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However, [[liberals]] since deny that as the cause of his termination, even though over a year later for the same reason they forced a rescission of an invitation for him speak to an academic audience.{{broken link}}
However, [[liberals]] since deny that as the cause of his termination, even though over a year later for the same reason they forced a rescission of an invitation for him speak to an academic audience.{{broken link}}
=== Larry Summers anc charges of conflicts of interest ===
As noted earlier, 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> Larry Summers favored the bailouts of Wall Street firms and banks.<ref>http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2009/02/obama-administr.html</ref> A 2005 study found that government corporate bailouts are often done for mere political considerations and the economic resources allocated exhibit significantly worse economic performance than resources allocated using purely business considerations.<ref>http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=676905</ref>
A government watchdog group reports:
{{cquote|Larry Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, ...continues to accept large speaking fees from bailed out banks.
"Most of the companies paying Summers' speaking fees are found at top the list of contributors to politicians from both parties, leaving voters to wonder if there is anyone left who isn't in Wall Street's pocket."<ref>http://www.campaignmoney.org/blog/2009/04/06/larry-summers-speaking-fees-targeted-by-watchdogs</ref>}}
The [[Washington Post]] reported:
{{cquote|Lawrence Summers, the chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, collected roughly $5.2 million in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw over the past year and was paid more than $2.7 million in speaking fees from several troubled Wall Street firms and other organizations.<ref>http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/04/03/summers_raked_in_speaking_fees.html</ref>}}
=== Larry Summers and Leftist Economics ===
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>
== Larry Summers failed economic experiment in Lithuania ==
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 [[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>}}
== References ==
<references/>
[[Category:Academics]]
[[Category:United States Secretaries of the Treasury]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Summers, Larry}}
=== Larry Summers and Leftist Economics ===
=== Larry Summers and Leftist Economics ===
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 adviser to [[Hugo Chavez]] of [[Venezuela]] or [[Robert Mugabe]] of [[Zimbabwe]], but do not qualify him to be an economic adviser 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 adviser to [[Hugo Chavez]] of [[Venezuela]] or [[Robert Mugabe]] of [[Zimbabwe]], but do not qualify him to be an economic adviser to the President of the United States.<ref>http://blog.mises.org/archives/009031.asp</ref>