Obama has just made Jason Furman Chairman of his Economic Council of Advisers.  Jason Furman has ties to the Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, the Hamilton Project and the Brookings Institution.  They promote bad trade deals, offshore outsourcing and the use of foreign guest workers to displace and labor arbitrage American workers.

According to Bloomberg, Furman would be instrumental in choosing the next Federal Reserve chair, as Ben Bernake's term expires in 2014.

Some are praising this appointment, but it is your classic masking of big business objectives as somehow Progressive policies.

MarketWatch has more reactions.

Businessweek reviews Furman's background

Furman, 42, received his Ph.D from Harvard in economics in 2003. When he left the Brookings Institution in the summer of 2008 to join the Obama campaign, the move was criticized by labor unions, who questioned his advocacy for free trade and his ties to former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

Since joining the administration, Furman has often sided with advisers who wanted the president to push for more fiscal stimulus to promote job creation. Internally, he was a proponent for the “cash for clunkers” program to promote automobile sales as well as a proposal, known as “cash for caulkers,” to give tax credits to help homeowners weatherize their houses.

Furman might be behind the social security cut and hidden regressive tax by using chained CPI instead of what is used now to adjust for inflation for a host of pensions and social service benefits.

It’s in Jason Furman’s quote here:

“The Consumer Price Indices currently used for indexation employ an outdated procedure that overstate inflation,” said Jason Furman, now the Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, in 2007 expert testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. “If all federal programs and taxes were switched to [Chained CPI] by the end of a decade the government would save more than $40 billion, with the bulk of the savings divided roughly equally between preventing de facto Social Security benefit increases and tax cuts that Congress never intended. Over time the savings would continue to grow.”

Yes, switching to chained CPI changes not only the cost of living adjustment for Social Security and other benefit programs that use a COLA, like federal pensions and veteran’s benefits. It also changes the cost of living adjustment for…. tax brackets. A tax bracket that might go up, say, $100 year-over-year would only go up $50, under chained CPI.

Furman so far hasn't been as bad as was expected in 2008, but anyone hoping for policies to finally address the employment crisis will surely be disappointed.