The discussions over Obama's announced appointments are interesting. For all the talk about how Obama's Econ Team are acolytes of Evil Deregulating Deficit Hawk Rubin, they're currently telling Obama to screw the deficit and do some Keynesian pump-priming. And not just for banks, either, but to entities that will actually inject the cash into the larger economy.
As for Bob Gates staying on as Secretary of Defense, people forget that he's part of Brent Scowcroft's circle, and Scowcroft opposed invading Iraq in 2002. (It was almost certainly Gates who advised Obama to put Eric Shinseki, another Iraq War skeptic, in as VA head.) But Gates' associations are never allowed to count for him, even as Obama's economic team's associations with Rubin are made to count against them.
And it's not as if their Rubin associations are the only ones that they possess. Three of the Evil Rubinites are also associated with Joseph Stiglitz:
Obama’s designated White House budget director and the current director of the Congressional Budget Office, Peter Orszag, and economic aides Jason Furman and Laura D’Andrea all worked for Sebago Associates, a now-defunct economic consulting company once chaired by Stiglitz.
While both Furman and Orszag have been called protégés of Rubin, they also worked closely with the more liberal Stiglitz early in their careers.
The economist was also a mentor to Furman and Orszag, whom he taught at Princeton University.
As a graduate student at Harvard University, Furman was hired by Stiglitz for a one-year assignment with President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers — and later followed the senior economist to the World Bank.
“In a group of people who were very good, he turned out to be one of the best,” Stiglitz told The New York Sun in June. “People in economic policy often grasp the big picture, but the details of modeling statistics is not their strength. Jason is unusual in being able to do both of those.
So who's Joe Stiglitz? Well, the short version is that he's the Anti-Rubin. He's also a Nobel Prize winner. And he also was invited to be on Obama's economic team, but declined the offer.
And as we already know, Robert Reich, another Anti-Rubin, has been acting as a sort of surrogate for Obama's economic policies. I can't imagine that he'd be doing so if he thought that Obama was being mind-controlled from afar by Evil Rubin.
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