Obama's team: ex-Harvard, pro-biz, pro-war and mostly a slap in the face to Obama's base

US President Barack Obama was swept into power on a popular wave seeking change. Unfortunately, the cabinet he has selected does not inspire much hope of such change.

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair

OBAMA's cabinet is drawing praise for all the wrong reasons, starting with the mad-dog right, like Ann Coulter who says she can't fault it or Karl Rove who heaped praise on Obama's economic team in a Wall Street Journal column. Move to the corporate mainstream, and there's measured congratulation for the respectability of Obama's team, pro-biz, pragmatic and, whether proximately from the Bush or Clinton administrations, often at source from Harvard.

So far as the progressive Obama base is concerned, it's been one bitter pill after another, starting with Rahm Emanuel (the only man in the Illinois congressional delegation to vote Yes to the war on Iraq), moving on to Hillary Clinton (another Yes on the war), Robert Gates, and the whole economic team. There was a brief ray of hope when Larry Summers didn't return to Treasury. Then he bobbed up as director of Obama's economic recovery team, formally known as the National Economic Council, based in the White House.

Clinton comparison

Contrast these desolate choices with what the progressives were given in the dawn of Clinton time. He didn't turn out to be much good, but Wisconsin Rep. Les Aspin, at the time he was nominated as secretary of defence, certainly had a reputation as a Pentagon critic. Environmentalists were exuberant when Bruce Babbitt, former head of the League of Conservation Voters, was given the Department of the Interior. It's true that Babbitt did not match such expectations, but when he was nominated, the mining and cattle lobbies were mad with fury. At HUD (Housing and Urban Development) there was Henry Cisneros, always in trouble but fairly progressive; at Labour - Robert Reich; at Agriculture - Mike Espy; at EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) - Carol Browner. As surgeon general we got Jocelyn Elders, a radical black woman who spoke her mind and was finally axed by Clinton for being honest about sex ed. We got Lani Guinier at the Justice Department, a terrific choice swiftly betrayed by the man who picked her, Bill Clinton. As number 2 at Health and Human Services, there was Peter Edelman, one of only three people in the Clinton administration who resigned over the onslaughts on the welfare system five years later.

Of course, as now, big business kept its mitts firmly on the essential levers: Treasury, the Fed.

Slim pickings

What is Obama's progressive base getting by way of reward? The pickings are very slim. The whole raison d'etre of Obama's campaign in the primary phase - the period when the progressive constituency has to be allured - was to turn the page not only on Bush time but on Clinton time, to move on. So... we get Hillary Clinton, given the extra privilege of staffing the lower positions at State with her own people; we get Clinton's economic team of Summers, Rubin (today an informal adviser), Summers' former deputy Timothy Geithner, nominated as Treasury secretary. Geithner's heraldic quarterings display Kissinger Associates, Treasury in the administration of Bush Sr., service in the Clinton administration working for Rubin and Summers, then a stint at the IMF, followed by his most recent billet at the New York Fed, where his fingerprints are on three bad decisions - the bailout and sale of Bear Stearns, the bailout of AIG, and the decision to allow Lehman to go bankrupt.

Nowhere has business-as-usual been more glaringly given the green light than at the Department of Defence. Anyone looking for change in America's political economy has to take on the Pentagon, a vast and steadily widening crater of corruption and Augean waste. Obama has simply kept on Robert Gates, who first made his name faking intelligence estimates at the CIA in Bush Sr.'s day, exaggerating Soviet military strength and aggressive intentions. Nominated as Gates' number 2, presumptively as Gates' successor, is William Lynn. Appointed by Clinton as a Pentagon reformer in '98, Lynn - in the words of famed Pentagon employee/critic Chuck Spinney - 'managed to construct a logically inconsistent and morally indefensible strategy to protect the unworkable status quo'.

