EXECUTIVE BRANCH: The Cabinet
and links to the department webpages
The rest of the team...and their webpages.
NOW ALL CONFIRMED BY THE SENATE
(APRIL28, 2009)
OBAMA CABINET: Other
offices, too (some still open); As it was being
assembled, news
reports and "teams" concept played out, some had problems with
taxes; and that story is here. Or
just click on picture of Cabinet
Officers
below and go directly to their story.
The Cabinet:
Agriculture
Attorney General
Commerce
Defense
Education
Energy
Health and Human Services
Housing and Urban Development
Interior
Labor
State
Transportation
Treasury
Veterans Affairs
and
United Nations Representative
Plus (click here
for photos): Highlight on Health Care :
Medicare and Medicade Office recess appointment
story - warning: opinion not necessarily that of this website
U.S. Trade Representative
Office of Management and the Budget (O.M.B.)
Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.)
NASA
F.E.R.C.
C.I.A.
Federal Communications Commission (F.C.C.)
Federal Trade Commission (F.T.C.)
Drug Control
CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL(C.D.C.)
Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.)
Security and Exchange
Commission
(S.E.C.)
Commodities Futures Trading Commission
Small Business Administration
National Security Advisor
(center)
Solicitor General
Surgeon General
New posts:
Dodging a
health-care fight
NYPOST
By JOHN PODHORETZ
Last Updated: 5:03 AM, July 8, 2010
Posted: 1:07 AM, July 8, 2010
On Tuesday, the Obama ad ministration decided to do something rather
peculiar, somewhat shocking and politically fascinating: It
circumvented the process by which the Senate advises and consents on
executive-branch nominees.
The move, which seems unprecedented in subtle but important ways,
promises increased chaos in Washington -- but also hope on health care.
President Obama wants a distinguished doctor named Donald Berwick to
head up the office that administers Medicare and Medicaid -- two of the
most expensive programs in the federal government. Ordinarily, the
nomination would have gone through the process known as "confirmation,"
with a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee followed by a full
vote of all 99 senators. (One seat is vacant due to the death of West
Virginia's Robert Byrd.)
Instead, Obama decided to invoke his constitutional authority to
appoint Berwick (and two other officials of lesser moment) to his post
without having to be confirmed by the Senate. This is possible only
when Congress is not in session, as is the case right now, and it's
called a "recess appointment." It is designed to be temporary; it is
valid only until that session of the Congress adjourns, which in this
case will come at year's end.
Past presidents have resorted to recess appointments when they believe
a nominee's appointment has been subjected to unjust political and
ideological gamesmanship. And the White House said it was resorting to
the recess appointment because of Republican recalcitrance.
"Many Republicans in Congress have made it clear in recent weeks that
they were going to stall the nomination as long as they could, solely
to score political points," Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said
on the White House blog Tuesday.
That was astoundingly untrue. The only way Republicans, who have 41
votes in the Senate compared to 58 for the Democrats, could have
"stalled" the nomination would have been to organize a filibuster, and
that would happen only when the nomination came to the Senate floor.
They couldn't have blocked a favorable vote on Berwick's nomination
from the Senate Finance Committee, which has 13 Democrats and 10
Republicans.
As ABC's Jake Tapper reported yesterday, "Republicans were not delaying
or stalling Berwick's nomination. Indeed, they were eager for his
hearing, hoping to assail Berwick's past statements about health-
care rationing and his praise for the British health-care system."
Democrats in charge of the Senate could have scheduled hearings at any
time since the administration sent his nomination to the Capitol in
April. But, Tapper reported, "neither Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
(D-Nev.) nor Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the chair of the Senate Finance
Committee, were eager" to hold them.
That's what makes the administration's decision unprecedented in my
nearly 30 years of closely following politics: I can't recall a
preemptive decision to make a recess appointment ab sent a controversy,
ugly political battle or contentious confirmation hearing.
And that's especially true when there's no indication there will be an
effort to filibuster, which Democrats would likely have been able to
override. (Berwick's credentials as a Harvard muckety-muck would have
given the two Maine Republican moderate senators more than enough
leeway to let him pass.)
So what's going on here?
First, it appears Obama likes to muscle things through. It makes him
feel like he's cutting through the nonsense and getting things done.
This unorthodox and questionable move is of a piece with his
administration's bullying of Chrysler creditors last year --
insisting, in contravention of eight centuries of common law, that the
contracts those creditors signed with Chrysler should simply be ignored
so as to get the United Auto Workers the deal it wanted.
But procedure, precedent and tradition exist for good reason; ignoring
and undermining them blazes a path to political disorder.
Second, this is as glaring an admission as there is that Obama and his
people know they've lost the public on health care. Rather than using
these hearings to bolster popular support for the landmark legislation
they rammed through in the spring, they can't bear to submit to public
questioning about it.
By running away from this fight, Obama is signaling that the
possibility of repealing the health-care monstrosity before it really
begins to sink its teeth into the American system by 2014 is very real
indeed.
United
States of Czars
NYTIMES "week in
review" staff borrowed this from...
Associated
Press
May 25, 2009, 5:01 am
Today’s idea: Czars, czars — everywhere we have government czars. But
of course, the term doesn’t quite describe technocrats who do little
more than convey the aura of can-do urgent reform.
Nicholas II of Russia: Now there was a czar.Politics | Let’s see,
there’s the energy czar, the border czar, the regulatory czar, the
green czar, the car czar, the tech czar, the Guantánamo closure
czar, the TARP czar, the stimulus czar …
Yes, “President Barack Obama is taking the practice of naming czars to
new heights.” writes Katherine Mengu-Ward in Reason magazine — 18 by
her count, in fewer than 100 days.
To be fair, the term “czar” is often just media shorthand for all the
high-level brainiac specialization that the President feels needs to be
focused pronto on the nation’s challenges. But what’s behind this
activist, “best and the brightest” impulse?
“The appeal of the czar rests on the belief that if we could just
figure out the right smart, competent, well-intentioned person to put
charge, everything would go more smoothly,” Mengu-Ward writes. Which
might be true if a czar were truly a czar instead of simply an
impressive technocrat hemmed in by the usual forces, she adds.
“Rather than solving the problems they are appointed to grapple with,”
she writes, “czars tend to wind up building or restructuring
bureaucratic agencies, issuing a bunch of suggestions that may or may
not be considered given the political climate, and then taking the
blame when the problem isn’t solved by the end of their stint as a
czar.”
Still, the term works for headline writers: It’s a four-letter word.
--------------
Safe Schools Czar
Manufacturing Czar from the union side...Green Czar out because he signed
(although now decries), a pro-nonbelief 9-11 petition (no photo) - oops!
Regulatory Czar
White House coordinator for
energy and climate (picture of Carol
Browner)
Maybe not a new post, but an
important
one!
White
House Office of Health Reform (Tom Daschle)
-
oops! He is now a Kitchen Cabinet Czar (our term).
Pay-Czar
And more appointees to new and old spots...
Fox in the
chicken coop? And we don't mean FOXnews!
White House Names
Manufacturing Adviser
NYTIMES
By Derrick Henry
September 6, 2009,
11:37 pm
President Obama
has named Ron Bloom as the administration’s senior counselor for
manufacturing policy, the White House said Sunday night. The
announcement came ahead of Mr. Obama’s planned remarks at the
A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s annual Labor Day picnic in Cincinnati.
Since February,
Mr. Bloom has been a senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy F.
Geithner. He sits on the president’s automotive industry task force.
The White House said Mr. Bloom would continue that position and would
expand his role to coordinate the administration’s manufacturing policy
with the Commerce, Treasury, Energy and Labor departments.
The White House
said Mr. Bloom would work with the National Economic Council to help
lead policy development and strategic planning for “the president’s
agenda to revitalize the manufacturing sector.”
“Ron has the
knowledge and experience necessary to lead the way in creating the
good-paying manufacturing jobs of the future,” Mr. Obama said in a
statement released Sunday night. He cited the first expansion in the
country’s manufacturing sector in 18 months as an early sign of
economic recovery and part of his reasoning in naming Mr. Bloom to his
new position.
The Institute
for Supply Management’s survey of factories and industry had been
edging higher this spring, as the pace of economic declines began to
level off. In August, the group’s manufacturing index turned positive,
rising to 52.9, from 48.9 in July.
A reading above
50 indicates expansion and growth; a number below 50 means economic
contraction.
Before he
joined the Treasury Department, Mr. Bloom was a special assistant to
the president of the United Steelworkers union. Before that, he was a
founding partner in Keilin and Bloom, an investment banking firm.
Mr. Bloom is
traveling to Cincinnati with Mr. Obama, who is expected to talk at the
picnic about Mr. Bloom’s position as well as the health care issue.
Organized labor is an important constituency for Mr. Obama.
On Wednesday,
Mr. Obama is scheduled to deliver a speech to Congress and the nation
about his efforts to overhaul health care.
New post for ex-"green
czar" - revising the tax code?
Embattled Obama Adviser Resigns
DAY
By JOHN M. BRODER , New York Times News Service
Published on 9/7/2009
Washington - White House officials on Sunday tersely accepted the
resignation of Van Jones, the administration's special adviser for
environmental jobs, after a number of his past statements became fodder
for conservative critics and Republican officials.
Jones, a controversial and charismatic community organizer and “green
jobs” advocate from the San Francisco Bay Area, signed a petition in
2004 questioning whether President George W. Bush's administration had
allowed the terrorist attacks of September 2001 to provide a pretext
for war in the Middle East.
He also used a vulgarity to refer to Republicans just before being
appointed to his White House post early this year, and he has publicly
supported Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is on death row for the murder of a
Philadelphia police officer.
Jones was a relatively minor figure in the administration, in charge of
a small White House program advocating for jobs in energy-efficient
industries. But he threatened to become a significant distraction as
President Barack Obama is planning a prime-time address on health care
to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night in an effort to
regain traction on the issue.
Jones' hiring and departure raised questions about the quality of the
White House personnel vetting process and the proliferation of
so-called policy czars who are not subject to Senate confirmation or
legislative oversight.
The Obama administration entered office promising the most thorough
scrutiny ever of candidates for senior jobs, including an extensive
questionnaire and time-consuming background checks that have left many
senior posts vacant for months. But the process seems to have missed
Jones' most inflammatory comments and associations, as well as the tax
problems that scuttled the nominations of former Sen. Tom Daschle to
two top health policy posts and Nancy Killefer as chief performance
officer.
A
White House official suggested that Jones' post was not seen as senior
enough to warrant the full vetting given other officials. The official
spoke on condition of anonymity because the authorized White House
account was delivered by administration officials in televised
interviews on Sunday.
The
Radicalization of Obama's 'Green Czar'
Van Jones was
arrested in San Francisco in 1992 for participating in a demonstration
following the acquittal of four LA police officers accused of beating
Rodney King.
FOXNews.com
Friday, September 04, 2009
The political radicalization of Van Jones, President Obama's "green
jobs" adviser, dates back to 1992, when he and hundreds of others took
their anger to the streets of San Francisco in the infamous Rodney King
protests.
Jones, a Yale Law School student who
was working in the Bay Area as an intern, was part of a mob that
stormed the city following the acquittal in Los Angeles of four white
police officers who had been charged with beating King, who is black,
after a car chase.
In an essay he wrote soon after the
rioting and republished in The Huffington Post in May 2007, Jones said
he "just marched around and chanted slogans" as other protesters set
trash cans afire, smashed car windows and threw rocks at passing
motorists. But he clearly reveled in the protest.
"Our moment had finally come! We
were righteous, fired up, weren't takin' no more!" Jones wrote. "We
were one thousand strong on Market Street, with the Bay Bridge shut
down in rush hour traffic and the grounds around the state building
swarming with angry mobs! Our rallying cry was for justice; our demand
was that the System be changed!"
Jones continued, "Yes, the Great
Revolutionary Moment had at long last come. And the time, clearly, was
ours! So we stole stuff. Y'know, stole stuff. Radios, tennis shoes.
Well, not everybody, of course."
Days after he wrote the essay, Jones
was arrested along with hundreds of participants in a "peaceful
protest" march.
Charges against him ultimately were
dropped, and he says he received a "small" settlement.
"I was arrested simply for being a
police observer," he later said.
Jones, in the piece he wrote for The
Huffington Post, said his essay "captures the pain, frustration and
aspirations of a much younger person. But I think it speaks well to the
thought process of many young activists at the time."
"But the incident deepened my
disaffection with the system and accelerated my political
radicalization," he wrote. "The political agenda I articulated for
myself and my generation in this essay remains largely undone and
incomplete."
Indeed, Jones' "disaffection with
the system" appeared to continue. In a June 2008 speech to the National
Conference for Media Reform, Jones blasted a proposed prison in Memphis
that he compared to a "huge slave ship on dry land."
"You don't have to call somebody the
n-word if you can call them a felon," Jones said in the speech, which
can be seen on YouTube . "The fight against this new Jim Crow, this
punishment industry, where for-profit prison companies are now being
traded on the stock exchange ... that struggle is being met as it was
40 years ago."
In his 2007 reflection on the
aftermath of King's beating, Jones said he was among those who chanted
"no justice, no peace" during the "understandable, unavoidable, even
necessary" riots.
"These riots were not revolution;
without revolutionary values and revolutionary organization, they were
merely sharp outcroppings of the systemic chaos that social injustice
breeds," Jones wrote. "But flashpoints of rage can never substitute for
radical social vision or grassroots coordination."
Jones, the founder of Green for All,
which focuses on creating environmentally friendly jobs in poor areas,
continues to be a focus of President Obama's critics after video
surfaced of him referring to Republicans as "assholes" and it was
revealed that he once joined the "9/11 truther" movement, which
contended that the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks might have been an
inside job by the Bush administration.
In 2004 Jones signed a statement
calling for then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and others to
launch an investigation into evidence that suggests "people within the
current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to
happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."
The statement asked a series of
critical questions hinting at Bush administration involvement in the
attacks and called for "deeper inquiry." It was also signed by former
Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney and Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans.
Jones distanced himself from the
position on Thursday, saying, "In recent days some in the news media
have reported on past statements I made before I joined the
administration -- some of which were made years ago. If I have offended
anyone with statements I made in the past, I apologize. As for the
petition [9/11 statement] that was circulated today, I do not agree
with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or
ever."
An aide to Jones told FOX News he
"did not carefully review the language in the petition." The aide did
not say when Jones signed the petition or when he became aware of the
controversy.
Thursday's apology followed Jones'
mea culpa on Wednesday, when he expressed his remorse for "offensive
words" he uttered in February, when he called Republicans "assholes."
He said those remarks "do not reflect the views of this administration"
and its bipartisan aims.
White House Press Secretary Robert
Gibbs limited his remarks about Jones on Friday, saying only that he
"continues to work in this administration." As to the Sept. 11
conspiracy theorists, Gibbs said, "It's not something the president
agrees with."
At least one congressman, U.S. Rep.
Mike Pence, R-Ind., has called for Jones' resignation.
Democratic strategist and FOX News
contributor Bob Beckel predicted that Jones would be out of a job by
Labor Day, and he wondered how Jones got the "czar" post in the first
place.
"He's got every right in the world
to be a self-avowed communist, but the Secret Service would no more
allow a self-avowed communist into the White House as they would
Charlie Manson, so that's what I don't get," Beckel said.
"There's something more in here
about the breakdown of the system. Yes, it broke down with the Obama
administration, but it also broke down with those people who are
responsible for doing the background check," he added.
Appointments at lesser than Cabinet status, but really,
really important! And stories that went along with the
appointments.
Brain trust above, in order...click on photo (or separate link
in those cases):
Sub-cabinet appointments of
importance: S.E.C., Federal Reserve Board
seat, Commodities Futures Trading Commission, Small Business
Administration, head of the FCC, Director - Office of Science and
Technology, NOAA. Then we have the appointees with Doctorates (besides
Dr. Chu of Energy) Co-Chair, Council of Advisors on Science and
Technology (and a Nobel Prize winner), genome man. C.I.A.
Director Panetta? (Note the trench
coat!)
Solicitor General Elena Kagan (Harvard Law School Dean). Climate
Change Envoy (from State Department) Stern (any relation to this one?). And
most recently, appointment of Commissioner Liebowitz of the F.T.C. as
its Chair. And here is the Drug Czar (Seattle Police
Chief); CT DEP Commissioner to
Washington! And the FDA chief, from N.Y.C.,
and CT's own
DEP Commissioner to EPA staff position.
C.D.C. head also from N.Y.C. Dr. Benjamin (Regina, from Alabama) named
Surgeon General; Manufacturing Czar and
departed "green" czar story. F.E.R.C.
gets new chief, too! (a group with power over L.I.S.!
Power grid chief touts
electric-car payback
YAHOO
By Steve Gelsi, MarketWatch
Sept. 24, 2009, 11:02 a.m. EDT
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- U.S. power grid chief Jon Wellinghoff is
touting the long-term cost savings of electric cars, saying the
vehicles could earn $1,500 a year in paybacks for their owners when
their batteries are connected to the power grid.
While electric cars planned for U.S. market in the next few years will
likely carry heftier price tags than many gas-powered cars, Wellinghoff
agued at an investor conference this week that owners of plug-in
vehicles will benefit from much lower costs for filling up, cutting
down the long term cost of operation.
On top of saving at least $3 or $4 a gallon on gasoline, Wellinghoff,
chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said grid
operators and power companies could reimburse car owners for the
battery storage offered by the roughly 22 hours a day that electric
cars would be connected to the nation's power system.
"Plug-in hybrids could help stabilize the grid and make money for their
owners," said Wellinghoff, who spoke at Knight Capital Group's
"Electrifying Transportation" conference for institutional investors on
Wednesday.
Wellinghoff, a lawyer who specializes in energy issues before becoming
FERC chairman earlier this year, cited positive moves into green energy
under President Barack Obama, who addressed climate change in a major
United Nations speech this week. Obama elevated Wellinghoff to the FERC
chairmanship.
The Obama administration awarded a $529 million government loan to
Fisker Automotive to build electric cars earlier this week. Tesla
Automotive and others have also received hundreds of millions of
dollars under government stimulus programs.
On the heels of other government subsidies, lithium-ion battery maker
A123 Systems Inc. drew strong interest in its initial public offering
on Thursday. See full story.
While the electric car industry remains in its infancy today,
proponents of plug-in vehicles expect millions of models on the road in
the next 10 years that could collectively add to the nation's power
storage capabilities.
Sharing the main points of his chapter in the book "Plug-In Electric
Vehicles," edited by David Sandalow, Wellinghoff said growth of solar
and wind energy in the U.S. will create a greater need for storage
capacity on the grid to smooth out surges in power.
Electric car batteries could help take up the storage slack, along with
flywheel systems.
Wellinghoff was joined at the conference by Knight Capital CEO Tom
Joyce, who said he drove an electric-powered Tesla before the meeting
and it was "possibly the coolest car I've ever been in."
Other speakers included venture capitalists Chelsea Sexton of
VantagePoint Venture Partners and Dhiraj Malkani of RockPort Capital.
Speakers at the conference were bullish on investments in the
electric-car sector.
Sexton said electric cars are "cool, fast and fun" and that gasoline
hybrid cars have managed to capture about 3% of the car market.
Malkani said most U.S. consumers adopted quickly to cell phones and GPS
systems and that electric vehicles will offer the benefit of avoiding
gas stations and fueling at home. "We all could be pleasantly
surprised," Malkani said.
Alabama Physician Chosen as Surgeon General
NYTIMES
By Gardiner Harris
July 13, 2009, 11:11 am
President Barack Obama has selected
Dr. Regina Benjamin, an Alabama family physician, as the U.S. surgeon
general, two administration officials said on Monday.
Mr. Obama will announce his
selection officially at a Rose Garden ceremony at 11:40 a.m.
An African-American, Dr. Benjamin is
nationally known for establishing a rural health clinic in Bayou La
Batre, Ala. — a small, medically underserved shrimping village along
the Gulf Coast. Hurricana Katrina destroyed the clinic in 2005, and
then when it was rebuilt, the clinic burned down on the eve of
re-opening.
In 2002, she became the president of
the Alabama Medical Association, making her the first African-American
woman to be president of a state medical society in the United States.
In September, she was one of 25 recipients of the $500,000 “genius
awards,” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
She completed her residency in
family medicine at the Medical Center of Central Georgia. She is a
graduate of Xavier University, Morehouse School of Medicine and the
University of Alabama School of Medicine.
The titular head of the U.S. Public
Health Service, the surgeon general is a largely ceremonial post used
by numerous administrations to communicate important health messages to
the public. The office itself has only a handful of staff and must rely
for research and support on the National Institutes of Health and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But the uniform of the surgeon
general invests its wearer with credibility in the public’s eyes and
has often led the wearer to distance themselves from the political
priorities of the administration.
Regulator faults Wall Street banks on
derivatives
YAHOO
By MARCY GORDON, AP Business Writer
March 11, 2010
WASHINGTON – Wall Street banks are
seeking exemptions to proposed new financial derivatives rules that
could shield more than half the trades that should be subject to
disclosure, a federal regulator said Thursday.
The chairman of the Commodity
Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler, criticized Wall Street's
stance on proposed new oversight for the shadowy $600 trillion
derivatives market. Derivatives have been blamed for hastening the 2008
financial crisis.
Gensler told a financial industry
gathering that Wall Street has not been "enthusiastic" about the
proposed new regulations now before Congress...full story here.
SEC, CFTC mull joint enforcement squad: sources
YAHOO
October 15, 2009
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S.
securities and futures regulators are considering creating a joint
enforcement squad to investigate and root out fraud in the markets, two
sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
The new squad would be made up of
staff from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity
Futures Trading Commission, who would come together to coordinate and
manage joint investigations, the sources said.
The "task force" is one of the
recommendations being considered by SEC and CFTC commissioners in an
effort to end a turf fight over market jurisdiction.
The Obama administration has
pressured the agencies to resolve long-standing conflicts and come up
with recommendations for Congress to align their rules.
The recommendations are expected to
be released on Thursday upon receiving the approvals of the SEC and
CFTC commissioners.
Others being considered include the
creation of a joint training program that may go beyond training for
enforcement staff, one source said. The sources requested anonymity
because the recommendations have not been made public.
Regulatory disputes have consumed
the SEC and CFTC resources and created uncertainty in the marketplace
as to how products will be regulated and laws enforced.
Regulatory lapses has been blamed
for the global credit crisis and economic fallout, triggering calls for
a sweeping overhaul of the country's financial regulatory system and
intensifying demands for the agencies to stop fighting.
CFTC Poised to
Move Aggressively on Position Limits
NYTIMES
By REUTERS
July 28, 2009, Filed at 3:14 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Commodity
Futures Trading Commission will consider "every option" to clampdown on
excessive speculation in energy markets, the head of the agency said on
Tuesday.
The CFTC, regulator of U.S. futures
markets, is reviewing how to limit how many futures contracts can he
held, so-called position limits, and if some traders should be allowed
to exceed those limits. The
agency held its first hearing on Tuesday to study proposed changes.
Meetings continue on Wednesday and August 5.
"I believe we must seriously
consider setting strict position limits in the energy markets," said
CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler. "Every option must be on the table."
Officials from the
IntercontinentalExchange Inc, or ICE, and the Chicago Mercantile
Exchange, the world's largest exchange, urged the CFTC to beware of
potential unintended consequences of efforts to curb speculation.
