Biden is reportedly considering Roger Ferguson, Gary Gensler, and former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault for top economic policy positions
President-elect Joe Biden is considering Roger Ferguson, former vice-chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, for National Economic Council director, sources close to the matter told CNBC.
Biden is considering regulatory veteran Gary Gensler, who worked for both the Obama and Clinton administrations, for Deputy Treasury Secretary, they said.
Kenneth Chenault, who spent nearly 40 years at American Express, is also being considered for a top economic policy position, they added.
President-elect Joe Biden is considering Roger Ferguson, Gary Gensler, and Kenneth Chenault for some of the top economic policy roles in his administration, CNBC reported Wednesday, citing sources close to the matter.
Ferguson, the outgoing CEO of The Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, who has previously held government roles, could be Biden's National Economic Council director, the sources said.
Former Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman Gensler could be appointed Deputy Treasury Secretary, they said. On Monday, Biden picked former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to head the Treasury Department.
Former American Express CEO Chenault, who has sat on boards including at Facebook, Airbnb, and Berkshire Hathaway, could also be in the running for another economic policy position, the sources said.
Biden is expected to announce some of the appointments to his economic team early next week.
Roger Ferguson
After being considered for Treasury Secretary, Ferguson is now in the running for National Economic Council director, the sources told CNBC. Ferguson is currently the CEO of the Fortune 100 fund manager TIAA, but earlier this month he announced his retirement in March after almost 13 years in the role.
Ferguson, who has three degrees from Harvard University, has held previous governmental roles.
After working in the legal industry, he was appointed to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors by the Clinton administration in 1997. He was appointed to the board's vice-chair two years later, and resigned from the role in 2006.
Ferguson sat on Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board when he first ran for president in 2008, and was considered for Federal Reserve Board chair in 2013.
Ferguson currently sits on the board of Alphabet, Google's parent company.
Gary Gensler
Biden is also considering Gary Gensler for Deputy Treasury Secretary, the sources said.
Gensler is currently leading Biden's financial policy transition team, which involves overseeing Wall Street and the regulations that govern it, alongside reviewing the Federal Reserve.
In this role he will likely knuckle down on financial and consumer protection policies, four securities lawyers told Business Insider.
Gensler has also worked alongside previous presidents. During the Obama administration, Gensler chaired the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates the United States' derivatives markets.
He also served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Markets and then Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance under former president Bill Clinton.
Gensler was also the chief financial officer for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.
Gensler additionally spent 18 years working at Goldman Sachs, and is a professor of global economics and management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Kenneth Chenault
Former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault is also under consideration for a top economic policy position, the sources said.
After working at the financial services company for 20 years, Chenault served as its CEO and chairman from 2001 to 2018, making him the third-ever Black CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Chenault has sat on the boards of IBM, Procter & Gamble, Airbnb, Facebook, and Berkshire Hathaway. He is currently managing director of General Catalyst Partners.
Read the original article on Business Insider
GLOBALIST
DEMOCRATS: PARTY OF BILLIONAIRES, BANKSTERS and open BORDERS. I was reminded
after reading that 131 billionaires who are pouring millions into Joe Biden’s
campaign in their mindless obsession to defeat Trump in November. Among the prominent are Jeff Skoll, of eBay
who has contributed $4.5 million; Laurene Powell Jobs of Apple and owner of The
Atlantic magazine has donated $1.2 million,
and Josh Bekenstein, of Bain Capital (co-founded by Mitt Romney), $5
million. STEVE McCANN
Report: Fortune 500
CEOs Will Intervene if Joe Biden Isn’t Inaugurated by January 20
16 Nov 20208,356
2:12
Executives
from Fortune 500 corporations say they are planning to intervene if Democrat
Joe Biden is not inaugurated into office by January 20, 2021.
A report by CBS News states that
in a conference call late last week, Fortune 500 executives were planning to
step in on behalf of Biden to pressure Republican lawmakers if President Trump
holds up the former vice president’s transition.
