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3 Things Black America Should Know About Joe Biden Advisor Larry Summers

3 Things Black America Should Know About Joe Biden Advisor Larry Summers

Larry Summers
Here are three things to know about Larry Summers, economic advisor to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden. President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, Larry Summers pauses during an address to the International Economic Policy in Washington, Friday, July 17, 2009. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, wants Congress and the public to be patient and let the Obama stimulus initiatives take hold. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Progressive groups have been pressuring presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, to remove former Harvard president Larry Summers from his group of economic advisors, according to The Hill.

”Larry Summers’ legacy is advocating for policies that contributed to the skyrocketing inequality and climate crisis we’re living with today. We hope Biden publicly rejects Summers’ role as an economic advisor to better earn the trust of our generation,” wrote Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement.

Summers – who is also a former Treasury secretary and director of the National Economic Council  for The Clinton and Obama Administrations, respectively – has often been criticized for his views and comments.

Here are three things to know about Summers.

Africa Comments

In 1991, Summers signed a memo he later said was written by Lant Pritchett in which they advocated using Africa as a toxic waste dumping site. Summers signed the audacious letter while serving as Chief Economist of the World Bank. It came to be known as the “Summers Memo.”

“Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]?” the memo began. It then listed the three reasons for this thinking.

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As reason number two, the memo stated: “The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.”

After the memo was leaked, Pritchett said it was written to be sarcastic. Summers released a statement which said he “reviewed the memo inadequately before” he signed it.

He added it “was never intended in any way as a serious policy recommendation. No sane person favors dumping toxic waste near where anybody lives or thinks that places could be made better off with more toxic waste.”

Association with Jeffrey Epstein

While Summers was president at Harvard, he regularly associated with Jeffrey Epstein, despite allegations of sexual assault against him by many underage girls. Reports state that Epstein gave Harvard nearly $9 million in donations and he was seen socializing with Summers often.

According to NBC News, Summers also insisted the school attach Epstein’s name to its Program for Mathematical Biology and Evolutionary Dynamics. Epstein made the claim in a 2003 Vanity Fair article, NBC stated.

Even after his tenure at Harvard, Summers continued his association with Epstein, as he is pictured with Epstein at his mansion in 2011.

In a 2015 deposition, attorney and scholar Alan Dershowitz said he, Summers and others who Epstein socialized with often didn’t know about the financier’s sex-trafficking ring on a private island.

“These people were seen not only by me, they were seen by Larry Summers, they were seen by [George] Church, they were seen by Marvin Minsky, they were seen by some of the most eminent academics and scholars in the world,” Dershowitz said.

Proponent of Inequality

By his own admission, Summers doesn’t believe all men were created equal. In 2005, he came under fire for a speech in which he suggested men were intellectually superior to women because of the differences in their biological makeup. He said women were underrepresented in STEM fields because of a “different availability of aptitude at the high end.”

In the book “Listen, Liberal,” Summers also told Journalist Ron Suskind “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.”

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