| − | [[Lawrence Summers]] is the Director of the [[White House]]'s [[National Economic Council]] (NEC) for President Barack Obama. The NEC was established to advise the U.S. President on U.S. and global economic policy.<ref>http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/nec/</ref>
| + | Lawrence Summers is the Director of the [[White House]]'s [[National Economic Council]] (NEC) for President Barack Obama. The NEC was established to advise the U.S. President on U.S. and global economic policy.<ref>http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/nec/</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>}} | | 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>}} |
| | George Gerald Reisman, Professor Emeritus of Economics at [[Pepperdine University]] and author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, wrote that Summers socialistic ideas on redistributing wealth demonstrate that Summers is a "lightweight leftist" who "fails to understand the nature of the most essential feature of capitalism, namely, private ownership of the means of production and the indispensable role it plays in the standard of living of the average person."<ref>http://blog.mises.org/archives/009031.asp</ref> Reisman also wrote that Summers is a shallow and ignorant man whose knowledge of economics is minimal and whose evil views qualify him to be the economic advisor to [[Hugo Chavez]] of [[Venezuela]] or [[Robert Mugabe]] of [[Zimbabwe]], but do not qualify him to be an economic advisor to the President of the United States.<ref>http://blog.mises.org/archives/009031.asp</ref> | | George Gerald Reisman, Professor Emeritus of Economics at [[Pepperdine University]] and author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, wrote that Summers socialistic ideas on redistributing wealth demonstrate that Summers is a "lightweight leftist" who "fails to understand the nature of the most essential feature of capitalism, namely, private ownership of the means of production and the indispensable role it plays in the standard of living of the average person."<ref>http://blog.mises.org/archives/009031.asp</ref> Reisman also wrote that Summers is a shallow and ignorant man whose knowledge of economics is minimal and whose evil views qualify him to be the economic advisor to [[Hugo Chavez]] of [[Venezuela]] or [[Robert Mugabe]] of [[Zimbabwe]], but do not qualify him to be an economic advisor to the President of the United States.<ref>http://blog.mises.org/archives/009031.asp</ref> |