CBS News reports:
But if Mr. Trump
tries to undo the legal process or disrupts a peaceful transition to Biden, the
CEOs discussed making public statements and pressuring GOP legislators in their
states who may try to redirect Electoral College votes from Biden to
Trump, said Yale Management Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who convened the
meeting. [Emphasis added]
“They’re all fine with him
taking an appeal to the court, to a judicial process. They didn’t want to deny
him that. But that doesn’t stop the transition,” said Sonnenfeld.
“They said if that makes people feel better, it doesn’t hurt anything to let
that grind through.” [Emphasis added]
…
The CEOs decided to wait for
the November 20 certification of votes in Georgia before meeting to decide
their next moves. Action could include threats to stop donations to
political action committees or even corporate relocations, Sonnenfeld said.
[Emphasis added]
The big business lobby and
Wall Street have been looking to undermine Trump’s economic nationalist agenda
for years. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable — both
representing some of the nation’s largest multinational corporations and
fighting Trump — congratulated Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris
(D-CA) days after the November 3 election.
“The U.S. Chamber stands ready to work with the Biden
administration and leaders on both sides of the aisle to restore public health,
revitalize our economy, and help rebuild American lives and communities,” the
Chamber’s statement reads.
John Binder is a
reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos congratulates Biden as the
president-elect packs his transition teams with servants of the corporate
oligarchy
10 hours ago
·
·
·
·
·
Amazon oligarch and COVID-19 profiteer Jeff Bezos, the world’s
richest man, congratulated president-elect Joe Biden following the declaration
four days after the November 3 vote that Biden had won the US presidential
election.
“Unity, empathy and decency are
not characteristics of a bygone era,” Bezos wrote on Instagram, congratulating
Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. “By voting in record numbers, the
American people proved again that our democracy is strong.”
Jeff Bezos in
2019 (Image Credit: AP Photo/John Locher, File)
This sentiment was echoed on
November 7 by the Business Roundtable, including Bezos as well as the chief
executives of Apple, Cisco, Microsoft and Salesforce. The big business
organization issued a statement that said: “Business Roundtable congratulates
President-elect Biden on his election as 46th President of the United States.
We also congratulate Vice President-elect Harris on her historic accomplishment
as the first woman, Black woman and person of South Asian descent to be elected
Vice President of the United States… We look forward to working with the
incoming Biden Administration and all federal and state policymakers.”
Last week, Biden’s transition
team posted the names and most recent employers of members of its agency review
teams on the website buildbackbetter.org. Given the composition of these teams,
it is easy to see why Bezos and his fellow oligarchs are in a congratulatory
mood.
The individuals who have been
appointed are listed alongside the company for which they most recently worked,
and organized into “teams” based on the government operations they are tasked
with reviewing, such as the departments of Commerce, Defense, Education, Labor,
State and Homeland Security.
The composition of these agency
review teams demonstrates the intersection, if not outright integration, of the
technology monopolies, academic aristocracy, beltway think tanks, trade union
bureaucracies, giant law firms and the military-intelligence apparatus of war
and repression at home and abroad.
Amazon will have not one,
but two seats on the transition teams. Tom Sullivan, Amazon’s director of
international tax planning, will sit on Biden’s Department of State team. In
addition to Sullivan, Mark Schwartz, an “enterprise strategist” for Amazon Web
Services, will serve on the extremely powerful Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) team. The OMB oversees the $5 trillion federal budget and exerts
influence across a broad range of federal regulatory frameworks.
In addition to figures from
Amazon, Nicole Isaac, senior director of North American policy at LinkedIn,
will sit on the Department of Treasury team. Brandon Belford from Lyft will
serve on the Office of Management and Budget team, along with Divya Kumaraiah
from Airbnb.
Shara Mohtadi of Bloomberg
Philanthropies, which is funded by the donations of billionaire oligarch
Michael R. Bloomberg, will sit on the Council on Environmental Quality. And no
less than four individuals, serving in various capacities, are drawn from the
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is co-owned by Facebook oligarch Mark
Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.
Arun Venkataraman from Visa
will sit on the team tasked with reviewing the Office of the United States
Trade Representative, which will also review the US International Trade
Commission and the US Trade and Development Agency. This team will also include
Ted Dean from Dropbox.
