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..."

The sad state that we find ourselves in politically stems from employing too many people in Washington who operate from what David Korten calls in "The Great Turning" a "magical or imperial consciousness".

They are "incapable of ethical behavior based on empathic understanding" even though at the same time "they may possess a highly developed intellect capable of formulating and executing complex political strategies...Unable to distinguish self-interest from collective interest, admit guilt or remorse for harms caused, these individuals may be incapable of acknowledging even to themselves that they are engaged in deception.Truth becomes what they want it to be."

In between working at my real job and prepping for my weekly 3 hour radio show, I was in the process of writing one more piece about the many sins of Summers. But I was growing weary of this chase. So I was much relieved that Mark Ames has saved me the trouble of listing all the many sins of Lawrence Summers by writing his own essay that
appeared on Alternet.org this week.www.alternet.org/workplace/106553/


Yes, indeed "Keep Lawrence Summers as Far Away as Possible from the U.S. Treasury". I've already chronicled his shabby treatment of Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission who warned of the coming financial catastrophe in 1997. But there are many more examples of Summers poor judgment and perhaps a lack of conscience. Most egregious to me is his being a part of the meddling of the Chicago School Friedman free market flim flammers in the ruining of Russia's
chance at democracy.

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.

In 1991, Summers moved from poor Lithuania to a bigger prize, Russia. With his protege Andrei Shleifer, he had a hand in turning the possibility of real democracy for millions of Russians into the sad and corrupt oligarchy that Russia is today. Mark Ames notes that

But by the end of the 1990's, Russia's GDP had collapsed by more than 60 percent, its population was suffering the worst death-to-birth ratio of any industrialized nation in the twentieth century, and the financial markets that Summers and Schleifer [sic] helped create had collapsed in what was then the world's biggest debt default ever. The result was the rise of Vladimir Putin and a national aversion to free markets and
anything associated with Western liberalism."

Naomi Klein chronicles the gist of the Russia story in her chapter "Bonfire
of a Young Democracy" in "The Shock Doctrine". It one of the saddest and most frightening chapters in her thoroughly scary book. She reminds us that The Washington Post, no less

ran a commentary under the headline "Pinochet's Chile a Pragmatic Model for Soviet Economy". The article supported the idea of a coup for getting rid of the slow-going Gorbachev, but the author, Michael Schragem worried that the Soviet president's opponents "had neither the savvy nor the support
to seize the Pinochet option."

The McClintick essay reveals the details of a rather tawdry story of avarice, hubris, and
incompetence by the Harvard branch of the Chicago Boys. The excellent financial site the agonist has a synopsis. agonist.org/story/2006/1/27/121211/032

Institutional Investor- The case of economics professor Andrei Shleifer, who in the mid-1990s led a Harvard advisory program in Russia that collapsed in disgrace. In August, after years of litigation, Harvard, Shleifer and others agreed to pay at least $31 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the U.S. government. Harvard had been charged with breach of contract, Shleifer and an associate, Jonathan Hay, with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. Shleifer remains a faculty member in good standing. Colleagues say that is because he is a close longtime friend and collaborator of Summers. In the following pages investigative journalist David McClintick, a Harvard alumnus, chronicles Shleifer's role in the university's Russia Project and how his friendship with Summers has protected him from the consequences of that debacle inside America's premier academic institution.

The entire prize winning expose of Shleifer, his wife Nancy Zimmerman and other whiz kids can be read here.
And in PDF form here.

Mark Ames points out that Summers also admired another rascal, Anatoly Chubais.

Summers praised Chubais as a "demigod" and called Chubais and his free-market cohorts "the dream team." In September 1998, after Russia's capital markets collapsed, along with billions in US-taxpayer-backed loans, Chubais boasted to a Russian newspaper, "We swindled them." By "them," he meant the Western and American aid institutions that funded his reforms.

It's a fascinating story of how predators ( to use James Galbraith and Thorsten Veblen's term) in academic sheep's clothing operate in full view and are admired for it. (Shleifer and his wife made millions by the by. Check out Felix Solomon's s article on the Condenast's "Portfolio" blog, a very good mag, by the way. www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2008/06/02/andrei-shleifer-billionaire

And check out another take on rich economics professors by David Warsh who is another chronicler of the Affair Shleifer: www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2008.06.01/320.html

A kid, newly emigrated with his family from Russia, turns up at Harvard, still learning English, and is assigned J. Bradford Delong as a roommate. (Today DeLong is professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, where, among many other pursuits, he maintains a popularblog.) A year later, he is adopted as research assistant by MIT assistant professor Lawrence Summers, and begins a meteoric rise. He earns his PhD at MIT, demonstrating the advantages of an innocent eye with a remarkable thesis titled "The Business Cycle and the Stock Market." He spends a year teaching at Princeton (where he acquires a disciple in Edward Glaeser, then an undergraduate, today a Harvard professor), then goes on to Chicago. He meets and marries Zimmerman. Five years out of graduate school, Andrei Shleifer returns to Harvard and goes to Russia as head of Harvard team advising President Boris Yeltsin on behalf of the government.