Nearing the end of his 2nd term, President Clinton upgraded Lawrence Summers (first, Undersecretary for International Affairs; next, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury) as his new Secretary of the Treasury, replacing the retiring Robert Rubin. At his 1999 confirmation hearings, not a single U.S. senator bothered to ask Summers whether he still found "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country" to be "impeccable."
Summers provided the ideological rationalizations for the new mechanisms of neoliberalism, the primary strategy of global capitalism and its Brave New World Order:
promoting cutbacks in all public services while "enclosing" (privatizing) lands, resources and social services that had been in the public domain and previously used in common (water, forests, air, transportation, medical care, etc.), sometimes using the legal pretext of "Eminent Domain" at home and economic and military might abroad;
patenting what would become known as "intellectual property rights" (corporate ownership of genetic sequences in people and other living organisms);
establishing a new market and "stock exchange" for trade in "pollution credits"; and,
proletarianizing peasants and villagers, driving both labor and nature under the domination of new forms of exploitation and expropriation.
In the name of neoliberalism, the Clinton/Gore administration annihilated and then rebuilt (somewhat) under private ownership Yugoslavia's water and electric systems, schools, hospitals and sanitation facilities, bridges, dams, refineries and factories. The Clinton/Gore bombardment of that country displayed the U.S. Empire's vast modern arsenal of death and ecological devastation. xx Depleted uranium weapons, cluster bombs, graphite bombs, supposedly invisible "Stealth" fighter jets, and so-called "Apache" and "Black Hawk" helicopter gunships ravaged the recalcitrant populace. "Don't f*ck With Us" was the message scrawled on U.S. bomb fragments found near Pristina, in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. xxi
As the U.S. bombed such beautiful cities as Belgrade, Nis and Pristina into the stone age, a "second wave" of attacks was launched -- the economic bombs of the IMF's "structural adjustment policy."
Back in the 1990s, opponents of U.S. policies focused on the horrors of the massive bombardment of Kuwait/Iraq, and then Yugoslavia. But in general they failed to fully observe the underlying long-term economic goals that the bombardments and de-structuralizations were designed to accomplish. In a similar way, Bush's and Obama's "War on Terror" is used today as a cover for repressing resistance to the expansion of empire. The Somali pirates, for example, have become one of the more visible forms of resistance to the dumping of hazardous wastes off the north-east coast of Africa -- a consequence of the neoliberal project that had been codified and refined by Summers. xxii There is a growing understanding that "neither government regulations nor the capitalist market is capable of providing adequate protection for natural ecosystems or communities affected by environmental pollution,"xxiii and so some of the victims of neoliberalism are taking matters into their own hands against the corporations poisoning them.
Nor are we immune from such policies here at home. While the world's environment is in worse shape than ever, also underway has been a gigantic transfer of wealth from the working class to banks, private corporations and their owners, leading to record levels of profit-taking on Wall Street. Just as he'd argued to deregulate trade in toxic wastes, Summers also advocated deregulating the banks. He testified before Congress that the banks and financial institutions were perfectly capable of regulating themselves -- and was a main opponent of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that restricted what the banks were allowed to do. Congress overturned the Glass-Steagall Act with Clinton and Gore's approval, leading to the economic crisis the world has been enmeshed in for the past 4 years. Former President Clinton himself has had second thoughts about Summers' role here, saying that Summers was wrong in the advice he gave him against regulating derivatives. And yet, President Obama seems to have had no second thoughts over appointing Summers to be director of the White House's National Economic Council, enabling Summers to again ascend to the pinnacle of global power, with the military might of the United States enforcing the administration's economic policies.
In the Autumn of 2006, Summers became a part-time managing director of the investment and technology development firm D.E. Shaw & Co. He was paid $5.2 million in his second of two years working there, while working just one day a week, xxiv and at the same time also collected $2.7 million in speaking fees from the same corporations to which Summers would later allot government bailout money. xxv
When Summers' hero -- right-wing economist Milton Friedman -- died in 2006, Summers wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times entitled "The Great Liberator." In it, he argued that "any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites" and that Friedman had made real contributions to monetary policy. But his real contribution, Summers opined, was "in convincing people of the importance of allowing free markets to operate."xxvi
Under Summers and other officials from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization, "world trade . . . burgeoned with imbalanced cargoes: banned pesticides, leaded gasoline, CFCs, asbestos, and other products restricted in the North [but which] are sold to the South," according to Jim Vallette, formerly of Greenpeace. "Tropical timber, oil, coal, and other natural resources flow from South to North with little or no benefit to the host communities; and while regulations tighten around dirty coal and dangerous nuclear power plants in the North, they are proliferating in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America, where they are owned and operated by Northern corporations.
"This trade has been facilitated through tens of billions of dollars of financing by the World Bank, the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the U.S. Export Import Bank, [quasi-]government institutions in which Mr. Summers has wielded his economic logic. His 1991 memo can be considered a working thesis behind this decade's dominant global economic policies."xxvii
Summers' recent actions as director of President Obama's National Economics Council serve to continue his contempt for those on the receiving end of global capitalism's largesse. One of his last battles as part of the Obama administration was to remove caps on executive pay at firms receiving stimulus money,xxviii including Citigroup, from which he is under fire for accepting free rides in its corporate jets. xxix
CONCLUSION
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