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Disillusionment I
Jul. 2nd, 2009 09:25 amI'm feeling increasingly disappointed by President Obama, particularly by his foreign policy, which is scarcely distingushable from that of Bush (a pointless war in Afghanistan vs. a pointless war in Iraq). He has done nothing to address the growing cancer that is Homeland Security and the threat to civil liberties that it poses, nor does he seem inclined to deny the military-industrial complex pretty much anything it wants.
In the matter of economic policy, he puts his trust in people like Lawrence Summers. Summers was president of Harvard for five years during the Bush housing bubble, and in his and its wake the university is going through tough times.
The President and Fellows of Harvard College, as Harvard formally styles itself, is the richest university in the world. Summers ran it as president from 2001 to 2006, and he is best remembered for spending a massive amount of money buying up land in the Allston neighborhood of Boston for a new campus which will ultimately be bigger than the one in Cambridge. It's clear in retrospect that Summers did not expect anything like the present economic crisis, which has cost Harvard 30% of its endowment, and if the man serving as president had been a chemist like James Bryant Conant, a lawyer like Derek Bok, or a historian like the current president, Drew Faust, this sort of misjudgment might be understandable. But Summers is an economist, supposedly one of the foremost economic experts in the world.
And it's clear he hadn't a clue.
This is the man Barack Obama chose as his chief economic advisor.
I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my brain around that. My contacts at Harvard feed me a steady stream of bad news, and with each dose of bad news my doubts about Summers, and therefore about Obama, grow.
These people are winging it. They have no idea what to do, and are tiptoeing along the Bush/Paulsen/Bernanke path, crossing their fingers, and hoping that the next wave of mortgage defaults isn't big enough to undermine their bank bailouts.
Meanwhile, Obama continues to pour billions of dollars into the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires, even as California goes bankrupt.
Unbelievable.
In the matter of economic policy, he puts his trust in people like Lawrence Summers. Summers was president of Harvard for five years during the Bush housing bubble, and in his and its wake the university is going through tough times.
The President and Fellows of Harvard College, as Harvard formally styles itself, is the richest university in the world. Summers ran it as president from 2001 to 2006, and he is best remembered for spending a massive amount of money buying up land in the Allston neighborhood of Boston for a new campus which will ultimately be bigger than the one in Cambridge. It's clear in retrospect that Summers did not expect anything like the present economic crisis, which has cost Harvard 30% of its endowment, and if the man serving as president had been a chemist like James Bryant Conant, a lawyer like Derek Bok, or a historian like the current president, Drew Faust, this sort of misjudgment might be understandable. But Summers is an economist, supposedly one of the foremost economic experts in the world.
And it's clear he hadn't a clue.
This is the man Barack Obama chose as his chief economic advisor.
I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my brain around that. My contacts at Harvard feed me a steady stream of bad news, and with each dose of bad news my doubts about Summers, and therefore about Obama, grow.
These people are winging it. They have no idea what to do, and are tiptoeing along the Bush/Paulsen/Bernanke path, crossing their fingers, and hoping that the next wave of mortgage defaults isn't big enough to undermine their bank bailouts.
Meanwhile, Obama continues to pour billions of dollars into the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires, even as California goes bankrupt.
Unbelievable.