The exchanges said the CFTC
risks increasing volatility, distorting pricing functions and pushing
traders to less regulated offshore markets.
"While well intentioned, these
measures often fail to achieve their desired objectives or, worse yet,
lead to unintended consequences ... that would otherwise be discovered
in properly operating markets," said Jeffrey Sprecher, chief executive
of ICE.
Gensler said several questions
remain that the CFTC must still answer, including what the position
limits should be; who should set them, the CFTC or the exchange; and if
exemptions should be allowed for traders to manage purely financial
risk, rather than accepting the delivery of the actual commodity.
Several commissioners warned the
CFTC must be cautious. But, at the same time, Commissioner Bart Chilton
said the "unprecedented volatility" over the past year had increased
the urgency for the CFTC to make changes. "Whatever manner the agency
proceeds, 'going slow' is not an option," he said.
U.S. futures markets said
supply-and-demand factors, not speculation, were responsible for the
increased volatility. Sprecher
of ICE complained the position limits, currently set by ICE rival CME
Group Inc, lack transparency. He said ICE supports having the CFTC take
over that authority.
Craig Donohue, the head of
CME, countered ICE on setting rules for the market. "To say you are
dependent on our limits is ridiculous. Adopt your own limits," he said.
During this testimony, Donohue said
the CME has the authority to administer
position limits and hedge exemptions for energy commodities. He
supported a hard limit regime, including single-month and all-month
combined limits, to complement the existing measures that are in place.
"We're trying to address the
perception issues out there even though I think it's been abundantly
clear that there is no evidence" of speculation driving up oil prices,
said Donohue.
Currently, exchanges try to prevent
manipulation and congestion by imposing limits on energy products in
the last three trading days before a contract expires. The exchanges
have accountability levels that trigger additional oversight tools, if
a position exceeds a certain size.
Gensler estimated 70 parties
exceeded accountability levels on the four major energy contracts
during the last year. To
protect against market manipulation, the CFTC sets limits on the amount
of contracts each investor can hold in some agricultural commodities.
But the futures exchanges set limits for energy products such as oil
futures. The move to
toughen oversight marks a turnaround for the CFTC, whose hands-off
approach toward regulation drew criticism last year when commodity
prices rocketed to record highs.
"We and our consumers cannot
continue down the same path," said Sean Cota, testifying on behalf of
the Petroleum Marketers Association of America. "It is time for a
concerted effort toward meaningful reform to restore stability and
confidence in these markets."
With a number of anti-speculation
bills pending in Congress, the CFTC's actions have been praised by some
lawmakers, especially Democrats.
CFTC
May Restrict Trades Over Wheat
Price Concerns
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:32 p.m. ET
July 21, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal regulators are ''seriously considering''
restrictions in the wheat futures market being urged by lawmakers
concerned over speculation they say has artificially inflated prices,
hampering risk management by farmers and grain processors.
A yearlong investigation by the investigative panel of the Senate
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee found that the
disconnect between the wheat futures and cash markets can mean higher
prices for consumers. Several senators have called on the Commodity
Futures Trading Commission to restrict the volume of index trading in
the wheat futures market on the Chicago Board of Trade.
The agency ''is seriously considering this recommendation ... (and)
will continue to closely monitor the performance of the wheat futures
contract,'' CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler told the Senate subcommittee at
a hearing Tuesday.
Panel chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said such a review ''is badly
needed.'' Several other members of the committee, representing farm
states, voiced concern about the impact of market problems on wheat
producers in those states.
But an official of the company that operates the Chicago Board of
Trade, where wheat futures are traded, opposed such constraints and
disputed the Senate probe's findings.
Charles Carey, vice chairman of CBOT owner CME Group Inc., said new
restrictions on index trading ''are more likely to be harmful to the
functioning of our markets than helpful.''
Commodity indexes are made up of futures contracts for delivery in
different months. Commodity index traders sell financial instruments
whose values rise and fall along with the value of the index on which
they are based.
Commodity index traders buy wheat futures to help offset their risk
from selling the instruments to third parties. That pumps billions of
dollars into the market and lifts demand and prices for wheat futures,
the Senate investigation found. The trend has been especially
pronounced since 2005.
The trading volume in wheat futures has created a large gap between
prices in the futures and spot, or cash, markets. It has prevented the
normal convergence between the two at the time when the futures
contract expires and delivery is due, the subcommittee's report found.
Speculation in the wheat futures market has disrupted normal price
patterns and hurt the ability of farmers, grain processors and others
to hedge against risk, according to the report released last month.
In his testimony prepared for the hearing, Carey said the Senate
report's findings ''are based on faulty economic analysis and a
misunderstanding of basic market economics.''
Carey agreed that there is lack of convergence between wheat spot and
futures prices -- which he said the exchange is committed to solve.
However, he rejected the notion that such ''temporary order
imbalances'' have a lasting effect on prices.
The CBOT has been working to resolve the problem and is prepared to
make further changes to the wheat futures contract if needed, Carey
said. The exchange already has added new delivery points and increased
the storage fee, he noted.
Some analysts and lawmakers also blame the surge in popularity of
commodity index funds for artificially boosting the prices of oil,
gasoline, corn and other commodities.
The CFTC also announced Tuesday that it will hold the first of three
public hearings next week to gather views on whether the government
should impose limits on the number of futures contracts in oil and
other energy commodities held by speculative traders.
The possible CFTC action take on added significance as Congress crafts
sweeping new rules for financial markets.
CFTC Asks
Authority Over OTC Market, Dealers
NYTMIES
By REUTERS
Filed at 5:35 p.m. ETJune 4, 2009
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S.
regulator of the futures industry proposed a package of reforms for the
first comprehensive regulation of over-the-counter derivatives and the
dealers who handle the exotic instruments on Thursday.
Derivatives such as credit default
swaps were blamed for amplifying last fall's economic crisis. Trading
runs in the trillions of dollars for derivatives, contracts whose value
is based on the price for another item.
"Many of these (reforms) will
require statutory changes, of course," said Gary Gensler, chairman of
the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, at a Senate hearing. For the
second time this week, he said broad reform is urgent this year.
"Such reforms must comprehensively
regulate both derivative dealers and the markets in which derivatives
trade."
His package expanded on a May 13
outline by the Obama administration to require standardized OTC
derivatives to go through clearinghouses and move standardized
derivatives onto public exchanges. Reporting and record-keeping rules
would apply to standard and customized contracts to assure fair trading.
Gensler said the federal regulation
must apply to all dealers and all types of derivatives. He suggested
two sets of rules: one covering markets, including regulated exchanges,
electronic trading and clearinghouses, and the other governing dealers.
The plan includes position limits on holdings.
"These two regimes should apply no
matter which type of firm, method of trading or type of derivative swap
is involved," Gensler told the Senate Agriculture Committee, which
oversees the CFTC and writes futures market law.
Agriculture Committee chairman Tom
Harkin is sponsoring a bill to move all OTC derivatives onto regulated
exchanges in order to increase liquidity, reduce risk and make terms of
trade public. U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia said banning OTC
derivatives "is unrealistic" and the wrong answer to the financial
crisis.
Two trade groups, the Business
Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a letter to Senate
leaders that OTC derivatives were a vital tool. They said the
administration's May 13 plan "is a positive catalyst" for reform.
"There's got to be some fundamental
change in the way we do things. We'll be developing this legislation
sometime this year, probably not until this fall," Harkin said at the
end of the hearing.
Under the CFTC proposal, dealers
would be subject to capital requirements, initial margining
requirements, business conduct rules, and reporting and record-keeping
rules. The CFTC would have power to set position limits, including
aggregate limits, on OTC derivatives that affect prices on futures
exchanges.
"We should require that all
derivatives that can be moved into central clearing be required to be
cleared through central clearing houses and brought on to regulated
exchanges or regulated electronic trading systems," said the CFTC
chairman.
Regulators would monitor contracts
to make sure dealers do not try wrongly to label a derivative as
customized.
The CFTC and the Securities and
Exchange Commission would share regulatory duties for the OTC system,
Gensler said.
"Position limits should be applied
consistently across all trading platforms and exemptions should be
limited and well-defined," said Gensler. The CFTC is reviewing
exemptions now in force.
"The term OTC derivative should be
defined and CFTC should be given clear authority over all such
instruments," said Gensler in discussing changes in law.
Editorial: New Rules for Derivatives
NYTIMES
May 15, 2009
President
Obama’s new proposal to regulate derivatives would go a long way toward
reining in the complex products and reckless practices that have been a
big factor in the financial crisis. But it would not go far enough. In
apparent deference to those who have made major profits from unfettered
derivatives trading, the proposal stops shy of creating a fully
transparent market.
Transparency is the best way to
avoid a repeat of the disaster triggered in recent years by these
unregulated financial products, which are supposed to help investors
manage risks, like the possibility of default or of interest-rate
swings. As the financial bubble burst mid-decade, many of these
derivatives didn’t work as advertised. Rather than reduce risk, they
created or amplified it, to the point — as in the case of the American
International Group — that the failure of one party to various
derivatives contracts threatened to topple the entire system.
Worse still, the debacle caught
regulators flat-footed — and taxpayers have been paying for bailouts
ever since. The tab for A.I.G. alone, so far, is some $180 billion, and
there are trillions of dollars more for which taxpayers are on the
hook. Derivatives are not entirely to blame for the fiasco, but they
are implicated in much of it.
The administration’s proposal
rightly seeks to repeal much of a law from 2000, the Commodity Futures
Modernization Act. It put derivatives beyond the reach of federal
regulators. It calls for certain derivative trades, though not all, to
be handled through clearinghouses. It also requires that derivatives be
backed by collateral, ensuring that a trader is able to make good if
called upon to pay up. It would allow federal regulators to police the
market for fraud and manipulation — basic safeguards missing from
current law.
In a far-reaching change, the
proposal also would subject participants in the derivatives market to
capital requirements and to record-keeping and reporting requirements.
These would allow regulators to track their activities, presumably
intervening as necessary to avert systemwide problems.
For all that, the proposal pulls its
punches. It does not call for trading derivatives on fully regulated
exchanges, the most visible and reliable way of reining them in. It
also makes a distinction between standardized and customized
derivatives and proposes a lighter regulatory touch for the custom
variety. That could open the door to gaming the new system, a door that
would be shut if all derivative contracts were traded on exchanges. In
some important respects, it appears to give regulators the discretion,
though not the duty, to police markets more closely.
The proposal also seems to invite
tension between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the main regulators that would
oversee derivatives. Regulatory jurisdiction must be clarified if the
new rules are to have any teeth.
Another tension is that, in carrying
out the new rules, President Obama’s nominee to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler,
has a credibility problem. During the Clinton administration, Mr.
Gensler — along with Lawrence Summers, Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser
— championed derivatives’ deregulation. That caused two senators to
place a hold on his confirmation, even though Mr. Gensler supported
greater regulation during his confirmation hearing. They released the
hold on Thursday only after the new regulatory proposal was made public.
The Obama proposal starts off in the
right direction. It is up to Congress to shore up its protections and
provide regulators with the resources and political support they would
need to carry out their new mandate.
New York City
Official Is Obama Pick for C.D.C.
NYTIMES
By GARDINER HARRIS and ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
May 15, 2009
WASHINGTON — President Obama will announce on Friday that he has chosen
Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the New York City health commissioner, as the
next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
administration officials said Thursday.
Dr. Frieden, a 48-year-old infectious disease specialist, has cut a
high and sometimes contentious profile in his seven years as New York’s
top health official under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He led the
crusade to ban smoking in restaurants and bars, pushed to make H.I.V.
testing a routine part of medical exams, and defended a program that
passes out more than 35 million condoms a year.
At the C.D.C., he will inherit a host of immediate and long-term
problems, including a looming decision about whether and how to produce
a swine flu vaccine. Health experts say the agency must resolve serious
morale and organizational issues even as the administration struggles
to overhaul the nation’s health care system.
“I think the administration selected Tom Frieden because he can take
public health to a new place,” said Jeffrey Levi, executive director of
Trust for America’s Health, a nonprofit public health advocacy
organization. “He’s a transformational leader.”
Dr. Frieden is expected to take office next month. With his
appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation, New York City
will have former commissioners in two of the nation’s most visible
health positions; Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, who held the job in the
1990s, is nearing confirmation as commissioner of the Food and Drug
Administration.
Dr. Frieden has long been expected to be Mr. Obama’s choice, and
although he is widely admired in the public health community, some
C.D.C. veterans began lobbying in recent weeks on behalf of the
agency’s acting director, Dr. Richard E. Besser.
Dr. Besser has been the government’s chief scientific spokesman during
the swine flu epidemic, winning rave reviews for his confident
performance. He will return to his post as head of the agency’s
coordinating office for terrorism preparedness and emergency response.
Dr. Frieden has won positive reviews himself for his televised swine
flu updates, and he will take some of his own advantages to his new
role, including his long and close relationship with Dr. Hamburg.
The two worked together for years in New York City and were critical
players in an effective campaign to stop a growing epidemic of
drug-resistant tuberculosis infections. Dr. Frieden and Dr. Hamburg
will play important roles in how the government decides to fight swine
flu next fall if the virus returns with a vengeance.
Their relationship will also be tested in the effort to improve the
safety of the nation’s food supply, in which both agencies play crucial
parts. Mr. Obama has made food safety a top health priority; a
government working group that includes the food and drug agency, the
Department of Agriculture and other agencies is already at work on the
problem; and Congress has proposed a variety of legislative fixes.
Any changes are likely to affect the disease centers, which play a
central role in monitoring and solving outbreaks of food-related
illnesses.
Also facing Dr. Frieden will be a set of decisions about how to
organize the agency. Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, who left in January as
the agency’s director, undertook a reorganization that lasted years and
has been widely criticized as overly bureaucratic and the cause of a
raft of top staff departures. But still another administrative overhaul
would create its own set of headaches.
“Morale is the weakest thing at the agency right now,” said Dr. James
M. Hughes, former director of the C.D.C.’s National Center for
Infectious Diseases. “He has to really listen to people, and I think
there are too many bureaucratic layers.”
Like other federal agencies, the disease centers added thousands of
contract employees during the Bush administration. Deciding which
functions are best fulfilled by contractors and which should be brought
back inside the agency is another delicate problem for Dr. Frieden.
“Health care reform also needs to be on his plate,” said Dr. Jeffrey P.
Koplan, who served as the centers’ director from 1998 to 2002. “There
is a huge opportunity there to improve public health, and it’s one in
which any C.D.C. director will want to be a player.”
However he decides these questions, Dr. Frieden is bound to kick up
controversy, say those who know him.
“I found he’s willing to challenge the status quo in an effort to make
a difference,” said Dennis deLeon, president of the Latino Commission
on AIDS in New York City.
Dr. Frieden has a history of focusing on health threats that endanger
large numbers of people, sometimes at the expense of more popular
causes. This put him in marked opposition to the Bush administration,
which spent more than $50 billion on bioterrorism initiatives and paid
far less attention to problems like smoking.
Dr. Alfred Sommer, emeritus dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School
of Public Health, who was on the team that recommended Dr. Frieden as
New York’s health chief in 2002, recalled interviewing him shortly
after the Sept. 11 attacks. Dr. Frieden had flown to New York from
India, where he was living and working on tuberculosis control.
Before he left India, he was asked about his top priority, Dr. Sommer
said. “Oh, well, that’s easy, Al,” Dr. Sommer recalled him replying.
“Tobacco. Tobacco is killing more people, and that’s my top priority.”
“Tom, I don’t disagree that tobacco is a real scourge, but have you
heard of 9/11?” Dr. Sommer said he countered.
“Of course I know about that, but bioterrorists are not going to kill
more New Yorkers than tobacco is,” Dr. Frieden said.
Obama taps McCarthy
for
EPA post
DAY
By Judy Benson
Published on 3/13/2009
State Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Gina
McCarthy, known for her accessible, pragmatic and plainspoken
leadership in her four years heading the agency, has been nominated by
President Barack Obama for a key post at the Environmental Protection
Agency.
McCarthy, 54, has been chosen to be the assistant administrator for air
and radiation at the EPA, a post in which she will oversee initiatives
to reduce air pollution and combat climate change, among other areas.
She was named late Thursday afternoon along with three other nominees
for key administration posts.
During her time at the DEP, McCarthy launched initiatives such as “No
Child Left Inside,” intended to encourage children and families to
spend more time enjoying the outdoors; and those aimed at fostering
better stewardship of the land, addressing climate change, and the role
of individuals in environmental quality, among others. In a statement,
said said she is honored to be nominated and “would be thrilled” to
work for EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.
”Much work needs to be done to address the nation's air pollution and
climate change challenges and I would very much like to play a part in
shaping these efforts,” she said. She also thanked Gov. M. Jodi Rell
for choosing her to head the DEP and said efforts by the governor and
DEP staff have “put Connecticut on the map as an environmental leader,
pushing the envelope on so many issues of regional, national and
international concern.”
A native of Massachusetts who maintains a home in Canton, Mass., and
another in Hartford, McCarthy spent 25 years at various environmental
posts in that state before coming to Connecticut to head the DEP. She
and her husband have three children. During her time at the DEP,
McCarthy was one of the state's most visible commissioners, attending
many local and statewide events. Most recently, she attended an event
in Stonington last month celebrating the addition of the Crowley family
property to the Barn Island Wildlife Management Area.
DEP spokesman Dennis Schain said the timing of congressional
confirmation hearings is not yet known. McCar-thy will remain as DEP
commissioner until the confirmation and approval process is completed,
he said.
The Obama administration has been in contact with McCarthy about the
nomination “going back several weeks,” he said. She told DEP staff she
was being considered for the EPA post several weeks ago.
During her career in Massachusetts, McCarthy worked for both Democratic
and Republican administrations. Now, after four years in the Republican
administration of Gov. M. Jodi Rell, McCarthy will work for a
Democratic one.
Rell issued a statement late Thursday afternoon calling McCarthy “a
public servant with tremendous talent and passion” who did “an
outstanding job for the citizens of Connecticut.
”Her leadership on climate issues is nationally respected, so it comes
as no surprise that the Obama administration would reach out to
Commissioner McCarthy,” Rell said. “While we certainly would hate to
lose her in Connecticut, it is reassuring to know she would be working
to preserve and improve the environment for all Americans.”
Former New York Health Commissioner Picked to Lead F.D.A.
NYTIMES
By GARDINER HARRIS
March 12, 2009
WASHINGTON — President Obama
intends to nominate Dr.
Margaret A. Hamburg, a former New York City health commissioner, to
lead the Food and Drug Administration, sidestepping a battle between
drug safety advocates and the drug industry, according to people
briefed on the decision.
The administration is likely to
announce the decision this week, these people said. Dr. Joshua
Sharfstein, the health commissioner of Baltimore, who led the Obama
administration’s transition team for the F.D.A., will become Dr.
Hamburg’s chief deputy, these people said.
Dr. Hamburg, 53, succeeds Dr. Andrew
C. von Eschenbach, who led the beleaguered agency from 2005 until last
January and often had to deflect critics who accused the Bush
administration of letting politics play too forceful a role in science
policy.
Her selection, first reported
Wednesday on the The Wall Street Journal’s Web site, was hailed by top
public health officials and experts.
“Peggy has a deep commitment to the
public health and, while she appreciates the vital role of industry,
will surely focus on what is best for the public,” said Dr. Harvey V.
Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine, the medical arm of
the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Hamburg, who was appointed by
Mayor David N. Dinkins as acting commissioner in 1991 and became
commissioner the following year, was one of the few top officials asked
to remain when Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani took office in 1994. She was
best known for developing a tuberculosis control program that produced
sharp declines in the incidence of the disease in New York. Under her
tenure, child immunization rates rose in the city.
She left New York in 1997 to become
assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of
Health and Human Services, where she created a bioterrorism initiative
and led planning for pandemic flu response.
That background makes her a more
obvious candidate to lead the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention than the F.D.A.
Indeed, the Obama administration
considered experts more steeped in the kind of drug safety issues that
the food and drug agency confronts daily, including Dr. Steven E.
Nissen, a cardiologist from the Cleveland Clinic, and Dr. Robert M.
Califf, a cardiologist from Duke University.
But Dr. Nissen and Dr. Califf would
have been divisive candidates, with rival supporting camps. Dr.
Hamburg’s selection avoids the usual debate between industry and
consumer advocates.
“She has the personal skills to
collaborate with the pharmaceutical industry and the science community
in a way that isn’t confrontational,” said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin,
executive director of the American Public Health Association.
Jeffrey Levi, executive director of
Trust for America’s Health, a nonprofit public health organization,
said Dr. Hamburg had revived a demoralized and cash-starved agency in
New York and could do the same at the F.D.A., which faces similar
problems.
“Right now,” he said, “the F.D.A.
needs a strong leader with a clear sense of mission who can fight for
the resources that the agency needs and do it in a bipartisan manner.”
Dr. Hamburg is the daughter of Dr.
David A. Hamburg, a former president of the Institute of Medicine and a
longtime force in public health. She has two teenage children and
serves on the board of the Sidwell Friends School.
Mr. Dinkins recalled that Dr.
Hamburg forced him to take a tuberculosis test after he spoke at a
disaster scene with someone who later tested positive for the disease.
“She took care of me like a
newborn,” he said. “She’s the kind of person you figure can do almost
anything.”
Seattle
Police Chief Selected as Drug Czar
NYTIMES
By David Stout
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
March 11, 2009, 1:35 pm
Vice President Biden announced that Seattle Police Chief R. Gil
Kerlikowske will head the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
R. Gil Kerlikowske, the police chief of Seattle, was chosen on
Wednesday to be the White House “drug czar,” signaling a shift in
emphasis from arrest and prosecution to intervention and treatment.
The selection of Mr. Kerlikowske, which had been expected, was
announced by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who said Mr.
Kerlikowske understands that “combating drugs requires a comprehensive
approach that includes enforcement, prevention and treatment.”
If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Kerlikowske, 59, will become director
of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, as the drug czar is
formally known. “The success of our efforts to reduce the flow of drugs
is largely dependent on our ability to reduce demand for them,” Mr.
Kerlikowske said in a ceremony at the Eisenhower Executive Office
Building.
“Our nation’s drug problem is one of human suffering,” Mr. Kerlikowske
said. “And as a police officer, but also in my own family, I have
experienced the effects that drugs can have on our youth, our families
and our communities.” Mr. Kerlikowske’s stepson, Jeffrey Kerlikowske,
39, has had several drug-related brushes with the law.
The nominee said that illicit drug use is “an incredibly complex
problem,” requiring cooperation among prosecutors, treatment providers
and others. “I am absolutely committed to this task,” he said.
Mr. Kerlikowske has been Seattle police chief since 2000. He was
previously the police chief in Buffalo and in Fort Myers and Port St.
Lucie in Florida.
“Gil Kerlikowske is the perfect person for this job,” John F. Timoney,
the police chief of Miami and former first deputy commissioner in New
York City, said in a statement released by the White House.
When John P. Walters was drug czar under President George W. Bush, the
office focused on tough enforcement of drug laws and on the use of
marijuana and other drugs by young people. While not against leniency
for first-time drug users, Mr. Walters disdained what he called the
“therapy-only lobby” in Washington, and said that prison sentences,
combined with therapy, were crucial in reducing drug use.
