[Pen-l] obama mart

[Dan Scanlan <coolhanduke1029@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Published on Tuesday, June 10, 2008 by The New York Sun
Wal-Mart Defender To Direct Obama’s Economic Policy
Appointment of Jason Furman Immediately Meets With Skepticism

by Josh Gerstein

Just days after clinching the Democratic presidential nomination,  
Senator Obama is naming as his economic policy director an economist  
who has clashed with critics of Wal-Mart by defending the company as a  
boon to poor Americans.

The appointment of Jason Furman, 37, a former Clinton administration  
official who is a visiting scholar at New York University, immediately  
met with skepticism from some who have faulted Wal-Mart for being  
stingy toward its workforce.

“It’s surprising because this guy seems to feel that Wal-Mart’s low- 
wage, low-benefit business model is good for America. That’s just flat- 
out wrong,” the executive director of Wal-Mart Watch, David Nassar,  
said. “This guy helped to lend credibility to the Wal-Mart business  
model. That was disappointing then and it’s disappointing now given  
this position,” said Mr. Nassar, whose group is backed by a board that  
includes the president of the Service Employees International Union,  
Andrew Stern. Mr. Nassar quickly added that he was “not critiquing the  
Obama campaign.”

A New York-based labor organizer and writer, Jonathan Tasini, said he  
was puzzled by the selection of Mr. Furman. “It’s legitimate to give  
you pause,” Mr. Tasini, who ran an unsuccessful primary challenge to  
Senator Clinton in 2006, said. “There have been concerns raised about  
where Obama’s economic policies will trend,” the writer said.

Mr. Tasini noted that, while Mr. Obama spurned labor groups by voting  
for a free-trade agreement with Peru, his past suggests he would be an  
ally of labor. “It’s hard to believe that during his community  
organizing work in the poorest neighborhoods of his own city he didn’t  
have something sink into him about income inequality. There’s no way  
to read anything he has put out there as anything but rejection for  
the Wal-Mart model,” Mr. Tasini said.

As the company became a pariah in Democratic circles, Mr. Furman  
stepped out on the issue in 2005 by publishing a 16-page paper titled,  
“Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story.” He argued that the huge cost  
savings the company has delivered to its customers, who tend to have  
low incomes, far outweighed any impact the chain may have had on wages.

In a debate on Slate.com in 2006, Mr. Furman took on the tactics of  
the anti-Wal-Mart movement, which include trying to block new stores  
in places like New York. “If I heard that Wal-Mart was coming to my  
neighborhood, New York’s West Village, I might rush for my mouse. But  
I wouldn’t kid myself into thinking that my opposition had anything to  
do with helping the poor. If anything, I would feel guilty that I was  
preventing moderate-income New Yorkers from enjoying the huge benefits  
that much of the rest of the country already knows so well,” he wrote.

“The collateral damage from these efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its  
wages and benefits is way too enormous and damaging to working people  
and the economy more broadly for me to sit by idly and sing ‘Kum-Ba- 
Ya’ in the interests of progressive harmony,” Mr. Furman added.

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, Joshua Earnest, said the candidate and Mr.  
Furman have not discussed Wal-Mart.

During the primary campaign, Mr. Obama was sharply critical of the  
company. He has said he will not shop there and that Wal-Mart should  
pay “a living wage.”

At a January debate, Mr. Obama seemed to play to Wal-Mart’s critics  
when he suggested that Senator Clinton’s six-year stint on the  
company’s board paled in comparison to his record as a community  
organizer in Chicago. “While I was working on those streets watching  
those folks see their jobs shift overseas, you were a corporate lawyer  
sitting on the board at Wal-Mart,” Mr. Obama said, in one of his  
sharpest jabs at Mrs. Clinton.

One economist who has disputed some of Mr. Furman’s findings on Wal- 
Mart said the disagreement shouldn’t disqualify him. “That’s small  
potatoes. Jason’s economic agenda goes way beyond that,” Jared  
Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute said. “That’s not anything  
close to a deal breaker.”

Mr. Furman had been affiliated with the Brookings Institution as  
director of its Hamilton Project, an economic policy project whose  
advisory council includes executives of Citigroup, as well as  
prominent hedge fund executives such as Eric Mindich of Eton Park  
Capital Management, Richard Perry of Perry Capital, and Thomas Steyer  
of Farallon Capital.

© 2008 The New York Sun_______________________________________________
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