The labor bureaucracies will
also have seats at the table, demonstrating their complete integration into the
apparatus of capitalist rule. Beth Antunez, Shital Shah and Marla
Ucelli-Kashyap of the American Federation of Teachers, together with Donna Harris-Aikens
of the National Education Association, will sit on the Department of Education
team.
The labor bureaucracies are
also represented by LaQuita Honeysucker from the United Food and Commercial
Workers International Union, who will be on the Department of Agriculture
review team, while Josh Nassar of the United Auto Workers will sit on the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau team.
Brad Markell of the AFL-CIO
will sit on the Department of Energy Team. His name appears right before that
of Trisha Miller from the venture capital firm Gates Ventures.
On the Department of Labor team
will be Jennifer Abruzzo of the Communications Workers of America, Dora Chen of
the Service Employees International Union, Jessica Chu of the Amalgamated
Transit Union International, Nadia Marin-Molina of the National Day Laborer
Organizing Network (NDLON), and Shaun O’Brien of the American Federation of
State, County and Municipal Employees, among others.
The major academic institutions
represented on the list include Harvard Law School, the University of Michigan
Law School, New York University School of Law, Duke University, Stanford
University, Georgetown University and others. Major law firms and consulting
firms include Deloitte Consulting; DLA Piper; Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe;
Sidley Austin; Covington & Burling; and Latham & Watkins.
The racial and identity
politics promoted by the Democratic Party did not fail to be reflected on the
list, with Bonnie Jenkins appointed to the Department of State team from an
organization titled Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security. Jenkins, a
nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, previously served as
the coordinator for threat reduction programs in the Obama administration’s
Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation.
The Department of Defense team
will be led by Kathy Hicks from the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS), who will be joined by Melissa Dalton and Andrew Hunter, also
from the CSIS; Stacie Pettyjohn, Christine Wormuth and Terri Tanielian from the
RAND Corporation; Ely Ratner from the Center for a New American Security; and
Lisa Sawyer of JPMorgan Chase, among others.
The composition of Biden’s
agency review teams exposes and refutes all of the pseudo-left and opportunist
groups in the orbit of the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracies,
which have throughout the year attempted to persuade American workers that
Biden, the Democratic Party and the unions represented some sort of channel
through which they could advance their own independent interests.
The parade of lobbyists,
servants and agents of the capitalist class into the incoming Biden
administration prompted a defensive article in the New York Times on
Thursday, titled “Progressives Press Biden to Limit Corporate Influence in
Administration.”
The title of the article
essentially acknowledges that “corporate influence” (i.e., corruption) is
playing a pervasive role in the formation of the incoming administration, and
suggests “limits” on that influence.
The article concedes that “Mr.
Biden’s team included executives from Amazon Web Services, Lyft, Airbnb and a
vice president of WestExec Advisors, a Washington consulting firm whose
secretive list of clients includes financial services, technology and
pharmaceutical companies.”
The Times then points to
the efforts of “progressive Democrats” who are advocating “for tighter ethics
rules.” This is nothing but a fig leaf for the otherwise naked domination of
the Democratic Party by the interests of the military-intelligence-corporate-financial
oligarchy.
The facts presented in
the Times article
themselves paint a devastating picture of how the so-called “left” wing of the
party is being shoved aside as the fat cats shoulder their way into the new
administration. In a joint letter sent Thursday, a number of organizations
associated with the so-called “progressive wing” of the Democratic Party
pleaded with Biden not to “nominate or hire corporate executives, lobbyists,
and prominent corporate consultants,” and to adopt “ethics” rules to limit
corruption.
These and other feeble efforts
by the “progressive Democrats” are being unceremoniously ignored. The Times itself was
compelled to acknowledge that “Mr. Biden has not always shared the left’s
concerns about lobbying.”
Tendencies like the Democratic
Socialists of America were used by the Democratic Party during the election
campaign to further the Democrats’ electoral prospects, but within days of the
vote they were tossed aside and roundly denounced for having supposedly cost
the Democrats votes and positions with their “radical” and “socialist”
rhetoric.
