While Obama economic aide Larry Summers – the same Larry Summers who was the architect of deregulation in the late 1990s – has done a masterful job of accruing fawning profiles about himself in Time and the Wall Street Journal, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) last week said what the power worshiping Beltway media would never allow itself to say: Namely, that Summers shouldn’t be anywhere near the White House because his economic world view is out of step with economic reality today. DeFazio was referring to what he says are Summers anti-infrastructure spending views, and Summers has confirmed his right-wing frame with a recent letter to Congress deriding the whole concept of an industrial policy – as if that would be a horrific thing.
Another cause of long-term unemployment is unionization. High union wages that exceed the competitive market rate are likely to cause job losses in the unionized sector of the economy. Also, those who lose high-wage union jobs are often reluctant to accept alternative low-wage employment.
This is a pure form of the right-wing argument that says any effort to raise wages – unionization, a higher minimum wage, anything – is the reason our economy falters. And yet, the person who promotes this kind of thing – Larry Summers – has the ear of the president we want to lift wages, pass the Employee Free Choice Act and generally help reshape the economy in a progressive way.
To the casual observer, it is shocking to think that Summers retains his expert billing after playing a crucial role in destroying the economy. It is even more shocking that he has been hired to fix the economy he destroyed. But to anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes in Washington, D.C. it isn’t surprising at all. Summers is an unspectacular zombie in the Establishment’s Zombie Culture – a culture where nobody in the Establishment politically dies, no matter what they do, say or destroy. Unfortunately, that culture persists in this era of “change.”
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