Austan Goolsbee, Obama's top economic adviser will step down. Couldn't have anything to do with that dismal jobs report now could it?

This leaves only Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner as the last remaining original Obama appointee. Of course G.E. is still there, although the offshore outsourcer left along with Larry Summers.

Larry Summers, former director of the White House National Economic Council, stepped down at the end of last year to return to his teaching job at Harvard University.

Christina Romer, his predecessor as CEA chair, left last August, also to return to academia, and Peter Orszag resigned as White House budget director last July.

While Goolsbee was better than others, unfortunately he stayed in denial on the trade deficit. He also denied the jobs crisis to the point of proclaiming this month as a bump in the road to recovery. Literally the BLS commissioner had to correct him as well as others echoing such feel good don't worry sentiment, indirectly. Sorry folks, the BLS says the pathetic jobs data is not due to weather. The jobs crisis is clearly not a blip, not a bump in the road.

On Friday, the witching hour of government press releases they want no one to read, the Treasury Department announced they will block regulation of large classes of derivatives:

Treasury is today issuing a Notice of Proposed Determination providing that central clearing and exchange trading requirements would not apply to FX swaps and forwards.

This proposed determination is narrowly tailored. FX swaps and forwards will remain subject to Dodd-Frank’s rigorous new trade reporting requirements and business conduct standards. Additionally, the Dodd-Frank Act makes it illegal to use these instruments to evade other derivatives reforms. Importantly, the proposed determination does not extend to other FX derivatives, such as FX options, currency swaps, and non-deliverable forwards. These other FX derivatives will be subject to clearing and exchange requirements.

The entire press release is almost burying the announcement for no regulation of FX swaps and forwards. Multinational corporations use FX swaps to hedge on currency fluctuations. According to Better Markets, this will bring out the financial engineers for some sort of derivative trickery fiction:

Huffington Post is reporting the leading candidate for Obama's Economic council chief, made millions from Wall Street, significant consulting fees from Goldman Sachs, while we experienced economic Armageddon.

Gene Sperling, a leading contender for a top economic post in the White House, made millions on Wall Street even as the economy faltered.

The adviser to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is near the top of President Barack Obama's list of candidates to replace Larry Summers as director of the National Economic Council, HuffPost reports. By appointing Sperling, the president would fuel perceptions that his administration is overly close to Wall Street, installing a policymaker who has not only overseen monumental deregulation of the financial sector, but has also collected hefty paychecks from its leading firms.

The next NEC director will help determine the administration's economic policy over the next two years. Summers, who last week left his White House post for a Harvard professorship, met with the president almost daily to discuss economic decisions. Long sympathetic to Wall Street interests, Summers pushed for deregulation of financial instruments under President Clinton, a policy that experts -- and Clinton himself -- now say was misguided, contributing to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Even worse, Sperling is a Rubinite. This is the same bad trade deals, the same lack of financial regulation which has lead us to where we are today. With anemic economic growth, no jobs and an unemployment rate that just isn't dropping.

A Federal Judge in Virginia just ruled Obamacare unconstitutional.

A federal district judge in Virginia ruled on Monday that the keystone provision in the Obama health care law is unconstitutional, becoming the first court in the country to invalidate any part of the sprawling act and insuring that appellate courts will receive contradictory opinions from below.

Judge Henry E. Hudson, who was appointed to the bench by former President George W. Bush, declined the plaintiff’s request to freeze implementation of the law pending appeal, meaning that there should be no immediate effect on the ongoing rollout of the law. But the ruling is likely to create confusion among the public and further destabilize political support for legislation that is under fierce attack from Republicans in Congress and in many statehouses.

In a 42-page opinion issued in Richmond, Va., Judge Hudson wrote that the law’s central requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance exceeds the regulatory authority granted to Congress under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The insurance mandate is central to the law’s mission of covering more than 30 million uninsured because insurers argue that only by requiring healthy people to have policies can they afford to treat those with expensive chronic conditions.

Wow. Looks like states are in revolt and the judicial battle has started.

Surely this is a Populist move. The Obama administration is planning on Ordering Pay Freezes for Federal Workers.

The president’s proposal will effectively wipe out plans for a 1.4 percent across-the-board raise in 2011 for 2.1 million civilian federal government employees, including those working at the Defense Department, but the freeze would not affect the nation’s uniformed military personnel. The president has frozen the salaries of his own top White House staff members since taking office 22 months ago.

The pay freeze will save $2 billion in the current fiscal year that ends in September 2011, $28 billion over five years and more than $60 billion over 10 years, officials said.

Federal employees only make up about 2-3% of the total workforce. There was a USA Today article which got people's panties get all in a bunch about the low unemployment rate and much better pay for Federal employees versus private ones.

