A recent Counterpunch essay by Patrick Bond gives some important insights into the ominous track records of Obama's economic advisers and potential heads of the Fed - Lawrence Summers and Paul Volcker.
On Volcker,
Conference calls and face-to-face meetings of the Obama economic team are often reorganized to accommodate his schedule. When the team discusses the financial crisis, 'The most important question to Obama: What does Paul Volcker think?' says Jason Furman, the campaign's economic-policy director... When Sen. Obama raised the prospect of a package of spending and tax measures to 'stimulate' the economy, Mr. Volcker disapproved. 'Americans are spending beyond their means,' he told the group. A stimulus package would delay the belt-tightening and savings needed, he added, proposing instead better regulation and assistance to banks."
On Summers:
Summers is best known for the sexism controversy which cost him the presidency of Harvard in 2006. But fifteen years earlier he gained infamy as an advocate of African genocide and environmental racism, thanks to a confidential World Bank memo he signed when he was the institution's senior vice president and chief economist: "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... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted, their air quality is vastly inefficiently low..."
After all, Summers continued, inhabitants of low-income countries typically die before the age at which they would begin suffering prostate cancer associated with toxic dumping. And in any event, using marginal productivity of labour as a measure, low-income Africans are not worth very much anyhow. Nor are African's aesthetic concerns with air pollution likely to be as substantive as they are for wealthy northerners.
Such arguments were said by Summers to be made in an 'ironic' way (and in his defense, he may have simply plagiarized the memo from a colleague, Lant Pritchett). Yet their internal logic was pursued with a vengeance by the World Bank and IMF long after Summers moved over to the Clinton Treasury Department, where in 1999 he insisted that Joseph Stiglitz be fired by Bank president James Wolfensohn, for speaking out against the impeccable economic logic of the Washington Consensus.
To contextualize the inter-imperial ambitions of the US and it's competitors toward Africa, check out this article from the International Socialist Review.
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