These “socialist” elements had
been promised “space” in a Biden administration, but they showed up after the
election only to find their “Green New Deal” and other promised reforms piled
up in trash bags by the curb.
There
is nothing unexpected about the emerging right-wing, pro-war, pro-Wall Street
composition of the incoming Biden administration. Biden himself spent decades in Washington as a
corrupt bag-man for wealthy interests in the state of Delaware, the legal
headquarters of hundreds of thousands of corporations that take advantage of
its business-friendly laws.
As vice
president, Biden was reportedly opposed even to the barebones rules against
corruption that were imposed during the Obama presidency. In the words of
the Times:
“When he was vice president under Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden bristled at the strict
lobbying rules, which he contended would deprive their nascent administration
of experienced talent.”
From the moment Biden secured a
lead in the voting results, the Democratic Party swung viciously to the right, attacking
“socialism” and the “left” in general. On a conference call with House
Democrats after the election, former CIA agent Abigail Spanberger, now a
representative from Virginia, shouted: “We need to not ever use the word
‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.”
While
the “socialists” have been escorted out of the back door, the front door has
been thrown open to corporate executives, lobbyists and consultants to staff
the new administration.
Tech Elites Endorse Joe Biden to Secure
More Foreign Workers for U.S. Jobs
SERVING
THEIR RICH - If Biden and Harris win, the country will devolve to a kingdom
of state and regional duchies composed of often
semi-hereditary rulers in the pay of the rich, donor class, the clerisy (media
scribblers, complaisant judicial appointees and academic rent seekers who
promote favored policies and shut out the dissenters), an impoverished,
smaller, and powerless middle class and a vast layer of muzzled, docile poor
serfs (ILLEGALS). CLARICE FELDMAN
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/biden-minister-of-propaganda-neo.html
Sold Out: How High-Tech
Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are ScrewingAmerica's Best
& Brightest
By
Michelle Malkin and John Miano
Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers
in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the
San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born
tech workers. Up to 99 percent of H-1B visa
workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms are from India.
Joe
Biden’s Donor List Includes More than 30 Executives Tied to Wall Street
JOSEPH
PREZIOSO/AFP/Getty Images.
2 Nov
2020601
2:52
Democrat presidential
candidate Joe Biden has more than 30 business executives on his donor list that
have connections to Wall Street.
Analysis of Biden’s more than 800 big donors,
those who have bundled contributions for his presidential bid against President
Trump, found that more than 30 of the executives listed have ties to Wall
Street.
CNBC reports:
CNBC reviewed a new
list of more than 800 Biden bundlers who raised at least $100,000 for the
campaign, and found that several of them had links to financial firms. A few had been
mentioned on the initial list of Biden fundraisers that was released in 2019
during the Democratic primary contests. [Emphasis added]
…
Beyond those from Wall
Street, Biden’s campaign saw fundraising help from leaders in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn
co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ron Conway. [Emphasis added]
Those executives with ties to Wall Street funding
Biden’s campaign include:
Frank Baker, Brett Barth, Jim Chanos, Mark
Chorazak, David Clunie, William Derrough, Roger Altman, Blair Effron, Jon
Feigelson, Mark Gallogly, John Rogers, Jon Gray, Tony James, Jon Henes, Sonny
Kalsi, Orin Kramer, Brad Krap, Brian Kreiter, Marc Lasry, Nate Loewenthall,
Eric Mindich, Kara Moore, Charles Myers, Alan Patricof, Deven Parekh, Robert
Rubin, Evan Roth, Faiza Saeed, Rajen Shah, Jay Snyder, Rob Stavis, and Jeff
Zients.
As Breitbart News
reported, Biden’s campaign is being backed by nearly “all the big banks” on
Wall Street, according to CNN analysis, and Wall Street
executives and employees have donated more than $74 million to elect the
former vice president.
Trump, on the other hand, has accepted far less
money from Wall Street — taking just a little over $18 million dollars from financial
firms. This is a whopping $56 million less than what Biden has accepted from
Wall Street.
