Speaking of Summers playing politician rather than economist...

http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2014/06/summers-and-cramdown.html

Larry Summers has a very interesting book review of Atif Mian and Amir Sufi's book House of Debt in the Financial Times. What's particularly interesting about the book review is not so much what Summers has to say about Mian and Sufi, as his attempt to rewrite history. Summers is trying to cast himself as having been on the right (but losing) side of the cramdown debate. His prooftext is a February 2008 op-ed he wrote in the Financial Times in his role as a private citizen.

The FT op-ed was, admittedly, supportive of cramdown. But that's not the whole story. If anything, the FT op-ed was the outlier, because whatever Larry Summers was writing in the FT, it wasn't what he was doing in DC once he was in the Obama Administration.

Let's make no bones about it. Larry Summers was not a proponent of cramdown. At best, he was not an active opponent, but cramdown was not something Summers pushed for. Maybe we can say that "Larry Summers was for cramdown before he was against it."

[...]

(via Atrios - "The Worst Person In The World - Larry Summers")

Cheers,
Scott.

--before anyone is given more power than a delivery-truck driver.
Glib... it's Everywhere.. from BHO's flowing pastoral rhetoric [then diametrically-opposite staffing/yielding to any Corp anywhere]
down to my local Comcast: attempting to con me out of an agreement (inscribed, even on one of their bills!) an ongoing matter I'll doubtless have to take to a Suit. And will.

(I think DRL.. nail/on-head/hit in one post wherein he dubbed Muricans as narcissists--pretty astute deduction from a self-admitted 'social-incompetent.) It does seem that we no longer have to delve as far-down, in the bios of the usual or unusual suspects--to find world-class duplicity.
This may be an expectable consequence if: in fact, the dis-USA's litany of problems are a function of also-increasing big-C Corruption,
a personality trait always difficult to sample with any precision. I guess its sorta comforting, just to confirm the workings of another process? For a few minutes anyway.

Surely there are -isms less-corrupt than our patch-quilt of contradictions; check around N. Europa, say.
Maybe 10,000 house-swaps-for-a-year could provide stats to begin the disinfection.

Welcome to IWETHEY!