Obama's economic adviser

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Alan Maass looks at the record of the man who Barack Obama tapped to
be the head of his team of economic advisers.

June 27, 2008

Barack Obama (BarackObama.com)

BACK IN January, at one of the Democratic presidential candidates'
debates, Barack Obama took one of his few open shots at Hillary
Clinton's past as a shill for shady corporations. "While I was working
[as a community organizer in Chicago]...watching those folks see their
jobs shift overseas," Obama said, "you were a corporate lawyer sitting
on the board at Wal-Mart."

It was a point that deserved to be made more often. Clinton's remade
campaign image as a populist fighting for the "little guy" was in
stark contrast to her long history as a fixture of the Democratic
Party establishment and defender of corporations like Wal-Mart.

But maybe Obama had his reasons for keeping quiet about the Beast of
Bentonville.

With the nomination finally in hand, Obama announced he was adding a
team of political advisers straight out of the pro-corporate,
pro-military mainstream of Clintonism.

And to head his economic team, he chose Jason Furman--best known to
labor activists for writing a 2005 article defending Wal-Mart as a
"progressive success story" and denouncing the efforts of union-backed
groups like Wal-Mart Watch to expose the retail giant.

Furman's appointment was consistent with a series of right turns by
Obama. The day after he claimed victory following the last Democratic
primaries on June 3, Obama appeared before the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee, where he committed himself to an undivided
Jerusalem, which isn't even the position of the Bush administration.
At a Father's Day speech, he renewed his blame-the-victim criticisms
of Black men as being responsible for the problems of the Black community.

Of course, it's the common wisdom of Democratic Party leaders that
their presidential candidate needs to move toward the "center" as a
general election gets underway. But Obama--who did say, once upon a
time, that he would be a different kind of Democrat--is seeming more
and more like a car whose steering wheel is stuck in one direction:
turning right.

Obama's latest lurch came after the U.S. Supreme Court announced its
5-4 decision barring executions of those convicted of child rape.
Obama criticized the ruling--which meant lining up with the right-wing
extremist wing of the court: John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Antonin
Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

On the issue of the death penalty, Obama likes to associate himself
with the Illinois moratorium on executions declared by former Gov.
George Ryan while Obama was still a state senator. At one Democratic
debate, for instance, he talked about the "broken system" that "had
sent 13 innocent men to death row."

There is no reason to believe that the justice system is any less
broken when it comes to crimes other than murder--and Obama knows it.
But he and his advisers apparently thought it was more strategic to
sign up with the absurd attack on the Supreme Court for committing
"abuse of judicial authority," in the words of Louisiana Gov. Bobby
Jindal.

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THE CHOICE of Furman to lead his economic team underlines just how far
Obama is from the progressive icon his supporters believe him to be.

Furman is a protégé of Robert Rubin, the Wall Street banker who shaped
Clintonomics in the 1990s to serve the pro-business, neoliberal agenda.

In 2006, Furman was selected to head the Brookings Institution's
Hamilton Project, a think tank founded by Rubin to press for free
trade and balanced budget policies. On the advisory council of the
Hamilton Project are Rubin and fellow Citigroup executives, as well as
prominent hedge fund bosses like Eric Mindich of Eton Park Capital
Management and Thomas Steyer of Farallon Capital.

Obama was the keynote speaker at the ceremony launching the Hamilton
Project. He praised its leaders for their willingness to "experiment
with policies that weren't necessarily partisan or ideological."

No one would confuse Furman with a radical. In a Washington Post op-ed
last year, he argued for a decrease in the tax rate on corporations,
provided loopholes in the tax code are closed. "We should consider,"
he wrote, "tax reform in the classic 1986 mode"--that is, tax policy
as defined under Ronald Reagan.

But Furman went above and beyond the call in a 2005 paper, titled
"Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story," where he argued that the
low-wage, no-benefit jobs created by the aggressively anti-union
Wal-Mart were the price to pay so low-income Americans could have a
place to buy goods at low prices.

As if the example set by Wal-Mart and emulated by other corporations
wasn't one of the main reasons why U.S. workers have to scramble to
find bargain-basement prices. By Furman's logic, every strike for
better wages is a blow to the interests of the working class as a
whole--and an injury to one must be a victory for all.

In a Slate.com debate about the tactics of groups organizing against
Wal-Mart's abuses of workers and customers alike, Furman clearly
delighted in using the same smears against liberals employed by the
likes of Karl Rove.

"The collateral damage from these efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its
wages and benefits is way too enormous and damaging to working people
and the economy more broadly for me to sit by idly and sing
'Kum-Ba-Ya' in the interests of progressive harmony," Furman wrote.

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FURMAN ISN'T the exception, but the rule on a team of economic
advisers to Obama that comes from, as author Naomi Klein puts it, "the
left side of a spectrum that stops at the center-right."

For example, there's Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago
economics department--though he's better known these days for having
met with Canadian government officials to assure them that the Obama
campaign's previous anti-NAFTA rhetoric "should be viewed as more
political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."

The UC economics department, of course, is notorious as the home of
Milton Friedman and the high priests of neoliberalism and corporate
globalization. Goolsbee comes from the Democratic wing of the
department, but he still worships the free market, and expects the
same of the presidential candidate he supports. "If you look at his
platform, at his advisers, at his temperament," Goolsbe said of Obama
to one reporter, "the guy's got a healthy respect for markets."

As Klein pointed out in the Nation, the neoliberal dogmas of the
"Chicago school" are increasingly discredited because of the damage
they have caused--to the extent that "Friedman's name is seen as a
liability even at his own alma mater. So why has Obama chosen this
moment, when all illusions of a consensus have dropped away, to go
Chicago retro?"

The question is the answer. For all his talk about change, Obama is
showing in such actions his commitment to an economic program that is
acceptable to Wall Street and Corporate America.

http://socialistworker.org/2008/06/27/candidate-makes-right-turns

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