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Week of November 9, 2008 - November 15, 2008

Sins of Summers


No, the sins of Summers aren't drinking too much at the neighbor's barbecue or not putting enough Sun Tan #30 on. It's the idea that we have to listen to the usual suspects praise the likes of Lawrence Summers who has enough past sins that wandering in the wilderness for a long period of time seems more appropriate than giving him another shot at screwing up the last vestiges of democracy.

In my essay "Uppity Women and Morons" on October 12 and my "Who Should Run the Treasury", I make the case against Larry Summers having a place in the next administration I cautioned against employing the current Wall Street hucksters and free market flim flam artists. On Sunday I heard the same old talking heads yap about the genius of this Summers guy. (Why we don't "change" all the TV anchors, pundits, and so-called journalists with a "change we can believe in" is the subject of yet another essay). Why oh why do the people responsible in part for the loser ideas of the last 40 some years keep turning up like bad pennies? I finished a pretty darn great essay by David McClintick "How Harvard Lost Russia" written in 2006. It's not a flattering piece on Lawrence Summers and some of the Harvard crowd's misadventures in Russia in the 1990's. What struck me at the end of the Mc Clintick piece was Summers
lack of ability to judge ethics. This from his deposition in the civil case
against Harvard:

Summers said conflict-of-interest "issues," in his Washington experience, were "left to the lawyers." He said he was sensitive to "ethics rules," but testified that "in Washington I wasn't ever smart enough to predict
them...things that seemed ethical to me were thought of as problematic and things that seemed quite problematic to me were thought of as perfectly fine..."

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