Obama to Nominate Jon Leibowitz as FTC
Chairman
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:34 p.m. ET
February 27, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama is choosing a member of the
Federal Trade Commission to become its chairman.
The White House said Friday that Obama intends to nominate commissioner
Jon Leibowitz to lead the agency.
Leibowitz is the only Democrat among the five commissioners responsible
for policing the business industry for anticompetitive practices and
enforcing consumer protection laws. A lawyer, Leibowitz became a
commissioner in September 2004.
The commission currently has one vacancy.
Before joining the FTC, Leibowitz was vice president of congressional
affairs for the Motion Picture Association of America.
US Officials: Clinton to Name
Climate Change Envoy
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:12 a.m. ET
January 26, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. officials say Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton plans to name a special envoy for climate change.
Clinton has picked Todd
Stern,
a former White House assistant who was the chief U.S. negotiator at the
Kyoto Protocol talks in her husband's administration, the officials
said Monday. They spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of a planned
midday State Department ceremony where Clinton will announce the
appointment.
Stern served in the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001, first in
the White House, where he worked on the Kyoto Protocol and coordinated
the president's Initiative on Global Climate Change and then at
Treasury, where he was a senior adviser to the secretary.
Source: Obama to Name Sunstein
His Regulatory Czar
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:59 p.m. ET
January 16, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President-elect Barack Obama has tapped legal
scholar Cass Sunstein as his administration's regulatory czar, a
Democratic source said Friday.
Obama hired the Harvard law professor to run the White House's Office
of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the administration's central
approver of rules that has say over environmental policy, workplace
safety issues and federal health care policies. All major agencies'
rules will pass across Sunstein's desk, giving him great influence in
the new administration.
His appointment was disclosed by a Democratic source who spoke on the
condition of anonymnity to discuss personnel decisions.
Sunstein's office would be the main place Obama's new administration
would look to reverse executive orders issued by President George W.
Bush, who leaves office Tuesday. Obama aides and advisers have their
eyes on Bush's policies on stem cell research and reproductive rights,
but advisers have combed Bush's record and found more than 200 rules
they would like to see reversed.
Independent and advocacy groups have been lobbying Obama aides
aggressively to move quickly on the policies, perhaps as early as his
first full day in office, Jan. 21.
Sunstein could be the face of that effort. He's a much-quoted expert on
regulation and has testified about Supreme Court nominees; Harvard
touted him as the most cited law professor in the country when
officials hired him last year.
Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan -- who is set to become Obama's solicitor
general -- called him the ''pre-eminent legal scholar of our time'' and
an ''individual superstar'' in her February 2008 announcement that he
would join the faculty. Aside from a short stint at the Justice
Department, he has never worked in government.
Sunstein previously taught at the University of Chicago, where Obama
also taught law part time.
He is married to Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign
policy adviser who was forced to resign from the campaign when she
called Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was then an Obama rival, ''a
monster.'' Power has since rejoined Obama's circle, helping his
transition team assess the State Department that Clinton would lead as
secretary.
Sunstein earned two degrees from Harvard and clerked for Supreme Court
Justice Thurgood Marshall. He also advised constitution writers in
Poland, South Africa and Russia.
Obama
to Tap Tech
Adviser as FCC Chief Article
By AMY SCHATZ and
LAURA MECKLER
JANUARY 13, 2009
WASHINGTON --
President-elect Barack Obama intends to nominate his technology
adviser, Julius Genachowski, to head the Federal Communications
Commission, a Democratic source close to the Obama transition team said.
Mr. Genachowski,
46 years old, is a former Harvard Law School classmate of Mr. Obama. He
previously worked at the FCC during the Clinton administration. More
recently, he co-founded LaunchBox Digital, a Washington, D.C.-based
venture capital firm. He worked at Barry Diller's IAC/InterActive Corp.
in various executive positions for eight years after leaving the FCC.
Mr.
Genachowski couldn't be reached for comment. A spokeswoman for the
Obama transition team declined to comment.
During
the campaign, Mr. Genachowski served as the top technology adviser to
Mr. Obama, putting together a detailed technology and innovation plan
that expressed support for open Internet or "net neutrality"
protections; media-ownership rules that encourage more diversity; and
expansion of affordable broadband access across the country.
Obama's
Advisers
See who else is
expected to join the administration.
An early
supporter of the president-elect, Mr. Genachowski also served as a
bundler for the campaign, raising more than $500,000 in donations.
If
confirmed, Mr. Genachowski will take over an agency that has had rocky
relations with Congress and major companies in the telecommunications
industry under current FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. The agency may also
still be coping with the U.S.'s transition to digital-only television,
which is scheduled to take place Feb. 17 but could be pushed back to
the summer.
While at
IAC, Mr. Genachowski served several roles at the media and e-commerce
conglomerate, first as general counsel and later as head of business
development and part of the top core of executives.
—Shira
Ovide contributed to this article.
Obama
confuses Harvard lawyer for tech guy
By Paul
Boutin, 5:00 PM on Thu Nov 6 2008, 6,099 views
I'm from MIT, so I'm hardwired to hate on Harvard Law grad Julius
Genachowski, the so-called technology guy newly named to our Internet
President's transition team. His company, LaunchBox, helps Web and
mobile entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to get seed funding. That makes
him a Paul Graham wannabe to me. He spent eight years working for Barry
Diller at IAC as general counsel. Is that a plus or a minus?
To be fair, Genachowski is said to be a clear thinker, and he hasn't
yet locked up Barry O's slot for America's CTO. Insider gossip says
he's eyeing the FCC instead, where he previously served under Reed
Hundt. Fine with me — Genachowski is a lawyer who I'm sure can grasp
net neutrality. But if this turns out to be Obama's idea of a
technologist, I'm going home to cling bitterly to my guns and religion.
Obama
to Select Genachowski to
Lead F.C.C.
NYTIMES
By Stephen Labaton
January 13, 2009, 8:59 am
President-elect Barack Obama intends to nominate Julius Genachowski ,
an adviser on technology issues and longtime friend, to become the next
chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, advisers to Mr.
Obama said.
Mr. Genachowski, 46, was a major fund-raiser for the Obama campaign who
also played a leading role in the campaign’s highly successful online
strategy. He remains very close to Mr. Obama—both men went to Columbia
College and Harvard Law School and the two served together on the
Harvard Law Review. They also were basketball buddies.
During the campaign, Mr. Genachowski shaped many of Mr. Obama’s telecom
policies. He advocated an open Internet in the debate over so-called
“net neutrality,’’ and media-ownership rules that promote a diversity
of voices on the airwaves.
People involved in the transition said that Mr. Genachowski was a top
candidate for both the chairmanship and a new White House position
overseeing technology issues that has not been fully defined yet.
If confirmed, one of his first challenges at the commission will be
what to do about the problems plaguing the conversion to digital
television. The Obama transition team has asked Congress to delay the
conversion, set for Feb. 17, because millions of viewers have been
unable to obtain coupons to pay for converter boxes that would enable
their sets to receive signals once all broadcasters lose their analog
signal. (The conversion will not affect viewers who subscribe to cable
or satellite television services.)
The chairmanship of the F.C.C. has played a more expansive role in
regulating the economy, particularly with the rise of the Internet and
wireless communications over the last 20 years. Now, as the new
administration plans to make the expansion of broadband and Internet
services a significant part of its stimulus package, Mr. Genachowski,
with his close ties to Mr. Obama, could wind up with an even bigger
role than his predecessors in shaping economic policy.
After graduating from law school, Mr. Genachowski clerked for federal
appeals court judge Abner J. Mikva after Mr. Obama turned down the same
job. Mr. Genachowski then clerked for Supreme Court Justice David H.
Souter. He was chief counsel to Reed Hundt, a chairman of the Federal
Communications Commission, during the Clinton administration. He then
worked for eight years as a senior executive at Barry Diller’s
IAC/Interactive Corporation. He also founded an investment and advisory
firm for digital media companies and co-founded the country’s first
commercial “green’’ bank.
Panetta to Be Named C.I.A. Director
NYTIMES
By Carl Hulse AND Mark Mazzetti
January 5, 2009, 2:30 pm
Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman and White House chief of staff.
(Kevin Wolf/Associated Press)President-elect Barack Obama has selected
Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman and White House chief of staff,
to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that Mr.
Obama criticized during the campaign for using interrogation methods he
decried as torture, Democratic officials said Monday.
Mr. Panetta has a reputation in Washington as a competent manager with
strong background in budget issues, but has little hands-on
intelligence experience. If confirmed by the Senate, he will take
control of the agency most directly responsible for hunting senior Al
Qaeda leaders around the globe, but one that has been buffeted since
the Sept. 11 attacks by leadership changes and morale problems.
Given his background, Mr. Panetta is a somewhat unusual choice to lead
the C.I.A., an agency that has been unwelcoming to previous directors
perceived as outsiders, such as Stansfield M. Turner and John M.
Deutch. But his selection points up the difficulty Mr. Obama had in
finding a C.I.A. director with no connection to controversial
counterterrorism programs of the Bush era...full
story
here.
See Jane’s Big Carbon Footprint:
Before they boss us around, shouldn’t Obama’s science team act like
they believe in global warming?
National Review
By David Freddoso
December 22, 2008, 7:00 a.m.
What’s your carbon footprint? Next year, it will probably be much
smaller than that of Jane Lubchenco. The renowned climate-change
crusader and professor of marine biology is Obama’s choice for
administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA).
National Review Online has obtained an e-mail from Lubchenco’s husband,
Oregon State University professor Bruce Menge, suggesting that the
couple will contribute mightily to global warming next year after she
takes the job by making frequent cross-country plane trips.
In the e-mail, Menge is enthusiastic about the appointment, but he also
mentions the “the hardships it will impose on us and our academic
family.” Their solution? “The plan is for her to be in WDC and me to
remain in Oregon at OSU, with frequent weekend trips back and forth,”
Menge writes. For the record: A single roundtrip between Portland,
Ore., and Washington, D.C., emits just under a ton of carbon, and a bit
more than a ton if there is a layover in between. The roundtrip from
the university to the airport is another 185 miles by car.
One could end there by acknowledging how understandable this is — after
all, conservatives are not the only ones who place greater stock in
familial bliss and human comfort than in fears of climate change and
the alleged havoc it will wreak. Even a liberal marine biologist who
has written extensively on the effect of global warming on marine life
is not willing to let such truths inconvenience or harm her family.
But Menge also writes of the appointment that “this opportunity could
have major positive impacts on fisheries management, marine reserves,
and PISCO’s future among many other things.” PISCO is the Partnership
for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, the very research
program under which Menge and Lubchenco currently work as principal
investigators at Oregon State University.
Most of PISCO’s funding is private, but some of it comes from NOAA,
according to the project’s website, suggesting that Menge is correct.
Even if it is all in the interest of science, it is a valid question
whether it would be right for a NOAA administrator to use her
government position to advance her husband’s academic research. It is a
question Lubchenco may face before she takes that carbon-heavy flight
to Washington for her confirmation hearing.
4 Top
Science Advisers Are Named by
Obama
NYTIMES
By GARDINER HARRIS
December 21, 2008
WASHINGTON — In his
selection of four top scientific advisers, President-elect Barack Obama
has signaled what are likely to be significant changes in policies
governing global warming, ocean protections and stem cell research.
“It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and
worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and
technology,” Mr. Obama said in a radio address on Saturday, when he
announced the appointments.
John P. Holdren, a physicist and environmental policy professor at
Harvard, will serve as the president’s science adviser as director of
the White House Office of Science and Technology. Jane Lubchenco, a
marine biologist from Oregon State University, will lead the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which overseas ocean and
atmospheric studies and performs much of the government’s research on
global warming.
Dr. Holdren will also be a co-chairman the President’s Council of
Advisers on Science and Technology along with the Nobel Prize-winning
cancer research Dr. Harold Varmus, a former director of the National
Institutes of Health, and Eric S. Lander, a genomic researcher.
“Whether it’s the science to slow global warming; the technology to
protect our troops and confront bioterror and weapons of mass
destruction; the research to find life-saving cures; or the innovations
to remake our industries and create 21st century jobs — today more than
ever, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our
security and prosperity as a nation,” Mr. Obama said.
Like Steven Chu, the energy secretary-designate, Drs. Holdren and
Lubchenco advocate mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions, which
the Bush administration opposed. Both served as president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Holdren said
last year that the world needed to undertake “a massive effort to slow
the pace of global climatic disruption before intolerable consequences
become inevitable.”
Dr. Lubchenco has documented enormous dead zones in oceans that have
resulted from climate change and has advocated placing vast ocean areas
off-limits to fishing and mineral exploitation. In an e-mail message on
Saturday, she wrote: “NOAA will play a central role in addressing
pressing challenges of our time — stabilizing the climate, restoring
ocean health and coastal vitality. Jobs and a healthy environment go
hand in hand — and both are enabled by good science.”
Dr. Varmus is president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in
New York. Dr. Lander is a professor of biology at M.I.T. and helped
lead the effort to sequence the human genome.
Obama Appoints Climate Change Experts
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:02 a.m. ET
December 20, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President-elect Barack Obama on Saturday named
Harvard physicist John Holdren and marine biologist Jane Lubchenco to
top science posts, signaling a change from Bush administration policies
on global warming that were criticized for putting politics over
science.
Both Holdren and Lubchenco are leading experts on climate change who
have advocated forceful government response. Holdren will become
Obama's science adviser as director of the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy; Lubchenco will lead the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees ocean and atmospheric
studies and does much of the government's research on global warming.
Holdren also will direct the president's Council of Advisers on Science
and Technology. Joining him as co-chairs will be Nobel Prize-winning
scientist Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes
of Health, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Eric
Lander, a specialist in human genome research.
''From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to
inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new
frontier because we had leaders who paved the way,'' Obama said in
announcing his selections in his weekly radio address. ''Leaders who
not only invested in our scientists, but who respected the integrity of
the scientific process.''
''Because the truth is that promoting science isn't just about
providing resources -- it's about protecting free and open inquiry.
It's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or
obscured by politics or ideology,'' he said. ''I could not have a
better team to guide me in this work.''
In their posts, the four scientists will confront challenges in global
warming after years of inaction by the Bush administration, which
opposed mandatory cuts of greenhouse gas pollution. Last year, former
Surgeon General Richard Carmona testified to Congress that top Bush
administration officials often dismissed global warming as a ''liberal
cause'' and sought to play down public health reports out of political
considerations.
Since 1993, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska,
California and Texas, and global warming is accelerating. The amount of
carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere has already pushed past the level
some scientists say is safe.
Holdren, 64, is a former president of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science in Washington who has pushed for more urgent
action on global warming. As Obama's top science adviser, he would
manage about 40 Ph.D-level experts who help shape and communicate
science and technology policy.
Colleagues say the post is well-suited for Holdren, who at Harvard went
from battling the spread of nuclear weapons to tackling the threat of
global warming. He's an award-laden scientist comfortable in many
different fields.
''Global warming is a misnomer. It implies something gradual, something
uniform, something quite possibly benign, and what we're experiencing
is none of those,'' Holdren said a year ago in a speech at Harvard.
''There is already widespread harm ... occurring from climate change.
This is not just a problem for our children and our grandchildren.''
Lubchenco, an Oregon State University professor specializing in
overfishing and climate change, will be the first woman to head NOAA. A
member of the Pew Oceans Commission, Lubchenco has recommended steps to
overcome crippling damage to the world's oceans from overfishing and
pollution and has expressed optimism for change once President George
W. Bush leaves office.
''The Bush administration has not been respectful of the science,'' she
said earlier this year. ''But I think that's not true of Republicans in
general. I know it's not. I am very much looking forward to a new
administration that does respect scientific information and that
considers it very seriously in making environmental policies.''
Varmus, who was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for his research on
the causes of cancer, served as National Institutes of Health director
during the Clinton administration. A former medical professor at the
University of California, San Francisco, he helped found the Ralph
Lauren Center for Cancer Care and Prevention and chairs a scientific
board at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Lander, who teaches at both MIT and Harvard, founded the Whitehead
Institute-MIT Center for Genome Research in 1990, which became part of
the Broad Institute in 2003. A leading researcher in the Human Genome
Project, he and his colleagues are using the findings to explore the
molecular mechanisms behind human disease.
In his radio address, Obama said he planned early next year to more
closely address the issue of engaging the nation's technology community
to ''harness technology and innovation to create jobs, enhance
America's competitiveness and advance our national priorities.''
''It's time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and
worked to restore America's place as the world leader in science and
technology,'' he said.
Obama's
Cabinet
Lineup Is Set; White House advisers may see enhanced role
DAY
By New York Times News Service
Published on 12/20/2008
Washington - President-elect Barack Obama finished building a Cabinet
of prominent and strong-willed players on Friday, but he is putting
together a governing structure that will concentrate more
decision-making over his top domestic priorities in the White House.
With new offices in the White House to coordinate health care, urban
policy and energy initiatives, Obama has signaled that he intends to
keep real power over domestic issues close at hand. The collective
moves shift the political center of gravity farther away from the
Cabinet, a trend that has accelerated under presidents of both parties.
At the same time, Obama's reorganization suggests a willingness to
tolerate, and even encourage, competing power centers within his
administration, but it is unclear how that will work in practice. Not
only is he creating new positions with authority over key areas, he is
filling his West Wing with people of stature equal to or even greater
than the members of his Cabinet, including two former Cabinet officers
and a former Senate majority leader.
David Axelrod, Obama's senior adviser, said issues like health care and
energy “are so fundamental to our ability to right the economy in the
long term that he knows he's going to have to drive a lot of that,”
adding, “and he wants a high-powered staff in the White House to help
him do that.”
While there may be some push-and-pull between the White House and
Cabinet departments, Axelrod said the president-elect had emphasized
during job interviews his insistence on cohesion. “He encourages
debate,” Axelrod said. “He doesn't tolerate factionalism.”
The revamped arrangement indicates a shift in priorities away from
those of President Bush, who spent much of his tenure fashioning a new
national security apparatus in a time of war and terrorist threats.
Obama's transition team is even considering undoing some of what Bush
built in terms of security structures in the White House.
Obama completed his Cabinet choices on Friday before heading off for
nearly two weeks of vacation in Hawaii, where he grew up. At a news
conference in Chicago, he confirmed he would nominate Rep.
Hilda L.
Solis of California as labor secretary, Rep. Ray
LaHood of Illinois as
transportation secretary and former Mayor Ron
Kirk
of Dallas as U.S.
trade representative.
He also announced that he would make Karen
Mills, a venture capitalist
from Maine, the head of the Small Business Administration.
With that, Obama has finished selecting his core team faster than any
president-elect in decades. In trying to balance various constituencies
and backgrounds, he assembled a 15-member Cabinet that includes six
current or former members of Congress, three current or former
governors and two Republicans.
SEC boss: Agency examining companies
By MARCY GORDON, AP Business
Writer Marcy Gordon, Ap Business Writer 33 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The head of the
Securities and Exchange Commission confirmed Wednesday the agency is
investigating several companies' actions in the run-up to the financial
crisis of 2008.
SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said "it
would be safe to assume" that the agency is looking very closely at the
conduct of a number of firms during this time. She did not name the
companies.
Schapiro spoke in testimony to a
House Appropriations subcommittee weighing the agency's request for
about $1.3 billion for the budget year starting Oct. 1, a 12 percent
increase from the current year.
Lawmakers want to know if the sort
of accounting gimmick recently uncovered that was used by the collapsed
investment firm Lehman Brothers to mask billions in debt was widely
deployed on Wall Street.
The SEC's review of the Lehman
Brothers disaster "has taken us down a path where we're looking
broadly," Schapiro told reporters following her testimony.
The implosion of Lehman Brothers
Holdings Inc. into the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history in September
2008 precipitated the financial meltdown that plunged the economy into
the most severe recession since the 1930s.
After saddling itself with tens of
billions of troubled assets that couldn't easily be sold, Lehman masked
$50 billion in debt and its perilous financial condition by using the
so-called Repo 105 accounting gimmick, an examiner appointed by the
bankruptcy court found in an extensive report issued last week.
"This cannot be tolerated again,"
said Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., chairman of the appropriations panel.
The Lehman collapse "could be an
even greater tragedy" than the multibillion-dollar swindle by money
manager Bernard Madoff, Serrano suggested, because it ignited a chain
of events that threw millions of Americans out of work and brought
hardship.
Questions have been raised about the
supervision of Lehman by the SEC and the Federal Reserve in the months
before its collapse.
"The culture of the agency is
changing. It doesn't happen overnight," Schapiro told the lawmakers.
In the meltdown's wake, the SEC and
the Justice Department launched wide-ranging investigations of
companies across the financial services industry, believed to include
insurer American International Group Inc. and mortgage giants Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac as well as Lehman. A year and a half after the
financial crisis struck, charges haven't yet come in most of the probes.
The autopsy of Lehman issued last
week by bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas could serve as a valuable
road map to the two agencies in their investigations, experts say.
Schapiro said Wednesday the report
raised "some very interesting points" and would be "helpful."
SEC reins in short sellers with new restrictions
YAHOO
By Rachelle Younglai
Feb. 25, 2010
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S.
securities regulators adopted a new rule to restrict short selling more
than a year after the financial crisis provoked cries to rein in
investors who bet on a stock's decline.
The Securities and Exchange
Commission voted 3-2 on Wednesday to approve a rule designed to put the
brakes on a stock that is falling precipitously. The new rule attempts to bridge the
divide between those who argued a market-wide curb was needed to
protect stocks from short sellers and others who said that restrictions
would hurt market liquidity.
"The commission was cognizant of the
benefits that short selling can provide to the markets," SEC Chairman
Mary Schapiro said at a public agency meeting.
However, Schapiro said the SEC was
also concerned that excessive downward pressure, accompanied by fear of
unconstrained short selling, can destabilize markets and undermine
investor confidence. The
SEC's actions drew a quick rebuke from famed short seller James Chanos,
who said the new rule will harm investors' interests through higher
transaction costs and missed opportunities. Under the SEC's rule, if a stock fell by
more than 10 percent in a day, a curb would kick in, allowing short
selling only above the national best bid.
That restriction would last for the
day the stock dropped and the day after.
Short-sellers bet on a stock's
decline. In a short-sale, an investor borrows stock and sells it in the
hope that its price will drop. When it does, the seller profits by
buying back the stock at the lower price and returning the borrowed
shares.
REPUBLICANS DISSENT
During the worst of the financial
crisis, lawmakers and companies begged the SEC to clamp down on the
short-sellers and said the uptick rule should be reinstated.
First adopted after the 1929 market
crash, the uptick rule allowed shorting only if the last sale price was
higher than the previous price. But the SEC abolished it in 2007 after
concluding that it was no longer effective in modern markets.
The two Republican commissioners,
Kathleen Casey and Troy Paredes, dissented and said there was no firm
foundation for adopting the new short sale rule. Paredes said there was no way to know
whether implementation of the rule would boost investor confidence.
"Human psychology is difficult to predict," he said.
Casey suggested that those who have
been clamoring for the old uptick rule will not be satisfied until the
SEC reinstated the Depression-era rule. Casey and Paredes both raised concerns
over potential compliance costs that are estimated to be in the
billions of dollars. Paredes questioned the logic behind the 10 percent
threshold and said there was no empirical data or analysis to support
this.
The new SEC rule goes into effect 60
days after it is published in the government's official federal
register. The market will then have six months to comply with
requirements.
