So, no, Biden didn't nominate Bruce Reed to head OMB.
That was the prior expectation. No doubt Kate Aronoff and others expected Joe Biden's big contact with the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to head the Office of Management and Budget.
Instead, he nominated Neera Tanden! Matt Taibbi:
With Tanden Choice, Democrats Stick it to Sanders Voters
Tanden is famous for two things: having a puddle of DNC talking points in place of a cerebrum, and despising Bernie Sanders.
Walker Bragman, discussing it at Jacobin:
Likely OMB nominee Neera Tanden called for cuts to Social Security, saying “we need to put both entitlements on the table as well as taxes.”
And --
Biden — who has repeatedly pushed for Social Security cuts throughout his career — announced his selection of Center for American Progress (CAP) president Neera Tanden as his choice to run the powerful White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). A longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, Tanden touted her think tank’s 2010 proposal to reduce Social Security benefits in 2012, as Biden was pushing for such cuts in the Obama administration.
The Reuters article on Biden's nomination of Tanden argues, though, that:
The (Biden) team’s makeup reinforces Biden’s view that a more aggressive approach to the pandemic is required. The advisers have all expressed support for government stimulus to maximize employment, reduce economic inequality and help women and minorities, who have been disproportionately hurt by the economic downturn.
The Wall Street Journal has a paywalled article on this nomination, and there's simply no way I'd subscribe to WSJ online, but I can see the beginning: "President-elect Joe Biden intends to nominate a team of liberal and centrist economic advisers..." It's important to see how the establishment media works this in: the nomination of Neera Tanden is presumably going to be part of a pandemic team, and the team is going to be "liberal and centrist." Do these mainstream news media sources actually discuss policy? Probably not.
Politico:
Bernieworld seethes over Tanden as OMB nominee
In the Politico article, the head of Justice Democrats suggests a half-a-loaf approach:
“Neera Tanden is not a pick progressives would have chosen, but she’s better than Bruce Reed,” said Alexandra Rojas, executive director of the left-wing group Justice Democrats, in a statement. “Tanden’s on the record over the past several years pushing back against nonsensical worries about the deficit. Reed has been more of an ideological deficit hawk throughout his career.”
And amusingly enough:
I guess this serves three purposes for Warren: 1) supporting someone from Massachusetts, which she's expected to do as a Senator from Massachusetts, 2) endorsing someone who worked hard to try to ruin Bernie Sanders while working as a protege of Hillary Clinton, and 3) cementing her reputation as a team player.
Glenn Greenwald sums it up:
The announcement that Joe Biden intends to nominate Neera Tanden as his Director of the Office of Management and Budget — a critical position overseeing U.S. economic and regulatory policy — triggered a wide range of mockery, indignation and disgust from both the left and the right. That should not be surprising: though a thoroughly mediocre and ordinary D.C. swamp creature from the perspective of both ideology and competence, Tanden’s uniquely unhinged, venomous, corrupt and pathologically dishonest conduct as a Clinton Family and DNC apparatchik and President of the corporatist-and-despot-funded Center for American Progress (CAP) has earned her a list of enemies far longer and more impressive than her accomplishments.
And just so you're clear about who you're dealing with, I should add this. Tanden's predecessor as head of Center for American Progress: John Podesta, another top Clinton protege.
What we are looking at, no doubt, is an attempt to pour the foundations of the Biden White House as another meeting place for neoliberal social climbers whose public face is "liberal and centrist" and whose aim in life is to be eternal junior partners to Republican neoliberal social climbers, who are at least not hobbled by the millstone of having to appeal to people who don't really like their policies.
Gee, I guess we could support the People's Party instead of endlessly having to support either one group or another of neoliberal social climbers -- but where's the career opportunity in that?
Comments
When Sneering Tanden finaly helps Joe get those SS cuts
that he Obama tried so hard to get, along with so many Dim partners, hopefully there will be a mass exodus from both butt cheeks of the duopoly.
That would be the bright side of this story, and for that reason it would be a good appointment by Biden after all.
We should post banners everywhere saying 'The Cat food Commission is Back!" Because it is.
This is more vague --
than nominating Bruce Reed. Besides, of course, it being another Joe Biden "I beat the socialist" moment. A Bruce Reed nomination would be a "who needs a Catfood Commission? Let's go!" moment. Now we might have to wait for a Catfood Commission.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
I am not sure
the Catfood Commission report is dead. I don't think there was a vote, so I don't know if it was defeated and dead. I could be wrong, though. Prob. part of Obamas ninth dimensional chess game.