Despite his Wall Street, big business, Big
Tech, and billionaire donations, Biden has attempted to portray himself as a
small-town fighter from Scranton, Pennsylvania.
In a post on Sunday, Biden
wrote that “Donald Trump sees the world from Park Avenue,” whereas he sees the
world “from where I came from: Scranton, Pennsylvania.” In fact, Biden has raised over $1 million
from wealthy Park Avenue donors, more than eight times the less than $130,000
that Trump has taken from Park Avenue residents.
John Binder is a
reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter
Big Tech and Big Law
dominate Biden transition teams, tempering progressive hopes
Alexander Nazaryan administration
takes office in January.
WASHINGTON — For six years, Brandon Belford worked as an
economic policy adviser to President Barack Obama in the White House and
federal agencies. He moved to the Bay Area when Donald Trump became president,
part of a massive flight of Obama officials from Washington to Silicon Valley,
Wall Street and Hollywood. He took high-ranking positions with Apple and then
Lyft, where he is currently the ride-sharing company’s chief of staff.
Now Belford is back, as part of one of the “transition teams”
named by President-elect Joe Biden to restock a federal government that has
been battered after four years of Trump by hiring new officials and advising
the incoming administration on what its first governing steps should be.
Those steps could be timid, judging by the composition of those
teams, where Obama-era centrism prevails. That has some progressives worried
that Biden represents nothing more than a return to normal, at a time when many
of them believe the nation is ready to embrace policy ideas well to the left of
center.
“The status quo is killing us,” says former Bernie Sanders press
secretary Briahna Joy Gray, who now hosts a podcast called “Bad Faith.”
Belford is joined by dozens of other Democratic operatives who
have spent the past four years working at prestigious law firms and think
tanks. On these “agency review teams” are high-ranking executives from Amazon,
partners at white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling and enough
experts from D.C. center-left think tanks — including six from the Brookings
Institution alone — to fill a center-left think tank.
Progressives knew this was coming. “I am very concerned about
the role Uber executives would play in this administration,” Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez D-N.Y., told Yahoo News. Even though she also effusively praised
the appointment of Ron Klain as the incoming White House chief of staff,
Ocasio-Cortez vowed that corporate America would not “pull the wool over our
eyes” when it came to crafting the Biden presidency.
Some have put it less bluntly. “Biden’s transition team is full
of wealthy corporate executives who are completely disconnected from the
struggles of the working class,” complains left-leaning activist Ryan
Knight, whose
Twitter handle is @ProudSocialist.
App-based
drivers from Uber and Lyft protest in a caravan in front of City Hall in Los
Angeles on October 22, 2020 where elected leaders hold a conference urging
voters to reject on the November 3 election, Proposition 22, that would
classify app-based drivers as independent contractors and not employees or
agents. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via
Getty Images)More
He was presumably referring to the two dozen agency review team
officials who come from law firms like Arnold & Porter. Or to the
40 or so members of the Biden transition who are current or recent lobbyists.
The agency review teams are not exactly settling into their
cubicles just yet. For one, President Trump has not yet conceded the election,
and the transition has been hindered in part by Republican
operatives at the General Services Administration. And agency review is an enormously
complex process, one that actually began months ago. The transition teams are
supposed to ensure a “smooth transfer of power,” in large part by making sure
that capable officials are ready to get to work in their respective agencies
the moment Biden lifts his hand from the Lincoln Bible.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one member of the Biden
campaign working on agency-related matters says teams were primarily tasked
with surveying the landscape of the federal bureaucracy. She says that the
transition teams would make some hiring recommendations, but only as a
secondary function.
With a single exception, the agency review team members
mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment.
One with a typically impressive biography is that of Aneesh
Chopra, who served as the U.S. chief technology officer for Obama before
starting his own medical data logistics company, CareJourney. Now he is on the
transition team for the U.S. Postal Service, where he will presumably work to
undo the alleged damage by another logistics maven: Trump appointee Louis DeJoy.
Of course, most progressives are glad that there’s a Biden
transition to speak of, instead of a second Trump term. But they also recognize
their own role in the Democratic candidate’s victory.