SEC Chief Backs 'Systemic
Risk Council' Idea
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:23 a.m. ET
May 8, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The head of the
Securities and Exchange Commission favors a new proposal for federal
regulators sharing oversight of companies that pose financial risks to
the economy.
SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said
she's ''inclined toward'' the idea floated this week by the head of the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for a new ''systemic risk council'' to
monitor large institutions against financial threats. The council would
include the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, FDIC and SEC.
Congress is working to craft an
overhaul of U.S. financial rules to prevent a repeat of the crisis that
plunged markets worldwide into distress.
Speaking to the Investment Company
Institute, the mutual fund industry's biggest trade group, Schapiro
says she is concerned about an ''excessive concentration of power''
over financial risk in a single agency.
SEC
Chief Says New Short-Selling Rules a Priority
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:32 a.m. ET
May 5, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The head of the
Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday she is making the issue
of new rules restricting short-selling a priority as the agency hears
from an array of interests about ways to limit trades that bet against
a stock.
Investors and lawmakers have been
clamoring for the SEC to put new brakes on trading moves they say
worsened the market's downturn.
''I have made it a priority to
evaluate the issue of short-selling regulation, and ensure that any
future policies in this area are the result of a deliberate and
thoughtful process,'' SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said at the start of a
public ''round-table'' meeting organized by the agency.
Schapiro has said the SEC must
evaluate the costs and benefits of new restrictions.
Representatives of companies
including General Electric Co., Credit Suisse, JPMorgan Chase &
Co., Charles Schwab Corp. and Fidelity Investments, as well as the New
York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq Stock Market and several universities
are participating in the forum.
One option the SEC has advanced is
restoring a Depression-era rule that prohibits short sellers from
making their trades until a stock ticks at least one penny above its
previous trading price. The goal of the so-called uptick rule is to
prevent selling sprees that feed upon themselves -- actions that
battered the stocks of banks and other companies over the last year.
Another approach would ban
short-selling for the rest of the trading session in a stock that
declines by 10 percent or more.
Schapiro and the other four SEC
commissioners voted unanimously last month to put forward five
alternative short-selling plans. They could settle on one and formally
approve it sometime after the 60-day public comment period that began
in early April.
Short-selling involves borrowing a
company's shares, selling them, then buying them back when the stock
falls and returning them to the lender. The short seller pockets the
difference in price.
Many financial and some other
company stocks were targeted by short sellers in the market turmoil
that began in mid-2008. GE was among 870 U.S. companies, mostly
financial institutions, whose stock was subject to an unprecedented ban
against all short-selling put in effect by the SEC last fall. The ban
remained in place for several weeks until Congress enacted the $700
billion financial bailout plan.
Short-selling is legal and widely
used on Wall Street. But as the market has plunged, investors and
lawmakers have pressed the SEC to reinstate the uptick rule. They say
its absence since mid-2007 fanned market volatility, prompting bands of
hedge funds and other investors to target weak companies with an
avalanche of short-selling.
Although many in the public blame
short-selling for enflaming market volatility over the past 18 months,
Schapiro has noted there is no ''specific empirical evidence'' that the
absence of the uptick rule fueled it. Schapiro has acknowledged the
SEC's difficult task in striking a balance between stemming market
abuses to bolster investors' confidence and stifling the legitimate
benefits of short-selling.
Proponents of short-selling say it
can make markets more efficient, bring in more capital and raise
warning signs about weak or badly managed companies. Professional short
sellers and some analysts also have warned that restricting
short-selling could distort edgy markets.
But companies and regulators
maintain that the practice widened the scope of the financial crisis
and contributed to the collapse in value last fall of many bank stocks
and the demise of Lehman Brothers.
Another option floated by the SEC,
is a ''circuit breaker'' for stock prices. That approach, in three
variations, either bans short-selling outright for the rest of the
trading session in a stock that declines 10 percent or more, or
restricts short-selling of the stock for the rest of the session based
on its previous sale price or highest bid.
The fifth alternative, known as an
upbid rule, would allow short sellers to come in only at a price above
the highest current bid for the stock.
SEC Chief Speeding Penalty
Process for Violations
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:12 p.m. ET
February 6, 2009
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- The new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission is
ending a practice that she said had slowed the agency's enforcement
efforts against corporate wrongdoing.
In her first public address as SEC
chairman, Mary Schapiro said Friday that she was ending a two-year
policy requiring agency enforcement attorneys to get approval from the
commissioners before negotiating fines and penalties with companies
accused of violations.
That practice ''just sends the wrong
message'' and has caused delays, Schapiro said. It is among the steps
she said she is taking to revitalize the SEC's enforcement efforts and
bolster investor protection.
But the private sector also has to
do its part to help restore investor confidence, she told a gathering
of securities lawyers and SEC staff members.
''There needs to be a new era of
responsibility on Wall Street and throughout our markets to ensure that
wrongs don't occur in the first place,'' Schapiro said. ''The sooner
that Wall Street works to repair its own problems, the sooner investors
will once again find the confidence to invest in what should be the
finest markets in the world.''
Schapiro, named by President Barack
Obama in December to head the SEC, took the agency's helm at a time
when it is being called on to help restore investor confidence
shattered by the worst financial crisis in more than 70 years. The SEC
has faced heavy and unrelenting criticism over its failure to discover
the $50 billion Ponzi scheme allegedly run by money manager Bernard
Madoff -- despite credible allegations against him being brought to the
agency over the course of a decade.
Five high-ranking SEC officials,
including the agency's enforcement director Linda Thomsen, received a
tongue-lashing from lawmakers this week who accused them of impeding
their inquiry into the SEC's breakdown over the Madoff affair.
It was a far friendlier reception
Friday for officials such as Thomsen, who cited a list of recent
high-profile enforcement cases by the agency.
Schapiro's announcement that the
more formal approval process for penalties is being shelved drew
applause from the audience. She outlined other steps to speed
enforcement efforts at the agency. Those include changes to the process
for issuing subpoenas in investigations, and improvements in the
handling of tips and whistleblower complaints regarding fraudulent
activity.
''Anything you do to quicken the
process should be good for investors,'' Larry Ellsworth, an attorney at
Jenner & Block who formerly worked in the SEC's enforcement trial
division, said during a break in the conference.
Schapiro also said she will work to
improve the effectiveness of the SEC's process for inspecting brokerage
and investment firms.
The agency likely will take further
action to address the conflicts of interest among the big credit-rating
agencies and to give shareholders a greater say in who sits on company
boards. A new investor advisory committee will be formed to gather
views from parties outside the traditional power corridors of Wall
Street and Washington, Schapiro said.
Asked about speculation that current
rules requiring banks to mark down assets could be suspended as a form
of relief in the financial crisis, Schapiro noted the SEC had recently
recommended the so-called ''mark-to-market'' accounting requirements be
retained with only possible revisions ''around the margins.''
The accounting standard requires
banks to carry assets, such as mortgage-backed securities, on their
books at how they are valued currently. Critics contend that has made
the financial crisis worse by forcing banks to slash the value of
assets depressed because of market conditions.
Schapiro announced separately Friday
that David Becker, who had been the SEC's general counsel from 2000 to
mid-2002, is returning to the agency in that position and as senior
policy director. Becker has been in private law practice.
Regulators on defensive over Madoff
DAY
By MARCY GORDON, AP Business
Writer
Posted on Jan 27, 4:39 PM EST
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Government and
industry regulators were put sharply on the defensive Tuesday at a
Senate hearing over their failure to uncover the more than a
decade-long, multibillion-dollar fraud scheme allegedly carried out
under their noses by Bernard Madoff.
With charities and residents in
their states ruined by losses from Madoff, members of the Senate
Banking Committee demanded answers and accountability. They were
scarcely satisfied with explanations given by two high-ranking
officials of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the interim CEO
of the securities industry's self-policing organization.
And they said the Madoff affair
clearly showed the need for an overhaul of the patchwork system
governing regulation of the financial markets - something the new
Congress appears to be moving toward.
"Madoff's fraud was so immense and
obvious, and took place over such a long period of time, it is simply
inexplicable how the SEC missed it," declared Sen. Charles Schumer,
D-N.Y. "It's as if there was a giant elephant standing next to the SEC
in a rather small room for 25 years, and the SEC never noticed the
elephant or even the smell of peanuts on its breath."
Schumer wants the SEC to get more
funding from Congress to hire 100 new enforcement staff members and to
move its inspections office from Washington headquarters to Wall Street.
The Banking Committee chairman, Sen.
Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., demanded of SEC Enforcement Director Linda
Thomsen and the other regulators, "What's happened here?"
"We want some action very quickly in
this area," Dodd told them, saying he spoke for the whole committee. He
asked the regulators to report to the committee every three months on
progress they were making in improving their processes for detecting
fraud.
Thomsen said the SEC is committed to
finding ways to bolster fraud detection after its breakdown in the
Madoff case. While the agency needs to improve its internal processes
for pursuing cases, she said the SEC also needs authority to regulate
parts of the financial system that escape oversight and more funding to
carry out more investigations.
"... If we had more resources, we
could clearly do more," Thomsen testified.
Thomsen faced grilling along with
Lori Richards, who heads the SEC's inspections division, and Stephen
Luparello, the interim chief executive of the Financial Industry
Regulatory Authority. FINRA, the industry regulator, was headed until
last month by Mary Schapiro, President Barack Obama's new SEC chairman.
Luparello was quick to say that
Madoff carried out the scheme through his investment business and
FINRA, the industry regulator, was empowered to inspect only the
brokerage operation. He also said the SEC didn't share with FINRA the
tips it received from outsiders on Madoff's operation.
The hearing provided a fresh volley
of criticism of the SEC over its failure to discover the $50 billion
Ponzi scheme allegedly run by Madoff, the prominent Wall Street figure
and money manager now fallen into disgrace - despite credible
allegations against him that were brought to the agency over the course
of a decade. Against the backdrop of the worst financial crisis since
the 1930s, the SEC also is accused of contributing to that disaster
with lax oversight of Wall Street and the markets.
Shortly before senators began
questioning the regulators on Capitol Hill, Schapiro was sworn in at
SEC headquarters. She pledged commitment "to reinvigorating a financial
regulatory system that must protect investors and vigorously enforce
the rules."
"We will work to deepen the SEC's
commitment to transparency, accountability and disclosure while always
keeping the needs and concerns of investors front and center," Schapiro
said.
Christopher Cox, then the SEC
chairman, last month pinned the blame on the agency's career staff for
the failure since at least 1999 to detect what Madoff was doing. He
ordered the SEC's inspector general, H. David Kotz, to determine what
went wrong. Kotz told a House hearing recently that he was expanding
the inquiry to examine the operations of the divisions led by Thomsen,
who has been the enforcement chief since mid-2005, and Richards, who
has held that position since mid-1995.
Kotz has also been examining the
relationship between a former SEC attorney, Eric Swanson, and Madoff's
niece, Shana, who are now married. As an SEC attorney, Swanson was part
of a team that examined Madoff's brokerage operation in 1999 and 2004.
Neither review resulted in any action against Madoff, a former chairman
of the Nasdaq Stock Market who was a member of SEC advisory committees.
Lawmakers say Madoff's alleged
fraud, which caused massive damage to investors large and small around
the world and may be the largest pyramid scam in history, reflects
deep, systemic problems at the SEC.
Six weeks after Madoff's arrest in
New York, thousands of victims who lost money investing with him have
been identified - including ordinary people and Hollywood celebrities -
as well as big hedge funds, international banks and charities in the
U.S., Europe and Asia.
S.E.C. Choice Is Sued Over
a
Merger of Regulators
NYTIMES
By STEPHEN LABATON
January 12, 2009
WASHINGTON — Mary L. Schapiro, who
appears this week at a confirmation hearing on her selection to head
the Securities and Exchange Commission, has been accused in two
lawsuits of making misleading statements to quickly complete a merger
of regulatory organizations that resulted in a 57 percent raise in her
pay.
The merger involved the regulatory
units of the New York Stock Exchange and the NASD two years ago. Ms.
Schapiro was then head of the NASD, and she spent months traveling the
country to persuade its 5,100 members to support it. The merger created
a new self-regulatory organization, the Financial Industry Regulatory
Authority, or Finra, where Ms. Schapiro is the chief executive. The
Securities and Exchange Commission relies on Finra to police Wall
Street.
Among the misstatements that she is
accused of making is that the Internal Revenue Service had prohibited
the NASD from paying each member more than $35,000 as part of the
merger deal. Although an NASD proxy statement issued while the deal was
pending said that the I.R.S. would not permit the organization to give
more compensation to members, the I.R.S. did not actually issue a
ruling on the matter until March 2007, long after the deal closed and
three months after the members voted to approve it.
Lawyers representing Ms. Schapiro,
Finra and other senior executives have fought vigorously to keep the
I.R.S. ruling — and court references to details of that ruling — under
seal. Last January, a federal judge in New York denied a request by The
New York Times to unseal the ruling and other documents in the case.
Ms. Schapiro’s lawyer has denied the
lawsuits’ allegations and, in a recent interview said that the second
suit, filed shortly after her selection, is an opportunistic effort to
pressure the defendants to settle. The first, dismissed by a federal
district judge in New York, is on appeal.
At the S.E.C., Ms. Schapiro would be
leading a government regulator that has been battered by setbacks,
including its failure to uncover the apparent long-running fraud at
Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. A recent report by the
S.E.C.’s own inspector general said the agency had failed to adequately
police the markets and regulate Wall Street’s largest investment banks.
Congressional critics have said that the S.E.C.’s shortcomings
contributed to the financial crisis.
The strongest proponents of the
merger that created Finra were the more than 200 firms that were
members of both the NASD and the New York Stock Exchange. The merger
significantly lowered their regulatory expenses, but many of the
smaller members were concerned about what benefits they might receive
from it.
In an effort to get enough votes
from the smaller firms, NASD offered each member $35,000, for a total
of about $178 million, and a smaller commitment to reduce future
assessments.
Executives said that amount was
derived from a calculation of efficiencies from the consolidation of
the organizations. NASD listed its total outstanding equity in an
annual report of more than $1.6 billion. NASD officials, including Ms.
Schapiro, said at the time that the organization could not make a
greater payment because the I.R.S. had opposed it because the NASD is a
nonprofit organization.
The lawsuits challenge that
assertion, saying that evidence that remains sealed undermines the
NASD’s description of the I.R.S. ruling. Also sealed is an independent
fairness opinion on the merger by the investment bank Houlihan Lokey
Howard and Zukin Financial Advisors.
“Our cases raise questions about the
transparency, truthfulness and candor of the NASD and its leadership in
a major financial transaction with its own members,” said Jonathan W.
Cuneo, the lead lawyer in both cases for the member firms. “It’s
certainly ironic that the case involves the NASD, which is charged with
policing those values in others.”
Defense lawyers said in court papers
and an interview that no material misrepresentations were made. They
assert that the top executives of the organization, as regulators, are
entitled to absolute immunity from lawsuits. They say that the members
of the NASD were not entitled to greater compensation because they do
not have the same rights as shareholders of a corporation.
“These lawsuits are meritless, and
the second suit is just a dressed-up version of the first one that was
rejected by a federal judge,” said F. Joseph Warin, a lawyer
representing Finra and Ms. Schapiro. “The lawyers are the same, and the
arguments are virtually identical. The second suit was filed days after
Ms. Schapiro was nominated to become chairman of the S.E.C. It looks to
me like a desperate effort to leverage Mary’s nomination to squeeze
money out of Finra before her confirmation vote — a last-second Hail
Mary pass.”
Mr. Cuneo said that the second
lawsuit was in the works long before the announcement of Ms. Schapiro’s
appointment and that its filing had nothing to do with her selection.
Herb Perone, a spokesman at Finra,
said that following the customary practice of presidential appointees,
Ms. Schapiro would not comment about the case while her confirmation
proceedings were pending. The Senate banking committee is to consider
her appointment on Thursday.
Lawyers involved in the proceeding
say they have not been asked about the lawsuits by either the Obama
transition team or the Senate banking committee.
An official at the Obama transition
said that the lawsuit had been examined during the vetting process and
that Ms. Schapiro would not have been selected if the lawsuit were
viewed as a problem.
Kate Szostak, a spokeswoman for the
Senate banking committee, said it would be examining Ms. Schapiro’s
record as a regulator, including Finra’s supervision of the Madoff firm
and her role in the merger of the NASD and the New York Stock Exchange.
Ms. Schapiro has extensive regulatory experience. She served for six
years as a commissioner at the S.E.C. before becoming chairwoman of the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 1994. She arrived at the NASD
in 1996 to be president of its regulatory arm.
Both lawsuits were filed as class
actions on behalf of most of the members of Finra. The first was filed
by Standard Investment Chartered. Federal District Judge Shirley Wohl
Kram of New York dismissed that suit a year later without addressing
the underlying allegations. Judge Kram’s dismissal has been appealed to
the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York.
A second lawsuit by Benchmark
Financial Services, was filed three weeks ago in federal district court
in New York. Benchmark was founded by Edward A. H. Siedle, a former
lawyer at the S.E.C. who investigates pension fraud and other financial
abuses. Mr. Siedle has been a plaintiff against other companies over
the years and sued the NASD in 2002 after it blocked him from
publishing a book about disciplinary proceedings against member firms.
“This case is about a corporate
transaction effectuated by deception,” the complaint in the latest case
said. “The officer defendants stood to gain substantially by the
transaction, in terms of enormously higher compensation and benefits,
vastly elevated prestige and powers resulting from the virtual monopoly
regulatory authority created by the transaction, and the higher degree
of control over the board of the consolidated entity.”
After the merger was completed, Ms.
Schapiro’s total compensation rose to more than $3.1 million, from
almost $2 million. The pay package, while not outsize by Wall Street
standards, is large for a nonprofit organization. Other top executives
at the new entity received pay increases of around 20 percent after the
merger was completed.
SEC's Enforcement
Accountant to
Leave Next Month
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:01 p.m. ET
December 30, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The top
accountant in the Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement
branch is leaving for a private sector job next month, in what could
herald a wave of departures from the embattled agency.
The SEC said Tuesday that Susan
Markel, chief accountant in the agency's division of enforcement, is
taking a job in the corporate investigations practice of AlixPartners
LLP, a turnaround consulting firm. Her departure comes as President-elect
Barack Obama's SEC chairman-designate, Mary Schapiro, is likely to face
tremendous pressure to bring sweeping changes to the agency, said James
Cox, a Duke University law professor and securities law expert.
The SEC has come under fire for
failing to detect signs that major Wall Street firms were in trouble.
It also has been criticized for ignoring allegations brought to SEC
staff about Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff's businesses.
Madoff has been accused of engaging in a massive fraud that may end up
costing investors $50 billion.
With the SEC under intense scrutiny
from the incoming administration and lawmakers a Capitol Hill, more
high-level staff changes could be in the works, Cox said. For current staffers, it is often better
''to leave on your own accord than to face the awkwardness of being
asked to leave,'' he said.
Markel has been at the SEC since
1994, working on the agency's inquiries into Xerox Corp., Cendant,
WorldCom and Cardinal Health Inc.
Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of
the SEC's Division of Enforcement, praised Markel saying in a statement
that ''her instincts are superb and her investigative abilities are
unparalleled''
Obama has promised a tougher
regulatory and enforcement approach after he takes office on Jan. 20.
''Instead of appointing people with
disdain for regulation, I will ensure that our regulatory agencies are
led by individuals who are ready and willing to enforce the law,''
Obama said earlier this month.
Meanwhile, the SEC also said Tuesday
it obtained a court order to halt an alleged Ponzi scheme that
collected more than $23 million from Haitian-American investors. The SEC said investors in the scheme were
promised a 100 percent return on their investments within 90 days. In
reality, the Florida-based operator of the alleged fraud had lost at
least $18 million over the past year and siphoned off at least $3.8
million for personal use, the SEC said in court documents.
Daniel
Sutherland for The New York Times
In Nantucket, Mass., sits one of Frank
Avellino’s homes. His dealings with Bernard L. Madoff, which began
decades ago, are drawing scrutiny in the wake of the government’s
Madoff investigation.
’92 Ponzi Case Missed Signals About Madoff
NYTIMES
By ALEX BERENSON
January 17,
2009
Seventeen years ago, federal
investigators questioned for the first time whether Bernard L. Madoff
was connected to a Ponzi scheme. Their inquiry centered on Frank
Avellino, an accountant who had been funneling investors to Mr. Madoff
since the 1960s. The
investigators did not get far. Within days, Mr. Avellino agreed to
return to investors the money he and his partner had raised and to pay
a small fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The inquiry
petered out, and Mr. Avellino — represented in the case by Ira Lee
Sorkin, the same lawyer who now represents Mr. Madoff — kept sending
money to Mr. Madoff...full story here.
Obama Names Regulator
Schapiro to
Lead SEC
By REUTERS
Filed at 10:53 a.m. ET
December 18, 2008
CHICAGO (Reuters) - President-elect
Barack Obama on Thursday named longtime financial industry regulator
Mary Schapiro to head the Securities and Exchange Commission amid calls
for reform of the agency in the wake of a massive investment fraud
scandal.
Obama also named Georgetown
University law professor Daniel Tarullo to fill one of two vacancies on
the seven-seat Federal Reserve Board, which is battling to ease a
credit crisis and fend off a deepening recession.
And he picked former Treasury
official Gary Gensler to head the Commodities Futures Trading
Commission, which regulates the U.S. commodity futures and options
market.
N E W A D M I N I S T R A T I O N N E W S
District Welcomes Obama as One of the Capital’s Own
NYTIMES
By IAN URBINA
January 3, 2009
WASHINGTON — Presidents come
and go from this city. Hosting inaugurations is nothing new. But for
residents here, over 92 percent of whom voted for President-elect
Barack Obama, his inauguration this month is special. The day ushers in hopes and expectations
for a president who speaks to local residents and brings with it the
excitement of a predominantly black city welcoming the nation’s first
black president. With
the inauguration scheduled for the day after the Martin Luther King Jr.
holiday weekend, the timing also strikes a chord for a city that was
racked by riots after Dr. King’s assassination.
“For D.C., this inauguration is less
like hosting a visiting official and more like throwing a homecoming
party for a family member,” said Ronald Walters, professor of
government and politics at the University of Maryland.
He added that normally, the
inauguration is an exclusive black-tie affair. “This time,” he said,
“it feels like the city has taken ownership of what is becoming a
people’s party.”
At Ben’s Chili Bowl, one of the
city’s oldest and most famous restaurants, the inauguration offers a
certain historical reconciliation.
“It took about 40 years,” said Kamal
Ali, the owner and son of the restaurant’s founder, Ben Ali. “But in
terms of race relations, the celebration that day will bring this
neighborhood, this city, full circle.”
In April 1968, four days of race
riots after the King assassination left 12 people dead here. Huge
swaths of what was then called Black Broadway for its concentration of
black-owned clubs and theaters were destroyed. Ben’s Chili Bowl was one
of the only restaurants along U Street that was not burned or ransacked.
“What happened here along U Street
on election night when Obama won was the exact inverse of those race
riots,” said Mr. Ali, recounting how on Nov. 4 the streets filled with
racially diverse crowds who were initially kept out of traffic by a
large and somewhat jittery police force. Eventually, the police opted
to close down the area and let the partiers celebrate freely, he
said. Across the
Anacostia River, in one of the city’s poorest sections, Thomas Thorton,
82, sat waiting for a bus.
