According to the well-respected website, CREDO Action: News broke this week that President Obama is dangerously close to nominating Larry Summers to lead the Federal Reserve. This would be a horrible choice for the president and for our country. Summers was one of the leading figures behind the deregulation of Wall Street, which paved the way for our most recent economic collapse. In addition, Summers has stated that he believes that women are "innately" less able to understand science and math than men. Yes, he said that. Let that sink in for a moment. President Obama is seriously considering nominating a man who both helped drive our economy off a cliff and who blames the relative lack of women in science and math on the supposedly innate intellectual inferiority of women.
As a former colleague of his father, distinguished economist Bob Summers, at the University of Pennsylvania, the best thing I can say about Larry Summers is that he was a cute baby -- actually, that is the only good thing I can say about Larry. Here is a man who managed to become head of Harvard, and then a key economic advisor to President Obama, while boasting about a host of reactionary views which would have seemed dated in the Nineteenth Century. Larry Summers is a rampant apologist for the abuses of Wall Street which continue to plague America, a champion of unbridled Capitalist greed, and a sexist who finds women inferior to men in the hard sciences.
Turning the Federal Reserve leadership over to Larry Summers would not just be putting the fox in charge of the henhouse -- it would be putting the henhouse into a cockfight of which this nation would be the major victim. Should Larry Summers be nominated to the Fed, contact your Senators to express violent opposition -- but first contact the President to try to head off one more major embarrassment for the Obama Administration. There are many distinguished economists who should be considered for this key appointment -- Larry Summers, however, is not among them.
