Trying to force a protégé to sleep with him is the least of Larry Summers sins. I’ve been hunting this toxic asset for three decades, and his victims number in the millions. No kidding.

The current charge that finally brought Summers down was the revelation that he was asking Jeffrey Epstein for advice on how to seduce a young mentee, using his position as one of the world’s most powerful economists to get her pants off. Yuck.

But I’m not writing to tell you about Larry the Lecher. Rather, I want to let you in on the secret known by a couple Nobel Prize winning acquaintances of mine who would agree that Larry Summers may just be the most dangerous, destructive economist on Earth. (And that’s saying a lot because I was a protégé of another killer economist: Milton Friedman, the mouthpiece for the phony “free market” horrors that have bedeviled the planet for decades.)

What set me on Summers was a whole stack of confidential documents I obtained via the brilliant investigator Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy. She’d gotten her hands on hundreds of secret documents of the World Bank where Summers had been Chief Economist.

But the killer doc was a highly confidential note written in 1997 from Summer’s flunky, Timothy Geithner, who was then Ambassador to the World Trade Organization when Summers was Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.

Clinton would soon give Summers the top job as Treasury Secretary when Robert Rubin went off to Chair Citibank (for a $126 million paycheck), a financial monolith created by banking “deregulation” as promoted by Rubin, Geithner and Summers.

The Summers plan for de-regulation allowed banks to gamble our savings accounts in the new derivatives markets. It didn’t take long for the crash. In 2008, Summers’ suckers — that’s you and me, the public — ponied up some $4 TRILLION dollars to bail out Citibank, Goldman Sachs (once chaired by Rubin). America went bust while Summers, Rubin and Geithner cashed in big time.

Get the full story, read: Larry Summers, Epstein and the “End Game” Memo

https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/p/larry-summers-epstein-and-the-end

Investigative journalist Greg Palast joins The Rick Smith Show to tear open the newly uncovered emails between Harvard’s Larry Summers and Jeffrey Epstein — emails in which the very-married Summers leans on the convicted predator as his “wingman,” seeking tips on how to seduce a young economist he was mentoring.

Palast lays out how Summers — Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and Obama’s National Economic Council Director — helped engineer the global deregulation spree that detonated economies from Wall Street to Latin America. And he returns to the infamous secret “End-Game” memo he first exposed in VICE: a blueprint showing how U.S. Treasury insiders quietly colluded with a cabal of banking titans to bulldoze financial protections worldwide.

Will this Epstein scandal finally push Democrats to cut loose the high priest of neoliberalism? Is this the long-overdue Summers reckoning?

Learn more: Read Larry Summers and the Secret "End-Game" Memo: https://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo/

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LBC's Matt Frei talks to Greg Palast about the latest madness in MAGA-land in this interview first broadcast on Nov 15, 2025.

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In this edition of the Election Crimes Bulletin, first broadcast on Nov 6, 2025, investigative journalist Greg Palast and Flashpoints host Dennis J. Bernstein unpack the results from Tuesday’s election.

Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election by 181,000 votes. The early vote in New York was a record-breaking 735,000. That's where Mamdani’s margin came in.

When you let people vote, they vote progressive. That’s why Trump has gone after mail-in voting and early voting, because that is how minorities vote these days.

In a democracy, the voters are supposed to pick the politicians. But now we have politicians picking the voters. Around 22 states have made it more difficult to vote by mail or use dropboxes.

They cut the number of voting stations and dropboxes in low income, student and minority areas to engineer long lines, while the people in the white suburbs have zero wait to vote.

These states are also “caging” voters, using the euphemism “voter-roll hygiene” to remove mostly poor, young, and minority voters from the rolls.

Onerous ID laws, heavy restrictions on early and mail-in voting, gerrymandering, laws that allow mass challenges — it's a soft coup. It's not troops in the street grabbing ballot boxes. It's seizing control of the procedure to make it impossible or difficult for people of color, students, and low income voters to vote.

To stay informed, and to learn how to save your vote, subscribe to our newsletter (GregPalast.com/subscribe) or Substack (Substack.com/@GregPalastInvestigates).

For years, I was BBC Television’s correspondent covering Venezuela and US attempts to overthrow their elected government. Trump invented nothing. This is at least the fourth US-backed attempt at overthrow and assassination of a Venezuelan president. To understand why Trump has ordered a covert operation to overthrow their government, you need to understand three things about Venezuela...

Get the full story, read my Substack report: I met Chávez and Maduro. I know drugs are not the reason Trump wants war with Venezuela: https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/p/i-met-chavez-and-maduro-i-know-drugs

Watch the film of my BBC reports, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, produced with Oscar-nominated cinematographer Richard Rowley, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/syExbfVPDnU

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"When cowards are ordering around heroes, there could not be anything more dangerous for America." — Greg Palast

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Thom Hartmann’s new book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party and a World on the Brink, is one giant fact check on the Whopper-in-Chief, and much more — a disturbing dive into the roiling miasma of self-aggrandizing, self-deluding, psychologically shattered, wailing man-child who is Commander-in-Chief.

Trump and Hegseth's gathering of the generals wasn’t patriotism — it was theater for authoritarianism. When you tell the military that America's “inner cities” are "a big part of war now” you’re not defending America — you’re declaring war on it. The question now is stark: when the illegal order comes — to turn U.S. troops with live ammunition on the American people — will these generals follow it? And are they more or less likely to after this gathering?

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