Fed Up: Now is the Summers of Our Discontent

This man thinks that you will NOT implore President Obama not to appoint him to be the next Fed Chair, even though you know very well that you should.

From Bill Moyers:

“We should not oppose offshoring or outsourcing,”proclaimed a well-known economist at the 2011 World Business Process Outsourcing/Information Technology Outsourcing (BPO/ITO) Forum. Hundreds of corporate executives sat in on this economist’s lecture, including representatives from Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Deustche Bank, Pfizer, Coca Cola and other major businesses. The economist went on to proclaim that critics of outsourcing were like “Luddites who took axes to machinery early in England’s industrial revolution.”

This economist was not a Heritage Foundation scholar or Ayn Rand Institute fellow. The speaker that June was none other than Lawrence Summers, who had just finished up his role as director of the White House National Economic Council, where he was President Obama’s top economic adviser.

…

This practice of giving private paid speeches to big corporations was nothing new for Summers. Before joining the Obama administration, he received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from financial institutions that the White House was involved in bailing out and then shielding from more intense regulation. For Summers, the speech at the outsourcing conference was simply a relapse.

All of this is particularly relevant now that Summers is being vetted as a possible chairman of the Federal Reserve, the most important economic post in the world. If Summers is still taking big payments to speak favorably towards the world’s biggest corporations, Americans and their representatives in Congress should know about it. But Summers is under no legal requirement to disclose his most recent payments from corporations until he is officially nominated, and if he’s nominated, he’ll most likely be confirmed. No Federal Reserve nominee has ever been defeated, wit Ben Bernanke coming the closest when 30 senators voted against confirming him for a second term.

I can only quote four paragraphs within Fair Use guidelines.  Luckily, you can read the rest of what Moyers has to say about Summers here.  (And here’s a bonus for you.  Plenty more where that came from on via Google.)

Janet Yellen for Fed Chair!  Talk amongst yourselves.  (Note: “End the Fed” is not on the menu at this time.)