Biden’s Cabinet and Cabinet-level nominations and appointments are complete. He didn’t ask me, but I think overall he gets a ‘B+.’ An ‘A’ for diversity (especially if you include Vice President Kamala Harris!), and definitely an ‘A+’ in categories we should be able to take for granted, like honesty, intelligence, experience, commitment to the citizens and not the president, and, actually understanding the mission of the agency or position. (It is unbelievable that has to be pointed out, isn’t it?)

Were it up to me, I’d name a cabinet full of people from the Sanders-Warren-Brown-Merkley wing of the party.  But I never expected him to name a whole team of progressives, so I tempered my expectations, and am trying to be realistic in my review.

Least favorite picks

I am most troubled by him putting a general in charge of the Pentagon (George Austin), which I think is a terrible idea, and also puts Democratic senators who opposed Trump’s appointment of a general there in an awkward position. I also dislike the nomination of Tom Vilsack at Agriculture. He is competent and experienced, but is not what is needed right now. A more dynamic appointment, such as Congresswoman Marcia Fudge would have been an excellent choice. She has served on the House Agriculture Committee and would give much needed attention to the often-overlooked nutrition-related responsibilities of the department. She also is Black, which Black farmers had been understandably hoping for.  Instead, Biden pigeon-holed Fudge into HUD, where she has little relevant experience.

Good choices that could have been better

I was rooting for Julie Su, California’s Secretary of Labor, for the Labor Department because the United Farm Workers supported her, and it would be nice to see more prominent Asian Americans, who will be under-represented in the Biden Administration. Biden appointed Boston Mayor Martin Walsh instead.  Walsh does have a strong labor background and was supported by the AFL-CIO, so at least he will be strongly pro-labor, which is so much needed after four years of Trump’s anti-labor goons who headed that department.

It is great to see a classroom teacher, Connecticut commissioner of Education Miguel Cardona, nominated to lead the Department of Education. I would have preferred a Black person like former Massachusetts Governor Patrick Duval as Attorney General at the Justice Department, although Judge Merrick Garland will be excellent, too. “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg at Transportation is sort of a weird choice, but I guess Biden thinks he will be a good salesperson for his infrastructure plan. I thought Buttigieg would have been better for Veterans Affairs, where Biden appointed non-veteran Denis McDonough.

Foreign policy and security: Solid

Biden’s foreign policy and security team at the State Department, United Nations, Homeland Security, and intelligence and trade agencies all seem well-qualified and extremely knowledgeable and are a diverse demographic group— all in contrast to the destructive group that reigned under Trump. Most importantly, they are all committed to Biden’s determination to bring the United States back into the world community. It is critical for the US to once again be a leader in peace treaties, trade agreements, and international alliances, instead of the globe-wrecking embarrassment we have been for the past four years.

Financial team: On the watch list

The Biden financial team is OK—some Wall Streeters but apparently they are reform types, and Janet Yellen at Treasury and Jared Bernstein on the Council of Economic Advisors are particularly good. But that’s the group I am most wary of. I hope that Biden does not follow Obama’s pattern of being too friendly to Wall Street and corporate interests, and I am depending on Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and others in Congress to keep him on the right path.

The best

I saved the best nominations for last: environment and health. The inauguration will bring with it a lifesaving, critical breath of fresh air. What a change! A president who places supreme importance on science, and medicine, and the environment. This may be Biden’s most important legacy.

Biden’s environment and climate team is excellent.  John Kerry, Jennifer Granholm, Michael Regan, Gina McCarthy, and Brenda Mallory are all strong and proven environmentalists and will make fighting climate change and reversing the disastrous war on the environment of the past four years the highest priority. Especially notable is Rep. Deb Haaland leading the Interior Department—which is exciting and groundbreaking. As the first Native American to be Interior Secretary, she will restore respect for our national parks and wilderness areas, and certainly will make the Bureau of Indian Affairs an honorable and respected agency that will earn the trust of American Indians.