“For us, for this side of the river,
the inauguration is personal,” he said, standing in front of the
hilltop Washington View Apartments, not far from the home of the
abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
Mr. Obama’s message of renewed
possibility resonates in Washington, he said, because this city, like
few others, embodies extremes within inner-city and black
America. Washington
has some of the highest incarceration and infant mortality rates in the
country, yet it also has one of the largest populations of
college-educated and upper-income African- Americans of any large city.
“It’s one day when all the folks in
this city really can really come together and share something,” Mr.
Thorton said of the inauguration. “We can think about how much has
changed.”
Washington’s mayor, Adrian M. Fenty,
reflects that change. In
choosing Mr. Fenty two years ago, residents here bucked the candidate
selected by the party machine and opted instead for a younger, more
liberal bi-racial candidate who relied on a populist message and a
massive grass-roots effort to straddle the city’s racial and class
divides.
“Voters are not looking for
categories,” said Mr. Fenty, who, like Mr. Obama, is the child of a
black father and a white mother. “They’re looking for results.”
Mr. Fenty added that the city was
especially hopeful that Mr. Obama would help deliver voting rights for
the city’s nearly 600,000 residents, who have no voting representation
in Congress. More than
any prior presidential candidate, Mr. Obama has supported changing
that, and with a Democratic majority in Congress, there is a real
chance the city could win those rights. Mr. Fenty said that early in Mr. Obama’s
candidacy, he told Mr. Obama that he wanted to support him but that
voting rights was one issue Mr. Obama needed to get firmly behind.
“He promised he would,” Mr. Fenty
said.
In an early test of Mr. Obama’s
commitment to follow through on that promise, the City Council last
month sent him a letter asking him to put district license plates that
bear the phrase “Taxation Without Representation” on the presidential
motorcade. President Bill
Clinton used the plates. President Bush did not, opting for different
district plates without the phrase. Asked if she thought this inauguration
would be different than previous ones, Alice Mukabane, the co-owner of
Safari DC, a Kenyan restaurant on Georgia Avenue, laughed.
“Of course, and not because of
race,” she said.
Behind her a collection of posters
and photographs of Barack and Michelle Obama hung on a wall in an area
she calls the “Obama Corner.”
“Obama came from a home with just
one parent,” Ms. Mukabane said. “He worked as a community organizer. He
has ties to inner-city Chicago. He can relate to real people like those
who live here.”
Like so many tourists, foreign
dignitaries and Capitol Hill staffers, presidents are transients here.
To them, the city consists only of an eight-block radius around the
White House. Beyond that is hostile territory. The hope among residents, however, is
that Mr. Obama, already at ease in big cities from his years in
Chicago, will get out more than Mr. Bush, who rarely ventured beyond
official Washington.
“This city considers Obama as one of
our own, and I think that will show on inauguration,” Ms. Mukabane
said. “But after the inauguration, we’re also hoping he will see the
city as his own.”
From the ceiling of her restaurant
hung a large white banner filled with well-wishes written by customers.
Four squares remained empty,
reserved for the first family’s signatures.
Aretha Franklin to Participate in
Inaugural Ceremony
NYTIMES
By Katharine Q. Seelye
December 17, 2008, 1:02 pm
Aretha Franklin and Dr. Rick Warren,
an evangelical minister of the Saddleback Church, are among the select
group of people who will participate in Barack Obama’s inaugural
swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 20.
Mr. Obama has also chosen Elizabeth
Alexander, an African-American poet at Yale University, and some of the
world’s premier musicians, including Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma, to
share the podium with him.
In honoring the civil rights
movement, Mr. Obama has asked the Rev. Dr. Joseph E. Lowery, dean of
the civil rights movement and co-founder with the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to
deliver the benediction.
The inaugural program, which begins
about 10 a.m. on the West Front of the Capitol, is an historic ritual
that is both an intensely personal statement by the new president and a
way for him to set the tone of his new administration.
The program was announced today by
the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, chaired by
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California.
The program opens with musical
selections by the United States Marine Band, followed by the San
Francisco Boys Chorus and the San Francisco Girls Chorus. Ms. Feinstein
will call the gathering to order about 11:30 and deliver opening
remarks.
Dr. Warren, author of “The Purpose
Driven Life,” will deliver the invocation. He will be followed by
Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, who sang “Someday We’ll All Be
Free” and “Respect” at a concert for Bill Clinton in 1993, but not at
the inaugural ceremony.
Justice John Paul Stevens will then
administer the oath of office to Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden,
Jr.
John Williams, the composer whose
music was heard at Mr. Obama’s victory party on election night in Grant
Park, will compose a new piece to be played for the incoming president.
His new piece will be played by Mr.
Perlman on violin, Mr. Ma on cello, Gabriela Montero on piano and
Anthony McGill on clarinet. (Usually at this juncture in previous
inaugurations an operatic soloist performs.)
Chief Justice John G. Roberts will
administer the oath of office will then be administered to
President-elect Obama.
At that point, Mr. Obama will
deliver his inaugural address.
He will be followed by Ms.
Alexander, who will read a poem, and Dr. Lowery’s benediction...
The ceremony will close with
the United States Navy Band “Sea Chanters” singing the National
Anthem...
Every
four year
the
government issues this report (for the incoming President...)
COMING SOON...CLICK ON WHITE HOUSE
(immediately below) to hear brief statement about prospects for
"change." Presidents do lunch (below, right).
Is this related?
Obama Team Urges Delay in Digital TV
Transition
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:51 p.m. ET
January 8, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) --
President-elect Barack Obama is urging
Congress to postpone the Feb. 17 switch from analog to digital
television broadcasting.
In a letter to key lawmakers, transition team co-chair John Podesta
warned Thursday that too many Americans who rely on analog TV sets to
pick up over-the-air broadcasts won't be ready.
The incoming administration is pushing for a delay in part because the
Commerce Department has run out of money for the coupons that subsidize
digital TV converter boxes for consumers. People who don't have cable
or satellite TV or a new TV with a digital tuner will need the
converter boxes to keep their analog TVs working.
Obama officials are also concerned that the government is not giving
consumers enough help with the TV transition.
Presidents Past,
Present and Future
By The New York Times
January
7, 2009, 12:31 pm
President-elect Barack Obama met in the Oval Office today with
President Bush and three former occupants of the White House: former
Presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter.
Mr. Obama called the meeting an “extraordinary gathering” and thanked
President Bush for hosting the group.
“All the gentlemen here understand both the pressures and possibilities
of this office, and for me to have the opportunity to get advice, good
counsel and fellowship with these individuals is extraordinary and I’m
very grateful to all of them. But again thank you, Mr. President, for
hosting.”
This is it
now for me...so President Obama would like to do what about this
kind of "boot"? How about our image in non-Muslim world?
Obama wants to 'reboot America's image'
DAY
By JENNIFER LOVEN, AP White House Correspondent
Posted on Dec 10, 11:45 AM EST
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President-elect Barack Obama says he will try to
"reboot America's image" among the world's Muslims and will follow
tradition by using his entire name - Barack Hussein Obama - in his
swearing-in ceremony.
The U.S. image globally has taken a deep hit during President George W.
Bush's two terms in office, primarily because of opposition to the
U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, harsh interrogation of prisoners, the
indefinite detention of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and
mistreatment of inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Obama promised during his campaign that one of his top priorities would
be to work to repair America's reputation worldwide, and that one
element of that effort would be a speech delivered in a Muslim capital.
He pledged anew to give such a speech, though he declined to say
whether it would happen during his first year in office.
"It's something I intend to follow through on," Obama said in an
interview published Wednesday in the Chicago Tribune and the Los
Angeles Times. "We've got a unique opportunity to reboot America's
image around the world and also in the Muslim world in particular. So
we need to take advantage of that."
Obama said his message would be twofold: that his administration will
be unyielding in stamping out terrorist extremism but also "unrelenting
in our desire to create a relationship of mutual respect and
partnership with countries."
"I think the world is ready for that message," he said in the
interview, conducted Tuesday.
During the campaign, Obama repeatedly faced questions about whether he
is a Muslim, particularly in whisper campaigns that noted his middle
name, that his father is Kenyan, and that he lived for a time as a
child in Indonesia. Obama is a practicing Christian.
Asked if he would drop his middle name during his inauguration on Jan.
20, the president-elect said he would not.
"The tradition is that they use all three names and I will follow the
tradition, not trying to make a statement on way or another," he said.
Obama also talked about the spiritual support he sought during his
White House bid, particularly since he and his family left Chicago's
Trinity United Church of Christ after inflammatory comments by its
pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, became a campaign issue.
Obama said he set up a "sort of prayer circle across the country" of
pastors who would pray for him every morning on a conference call.
Obama said he sometimes joined the call, which involved leaders from
various Christian denominations and other religious faiths.
"I'm not even sure that all of them voted for me," Obama said. "But
they were willing to pray for me, and that's something that was
wonderful."
On other topics:
-Obama would not put a timetable on issues important to organized
labor, what he called his promise to "put an end to the kinds of
barriers and roadblocks that are in the way of workers legitimately
coming together in order to form a union and bargain collectively."
Among other things, he has promised support for a card-check system for
unions trying to organize a new workplace and for adding labor and
environmental protections to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
"I don't want to anticipate right now what sequences will be on these
issues," Obama said.
-The man about to be the nation's first black president said he will
make enforcing civil rights laws and making the criminal justice system
color-blind top priorities for his administration. The Justice
Department's Civil Rights Division "over the last eight years has had a
lot of problems and really declining morale," he said.
-Obama said he, his wife Michelle and their two young daughters will
make frequent visits during his presidency back to their home in
Chicago, perhaps as often as every six weeks. "My Kennebunkport is on
the South Side of Chicago," he said. "Our friends are here. Our family
is here. And so we are going to try to come back here as often as
possible."
Obama Unveils Team to
Tackle ‘Historic’ Crisis
NYTIMES
By JEFF ZELENY
November
25, 2008
CHICAGO — With the financial crisis
looming as a priority of his term, President-elect Barack Obama sought
to put his imprint on efforts to stem the turmoil as he introduced his
economic team on Monday, nominating Timothy F. Geithner as Treasury
secretary and Lawrence H. Summers to head the White House Economic
Council.
By naming a team deeply experienced
in dealing with financial crises — Mr. Geithner was heavily involved
over the weekend in the efforts to stabilize Citigroup — Mr. Obama
underscored his determination to assure Americans and foreign investors
that he would aggressively step into a leadership vacuum in Washington
during the transition.
Moreover, by pledging that his
economic team would begin work “today” on recommendations to help
middle-class families as well as the financial markets, the
president-elect sought to convey an impression of continuity and
coordination, so that his administration can “hit the ground running.”
The president-elect also announced
that he had chosen Christina D. Romer to head his Council of Economic
Advisers and Melody Barnes as director of his White House Domestic
Policy Council. Ms. Romer is an economics professor at the University
of California, Berkeley, while Ms. Barnes is a longtime aide to Senator
Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.
The recent economic news, capped by
the Citigroup effort, “has made it even more clear that we are facing
an economic crisis of historic proportions,” Mr. Obama said at a news
conference. He listed the drop in new home purchases, the surge in
unemployment claims to an 18-year high and the likelihood of up to a
million further job losses in the coming year.
“While we can’t underestimate the
challenges we face,” he said, “we also can’t underestimate our capacity
to overcome them to summon that spirit of determination and optimism
that has always defined us, and move forward in a new direction to
create new jobs, reform our financial system and fuel long-term
economic growth.”
Responding to questions, Mr. Obama
said that the struggling automobile industry could not be allowed
“simply to vanish,” but that the companies should not get “a blank
check” from taxpayers. And he said he was surprised that the auto
companies’ chief executives were not better prepared with specific
recovery proposals in their appearances last week on Capitol Hill. He
also all but promised that the tax cuts pushed through Congress by
President Bush would be repealed, or at least not renewed when they are
scheduled to expire in 2010.
In an effort to inject confidence
into the quavering financial markets, Mr. Obama made certain that his
first formal cabinet announcement dealt with the economy, not, as is
often the case, with national security or diplomacy.
In announcing the nominations of Mr.
Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, and Mr.
Summers, a Harvard economist, Mr. Obama sent a signal that he was set
to pursue aggressive, yet centrist policies, in devising moves to help
jump-start the economy. He stretched his economic announcement into a
two-day affair, planning another news conference on Tuesday to present
the rest of his team.
The televised news conference, which
came shortly after President Bush made brief remarks at the Treasury
Department with Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., created a stark image
of the transfer of power that is under way in Washington. Mr. Obama and
his new team arrived in a room of dozens of reporters, while Mr. Bush
stood nearly alone on the steps of the Treasury Department.
“This is a tough situation for
America,” Mr. Bush said, adding that he had spoken to Mr. Paulson by
phone Sunday while returning from an economic summit meeting in Peru.
He said that he would keep Mr. Obama and his team informed of any major
decisions, and added that Mr. Paulson was working in “close
cooperation” with the Obama team.
Mr. Bush spoke to Mr. Obama on
Monday about the rescue plan for Citigroup. Mr. Obama said he had also
spoken Monday to Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
“The truth is, we do not have a
minute to waste,” Mr. Obama said. “These extraordinary stresses on our
financial system require extraordinary policy responses.”
But he also sought to emphasize the
sort of continuity that the markets can find comforting, vowing to
“honor the public commitments made by the current administration.” He
said his economic team would consult regularly with Congress and the
current administration during the transition. Earlier in the day he
spoke to President Bush about Citigroup.
Mr. Geithner worked through the
weekend on the plan to stabilize Citigroup. Earlier, he was deeply
involved in the bailout of American International Group. So he is
intimately familiar with the developing crisis — and the controversial
efforts so far to stanch it.
Mr. Obama has said repeatedly that
there is “only one president at a time,” but the markets’ apparent
concerns at the specter of a do-nothing transition — with neither
President Bush nor Mr. Obama seeming to aggressively steer recovery
efforts — has forced him into a more active role.
The Dow Jones industrial average
soared Friday by nearly 500 points on word of the Geithner appointment
and markets were up again by more than 200 points at midday Monday.
Obama Proposes New Economic Stimulus
Plan
NYTIMES
By JEFF ZELENY
November 23, 2008
CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama on Saturday proposed an economic
recovery plan designed to create or salvage 2.5 million jobs over the
next two years, calling for “a plan big enough to meet the challenges
we face.”
Mr. Obama, speaking in the weekly Democratic radio address, said he had
directed his advisers to put together a two-year stimulus plan intended
to jumpstart the economy and ease the financial crisis in the United
States. The plan is larger than any initiatives he proposed during the
presidential campaign.
“There are no quick or easy fixes to this crisis, which has been many
years in the making, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets
better,” Mr. Obama said. “But January 20th is our chance to begin anew,
with a new direction, new ideas, and new reforms that will create jobs
and fuel long-term economic growth.”
Mr. Obama said he would outline specific details of the proposal in the
coming weeks, offering only a broad sketch of the plan on Saturday. He
said the two-year effort would put Americans back to work through
infrastructure and energy projects.
“These aren’t just steps to pull ourselves out of this immediate
crisis, these are the long-term investments in our economic future that
have been ignored for far too long,” Mr. Obama said. “And they
represent an early down payment on the type of reform my administration
will bring to Washington.”
For the second week in a row, Mr. Obama also recorded the radio address
on video, which will be placed on YouTube to increase the audience.
When he is sworn into office, he also intends to distribute his weekly
radio address on the Internet. In the address, Mr. Obama praised
Congress for passing a provision to extend unemployment benefits, but
said an economic stimulus plan was urgently needed and would be among
the first orders of business when he becomes president.
“I know that passing this plan won’t be easy,” Mr. Obama said. “I will
need and seek support from Republicans and Democrats, and I’ll be
welcome to ideas and suggestions from both sides of the aisle.”
The message from the president-elect was, in effect, competing with
President Bush’s weekly radio address, yet their approaches were
different. Mr. Obama did not mention the controversial proposal
to rescue the auto industry. Mr. Bush, who is traveling in Peru, made
that the centerpiece of his message and criticized Democratic leaders
for adjourning without reaching agreement.
“If the automakers are willing to make the hard decisions needed to
become viable, they should be able to receive the funds Congress
already allotted to them for other purposes,” Mr. Bush said. “This is a
critical issue for our economy and our country.”
TEAM (S) OBAMA:
Our question -
with this concept, where does the telephone booth Superman always used
come in?
Captain of
each of the teams is President-Elect Obama? Do responsibilities
cross over departments by "dotted line" depending on the crisis or
issue...then what?
IN-THE-IN
BETWEEN-MONTHS...PLANNED-NEXT-CABINET:
Photo
gallary from
Hartford Courant; (?) = name mentioned in NYTIMES
AGRICULTURE - ATTORNEY
GENERAL
-
COMMERCE -
DEFENSE -
EDUCATION - ENERGY
- HEALTH
AND HUMAN SERVICES - HOUSING
- INTERIOR - LABOR
- STATE -
TRANSPORTATION - TREASURY
- VETERANS' AFFAIRS - HOMELAND
SECURITY;
REST OF THE TEAM: CHIEF
OF STAFF
- UNITED
NATIONS REPRESENTATIVE
- TRADE
REPRESENTATIVE - OFFICE
OF
MANAGEMENT AND THE BUDGET - ENVIRONMENTAL
PROTECTION AGENCY - NASA - FCC
- DRUG CONTROL
Agriculture
Jim McGovern of Massachusetts(?) - nope.
Former Governor Tom Vilsack
Agriculture Dept. Nominee to Push Food for Poor
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:01 a.m. ET
January 14, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President-elect Barack Obama's nominee for secretary
of agriculture said Wednesday that if he is confirmed he will work to
boost the economies of farm communities, promote nutritious foods and
help poor families put meals on the table.
Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who has won wide support from farm groups
and farm-state members of Congress, told the panel that the Agriculture
Department faces ''historic challenges,'' mostly brought on by economic
woes.
''Farmers and ranchers experience volatile markets while credit
tightens,'' Vilsack said. ''Small towns and rural communities continue
to lose people and jobs while critical infrastructure crumbles. These
towns and communities find it increasingly difficult to keep pace with
the ever-changing national and global economy.''
If confirmed, Vilsack would oversee the nation's nutrition programs,
including food stamps, which make up a large part of the department's
budget. Those programs are facing increased need in recent months as
the economy has stumbled.
Despite problems in rural communities, the agricultural sector has
fared better than many industries in recent years as the demand for
renewable fuels has helped fuel record crop prices. But those prices
have dropped in recent months.
''All of these are serious challenges that require a compelling new
vision for the department,'' Vilsack said.
The farm-friendly panel has had few qualms with Vilsack, who was chief
executive of one of the country's largest crop-producing states for
eight years. The Democratic chairman of the panel is Iowa Sen. Tom
Harkin, one of Vilsack's biggest supporters.
Vilsack has been friendly with corporate agriculture and was a
mainstream choice for the post. But his nomination disappointed some
activists who would like to overhaul the way the government's
agricultural programs are run.
One of Vilsack's first priorities as secretary would likely be putting
a $290 billion farm bill, enacted last year, into place. President
George W. Bush, backed by fiscal conservatives, said the bill was
wasteful and too costly. He vetoed the bill but Congress, with Obama's
support, overrode the veto.
Vilsack has been a champion of corn-based ethanol, a central part of
his short-lived campaign for president in 2007, and endorsed tax breaks
for the ethanol industry. Renewable fuels policy, along with subsidies
for that industry, is expected to be a top issue for the incoming
secretary.
The former governor also made an overture to a growing number of food
groups that have pushed for government support of more locally grown,
environmentally friendly and nutritious foods, saying he will seek to
work ''with those who seek programs and practices that lead to more
nutritious food produced in a sustainable way.''
Vilsack is expected to push Obama's pledge to trim some wasteful farm
subsidies, a position that Harkin and many other Midwestern members
have endorsed. Southern lawmakers have long blocked lowering subsidy
limits, however, as Southern rice and cotton crops require more
investment.
The top Republican on the panel, Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, has
said he hopes that Vilsack will listen to concerns from all parts of
the country in his tenure at Agriculture but has otherwise voiced no
objections to his nomination, saying at the hearing that he hopes it
moves quickly.
Obama
picks Vilsack, Salazar for Cabinet
DAY
Posted on Dec 17, 6:37 AM EST
CHICAGO (AP) -- Barack
Obama is on a pre-holiday roll to fill his Cabinet, with two more
nominations in former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack for agriculture secretary
and Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar to lead the Interior Department.
Obama was appearing with his latest picks Wednesday, his third
news conference in as many days to announce Cabinet appointments.
Transition officials said more announcements were likely this week,
before Obama planned to head to Hawaii for Christmas vacation with his
family.
Democratic officials familiar with the selection process
discussed Obama's plans with The Associated Press, speaking on
condition of anonymity because a formal announcement had not yet been
made.
Vilsack will be the fourth former opponent of Obama in the
campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination to join his
administration. Others include Vice President-elect Joe Biden, Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has been tapped for secretary of state, and
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, selected to head the Commerce
Department.
Vilsack announced his presidential candidacy in late 2006,
positioning himself as a Washington outsider with heartland appeal, but
he dropped out before the primaries because he had trouble raising
money. He endorsed Clinton and campaigned actively for her in the long
primary campaign against Obama. After Obama defeated Clinton, Vilsack
endorsed him.
First elected governor in 1998, Vilsack, 58, carved out a
reputation as a political centrist. He balanced Iowa's budget and
resisted raising taxes, but was willing to spend on such priorities as
education and health. He argued that pushing alternative energy sources
was key to bolstering rural sections of the nation that are struggling
economically and with vanishing populations.
Salazar will head a department that oversees oil and gas
drilling on public lands and manages the nation's parks and wildlife
refuges. Salazar is expected to try to balance the protection of
natural resources while tapping the nation's energy potential - an
approach Obama has said he wants.
Salazar co-sponsored a bill in Congress to create a new land
conservation system under the Interior Department's Bureau of Land
Management for permanently protecting 26 million acres of national
monuments, wilderness areas and wild and scenic rivers. The legislation
died during the lame-duck session of Congress after the November
election.
The Colorado senator opposed drilling in Alaska's Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge and objected to the Bush administration's
efforts to lease Western lands for oil shale development. It will be up
to the Obama administration whether to go ahead with leasing.
If Salazar is confirmed as interior secretary, Colorado Gov.
Bill Ritter, a Democrat, will name a replacement to serve out the final
two years of Salazar's term. Before being elected to the Senate in
2004, Salazar was Colorado's attorney general. He also headed the
state's Natural Resources Department from 1990-1994.
Attorney
General
Eric Holder, 2nd at Justice during Clinton Administration
U.S.
Is a ‘Nation of Cowards’ on Race, Says Holder
NYTIMES
By Bernie Becker
February 18, 2009, 2:03 pm
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told Justice Department employees
that “this nation has still not come to grips with its racial past.”
In a speech marking Black History Month, Attorney General Eric H.
Holder Jr. on Wednesday labeled the United States “essentially a nation
of cowards” when it comes to race relations.
Mr. Holder, the first black attorney general, told Justice Department
employees that “this nation has still not come to grips with its racial
past” and suggested Black History Month could be used to spark more
candid discussion of racial issues.
“This will be, at first, a process that is both awkward and painful,
but the rewards are, I believe, potentially great,” Mr. Holder said.
