LAWRENCE (LARRY) SUMMERS SHOULD NOT BE APPOINTED SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY BY PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA!
Numerous media reports suggest President-elect Obama is close to choosing his Secretary of the Treasury, and Larry Summers is a finalist. Help spread the word about this group by inviting your friends, and keep the fox out of the henhouse! We need real change -- not a pro-deregulation, pro-NAFTA, anti-woman Secretary!
You can also sign this open petition to the Obama transition team not to appoint Larry Summers:
http://action.openleft.com/page/petition/treasury
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PLEASE INVITE YOUR FRIENDS AND HELP SPREAD THE WORD!
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Why do we oppose Larry Summers for Secretary of the Treasury?
LARRY SUMMERS WAS A KEY ARCHITECT OF THE POLICIES THAT LED TO THE FINANCIAL MELTDOWN.
In 1999, Larry Summers was a member of the Clinton cabinet and a key supporter of Republican Sen. Phil Gramm's bill to deregulate the banking industry. Summers, along with fellow Secretary Robert Rubin, supported this legislation repealing safeguards put in place during the Great Depression. Phil Gramm -- John McCain's economic adviser who called the country's financial crisis a "mental recession" from a "nation of whiners" -- is the person in whom Larry Summers put his trust in 1999.
In fact, earlier that year Larry Summers wrote a personal letter to Enron CEO Ken Lay, saying, "I'll keep my eye on power deregulation and energy market infrastructure issues." Enron -- which defrauded investors, created artificial energy crises and single-handedly caused the 2001 rolling blackouts in California -- was the company Larry Summers was going to look out for.
President-elect Obama ran a campaign of change against the Washington insiders who ran our country into the ground -- yet Summers and his friends Phil Gramm and Ken Lay are precisely this sort of insider. Do we want to trust Summers' failed judgment in such a perilous time for this nation's economy?
More: http://tinyurl.com/nosummers1
Summers' letter to Ken Lay: http://tinyurl.com/summerswriteskenlay
LARRY SUMMERS HELPED CRAFT THE NAFTA AGREEMENT THAT COST THOUSANDS OF JOBS IN THE UNITED STATES.
"I think the decision to support NAFTA was a crucial one because it was really a watershed as to whether America was going to stand for larger markets, was going to stand for forward defense of our interests by trying to have a more integrated global economy [in] which countries were growing," Summers said in 2001. "I don't know that the Seattle protest against globalization, how linked [those demonstrations] are with some of the financial questions. I find them very sad because it seems to me that there's an enormous amount of very valuable moral energy that is being very, very badly misplaced."
President-elect Obama has rightly campaigned against NAFTA, the "free trade" agreement that cost the United States tens of thousands of jobs and encouraged inhuman working conditions in countries where those jobs were exported. Yet in 2001, Larry Summers said "NAFTA didn't cost the United States a penny." Should President-elect Obama really nominate someone who finds so little value in U.S. jobs?
More: http://tinyurl.com/nosummers2
LARRY SUMMERS THINKS AFRICA IS 'UNDER-POLLUTED' AND RIPE FOR ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION.
Those are Larry Summers' own words, that the World Bank should actively encourage the dumping of toxic waste in developing countries, particularly "under populated countries in Africa," which Summers described as "UNDER-polluted." Does President-elect Obama want to have a secretary who views the rest of the world as a dumping ground?
More: http://tinyurl.com/nosummers3
LARRY SUMMERS THINKS WOMEN DO NOT HAVE AS MUCH 'NATURAL ABILITY' AS MEN.
Larry Summers was president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, but was forced out -- the shortest tenure as a Harvard president since the Civil War -- after making outrageous assertions that women did not have the same "innate ability" or "natural ability" as men in fields of science.
Summers, in fact, specifically sought out a speaking engagement at a conference about increasing gender diversity in scientific fields to push his reactionary thinking. ''Here was this economist lecturing pompously [to] this room full of the country's most accomplished scholars on women's issues in science and engineering," said Denice D. Denton, the chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, "and he kept saying things we had refuted in the first half of the day."
Nor was Larry Summers all talk: Out of 32 individuals offered tenure-track positions at Harvard, just four were women -- no doubt because of his lack of faith in their "ability." After an election in which women broke significant barriers in both parties, does President-elect Obama want a member of his cabinet who is stuck in '50s-era ideas of gender roles?
Moreover, Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel has documented Larry's attempts to silence the warnings of Brooksley Born, who testified to Congress in 1997 that less regulation of derivatives trading would imperil the economy. Indeed, it was this type of unregulated trading Larry and his pal Sen. Phil Gramm were trying to increase -- and what ultimately caused the financial meltdown this year.
More: http://tinyurl.com/nosummers4
LARRY SUMMERS WOULD BE A POOR CABINET SECRETARY.
In his previous time as Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers was an embarrassment to the United States government, repeatedly falling asleep in public in the presence of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, United Nations head Kofi Annan and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Nor was he an inspiring leader to his staff. "If you're in a meeting, whatever you say, he will make you feel like you're an idiot," a Treasury employee said. Is this who we want helping get our economy back on track -- someone who will make you feel like an idiot?
More: http://tinyurl.com/nosummers5
LARRY SUMMERS SHOULD NOT BE APPOINTED SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY BY PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA!
Don't forget to INVITE YOUR FRIENDS and SIGN THE PETITION!
http://action.openleft.com/page/petition/treasury
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