I don’t expect his healthcare team to push for single-payer or Medicare for All but I hope they will implement major improvements. Xavier Becerra, a former Congressman and currently the California Attorney General, seems like a good choice at Health and Human Services. He has worked on healthcare issues and will also be the first Latino to direct the department.

The most exciting appointees

Going hand in hand with environment and health care are science and medicine, and this is perhaps the best and most exciting area of Biden’s nominations.  It is clear we will have an administration that actually believes in science!  Biden announced he is making his science advisor, Eric Lander, a member of his Cabinet.  The group he has appointed to lead the critical medical team that will take on Covid-19 are all respected doctors with literally decades of experience fighting epidemics. Doctors Anthony Fauci, David Kessler, Vivek Murthy, Marcella Nunez-Smith, and Rochelle Walensky, will all ensure that our government finally has a plan to stop and reverse the spread. Along with Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients and Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who both have experience on the administrative side of health crises, Biden has a team that will address the pandemic for the public health emergency that it is. Hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved, quite literally.

And at the DNC..

Not in the realm of government, but related to Biden appointments, is his pick to head the Democratic National Committee. I think Jaime Harrison is an excellent choice. Stacy Abrams would have been great, too, but I am sure she will be doing her desperately needed thing wherever she is!

The post The Incoming Biden Team: A Review appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Remember Donald Trump’s assertion during his 75-minute faux–news conference that his administration was running like a fine-tuned machine? Trump’s grandstanding that day was at such odds with the actual record of continuing vacancies at the senior levels of his administration that it’s almost laughable.

Opening up the hood on Trump’s “fine-tuned machine” reveals a frightening level of dysfunction at odds with the smooth transitions of previous administrations. (Take note of the quotation marks here. They’ve been included in the Trumpian manner just to add a touch of ambiguity as to whether the president will actually stand by the dictionary definition of fine-tuned or whether he might concoct some flimsy alternative definition in an upcoming Saturday morning tweet.)

What is a fine-tuned machine? It’s a description of a complex object in which all of the parts work together in a smooth and well-functioning manner. What about when essential parts are missing? Does the machine still function as intended? Will it start at all? And if it does kick on, will it sputter along and burn out when demand is too high? The question is: Will that kind of catastrophic burnout be the inevitable result when Trump’s understaffed and inexperienced machine is faced with the pressures of domestic or international crises?

Even with Trump’s repeated boasts, it certainly doesn’t look like he has all of the parts in place to justify his confidence. As of the beginning of this month, it’s been reported that there are more than 1,000 unfilled appointments that require senate confirmation, and hundreds of unfilled senior positions at agencies across the federal government.

This is what New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld and Sharon LaFraniere said, about the causes of this unprecedented sluggish pace of hiring, in a March 12, 2017 article, entitled “Trump Lets Key Offices Gather Dust Amid ‘Slowest Transition in Decades.”

Mr. Trump’s personnel problems are rooted in a dysfunctional transition effort that left him without a pool of nominees-in-waiting who had been screened for security and financial problems and were ready to be named on day 1.

The two reporters went on to observe that a lion’s share of the problem is Trump himself and a general unease with the direction of the administration itself:

 . . the problem has been compounded by roadblocks of his [Trump’s] own making: a loyalty ban that has discouraged some of the most sought-after potential appointees, a five-year lobbying ban that has discouraged some of the most sought-after potential appointees, and a general sense of upheaval at the White House that has repelled many others.

In an interview on FOX News, Trump hinted that he might not even bother to fill all of those vacant positions. Perhaps we should assume that the new president has spent countless weekend hours under the Mar-A-Lago sun studying the beltway parts manuals and structural flow charts of the federal bureaucracy. Perhaps he’s come to the conclusion that many, or most, of these senior-level positions are, as he says, “unnecessary. It’s people, over people, over people. I say, what do all those people do? You don’t need all those jobs.”

