Ford does not need government loans: CEO

Hear hear.

Ford Motor Co has enough liquidity to fund its restructuring plan and despite the deep downturn in auto sales still sees no need to ask for government loans, Chief Executive Alan Mulally said on Saturday.

"We don't want to borrow any more money. We have sufficient liquidity to fund our transformation plan, which means our business is in a relatively good shape," Mulally told reporters on the sidelines of the National Automobile Dealers Association convention.

Ford's U.S. rivals, General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC, won approval in December for $17.4 billion of government loans to avert collapse. Ford has asked for access to a $9 billion credit line from the U.S. government but has not sought loans. Washington has not yet responded to Ford's request.

Mulally said Ford was in a better situation than its rivals because it borrowed more than $23 billion in 2006, using most of the company's assets as security, including its well-known blue oval logo.

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China economy cools, unrest builds

The communist regime has struggled with honest production numbers throughout its history, with deadly results decades ago as food production figures were falsified and mass starvation claimed lives. (Fellow regional communist regimes struggled with similar problems with the worst case being Cambodia.) Whether the economic growth numbers are real today - many say they are inflated - remains to be seen. I wouldn't bet against the 6.8% numbers being bloated but even so, this is well below the required 8% growth needed to break even. As the west has discovered during our own bubble, bubbles burst and lies eventually are exposed. Whether the Chinese workers respond as passively as European and American workers is the question.

Officials announced this week that growth fell to 6.8% in the last quarter of 2008. Enviable as that sounds to countries in recession, it follows five years of double-digit growth and rising expectations. Just as crucially, experts believe that China needs 8% growth to provide enough jobs for new entrants to the labour force. But economists predict that the rate could fall as low as 5% this year.

It is figures like these that prompted the state-run magazine Outlook to issue a remarkably stark warning of the dangers posed by rising unemployment.

"Without doubt, now we're entering a peak period for mass incidents ... In 2009, Chinese society may face even more conflicts and clashes that will test even more the governing abilities of the party and government at all levels," said a senior Xinhua agency reporter, Huang Huo.

"The key is going to be what happens in a week or two. How many people are going to come back? And are there going to be jobs for them?" asked Geoffrey Crothall of China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based organisation defending mainland workers' rights. "The most likely thing is that it will get heated after the new year. The government pulls out all the stops beforehand to make sure people have enough money to put in the red envelopes [traditional gifts] when they go home. It puts a false gloss on the real situation."

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If you're in DC, consider coming to a fundraiser I'm hosting for a House candidate Monday night

From my friend Adam - I'm one of the cohosts, and will be there:

Hi, I'm co-hosting an event this coming Monday evening, January 26, at Local 16 restaurant in Washington, DC in support of a really inspiring progressive who is running in a special election to replace Rahm Emanuel in the House. Can you make it? Here's the link.

And here's the Facebook invitation.

Tom Geoghegan is a famed labor lawyer who wrote pro-worker books like "Which Side Are You On?" David Sirota calls Tom "one of the greatest living progressives in America" and a writer at The Nation wrote "Tom could be the next Paul Wellstone."

There will be happy hour drink specials, and a raffle at the event will include autographed books by Rick Perlstein, David Sirota, Jerome Armstrong, and the January 21st Obama Inauguration issue of the New York Times.

Tom has already raised over $100,000 in mostly small-dollar contributions, but he'll need $500,000 to win. Tickets are $30. Raffle tickets are $20 each in advance, $25 at the door. Every dollar really goes a long way, so the more you can give, the better.

Would be great if you could make it, and help support this progressive candidate. Just click here to sign up (oh, and if you can't make it, you can still donate via the linik).

Thanks so much. I hope to see you Monday!

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Lawyers, the way they're supposed to be

Via Ben Smith:

President Barack Obama is staffing his Justice Department with some of his predecessor’s fiercest critics, among them lawyers who were fired by President Bush or who quit jobs working for his administration.

Now, the opposition is in charge, and lawyers who spent years defining the limits of executive power will be helping wield it.

The change may be most dramatic at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — which defended some of Bush’s most controversial policies — where a small cadre of lawyers who had an outsized influence on legal criticism of Bush are taking the top three jobs.

Those three — Dawn Johnsen, Martin Lederman, and David Barron — and others made the case that Bush’s interrogation policy was justified by flawed legal reasoning. Their arguments precipitated one of Obama’s most dramatic early acts: flatly repudiating all government legal advice on interrogation issued between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009.

“I think they will be an irritant for Obama in the best possible way — they’re very honest lawyers,” said Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown University Law School, where Lederman also taught. “When Dawn and Marty and David think that he is asking if he can do something that in their view pushes the envelope and goes beyond the bounds of what is legal, they’re going to say, ‘Sorry Mr. Obama, we think that would be illegal.’”

Another reason why, in spite of whatever differences we may have with Obama in the future, his presidency is an inherently good thing after 8 years of Bush. Read More......

