Obama's Economic Policy Director Brings Aboard Progressive Voices

Ignore the trolls. Here's info on Furman and people he's reaching out to.

June 9 (Bloomberg) -- Until recently, Furman, 37, worked as an economist and budget expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, where he was director of the Hamilton Project, a research group that generates economic proposals and is aligned with the Democratic Party. In that role Furman worked with Rubin, who helped launch Hamilton in 2006. Rubin, 69, now chairman of Citigroup Inc.'s executive committee, is on the project's advisory council.

Furman said the Obama campaign's economic goal, like the Hamilton Project's, is based on ``broadly shared, bottom-up growth.'' ``You need to empower people to make the economy work for them,'' he said.

Furman said his priority as Obama's economic policy director would be to expand the range of advice and proposals flowing to the Democratic nominee by reaching out to a wider group of economists. ``My key mandate, which came directly from the senator, is to bring him a diverse set of voices and ideas, because that's the kind of debate he likes to hear to make up his mind about his economic agenda,'' Furman said. He named Rubin, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder as advisers the campaign would turn to.

Some people Furman's bringing aboard:

Robert Rubin- Treasure Secretary, Clinton
Lawrence Summers- Treasure Secretary, Clinton
Alan Blinder- Federal Reserve Vice Chairman
Jared Bernstein- see below
James Galbraith- see below

About Jared Bernstein:

Jared Bernstein joined the Economic Policy Institute in 1992. His latest book is "Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries)," which follows "All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy." His areas of research include income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, low-wage labor markets and poverty, international comparisons, and the analysis of federal and state economic policies. He is the co-author of eight editions of the book The State of Working America and has published extensively in popular and academic venues.

About James K. Galbraith

James Galbraith "is a progressive American economist who writes frequently for mainstream and liberal publications on economic topics. He is the son of renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith. From 1981 to 1982, Galbraith served on the staff of the Congress of the United States, eventually as Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee. In 1985, he was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.

He is the Chair of Economists for Peace and Security, formerly known as Economists Against the Arms Race and later Economists Allied for Arms Reduction (ECAAR), an international association of professional economists concerned with peace and security issues. He is also a Senior Scholar with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and Director of the University of Texas Inequality Project.

Galbraith's books include Balancing Acts: Technology, Finance and the American Future (1989), Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay (1998), and Industrial Change: A Global View, co-edited with Maureen Bemer, (2001)

He also contributes a column to The Texas Observer and writes regularly for The Nation, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and The Progressive. His Op-Ed pieces have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and other newspapers.

Galbraith argues that modern America has fallen prey to a wealthy, government-controlling "predatory class":

Today, the signature of modern American capitalism is neither benign competition, nor class struggle, nor an inclusive middle-class utopia. Instead, predation has become the dominant feature--a system wherein the rich have come to feast on decaying systems built for the middle class. The predatory class is not the whole of the wealthy; it may be opposed by many others of similar wealth. But it is the defining feature, the leading force. And its agents are in full control of the government under which we live. <1>

Galbraith is also highly critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy apropos of the Iraq invasion:

be here