It makes you wonder. Which of the essential parts of a functioning government is Trump going to leave behind on the shop floor?

State Department

Deputy Secretary appointment: Unfilled

Undersecretary appointments:  6 unfilled

Treasury Department

Deputy Secretary: Unfilled

General Counsel: Unfilled

Chief Financial Officer: Unfilled

Undersecretaries: 3 unfilled

Assistant Secretaries: 9 unfilled

Homeland Security

Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Unfilled

Director of Customs and Border Protection: Unfilled

FEMA Director: Unfilled

TSA Administrator: Unfilled

Chief of Citizen and Immigration Services: Unfilled

Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection: Unfilled

Undersecretaries: 4 unfilled

Assistant Secretaries: 3 unfilled

Pentagon

Undersecretary for Policy appointment: Unfilled

The post The president’s fine-tuned machine appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Newly elected Presidents do not obtain formal power for over two months, but it feels like they gain control immediately. Their major appointments and legislative recommendations reveal looming ideological priorities far more than bombastic campaign rhetoric. For many of us, discouragement eroded hope when the Obama administration announced before the inauguration that private insurance companies would profit from any changes in the heath care provision. The “single payer” plan was abruptly “taken off the table” without public discussion. When Obama next appointed Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to influential positions, it was equally clear that Wall Street remained in control of the political economy. On the other hand, Obama placed thoughtful scientists to oversee environmental issues.

While many of Obama’s appointments and subsequent actions confirmed that the Democratic Party’s commitment to gradualism was becoming so gradual that it would morph into the staunch defender of the status quo, Donald Trump’s selections reveal a reckless contempt not just for competent government and the reality principle, but also for humanity’s habitat. Despair arises when one perceives that future Secretary-of-State Rex Tillerson, recent CEO of Exxon Mobil, may be the Trump administration’s most reasonable environmental analyst. His company, which relentlessly fought the theory of climate change, has finally conceded that global warming exists. According to Tillerson, it is a “low priority problem.”  Exxon recently tweeted its support for the Paris agreement proposing feeble efforts to reduce pollutants.

Many other Trump nominees, such as Scott Pruitt, Rick Perry, Myron Ebell, and Ryan Zinke, are blindly hostile to environmental science and concerns, determined to permit extraction of as much wealth as possible from the planet at lowest possible cost to themselves. All other risks and externalities—worker safety, citizen health, excessive consumption of resources, and climate change—will fade from policy analysis.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs remains well represented, and the military-industrial complex has sufficient ex-generals in positions of civilian power. Billionaires populate important Cabinet posts. Another wave of despondency arises when it appears that the most restrained foreign policy actor is General James Mattis, whose nickname is “Mad Dog.”  At least Tillerson and Mattis are serious people who thrived within important organizations. The military foresees the costs of climate change and resource depletion. Most other appointments are wealthy hustlers or clowns chosen from a political-cultural system that is becoming another corporate-sponsored circus.

Trump’s willingness to increase carbon pollutants is not surprising. He mocked climate change, absurdly claiming it was a Chinese plot. Supporting the carbon-based energy industry will probably garner support from the Koch Brothers, who previously did not like him because he was not one of their puppets. There is a good chance a Trump offspring will soon be the proud owner of an oil patch.

Sadly, these developments are nothing new. Simply recall Dick Cheney’s service to Halliburton, a beneficiary of energy deregulation and the invasion of Iraq. Tony Blair, England’s slippery equivalent of Bill Clinton, and Bush family confidant James Baker make millions working for the Carlyle Group, a mysterious financial organization that facilitates the flow of oil and money. The Bushes have enduring contacts with the House of Saud. Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, obtained a seat on the Board of Directors of a private Ukrainian energy company (revealing that self-interest is one of the motivations for the Democratic leadership’s animosity towards the Russians).

American exceptionalism has created a new form of government: Oligarchy, plutocracy, and kleptocracy blend into a filthy pollutocracy. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer presciently reduced unrestrained egoism’s perspective to a chilling maxim: “May the world perish, provided I am safe.”

