On CNN Monday night, David Gergen, the very embodiment of the Establishment, advised Barack Obama to surround himself with economic heavyweights like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin, and Lawrence Summers to reassure the American public that he can handle the economic crisis.

It just so happens that Obama had been on a conference call with those three earlier that day.

But Volcker, Rubin, and Summers are the least comforting people to me—and to millions of Americans who owe their distress to just this trio.

Thirty years ago, under Jimmy Carter, Paul Volcker engineered one of the most brutal recessions in the post-World War II era. He intentionally hiked interest rates so that unemployment would go up, and union bargaining power for higher wages would erode.

In the Clinton years, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers pushed free trade above all else, destroying much of the U.S. manufacturing sector. And Rubin, along with McCain’s Phil Gramm, helped abolish the Glass-Steagall Act, which had regulated the banking and financial industries after the Great Depression. Rubin is as much responsible for the crisis on Wall Street and in the housing market as anyone else. And he helped it along when he moved over to Citigroup, which hustled subprime mortgage instruments.

Why Obama should surround himself with these three free marketeers is beyond me.

Obama has unfortunate ties to Wall Street already, collecting much more money from that sector than McCain has, as David Sirota notes.

A Rubin protégé, Jason Furman, is Obama’s chief economic adviser. (Jim Hightower, however, notes that Furman also has done good work at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.)

Obama has other advisers who don’t inspire confidence, as Sirota points out, including UBS’s Robert Wolf, who is Gramm’s boss. And, Sirota adds, “it was Obama, in fact, who initially appointed a former Fannie Mae chairman and lobbyist, Jim Johnson, to spearhead his Vice Presidential selection committee.”

Instead of these Wall Street gargoyles, Obama should listen to Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, who also is advising him, and has a much more progressive orientation.

“To correct the problem we need political leaders and policymakers who believe in regulation,” he tells Nathan Gardels at Huffington Post in an excellent interview.

“Beyond that, we need to put in place a new system that can cope with the expansion of finance and financial instruments beyond traditional banks.”

(Stiglitz posted an excellent column at cnn.com on Wednesday.)

There are other progressives in Obama’s camp. Hightower mentions Joel Rogers, Van Jones, and Dan Carol. I’m hoping Obama also listens to the folks over at the Economic Policy Institute and to Robert Greenstein at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

If Obama’s smart, he’d enlist Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. They predicted this housing bubble, and even wrote a book about it, before almost anyone else took notice.

Allen Fishbein, director of housing and credit policy at the Consumer Federation of America, would be another ideal person to have on the Obama economic team. Fishbein knows the housing market backwards and forwards.

Over at Nader’s Center for the Study of Responsive Law (and Ralph was right the other day when he said he’s been predicting this meltdown), John Brown has done yeoman’s work for decades on the dangers of financial deregulation.

So, too has Jake Lewis, the former Hill bank staffer.

On other economic issues, like how to allocate the budget, there is Anita Dancs, who used to be at the National Priorities Project. And on how to lift wages, there is no one better than economists Robert Pollin and Stephanie Luce.

And for a 12-step program for getting off the deregulation addiction, Obama would do well to consider Robert Weissman's ideas, which he just posted at his Multinational Monitor blog.

As you can see, there is plenty of progressive economic advice to go around.

Obama doesn’t need to rely on Wall Street and Treasury retreads.