Obama’s man for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Former Senator Tom Daschle, served as Senator for South Dakota for 26 years, was the Democratic senate leader for 10, and, as far as I can tell, has very little in his resume that is specifically relevant to the position of Health Secretary. Additionally, he has worked since leaving the senate as a “consultant” for the law firm Alston and Bird, providing strategic consulting on issues of health care, energy, and taxes. While this doesn’t immediately make him a lobbyist, the appearance of close ties between a cabinet member and a law firm that has represented mortgage companies and commercial airlines is not something Obama can ill afford in light of his public criticism of lobbyists and the economic situation that involves both mortage giants and airlines. Obama is just rewarding a supporter here, which I can understand, but he shouldn’t be doing this with his first appointment

My choice for Secretary of Health would have been Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton herself. This way, Obama could have extended an olive branch to Hillary and allowed her to oversee health care reform, something she is highly knowledgeable and highly concerned with. Picking Clinton would also have allowed him to shore up his position with certain sectors of the Democratic party that backed Clinton.

Unfortunately it looks that Clinton is bound instead for the position of Secretary of State. I give it 7 to 3 for. This is a major mistake. With the Secretary of State position, one of the most important in the cabinet, Obama needs to send a clear message to the Republican party that he wants them in the tent. To this end, I believe there is a clear choice for Sec of State who already has experience in the job: Colin Powell. Powell is a universally respected Republican statesman who knows international diplomacy and knows world leaders. Powell is also a man who strikes me as very noble and patriotic; he puts the country before his own ambition, which is something I can’t be sure of from Hillary Clinton. The trick would be to convince him to take the position after getting thrown in the path of a torpedo by the Bush Administration over WMDs in Iraq.

This brings us to Obama’s probable Attorney General, Eric H. Holder Jr. Holder is the one of the three appointments that I like the best; he served as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration under Janet Reno, and has a wealth of pertinent legal experience, including 12 years in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity section prosecuting misconduct by state officials. He also served on the District of Columbia Superior Court, and was appointed to this position by the conservative demigod Ronald Reagan, which is a good indication that he might gain approval from Republicans. Still, Holder is Democrat who has been on the Hill longer than i’ve been alive, which could generate backlash in light of Obama’s promise to shake things up.

That’s it for this round of picks. Keep an eye out here for my comments on future appointments. In closing, here’s a list of my suggestions for a few other cabinet positions.

Secretary of Energy - Vice President Al Fucking Gore.
He is undoubtedly one of the country’s primary authorities on green technology and understanding and controlling climate change, both of which Obama has made centerpieces of his energy policy. Our nation needs to dramatically rethink the way we power our shit, and who better to have at the helm than the eco-crusader and elder statesman behind “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Secretary of Defense -General Wesley Clark
Remember him? He ran in the 2004 presidential primary. He’s a smart, tough career soldier who graduated at the top of his class from West Point and served with distinction in Vietnam and was a top commander during the Kosovo conflict. Like Obama, he supported the U.S. response to 9/11 in Afghanistan but was against the war in Iraq, and he opposes using force in Iran. He endorsed Hillary Clinton in the primary, which would make his appointment another olive branch to the Clinton camp.

Secretary of Transportation - Jim Oberstar
As chair man of House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Minnesota’s Oberstar has experience and knowledge in the area. And as a Minnesotan, he knows firsthand the consequences that our neglect of our transportation infrastructure can have.

Cut to Dateline - Washington. When I heard today Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson say on the radio today that there is still a very real danger of “systemic failures in the economy,” the peak-oil survivalist mentality that occasionally grips me like a fever took hold. My god, I thought. It’s going to happen here. This man was just handed a bag of money and carte blanche by Congress. He has all the resources of the United States Government at his disposal, and he is still saying we might end up like Argentina, toppled overnight from affluence by an economic time bomb. It’s time to buy food and water reserves and a solar clock-radio and moving to a farm–.”

Eventually my rational mind regained control, and I applied myself to calmy examining the situation at hand: we are still uncomfortably close to entering a period of marked decline in America, economically, politically, and socially. It happened with Rome: they became too powerful, too corrupt, too big, too bloated, and they fell for their arrogance. While things on Pennsylvania Avenue are looking up, things on Wall Street continue to rapidly disappear down the shitter. The Secretary of the Treasury with his big bag of money was basically saying that we’re still on the brink, despite efforts. Paulson constantly stresses that we are in for the long haul.

But the “long haul” is not something business in America has been considering for the past 25 years. Since Reagan flew in on a magic carpet of trickle-down economics and deregulation, America has, except for a few slumps, prospered. Everyone was encouraged to maximize on short-term gain and spend themselves into debt, because this drove the economy. Businesses got more profitable, people got more shit to buy and eventually more “entertainment” to give them quick pleasure, and for a time, it was good. Eventually we began to stop using business to build actual “things” altogether. It seemed as if the wizards on Wall Street could make money appear out of thin air, and everybody benefited: there was an SUV in every driveway and a PS2 in every family room. The rising tide really did raise all boats. It just raised some boats more than others, and those at the top of the trickledown pyramid had more money than they knew what to do with.

The age of prosperity was here to stay, of course. We were in the “information age” now; the times of actually having to build things were over, left to countries with cheaper, less educated work forces.

This brings us to today. Surprise! There really is no free lunch. All those complicated formulas and “market tools” that assholes at the top of the trickledown pyramid have been using to make themselves
and their buddies rich have failed, and we are all fucked because of their irresponsibility. So I think it is time for us to declare pretty overwhelmingly that trickledown economics doesn’t work, and an unregulated economy based entirely on short-term profit doesn’t work, and the “information age” economy fallacy that we don’t actually need to MAKE anything doesn’t work, and we need to figure something else out.

And that’s something that we, as the people of a democratic nation whose government is, at least in principle, supposed to answer to us, need to think about, as well as our leaders. We are at a crossroads. It is time, as a group of people, as a country, and as a nation, to make plans for the way one of the most important aspects of our country, the economy, is going to function into the future. We need to look ahead.

That’s how we draw a silver lining out of all of this. We have a chance here to rebuild our economy, from the ground up, on more sound and sustainable business practices. First, we need to recognize that we can’t fix the economy from the top down. President-Elect Obama has made a deal to push for aid for the suffocating American auto industry in exchange for the Big 4’s promise that they will ramp up production and research on fuel efficient and green cars. Revitalizing the auto industry to produce high-tech but affordable green cars would create thousands of jobs in a sector that has been hard by the recssion. But, even under pressure from Senate Democrats and Mister Obama, President Bush and Secretary Paulson are refusing to use any of the 700 billion dollar bailout to help auto makers, preferring instead to hand the money to banks run by the people who put us in this mess, who are just stuffing it away instead of spending it constructively anyway.

Second. we need to find a way to encourage financial institutions, businesses, and banks to make stable, sustainable, mid to long term investments instead of obsessing over maximizing risky profits in the short term. We need to do this through careful, well-designed, and robust regulation, and by giving making sure institutions such as the SEC have the power and will to enforce such regulations.

Even if Obama can take us in that direction, he’s not in office yet. There are still people in power that believe that the market will correct itself and everything will be hunky-dory again if we just rescue firms headed by stupid rich executives from their bad decisions. But top-down economic policy put us IN this spot, so it’s certainly not going to get us out. To borrow from a popular buzz-phrase, it’s time for a change.

P.S. As a side note, I actually respect Henry Paulson quite a bit. While I disagree with some of his decisions, I think he is doing his best in a very tough situation. Plus he looks like the main character from Hitman.