“Everyone fell into line and did everything they could to get
Joe Biden elected,” says Max Berger, a progressive activist who worked for
Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Justice Democrats, the group that
helped elect Ocasio-Cortez to the House in 2018.
Berger recognizes that progressives will be a “junior partner”
to the establishment Democrats with whom Biden has been ideologically and
temperamentally aligned for a good half-century. They want to be partners all
the same, not just the loyal opposition.
Many are cheered by some of the agency review teams. For one,
they are notably more diverse, a stark contrast to Trump’s reliance on white
males for so much of his advice. On the transition team for the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration is Jedidah Isler, the Dartmouth professor
who in 2014 became the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in astrophysics
from Yale. The transition team for the Small Business Administration includes
Jorge Silva Puras, a political leader in Puerto Rico who also teaches
entrepreneurship at a community college in the Bronx.
“The presence of labor officials throughout many of the groups
is notable,” says David Dayen, executive editor of the American Prospect. In
the Department of Education team, for example, are several executives from the
American Federation of Teachers.
He called the Federal Reserve and Treasury teams “all-stars,” a
sentiment shared by other progressives interviewed for this article. On the
Treasury team is Mehrsa Baradaran, a progressive economist who has written on the racial wealth gap. She is also on the Federal Reserve
team, along with Reena Aggarwal, a corporate governance expert.
Progressive strategist Elizabeth Spiers says the finance-related teams are
not “not quite Elizabeth Warren levels of aggressiveness but also not stuffed
with finance people.” Biden’s advisers appear to have learned the lessons of
his former boss. During Obama’s first year, he relied on banking executives to help quell the financial
crisis. They did so in ways that steered the new president away from
progressive proposals, such as nationalizing those very same banks.
There is not a single current executive from Citibank or Goldman
Sachs on any of the transition teams. Bank of America has also been shut out.
JPMorgan can boast a single toehold in the agency review process: Lisa Sawyer
of the Pentagon team. A spokesman for JPMorgan told Yahoo News that the bank
was “following the appropriate election laws” and that Sawyer was “not on an
agency review team that will touch any banking issues.”
“I think the Biden administration is going to be surprising to
progressives in some ways and disappointing in others, and the agency review
teams reflect that,” Dayen says. During the summer, the American
Prospect published a lengthy exposé about Biden’s foreign policy advisers’ lucrative foray into corporate
America.
Many are set to return to the highest echelons of official Washington.
“I have to be cautiously optimistic,” says Waleed Shahid,
communications director for the Justice Democrats.
Relatively young progressives like Shahid are less likely to wax
romantic about the way things were in Washington. They are less interested in
experience than conviction. But for many in Biden’s camp, a lack of experience
was among the several fatal flaws of the Trump years.
“Everyone — right or left — has made the mistaken assumption for
years that governing is easy,” says “The Death of Expertise” author Tom Nichols, who teaches at
the Naval War College and is an ardently anti-Trump Republican.
“After having a bunch of nitwits and cronies loose in the
government,” Nichols wrote in an email, “I think a lot of people on the left
are really giving in to the assumption that as long as you’re not Trump, or not
a complete idiot, anyone can do it.”
Given the title and theme of his book, Nicholas cautioned
against that approach. “It’s a childish and silly approach to government, but
it’s a bipartisan problem,” he told Yahoo News.
While progressive may not see their stars like Sens. Bernie
Sanders or Elizabeth Warren occupying the Treasury Department, they do very
much hope that a Biden presidency amounts to more than a third Obama term. It
was unaddressed economic inequality, they believe, that bred the populist
resentment that gave Trump an opening in 2016. The coronavirus has only made
that inequality worse. That will only increase populist resentment, they worry,
to be exploited by a Trump acolyte — or perhaps Trump himself, again — in 2024.
Addressing that inequality, for now, falls to transition team
officials like Mark Schwartz of Amazon and Ted Dean of Dropbox, as well as Arun
Venkataraman of Visa and David Holmes of defense contractor Rebellion Defense,
in which Eric Schmidt of Google is an investor. Many of these officials are veterans
of the Obama administration or Democratic offices on the Hill.
