Posts
since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
I have been surprised that President Obama's effort to restore the economy has not included the identification and arrest of important malefactors in the finance industry.
I have been astounded that the Jewish Zionists appointed by Obama to important economic and financial roles in his administration almost uniformly have records of failure, incompetence and association with corruption.
Does Obama really believe that anyone besides the US government will put serious money in the US economy while the crooks are still in charge? Does he really think that adding more crooks at the senior governmental level will help? The effort to fix the US economy is already beginning to look like a new transfer of wealth from the American public to the Zionist political economic oligarchy.
I have already noticed an ongoing PR campaign in the US media to rewrite the biographies of Obama appointees.
This campaign seems to include a series of hagiographic articles focusing on
National Economic Council Director Larry Summers and appearing in papers like the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Boston Globe.Because I was involved in the campaign to undermine Summers at Harvard, I could not ignore a recent Globe column depicting Summers as a martyr on behalf of freedom of expression.
In his February 25th op-ed entitled Free speech at Harvard Scott Lehigh severely misrepresents the issues that undid the Summers presidency at Harvard .
Freedom of expression simply was not the issue.
Harvard professors often take unpopular minority positions on various subjects inside and outside their fields, but it reflects back on the University when the Harvard President shoots off his mouth in a scientific discipline about which he knows very little especially when that same President stresses the importance of a science education.
Like any high office holder, the Harvard President has an ethical, political, and common-sense obligation to use his freedom of expression responsibly.
When Summers suggested in 2005 with no genuine scientific and statistical support "that innate differences between the sexes could help explain why men have been more successful in science and math careers," Summers had the potential of validating a long standing pattern of discrimination with negative impact on students and faculty not only at Harvard but also throughout the world.
Defending Summers' right to utter nonsense on the basis of free speech arguments is silly to say the least because Summers himself undercut freedom of expression at Harvard when he accused the Harvard Israel divestment movement of anti-Semitism in effect if not in intent.
Summers' close association with Professor Andrei Shleifer and Shleifer's wife Nancy Zimmerman discomforted some of Harvard's large donors as well as many faculty members because the Shleifers' questionable financial dealings had exposed Harvard to at least $100 million in potential liabilities. Some important contributors had begun to wonder whether Summers antics were meant to distract from more serious issues of corruption.
PS. Not only does my blog entry Fighting Hegemonic Blocking on Campus -- Ousting Summers at Harvard provide more information about the failure of the Summers presidency, but Georgetown University Emeritus Professor Norman Birnbaum also published the following letter in the Financial Times in order to point out Summers' serious intellectual inadequacies that made him completely unfit to be the president of Harvard.
Real issue at Harvard was if Summers' 'militant philistinism' would alter the university's culture
Published: March 4 2006 02:00 | Last updated: March 4 2006 02:00
Sir, I have long regarded Christopher Caldwell's writing as proof that Harvard did provide an excellent education. Perhaps, however, he should think again about his denunciation of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and his depiction of Lawrence Summers as a martyr to its dogmatism ("The taboos that undid Summers", February 25/26).
As an economist, Dr Summers is free to consider certain forms of quantitative inquiry privileged. As Harvard president, with the power to appoint professors, allocate funds to departments and programmes, and influence curriculum, his open hostility to the historical and reflective disciplines threatened the continuity of Harvard's intellectual traditions. It is understandable that as a former government official he might think the students of Phillips Brooks House (Harvard's centre for voluntary social action) naive in their ideas about public education. As president, his disparaging words to them were arrogantly patronising.
As a student of modern America, Dr Summers considers contemporary black culture not a fit subject of academic inquiry, as opposed, let us say, to Yiddish folklore. As president, he drove away an imaginative and original Afro-American thinker and nearly destroyed a splendid centre of Afro-American studies.
Mr Caldwell is right, surely, on one thing: the issue was not Dr Summers' "managerial style". It was whether his militant philistinism would alter the culture of the university. Finally, for more than two decades at Georgetown University Law Center I taught students from many colleges and universities. I saw no evidence that the ones from Harvard had had a worse education than those from other institutions.
The alleged decline of academic standards, a common fiction in circulation well before the controversies around Dr Summers, reflects the anxieties of those made uncomfortable by ideas they did not hear about when they were 18.
Norman Birnbaum,
Washington, DC 2007, US
(Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University Law Center, PhD, Harvard, 1958)
