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.
Summers has only now relinquished some of these appointments after the latest revelations about his links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
His downfall tells us that America’s system of elite impunity has adopted at least one new rule for its members: For the moment, you probably can’t remain in the club and have a written record asking the owner of Rape Island for advice about hunting for extramarital sex. That’s a significant shift, considering only months ago the club’s broadsheet of record was still insisting that Epstein “had a lot of powerful friends, and that he was a predator and a pedophile, and those sides of his life were mostly separate.”
But Summers’s situation also reminds us that in America, elites get to keep their club membership even if they wrought more polite and profitable forms of societal destruction — stuff like mass foreclosures and the pillaging of the…
Auteur: David Sirota