Edited to put in left out words
This article goes well with your collection
It’s from a few years ago by Greenwald on Neera and how she catered to Bibi and AIPAC
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/05/leaked-emails-from-pro-clinton-group...
Neera really is a piece of work and she is such a nasty, bitter woman. The way she responds to people on Twitter will need to be cleaned up bigly.
She is on it.
Tweets being deleted as we type.
Mary Bennett
Listening into Tim Black --
tearing into Neera Tanden right now.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
I found the highlight to be . . .
when Tim Black called her a wallet with legs.
True, but so what
... although there will be no actual liberals nominated.
Weirdly enuf the Repubs may come to the rescue again
, inadvertently of course but the result is the same.
Just like how the Repugs killed Obama's Grand Bargain ,(with its cuts to Social Security), because Obama wanted a tiny tax cut, and they were set on opposing anything Obama put forth for a vote.
Repug. Senator John Cornyn said Tanden had "zero chance" of being confirmed by the Senate.
If I think that is gonna happen there is no way I want to miss the hearing, if it is broadcast.
Tanden is as qualified to be OMB director
as Judge Barrett is to be on the Supreme Court. But, hey, both are middle aged attractive and wear nice clothes, and besides, we all know they won't be making any important decisions. At least Barrett had the excuse she was cutting the deal of a lifetime on behalf of her kids, or so I think. Tanden is your basic empty blazer back-stabbing social climber.
Mary Bennett
Yep, Joe Biden sucks.
At least he's not a fascist, racist asshole who wants us all to die.
There's kind of a big difference in that.
The Left can maybe, possibly work with Joe Biden. There's no way we can work with the Trump faction. Marco Rubio and co. won't even approve his most moderate appointees.
We should take some solace in the fact that we no longer have a right-wing fascist appealing to racists in charge of our government.
"The enemy is anybody who is going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on." Yossarian
Time will tell
He sure is as hell isn’t a populist or environmentalist. He promised “nothing will change” during his campaign, at a time when our population and our planet need change most urgently.
“Better than...” is a very low bar when it refers to Trump. The only hope I see for Biden is that he can actually manage to avoid being a worse President than Trump, or that he is replaced before he becomes completely incoherent or launches a major new military misadventure. I fully expect even these meager hopes I have will be dashed. I envy you your optimism.
“ …and when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine,and understand who God is, and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.- RFK jr. 8/26/2024
We've been over this.
If Trump were really a "fascist," he wouldn't be running on a platform of "freedom," and he certainly wouldn't allow his own defeat in an election.
https://caucus99percent.com/content/why-i-have-so-little-confidence-nice...
It's this persistent misidentification of Trump as a "fascist" that inspired so little confidence in the "other" side. Trump is a lazy asshole who likes appealing to the alt-right and their best buds in the police forces in big showy ways because he thinks, or at least he thought, that this was a strategy for holding onto power while spending his best daylight hours playing golf. Of course it didn't work. Better to pursue the Democratic Party mayor's strategy of pandering to the fascists in the police forces quietly. Trump's pandemic strategy was also fatally about "freedom," which everyone knows is a cardinal fascist principle, only in this case "freedom" meant freedom to enter a department store without wearing a mask, and so, like a good fascist totalitarian dictator (/snark), Trump left the matter up to the states while trolling the good states, the ones who currently inspire alt-right protests in the name of "freedom." This is why he lost, and it's why North and South Dakota are what they are today.
Want to know how little confidence the "we can work with them" pitch inspires? The real problem with governance in 2020 was Congress. Yet the Democrats ran two neoliberal social climbers against Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, whose (D) opponents raised nearly $200 million and lost to Mitch and Lindsey by a combined total of 35 points. See, that's what this diary is about -- promoting neoliberal social climbers as a bad practice. Did you contribute to the campaign funds of Amy McGrath or of Jaime Harrison?
And you say you want to work with Joe Biden? Are you planning to become a neoliberal social climber yourself? That would be the most direct way of doing it. Maybe if you pander hard enough you can eventually become the head of the Center for American Progress or something like that. Otherwise Joe will give you just enough to get you to like him -- shouldn't be much if you're a cheap date -- and then he'll get busy imposing the vast darkness of austerity upon non-military America while his cabinet's warmongers are let loose upon the world. What will "working with Joe Biden" look like when the post-PSUV New World Order is installed upon Venezuela?
One of the reasons there's currently an attempt to create a People's Party in the United States is that too many Democrats are kept busy proclaiming that the election of any Democrat would count as a "win" for them, while failing to reflect upon what in fact they've "won." This is why it's all too easy to read "we can work with Joe Biden" as saying "we can be co-opted by Joe Biden."