Dashed by the disasters at State and Treasury, the progressives looked for comfort at the Departments of Agriculture and Interior, which supervise vast slabs of the homeland. At Ag they got the former governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, who'd opposed Obama in the primaries and who is best known as being a fanatic lobbyist for genetically engineered biocrops and ethanol. He's Monsanto's pinup boy and comes factory guaranteed as a will-do guy for the agrochemical complex. For a moment, hope glowed from the transition team's office in Chicago, as the panel listened attentively to those lobbying for Raul Grijalva, a US rep. from Arizona who is firstrate and has done more than anyone in recent years to root out scandal in Bush's scandal-sodden sojourn as custodian of the nation's forests, energy reserves and public waters. Rejected, Grijalva said accurately, 'I think we [the progressives] are seen as convenient allies, not as necessary allies. It's an awkward position. We're taken for granted. We're not like Blue Dog Democrats, who threaten to vote against children and health care to get what they want. Maybe we need to do that.'

In the end, Interior went to Colorado's senior senator, Ken Salazar. He's a born heel-clicker to the Money Power, always hatching deals with the coal industry and big ranching interests. He makes Bruce Babbitt look like Edward Abbey.

Promising

Are there any encouraging Obama picks? Her role may be to tell the unions that card check reform is a non-starter with Obama, but certainly California congresswoman Hilda Solis is a promising pick as Labour secretary. Solis is the daughter of poor Latin American immigrants: her father, a Mexican, was a shop steward with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Mexico, and her mother, a Nicaraguan, was a former assembly-line worker. A good left economist, Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, is scheduled to be chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden. At the Justice Department, now destined to be ruled virtually 100% by graduates of the Harvard Law School, the Office of Legal Counsel has been given to Dawn Johnsen, most recently at the University of Indiana Law School, Bloomington. This was the position held by the execrable John Yoo, friend of the thumbscrew and the water board. Johnsen has been a fierce assailant of Yoo's constitutional abuses, writing at one point, 'Where is the outrage, the public outcry?! The shockingly flawed content of this memo, the deficient processes that led to its issuance, the horrific acts it encouraged, the fact that it was kept secret for years and that the Bush administration continues to withhold other memos like it - all demand our outrage.' Johnsen has also attacked the Cheney-style 'theory of a unified executive', otherwise known as untrammelled presidential power.

He's no radical, but the choice of Leon Panetta as CIA chief seems good. Panetta, from Monterey on California's central coast, bailed out the Clintons by becoming chief of staff after the organisational and political disasters of 1993. Panetta may turn out to be a good pick along the same lines as Stansfield Turner, back in Carter time. The other national security appointments are bad.

Towering at Obama's other elbow from Emanuel looms National Security Adviser Jim Jones, a Marine, mustard keen on NATO expansion. As his special assistant on the Middle East, Obama has selected Dan Kurtzer, ambassador to Egypt under Clinton and Israel under George Bush Jr. Kurtzer allegedly helped write Obama's notorious piece of grovelling to the Israeli lobbying organisation AIPAC in June 2008. As National Intelligence director, we're scheduled to get Admiral Dennis Blair, recently exposed on the CounterPunch site as abetting the Indonesian generals in the infamous butchery known as the Church Killings in East Timor. After he retired from the Navy, Blair joined the board of directors of the EDO, he was serving as head of a Pentagon board - the Institute for Defence Analyses - which was evaluating the F-22 contract, and endorsed another three years of subsidies for the programme. Blair did not disclose his board membership and got publicly reprimanded by the Pentagon's inspector general.

At almost every level, Obama's choices have been calibrated to appease the establishment, from the financial markets (or what's left of them), to the press (or what's left of it), to the think tanks and lobbyists of Washington (as strong as ever). As an agent of change - we do not even mention hope - the age of Obama looks wan. Perhaps worsening economic circumstances will force Obama into uncharted territory.          

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are the Editors of CounterPunch, from which this article is reproduced (January 1-15, 2009 issue).

*Third World Resurgence No. 221/222, January-February 2009, pp 13-14