Who Are Contenders for Biden’s Cabinet?

 

Minutes ago, we learned that Biden has tapped consultant Ron Klain as his chief of staff. Klain may know but the NY Times doesn't know who's going to be in Biden's cabinet anymore that Politico or anyone else does. But this morning The Times listed 50 strong contenders whose names are being bandied about in BidenWorld. Most, as anyone who has followed Biden's career would guess, are terrible. Others are OK and The Times even named a few who are great... but with no realistic chance of being named. The team of Times contributors, or someone at The Times introducing them by noting that in selecting them "Biden must appease progressives within his own party"-- note the word "appease"-- "while gaining support from Republicans who may still control the Senate." There's no doubt that Biden is "likely to include Republicans in his cabinet as he attempts to engineer a working relationship between the parties." They insinuate that the names comes from lists of potential appointees being vetted by Ted Kaufman and his transition team.

State Department

• William Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former ambassador to Russia and Jordan, former deputy secretary of state and special assistant to Secretaries Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright.
• Senator Chris Coons (D-DE)
• Susan Rice, Bush's national security adviser

Treasury

• Raphael Bostic, first African-American and the first openly gay man to lead a regional Federal Reserve bank (Atlanta)
• Lael Brainard, a member of the FED Board of Governors
• Sarah Bloom Raskin, former deputy Treasury secretary and a former member of the Fed’s Board of Governors
• Senator Elizabeth Warren
• Janet Yellen, Fed Chair from 2104 to 2018

Defense

• Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)
• Michèle Flournoy, former deputy assistant secretary of defense
• Jeh Johnson, former secretary of homeland security

Attorney General

• Xavier Becerra, California Attorney General
• Senator Doug Jones (D-AL)
• Sally Yates, former deputy attorney general and acting attorney general, fired by Trumpanzee
• Tom Perez, DNC chair, former Secretary of Labor

Interior

• Governor Steve Bullock (D-MT)
• Rep. Deb Haaland (D-NM)
• Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM)
• Senator Tom Udall (D-NM)

Agriculture

• Heidi Heitkamp, very conservative former Senator from North Dakota
• Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)

Labor

• Seth Harris, former deputy labor secretary and acting secretary
• Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI)
• Bernie
• Julie Su, secretary of California’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency

Health and Human Services

• Mandy Cohen, secretary of North Carolina’s
• Health and Human Services Department
• David Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration
• Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM)
• Vivek Murthy, former surgeon general, top Biden coronavirus advisor

Housing and Urban Development

• Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA)
• Alvin Brown, former Jacksonville mayor
• Maurice Jones, a top deputy at the department under Obama
• Keisha Lance Bottoms, mayor of Atlanta
• Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition

Transportation

• Eric Garcetti, mayor of Los Angeles (under investigation/not gonna happen)

Energy

• Governor Jay Inslee (D-WA)
• Ernest Moniz, nuclear physicist, former Obama Energy Secretary

Education

• Lily Garcia, former teacher and former president of the National Education Association
• Randy Weingarten, former teacher and current president of the American Federation of Teachers

Veterans Affairs

• Mayo Pete
• Robert McDonald, former veterans affairs secretary under Obama

Homeland Security

• Rep Val Demings (D-FL)
• Alejandro Mayorkas, ran Citizenship and Immigration Services at the department

Director, National Intelligence

• Susan Gordon, deputy director of national intelligence in the Trump Regime
• Lisa Monaco, top Obama homeland security advisor, former assistant attorney general for national security and former chief of staff to FBI director Robert Mueller.

CIA

• Tom Donilon, former Obama National Security Advisor
• Avril Haynes, former deputy C.I.A. director
• Mike Morell, former CIA. deputy director and acting director.

National Security Advisor

• Antony Blinken, Biden's top foreign affairs advisor and former deputy secretary of state under Obama

Not included on The Times list: EPA, Small Business Administration, Commerce, Office of Management and Budget and Trade Representative, all slots where Biden is reported to be seriously considering Republicans.

Foreign Correspondent: Biden’s Troubling Foreign Policy

An important behind-the-scenes battle is being fought over the Democratic nominee’s conservative positions.