Senior Bush climate change denialist refuses to leave agency

She found a job she liked, and is trying to use the rules to keep the Obama people from firing her. If she can't be gotten rid of, per civil service rules, they can, I suspect, simply cut her out. She has already proven that she is incompetent and that her views can't be trusted. While it is possible Obama can't discharge her, he may be able to create a firewall around her, as an employee whose views are untrustworthy and traditionally wrong. That's not political retribution, it's minimizing the damage of an employee who is clearly biased, insufficiently educated, and incompetent. Read More......

Obama moves to add regulation to financial markets

It sounds good on paper but I will believe it when I see it. The leads on this - Shapiro and Geithner - are saying the right things but it's still a mystery what they had been doing in recent years when they were supposed to already be watching the markets. Both have been in New York both before the crash and during the initial period so at least they should have a working knowledge of what went wrong. It's all a bit late but again, let's see what they do now. Hopefully they lose the chummy relationship with Wall Street don't drop the ball this time.

The Obama administration plans to move quickly to tighten the nation’s financial regulatory system.

Officials say they will make wide-ranging changes, including stricter federal rules for hedge funds, credit rating agencies and mortgage brokers, and greater oversight of the complex financial instruments that contributed to the economic crisis.

Broad new outlines of the administration’s agenda have begun to emerge in recent interviews with officials, in confirmation proceedings of senior appointees and in a recent report by an international committee led by Paul A. Volcker, a senior member of President Obama’s economic team.

A theme of that report, that many major companies and financial instruments now mostly unsupervised must be swept back under a larger regulatory umbrella, has been embraced as a guiding principle by the administration, officials said.

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Sunday Talk Shows Open Thread

Stimulating talk about the stimulus today. Obama's plan for the economy is the subject on the table. Biden, Pelosi and Summers are out front to explain and sell the recovery package. The GOP is sending out John Boehner in opposition. Can someone make him explain why anyone should listen to any GOPer on the economy these days? They've got no cred. None.

Here's the lineup:

ABC's "This Week" — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

___

CBS' "Face the Nation" — Vice President Joe Biden.

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NBC's "Meet the Press" — National Economic Director Lawrence Summers; Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio.

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CNN's "State of the Union" — David Plouffe, Obama presidential campaign manager; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind.; Doug Feith, former undersecretary of defense; Charles Swift, former naval defense attorney.

"Fox News Sunday" _ Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

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Harry Enfield - teenage transformation

A favorite episode and very funny character for future shows. Read More......

Pope lifts excommunication for Holocaust denier

Is there any religion that Pope Benedict hasn't offended? Considering his own past in Nazi Germany - he never noticed the Jews being sent to the concentration camp in his small town - this is amazing. It's people like this that made the decision for people like my family to leave the church and never come back.

The Vatican stirred a diplomatic maelstrom yesterday when it announced that it had lifted the excommunication of four rebel bishops, including the British Holocaust-denier Richard Williamson.

The decree repealing the 20-year-old Vatican punishment, imposed after the traditionalist French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre consecrated the four as bishops in defiance of the Pope's authority, was signed on Wednesday by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the Prefect for the Congregation of Bishops. This coincided with the broadcast on Swedish state television of an interview with Mr Williamson in which the breakaway bishop denied the Holocaust.

"I believe there were no gas chambers... I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers," he told SVT television in an interview that was recorded in Germany last November. "There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!"

Mr Williamson, 68, who is the rector of the Seminary of Our Lady Co-Redemptrix in La Reja, Argentina, is no stranger to controversy. He has endorsed "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a notorious anti-Semitic forgery, and claimed that Jews are bent on world domination. He supports conspiracy theories on the assassination of President Kennedy and the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, and has accused the Vatican of being under the power of Satan.

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Credit crisis is killing non-profits

Basically, the banks aren't lending, and state government aren't making their usual payments, so non-profits are suddenly cash poor. Another example of how credit is used to help businesses and non-profits get by while waiting for expected revenue. It's a bit like working for yourself - the money changes each month, so you have to find a way to pay all your bills, which don't go away in lean months. In the past, people went to the bank for short-term loans. Now they can't.

SCO is one of hundreds of charities caught in the credit crunch as skittish banks reduce their lines of credit or cut them off entirely at a time when the need for their services is climbing sharply, nonprofit leaders say....

Almost three-quarters of nonprofits in the United States receive some type of government financing, according to new research by the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, and about half of those count on that aid for at least half of their budgets.

As a growing number of states delay payment, nonprofits must rely on lines of credit to help them get by. In Illinois, the state is running as much as 150 days late in making reimbursements, and California has told nonprofits to expect i.o.u.’s in lieu of payment starting next month.

“You can just imagine a nonprofit walking into a bank with this tattered envelope from Sacramento saying that some day the state government will pay it,” said Thomas Peters, chief executive of the Marin Community Foundation in Marin County, Calif. “How’s a bank to make a loan against that promise?”

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