Susan Walsh/AP Photo
President Joe Biden talks about his nomination of Julie Su, right, to serve as secretary of labor during an event in the East Room of the White House in Washington, March 1, 2023.
Joe Biden is not always everything that the progressive movement hopes, but let’s take a moment to salute his outstanding appointees. They include:
Gary Gensler, who has resisted pressure from the financial industry and its friendly press, and has intensified his efforts to protect both investors and the financial system from the intricate scams of crypto. The SEC last week filed suits against Binance and Coinbase, charging them with violating U.S. securities laws, offering unregistered securities and operating as unregistered trading platforms. The two account for about half of all trading in digital assets. Binance was also accused of mixing customer funds with assets of a separate firm owned by its CEO.
“We don’t need more digital currency,” Gensler said Tuesday in a CNBC interview. “We already have digital currency. It’s called the U.S. dollar. It’s called the euro or it’s called the yen, they’re all digital right now.”
Jared Bernstein, who was finally confirmed as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, by a margin of 50-49, with the reliably faithless Joe Manchin voting no. (Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville deciding to go live it up with Donald Trump at his golf club saved Kamala Harris a trip to the Capitol to break the tie.) Bernstein is the most resolute progressive ever to hold the post. And despite the recent trend to have the National Economic Council (which was created in 1993 for Bob Rubin) upstage the older CEA and relegate the latter to technical research, Bernstein has a long-standing close relationship with the president, dating to Biden’s eight years as vice president, and is in the room where it happens.
Julie Su. Acting labor secretary Su played an indispensable hands-on role in settling the West Coast dockworkers strike. She was in touch with both sides, daily by phone for several weeks, and then personally in San Francisco. The workers won a six-year contract, with raises of 8 to 10 percent in the first year, retroactive for the eight months that they worked without a contract.
Su “used her deep experience and judgment to keep the parties talking, working with them to reach an agreement after a long and sometimes acrimonious negotiation,” President Biden said in a statement Thursday. “Above all I congratulate the port workers, who have served heroically through the pandemic and the countless challenges it brought, and will finally get the pay, benefits, and quality of life they deserve.”
Su, like President Biden, leaves no doubt about her strong support for unions. This has caused big business to mount an all-out campaign to block her confirmation, focusing on Democrats who are up for re-election in close contests in 2024. If she is not confirmed, she will continue on an acting basis, so the joke’s on corporate America.
Katherine Tai. The U.S. trade representative has resisted pressure to backpedal from Biden’s commitment to advance industrial policy that flies in the face of conventional views of free trade. “Let’s put the U.S. back in USTR,” she likes to say.
Speaking Thursday at a conference convened by the Open Markets Institute on the shape of the global trading system, Tai said, “Our trade policy places workers at its center to reflect the reality that the consumer who enjoys the low prices of imported goods is also a worker who must withstand the downward pressures that come from competing with workers in other parts of the world toiling under exploitative conditions.” No other U.S. trade rep has ever said anything remotely close.
Tai does not quite have the direct access to the president that more corporate-oriented U.S. trade reps have had. And she is constantly fighting a rearguard action to return to trade traditionalism from some on the USTR permanent staff and corporate lobbyists long accustomed to setting trade policy agendas. But what a breath of fresh air.
And I haven’t even mentioned Biden’s antitrust team: Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter, and Rohit Chopra. By appointing first-rate progressives and letting them lead, Biden increases the chances that his really will be a transformative presidency.