-by Reese Erlich
@ReeseErlich

Last spring, the Biden campaign decided to hit back hard against accusations of being soft on China. So the campaign produced a blistering ad [above] attacking Trump’s failure to confront China in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Biden ad was xenophobic and racist.

“Trump let in 40,000 travelers from China into America,” says the ad’s narrator as ominous music plays in the background. “He rolled over for the Chinese... Donald Trump left this country unprepared and unprotected.”

Hundreds of major Asian American organizations and prominent individuals expressed outrage in an open letter. They wrote that blaming China for the pandemic helps foster violence and discrimination against Asian Americans. Prominent Asian American activists met remotely with Amit Jani of the Biden campaign in early May, asking that the ad be dropped.

“Jani seemed sympathetic to the anti-racism argument,” says meeting participant Calvin Cheung-Miaw in a phone interview.

“But we were there with a wider message. We don’t want Biden to outdo Trump in attacking China. It’s bad for the campaign and bad for the planet.”

Jani forwarded a request for an interview to Biden’s campaign staff, which had not responded as of press time.

That incident reflects just one battle being waged against Biden’s conservative foreign policy positions. Most supporters of progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, remain committed to voting for Biden in order to defeat Trump. But they are also launching grassroots efforts to push a future Biden Administration to adopt internationalist and anti-interventionist policies.

Biden's checkered record

Biden’s record on foreign policy is checkered. As a leading member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for many years, he supported the US occupations of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and the drone war in Pakistan. He also staunchly supports Israel at the expense of Palestinians.

But, on the whole, Biden’s policies are better than Trump’s. Biden opposed the 1991 US invasion of Iraq, opposed the 2007 Iraq troop surge, and supported the 2011 US troop withdrawal from Iraq. As Vice President, Biden opposed the wars in Libya. In 2019 he came out against the Yemen war. He calls for restoring normal relations with Cuba.

If Biden wins, it seems likely he will end Trump’s tariff wars with allies, re-engage in the Paris climate agreement, and reverse Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran.

Matt Duss, the top Sanders’ foreign affairs advisor, expresses optimism about the Democratic Party platform, which calls for ending forever wars and stopping US support for the war in Yemen.

“There is no denying the fact that the party is moving in a very positive direction on these questions,” he told Foreign Policy.

But there’s a very large gap between a party platform and policy implementation.

Questionable advisors

Biden’s choice of foreign policy advisors is revealing. He is likely to rely heavily on former Obama staffers such as Susan Rice, Tony Blinken, and Samantha Power, according to Daniel Bessner, a foreign policy advisor to the Bernie Sanders’ campaign and professor at the University of Washington.

“I don’t think they would challenge the US armed presence in the world,” he tells me in a phone interview, saying Biden may well rely on military advisors in deciding whether to maintain troops overseas.

“Biden is likely to keep some troops abroad,” says Bessner. “He’s unlikely to close military bases or reduce the military budget.”

A number of Biden’s top aides come from WestExec Advisors, a strategic planning firm, which employs former government officials who use their connections to benefit corporations and foreign governments. WestExec clients include at least one arms manufacturer and other major corporations.

The Biden transition team for foreign policy and national security is headed by Avril Haines, a former deputy CIA director who also worked at WestExec. Haines helped oversee the illegal US drone war against Pakistan, although she’s considered a moderate because she reduced the number of strikes. She helped cover up the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program and helped redact incriminating sections of the Senate report about CIA crimes.

Michèle Flournoy, WestExec co-founder, has been mentioned as a possible Secretary of Defense. Progressives have already launched a campaign against Flournoy, based on her support for continued arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Democrats in Congress voted for passage of a war powers resolution that would have cut off aid to the Saudis’ war in Yemen.

“Somebody like Flournoy, should have no place in a Democratic administration,” says David Segal, a leader of Demand Progress, a progressive lobbying group in Washington, D.C. “She has a more militaristic stand towards Saudi Arabia than many Republicans,” he tells me in a phone interview.

Segal says some Biden advisors want to end the forever wars; others do not. Changing US foreign policy, in his view, “will require ongoing activist engagement that targets the administration and Congress.”

