The Reason So Many Americans Distrust Elites (Part 1)

The Public’s Warranted Suspicion of Elites

Over the course of the last two to three decades, Americans have become more and more distrusting of elites. This distrust has extended beyond the realm of the financial sector into a wariness of higher-ups within governmental, military, entertainment, educational and even some scientific institutions.

There’s a reason that this suspicion of elites has grown in each of the aforementioned domains. In fact, this distrust has burgeoned alongside the public’s growing recognition of the increasing financial collusion among the elite sectors of society. Four decades of rampant financial deregulation has enabled the convergence of what is now a quasi-aristocracy that has hoisted itself above the regulative checks and balances that previously limited the reach of elites’ influence and the intermingling of their respective dominions of power.(1),(2)

The result has been an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of a very wealthy few who select the main players and shape everything from the American electoral process, to the agenda of the US military, to the nearly uniform foreign policy narratives of privately owned “mainstream media” news outlets, to what prescriptive drugs people take.(2a),(2b),(2c) This small group of elite players, whose interests are connected to the interests of other elites, many of whom reside in countries outside the US, tend to operate more and more independently of the regions which they claim to physically inhabit. This is why the decisions they make, most noticeably related to war and the allocation of finances gleaned primarily from public taxation, very rarely reflect the wishes and needs of the vast majority of the people who pay the taxes and live in the countries that these elites are on record as residing in.(3),(4)

In order to illustrate the level of privilege and invulnerability (legal and other) that this small, financially connected group of very wealthy elites enjoys, I’m going to focus, for the moment, on one elite individual in particular.

(Insider) Larry Summers Gives the Game Away

In a conversation with Yannis Varoufakis in 2014, Larry Summers described the political landscape as consisting of “insiders” and “outsiders.” He explained that outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth, but they are often ignored by insiders who make policy and “follow a rule of silence”. He made it clear that, as insiders, they protect their own. In the context of recent revelations about how the upper tiers of government function and what influences their decision making process, Mr. Summers’ observation becomes particularly informative.(5),(6)

A Financial Guru to Elites, an Economic Wrecking Ball to Everyone Else

Among wealthy and well-positioned elites like Jamie Dimon, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Robert Rubin, Kenneth Starr, Bono, Donald Trump, Alan Dershowitz, Tim Geitner, Jeffrey Epstein, William Kristol, George Bush Junior, Henry Rosovsky (former Dean at Harvard), Barack Obama, Dick and Liz Cheney, Bill Gates, etc., Larry Summers has been considered an economic wizard, a sort of financial guru to the wealthy and well positioned.(7),(8)

To everyone else who’s been paying a modicum of attention to his “contributions” over the course of the last 3 and 1/2 decades however, Larry Summers, who was Economic Chief of The World Bank from 1991-1993, US Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton from 1999-2001, President of Harvard University from 2001-2006 and Director of the Economic Council under Barack Obama from 2008-2011, has (arguably) been the greatest single destructive economic force on the planet over the course of the last 35 years.

A Sidenote Going Forward

In this writer’s opinion, it’s important at this time that we all begin recognizing that the record clearly shows the elite class consistently puts profit and power before the well being of the general public and/or any other form of partisanship. Look again at the bipartisan list of elites above. The idea that there’s a lesser of two evils among elites within the two major US political parties is ridiculous at this point. If nothing else let’s stop deceiving ourselves regarding the idea that the donor owned politicians in one of the two parties, as they exist now in 2025, cares more about our well being than the donor owned politicians in the other party. Let’s at least disabuse ourselves of this bamboozlement.

A Few of Larry Summers’ Contributions (1991 – 2025)

1- Larry Summers was the Clinton administration‘s “leading advocate” in seeing to it that the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was repealed in 1999, which finally brought down the firewall between investment and commercial banking. After 66 years of relative safety for investors, Summers swung the power pendulum back toward the Banking system, opening the door to all sorts of fraud and an increasing division of wealth that has recently surpassed anything we’ve seen since the Great Depression.(9)

2- Larry Summers was “the main person who set up the bailout” after the 2008 crash, a crash that was largely made possible by his push to remove Glass-Steagall from law. The bailout heavily favored the extremely wealthy and the people who committed the crimes that made the bailout necessary in the first place.(10)

3- During his tenure as President of Harvard University, Larry Summers made clear his disagreement with the idea that women are capable of occupying certain positions of power due to their “intrinsic lack of aptitude” in certain areas of mental functioning. He felt their lack of aptitude was particularly evident in the realm of the sciences.(11)

4- While running the economy of the World Bank in 1991, Chief Economic Executive Larry Summers suggested that the best place to dump toxic waste would be in “third world” countries like Africa, (paraphrasing) due to the fact that they occupied an inferior realm in the overall spectrum of human possibilities.(12)

5- Along with his colleagues Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers spearheaded a financial debacle that crushed a good portion of Asia’s economy at the end of the 1990s, leaving hundreds of thousands of people in dire poverty.(13)

6- Larry Summers (recently) resigned from public life in disgrace after no longer being able to hide his close association and numerous interactions with Jeffrey Epstein, which involved Summers’ procurement of advice from Epstein regarding how to sexually seduce his much younger female mentee, along with a slew of other problematic endeavors including multiple visits to Epstein’s “slave island”.(14)

Insider Privilege and the Strangulation of Democracy

It would be difficult to imagine a more reprehensibly flawed list of actions and infractions than the one above. With that record of failure you’d think it’d be impossible for Summers to land a job anywhere. Yet up until a week or so ago, Larry Summers was a celebrated, respected figure in the elite circles he ran in. It didn’t matter (before his friendship and collaborations with Jeffrey Epstein were made public) that his reputation amongst the American public has been extremely negative for decades.(15)

It’s precisely this sort of chasm between what elites actually do and the privileges and accolades they garner that makes it obvious that there is something deeply nefarious about the way the current system of relations between institutions of power, a system that is now run entirely by elites, functions. It’s a system that all too often rewards bad faith and criminality at the expense of the vast majority of the population’s health and well being. What was formerly (arguably up until the beginning of the 21st century) at least a formal democracy isn’t even that anymore. At this point we’re dealing with an oligarchic plutocracy that barely bothers to cover its tracks. Why pretend? Why cover up when there’s no one in power you need to fool anymore?

In Part 2

In Part 2 of this article, amongst other things, we’ll go into detail about how elites use the outbreaks of major crises to increase their levels of power and wealth.

CITATIONS

1-https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-great-secession-of-the-morbidly-72d

2-https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/05/americas-new-aristocracy-live-accountability-free-zone-david-sirota

2a-https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241104-us-election-how-aipac-shapes-american-politics/

2b-https://www.commondreams.org/news/aipac-100-million

2c-https://www.cchr.org.uk/who-are-the-investors-who-owns-big-pharma/

3-https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/10/5/why-europes-leadership-wants

4-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1O0T4b8U1U

5-https://lbo-news.com/2020/04/25/yanis-varoufakis-on-larry-summers/

6-https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-jeffrey-epstein-helped-israel-establish-a-police-state-in-this-country-9645587

7-https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2001/07/bono-speeches-commencement-2001

8-https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/08/01/obamas-risky-summers-fling