To the frustration of many a cabinet secretary, the Obama administration is a little behind on its appointments. At this point—with only five weeks to go before the Senate breaks for recess—a little over half of the 514 positions that need filling have been filled. Some jobs are really important: The nominee for the Office of Legal Counsel has been held up for months. Obama’s choice for a USAID director came down just today. U.S. attorney nominations have slowed to a crawl.
Other jobs? Not as important.
Take, for example, the eight-person Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the five media entities—Voice of America foremost among them—tasked with broadcasting American culture and journalism around the globe. In theory, the board is supposed to serve as a “firewall” between the broadcasters’ mission of journalistic objectivity and the political whims of legislators, who would often rather see taxpayer dollars go towards burnishing America’s image abroad. By statute, the president and minority party nominate four governors each to keep a bipartisan mix. But right now, the BBG is only half full. The four currently serving members were all appointed in 2002, and have overstayed their terms by three years—if anyone left, the board would no longer have a quorum to conduct business. Journalistic wise man Walter Isaacson is rumored to be the administration’s choice for the vacant post of chairman, and it’s hard to imagine him being held up for any substantive reason. It’s also hard to imagine the administration nominating him between now and when Congress leaves town in December.
The sad saga of the BBG began almost as soon as it was created in its current form, when the U.S. Information Administration was dissolved in 1999. As this magazine documented in 2005, Bush partisan Kenneth Tomlinson turned the board into an ideological battleground—purging people whom he saw as insufficiently conservative—that hamstrung the broadcasters’ operations and drove morale into the toilet. After Tomlinson was ousted, the well-respected editor James Glassman restored the board to some order, before he was tapped as Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy in the dying days of the Bush administration.
If your image of Milwaukee is largely derived from Laverne and Shirley re-runs, think again. My recent visit with leaders of Milwaukee’s Water Council showed me how communities in the Great Lakes are beginning to tap the “magic” of water for economic revitalization (the words of Milwaukee Mayor, and maybe-gubernatorial candidate, Tom Barrett).
The Milwaukee River running through town used to be a mess, and the only thing that looked out on it was the backs of factories. Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce CEO Tim Sheehy explained, “We opened it up for development; now it is lined with shops, restaurants, condos and offices. When we bring CEOs to town, we don’t put them in a car. We put them in a boat and show off our city.”
These efforts in Milwaukee and other Great Lakes metros are getting a major shot in the arm with President Obama signing a bill that provides $475 million in Great Lakes cleanup dollars. This “down-payment” on a long term multi-billion dollar federal-state-local plan to clean water and reboot municipal waste systems (so beaches are open and not closed for weeks during the year); to cleanup toxic hot spots still lingering in Great Lakes harbors and rivers, and protect and reclaim wetlands and scenic areas was promised by then-candidate Obama last year.
The promise he made during the campaign to follow up on a Bush-era Great Lakes clean up plan that had been languishing in Congress, was muscled forward, aided by the Healthy Waters, Strong Economy economic analysis of its prospects.
Ezra Klein, channeling Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson:
Per today's Wall Street Journal, Chamber of Commerce CEO Ton Donohue, whose organization backs the idea that significant global warming "would, on balance, be beneficial to humans" because the number of cold-weather deaths it would eliminate is "several times larger than the increase in summertime heat stress-related [deaths]," had this to say about the group's position on the issue:
As the front-page story in today's Times points out, the relationship between AIG and its longtime former CEO, Hank Greenberg, is getting more and more fascinating. On the one hand, Greenberg still owns a lot of stock in the company and is keen to see it become viable again.
Something sure to get Simon Johnson's heart pumping: Via the Journal's Real Time Economics blog, I see that John Reed, the man who helped deliver the coup de grace to the Depression-era law against combining commercial banking with investment banking and insurance, now wants to bring it back.
If you've been following the trials of the auto industry this last year, then you already know GM's management team, led by former CEO Rick Wagoner, left a lot to be desired. But, even so, Wagoner comes off as unbelievably lame in Steve Rattner's account of his time as Obama's auto guru. To wit:
At GM's Renaissance Center headquarters, the top brass were sequestered on the uppermost floor, behind locked and guarded glass doors. Executives housed on that floor had elevator cards that allowed them to descend to their private garage without stopping at any of the intervening floors (no mixing with the drones).
In my relatively few interactions with chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner, I found him to be likable, dedicated, and generally knowledgeable. But Rick set a tone of "friendly arrogance" that seemed to permeate the organization.
Certainly Rick and his team seemed to believe that virtually all of their problems could be laid at the feet of some combination of the financial crisis, oil prices, the yen-dollar exchange rate, and the UAW. ...
As we continued our rather awkward conversation [about his ouster], Rick suddenly asked, "Are you going to fire Ron Gettelfinger too?" Startled by the reference to the UAW head, I replied, "I'm not in charge of firing Ron Gettelfinger," and Rick soon left to brief his board on our decision.
How bout a little personal responsibility? After all, as Rattner notes, "any management team that had burned through $21 billion of cash in a year and another $13 billion in the first quarter of 2009 could not be allowed to continue."
