Courtesy of Pam Martens
Larry Summers Testifying Before the Senate Budget Committee, June 4, 2013
David Sirota has read the collective mind of progressives when it comes to Presidential candidate Joe Biden. On August 1 Sirota Tweeted: “Give us an anti-Wall Street Treasury Secretary and AG [Attorney General], and you can have your sh*tty VP…On the other hand, give us a sh*tty Treasury Secretary and AG and try to paper it over with a good VP, and you’ve basically given everyone the big middle finger.”
There is growing concern about Biden among progressives because he has made the decidedly ill-advised move of using the infamous Larry Summers as an advisor. Summers is the man who played an outsized role in the creation of Frankenbanks on Wall Street in 1999 with his push to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act and the deregulation of derivatives in 2000 as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration.
Carrying on the proud tradition of failing up as a Wall Street Democrat, Summers became director of the National Economic Council under the Obama administration during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression – brought on in no small part as a result of the Wall Street deregulation endorsed by Summers during his time in the Clinton administration.
Summers’ economic policies during the Obama administration led to the Occupy Wall Street protests and chants around the country that “Banks got bailed out; we got sold out.” This was an accurate assessment of Summers’ policies.
Not quite finished in his work at pushing the country backwards, Summers launched his misogynist attack on women’s math and science aptitude as President of Harvard in January 2005. These remarks produced world-wide notoriety for Summers and a vote of no-confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. A year later, facing a likely second no-confidence vote from the same body, Summers resigned his post as President of Harvard. He is currently a professor there.
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