Rumsfeld nemesis Shinseki to be named VA secretary

You have to give the Obama people credit. They are quite adept at slipping the knife in slowly. Obama is appointing retired General Eric Shinseki to be our next secretary of Veterans Affairs. You might recall that Shinseki is the guy who basically canned by Rumsfeld after he testified to Congress that we might need hundreds of thousands of US troops to quell Iraq:

Shinseki's tenure as Army chief of staff from 1999 to 2003 was marked by constant tensions with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which boiled over in 2003 when Shinseki testified to Congress that it might take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to control Iraq after the invasion.

Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, belittled the estimate as "wildly off the mark" and the army general was ousted within months. But Shinseki's words proved prophetic after President George W. Bush in early 2007 announced a "surge" of additional troops to Iraq after miscalculating the numbers needed to stem sectarian violence.

Obama said he selected Shinseki for the VA post because he "was right" in predicting that the U.S. will need more troops in Iraq than Rumsfeld believed at the time.

Obama is announcing the choice of Shinseki, a Japanese-American, as VA secretary, tomorrow, Sunday, December 7. Pearl Harbor day. Don't think it wasn't intentional. The man who who gave his acceptance speech on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" address leaves nothing to chance. Read More......

Sleazy bank layoffs

A reader writes about layoffs in the banking industry. As I can't confirm his information, I'm going to leave the name of the banking institution out of this. They know who they are, and they now know that we know who they are and what they're apparently doing:

XXXXXXX just sent out a huge wave of layoffs. However, "at the last minute" they decided to spare a bunch more positions where the employees have generally worked up long spans of seniority. Sounds like a big relief, right?

They also sent out a notice last week that effective January 1, they are changing their severance packages for people they dump. Instead of getting severance based on years served up to two years of pay, they are capping it at 46 weeks. In other words, they are kindly "sparing" these people's jobs until January "to ensure branch service continuity," at which point they can lay them off far more cheaply based on the revised severance terms and save up to $100K per person.

Not only is this incredibly sleazy and demoralizing (people were crying in the branches yesterday), the very best way to send your company into a tighter death spiral is to get rid of as much long-term customer knowledge as possible.

Any of our friends in Congress interested in a hearing? Read More......

Once again, it's the Romans

Who would have guessed that branding was popular even back in those days? It comes as no surprise that fake products were sold in markets as well.

Evidence of the pottery workshops emerged in Modena, in central-northern Italy, during construction work to build a residential complex near the ancient walls of the city.

"We found a large ancient Roman dumping filled with pottery scraps. There were vases, bottles, bricks, but most of all, hundreds of oil lamps, each bearing their maker's name," Donato Labate, the archaeologist in charge of the dig, told Discovery News.

Firmalampen, or "factory lamps," were one of the first mass-produced goods in Roman times and they carried brand names clearly stamped on their clay bottoms.

The ancient dumping in Modena contained lamps by the most famous brands of the time: Strobili, Communis, Phoetaspi, Eucarpi and Fortis.

All these manufacturers had their products sold on the markets of three continents. Fortis was the trendiest of all pottery brands and its products were used up to the end of the second century A.D.

"It was indeed a commercial success. Fortis gained such a name for its lamps that its stamp was copied and reproduced throughout the empire. It was one of the earliest examples of pirated brands," Labate said.

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Daschle wants your health care stories

Don't be shy and share your story here. The most recent terrible-yet-all-too-common story that I heard is a friend of a friend who was being laid off from his job and his wife was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When I tell people here in France, they can't remotely imagine being thrown to the wolves the way it happens in the US. COBRA is better than nothing, but if a family health insurance plan is $1000 or $2000+ per month, how the heck do you afford coverage when you are getting the boot? Facing one of those issues is bad enough but both at the same time? Are you kidding?

The plan has to be something that appeals to the real world and the middle class or else forget about it. If people can't see the benefits they're going to once again fall for the Republican/insurance lobby stories about socialism and lack of choice. I use socialized health care and choose my own doctors and don't wait any more or less than I did in the US. And it's cheaper. And better. This is a great idea by Daschle so do us all a favor and be heard.

