Today Paul Volcker got an outsider economic advisory panel. Just yesterday there were reports Larry Summers was holding it up.

So, who are these great outsiders who need a voice in D.C.? Any working class Americans? How about some more economists?

Oops!

We have

• former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson
• former Fed Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson
• UBS Americas Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert Wolf
• General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt
• Service Employees International Union Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger
• David Swensen, chief investment officer at Yale University
• Mark Gallogly, founder and managing partner of Centerbridge Partners L.P.
• Penny Pritzker, chairman of Pritzker Realty Group
• John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers
• Jim Owens, chairman and of Caterpillar Inc.
• Monica C. Lozano, publisher and CEO of La Opinion, the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the U.S.
• Charles Phillips, president of Oracle Corp.
• Richard L. Trumka, secretary- treasurer of the AFL-CIO
• Laura Tyson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley
• Harvard University Professor Martin Feldstein

So does anyone believe Oracle, a notorious offshore outsourcer and labor arbitrage promoter, Caterpillar, who just tried to stop the Buy American provisions in the Stimulus, UBS and then my favorite, a Spanish newspaper publisher, are going to recommend policies that actually do what is needed to be done?

What kind of outside panel is this? Even the ones with economics backgrounds are in economic fiction land. Laura Tyson is a notorious , recommending absurd "adjustment and retraining" blow off policies to working America and also to the theory itself!