“There is a lot of corporate influence there,” says Maurice
Weeks, co-founder of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. “And that is
troubling.” But he is encouraged by the presence of “hard-core progressives”
like Sarah Miller, a former Treasury deputy who is both
an anti-Facebook activist and the executive of the American Economic Liberties
Project, which seeks to curb corporate power. She is now on the Treasury
transition team.
In some ways, the difference is between former Obama officials
who, like Miller, went on to become activists and those who moved on to become
rich. The latter did only what many government officials had done before them.
But at a time of mass unemployment, a stint at the corporate law firm Latham
& Watkins (three transition team members) may not seem as impressive as it
may have when Obama was president.
“We don’t just want to rewind the clock by four years,” Weeks
says.
For many progressives, Trump was a singular threat to important
institutions of the federal government, but rebuilding those institutions is
simply not as important as rebuilding entire communities shattered by economic,
social and racial inequalities.
It doesn’t help matters that, today, tech giants are distrusted
by conservatives and progressives alike. Firms that were run out of Palo Alto
garages now chafe at antitrust laws like the railroad companies of a century
ago.
And like those companies, they know how to use their influence.
In 2019 alone, two of the biggest and most influential technology firms —
Amazon and Facebook — each spent $17 million on “government affairs,” better known as lobbying.
Ocasio-Cortez’s reference to Uber may have been a subtle warning
to the incoming administration: The brother-in-law of Vice President-elect
Kamala Harris is Tony West, who worked for the Department of Justice under
President Bill Clinton and is now the chief counsel at Uber. Jake
Sullivan, another top Biden adviser, also worked for Uber.
The company recently won a major victory in California
with Proposition 22, a successful response to legal efforts
to make Uber drivers and other “gig workers” employees, not contractors. That’s
exactly the kind of labor policy, Ocasio-Cortez says, the Biden administration
must avoid.
Many top Obama staffers went to Silicon Valley in 2017. They
could be returning to Washington with a new appreciation for free market
capitalism at a time when “socialism” is no longer a dirty word.
“Joe Biden’s transition is absolutely stacked with tech industry
players,” noted Protocol, an online publication that covers
technology.
That’s exactly what worries Jeff Hauser, executive director of
the Revolving Door Project, which tracks what Trump has called, without much
affection, “the swamp.” He notes that the transition team for the Office of
Management and Budget appears to have borrowed rather avidly from Silicon
Valley, with team members hailing from Lyft, Airbnb and Amazon.
The budget office wields an “enormous amount of power,” says
Hauser, including in both how congressionally appropriated money is doled out
and how certain rules are implemented. Though it had a supporting role in Trump’s
impeachment drama over foreign aid, OMB is otherwise obscure, making it a perfect site for
covert exercises of federal power.
Hauser also didn’t like the prevalence of Big Law talent
on the Department of Justice team, which signaled to him that the Biden
administration could go soft on corporate malefactors.
Watching the transition, Gray, the former Sanders adviser,
recalled an old saying: “The fish rots from the head.” The head, in this case,
is Joe Biden, of whom Gray has long been a skeptic.
“He’s a fundamentally conservative man,” Gray says. She reasons
that if Biden was “unmoved by the largest protest movement in American history”
to endorse Medicare for All, he can’t be trusted to do much for conservative
causes like a $15 minimum wage and the Green New Deal.
Still, she believes that Biden can be made to hear the voices of
progressives — if, Gray says, they are loud enough. She points out that there
is widespread support for progressive legislation like the $15 minimum wage in Florida, even though Trump won the state.
Biden easily won Oregon, but a push to legalize small amounts
of drugs, known as Measure 110, was even more popular than he was.
She sees that as evidence that progressive ideas are more
popular than Biden himself. “Progressives should never stop screaming that
reality from the rooftops,” Gray told Yahoo News. And she vowed to keep
fighting, even with Trump gone and a Democratic president in the Oval Office
once again.
“I don’t accept resignation,” she said.
Cover thumbnail photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
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