By asking anybody and everybody to share their health care experiences, Daschle is confronting one of the major criticisms of 15 years ago: that the effort to craft former President Bill Clinton's plan for universal coverage was too secretive.

"We have to make this as inclusive a process as possible," Daschle, the former Senate majority leader from South Dakota, said in a speech in Denver, his first since Democratic officials confirmed last month that he had been offered the job as health and human services secretary and that he had accepted.

The effort will expand the circle of people who believe they have a stake in next year's debate, analysts said.

"Last time, we're talking 15 years ago, in part because the process was done behind closed doors, it was hard to see what the impact would be on people," said John Rother, public policy director for the advocacy group AARP. "It was about systems, it was about budgets, it was about insurance companies. It didn't translate to people very easily."

"They are clearly trying to do it differently and help the American public see the case for reform in human terms," he said.

NOTE FROM JOHN: Let me add something. As I recently discovered that I am apparently no longer middle class, or upper middle class (no stimulus checks for me!) - and, mind you, I rent a studio apartment, don't own a car, and have no other assets other than my retirement and two foster cats in Paris (and a foster dog in Chicago) - I want to say something about this health care plan helping the middle class. It needs to help everyone. Unless you are Bill Gates, you can't afford to have health care insurance that caps you at a lifetime limit of benefits. Unless you're Albert Einstein, you can't even make sense of your health care plan.

And speaking as someone who just had to turn down medication I need, and take a weaker substitute, because the stuff I need is $350 for one month's supply (after my insurance cut me off for the rest of the year because I'm too expensive), we need health care reform that helps EVERYONE. Not just the unisured, putting them in the same crappy system the rest of us are already in is not a solution, and not just the middle class, so the rest of us can die when we get cancer, or lose our coverage when we move home to take care of ailing moms and dads. We need a national solution taht helps everyone. If it's healthcare for all, then it needs to truly be for all. Read More......

David Corn thinks progressive should be upset with Obama

David Corn, the Washington Bureau Chief of Mother Jones magazine, asks, in a Sunday piece in the Washington Post, whether progressives should be upset with Obama. Read it and see what you think:

The more things change, the more theystay . . . well, you know. And looking at President-elect Barack Obama's top appointments, it's easy to wonder whether convention has triumphed over change -- and centrists over progressives.

A quick run-down: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who supported the Iraq war until she initiated her presidential bid, has been handed the Cabinet's big plum: secretary of state. And Bush's second defense secretary, Robert Gates, will become Obama's first defense secretary. The Obama foreign policy adviser regarded as the most liberal in his inner circle, Susan E. Rice, has been picked for the U.N. ambassador slot. Obama is elevating this job to Cabinet rank, but he's still sending Rice to New York -- and in politics and policy, proximity to power matters. For national security adviser, Obama has picked James L. Jones. The retired four-star general was not hawkish on the Iraq war and seems to be a non-ideologue who possesses the right experience for the job. But he probably would have ended up in a McCain administration, and his selection has not heartened progressives.

Obama's economic team isn't particularly liberal, either. Lawrence H. Summers, who as President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary opposed regulating the new-fangled financial instruments that greased the way to the subprime meltdown, will chair Obama's National Economic Council. To head Treasury, Obama has tapped Timothy F. Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, who helped oversee the financial system as it collapsed. Each is close to Robert Rubin, another former Clinton Treasury secretary, a director of bailed-out Citigroup and a poster boy for both the corporate wing of the Democratic Party and discredited Big Finance. Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board will be guided by Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman whose controversial tight-money policies ended the stagflation crisis of the 1970s but led to a nasty recession. (A genuinely progressive economist, Jared Bernstein, will receive a less prominent White House job: chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.)

It's no surprise that many progressives are -- depending on whom you ask -- disappointed, irritated or fit to be tied. Sure, Obama's appointments do represent change -- that is, change from the widely unpopular Bush-Cheney status quo. But do these appointments amount to the kind of change that progressives, who were an essential part of Obama's political base during the campaign, can really believe in?