So how should environmentalists prioritize resistance to the frenzied degradation of our planet?  The awful truth is that neither party has been serious about environmental challenges. The difficulties appear almost insoluble; eight billion people are entangled in a web of desperate need and insatiable greed. Worldwide, a vast amount of pollution will be created no matter what Americans do over the short-term.

But there will be another election in less than two years, and Trump seems incredibly mercurial and unprincipled, sensitive to swings in public opinion. Thus, most regulatory changes can be readjusted if the populace decides their grandchildren’s future is more important than energy-inefficient transportation, plastic shopping bags, excessive corporate profits, and so forth.

The sale and leasing of public lands is another matter. The Department of Interior will probably cause the most irreparable damage. Once private actors gain title, they have extractive power that lasts for decades or even lifetimes. Thus, the demonstrators at Standing Rock have chosen the proper battleground: oil profits versus land and local people. Once the remaining commons is privatized, becoming another plaything for the opulent, there is far less we can do for ourselves, much less future generations.

The post Welcome to American pollutocracy appeared first on Occasional Planet.

How awful is the lineup of appointees to Donald Trump’s cabinet? More awful than we could have imagined, I’m afraid. In the continuous drip, drip, drip of appointments, it’s easy to fret over individuals and lose sight of the bigger picture: Cumulatively, the new cabinet is a rogue’s gallery of rich billionaires with giant conflicts of interest, promoters of discredited economic theories, deniers of scientific facts, and just plain unqualified people.

Kevin Drum, at Mother Jones, has gathered them all into a chart that highlights their “swampiness,” their craziness/scariness, and their wealthiness. I’m sure he meant it to be funny. Certainly some of Trump’s nominees are  laughable. [Trump demonstrated, in no uncertain terms, his give-America-the-middle-finger attitude when he announced Rick Perry as his nominee for Department of Energy.] Unfortunately, the net effect for our country is anything but humorous. And, undoubtedly, there are more un-funny appointments to come. Brace yourself.

Here’s the chart.

The post The rich, the conflicted, and the crazy: Trump’s swamp creatures appeared first on Occasional Planet.

As I watch the disastrous choices DT is making for important positions in the federal government, I am more and more convinced the tea party, Free Market Republicans in Congress have made a deal that will help both them and Trump accomplish their goals, most of which they have worked on for decades.

Trump has no interest in actually governing. He’s not even bothering to attend national security briefings or meetings with the State Department that are offered to every incoming president to bring them up to speed on what’s happening in the world. That should be the first clue that he is not going to be directly involved in running the executive department. If he isn’t all that interested in learning about our basic safety and security, that means he probably doesn’t give a damn about any domestic plans or programs either.

But the Free Market Republicans who don’t believe it’s government’s job to help people directly really DO care about those domestic programs, especially those we call the social safety net. It has taken half a century to build up programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, voting rights, veterans’ benefits, disability programs, environmental standards, etc.

The “no new taxes” pledge has been used effectively to replace reasonable (i.e., moderate/liberal) Republican members of Congress with right wing zealots as far back as the first Bush administration. The goal has been to shrink government at all levels down to a size where they can “drown it in a bathtub.”

Look at Trump’s appointments. A climate change denier to head the EPA. Ben Carson, a doctor with no experience managing a large department, as HUD chair. Betsy DeVos, of Amway fame, and who has worked for decades to siphon funds from public education to private (usually Christian) schools, in charge of the Ed Dept. Some woman who made millions from Worldwide Wrestling or whatever it’s called will be in the cabinet in some position. Egad. And don’t even get me started on the possibility of the chairman of ExxonMobil becoming Sec. of State. He and Putin have great plans for drilling in the sea north of Siberia (And probably everywhere else they want.)

If the right wing Republicans were given the job of choosing cabinet members, they couldn’t have done better to accomplish their goals than Trump has done.

