No doubt figuring out how the rich can get even richer from this whole mess.
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https://twitter.com/garbageape/status/1188116799520415745?s=21
Gee, I wonder why working-class voter turnout is so low?
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to be fair some of us don’t even run for office.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Look up his behaviour in re: post-Soviet Russia. I’m not one to lay the blame for the rise of Putin entirely on the disastrous Western meddling in the economy there during the 1990s (I’ll leave that to the Shirtless Wonder’s fanbois and useful idiots), but it did happen and Summers was a major bad actor there.
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This crappy, complacent and uninspiring Dem establishment campaign won’t play out exactly as the crappy, complacent and uninspiring Dem establishment campaign did in 2016. I’m hoping it will work out better, but that’s only hope…
Also…
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And I am desperate for the opportunity to push against the policies of President Biden.
I don’t think he’d make it through the approval process for any position that needs approval.
Summers and Elizabeth Warren hate each other. With the passion of a fiery sun on Warren’s side. They will not both be in a Biden administration, and if Warren remains in the Senate she will move heaven and earth to keep Summers out of any authority.
(I also doubt that Summers has any respect for Biden. After all, Biden was a lousy student, and managed to not make tons of money from the insurance industry while he was representing them in the Senate. If Biden picks up on this – he used to be sensitive to vibes like this – Summers will be out on his ear.)
It’s not like there are experienced alternatives like Stiglitz and Krugman and Reich out there to help.
I was a little surprised to not see Reich with a role in the Obama administration, though he had a pretty great new academic job where through the Blum foundation he could wield some influence through another path, not subject to the vagaries of election years. He’s another Scrantonite that Biden knows well, so you never know.
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They’re almost all either Alan Dershowitz or Larry Summers.
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To continue your analogy, Summers created a dam that was a high-rise luxury condo for the wealthy and drowned a significant percentage of the poor and middle class at it’s base. Fundamentally, the dam could have been rebuilt for less while saving those people by protecting them directly from drowning.
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Ah, but you see, Summers’ luxury high-rise dam wasn’t whites-only and had a slightly lower initiation fee. From which it follows that Biden is almost as progressive as Sanders or Warren.
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The issue as always is what is possible in a given political climate. The bailout policy was fundamentally Obama’s decision, worked out in conjunction with Congress. I like to think he could have pushed through a plan that was less friendly to the monied elite, but we really don’t know.
Really? 'Cause right now all you seem to be doing is going to bat for his bad decisions…
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The most generous interpretation is that the Obama administration got played by the banksters, who pulled a bait-and-switch by promising that the bailout money would go to mortgage holders then took most of it for themselves. A less-generous read is they were complicit in the fraud.
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You get that from “Summers is an arrogant, sexist prick who suffers from Dunning-Kruger, thinks CEOs shit caviar, and leaves a slight ethical smell on everything he touches”?
Right now I am trying to muster enthusiasm for Biden, because barring something extraordinary he is going to be the nominee and I think that unless base Democrats can get enthusiastic about him then Trump will win. I don’t think we can survive that. That doesn’t change the fact that I have held a low opinion of Biden since his presidential run in the 80s.
I am trying very hard to convince myself that he will follow the pattern of other ex-VPs who became president, and model his administration on the one where he was veep. I can live with Obama-light for a few years. I don’t think it does any good at this point in time to discuss the problems with the last administration.
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No, but I do get it from
Summers is far from the only competent economist in the universe. And yet, Biden went straight to picking him, instead of seeking out someone who doesn’t suffer from all of the problems people have been highlighting.
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And let’s be clear, publicly making Summers his go-to economic advisor (formal or informal) when there were much better and less divisive choices is a very bad decision by Biden. Most progressive Dem voters probably don’t know what kind of creature Summers is, but for the ones who do it might make the difference between holding their noses at the ballot box or staying home.
Also, given Summers’ CV, the Russian tr0ll farms are going to make damned sure to inform those progressive voters who don’t know about the history of Biden’s pick (formal or informal) for an economic advisor during a crisis to make sure that they stay home, too.
Personally, I’m still in the “hold my nose” category, but I’m the kind of economically comfortable coastal blue-state liberal that Summers’ business-as-usual policies doesn’t hurt (at least in the short term – the long term is a different story). But I wouldn’t blame someone who’s less privileged and living in a swing state that’s less prosperous thanks to the kind of policies Summers has advocated if they said “screw this, I’m staying home”.
And I’m damned well not going to defend Biden in any way for making a manifestly awful choice when he didn’t have to just because it’s slightly better than Peter Navarro or whichever future monster Il Douche will appoint. It’s bad but depressingly predictable decisions like this (past and no doubt future) that could cost him the election and give us four more years of Biff in the White House.
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Yes, it is a bad choice, but not at all an unexpected one; it is a lazy choice for him.
And I do believe Summers’ experience gives him the ability to make a positive contribution to a recovery, even if it is also likely that any plan he’s involved with will disproportionately benefit the wealthy. That is still better than the expectation with Trump, that any recovery plan (a) will benefit the wealthy while harming everyone else even more, and (b) won’t work.
Sorry, I’m not going to accept “at least it’ll be better than Trump” as the bar to clear. There is fundamentally no way to “recover” while disproportionately benefiting the wealthy. I know, because we did that during the Obama era and nobody near the bottom of the economic ladder ended up any better off than they were before (and a lot of people came out worse). That’s not a real recovery, that’s just the stock market looking better.
We can’t do that again. Not after Trump. The wealthy already have so much, it’s difficult to fathom how they could possibly obtain more while still enabling us to come out the other side with a functional society.
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Sure, you say that, but the Dem establishment and Biden are probably considering the idea of making this one of their official campaign slogans.
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I agree that the bar should be higher. However, I don’t expect better between now and November. I disagree that the Obama recovery was just the stock market looking better, it also returned people to work. What didn’t happen was a reversal of the acceleration of the flow of capital from the poor to the rich that Reagan set into motion and Clinton made bipartisan policy. That will take a political correction, not only at the level of the president (which is likely not happening this cycle) but also at the level of Congress (which is still possible).
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Terrible, low-wage work. But sure. It was work.
I’m glad you agree that the bar should be higher. But please at least acknowledge that arguing “better things aren’t currently possible” is kind of fundamentally at odds with your stated thirst for pushing back against Biden’s bad policies.
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