Economy: Obama chooses those who have a record of failure
- Opinión
Some expected Barack Obama, the newly elected president of the United States, to appoint a completely
Robert Rubin was Secretary of the Treasury from 1995 to 1999. As soon as he came into office he had to face a financial crisis in
Lawrence Summers has been appointed to the position of Director of the National Economic Council, a position inside the White House. Yet his CV is marred by a number of stains, some of which should have been indelible… In December 1991, when he was the World Bank’s chief economist, Summers went so far as to write in an internal note: The under-populated countries of
When he became Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton in 1999, he exerted pressure on the president of the WB, James Wolfensohn, for him to get rid of Joseph Stiglitz, who had succeeded him as chief economist and who was highly critical of the neoliberal policies that Summers et Rubin were implementing wherever financial fires broke out on the surface of the earth. After George W. Bush’s arrival he became president of
While his part of responsibility for the current situation is not proven, his biography, on the Harvard university website, claims that he “led the effort to enact the most sweeping financial deregulation in 60 years”.[5] One can hardly be more explicit!
Finally, Timothy Geithner has been appointed Secretary of the Treasury. Currently president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York he used to be Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs from 1998 to 2001, under Rubin and Summers successively, and active in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand, which are all text-book cases of the damage ultraliberalism can wreak and which were all in deep crisis during that period. The measures put forward by this infernal trio led to the populations of these countries bearing the brunt the crises. Rubin and Summers are Geithner’s mentors. Now the pupil is catching up with his masters. No doubt he will continue to defend major private financial institutions and remain deaf to fundamental human rights, which are flouted in the
Claiming that you intend to regulate the global economy while giving decisional power to people who are responsible for its deregulation, is like giving the job of fireman to arsonists.
(Translated by Christine Pagnoulle in collaboration with Elizabeth Anne.)
- Damien Millet is spokeperson for
Source: Committee for the Abolition of
[1] Extracts were published in The Economist (8 February 1992) and in The Financial Times (10 February 1992) under the title ‘Save Planet Earth from Economists.’
[2] Lawrence Summers, on the occasion of the annual assembly of the WB and the IMF in
[3] Financial Times, 26-27 February 2005.
[4] The debate was also fed by the disapproval Summers’ attack against Cornel West met with. Cornel West is a black liberal academic, Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at the
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