Some lawmakers are planning to use the lame-duck session that starts Monday to challenge the president's plan to give a 1.4% across-the-board pay raise to 2.1 million federal workers.

It seems this move by the Obama administration is to head 'em off at the pass. This stops the GOP wanting to make this an issue as well as avoids a 10% pay cut for Federal Employees. Instead of course, doing something to raise the pay of the private sector.

Here are some statistics from the USA Today article:

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer? It appears either the Obama administration is doing a run around Congress or possibly muzzling Elizabeth Warren. Warren has been strongly desired to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Supposedly it would be difficult to get her confirmed in Congress. The Obama administration is hiring Elizabeth Warren as an assistant to the President, to de facto run the Consumer Financial Protection Agency claims The New York Times:

Elizabeth Warren, who conceived of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will oversee its establishment as an assistant to President Obama, an official briefed on the decision said Wednesday evening.

The decision, which Mr. Obama is to announce this week, would allow Ms. Warren, a Harvard law professor, to effectively run the new agency without having to go through a potentially contentious confirmation battle in the Senate. The creation of the bureau is a centerpiece of the Wall Street financial overhaul that Mr. Obama signed in July.

After Christina Romer's departure, Goolsbee to Lead Council of Economic Advisers:

President Barack Obama will name Austan Goolsbee, a longtime adviser and an architect of his campaign's economic message, to be chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers at a White House press conference Friday, an administration official said Thursday night.

No dumping of Larry Summers or any of our other glorified neo/con/liberal/corporate/free trade disasters.

In 2008, we wrote about Obama's economic advisers, noting Goolsbee is your basic University of Chicago neoliberal free traitor type. To make matters worse, Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner are still in place, so if Goolsbee sees the light on any policies that might help the U.S. middle class, odds are....he will lose to Geithner and Summers regardless.

So, don't expect any real policies changes that will turn the country around or restructure it's economy.

President Obama is proposing a $50 Billion Infrastructure Plan:

Part of the plan being released today calls for the funding of a permanent infrastructure bank that would invest in projects most critical to the economy. The up-front investment would go to the nation's highway system and focus on modernizing the system while providing jobs. There also would be investment in the nation's bus and rail systems, including an overhaul of Amtrak's fleet. The final cog would be the modernization of the nation's air traffic control system.

Infrastructure, which is an investment in America, is sorely needed and has the potential to create jobs. That said, last spending on infrastructure, the government did not require two conditions, hire America and buy American, thus funds flowed out of the country instead of into the pockets of Americans.

Also, the bidding procedure for contracts was the same as the one used in Iraq. It's all well and good to invest in U.S. infrastructure, this is one of the most bang for the buck stimulus proposals out there. But the devil is in the details and will we see this government do Stimulus right right this time? Democrats are bad enough, but Republicans block anything that will help the American people and this economy at every turn.

President Obama is proposing a $100 Billion Research tax credit. The problem is this won't create jobs.

President Barack Obama, focusing on ways to spur economic growth with less than two months to the congressional elections, will urge Congress to permanently extend and expand a research and development tax credit for businesses.

Obama will detail the plan, which would cost about $100 billion over a decade, in an economic speech Sept. 8 in Cleveland, according to two administration officials speaking on condition of anonymity.

Once again, it is manufacturing of scale that is needed. That means curtailing offshore outsourcing, confronting China on their currency manipulation, modifying trade policy and offering tax incentives with strict conditions enforced, that companies manufacture in the United States.

R&D is all well and good. I am in R&D so a tax credit is especially nice for me. But hiring a few researchers in the U.S. is simply not going to generate 7 million jobs, especially when the results of that research, production, will be offshore outsourced to China and India.

Oh my. Newsweek journalist Michael Hirsh gives a blow by blow on how Obama got rolled by Wall Street. Here's just a snippet:

He had arrived in office perceived by some as the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yet Obama hadn’t acted much like FDR in the ensuing months. Instead he had faithfully channeled Summers and Geithner and their conservative approach to stimulus and reform. Early on, Obama’s two key economic officials had argued down Christina Romer, the new chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, when she suggested a massive $1.2 trillion stimulus to make up for the collapse of private demand. They opted for slightly less than $800 billion. “We believe that this is a properly sized approach to move the economy forward,” said Summers, who didn’t want to expand the federal deficit or worry the bond market. With the recession still darkening their outlook, Summers and Geithner also didn’t want to tamper too much with what they still saw as the economy’s engine room: Wall Street. Partly on their advice, the president “explicitly decided not to break up all big financial institutions,” said another top economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee.

That ain't no lie. But tell me, Joe Q. Public, when are you going to start paying attention to the issues and details on voting records, money and policy positions instead of making an election a personality contest? Hmmm? Ya all were gaga over Obama to the point of nausea.