It's Raining Neoliberals: More Biden Picks
As the cabinet positions continue to get filled, the teeth of the Washington elite are showing themselves from behind the mask of "bipartisanship."
[Above: Michèle Flournoy in 2019. Image Retrieved From Getty Images®.]
As the cabinet positions continue to get filled, the teeth of the Washington elite are showing themselves from behind the mask of "bipartisanship." Saagar Enjeti noted last week on Rising, the show he co-hosts with Krystal Ball, that what should scare people is not where Washington disagrees, but rather what Washington agrees on.
Administration picks like Richard Stengel, Cedric Richmond, Steve Ricchetti, Jennifer O'Malley Dillon, and Jessica Hertz all bring with them their own reasons for people to be concerned about the return to this direction of leadership, as previously stated.
Here at the start of this week, we have more picks.
The perpetually underwhelming John Kerry was named Biden's Climate Czar. The hawk, Susan Rice, is being floated around for a job. Rahm Emanuel, for some reason is throwing his name into different hats and will probably get a job-- remember Rahm Emanuel is a former Freddie Mac financier who was mayor of Chicago and happened to be really bad at it. Also being considered is Samantha Powers who, like Rice, is also an Obama-era hawk who pushed for military intervention in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.
In addition to this long list of establishment financiers and interventionist hawks, former chairwoman of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen was announced as the Secretary of Treasury. Yellen isn't the worst of the bunch by any means, but her background as a neoliberal economist is alarming. Considering the economic hole most of America is in and the various resources they need shelled out to them, it's important to note she also famously said the U.S. deficit is "completely unsustainable."
But it always gets worse...
There were also two names that were solidified for the jobs of Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense: Tony Blinken and Michèle Flournoy, respectively.
Blinken, who was officially announced today, has a long history with Joe Biden. In 2002, as Biden's top aide, he urged the senator to vote in favor of the Iraq War. As a national security advisor in the Obama administration, he was the leading face of Syria policy and supported both military intervention in Libya and Saudi intervention in Yemen.
Flournoy, who is a strong lock for Defense Secretary, was once a Pentagon official and military investor. An Obama-era Under Secretary of Defense, Flournoy has a history of supporting the Iraq War and of wanting militaristic approaches to be used in other regions of the world, like the Indo-Pacific region, while not abandoning the operations in the Middle East. As the CEO of the Center for a New American Security, the think tank had at least $3.8 million in donations from Defense Contractors. She was also a key force behind Obama's North Korea Policy as well as the administration's seemingly endless use of drone warfare.
If that wasn't enough, then wait until you hear that these two are more than deeply connected.
Blinken and Flournoy founded WestExec Advisors, an advisory firm set on developing "a strategy for expanding market access in China while safeguarding against trade tensions between the U.S. and China."
Lee Fang wrote of the firm in July 2018:
"Enter a group of former high-level officials from the Obama administration, who are helping to bridge the divide between tech firms and the Defense Department through a new company called WestExec Advisors."
Fang noted the outrage within Google when employees were made aware of a defense contract that allowed the Defense Department to work with the tech company in order to utilize A.I. for drone warfare (known as Project Maven). As a result, Google did not renew the contract.
WestExec Advisors is an example, as Fang and arms control expert William D. Hartung noted, of the revolving door between corporations and public service that is the cause for the extremely corrupt normalcy of influencing policy with financial interests. This phenomenon only continued to expand in the last five or so years as the Pentagon has repeatedly vied for help from Silicon Valley.
The scoop that really highlights WestExec's scumminess is that one of the firm's key figures, Robert Work, actually launched Project Maven when he was Deputy Secretary of Defense under Obama, well before the firm existed.
The Biden administration is shaping out to be very much unlike a Trump administration, and that's good in a lot of ways. However, this administration is looking like a composite version of the Clinton, W. Bush, and Obama administrations. If that sounds like we're moving backwards, it's probably because we are.
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