And what does the man with narcissistic personality disorder get from this deal with Congress?  The prestige of an office that will help him expand his empire worldwide.

Many years ago, Trump was asked why he wanted a certain piece of land in Manhattan when others were trying to protect it as open space along a river. He replied that it was just a challenge to him. He said he knew he didn’t need the money, but he just wanted to do it to show that he could. And he did.

This man has no limits. He can make any deal he wants with foreign governments or corporations knowing the Republican Congress won’t blink an eye. No hearings, no “recommendations” for restraint, NADA !

Anyone who has watched Free Market Republicans (e.g., ALEC, Heritage Foundation, Free Enterprise Institute, etc.) over the last 30 years could see this coming. Why Democrats haven’t explained this in terms voters can understand is beyond me.

Working and middle class voters have been getting the short end of the stick for over 20 years. Wealth has been rising to the top of the income scale for at least that long too. But, when Trump told them all those lies, they lapped it up.

Whose fault is that?

“The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars…..”

This quote from Shakespeare is popping up in many of the articles trying to explain why Hillary Clinton did not win enough electoral votes to win the White House. (For the record, the tally of her popular votes is now over 2 million more than Trump got, yet he’s claiming a landslide.)  Yikes.

But in all the articles grasping for an explanation why Dems lost big time both nationally and on the state level, no one (as far as I’ve seen) has mentioned the well-executed strategy the Free Market Republicans initiated 30 years ago.

Think about how Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and called women who needed federal assistance to survive “Welfare Queens.”  That was the beginning of the shift from a “Stronger Together,” “a rising tide lifts all boats” mentality to one of “I’ve got mine and to hell with you.” It didn’t happen overnight. It’s been a long, slow process.

Thomas Wolfe wrote in the 1930’s that selfishness and greed would bring an end to the American experiment in democracy. Neil Postman wrote in the 1980’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Policy in the Age of Show Business.”  We’ve had plenty of warning, but Democrats have been loathe to lift the rock and show voters how dangerous that snake on the tea party flag really is.

We Democrats get points for politeness and for taking the high road. But that and a buck and a half with buy a cup of coffee at BreadCo, and that’s about all.

It’s not just the white working class males who are to blame for being duped by Trump. Yes, they have their reasons for being angry. But there is plenty of fault to go around and the first place Democrats should look is in the mirror.

The post Trump and the triumphant “free market” Republicans appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I don’t know why we are surprised at dysfunctional behavior at the Internal Revenue Service: Any agency that has been denied a permanent director since November 2012–and for some agencies, it’s been longer than that– cannot be expected to operate optimally. And that’s really the point: Republicans have blocked President Obama’s appointments on almost every level since day one, because that strategy fits into their overall game plan to deliberately make government dysfunctional–so that Republicans can say, “See? Told ya so. Government is dysfunctional. It doesn’t work.”

The “starve the beast” strategy we’ve become most familiar with is the one where you cut appropriations for regulatory agencies. No money, no enforcement. We’ve seen that at work with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and so many others. That tactic has been in play since the Ronald Reagan years. [Later recanted by one of its primary proponents–Regan’s budget director, David Stockman.]

The newer game–which has escalated with the arrival of President Obama–is to obstruct agency appointments by hyper-investigating [see: Susan Rice], putting politically motivated holds on appointments, holding appointments for political ransom [see: Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt’s hold on Obama’s appointment of Gina McCarthy to head EPA], delaying hearings, not showing up for hearings, and issuing pre-emptive strikes against anybody nominated by the President [such as Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency]. According to Pro Publica, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services haven’t had a Senate-confirmed administrator since 2006. The Federal Labor Relations Authority has had only a single member since January 2013 and can’t issue decisions. And the Election Assistance Commission hasn’t had any commissioners at all since 2011.

In the meantime, the director’s office in key government agencies is occupied by a deputy or interim director, or by nobody at all. And that’s a big problem.