The question is whether Wagoner's successor, Fritz Henderson, is really up to the job of changing GM's culture. He was, of course, part of the same management team that made a habit of shuttling directly from the executive suite to the garage and back. (No word on whether or not that's changed.) Also, you get the impression from Rattner's account and others that the auto task force would have liked to hire an outsider, but thought there was a limit to the amount of change the company could withstand. My favorite indicator that Henderson was far from the ideal choice comes from this Times piece:
Thursday October 8, 6:30 a.m., the phone rings. I pick up sleepily. "My family! My family! Magda … my family!" I hear sobbing and low, sad groans on the other end. It is our babysitter, Maricel, originally from the Philippines, where two typhoons--"Ondoy" and "Pepeng," as they are known locally--have caused floods that, over the last few weeks, have killed hundreds, left hundreds of thousands homeless, and inflicted damage estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Political circumstances can change unexpectedly, of course, but at the moment the Democrats seem very likely to lose seats in the 2010 midterms, and possibly quite a few of them. What's a little harder to predict is what will happen in the 2010 Republican primaries, where the number of insurgent, tea-party-propelled challenges to establishment candidates continues to multiply.
Simon Johnson raises a fair question in response to this AP scoop about the bankers Tim Geithner was in touch with early in the Obama administration. Here's the AP:
The calendars, obtained by the AP under the Freedom of Information Act, offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the continued influence of three companies -- Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. ...
In the first seven months of Geithner's tenure, his calendars reflect at least 80 contacts with Blankfein [of Goldman], Dimon [of JP Morgan], Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons or Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit. ...
Treasury has a huge financial stake in North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp., but CEO Ken Lewis appears on Geithner's calendars only three times. Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack also appears three times.
A month-old labor dispute in Boston has taken a curious twist. It began when on August 31, a hundred housekeepers at three Hyatt hotels in Boston were fired and replaced by workers from a Georgia company, Hospitality Staffing Solutions. The housekeepers, some of whom had worked for Hyatt for over twenty years, were making between $14 and $16 an hour plus health, dental, and 401(k) benefits. Their replacements were to make $8 an hour with no health benefits. To make matters worse, Hyatt had earlier gotten the fired workers to train their replacements. Hyatt told them the workers would filling in for them during vacations.
Hyatt’s move has drawn demonstrators and a threat by Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick to bar state employees from using the Hyatt for state business. In Chicago, the home of the Hyatt Corporation, hotel workers were arrested at a demonstration in front of the Park Hyatt; and one of the fired hotel workers flew to Chicago to appeal to Penny Pritzker, whose family owns the Hyatt Corporation and who was Barack Obama’s national finance chairman. Appealing to Penny Pritzker may seem like overkill, but wait.
The Citigroup CEO apparently made the comment in response to a question at a 92nd Street Y event last night. The question was about his star commodities trader, Andrew Hall.
Interestingly, the Journal piece adds this detail: "The response elicited murmurs from the audience, which included Citigroup employees." One wonders if those were murmurs of agreement or disagreement...
Long before Martin Wolf became the chief economics columnist for the Financial Times, he wrote the newspaper letters--lots and lots of letters. It was the early 1980s, the height of the Thatcher era, and Wolf was running research at a think tank in London that was sympathetic to the government's pro-trade agenda. The FT's letters section became the ideal place to take to task all those who would stand in the way of the first waves of globalization.
President Obama’s speech yesterday was disappointing. As a diagnosis of the problems that let us into financial crisis, it was his clearest and best effort so far. He didn’t say it was a rare accident for which no one is to blame; rather he placed the blame squarely on the structure, incentives, and actions of Wall Street.
But then he said: Our regulatory reforms will fix that. This is hard to believe. And even the president seems to have his doubts, because he added a plea that--in the meantime--the financial sector should behave better.
The audience was composed of our financial elite, but the Wall Street Journal reports “not one CEO from a top U.S. bank was in attendance” (p.A4). How’s that for demonstrating respect, gratitude, and a willingness to behave better?
Louis Brandeis, of course, would have seen things differently. The author of Other People’s Money: And How The Bankers Use It, was under no illusions concerning the underlying financial power structures and how they operated. He would have regarded an appeal to the better nature of bankers as somewhere between humorous and sad.
In today's The Wall Street Journal, Tyler Grimm takes a trip to Johnstown, PA, where he reports despondently on the John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport, which services roughly 30 people a day and has received over $130 million in federal assistance over the course of 20 years thanks to earmarking efforts of Representative John Murtha.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan proposed today that $3.5 billion in grants dedicated to improving Title I schools--or those with at least 40 percent of students from low-income families--should go to school districts committed to "turnaround" strategies.
At the end of the day, CIT had nothing. Their asset quality was poor, their systemic risk implications seemed limited, Sheila Bair dug in her heels, and Jeffrey Peek (CEO) didn't have sufficiently strong connections
Salt Lake City, Utah
What went wrong at AIG? Since the uproar over the firm's bonuses, it's become fashionable to distinguish between the masters of the universe at AIG Financial Products, the subsidiary that nearly torched the global economy, and the working stiffs at the rest of the company. So compelling is this dichotomy, in fact, that even the AIG basher-in-chief has invoked it. "You've got a company, AIG, which used to be just a regular old insurance company," President Obama explained during his recent "Tonight Show" appearance.
On the evening of January 22, a few hours after his administration's debut news conference, Barack Obama made a surprise visit to the cramped quarters of the White House press corps. It was meant to be a friendly event, and Obama glad-handed his way through reporters and cameramen, exchanging light banter as he went.
I fully realize that few complaints are more tiresome than "your party's scandal is worse than my party's scandal." But indulge me for a moment. I can't think of a good reason why Rod Blagojevich has become the most hated man in America while Norm Coleman still walks the streets with his head held high.
There are so many things that make The Wall Street Journal editorial page a source of personal fascination--the undying faith in voodoo economics, the staunch defense of executive privilege and disdain for independent counsels during Republican presidencies alternating with disdain for executive privilege and staunch defense of independent counsels during Democratic presidencies--but perhaps the most intriguing is the wildly promiscuous use of quotation marks. Over the years, it's become an obsession of mine.
