Obama has replaced Summers with a less notorious Rubinite, and the Harvard research center Summers will now direct provides a name-brand intellectual cover for, not an alternative to, the dangerously insular politics his career has thus far embodied.

Summers’ exit does not significantly diminish Rubin’s shadow over the White House, nor does it mark an end or pause in the vicious cycle of today’s crony capitalism. His departure from the White House is more a reflection of this public anger than a personal career choice.īut strategic sensitivity is not change. Summers has become a defining symbol of the latest sold-out administration within a sold-out system of government. Obama’s economic program, developed almost entirely by Rubin’s proteges, has received widespread popular condemnation for bailing out Wall Street while leaving Main Street out in the cold.

Despite the economic catastrophes these policies have contributed to, Summers and other Rubinites have continued their political ascendancy in recent years, filling top positions in the Obama administration. He aggressively advanced Rubin’s program of financial deregulation and faithfully rescued his cronies when deregulation went wrong. Summers rose to power under the protective wing of Wall Street and Democratic Party mogul Robert Rubin. Larry Summers’ path to the Obama administration, and his record within it, are symptomatic of a new American plutocracy, and his new job at Harvard will keep the gears of corruption greased. Francis Fukuyama, The American Interest, January 2011 And it has kept the system going despite the enormous policy failures it has generated, not to exclude the recent crisis.” The alliance was enormously profitable for everyone: The academics got big consulting fees, and Wall Street got legitimacy. It was very easy for academic economists to move from universities to central banks to hedge funds - a tightly knit world in which everyone shared the same views about the self-regulating and beneficial effects of open capital markets. Wall Street seduced the economics profession not through overt corruption, but by aligning the incentives of economists with its own. “So here is the evidence for an American plutocracy of a narrow and discrete but hardly harmless sort.

Plutocracy symbol