We start with me being, I admit, a trifle exasperated.
The level of narrative driven stupidity in liberal press coverage of Fed Chair is infuriating.
— rootless (@root_e )
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Dante Atkins, “Featured writer, DailyKos” pops up to engage.
@root_e I can give you a ton of reasons not to want Summers. Why precisely did you, outside of the fact that Obama floated him?
— Dante Atkins (@DanteAtkins)
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Now that he is “asking” whether I have reasons for supporting Summers beyond just blindly following President Obama’s lead. Some might take the implication as insulting, but I sent back a link to a long article I wrote 3 years ago about Summer’s defiance of Economic Orthodoxy in wealth inequality.
@DanteAtkins http://t.co/4DdL7oIzb1
— rootless (@root_e)
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There was no response. Sometime later I pushed again.
@DanteAtkins So any substantive critique of this? http://t.co/4DdL7oIzb1
— rootless (@root_e)
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Still nothing.
@DanteAtkins I’m trying to believe you wanted to have a discussion. So what’s your response to my analysis? What are your “ton of reasons”?
— rootless (@root_e)
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Finally Eric Bogan chimed in and he got response:
@bogan3253 @root_e yeah, so, Larry Summers was the biggest advocate for repealing glass-steagal and deregulating derivatives. Disqualified.
— Dante Atkins (@DanteAtkins)
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That response ignores my answer to Atkins original question. He could have said “ bad argument” or TL;DR or something. But I doubt he bothered to even click the link. And the “ton of reasons”, well:
@DanteAtkins @bogan3253 So weak. And you are even wrong about the deregulation – look up Phil Gramm.
— rootless (@root_e)
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@DanteAtkins @bogan3253 How do you know Clinton relied on Summers and not on Dick Morris?
— rootless (@root_e)
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And that was that. Let’s review the ton’o reasons.
- They are false as a matter of fact. For example the bill deregulating derivatives passed during the last month of Clinton’s administration was written by Republican Phil Gramm, the actual biggest champion of deregulation (his wife was on Enron’s board) and was very different from what Summers recommended.
- They are stale. Summers has very publically changed his mind about deregulation of finance and did so well before the crisis. And here’s the funniest part: pretty much every senior Democratic economist is somewhat complicit in the deregulation error – including the candidate for the job that Mr. Atkins presumably supports Dr. Yellin. She even wrote a whole boook on how cool the 90s dereg was. Somehow Summers role in Dodd-Frank, the biggest reregulation of finance since FDR, doesn’t matter as much as Atkins unsupported assumption that Summers persuaded Clinton to sign Gramm’s bill.
- They whitewash the Republican responsibility for the financial crisis – for 7 years as problems with out of control derivatives and deregulated banks became more and more obvious, the Bush administration did zilch. Remarkably, the Progressives are always more interested in blaming Obama’s Cabinet (but not Clinton or Robert Reich or others equally involved in deregulation) than Republicans. The Supreme Court’s bizarre destruction of usury laws in 1978, the Gramm derivatives deregulation of 2000 – signed just before Clinton left office so implemented by Bush II, the 1982 Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act which caused the S&L crisis and further concentration in banking, Alan Greenspan’s “reinterpretation” of Glass-Steagal while Fed Chair, the SEC’s “voluntary regulation” initiatives of 2004 – none of those events ever appear in Progressive complaints, only Larry Summers and Robert Rubin- the cartoon bad guys of Progressive mythology.
- And most important, catch that imperious Disqualified. YES SIR!
For the record, I don’t think President Obama would benefit from or wants my input on this issue.
krebscycle 
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