party back into power, the first East European nation to do so--even though just a year earlier Lithuanians actually died on the streets fighting communism.

Fresh off his success in Lithuania, Summers moved to the World Bank, where he was named the chief economist in 1991, the year he issued his famous let's-pollute-Africa memo.

(Summers said developed nations should ship their carcinogenic toxic waste to poor African nations because those nations' citizens' low life expectancies----due to poverty----meant they would be deceased before they ever developed cancer from exposure to the carcinogens)

snip

In light of all of the corruption, cronyism and devastation that have marked his career, Summers' statements about an under-polluted Africa or intellectually-inferior women no longer seem like provocative eccentricities but part and parcel of the Summers shtick. "

snip

......to put Larry Summers in charge of our economy's future is so frightening that it makes the Sarah Palin vice presidential choice seem almost quaint by comparison. Let's hope the rumors are wrong......

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081124/ames

[leftstreet]

1. K&R

[rockymountaindem]

2. But we have to keep imagining that everything is going to be okay

and that Obama has absolutely nothing to do with these kind of policies just because he has put their architects in places of power and influence.

Honestly it seems to me that there is some level of "achievement" whereupon attaining it, you are bulletproof no matter how many times you screw up.

[bemildred]

3. Summers has the fecal touch.

Everything he touches turns to shit.

[bemildred]

4. Dupe.

Though it does bear repeating.

[slipslidingaway]

5. knr nt

[prairierose]

6. More people need to read this...

I plan to contact all of my congresscritters and ask them not to support Summers for any position in the administration. We are too far down the road that the free-marketeers have laid out and that is why we are in the economic mess we are.

[readmoreoften]

7. K & R. Reaganomics 2010.

[Octafish]

8. Small world. Summer's mentor Henry Paulson cut his teeth in Nixon White House working for Ehrlichman

Larry's a major turd, in his own -- eh -- right:

AIG, Larry Summers and the Politics of Deflection