November 2008: Who is Obama?
Who is Obama?
Page created on November 14, 2008 - updated on December 3 and 23, 2008, below
| UNITED STATES: Obama surrounds himself with neoliberalists | December 22, 2008 | Barack Obama has brought into his team the most conservative of Democratic advisors, those who organized the frenzied deregulation of the late 1990s. Damien Millet and Éric Toussaint, spokespersons for the Committee for the Cancellation of the Third World Debt (CADTM), explain the consistency of Obama's choice through three emblematic names: Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. | P | First in line, Robert Rubin was Secretary of the Treasury between 1995 and 1999. From the moment he arrived, he was confronted with the financial crisis in Mexico, the first major failure of the neoliberal model in the 1990s. Subsequently, he imposed, with the IMF, shock treatments that worsened the crises in Southeast Asia in 1997-1998, then in Russia and Latin America in 1999. At that time, Rubin had no doubts about the benefits of liberalization and he resolutely contributed to imposing on the populations of emerging countries policies that deteriorated their living conditions and increased inequalities. In the United States, he exerted all his influence to obtain the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act, or Banking Act, in place since 1933, which, among other things, declared incompatible the activities of deposit banks and investment banks. The door was then wide open for all sorts of excesses by profit-hungry financiers, which led to the current international crisis. This repeal also allowed the merger of Citicorp with Travelers Group to form the banking giant Citigroup. Later, Robert Rubin became one of the main managers of Citigroup, which the American government had to, in November, rescue urgently by guaranteeing more than 300 billion dollars in assets. Such a record does not prevent Rubin from becoming today one of the main advisors of Barack Obama. | Neoliberal pots and pans | The second personality on stage, Lawrence Summers inherited the position of director of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. However, his career has a number of stains that should have been indelible. In December 1991, while chief economist at the World Bank, Summers dared to write in an internal note: "The sparsely populated countries of Africa are largely under-polluted. The air quality there is unnecessarily high compared to Los Angeles or Mexico. We should encourage a greater migration of polluting industries to less advanced countries. A certain amount of pollution should exist in countries where wages are the lowest. I think the economic logic that suggests that large amounts of toxic waste should be dumped where wages are the lowest is unassailable. [...] The concern [about toxic agents] will obviously be much higher in a country where people live long enough to get cancer than in a country where infant mortality is 200 per 1,000 at five years old1." He added, still in 1991: "There are no [...] limits to the planet's capacity for absorption that would block us in a foreseeable future. The risk of an apocalypse due to global warming or any other cause is non-existent. The idea that the world is heading for destruction is deeply false. The idea that we should impose limits on growth because of natural limits is a profound error; it would also be an idea whose social cost would be staggering if ever applied2." With Summers at the helm, productive capitalism has a bright future. | Having become Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton in 1999, he pressured the president of the World Bank to get rid of Joseph Stiglitz, who was very critical of the neoliberal orientations that Summers and Rubin were implementing around the world. After the arrival of George W. Bush, he continued his career by becoming president of Harvard University and particularly stood out in February 2005 by angering the entire academic community. Asked about the reasons why there are few women in high positions in the scientific field, he claimed that they are intrinsically less capable than men in science, dismissing as possible explanations social and family origins or a will to discriminate3. This caused a big controversy, both inside and outside the university4. Despite his apologies, the protests of a majority of Harvard professors and students forced him to resign in 2006. His biography, available on the Harvard University website at the time of his presidency, states that he "led the effort to implement the most important financial deregulation in the last 60 years." One could not be clearer. | Firefighters pyromaniacs | The third personality chosen by Obama, Timothy Geithner, has just been appointed Secretary of the Treasury. Currently president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, he was Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs between 1998 and 2001. Successively assistant to Rubin and Summers, he was active especially in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand, all symbols of the ravages of ultra-liberalism, which caused serious crises during this period. | The measures recommended by this infernal trio have made the populations of these countries pay the cost of the crisis. Rubin and Summers were mentors of Geithner and, today, the student joins his masters. There is no doubt that he will continue to defend the major private financial institutions, deaf to fundamental human rights, which are violated in the United States as elsewhere following the economic policies he strongly defends. To claim to re-regulate a confused global economy by giving decision-making levers to those who forced deregulation is like trying to put out a fire by calling pyromaniac firefighters. | Damien Millet and Éric Toussaint | 1. The Economist of February 8, 1992 as well as The Financial Times of February 10, 1992 under the title "Save the planet from economists." | 2. Lawrence Summers, at the occasion of the annual meeting of the World Bank and IMF, in Bangkok, in 1991, in an interview with Kirsten Garrett, "Background Briefing," Australian Broadcasting Company. | 3. The Financial Times, February 26-27, 2005. | 4. The controversy was also fueled by his attack on Cornel West, a black and progressive academic, professor at Princeton University. Summers, a notorious proponent of the status quo, denounced West as anti-Semitic because he supported the actions of students demanding a boycott of Israel as long as its government does not respect the rights of Palestinians. (The Financial Times, February 26-27, 2005). |
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The bellicose policy of the United States has not weakened in the least, on the technical-scientific level. On this level, several important news. The first is that Americans now master the technique of landing planes on their aircraft carriers.