patrick.net

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers blasted Donald Trump’s deal with United Technologies Corp. to keep factory jobs in Indianapolis, labeling the president-elect’s intervention as a dangerous shift away from American capitalism.

Summers, a Democrat who was Treasury chief under then-President Bill Clinton, argued that rich and successful countries have a strong foundation of rules-based capitalism. He said Trump skirted that tradition when he used a “combination of carrots and sticks” to prevent United Technologies from sending jobs at its Carrier plant to Mexico. He called that “an act of ad hoc deal capitalism.”

“A principle is being established: it is good for the President to try to figure out what people want and lean on companies to give it to them,” Summers wrote in a blog post Friday. “Presidents have enormous latent power and it is the custom of restraint in its use that is one of the important differences between us and banana republics.”

Summers warned that “the negotiation with Carrier is a small thing that is actually a very big thing -- a change very much for the worse with regards to the operating assumptions of American capitalism.”

Remember the unapproved, no-legal-status private registry the financial institutions used instead of filing Title paperwork at the courthouse? How the state (and states) winked at it? Robo-signing by former Walmart cashiers signing in an ex-employees name thousands of times at various banks without required due diligence in a coordinated conspiracy of the massive filings of False Affidavits which were never criminally prosecuted? The outrageous settlements far below reasonable damages? The total lack of criminal prosecutions, fewer than in financial crisis a tenth or less of the size (far more people went to prison for S&L, which was pitiful in relative impact to the Great Recession)?

Any asshole Bankster talking about the Rule of Law should be mocked, vigorously. Frankly, should be sent to the Gulag.