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Shall I compare thee to a Summers day

By Michael J. Smith on Monday October 30, 2006 07:47 PM

J Alva Scruggs passes this along, from Clinton golden boy, Ivy League meritocrat, and con artist Larry Summers:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/89aac4dc-6777-11db-8ea5-0000779e2340.html:

Yet in many corners of the globe there is growing disillusionment... we see a degree of anxiety about the market system that is unmatched since the fall of the Berlin Wall and probably well before.

Why is there such disillusionment?.... As the great corporate engines of efficiency succeed by using cutting-edge technology with low-cost labour, ordinary, middle-class workers and their employers – whether they live in the American midwest, the Ruhr valley, Latin America or eastern Europe – are left out. This is the essential reason why median family incomes lag far behind productivity growth in the US, why average family incomes in Mexico have barely grown in the 13 years since the North American Free Trade Agreement passed, and why middle-income countries without natural resources struggle to define an area of comparative advantage.

It is this vast group that lacks the capital to benefit from globalisation and is desperately seeking either reassurance or a change in course. Yet without its support it is very doubtful that the existing global economic order can be maintained.

JAS comments:
What Larry fails to point out is how the despair of Globalism's "losers" can actually be an advantage. Their opportunities are shrinking, thanks to restricted access to capital, and therefore they can take greater risks. Rational maximization of that potential will save them. His past thinking along those lines remains as valid as ever.

http://www.whirledbank.org/ourwords/summers.html:

DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP

'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]...?

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.

Query: who invented the phrase "instrumental rationality," a discipline where Larry Summers is the equivalent of Thomas Aquinas?

Query 2: Suppose Larry's party does succeed in regaining power, next week or in 2008 -- are we likely to see Larry in government again?

Comments (3)

Should the donkeys take over again we'll no doubt see a massive program to help Africe. We'll be sending our armed forces to burn heaps of old tires and smelt iron in open furnaces until Kinshasa catches up to L.A.

js paine:

larry the lip
on the great global "middle class ":

"desperately seeking either reassurance
or a change in course.....
Meeting the needs of the anxious global middle is the economic challenge of our time...."


okay we're hip to your up date Larry baby
so now
what's your pitch ...???

well unlike his old asshole buddy
bobo rubin
for larry
it ain't all about
all us slubs gettin ourselves
a serious skill set upgrade

and only cause of the obvious
"...limit to what it can do for workers in their 40s and beyond...."

but more because he gets
to the very center of the point

".. education .."(can not be)
".. a complete answer...
when skilled computer programmers in India are paid less than $2,000 a month"

chop away his ivy understated "framing "
as i have

where the polite
" not ....a complete answer.."
becomes the stark
no fucking answer at all
and you gotta say
score one for Summers

on the candor scale
this puts
him
far above
the shoe shine offerings
of "the big bobo of bondage town "


but let's press on ...

well here's a candy striped guide post

"The best parts of the progressive tradition do not oppose the market system;
they improve on the outcomes it naturally produces "

so we progs gotta obey the law of value whilst we compensate the losery

Hmmmmmm

but then there's but this

"the Federal Housing Administration’s effort to make owner-occupied housing more available after the second world war
was a crucial part of the policy approach that permitted the Marshall Plan to go forward"

and its so loaded it makes me realize why larry is the real deal
most vicious ghouls
only wish to be

get the magic here

the truman liberals and their wall street backers
used the same credit system
to turn home land geefs
into home lot owners
as the one
they were using
at the same time
to allow the trans nat corporations
consolidate
their financial occupation of western europe
( branded for public sale as :
trans atlantic economic intergration)

larry's implied thesis
the latter god
would have been politically
impossible
without the former good

and like wise today

"... our success in advancing international integration "
(the whole earth safe for
a marshall plan )

"will depend on what can be done for the great global middle "

wait wait...
where's the beef larry??

no program ????
no hope full path way ???

just a nasty "better watch out boys"
challenge ????

you smug comfotable side line
turd plopper you

no wonder that "swiftian" world bank
confidential memo
from 91
stuck to your official ass so well

for u
telling the deeper truths
is
just short sheet sadism

j s paine:

"are we likely to see Larry in government again? "

does Dracula know the way to the blood bank???

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