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
This plays into my thinking
It's best to know now rather than be surprised and disappointed.
It's better to start building now and not pin our hopes on Bernie or any other candidate for the Dem nomination.
From what I've seen of the People's Party I'm not sure it's the answer. It feels like another leftwing party, hardly different from the Greens who just got about 0.2% of the vote.
In one sense it's too specific. There are stances on so many issues. It looks as if everyone involved spoke up about his or her most important cause. Personally I might agree with each one but I'm a fringe voter.
Consider that 155,000,000 voted for either Biden or Trump. How do we turn 800,000 votes into 55,000,000? I'd say being more detailed than the Green Party isn't going to work.
My opinion is that it's pretty simple. All American citizens (we'll get to the world after that) are entitled to enough food to eat, a place to live, and clothing.
We could add others to the list, which is what the People's Party has done. And they all sound good. Ban super PACs. $15 an hour. I'll vote for that. I'll vote for Cornel West. Probably all 800,000 Green voters will, too. But who else?
The more lefty solutions you list (again, I'm for them) the less likely you are to grow this new party. Do we want to win or do we want a glorious failure that ends up being a vanity project?
I want to make it clear that I don't want to add centrist or rightwing solutions. Not at all! But it seems to me if we focus on values stemming from the concept that we're all in this together, if we focus on decency, real decency and not the phony DC decency, maybe we can come to common ground with more and more people.
One thing to remember is that a lot of Americans are, as they say in New York, schmucks and if we were involved in something that drew in slightly more than 1/3, which we'd need to outpoll the dems and repubs, we'd be aligned with a lot of those schmucks. If that's not acceptable then we are talking about consciously creating a loser.
But if there's some bit of humanity in a plurality of this country then I think that's the way to go. Focus on a small number of "givens" as I mentioned. Food, shelter, clothing. All of the other stuff should arise out of that.
When does vanity transform into reality?
"… But it seems to me if we focus on values stemming from the concept that we're all in this together, if we focus on decency, real decency and not the phony DC decency, maybe we can come to common ground with more and more people … Focus on a small number of "givens”
It’s a good start, for sure.
[video:https://youtu.be/z-Mx5wZ91rE]
In April the US Congress passed the CARES Act.
One of the provisions of this Act is that large corporations now qualify for direct Federal Reserve loans. What do they do with these loans, you might ask? One thing they do with them is they use said loans to pursue stock buy-backs. This is your general Ponzi scheme -- it inflates the value of their stocks as commodities so that eventually they can sell the stocks, pay back the loans, and pocket the difference. Another thing they do with these loans is to buy the Treasury bills that were issued along with the loans -- the bills accumulate interest with which the loans and their interest can both be paid back.
Generally then, Congress created a free money-spigot for the super-rich. Do we get any of this money? We're stuck begging for $1,200 checks to offset the Second Great Depression (I don't remember getting one -- did you?), and these are to be means-tested.
This is because Congress is organized socially behind two rather undemocratic parties, the Democratic and Republican Parties, in which power is granted to those who persist in being neoliberal social climbers. The ruling principle behind these parties is that of APPOINTMENT -- you get to where you are, and the super-rich with their indefinite money-spigots hand you money for campaigns and so on, because you are able to parlay previous appointments into present and future ones. And, of course, the most sacred principle shared by both parties and their social-climber elites is that of the MARKET -- the one dominant form of social architecture whence those with the indefinite money-spigots rule both the parties and us by being the preponderant possessors of what Karl Marx called "value," and the rest of us beg for those $1,200 checks. And, yes, the Republican Party's "right-wing" status is a gimmick.
The idea of the People's Party is to have a party that isn't a party of neoliberal social climbers. The problem with the Green Party was and is a problem of internal dynamics -- I've attended plenty of Green Party meetings and can tell you first-hand that the Green Party grants a lot of power to a few people who are allowed to make decisions for everyone else, and the decisions they make are often not good ones. The People's Party might do just as badly, or they might do better. They can't do worse. Forty years of Democratic Party "liberalism" has gotten us peanuts, and meanwhile Joe Biden nominates Neera Tanden.
The ruling classes need an extra party to make the rest of us feel as if we participate in democracy. That's what the Democrats are for. They make the US more durable than the Soviet Union was.
Agreed
It should focus on "Make the system work for everyday people."
Something like that, if done right, can theoretically attract left, right, and center.
Hell, have primaries for the People's Party candidates with differing views. Let the people of the People's Party decide.
Please add universal health care . . .
and I'm with you.
I like "universal health care" better than "medicare for all"
Medicare is very useful, like insurance, but health care is really what it's all about.