“The alternative is to allow to continue the polite, restrained mixing
that now passes as meaningful interaction but that in reality
accomplishes very little.”
Mr. Holder noted that increased dialogue would help advance what should
be “nuanced, principled and spirited” debate on topics such as
affirmative action.
Holder
Sworn In as Attorney General
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:33 a.m. ET
February 3, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Eric Holder, sworn in Tuesday as attorney general,
promised a clean break with the past policies of the Bush
administration, saying the Justice Department will be ''no place for
political favoritism.''
''I am determined to ensure that this shall be a new day for the
dedicated career professionals that I am so honored to call my
colleagues,'' Holder told various employees and dignitaries gathered
for the ceremony. He said he was committed to remaking the department
''into what it once was and what is always should be.''
Vice President Joe Biden administered the oath to President Barack
Obama's pick for the nation's top law enforcement officer, the first
African-American to hold the post.
Biden said the department, under Holder, would return to a past
standard of ''no politics, no ideology. Only a clear assessment of
facts and law.''
Hundreds of department employees packed the hallways and stairways to
welcome Holder. To loud cheers and applause, he pledged to remake the
department by ''taking it back to what it once was and always has to
be.''
Holder was confirmed Monday evening by a 75-21 Senate vote, with all
the opposition coming from Republicans.
Holder takes over a department wracked by Bush administration scandals
over politically motivated hirings and firings. He has pledged to
restore its reputation.
For starters, the new attorney general will learn the secrets of the
Office of Legal Counsel, whose lawyers justified the use of
controversial interrogation tactics and even declined to provide Bush
administration documents to internal Justice Department investigators.
Holder also will play a major role in the future of terrorism detainees.
Obama, in a major policy shift, signed an executive order to close the
U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. He also
created a special task force to review detainee policy; Holder and
Defense Secretary Robert Gates will serve as co-chairs.
That panel will look at options for apprehension, detention, trial,
transfer or release of detainees and report to the president within 180
days.
Holder promised senators he would review why career prosecutors in
Washington decided not to prosecute the former head of the department's
Civil Rights Division. An inspector general's report last month found
that Bradley Schlozman, the former head of the division, misled
lawmakers about whether he politicized hiring decisions.
Another key question facing Holder is whether to reverse former
President George W. Bush's order that three of his former top aides --
Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten -- should not testify before
Congress about firings of U.S. attorneys. Rove and Miers were former
aides when Bush gave his order.
If Obama reverses Bush's policy, it would create a new legal issue:
whether a former president's order against testifying would still be
valid.
The Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program is certain
to come under Holder's scrutiny.
After a lengthy and heated debate that pitted privacy and civil
liberties concerns against the desire to prevent terrorist attacks,
Congress last year eased the rules under which the government could
wiretap American phone and computer lines to listen for terrorists and
spies.
Holder promised one senator that he would re-examine a ruling by former
Attorney General Michael Mukasey that immigrants facing deportation do
not have a right to government-provided lawyers. Holder said he
understands the desire to expedite immigration court proceedings, but
added that the Constitution also requires that proceedings be fair.
Holder's chief supporter, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the
confirmation was a fulfillment of Martin Luther King's dream that
everyone would be judged by the content of their character.
''Come on the right side of history,'' said Leahy, chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee.
A
Public Servant’s Private Stint Clouds His Cabinet Prospects
NYTIMES
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
January 11, 2009
WASHINGTON — Chiquita was facing the prospect of federal
charges for paying protection money to Colombian terrorists to
safeguard its banana crops, and the company needed help. It turned to
Eric Holder, an elite Washington lawyer well versed in the ways of the
Justice Department.
“We were in an extraordinarily difficult position,” James E. Thompson,
the general counsel for Chiquita, recalled in an interview. As a former
prosecutor, Mr. Holder “carries a level of credibility with him, and
that’s a valuable commodity,” he said.
Mr. Holder, now President-elect Barack Obama’s pick for attorney
general, made his name publicly during a quarter-century in government
service, first as a corruption prosecutor, then as a judge, and finally
as the second-ranking official in the Clinton Justice Department. But
it is as a power lawyer in Washington over the last eight years —
billing up to a reported $1,000 an hour as a partner at the blue-chip
firm of Covington & Burling — that Mr. Holder, 57, has made his
wealth, as well as a reputation as a legal fixer for clients in crisis.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is to begin confirmation hearings on Mr.
Holder on Thursday and if he is confirmed he will take over at the
Justice Department with perhaps the most extensive private practice of
any attorney general in modern times. Colleagues and admirers see his
impressive range of work as a sign of a lawyer who has seen the law
from all sides. But some Republicans plan to press Mr. Holder
about what they view as the potential conflicts of interest posed by
his client list and how he would go about deciding whether to bow out
of issues that come before him involving past clients, staff members
said. Others question how his corporate ties will affect his work at
the Justice Department.
“We’ve had eight years of an administration that turned a blind eye to
corporate criminals,” said Terry Collingworth, a Washington lawyer who
is suing Chiquita over the Colombian protection money and is facing Mr.
Holder in the case. “We need someone with his level of experience and
cachet to clean up the Justice Department. Yet I do have a concern and
I sure hope that he doesn’t carry over his corporate defense practice
into his approach to the job and how he handles these types of cases.”
When the National Football League was facing a legal and
public-relations disaster in 2007 over a dogfighting scandal involving
the Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, it turned to Mr. Holder to help
navigate the maelstrom and represent the league. The pharmaceutical
giant Merck, tapped him as its lawyer in a Medicaid overbilling case
that ended in a $671 million civil settlement. And Rod R. Blagojevich,
the now-impeached governor of Illinois, picked him, albeit briefly, to
investigate a controversy over a casino development and possible ties
to organized crime.
Already, Mr. Holder’s brief association with Mr. Blagojevich has drawn
scrutiny from Republicans, who are waging a more spirited campaign
against Mr. Holder’s nomination than many had anticipated. Until now,
most of the scrutiny has focused on controversies during the nominee’s
time as deputy attorney general at the end of the Clinton
administration, particularly his role in the pardon of the fugitive
financier Marc Rich.
Link
to a
story we saved from the Wall Street Journal from 2001...do folks
remember things
exactly the way they saw them in 2001?
In responding to written questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee,
Mr. Holder made no mention of a 2004 announcement in which Mr.
Blagojevich introduced him as a “special investigator” under a $300,000
contract with the state.
The appointment fell through, and Mr. Holder’s aides said his failure
to mention the episode had been an oversight that was soon corrected.
But some Republicans said they were troubled by the omission. Three
Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee — Tom Coburn of
Oklahoma, John Cornyn of Texas and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa — sent
the governor’s office a Freedom of Information Act request last week
seeking documents on the aborted agreement.
Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the
Judiciary Committee, sharply questioned Mr. Holder’s character and
political independence in a speech last week on the Senate floor. Mr.
Specter told reporters Friday that he wanted to see more information
about Mr. Holder’s private practice, to assess whether he was up to the
job of attorney general.
“Covington & Burling is a very prominent, prestigious firm,” Mr.
Specter said. He said Republican investigators had not yet found
anything untoward in Mr. Holder’s private practice, but added, “We’re
looking through all his records.”
Mr. Holder’s record in private practice has received much less
attention than his earlier work at the Justice Department, particularly
his role in Mr. Clinton’s 2001 pardon of Mr. Rich. Mr. Holder is being
scrutinized as well over his role in other Clinton-era controversies,
including clemency granted by Mr. Clinton for 16 members of a militant
Puerto Rican nationalist group and the Justice Department’s refusal to
appoint an independent counsel to examine possible campaign finance
abuses by the White House.
With Senate Republicans challenging Mr. Holder’s nomination, a string
of well-known lawyers from both parties have come to his defense with
testimonials in recent days, citing both his record at the Justice
Department and in private practice as evidence of his strong
qualifications. In a letter of support to the Judiciary Committee last
Wednesday Louis J. Freeh, who was director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation before becoming general counsel of MBNA America Bank,
told of hiring Mr. Holder as the trial counsel on a complicated case
that he won for Mr. Freeh’s company.
“I could have engaged any lawyer in America to represent our bank,” Mr.
Freeh wrote. He said, “I chose Eric” because of “his excellent legal
skills, complete integrity, sense of fairness, courage and, most
importantly, my confidence that he would provide me with his
independent judgment without fear or favor.”
Those skills have paid off handsomely for Mr. Holder and his law firm.
He has done extensive pro bono work for crime victims, inmates who say
they were wrongly convicted and others, and he is well known in
Washington for his charitable work and deep roots in the community. At
the same time, he has entered a group of A-list lawyers in the capital
who reportedly earn $800 to $1,000 an hour. (Covington & Burling
would not comment on Mr. Holder’s fees.)
Last spring, when Mr. Holder was traveling extensively to campaign for
Mr. Obama, he joked to The American Lawyer magazine, “I hope the
management committee is going to be real understanding when they see my
billable hours this year.”
Not that the absences appear to have hurt his bottom line. In his
disclosure statement to the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Holder said he
expected to earn more than $2.5 million from the law firm in 2008, from
$2.15 million the year before. That total includes an expected
separation payment of $1.3 million to be paid upon his resignation from
the firm, if he is confirmed as attorney general. Kathryn King, a
spokeswoman for Covington & Burling, said the separation agreement
was a result of a standard procedure at the firm. “The methodology has
been established and applied by our firm for many years and was in
place well before the parties knew that Mr. Holder was being considered
for a federal appointment,” she said.
For all his recent prominence as a lawyer in private practice, friends
say that Mr. Holder has been itching to return to the place where he
first made his name.
“Eric truly loved his days at the Department of Justice,” said Billy
Martin, a prominent Washington lawyer and longtime friend of Mr.
Holder’s who worked opposite him as Mr. Vick’s defense lawyer in the
dogfighting prosecution. “He was very good at being a public servant in
a position of leadership, and I think he missed it.”
Obama
team fills top Justice Department posts
Hartford Courant
By Josh Meyer, Washington
Bureau
1:39 PM EST, January 5, 2009
WASHINGTON
President-elect Barack Obama has named four former Clinton
administration officials as part of his new team at the Justice
Department, including David Ogden as deputy attorney general and
Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan as solicitor general, the White
House's lawyer before the Supreme Court.
Kagan, the first female dean at Harvard Law, reportedly met Obama when
the two worked on the University of Chicago Law School faculty in the
1990s. Ogden is heading Obama's Justice Department transition team, and
his deputy on the team, Tom Perelli, was tapped Monday to be as
associate attorney general. Obama also nominated Dawn Johnsen to be
assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.
There was no mention of whether Obama and his nominee for attorney
general, Eric Holder, intend to replace those heading the key posts at
the Justice Department's Civil, Criminal and National Security
Divisions that oversee most of its high-profile prosecutions.
"These individuals bring the integrity, depth of experience and
tenacity that the Department of Justice demands in these uncertain
times," Obama said in a statement released by the transition team in
Chicago. ``I have the fullest confidence that they will ensure that the
Department of Justice once again fulfills its highest purpose: to
uphold the Constitution and protect the American people. I look forward
to working with them in the months and years ahead."
Holder's confirmation hearing is set for Jan. 15 before the Senate
Judiciary Committee. And while there were early indications that he
would be confirmed swiftly and with little if any opposition, Holder
has more recently come under fire for his role in some controversial
pardons and commutations of prison sentences issued by President Bill
Clinton.
``The new attorney general, the department, and the nation will be
well-served by this leadership team," Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.),
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement about
Obama's picks.
``Just as Senators on both sides of the aisle moved quickly in the last
Congress to confirm nominees for the top positions at the Justice
Department that were emptied by scandals, the Judiciary Committee will
move forward promptly with confirmation proceedings for these nominees,
beginning with Mr. Holder's hearing on Jan. 15," Leahy said.
``The need to have the new leadership team at the department up and
running without delay could not be greater in light of the department's
vital missions and the unprecedented politicization that has weakened
morale throughout the department and dealt a blow to the country's
confidence in the nation's top law-enforcement agency."
Ogden is currently a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr
and serves as the Department of Justice Agency Review lead for the
Obama-Biden Transition Project. He was nominated by Clinton, and served
as assistant attorney general overseeing the Civil Division from 1999
until 2001. Before that, he served as chief of staff to Atty. Gen.
Janet Reno and as counselor to the attorney general, associate deputy
attorney general and as deputy general counsel at the Department of
Defense's Office of Legal Counsel.
Ogden also was a partner at Jenner and Block in Washington, D.C.,
worked at the law firm of Ennis Friedman & Bersoff and clerked for
Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun from 1982-1983. He received his BA
in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976,
summa cum laude, and his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1981,
magna cum laude, where he also served on the Harvard Law Review.
Kagan has been teaching law at Harvard since leaving the Clinton
administration in 1999, becoming a professor in 2001 and dean in 2003.
She has taught administrative law, constitutional law, civil procedure,
and seminars on issues involving the separation of powers.
From 1995 to 1999, Kagan served in the White House, first as associate
counsel to the president and then as deputy assistant to the president
for domestic policy and deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council.
In those positions she played a key role in the executive branch's
formulation, advocacy, and implementation of law and policy in areas
ranging from education to crime to public health.
Kagan also taught at the University of Chicago Law School, and clerked
for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. She then worked as an
associate in the Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly from
1989 to 1991. Kagan received her bachelor's degree from Princeton in
1981 (summa cum laude)and attended Harvard Law School, where she was
supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review, graduating magna cum
laude in 1986.
Perrelli, currently managing partner of Jenner & Block's Washington
office, was counsel to Atty. Gen. Reno from 1997 to 1999, supervising a
variety of civil matters at the Department of Justice. He later became
deputy assistant attorney general, supervising the Federal Programs
Branch of the Civil Division. Perrelli also graduated from Harvard Law
School, magna cum laude, in 1991, where he was managing editor of the
Harvard Law Review.
Johnsen, tapped for the Office of Legal Counsel, is currently a law
professor at the Indiana University School of Law, Bloomington, where
she teaches and writes about issues of constitutional law. She served
in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel as the acting
assistant attorney general heading that office from 1997 to 1998 and as
a deputy assistant attorney general before that. She received a BA from
Yale University in 1983 and a JD from Yale Law School in 1986.
The Next Attorney General
NYTIMES Editorial
December 3, 2008
If he is
confirmed by the Senate as attorney general, Eric Holder,
President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for the job, will inherit a
Justice Department that has been mired in scandal and that has
seriously lost its way in critical areas. Under President Bush, the
department has been used to defend the indefensible, like indefinite
detention and torture of prisoners, and to undermine rather than
protect Americans’ cherished rights. Mr. Holder could be an exemplary
choice to face this daunting agenda, but he must answer serious
questions before the Senate votes on his confirmation.
Mr. Holder, who would be the first African-American attorney
general,
has a particularly good record of public service for this job. He has
been a United States attorney for the District of Columbia, a
prosecutor in the Justice Department’s public integrity section and a
deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton.
He has been outspoken on the most critical issue facing the
department:
restoring the rule of law. In a speech in June, he described the Bush
administration’s anti-terrorism policies as “excessive and unlawful.”
And he has called for closing the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
But senators should ask Mr. Holder to square those views with
comments
he made after the Sept. 11 attacks when he defended the Bush
administration’s prisoner policies by declaring that “you can think of
these people as combatants and we are in the middle of a war.”
Americans need to know that Mr. Holder does not believe that
detainees
can be held indefinitely without being brought before a judge — and
that he would stand up for the Constitution when times are tough.
There are other aspects of Mr. Holder’s record that are of
concern,
starting with his role in Mr. Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, a
billionaire financier who had fled the country rather than face federal
tax-evasion charges whose ex-wife, Denise Rich, had contributed heavily
to the Clinton presidential library and the Democratic Party.
The Senate needs to probe that serious lapse in judgment closely
to
seek assurances that Mr. Holder will be unyielding about keeping
political influence out of the Justice Department, which was shamefully
politicized under Alberto Gonzales.
In addition to signing off on torture memos and depriving
detainees of
basic rights, the Bush Justice Department adopted legal positions that
greatly expanded executive power. These policies must be quickly
undone. The next attorney general also will have to get to the bottom
of the department’s disgraceful record of politicized hiring and
firing. The attorney general will need to ensure that the investigation
of the firings of United States attorneys for what appear to be
partisan reasons is thorough and credible, and that witnesses who have
been defying subpoenas, including Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, the
former White House counsel, testify under oath.
There already are people — mainly Republicans — who say
investigating
these matters would be divisive. But the department’s integrity cannot
be restored until the truth comes out and any wrongdoers are punished.
Many parts of the Justice Department must be pointed in a new
direction. In the Bush years, the voting rights section worked against
voting rights. The civil rights division too often sat idly by, or
supported the wrong side, when rights were infringed. The antitrust
division all but abandoned its responsibility to protect the public
from the harm of monopoly power.
The attorney general is the nation’s top law enforcement
official. The
Senate must make sure that Mr. Holder is committed to the right kind of
change in that job.
Pardon
Is Back in Focus for the Justice Nominee
NYTIMES
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DAVID JOHNSTON
December 2, 2008
WASHINGTON — In the much praised career of Eric H. Holder Jr.,
President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to be attorney general, there is
one notable blemish: Mr. Holder’s complicated role in the 2001 pardon
of Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who had fled the country rather
than face federal tax evasion charges.
Mr. Holder’s supporters portray him as having been a relatively
uninvolved bystander caught in a Clinton-era controversy, the
remarkable granting of a last-minute pardon by President Bill Clinton
to a fugitive from justice. But interviews and an examination of
Congressional records show that Mr. Holder, who at the time of the
pardon was the deputy attorney general, was more deeply involved in the
Rich pardon than his supporters acknowledge.
Mr. Holder had more than a half-dozen contacts with Mr. Rich’s
lawyers
over 15 months, including phone calls, e-mail and memorandums that
helped keep alive Mr. Rich’s prospects for a legal resolution to his
case. And Mr. Holder’s final opinion on the matter — a recommendation
to the White House on the eve of the pardon that he was “neutral,
leaning toward” favorable — helped ensure that Mr. Clinton signed the
pardon despite objections from other senior staff members, participants
said.
At the same time, Mr. Holder was not the sinister deal maker
that his
critics made him out to be. He let himself be drawn into the case by
politically influential advocates, the review of the case shows,
bypassing the usual Justice Department channels for reviewing pardon
applications and infuriating prosecutors in New York who had brought
the initial charges against Mr. Rich and his business partner.
Most perplexing to Justice Department allies was that Mr.
Holder, by
his own admission, involved himself in the discussions without a full
briefing from his own prosecutors about the facts of the case,
according to an associate of Mr. Holder who spoke on condition of
anonymity.
Reid Weingarten, a lawyer for Mr. Holder, said that Mr. Holder
had done
nothing improper in his handling of the Rich matter and that
conversations about it were routine and largely insignificant, in part
because he assumed that Mr. Rich’s lawyer, Jack Quinn, was going
through normal pardon channels.
“Mr. Holder assumed that this was all being handled in the
normal
course,” Mr. Weingarten said. He added that “there’s no question that
Quinn played him, and it was astute by Quinn because he did catch Eric
unawares.”
By all accounts, Mr. Holder’s role in the affair represents the
biggest
misstep of his career, and Mr. Obama’s aides focused on the issue
before Mr. Holder was selected. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary
Committee were consulted to gauge whether the pardon will prove an
insurmountable hurdle.
Some Republicans in Congress are eager to revisit the Rich
pardon,
which was investigated at length in 2001 both by Congress and by a
grand jury amid a public clamor that was fueled by hefty donations that
Mr. Rich’s former wife had made to Mr. Clinton’s presidential library
and to Democratic causes. Critics of the pardon also seized on reports
from American intelligence officials that Mr. Rich’s
oil-and-commodities company had done business with Iran, Iraq and other
so-called rogue states.
“Marc Rich was a fugitive for nearly two decades, wanted by the
federal
government for fraud and tax evasion,” Representative Lamar Smith of
Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said
Monday after the nomination was announced. “If a Republican official
had engaged in this kind of activity, he would never receive Senate
confirmation.”
Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on
the
Judiciary Committee, said in an interview on Monday that Mr. Holder’s
role in the Rich pardon would be “a big question” at his Senate
confirmation hearing.
A longtime prosecutor and a former judge, Mr. Holder remains a
popular
figure at the Justice Department eight years after he left, and his
supporters insist he was made the “fall guy” for a controversy mainly
of Mr. Clinton’s making.
Both Republican and Democratic admirers say Mr. Holder’s handing
of the
Rich affair, which he has acknowledged was flawed, should be balanced
against the bulk of his law enforcement career.
“There’s no way you can have a high-profile job in Washington
like the
deputy attorney general without attracting some kind of controversy,”
Larry Thompson, who succeeded Mr. Holder in that post in the Bush
administration, said before Monday’s announcement. “That matter has
been fully investigated, and it should be put behind him.”
Janet Reno, the former attorney general who was Mr. Holder’s
boss,
attributes the episode in part to the fast pace of pardon requests at
the end of the Clinton administration. “There wasn’t much time to vet
anybody,” Ms. Reno said in an interview.
But for Mr. Holder, his role in the Rich issue actually began
more than
two years before the end of the Clinton administration, almost by
happenstance. At a corporate dinner in November 1998, Mr. Holder was
seated at a table with a public-relations executive named Gershon
Kekst, who had been trying to help Mr. Rich resolve his legal troubles.
When Mr. Kekst learned that his dinner companion was the deputy
attorney general, he proceeded to bring up the case of an unnamed
acquaintance who had been “improperly indicted by an overzealous
prosecutor,” according to the Congressional inquiry.
A person in that situation, Mr. Holder advised, should “hire a
lawyer
who knows the process, he comes to me, we work it out.” Mr. Kekst
wanted to know if Mr. Holder could suggest a lawyer. Mr. Holder pointed
to a former White House counsel sitting nearby. “There’s Jack Quinn,”
he said. “He’s a perfect example.”
Months later, Mr. Rich’s advisers settled on Mr. Quinn to lead
the
legal efforts, which stemmed from Mr. Rich’s indictment in 1983 on
charges that he evaded taxes on tens of millions of dollars in revenue.
At the time, it was the biggest tax fraud case in American history. He
fled to Switzerland while the investigation against him was pending.
Mr. Quinn and his legal team sought to make the case that Mr.
Rich and
his partner, Pincus Green, had been wrongly prosecuted by the office of
Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was the United States attorney in Manhattan at
the time of the indictment, and that the charges against them should
best have been treated as a civil matter, not a criminal one.
One of the first people Mr. Quinn contacted was Mr. Holder, his
former
colleague. Mr. Quinn wanted his help in interceding with prosecutors in
Manhattan, and the two men had several conversations about the topic
beginning in October 1999.
Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were
unwilling
to negotiate with Mr. Rich’s lawyers while he remained a fugitive. Mr.
Holder told Mr. Quinn in one phone call in November 1999 that he
believed the prosecutors’ refusal to meet with the Rich lawyer was
“ridiculous,” according to notes by Mr. Quinn obtained by House
government reform committee investigators as part of a three-volume
report on Mr. Clinton’s pardons.
