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This is the point in the campaign when progressive groups begin assembling lists. Whats colloquially known as the Plum Book is the list of the more than 7,000 appointments that a president gets to make.

There are groups making lists of progressives for Plum Book jobs, as well as lists of prospective Cabinet officials. Here is a particularly thoughtful one, from Data for Progress.

The most instructive item is the list of progressive nominees for Treasury secretary. The Treasury secretary needs to know all the byzantine details of the plumbing of how the financial system worksand also the abstruse details of the accumulated financial-engineering abuses that need to be remedied.

Whats interesting is how short is the list of plausible candidates. Wall Street has had such a lock on Treasury secretary and related subcabinet jobs for so long that the bench is rather thin. Under Carter, Clinton, and Obama, lefties simply did not get these posts.

Heading the Data for Progress list is Sarah Bloom Raskin, a genuine progressive who served both as a governor of the Federal Reserve and as deputy secretary of the Treasury. Shes perfect, with both a deep understanding of the plumbing of the financial system and a commitment to reform. As an Obama administration appointee, Raskin doesnt seem all that scary. But she is almost a category of one.

The other proposed nominees are Richard Cordray, former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; former labor secretary and renaissance progressive Robert Reich; and Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs, a notable expert on sustainable development and critic of financialized globalism.

Any of them would be great. But the usual suspects would veto them as not sufficiently versed in how the Treasury works. Indeed, the typical definition of that requirement virtually limits it to Wall Street veterans.

Its time to rebuild the progressive bench, so that we have a more plausible farm-team system. Only by breaking the Wall Street link and lineage can progressives take back the government as well as taking back the presidency.

Read more here:
Bidens Cabinet and the Thin Progressive Bench - The American Prospect