Sometimes it's really baffling that Thomas Friedman is considered one of our nation's most important thinkers on political and economic matters. Here he is today (2/11/09) channeling what "non-Americans" have to say:

Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn't through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.

If you don't understand that the United States developed its economy behind high tariff walls, then you probably believe the Earth is flat.

The corporate media has more or less been on the same page in applauding Obama's cabinet picks so far--"He's been pragmatic in choosing pragmatists," as the Washington Post editorial page cheered on November 28. There's been occasional criticism of Obama's choices as being too progressive, as when the L.A. Times (12/5/08) attacked the idea of Rep. Xavier Bercerra as U.S. trade representative, declaring that Obama "should break his promises and appoint a free-trader as trade representative."

So it was refreshing to see Michael Hirsh's piece in Newsweek wondering why left-leaning Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz hasn't been in the mix:

But lost amid the cascades of ticker tape is the fact that, astonishingly, you didn't hire the one expert who's been right about the financial crisis all along--and whose Nobel Prize-winning ideas will probably be most central to fixing the global economy.

In Hirsh's mind, Stiglitz has a solid record that would recommend him in the current crisis--namely, that he saw much of it coming, unlike some of Obama's other advisers (specifically media favorite Larry Summers):

Stiglitz, more than anyone on the Washington scene, was the biggest fly in the ointment of "free-market fundamentalism" pressed on the world in the '90s by Summers, Geithner and their mentor, former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin—advice that has now contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

That perspective was seconded by New York Times columnist Frank Rich on Sunday (12/7/08), who wondered if we are seeing a replay of Kennedy's "best and brightest" team of advisers:

No, it’s the economic team that evokes trace memories of our dark best-and-brightest past. Lawrence Summers, the new top economic adviser, was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history and is famous for never letting anyone forget his brilliance. It was his highhanded disregard for his own colleagues, not his impolitic remarks about gender and science, that forced him out of Harvard’s presidency in four years. Timothy Geithner, the nominee for treasury secretary, is the boy wonder president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He comes with none of Summers's personal baggage, but his sparkling résumé is missing one crucial asset: experience outside academe and government, in the real world of business and finance. Postgraduate finishing school at Kissinger & Associates doesn’t count.

Summers and Geithner are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transition economic advisers three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Ever since his acclaimed service as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.

Geithner was no less tardy in discovering the reckless, wholesale gambling that went on in Wall Street’s big casinos, all of which cratered while at least nominally under his regulatory watch. That a Hydra-headed banking monster like Citigroup came to be in the first place was a direct byproduct of deregulation championed by Rubin and Summers in Clinton’s Treasury Department (where Geithner also served). The New Deal reform they helped repeal, the Glass-Steagall Act, had been enacted in 1933 in part because Citigroup's ancestor, National City Bank, had imploded after repackaging bad loans as toxic securities in the go-go 1920s.

The media trope that presidents-elect ought to break progressive campaign promises really displays the anti-democratic and pro-corporate biases of the press at their most glaring. Who cares what you told the voters? Here's what the interests that really matter want you to do.

The latest instance in this sad series is a USA Today editorial (12/2/08), which eagerly spots a silver lining in the economic crisis:

During his campaign...Obama endorsed a number of smaller bore ideas more for the sake of their political appeal than for their economic usefulness. The financial crisis gives the incoming president a compelling rationale to make a few modest course corrections.

The paper then offers three of its own "modest" proposals for how Obama should best rewrite his platform in a more big business-friendly direction. One is to drop the idea of a windfall profits tax on the oil industry, arguing that "windfall profits taxes...aren't a very reliable or stable source of revenue." Since windfall profits are by definition sudden and unexpected, that seems like a rather peculiar objection--like saying that receiving emergency aid isn't something you can count on every year.

Another way that USA Today hopes that Obama will betray the people who voted for him is by dropping the idea of renegotiating NAFTA. "Outside of a handful of heavily unionized states where the trade pact with Canada and Mexico has become a scapegoat for job losses, NAFTA is not seen as such a bad thing," the editorial claims--which ignores not only national polling but the fact that the entire country expressed its opinion by voting by a substantial margin for a candidate who promised to reopen the deal in no uncertain terms.

USA Today went on to assert that "the addition of 18 million jobs in the decade following [NAFTA's] enactment suggests that it produced more winners than losers." Actually, since the total U.S. population grew by an estimated 35 million between 1994 and 2004, adding 18 million new jobs is not particularly impressive. A more relevant statistic is that the U.S. trade deficit grew from $150 billion in 1994 to $650 billion in 2004, suggesting that U.S. trade policies during this period resulted in the transfer of trillions of dollars of wealth overseas.

Finally, echoing other corporate media pleas for Obama to abandon his progressive campaign pledges, USA Today singles out Obama's long-standing support of card-check union certification as a promise to break, saying, "It is hard to see how ending the secret ballot would do much besides initiating campaigns of subtle, and not so subtle, intimidation as workers contemplate their decisions."

The argument turns reality on its head: The current system, which treats worker organization as a matter to be contested with the employer rather than decided on by the workers themselves, allows those employers to intimidate workers in ways that are not subtle at all--a study by CEPR (1/07) based on NRLB data concluded that as many as one in five union organizers are illegally fired during the course of a typical union certification campaign.

The paper concludes that "pushing this idea through Congress would position Obama less as an agent of change and more as a pal of Big Labor." It's corporate media's Orwellian notion of change in action: Changing the Bush administration's hostile attitude toward labor--big or otherwise--would not be change; continuing that attitude would be change.

Today's Washington Post (11/14/08) explains that Obama's economic advisers "span the policy spectrum:"

They include free traders and "fair traders," deficit hawks, Wall Street executives, corporate moguls and labor advocates.

Why the different typographical treatment of free trade and fair trade? The implication is that "free trade" really is free, whereas "fair trade" is just what its supporters call it. This treatment of so-called "free trade," as economist Dean Baker has long explained, "reflects deeply held biases in the media. The most important point, which I unfortunately have to keep repeating, is that these are not free trade agreements. They do not free all trade and, in fact, increase some forms of protectionist barriers." But in the corporate media, "free trade" does not generally require any sort of qualifier or explanation.