....My hunch is that Obama has made a calculation. In constructing his administration, he has decided not to create a (liberal) Washington counter-establishment. Instead, he's fashioning a bipartisan, centrist-loaded version of the Washington establishment to carry out his policies, which do tilt to the left. (And good news for the establishmentarians: Having screwed up on Iraq or the economy is no disqualification.) When asked at a Nov. 26 news conference whether his appointments of old Washington hands indicated that his administration was not going to be a festival of change, Obama replied, "What we are going to do is combine experience with fresh thinking. But understand where the -- the vision for change comes from first and foremost. It comes from me." His job, he added, was to "make sure . . . that my team is implementing" his policies. In other words, la change, c'est moi.

It's a tough call. I thought "bah, humbug" when I first read David's title, but then on reading the piece, he has a point. There don't seem to be any liberals in Obama's cabinet. And Obama even did a favor for Joe Lieberman (though not in the Cabinet, he's not with the fishes either.) What does all of this mean for Obama's policies, and just as important, Obama Supreme Court announcements?

Actually, it reminds me a bit of the campaign, at least the beginning and the middle, when the Obama campaign didn't seem particularly interested in reaching out to progressives. Once they realized that in order to win they needed to marshal everyone on their side, the reaching out began. I hope we're not seeing a similar "we can do it alone" approach developing in the transition team. The same bipartisan outreach shown to Republicans, conservative Dems, and political enemies of all stripes, should also be shown to progressives in Obama's own party. Read More......

Possible deal to salvage auto industry

Yesterday's devastating economic news provided the impetus for the Bush administration and Hill leaders to cut a deal to save the auto industry:

Jolted by news of the worst job losses in more than 30 years, congressional Democrats were near an agreement with the White House yesterday on a plan to speed at least $15 billion to the faltering Detroit automakers in hopes of averting the collapse of an industry that supports millions of U.S. jobs.

In talks with White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) dropped her long-standing opposition to tapping a loan program created by Congress to fund the development of fuel-efficient cars. Pelosi agreed instead to use the money to provide immediate cash to General Motors and Chrysler. Without government help, GM executives have said their company may not survive the month.

Pelosi is insisting, however, that money pulled from the loan program be "replenished in a matter of weeks so as not to delay that crucial initiative," she said in a statement. The White House has yet to agree to those terms, senior congressional aides said, but Democrats believe President Bush would be unlikely to veto a bill over those provisions.

The apparent breakthrough comes as the House and the Senate prepare to return to Washington next week to respond to requests from the Detroit automakers for as much as $38 billion to help them survive the economic downturn. The auto executives appeared on Capitol Hill for a second day yesterday, making a desperate plea for the funds. News that the nation had shed 533,000 jobs in November -- the most since 1974 -- added urgency to their appeal.

Not a done deal. But, sounds like it's close. Read More......

Obama addresses the economic crisis-- with solutions: "We need action -- and action now"

It's a good thing the president-elect is addressing the current economic crisis. The current president, who helped create the mess, is ignoring the situation. In the weekly radio address, Obama unveils some of the specific ideas in his plan. Reuters calls the proposals "aggressive growth measures." The New York Times titles its article "Obama Pledges Massive Public Works Project." So, he's thinking big.

From the Transition Office press release, here's some of what Obama will announce today:

Embark on a large-scale effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient;

Make the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since President Eisenhower established the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s – creating millions of jobs and compelling states to act quickly and make smart investments;

Create jobs and help our children compete by launching the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen;

Renew our information superhighway by boosting broadband deployment in communities across America;

Modernize our health care system so that every hospital and doctor’s office is using cutting-edge technology and every American has access to electronic medical records.

And, here's the video:

Read More......

Saturday Morning Open Thread

Good morning. It's a cold one in D.C.

Check out the week's best editorial cartoons via our friend, Bob Geiger. They're are some hysterical ones this morning. I especially liked the one about "Jeb."

The poem of the week is "The Rose is Obsolete" by William Carlos Williams. The poet behind the poem of the week blog is struck by the "imagery" and "energy" of Williams' work.