In February 2000, Mr. Quinn sent Mr. Holder a memorandum
entitled “Why
D.O.J. Should Review the Marc Rich Indictment.” About a month later,
Mr. Holder spoke with Mr. Quinn again and told him that “we’re all
sympathetic” and that the legal “equities” in the issue were “on your
side.” Pressed to explain the remark when he appeared before Congress a
year later, Mr. Holder said that he meant only that he thought it was
“unreasonable” for prosecutors in Manhattan not to meet with Mr. Rich’s
lawyers and that he was not intending to assess the merits of the case.
By the fall of 2000, efforts to re-open the criminal case were
dead,
and Mr. Rich’s lawyers had moved on to the idea of a pardon.
Again, Mr. Quinn turned to Mr. Holder. On Nov. 21, 2000, at the
close
of a meeting on a separate topic, Mr. Quinn took Mr. Holder aside, told
him he was planning on filing a lengthy pardon petition with the White
House and asked whether the White House should contact Mr. Holder for
his opinion, according to Mr. Quinn’s account. (Mr. Holder said he did
not remember the conversation but did not dispute the account.)
In a separate e-mail message that Mr. Quinn sent three days
before that
to other members of the Rich team, under the topic “Eric,” he wrote:
“Spoke to him last evening. Says to go straight to W.H. Also says
timing is good.”
For the next months, Mr. Rich’s team pressed ahead with the
pardon,
soliciting foreign leaders from Spain, Israel and elsewhere to speak to
the White House about Mr. Rich’s philanthropic work.
Still, many White House officials remained opposed to the idea
because
of the precedent it would set to pardon a fugitive. Prosecutors in New
York would “howl,” Mr. Holder told Mr. Quinn.
On Jan. 19, 2001, Mr. Quinn called Mr. Holder and let him know
that the
White House would be contacting him for his recommendation on the
pardon, which he said was receiving “serious consideration.” Mr. Holder
told him that he did not have a personal problem with the pardon, and
Mr. Quinn quickly passed on the gist of the conversation to the White
House.
A few minutes later, Mr. Holder got a call from Beth Nolan, the
White
House counsel, who had opposed the pardon idea and was now surprised to
hear that Mr. Holder apparently felt differently.
Mr. Holder, according to Ms. Nolan’s testimony, told her that if
the
Israelis were in fact pushing for the pardon, he would find that
“persuasive” and would be “neutral leaning toward” favorable.
Mr. Holder told Congressional investigators that he assumed the
pardon
was going to be rejected and that his comments were not intended to
push it through. “I was ‘neutral’ because I didn’t have a basis to make
a determination,” he testified.
But investigators for the House government reform committee, in
a final
report in 2002, concluded that Mr. Holder’s input on Jan. 19, 2001, had
a “significant impact” in giving the Justice Department’s imprimatur,
even though no formal review was conducted by the department’s pardon
office, which normally reviews all clemency applications. The next day,
Mr. Clinton signed the pardon, setting off the final scandal of his
terms.
After Mr. Clinton left office, a federal grand jury
investigation was
eventually closed with a finding that no criminal wrongdoing had
occurred.
Holder
Is Poised to Scale New Heights
NYTIMES
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
December 1, 2008
Nine-year-old Eric Holder sat in the basement of his family’s
house in
Queens, enraptured by the inaugural words of the fresh-faced president
from Massachusetts. The broadcast on the tiny television set faded in
and out, muffled by the steady roar of jetliners at nearby La Guardia
Airport, but John F. Kennedy’s call for hope and change was enough to
stir the boy’s desire to serve.
By ninth grade, Ricky, as he was known to his friends, was
standing
before his peers in the auditorium making his case for student body
president. In high school, towering above his classmates and teachers
at 6 feet 3 inches tall, he passionately debated how to rid
African-Americans of their second-class status.
Now, four decades later, Eric Himpton Holder Jr., 57, the
Bronx-born
son of Miriam, an Episcopal church secretary from New Jersey, and Eric
Sr., a real estate broker from Barbados, is expected to be nominated on
Monday by President-elect Barack Obama to become the attorney general
of the United States. He would be the first black person to do so.
“I didn’t have any idea what I would be when I grew up,” Mr.
Holder
said in an interview last week, his first public comments since reports
of his selection emerged in November. Attorney general, he added, was
“not on the radar.”
Growing up in East Elmhurst, Queens, Mr. Holder lived in two
worlds.
There was the neighborhood kid, a basketball addict who drew smiles
from girls and once cut class to watch the Mets. Then there was the
overachiever, a history scholar who buried himself in books and
newspapers and was plucked from his local public elementary school to
attend a program for gifted students at another school.
“I had this dual existence,” he said. “I wanted to hang. I was
still
one of the guys. I tried to convince them that I was still cool.”
In his classes, he was one of only a few black students, but
even as
sit-ins and freedom rides in the South roiled the debate on civil
rights, school life remained mostly free of racial tension. His
classmates were more concerned with who was free to play softball after
school than the color of anyone’s skin, he said.
It was not until he started middle school in 1963, when clashes
over
integration at the University of Alabama captured the national
spotlight and President Kennedy was assassinated, that he grew
conscious of the racial complexities of American society, he said.
“That clicked the switch in me,” Mr. Holder said. He began to
read book
after book on World War II and biographies of public servants, drawing
inspiration from the story of redemption he saw in “The Autobiography
of Malcolm X.”
He soon sought leadership roles himself. As a ninth grader
running for
student body president on the Patriot Party ticket, he cut up and
rearranged magazine ads into “Vote for Holder” insignia.
His victory showed him that his intellectual gifts and witty,
down-to-earth demeanor could propel him to high places, his classmates
said.
That same year, his high score on a grueling city test earned
him a
seat at Stuyvesant High School, where the prom was sometimes canceled
because of a lack of interest and students had a penchant for reciting
class rankings (Mr. Holder graduated 363rd in a class of 721 boys).
“We didn’t know if a black student was going to get admitted,”
recalled
his younger brother, William Holder, a retired Port Authority police
lieutenant. “When he got in, it was huge.”
At Stuyvesant, whose students were primarily white and Jewish,
Mr.
Holder said his first year was one of the most difficult periods of his
life, as he adjusted to a hefty workload and an hour-and-a-half
commute. When the stress of taking biology and chemistry at the same
time grew overwhelming, he turned to his mother for advice. She told
him to stick it out, he said.
It was a refrain Mr. Holder had heard before. His parents made
clear
the importance of education and told their children they could achieve
anything. “We weren’t taught limits,” his brother said.
Eric Sr., who is no longer alive, and Miriam Holder kept a close
watch
on their two children. They knew at whose house they could be found on
any given night. On Sundays, if the children tried to feign illness to
get out of going to church, it took only the rumble of their father
marching down the hallway to rouse them, William Holder said.
At Stuyvesant, Eric joined the Afro-American Society and became
co-captain of the basketball team, the Peglegs, helping to lead his
peers to 2 wins and 12 losses. “When you’re on a team that doesn’t win
very much, you can either get angry at teammates or bond,” said Paul
Grayson, a former Pegleg who is now a Manhattan accountant. “He bonded.”
Mr. Holder’s years at Stuyvesant progressed as opposition to the
Vietnam War escalated, but though he opposed the war, he did not
actively protest it.
When he arrived at Columbia in 1969 as a boyish-looking
freshman, he
was recruited by upperclassmen to help take over the R.O.T.C. office.
Armed with pillowcases and sheets, he joined several dozen students and
christened the office as a student center named for Malcolm X.
Steven Sims, a close college friend, said, “It was very
galvanizing
because, for many of us, it allowed us to further develop and embrace
our black consciousness.”
In school, Mr. Holder said, he chose to major in American
history as a
means to explore his own heritage and to use as a prism through which
to examine current events.
Longing to escape the elite world at Columbia, he spent
Saturdays
taking underprivileged teenagers around New York City. He tried to
expose the poor and predominantly black children living near campus to
the cosmopolitan richness that had informed his own worldview.
“It just seemed incumbent on me, and many of us, that as
students of
color, we had to be engaged in this community of color that surrounded
our campus,” he said.
Some weekends, a group of friends would pile into his 1971 blue
Plymouth Duster and head to East Elmhurst for home-cooked meals —
macaroni, fish cakes, pepper pot soup. At night, they went to parties
or to women’s colleges in search of dates.
Still, Mr. Holder’s behavior hewed to his parents’ principles.
“Even in
our wildest moments,” Mr. Sims said, “you didn’t want to embarrass
Mother Holder.”
Mr. Holder’s attraction to public service pleased his parents.
“He was
always interested in being able to maybe change things, help those
folks that needed it,” said Ms. Holder, 84.
As history unfolded around him — the shootings of students at
Kent
State and Jackson State — Mr. Holder saw the law as an instrument of
change. “The law inevitably is wound up with some great political
movements, social movements,” he said. “I wanted to be a part of that.”
He attended law school at Columbia, becoming a role model to
black
students pursuing public service, his classmates said. He clerked for
the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and joined the Justice
Department after graduation, working his way up to deputy attorney
general under Bill Clinton.
But he always made time for basketball, the game that had
grounded him
since his days on the cracked courts in East Elmhurst, where, his
friends said, he received jealous glances for his good aim and easy
dunk.
“When I was on that court, that was it,” he said. “I loved the
competition.”
Mr. Holder said he took with him many of the lessons he learned
on the
court — the art of preparation, discipline and hard work. But as he is
about to ascend to the top of the American legal system, there is one
opponent he has yet to take on: his future boss, Mr. Obama, himself a
devotee of pickup basketball.
Mr. Holder said the soon-to-be president had an advantage in age
(Mr.
Obama is 10 years younger). And Mr. Holder’s knees are not what they
used to be. Still, he said, he is skeptical of Mr. Obama’s chances:
“I’m not sure he’s ready for my New York game.”
A
Pardon to Remember
NYTIMES
November 22, 2008
By GEORGE LARDNER Jr.
WHEN President Bill Clinton pardoned a billionaire fugitive from
justice on his last day in office, even usually loyal Democrats were
dismayed. Representative Henry Waxman of California called it “bad
precedent” and “an end run around the judicial process.” He said it
appeared to set a double standard for the wealthy and powerful.
The billionaire was Marc Rich, a commodities trader, and his
pardon is a subject of discussion again because Eric Holder, Mr.
Clinton’s deputy attorney general at the time and a key figure in the
clemency process, is reported to be Barack Obama’s choice for attorney
general. In the years since the Rich pardon, Mr. Holder has said he
“never devoted a great deal of time to this matter.” He also told an
interviewer that, in hindsight, he wished that the Justice Department
had been “more fully informed” about the case. As someone who helped
cover the story for The Washington Post, I think the issue is far more
complicated and deserves more scrutiny if Mr. Holder is to become our
top law-enforcement official.
A little history first. In 1983, Marc Rich was indicted along
with his partner, Pincus Green, and their companies on 65 counts of
defrauding the I.R.S., mail fraud, tax evasion, racketeering,
defrauding the Treasury and trading with the enemy. (The last of these
was for an oil deal with Iran while it held American hostages.) On
hearing that they were about to be prosecuted, they fled to
Switzerland. For the next 17 years, Mr. Rich ducked extradition
requests as well as attempts by federal marshals to arrest him in
France, England, Finland and elsewhere.
Mr. Rich’s lawyers tried repeatedly to reach a deal with federal
prosecutors in New York that would keep him out of jail if he returned.
Though his companies pleaded guilty and paid $200 million in fines and
other penalties, Mr. Rich insisted that the case against him was weak.
The prosecutors offered to drop the racketeering charges and to let Mr.
Rich free on bail (without a passport) if he would return. Mr. Rich
refused.
The story of how the fugitive came to be pardoned by President
Clinton was the subject of a painstaking study by the House Government
Reform Committee. While the committee’s report is the subject of some
controversy — its Republican chairman, Dan Burton of Indiana, was
accused of partisanship — the staff that compiled the documentation was
thoroughly professional. All the citations and facts that follow are
supported by testimony before the committee or its staff’s documentary
evidence.
In 1999, Mr. Rich hired Jack Quinn, who had been Mr. Clinton’s
White House counsel from 1995 to 1996, to help him advance his cause.
The Rich team was still hoping to strike a deal with federal
prosecutors in New York, who were in charge of the case. An e-mail
message to Mr. Rich from one of his New York lawyers said that Mr.
Quinn felt “he could convince Eric that it made sense to listen to the
professors and that he could convince Eric to encourage Mary Jo to do
the same.” The “professors” were two tax experts paid more than $96,000
for a study based solely on statements provided them by the Rich legal
team; “Mary Jo” was Mary Jo White, the United States attorney in New
York.
Mr. Holder was not unsympathetic. He told Mr. Quinn in November
of 1999 that he considered the New York prosecutor’s persistent refusal
of a meeting “ridiculous” and that “the equities” were on Mr. Rich’s
side. Mr. Holder told Mr. Quinn to write a letter to Ms. White with a
copy to him, and promised to call her when it arrived. Mr. Holder then
called Ms. White personally and, after that conversation, told Mr.
Quinn she “didn’t sound like her guard was up.” But New York stood firm.
On Nov. 18, 2000, Mr. Quinn told Mr. Holder that Mr. Rich was
going to go for a pardon, a step his team had been contemplating for
months. After the conversation, Mr. Quinn told colleagues that Mr.
Holder had advised him to “go straight to” the White House and that the
“timing is good.” On Dec. 11, just over a month before Mr. Clinton was
to leave office, Mr. Quinn delivered the pardon papers to the White
House. “The greatest danger lies with the lawyers,” Mr. Quinn wrote in
an e-mail message to an aide to Mr. Rich, referring to the prosecutors
in New York. “I have worked them hard and I am hopeful that E. Holder
will be helpful to us.”
Under the rules governing pardon petitions — rules that were
approved by Mr. Holder’s office — the views of United States attorneys
“are given considerable weight” because of the “valuable insights” they
have. And yet Mr. Holder did not consult Ms. White and her colleagues
about the Rich pardon petition; they did not know of it until it had
been granted.
Then, on Jan. 19, 2001, Mr. Holder delivered his pardon
assessment to the White House, telling Beth Nolan, the White House
counsel, that he was “neutral leaning favorable” on the Rich pardon.
His decision, he added, was influenced by the support of Ehud Barak,
the Israeli prime minister.
The people in the United States attorney’s office in New York
weren’t the only ones surprised by Mr. Holder’s decision. Deborah
Smolover, his top deputy for pardon cases, did not find out about the
pardon for Mr. Rich until the White House called to inform her of it
after midnight on Jan. 20. (Mr. Green won a pardon, too.) After the
pardon was signed, Mr. Quinn has testified, Mr. Holder called him to
commend him on “a very good job.” Mr. Holder also asked Mr. Quinn to
consider hiring two former aides, one of whom had already contacted Mr.
Quinn on Jan. 2 “at Holder’s suggestion.”
The precedent against pardons for fugitives was set more than
200 years ago by President John Adams. The charge, brought in 1799, was
murder on the high seas against a ship’s captain who was clearly trying
to put down a mutiny. But the mutineers made it back to the States,
ready to testify against the captain, while his supporters were still
at sea. The captain was afraid to return. Asked to approve a nolle
prosequi (a notice that prosecution won’t be pursued, a procedure then
treated as part of the pardon power), the president consulted his
cabinet, which concluded that a trial should come first and a pardon,
if justified, after that. Clemency, wrote Secretary of War James
McHenry, should be exercised only with “great caution and on the
fullest information.”
Mr. Holder never came close to meeting that standard. He had the
last word at Justice on clemency petitions and he saw to it that he had
the only word. He brokered one of the most unjustifiable pardons that
an American president has ever granted.
Commerce
Former
Governor of Washington, Hon. Gary Locke, latest name for Commerce
post. Senator Gregg of
New Hampshire thinks it over and withdraws, too. Gov.
Bill Richardson, candidate for the Democratic nomination last year,
original Commerce Secretary designee, withdraws.
Democrats Vow Swift Passage of Obama’s Ambitious Agenda
NYTIMES
By CARL HULSE
February 26, 2009
WASHINGTON — Senate Democratic leaders pledged Wednesday to move
quickly to enact the ambitious policy agenda outlined by President
Obama in his speech before Congress on Tuesday night, with Senator
Harry Reid, the majority leader, saying he hoped to achieve a health
care overhaul this year.
“By the end of this year, I want to do something significant dealing
with health care,” Mr. Reid, a Nevada Democrat, told reporters as he
and fellow Democrats hailed what they saw as a successful address by
the new president.
In the aftermath of Mr. Obama’s first speech to a joint session, Mr.
Reid and fellow members of the Democratic leadership also called on
Republicans in Congress to join them in pursuing the president’s
initiatives not only on health care but on energy, education and
stabilizing the economy and housing markets.
Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, said
Republicans cannot praise Mr. Obama, who retains a high level of
popularity in the early days of his presidency, but then continue to
attack his policy proposals.
“Our Republican colleagues have tried to act like they’re cheering for
the quarterback, and then nitpick his play calling,” Mr. Schumer said.
“Well, President Obama and his agenda are one and the same. You can’t
separate the man from the agenda.”
In an interview on National Public Radio Wednesday morning,
Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the second-ranking Republican
in the House who helped engineer united party opposition to Mr. Obama’s
economic stimulus plan, said his colleagues remain willing to work with
the president on policy goals they share.
“That debate is behind us,” Mr. Cantor said of the stimulus fight.
“We’ve got to go forward. We have to tackle these very difficult
situations, starting with our banking system. We’ve got to get credit
flowing again. The president was very definite in his commitment to
make sure that happens, and I believe that we will have some ability to
work together to produce results.”
Mr. Reid’s commitment to a health care overhaul this year could be
considered ambitious, given the difficulty Congress has had in the past
in taking on the complex issue of how to deliver affordable health care
to most Americans combined with the partisanship that has gripped the
House and Senate.
In addition, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who
heads the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, is absent
from Washington most of the time because he is receiving treatment for
brain cancer.
But Mr. Reid said significant progress has been already been made in
meetings among lawmakers and staff members, and he maintained that the
schedule could be met.
“I think we’re doing quite well,” he said. “I’m satisfied with our
progress on this.”
In the next few weeks, Mr. Reid said he would like to push forward with
energy legislation, which has broad Democratic support, to clear the
way for the climate change bill sought by the new administration. He
also dismissed criticism that the federal government was engaged in a
spending spree at a time when Mr. Obama was also talking about reducing
the deficit during his term.
He said lawmakers “recognize that we’re going to have to spend some
money to get out of this hole,” adding, “This isn’t the time to talk
about balancing the budget.”
At the White House Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and
their top aides continued on Wednesday to emphasize the need for moving
ahead briskly with the $787 billion stimulus package that Congress
recently approved and promised both to rush money through the federal
bureaucracy and to exercise as much control as possible so that haste
does not lead to wasteful spending.
Mr. Biden, still beaming at the president’s description of him the
night before as the tough enforcer of efficiency, introduced himself at
a staff meeting as “the guy to don’t mess with” and urged everybody
involved in the stimulus program to make sure that the money is
“actually getting out there and working.”
The twin message — spend it fast, but spend it smartly — is crucial to
the Administration’s attempt to make it easier to win Congressional
passage of the rest of their program this year and to avoid the
pitfalls of waste, fraud and abuse that could derail progress.
On Thursday, the White House is to begin presenting details of its
spending proposals for the fiscal year that begins in October, and in
the next few weeks Congress must pass omnibus spending legislation to
keep this year’s programs running for the next several months.
Mr. Obama, officially naming former Gov. Gary Locke of Washington his
latest choice to head the Commerce Department — after his two earlier
nominees fell by the wayside — said the task of the department was,
like that of the rest of the government, “to help create conditions in
which our workers can prosper, our businesses can thrive and our
economy can grow.”
Former Governor Locke Is Latest
Choice for Commerce
NYTIMES
By Peter Baker
February 23, 2009, 5:33 pm
WASHINGTON – President Obama has settled on former Gov. Gary
Locke of Washington state as his top choice for commerce secretary as
he tries for a third time to fill a cabinet position that has bedeviled
his administration, a White House official said Monday.
The official described Mr. Locke as the “likely” nominee, a formulation
the Obama team has used in the past for a candidate on the verge of
being nominated pending final vetting checks.
Mr. Locke would be the third choice for the Commerce Department after
Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico dropped out because of a federal
investigation into state contracting and Senator Judd Gregg, a
Republican from New Hampshire, withdrew his nomination citing
philosophical differences with the president.
Mr. Locke’s election in 1996 made him the first Chinese American
governor in the United States and he served two terms before stepping
down after the 2004 election, citing a desire to spend more time with
his family. Born into an immigrant family living in public housing, Mr.
Locke, 59, made it to Yale University and served as a prosecutor, state
legislator and King County executive before his election as governor.
Judd Gregg Withdraws
as Commerce Nominee
NYTIMES
By JEFF ZELENY
February 12, 2009
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s choice for
commerce secretary, Senator Judd Gregg, withdrew his nomination on
Thursday, saying there were “irresolvable conflicts” between him and
the administration.
“It has become apparent during this
process that this will not work for me as I have found that on issues
such as the stimulus package and the Census there are irresolvable
conflicts for me,” Mr. Gregg said in a statement. “Prior to accepting
this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but
unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns. We are
functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of
policy.”
At a Washington news conference soon
after his statement was issued, Mr. Gregg said it had become clear that
he had made a mistake in accepting the president’s offer to join the
cabinet. “That was my mistake, not his,” the senator said, adding that
he admired President Obama and the team he has assembled.
“Bottom line,” he concluded, “this
is simply a bridge too far for me.”
Mr. Gregg said that the Census had
been “only a slight issue” in his decision to withdraw. Nevertheless,
the Census has been a big issue between Republicans and Democrats for
years, and Mr. Gregg has been involved in the dispute. A decade ago, he
resisted efforts by President Bill Clinton to increase financing for
the 2000 Census.The abrupt withdrawal comes one week after Mr. Gregg
was selected to be the third Republican member of the Obama cabinet.
And he is the second nominee for commerce secretary to withdraw.
Moments after the stunning
announcement, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, issued a
statement that Mr. Gregg had “reached out to the president and offered
his name for secretary of commerce.”
“He was very clear throughout the
interviewing process that despite past disagreements about policies, he
would support, embrace, and move forward with the President’s agenda,”
Mr. Gibbs said. “Once it became clear after his nomination that Senator
Gregg was not going to be supporting some of President Obama’s key
economic priorities, it became necessary for Senator Gregg and the
Obama administration to part ways.”
Although Mr. Gregg, a Republican of
New Hampshire, had not resigned his Senate seat, he has been away from
the Senate floor this week — presumably preparing for his confirmation
hearings — and he did not vote on the administration’s $789 billion
economic stimulus plan agreed on by the House and Senate.
Last Tuesday during a brief ceremony
at the White House, Mr. Gregg stood Mr. Obama as the president touted
his nominee as a fiscal conservative who could help “shore up our
financial system and revitalize our economy.”
The president selected Mr. Gregg
exactly two months after he nominated his first choice for commerce
secretary, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who withdrew from
consideration because of a federal investigation into state contracts.
It was the first of several controversies surrounding the president’s
top nominees.
In announcing his withdrawal, Mr.
Gregg released a statement through his Senate office. The surprising
move was not announced by the White House, although aides said the
president had been informed of Mr. Gregg’s decision.
“Obviously the President requires a
team that is fully supportive of all his initiatives,” Mr. Gregg said
in a statement. “I greatly admire President Obama and know our country
will benefit from his leadership, but at this time I must withdraw my
name from consideration for this position.”