The job of the head of a government agency–or the head of any organization, for that matter–is to make sure that the mission of the agency is being properly pursued. It’s his or her responsibility to make the gears turn so that the job gets done. The agency director sets the tone, establishes and reinforces the culture of the organization, and is the ultimate enforcer.

So, when an agency is led by someone who everyone knows is a temporary placeholder–which has been the case with the IRS–the mission can get lost, the culture can be in flux, and enforcement can go all squishy. An interim or deputy director doesn’t have the clout–and may not have the nerve– to take tough stands and institute innovations. And lower-level employees may not bother to report issues up the line to a temporary director. So, what you can get is a wishy-washy organization where front-line workers don’t feel part of an overall mission and may feel that what they do doesn’t really matter.  And that’s where mistakes and misguided  decisions come in and can run amok.

But that’s just fine with the current crop of Congressional Republicans. Having created the situation themselves–by stonewalling just about every appointment the Obama Administration has sent up to the Hill–they gleefully pounce on every misstep of the agencies they are intent on destroying. Then, they disguise their cynical, self-fulfilling strategy with outrage expressed on the floor of Congress and in a press that’s oh-so-willing to jump on anything that looks remotely like a “scandal.”

Congressional Republicans are also undoubtedly happy to keep the Obama Administration busy scrambling to find second- or third-choice nominees, fending off hypberbolic attacks on nominees, and defending the actions of lower-level employees in the leaderless agencies Republicans have cynically created. For obvious reasons,  the anti-taxers have got to be  delighted that their outrage du jour comes from the IRS.

The obstructionism and cynicism is escalating in President Obama’s second term.  And, unfortunately for our country, it’s working. The unceasing effort to block anything from happening distracts the administration from accomplishing important goals, makes President Obama look inept [except when Republicans call him a dictator, of course], and keeps the public and the press entertained with ersatz scandals, rather than engaged in real issues.

And there is no end in sight.

The post How Republicans “starve the beast” by blocking agency appointments appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Once upon a time, Congressional representatives had the guts to bring up controversial bills, state their views openly, and go on the record with a yea-or-nay vote. Those days are long gone. Today, we see the depths to which Congressional Republicans have sunk: If they can’t repeal Obamacare with an open vote (which they’ve tried many times), they’ll try to kill it by using obscure rules to block its implementation.  If they don’t want to openly demonstrate—once again—their unpopular obstructionism, they’ll go passive-aggressive with backdoor, bureaucratic tactics.

Here’s their latest gambit, which represents an escalation in tactics to obstruct, as reported [May 9, 2013] by David Hawking, a veteran Congressional Quarterly reporter:

Speaker John A. Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced they would simply ignore a provision in the health care law calling on each leader to pick someone for a new panel with the power to dictate Medicare spending reductions without fear of congressional reversal.

The two said in a letter to Obama that such a bureaucratic maneuver was the best way they knew to protest the new Independent Payment Advisory Board, in light of their inability to kill it by repealing Obamacare completely.

At the same time, all eight Republicans boycotted this morning’s meeting of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which under a wrinkle in the rules prevented the panel from advancing Gina McCarthy’s nomination to run the EPA.

The protest came less than 18 hours after the Republicans on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions panel leveraged another obscure procedural obstacle to stop Thomas E. Perez’s nomination for Labor secretary from getting to the Senate floor.

Hawking adds:

The question for the GOP is whether those oppositional tactics, which are all about passive parliamentary maneuvering rather than overt ideological argument, will provide any traction for their policy objectives or if they will only succeed at further annoying an electorate wary of partisan hijinks.

It seems as though Congressional Republicans do not fear political repercussions from these tactics. And as long as their greatest fear is being challenged by an even more radically right Republican, we’re going to continue to see these junior-high shenanigans and the crippling of government—meaning the degradation of our democracy—all because Republicans hate Obama more than they care about doing what’s right for the greater good of the country.

The post Republicans use obscure rules to block Obama’s agenda and appointments appeared first on Occasional Planet.