Changes

Even the liberal publication [[The Nation]] declared concerning Obama's chief economic advisor Larry Summers:

Even the liberal publication [[The Nation]] declared concerning Obama's chief economic advisor Larry Summers:

{{cquote|In 1988, he was [[Michael Dukakis]]'s chief economic advisor, but when that campaign failed to bring Summers to power, he turned to America's great rival, the former [[Soviet Union]], to try out his economic experiments. 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]].

{{cquote|In 1988, he was [[Michael Dukakis]]'s chief economic advisor, but when that campaign failed to bring Summers to power, he turned to America's great rival, the former [[Soviet Union]], to try out his economic experiments. 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 [[communism|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]].

Fresh off his success in Lithuania, Summers moved to the [[World Bank]], where he was named the chief economist in 1991, the year he issued his famous let's-pollute-Africa memo. It was also the year that Summers, and his [[Harvard]] protégé Andrei Schleifer (who worked with Summers on the Lithuania economic transformation), began their catastrophic "rescue" of Russia's crisis-ridden economy. It's a complicated story involving corruption, cronyism and economic devastation. But by the end of the 1990s, [[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 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 market]]s and anything associated with Western liberalism.<ref>http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081124/ames</ref>}}

Fresh off his success in Lithuania, Summers moved to the [[World Bank]], where he was named the chief economist in 1991, the year he issued his famous let's-pollute-Africa memo. It was also the year that Summers, and his [[Harvard]] protégé Andrei Schleifer (who worked with Summers on the Lithuania economic transformation), began their catastrophic "rescue" of Russia's crisis-ridden economy. It's a complicated story involving corruption, cronyism and economic devastation. But by the end of the 1990s, [[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 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 market]]s and anything associated with Western liberalism.<ref>http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081124/ames</ref>}}