Times are changing

Biden faces a very changed world heading into the November elections. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a massive recession in many countries. The United States has shown itself unwilling or unable to provide either medical or economic relief. Many other countries-- including European allies, Russia, and China-- are ignoring the weakened superpower and charting their own future.

“A world totally dominated by the United States will probably never exist again,” says Bessner.

Trump’s defeat could lay the groundwork for a significantly better foreign policy based on peace and non-intervention. But that will take a big struggle inside and outside of the Democratic Party. Chinese American activist Cheung-Miaw says Biden’s efforts to sound tough on China damages his campaign and alienates voters. People of color and young voters, he says, want a break with aggressive foreign policy.

“We are strongly and firmly committed to defeating Trump,” says Cheung-Miaw. “But we have to keep up grass-roots pressure on the Biden campaign.”

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Let me take the opportunity of Reese's post this week to link an open letter from over 450 elected DNC delegates to Joe Biden, asking him to hire new-- better-- foreign policy advisors. Particularly singled out are former White House aides who have "demonstrated poor judgment" on national security issues: Antony Blinken, Nicholas Burns, Avril Haines, Samantha Power, Michele Flournoy, Susan Rice, and the aforementioned Amit Jani. They wrote that "It is time to reject a foreign policy based on patronage of authoritarians, regime change, failed military interventions and world policing. The people of the United States are tired of squandering our resources on perpetual war and occupation that result in carnage, breed global resentment and drain our treasury of funds needed to address environmental sustainability, health care, housing and education at home."

As DNC delegates, we ask you not to rely on foreign policy advice from those who may have a conflict of interest as a result of their relationships and lobbying on behalf of merchants selling weapons and surveillance technology.

We ask you to appoint top foreign policy advisors whose records reflect good judgment and an understanding of the importance of diplomacy and international cooperation, particularly in the face of global climate catastrophe that poses an existential challenge. Going forward, we need to marshal our resources not to topple governments or to maintain 800 military bases overseas, but to ensure our planet survives the greatest environmental challenge of our time.

Terrible Rumor: Donald Norcross, A Conservative Democrat From New Jersey's Most Corrupt Political Family Is Being Vetted As Biden's Labor Secretary

Neoliberal Democratic presidents do a little balancing dance when they pick their first cabinets. They give a grotesque Wall Street whore the Treasury job and they gave a real progressive the Labor Secretary job. JFK's first Secretary of Labor was Arthur Goldberg, a Steelworkers general counsel who was appointed to the Supreme Court. JFK didn't even pretend when it came to the Treasury Secretary; he gave the job to conservative Republican and Wall Street bankster Douglas Dillon. Bill Clinton gave the Labor job to Robert Reich and then appointed 3 for the most conservative assholes to Treasury imaginable: Lloyd Bentsen, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Obama gave Labor to Hilda Solis-- another outstanding progressive-- and Treasury to Wall Street creep Tim Geithner.

There's no reason to imagine Biden isn't going to find a nightmarish conservative for the Treasury job. Bank on it. And I think he intends to pick a progressive for Labor-- but not a real progressive. A rumor has been circulating in New Jersey and DC that he has his mind on a crooked pro-labor conservative congressman, Donald Norcross. How can Norcross be called a progressive? Well, he can't-- except that Mark Pocan sold him a spot in the Progressive Caucus and made him vice chair for labor. Norcross doesn't have an "A" rating from Progressive Punch, nor even a "B" or a "C." He doesn't even have a "D." Nope-- pure "F." That's Pocan's idea of a progressive-able-to-write-a-check. And Biden's people honed right in on it.

Norcross' big brother, George-- who gave him the congressional seat in 2014-- is the party boss of South Jersey and widely considered one of the most corrupt and venal Democrats in America-- just the kind Biden loves. He was also a Chris Christie ally.

And the front man for the Norcross appointment is Douglas McCarron, president of one of America's most right-wing union-- the Republican-leaning Carpenters, a union George Norcross controls. (They even have another crooked Democrat owned by George as Norcross' replacement in Congress, New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney, another piece of crap.)