Forget appointing any of the inbred Washington-Wall Street morons. If Obama's "change" mantra is to mean anything, his picks are going to have to go outside of the usual gang of idiots.

For Treasury Secretary, my short list is Paul Krugman or Nouriel Roubini.

"his much-criticized (and ancient) World Bank memo hypothetically supporting the export of pollution to Africa"

1991 is your idea of ancient? This from the man who draws parallels to late nineteenth-century crises? I suppose you think the issues of toxic dumping in Africa have changed radically since 1991? Or that Africa is no longer poor now? I assume you know about the Abidjan dumping scandal. Or is 2006 also ancient to you?

And Summers might have been speaking hypothetically, but it was in a context where his musings carried great import. At the height of the World Bank/IMF-sponsored destruction of Africa known as Structural Adjustment, the words Summers signed off on were:

"Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) 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.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization."

Appointing Summers would be a slap in the face of the world's poor and it would not go unlamented in governments across the global south. A man this crass and ruthless has no place in an Obama administration. He has more blood on his hands than Rumsfeld.

I taught C. Wright Mills' Power Elite in one of my courses this semester. One of the things I advised my studetns to do was check the bios of the people the next President appointed to high government offices and as his "court" (you know, the White House Councils, Chief of Staff, Special Advisors). If Mills still holds water, then these should be rich retreads from previous administrations or from major corporations and retired military types. I argued that irrespective of party, the good old Power Elite were likely to stay clenched like rabid hyenas to the positions that count. The verdict is still out on President Change We Can Believe In, but is anyone really hopeful at this moment?

Previously, I thought Summers was icky. Now I think he's ickier.

If other things are more or less equal regarding the qualifications of either man for the job, why shouldn't the morality of previous statements and viewpoints count?

...slim pickens!

Any conversations that can involve C. Wright Mills are worth listening to. The claim is going to be made that Treasury is much too important to be handed over to a fresh face, so it will be an establishment figure. That has never really been in doubt. The closest to a non-Wall Street giant who got bandied about during the campaign by both parties (in a rather silly way, mind you since there is no way he would have accepted) was Warren Buffet, who gets the nod for being an "outsider" because he resides in the flat part of the country and supposedly does not like Wall Street.

So although I doubt that Treasury will be given to a "risky" new face, I am hoping that it will not be Summers. His expertise at the World Bank was gutting social systems to unlock prosperity...see how well that worked.

Geithner is a banker. That's what bankers do. The Treasury secy has a entirely different role and scope of responsibilities. We really don't need two Fed Chairmen at the helm, do we? Also while Geithner may have spoken out in the past, in his role as NY Fed Gov, he has had a deep and wide role in this financial mess. He's lent his organization to offering up cheap almost free debt for years. THAT apparently didn't stick in his craw.

As quoted by William Rees:

Lawrence Summers, then Chief Economist of World Bank, put it this way in 1991: “There are no... limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future. There isn’t a risk of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit, is a profound error and one that, were it ever to prove influential, would have staggering social costs.”

In my mind, that's tantamount to saying that the economy has no physical basis, or that the human economy somehow transcends the physical sphere on which it lives. Once you shift your frame of reference, the question moves from "how can we make more" to "how can we do more with less" and "what should we actually be doing in the first place?"

When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. When you see a precipice ahead, stop accelerating. These last few months, we've seen what happens when a bedrock piece of the economy is systematically abused. The environment is far more fundamental, and much harder to fix once broken.

http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/ubcreports/2006/06apr06/footprints.html