Let's get this Saturday started... Read More......

What is the proper value for a CEO?

Americablog reader Trician M. sent over an excellent link from the Times as well as a personal story related to executive pay.

My father built a financial institution in the late 60's that had offices in 17 countries. He took great pride in it's reputation. He was never compensated on the order of today's CEO's but he never gave anything but his best. We have gone way off track and as far as I am concerned we need a new generation of CEO's like him.

We've come a long way from those days, haven't we? The comments in the Times article include some great ideas such as opening up the books of Wall Street. When a consumer asks for a loan, that's what the banks ask for so let's do the same for Wall Street so we can see just how much they're cutting back.

The problem also is the influence of the compensation committees and the compensation consultants. This is a nothing more than friends taking care of friends. As long as the money flows and everyone (at the top) gets a cut, no questions are asked. The chummy relationships are great for the inner circle (including the likes of Robert Rubin, who needs to do the honorable thing and give back the money he made at Citi and then go away and stay away) but for the American investors who now own substantial pieces of these banks, it sucks. Listen to the Citi CEO in this interview and tell me this is someone who has a clue. He sounds like a politician who can't answer a question but can tell a completely irrelevant story.

Another theme in the comments is to let them go away. If these over-hyped and over-paid executives think they're worth more, fine, give it a try. Robert Nardelli (now at Chrysler after failing at Home Depot to the tune of $240 million) managed to jump ship at the right time, but as they say, the times they are a changin'. Let the arrogant Citi CEO Pandit go out and create a new hedge fund. Go ahead and see how that works. Let him send out his CV to Europe, Asia or the Middle East and let's see how many people jump at the opportunity to pay him millions upon millions for being a failure. I'm sure the list is endless, so let us know how it all works out.

Executive pay needs to be much more closely associated with the overall success of a business over more than a quarter-by-quarter or financial year cycle and when business is removed because it's bad, you don't get paid for it. A crazy idea, isn't it? There is no evidence out there (beyond what the pay consultants whip up) that suggests the high pay has been worth it for business or investors yet it continues.

So coming back to the original article, what is the answer to CEO pay? What are they worth and how do we restructure what is obviously a failed system? The most important question is, do we have the right team arriving to address this system? While all qualified and competent, have they changed their now dated views of the system and will they make the necessary changes? The Robert Rubin connections are a concern. Read More......

Gordon Brown calls in bank chiefs to demand full rate cut to clients

We need to see a lot more of this and not just in the UK. The banking groups even admit that they're squeezing people (both savers and borrowers) and that they have to make money somehow. Well, how about cutting back? You know that's the first thing they would tell everyone else, much like the GOP in the US or the Tory's in the UK. Are we really seeing the banks economize? Just because they're cutting back on their posh holidays parties and sending employees packing with with hundreds of thousands instead of millions doesn't mean they're serious.

Gordon Brown said the Government would hold another round of talks to urge them to lower their rates for borrowers. "Remember last time there was a cut, we had to speak to them before it was passed on and we will be speaking to them again," he said. The Prime Minister dismissed criticism that savers, including many pensioners, are seeing their incomes squeezed by low interest rates. "What I would be worried about most is if we had inflation going up and taking away the value of people's savings," he said in a television interview yesterday. "The interest rate going down is necessary to get the economy moving again. If you are a saver the best protection you have is that inflation is kept low."

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, added: "It really is important that we see these reductions passed on because that is the best way of helping the economy get through this difficult time."

Banks faced further criticism as it emerged that first-time buyers and people who remortgage newly-bought homes face an interest rate of about 6 per cent – three times the new base rate. Moneyfacts, the personal finance publisher, said banks were making considerably more money from their fixed-rate mortgages than a month ago. But Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers' Association, said: "The cost of funds to lenders and the rates they charge to borrowers depend on a range of factors, of which base rate is one."

Sir Howard Davies, the Bank's former deputy governor, said the Government should stop trying to dictate terms to the banks. He said: "The banks have got to raise money both from depositors and indeed from the inter-bank market."

Read More......