The left was right about Larry Summers [View all]

The left was right about Larry Summers all along. Democrats didn’t listen
Long before the Epstein scandal, it was clear Summers was a viper. Clinton and Obama simply didn't want to know

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published November 30, 2025 6:45AM (EST)


(Salon) In former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’ now-legendary memoir “Adults in the Room,” he recounts a conversation with Larry Summers, conducted in a Washington hotel bar late on a spring night in 2015 over (one imagines) glasses of excellent single-malt Scotch. The former Treasury secretary and Harvard president was, in effect, making the charismatic young radical — a newly-minted official in Greece’s left-wing government — an offer of the sort you’re not supposed to refuse.

Varoufakis had to choose, Summers suggested, between being an insider or an outsider:



If Summers’ “sacrosanct rule” was meant to sound sinister a decade ago, it carries considerably darker resonance today. As we now know — and as numerous insiders no doubt knew all along — Summers continued his longtime friendship with Jeffrey Epstein right up to the eve of the latter’s final arrest in 2019, asking the convicted sex trafficker for advice on how to cajole a younger female colleague into a sexual relationship. (Epstein valiantly volunteered to serve as Summers’ “wing man” in this quest.) “Never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do,” it would appear, is also meant to apply to whatever those insiders get up to in private, not just to matters of state or the backroom shenanigans of high finance.

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At least that’s the only possible explanation I can imagine. Because the truth about Larry Summers has been obvious, or at least should have been, for many years. That did not prevent him from being one of the most dominant figures in global finance and economics, or the leading apostle of the disastrous worldwide gospel of deregulation and privatization now known as “neoliberalism.” It didn’t prevent Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Harvard University and any number of investment banks, hedge funds and corporations from swooning at Summers’ sermons on austerity — which invariably confirmed their prior assumptions that wealth was virtuous and virtue led to wealth — and offering him second, third and fourth bites of the apple.

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Progressive economists, feminists and environmental activists have been calling out Summers as an intensely toxic force in both politics and finance realm for years. For that matter, his parasitic or symbiotic relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has been a matter of public record since at least 2003, when the Harvard Crimson earned his eternal enmity by reporting on it. He has survived multiple damaging scandals and found his way back to power every time, like a wily Renaissance courtier or an unkillable horror-movie villain, and may well survive this one. ....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/11/30/the-left-was-right-about-larry-summers-all-along-democrats-didnt-listen/