January, 18 2023, 04:17pm EDT
Larry Summers Must Answer for Years of Revolving Door Service toCollapsing Crypto Company
The media must stop treating Summers as an impartial expert and recognize how he uses his status in the economic media to provide credibility to corporations
In response to Bloomberg’s report that “Genesis Global Capital is laying the groundwork for a bankruptcy filing as soon as this week,” Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser issued the following statement:
Genesis Global Capital is a key part of the crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group, or DCG. DCG would not be as large as it is, and Genesis’ collapse wouldn’t affect as many retail investors as it has, if not for former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers’ decision to lend his name and reputation to the firm in 2016.”
“For years, Summers advised DCG on the one hand, and made widely-reported positive statements about Bitcoin and the crypto industry on the other. Then, as DCG and the broader crypto market began to crumble a few months ago, Summers slipped out the back door, quietly deleting his name from the DCG website. The media shouldn’t let him wipe his hands of the cryptocurrency industry, or treat his speculation on future economic trends the same as they would someone who didn’t spend years opening doors for crypto barons.”
The Revolving Door Project wrote last week about Summers’ long history with DCG, and how his early partnership with the firm helped legitimate crypto the public in the mid-2010s. In 2021, for instance, Summers said Bitcoin “is here to stay” and implied it was becoming “systemic in [its] importance,” without disclosing his professional connections to DCG or other crypto firms like the Swiss crypto storage firm Xapo.
“As we saw with FTX and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, revolvers like Summers play a critical role in legitimating the crypto industry, and opening doors in public policy and the media.” It’s imperative that the press informs the public of conflicts of interest when reporting on crypto or any industry. Better yet, the media simply shouldn’t offer a platform to someone playacting as a sage economist offering independent analysis when just a few internet searches expose that that person is part of the same industry they’re analyzing,” Hauser said.
“Recall as well that crypto used to market itself as an ‘inflation hedge’ — Summers’ underscrutinized ties to crypto inform even his pronouncements on fiscal and monetary policy. Our message to producers and editors is clear: Larry Summers’ perspective is not irreplaceable, while his conflicts of interest and poor judgment are undeniable. If you need an expert opinion, please find actually neutral experts to quote.”
The Revolving Door Project (RDP) scrutinizes executive branch appointees to ensure they use their office to serve the broad public interest, rather than to entrench corporate power or seek personal advancement.
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"I saw body parts flying everywhere, and bodies cut and burned," said one eyewitness to a strike on the popular al-Baqa Café.
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Israeli forces ramped up their genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip Monday, killing at least 95 Palestinians in attacks including massacres at a seaside café and a humanitarian aid distribution center and bombings of five school shelters housing displaced families and a hospital where refugees were sheltering in tents.
An Israeli strike targeted the al-Baqa Café in western Gaza City, one of the few operating businesses remaining after 633 days of Israel's obliteration of the coastal strip and a popular gathering place for journalists, university students, artists, and others seeking reliable internet service and a respite from nearly 21 months of near-relentless attacks.
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Warning: Photos shows image of death
Survivor Ali Abu Ateila toldThe Associated Press that the café was crowded with women and children at the time of the attack.
"Without a warning, all of a sudden, a warplane hit the place, shaking it like an earthquake," he said.
Another survivor of the massacre told Britain's Sky News: "All I see is blood... Unbelievable. People come here to take a break from what they see inside Gaza. They come westward to breathe."
Eyewitness Ahmed Al-Nayrab toldAgence France-Presse that a "huge explosion shook the area."
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"We were targeted by artillery," survivor Monzer Hisham Ismail told The Associated Press. Another survivor, Yousef Mahmoud Mokheimar, told the AP that Israeli troops "fired at us indiscriminately." Mokheimar was shot in the leg, another man who tried to rescue him was also shot.
IDF troops have killed nearly 600 Palestinian aid-seekers and wounded more than 4,000 others over the past month, with Israeli military officers and soldiers saying they were ordered to deliberately fire on civilians in search of food and other necessities amid Israel's weaponized starvation of Gaza.
Another 13 people were reportedly killed Monday when IDF warplanes bombed an aid warehouse in the Zeitoun quarter of southern Gaza City, according to al-Ahli Baptist Hospital officials cited by The Palestine Chronicle. IDF warplanes also reportedly bombed five schools housing displaced families, three of them in Zeitoun. Israeli forces also bombed the courtyard of al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinian families are sheltering in tents. It was reportedly the 12th time the hospital has been bombed since the start of the war.
The World Health Organization has documented more than 700 attacks on Gaza healthcare facilities since October 2023. Most of Gaza's hospitals are out of service due to Israeli attacks, some of which have been called genocidal by United Nations experts.
Israel's overall behavior in the war is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and using starvation as a weapon of war.
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 204,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried under rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose casualty figures have been found to be generally accurate and even a likely undercount by peer-reviewed studies.
The intensified IDF attacks follow Israel's issuance of new forced evacuation orders amid the ongoing Operation Gideon's Chariots, an ongoing offensive which aims to conquer and indefinitely occupy all of Gaza and ethnically cleanse much of its population, possibly to make way for Jewish recolonization as advocated by many right-wing Israelis.
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"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade," said one observer. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
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Some of the names on the list of people crafting the agenda—named Project 2029, an echo of the far-right Project 2025 blueprint Trump is currently enacting—left progressives with deepened concerns that party insiders have "learnt nothing" and "forgotten nothing" from the president's electoral victories against centrist Democratic candidates over the past decade, as one economist said.
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Progressives on the advisory board for the project include economist Justin Wolfers and former Roosevelt Institute president Felicia Wong, but antitrust expert Hal Singer said any policy agenda aimed at securing a Democratic victory in the 2028 election "needs way more progressives."
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After democratic socialist and state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani's (D-36) surprise win against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week in New York City's mayoral primary election—following a campaign with a clear-eyed focus on making childcare, rent, public transit, and groceries more affordable—New York City has emerged as a battleground in the fight. Influential Democrats including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have so far refused to endorse him and attacked him for his unequivocal support for Palestinian rights.
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