(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Jon Stewart goes head-to-head with economist Larry Summers over corporate greed and inflation [1] ['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-03-17 The Problem with Jon Stewart only put up about 5 minutes of the interview, but it was more than enough to see the flawed (at best) logic of Summers and the class he represents. After a longwinded analogy to explain how the stimulus package caused inflation, Summers landed on a new analogy where he’s the economy doctor: “There's certain sicknesses you can have where there's a drug and it has side effects and everybody hates the side effects, and no doctor wants their patient to suffer the side effects. But if you don't address the sickness, you can have a bigger problem down the road.” Having explained how medicine works, Jon Stewart reminds Summers of the facts: “But the stock market assets have gone up 150%. CEO pay has gone up 1500 percent. Workers wages haven't gone up at all. I think you're misdiagnosing the sickness.” He is. Or, he’s purposefully being oblique about it all. I’m going to say it’s the latter. Side note about Larry Summers: He urged California’s Gray Davis to relax environmental protections in order to help promote...Enron. Any the who! Stewart continues to point out the facts: How, even though it wasn’t as much as most progressives wanted, or as frequent or as long as most progressives wanted, the stimulus package was arguably the only successful policy implemented for our forever-in-crisis economy over the last two decades. “This pandemic was the first time the government, in my opinion, did the thing that they're supposed to do in a crisis. When you look at the stimulus payments that went out, you know, 70% of it was being used for rent and food.” Furthermore, Stewart reminds Summers that our continued lack of success in having an economy that serves the majority of Americans and not simply people Larry Summers has in his contact list is because elected officials have deferred to people like Larry Summers who cannot see how terribly self-involved his concept of economics is. “And if you look at the recovery in the pandemic versus the recovery from 2008, when you stimulated the economy at the demand level, jobs had plunged in the pandemic and then they shot back up. The recovery in 2009 was painstaking, but the stock market did great. So our fiscal policy and our monetary policy has always been on the side of corporate easing.” The final tact Summers takes is the same one he’s leaned on in recent years, as decades of failed centrist economic policies have led to the Democratic Party losing millions of once solid working-class jobs: Not firing millions of Black and brown people is bad progressive policy. Wait, what? He didn’t say that, did he? Let me illustrate it. Summers is critiquing the stimulus package as a progressive policy (one that he was against), saying, “If you talk to African-American voters, if you talk to Hispanic voters, talk to voters who don't have college degrees, they regard the country's biggest problem as having to do with inflation. So while you may see this (stimulus package) as having been tremendously successful, our fellow Americans who don't live as comfortably as you and I do have a lot of questions, John.” The very easy-to-understand problem here is that Summers is openly promoting the loss of 2 to 10 million jobs in order to loosen up the labor market for the richest employers. There is no shortage of data and studies that show that Black and brown people are the last to be hired, the first to fired, and the people Summers is suggesting take a hit for the corporations are going to be predominantly Black and brown. You know what a bad policy for progressives is? Firing the people who are being hurt the most by corporate greed. Jon Stewart, instead of calling Mr. Summers a quack, tries once again to get Summers to interact with the facts, “But what you're not addressing is not all of inflation was stimulus. The tools that we have, though, are basically saying to somebody, everyone's paying more for gas and groceries and that's really hard. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to throw 10 million of them out of work. So that we all don't have to share that burden. Why aren't we attacking corporate profit in any way? Because that's been estimated to be 30% of inflation, 40% of inflation?” It is here that Summers sort of shows his ass—for the umpteenth time in his career. He tries to generate a new false myth about corporate greed, jumping off of Stewart’s last words to say, “I don't think it's a tenable view that all of a sudden corporations became greedy.” He proceeds to begin some hot garbage rhetorical concession about how there are monopolies that we should give lip service to regulating, but the cat is out of the bag, as they say. No one is saying “that all of a sudden corporations became greedy.” What we are all saying is that corporations have always been greedy. Always. What this new “inflation” cycle has shown us is that those corporations, because of their eternal greed, have taken this opportunity to gouge people, and now you Larry Summers, are doing the dirty work of telling everybody to look elsewhere for solutions. Stewart cuts Summers off to remind him that there are recordings and reports on all of the earnings calls these corporations, where they’re giddy to talk about their huge increased profits. Judd Legum is the founder and author of Popular Information, an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism. Judd joins Markos and Kerry to talk about the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News and the recent revelations of behind-the-scenes deceit practiced by everyone from on-air host Tucker Carlson, to the owner of it all, Rupert Murdoch. x Embedded Content RELATED STORIES: Jon Stewart tells Republican, 'You don't give a flying f&ck' about kids being shot Restaurant lobby group has siphoned off $25 million from workers to support its anti-worker efforts Inflation is in the headlines again, and the media is still leaving out one of the biggest factors [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/17/2158763/-Jon-Stewart-goes-head-to-head-with-economist-Larry-Summers-over-corporate-greed-and-inflation Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/