This morning the AP reports "Lawrence Summers, President Barack Obama's top economic adviser, earned millions over the past year as managing director of the hedge fund D.E. Shaw Group and through speaking fees, some from financial institutions now at the center of the government's rescue program."
This is the man who provides the most significant economic policy input to both Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner. As this item suggests and as does the Charles Black appearance on Bill Moyers'Journal, we are being stiffed so that the plutocrats, at least one of whom is a high-ranking policy maker, may continue their wholesale fleecing of the American tax-payer. Summers, if anything, is guilty of the impression if not the actuality of conflict of interest. His income is drawn from those same people whose recklessness and greed has brought us to the edge of this precipice. Summers must be removed and Geithner must be continued to challenged in every way to fess up to the insolvency of those banks too big to fail, to end the slavish devotion to the criminal bankers, to remove them from their posts and prosecute them in courts of law for the willful ignoring of their fiduciary responsibilities.
Obama was great in Europe. I'm very proud of him. But much of his success was symbolic and verbal. Very little of a substantive nature was produced. Same thing goes with his policies toward the financial crisis. That Larry Summers is so compromised offers us an ideal teaching moment to our president. What has been done so far is insufficient and only rewards those who have robbed us by their financial sleight-of-hand. We want real change! Get rid of Summers, admit the full extent of the problem, take into receivership the insolvent institutions, and investigate and prosecute their management.