The Ruling Class Is Uncancelable
If the late Dick Cheney’s Never-Trump rehabilitation is any indication, Larry Summers’s public-facing career is far from over — despite not just his Jeffrey Epstein ties but his principal role in laying waste to America’s working class.
Larry Summers was able to lay waste to America’s working class and yet keep all of his fancy academic, media, corporate, and political credentials, giving him little reason to think he’d face consequences for palling around with Jeffrey Epstein. (Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
America’s system of elite impunity is more complex than the old George Carlin joke about a club with member benefits. The system has unstated rules that we learned a lot about recently, thanks to the (momentary) political death of former Treasury secretary Larry Summers and the actual death of former vice president Dick Cheney.
As President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Summers engineered the deregulation that created the 2008 financial crisis, and then, as President Barack Obama’s economic adviser, Summers made sure the postcrisis rescue plan prioritized serving the bankers throwing millions of Americans out of their homes.
Those decisions should have ended Summers’s public-facing career, but they didn’t. He was instead rewarded with Harvard University’s presidency; platforms at the New York Times and Bloomberg; gigs at a hedge fund, an artificial intelligence giant, and a cryptocurrency firm; and a distinguished senior fellowship at the Center for American Progress, where he was slated to sculpt Democrats’ agenda.
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