He added: “As a further matter of
clarification, nothing about the vetting process played any role in
this decision. I will continue to represent the people of New Hampshire
in the United States Senate.”
The once-a-decade Census has
enormous implications, both social and political. It is used to
distribute federal money to states and cities based on population, and
it is used to redraw Congressional districts — determining how many
seats in the House of Representatives that growing states like
California and Florida will pick up at the expense of states whose
populations are relatively stagnant.
The Commerce Department under the
Clinton administration wanted to use statistical sampling in the 2000
to arrive at population figures on which Congressional districting
would be based. Republicans resisted furiously, arguing that only a
true head count was proper. Political analysts believed that
statistical sampling would help Democrats by adding more urban and
minority people to the totals.
In early 1999, the Supreme Court
ruled that the 2000 census had to be done by traditional head count as
far as redistricting was concerned, but that sampling could be used for
other purposes, like the distribution of federal money.
In recent days, Republicans have
been upset by suspicions that the Obama White House might try to assert
more direct control over the Census, a prospect they find troubling,
given that the president’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is a former
Democratic Congressman from Chicago.
Mr. Gregg’s withdrawal was the
latest blow for the White House, which has seen three cabinet nominees
withdraw from consideration. In addition to the withdrawal of Mr.
Richardson, former Senator Tom Daschle took his name from consideration
to lead the Health and Human Services Department last week amid
questions about his tax returns.
David Stout contributed reporting.
Former Gregg Staffer Caught Up
in Corruption Probe
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:22 p.m. ET
February 4, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A former congressional aide to Commerce
Secretary-nominee Judd Gregg has been caught up in a long-running
investigation into a Capitol Hill lobbying scandal.
A person familiar with the case confirmed Wednesday that ''Staffer F''
in court documents is Kevin Koonce, who worked as legislative director
in Gregg's Senate office from 2002-04. The person spoke on condition of
anonymity because the case is still under investigation.
Staffer F was cited in a guilty plea last week by Todd Boulanger, a
former deputy to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. In federal court,
Boulanger admitted he plied the staffer with front-row tickets to a
hockey game, meals and drinks and other tickets to a baseball game, and
in exchange received favors in spending legislation.
The total value of the gifts Staffer F took from Boulanger exceeded
$10,000, court papers said.
The biographical details about Staffer F contained in court documents
-- his job title at the time in the Senate office -- correspond to
Koonce's.
Koonce has not been charged with any crime. He now works at a private
firm, Sorini Samet & Associates LLP.
After several attempts by The Associated Press to reach him, Koonce
replied to an e-mail Wednesday, saying only that he was on personal
leave.
A spokesman for President Barack Obama, who on Tuesday appointed Sen.
Gregg, R-N.H., to serve as Commerce secretary, declined to comment.
Gregg's spokeswoman, Andrea Wuebker, had no immediate comment.
Abramoff, once a top GOP lobbyist, is now in prison and has cooperated
with the Justice Department to help convict more than a dozen people,
including former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, former Deputy Interior Secretary
J. Steven Griles, and a number of former lobbyists and Capitol Hill
aides.
Boulanger was the most recent ex-lobbyist to fall, pleading guilty
Friday to lavishing a number of congressional staffers with gifts
similar to those he gave Staffer F, including an all-expense-paid trip
to the World Series.
As part of the plea documents, prosecutors said Staffer F tried to help
insert spending measures and add other amendments to legislation for
Boulanger's clients. Later, the staffer asked Boulanger if he could
''score some hockey tickets,'' and Boulanger got him front-row seats.
Boulanger later got the staffer box tickets to see the Baltimore
Orioles, but Staffer F wanted more.
''Could you make sure there's beer this time,'' he wrote in an e-mail.
I ''mean, the red sox, crab cakes, and fillet mignon's were nice but
... haha.''
Later, Boulanger sent an e-mail to Abramoff expressing confidence that
the senator for whom the staffer worked would give them a favor. ''Easy
money,'' Boulanger wrote, adding that the aide ''practically lives in
our various suites. We are shady.''
According to his biography on the Web site of Sorini Samet &
Associates, Koonce was a negotiator for the U.S. trade representative
prior to working for Gregg. Koonce also worked for six years as a
legislative assistant to former Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., in the 1990s.
Koonce graduated from Denison University and received a law degree from
Catholic University.
NOTE:
Tom Daschle withdrew from HHS posts
Gregg Nominated for Commerce
Post
NYTIMES
By JEFF ZELENY
February 4, 2009
WASHINGTON — As the White House grappled with fresh
revelations about tax problems among its political appointees,
President Obama on Tuesday nominated Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of
New Hampshire, to help “shore up our financial system and revitalize
our economy” by serving as commerce secretary.
“With the stakes this high, we cannot afford to get trapped in the same
old partisan gridlock,” Mr. Obama said as he named the third Republican
nominee to his cabinet. He added, “Judd is a master of reaching across
the aisle to get things done.”
The president made the announcement exactly two months after he
nominated his first choice for commerce secretary, Gov. Bill Richardson
of New Mexico. He withdrew his name from consideration because of a
federal investigation into state contracts, the first of several
controversies surrounding the president’s top nominees.
As Mr. Obama stood in the Grand Foyer of the White House with Mr.
Gregg, the president’s nominee for chief White House performance
officer withdrew her name from consideration, citing concerns over
unpaid unemployment taxes in the District of Columbia. The nominee,
Nancy Killefer, said her confirmation would create a “distraction” and
delay the urgent agenda facing the administration.
Mr. Obama declined to take questions from reporters about Ms. Killefer
or Tom Daschle, the president’s choice for Health and Human Services
Secretary, who is fighting through tax concerns of his own. A senior
administration official said on Tuesday that the president remains
committed to seeing that Mr. Daschle is confirmed.
The president is seeking to advance his economic recovery plan through
the Senate, dispatching his top advisers to Capitol Hill to answer
questions and make changes to the legislation. Mr. Obama is taking the
unusual step of inviting the top anchors from the five broadcast and
cable television networks to the Oval Office on Tuesday afternoon to
speak about the urgency of his proposal.
“By now, our economic crisis is well known, and our economy’s
shrinking, unemployment rolls are growing, businesses and families
can’t get credit, and small businesses can’t secure the loans they need
to create jobs and get their products to market,” Mr. Obama said
Tuesday. “Now’s the time for Washington to act with the same sense of
urgency that Americans all across the country feel every single day.”
In naming Mr. Gregg to the post of Commerce Secretary, which requires
Senate confirmation, the president is seeking to win more bipartisan
support for the plan. Mr. Obama said that Mr. Gregg would be a key
member of his economic team.
“Judd is famous or infamous, depending on your perspective, on Capitol
Hill, for his strict fiscal discipline,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s not that
he enjoys saying no, although if it’s directed at your bill, you might
feel that way. It’s that he shares my deep-seated commitment to
guaranteeing that our children inherit a future they can afford.”
The president added: “Clearly Judd and I don’t agree on every issue,
most notably who should have won the election. But we do agree on the
urgent need to get American businesses and families back on their feet.”
Mr. Gregg, who is in the middle of his third Senate term, said he
agreed to answer the president’s call to serve because of the enormity
of the nation’s economic crisis.
“This is not a time for partisanship,” Mr. Gregg said. “This is not a
time when we should stand in our ideological corners and shout at each
other. This is a time to govern and govern well.”
Part of the agreement of nominating Mr. Gregg pertained to who would
fill his Senate seat. The Democratic governor of New Hampshire, John
Lynch, agreed to appoint a Republican to succeed Mr. Gregg. Advisers to
Mr. Lynch said Tuesday that he would name Bonnie Newman, a Republican
fixture in New Hampshire who has served in the administrations of
Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
“I also want to thank the governor of New Hampshire for his courtesy
and courage in being willing to make this possible through the
agreement that we have relative to my successor in the Senate,” Mr.
Gregg said.
Obama Names Judd Gregg
Commerce Secretary
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:21 a.m. ET
February 3, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama has nominated Republican Sen.
Judd Gregg to be Commerce secretary. Obama announced the nomination at
the White House.
If confirmed, Gregg would be the third Republican in the Democrat's
Cabinet, joining Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Transportation
Secretary Ray LaHood.
It was the last open spot in the senior ranks of the Obama
administration.
Obama initially had tapped New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson for the
Commerce job, but he withdrew his nomination amid a grand jury
investigation into a state contract awarded to his political donors.
New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat, will appoint a Senate
successor. Officials in the state say he will tap Bonnie Newman.
GOP Leader: Sen. Gregg
Departure Won't Shift Power
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:58 a.m. ET
February 1, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- No change in the Senate's balance of power if New
Hampshire Republican Judd Gregg leaves to become commerce secretary.
That's the word from the Senate's top Republican, Mitch McConnell. He
says Gregg has assured fellow GOP senators of that. McConnell
says
Gregg has promised he would be replaced by someone who would affiliate
with other Republicans in the Senate.
McConnell's comments suggest Gregg has negotiated a deal that would
allow New Hampshire's Democratic governor to name either a Republican
or Republican-leaning replacement. That would leave Senate Democrats
short of a 60-member, fillibuster-proof majority.
Officials say Obama is set to make Gregg his third Republican Cabinet
official as early as Monday.
McConnell spoke on CBS' ''Face the Nation.''
Obama Ready to Pick
Republican Senator for
Commerce Post
NYTIMES
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
February 1, 2009 - another day early...
WASHINGTON — The White House on Saturday confirmed the widespread
speculation that President Obama is set to pick Senator Judd Gregg,
Republican of New Hampshire, as his nominee for commerce secretary.
“Senator Gregg is now the leading candidate for commerce and a pick
that could come as early as Monday,” a senior administration official
said, speaking on condition of anonymity because a formal announcement
has not yet been made.
Mr. Gregg’s name has been circulated for several days as Mr. Obama
tries to replace his previous nominee for commerce secretary, Gov. Bill
Richardson of New Mexico, who withdrew amid revelations that a grand
jury is investigating how he awarded state government contracts. Mr.
Gregg himself said on Friday that he was under consideration.
If the senator accepts and is confirmed, he would be the third
Republican appointee in Mr. Obama’s cabinet, after Secretary of Defense
Robert M. Gates, who also served under former President George W. Bush,
and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a former Republican
congressman from Mr. Obama’s home state of Illinois.
Mr. Gregg’s selection could also open the door to a significant shift
in the balance of power in Congress. There are currently 58 Democrats
in the Senate; the number would rise to 59 if Al Franken of Minnesota
is seated after the court challenge to his race is completed.
If Gov. John Lynch of New Hampshire, a Democrat, replaced Mr. Gregg
with a member of his own party, that would put the Democratic majority
at 60 — a magic number in the Senate, because 60 is the number of votes
needed to control the legislative agenda and block a Republican
filibuster.
But there are no guarantees that Mr. Lynch will pick a Democrat: New
Hampshire is a state that prizes its political independence, and Mr.
Lynch is a moderate. Some analysts say the governor could turn to a
well-regarded Republican — the name of Warren Rudman, a former senator
from New Hampshire, has been mentioned — to serve as a kind of
“caretaker senator” to fill out the remainder of Mr. Gregg’s term,
which expires at the end of 2010.
Mr. Gregg was not particularly close to Mr. Obama when they were
senators together. But the New Hampshire senator did have a close
relationship with Mr. Obama’s predecessor, former President George W.
Bush, a friendship stretching back two decades to when Mr. Gregg’s
father, Hugh Gregg, a former New Hampshire governor, worked to help
elect Mr. Bush’s father, the first President Bush.
But Mr. Gregg has been complementing Mr. Obama of late. Earlier this
week, the senator was quoted as calling the president a “tour de force.”
NYTIMES Sunday, January 4,
2009 - Update | 2:28 p.m.
Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico confirmed in a statement
released Sunday afternoon that he has withdrawn his name as the
commerce secretary nominee, citing a pending “investigation of a
company that has done business with New Mexico state government.”
Mr. Richardson says in the statement that he and his administration
“have acted properly in all matters,” but that the “ongoing
investigation also would have forced an untenable delay in the
confirmation process.”
On Dec. 19, The Times published an article stating that a federal grand
jury in New Mexico was looking into accusations that Governor
Richardson’s administration gave lucrative contracts to a California
financier because he contributed heavily to the governor’s political
action committees.
The article, citing a person familiar with the grand jury proceedings,
stated that since August, federal investigators have been examining how
CDR Financial Products Inc., of Beverly Hills, Calif., got two
consulting contracts in 2004 worth about $1.4 million to advise the
state on a large bond issue for building infrastructure, one of Mr.
Richardson’s initiatives.
The investigation was first reported in The Albuquerque Journal...
Official:
Richardson to Be Commerce Secretary
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:38 a.m. ET
November 23, 2008
NEW YORK (AP) -- A Democratic official says President-elect Barack
Obama will name New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as commerce
secretary. The official says Obama plans to announce Richardson's
selection after Thanksgiving. The official spoke on condition of
anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly
about the negotiations. Richardson was energy secretary and U.N.
ambassador under President Bill Clinton. Richardson would be the most
visible Hispanic named to Obama's Cabinet. Richardson dropped out
of the Democratic presidential contest in January and endorsed Obama.
-----------------------------
Penny Pritzker, national finance
chair. for Obama
Obama
Fund-Raiser Knocks Down Cabinet Rumors
NYTIMES
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
November 21, 2008
WASHINGTON — When Barack Obama was looking for an
entree
into Chicago’s elite business community, he had the perfect
door-opener: Penny S. Pritzker, a billionaire from one of the city’s
dynasties.
Ms. Pritzker, 49, went on to become the Obama presidential
campaign’s
national finance chairwoman, raising record-breaking sums. And after
Mr. Obama won the election, she was widely reported to be a leading
contender for commerce secretary.
But the same business holdings and connections that made Ms.
Pritzker
so vital to Mr. Obama’s ability to raise campaign money also came under
sharp scrutiny. On Thursday, she released a statement declaring that
she would not be a candidate for the job.
“I think I can best serve our nation in my current capacity:
building
businesses, creating jobs and working to strengthen our economy,” Ms.
Pritzker said. “It has been my great privilege to serve in the Obama
campaign. I look forward to helping our new president in every way
possible and am excited about the future under his leadership.”
Ms. Pritzker is one of three cousins who manage their family’s
fortune,
which includes Hyatt hotels, casinos and other ventures. She oversees a
chain of luxury retirement communities, an airport parking company, a
realty group and the credit-rating agency TransUnion.
The talk of a cabinet post, which would require Senate
confirmation,
had cast a spotlight on her secretive family’s empire and her past
business dealings, including episodes that might prove politically
embarrassing.
Earlier in her career, Ms. Pritzker was involved in running and
overseeing Superior Bank, in a Chicago suburb, which focused on
bundling subprime mortgages into securities, the practice that later
helped set off the current financial crisis. The institution collapsed
in 2001.
Moreover, Ms. Pritzker’s family is renowned for finding ways to
avoid
paying taxes on its wealth. The Pritzkers were pioneers in using tax
loopholes to shelter their holdings from the Internal Revenue Service,
and many of their dealings have never been made public.
It was not clear why she put out the statement on Thursday, but
some
news outlets, including The New York Times, reported late Wednesday
night that she was in the final stages of being vetted. An Obama
transition spokesman said Thursday that those accounts were incorrect.
Burt Ely, a banking consultant who testified at a 2001 Senate
committee
hearing about the failure of Superior Bank, said it had never made
sense for Ms. Pritzker to become a nominee. “The confirmation hearing
could have been quite ugly for all that would have been dredged up
about Superior as well as possibly other Pritzker dealings,” Mr. Ely
said Thursday.
In 1988, the Pritzker family and another wealthy investor took
over a
failing savings and loan and turned it into Superior Bank. Ms. Pritzker
was its chairwoman from 1991 to 1994, after which she sat on the board
of the bank’s holding company.
In 1993, the bank began a strategy of concentrating on packaging
subprime mortgages into securities. At first, the bank flourished. But
regulators later discovered accounting irregularities that overstated
the value of its assets. The bank was forced to write down huge losses,
leaving it without adequate capital in the spring of 2001.
In May 2001, Ms. Pritzker wrote a letter to bank employees
assuring
them that her family would put more cash in to save the bank, and
declaring that “our commitment to subprime lending has never been
stronger.” But the Pritzker family did not carry out the plan, and the
bank was shut down in July 2001.
A 2002 report by the inspector general of the Federal Deposit
Insurance
Corporation concluded that “the failure of Superior Bank was directly
attributable to bank management and the board of directors ignoring
sound risk management principles and failing to adequately oversee
Superior operations.”
The Pritzkers agreed in 2001 to pay the F.D.I.C. $460 million
over 15
years to cover claims by depositors. Still, more than 1,400 depositors
who had more than $100,000 in their savings accounts — the maximum the
government then insured — were left short about $10 million, said Clint
Krislov, a lawyer for several of them. “Why the Pritzkers wouldn’t do
the right thing and just make these people whole for the small amount
of money that it would take, I still cannot understand,” he said.
In a written response to questions by The Times on Thursday, Ms.
Pritzker said, “I sincerely regret the closing of Superior Bank.” She
said that she did not personally own any of the bank, but that her
trusts had contributed to the “large amount of money” that her family
paid to the F.D.I.C.
The Pritzker clan’s fortune traces back to a Chicago law firm
run by
Ms. Pritzker’s grandfather, who bought up property during the
Depression and became an investor. His sons expanded the empire,
establishing the Hyatt chain.
The family also increased its wealth by exploiting loopholes in
the tax
code, including setting up a series of offshore trusts that sheltered
their assets from taxes.
The I.R.S. fought several battles with the Pritzkers over the
arrangements. But the agency was hindered by foreign bank secrecy laws
that concealed what the Pritzkers owned.
In 2002, a few cracks appeared in the wall of secrecy when two
young
Pritzker heirs filed a lawsuit claiming their older relatives had
looted their trusts. The litigation revealed that the family was worth
at least $15 billion, that it was held in some 950 trusts, and that
they were trying to split it up among 11 heirs by 2011.
One Democrat familiar with the transition said Thursday that Ms.
Pritzker initially believed she could weather questions about Superior
Bank, but her family resisted because their assets are so entangled.
The transition team’s vetting form, which she never filled out,
required disclosing all property owned in the past decade, including
“held in trust” or “held in combination with others.”
-------------------------
Pritzker
Withdraws From Cabinet Consideration
NYTIMES
By Brian Knowlton
November 20, 2008, 2:08 pm
Penny Pritzker, the Chicago businesswoman,
longtime
friend of Barack Obama’s, and national finance chairman of his
presidential campaign, has withdrawn from consideration as commerce
secretary.
Ms. Pritzker issued the following statement on Thursday:
“Speculation
has grown that I am a candidate for secretary of commerce. I am not. I
think I can best serve our nation in my current capacity: building
businesses, creating jobs and working to strengthen our economy. It has
been my great privilege to serve in the Obama campaign.”
Ms. Pritzker was a chief architect of Mr. Obama’s
record-breaking
fund-raising efforts, and speculation had grown in recent days that she
would be offered the commerce post.
But some of her vast business dealings – her family’s financial
empire
includes the Hyatt hotel chain and many other ventures — seemed likely
to raise obstacles to any confirmation process. Among other things, she
helped run and oversee an Illinois bank involved in turning subprime
loans into securities. The bank collapsed after regulators discovered
accounting irregularities
Defense
Robert Gates
EXCLUSIVE: Obama wants Bush war team to stay
Washington Times
Bill Gertz (Contact)
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
EXCLUSIVE:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is asking many of the Bush
administration's 250 Pentagon political appointees to remain on the job
until the incoming Obama administration finds replacements -- a move
designed to prevent a leadership vacuum with U.S. troops engaged in
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The unusual request by Mr. Gates, whom President-elect Barack Obama has
asked to continue in his Cabinet post, ensures that key policy
positions will not be left to "acting" subordinates as typically occurs
when political appointees are directed to resign during a presidential
transition.
"I have received authorization from the president-elect's transition
team to extend a number of Department of Defense political appointees
an invitation to voluntarily remain in their current positions until
replaced," Mr. Gates said in a Friday e-mail.
The chance to stay is "available to all willing political appointees
with the exception of those who are contacted individually and told
otherwise," he said.
Geoff Morrell, Pentagon press secretary, confirmed that Mr. Gates wants
to retain temporarily most political appointees, saying nearly all of
the service secretaries and undersecretaries will remain until Senate
confirmation of their successors, which can take months. He declined to
identify who will be asked to leave.
"It is his top priority to ensure a smooth transition," said Mr.
Morrell, who is also staying on.
Other federal agencies, including state, justice and homeland security
are not keeping political appointees.
The Pentagon was scheduled to notify those it would ask to leave at the
close of business Monday. At least three officials were notified Monday
in an e-mail that they had to vacate their offices by Jan. 20. Deputy
of Defense Secretary Gordon England and Undersecretary of Defense for
Policy Eric S. Edelman already have announced that they plan to depart
by Jan. 20. Two senior officials expected to stay are John Young,
undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics,
and James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence.
Mr. Gates said he could not provide "more clarity and guidance" on how
long those who wish to become holdovers will be allowed to stay.
"To the extent you are willing and in a position to continue to serve,
I am deeply appreciative," Mr. Gates said in the e-mail. "However, I
encourage you to continue to prudently plan for the transition from DOD
employment, as the pace of personnel decisions by the incoming
administration is likely to accelerate."
About 40 Pentagon positions require Senate confirmation, including the
undersecretaries, assistant secretaries and some deputies. The rest do
not require a formal presidential nomination and Senate approval and
can be made by the defense secretary. Senate confirmation in some
cases can take months and require hearings. In other cases, nominees
can be approved within a few weeks of nomination.
The secretary said he appreciated the appointees' willingness to
continue "in the interest of providing continuity for this department
and for its critical mission to the nation in a time of war," and he
promised to thank each appointee personally in January.
"But I still want to take advantage of this note to thank you
collectively for all you have done for our country. I wish you and
yours happy holidays," he said.
The note was signed "Bob Gates" and sent by Mr. Gates' chief of staff,
Robert Rangel.
FROM
THE I-BBC: US Defence Secretary Robert Gates is reported
to have agreed to remain in charge of the Pentagon when Barack Obama
takes office, at least for the first year of his
administration.
Robert Gates, 65, is a former director of the CIA and was
appointed Defence Secretary by President Bush in 2006. He has promoted
the military surge in Iraq that has been credited with stemming
violence there. Mr Obama opposed the surge but
both men are agreed on a greater focus on Afghanistan. Mr Gates
is seen as a moderate and is widely respected among both Democrats and
Republicans in Congress.
His appointment would also fulfil Mr Obama's pledge to include a
Republican in his Cabinet.
SECURITY
TEAM:
Secretary of Defense, State and National Security
Advisor heading this up...including, so far...
First woman to head
major US intelligence agency
YAHOO
By KIMBERLY DOZIER, Associated Press Writer
9 Aug. 2010
FORT BELVOIR, Va. – The United States has had three female secretaries
of state — but until now has never had a woman lead one of its 16 major
intelligence agencies.
Letitia A. Long, 51, was praised by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, as
the right person for the job, as she took up her post as director of
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in a ceremony Monday at the
agency's half-built, high-tech campus in Springfield, Va.
Long, in turn, saluted what the NGA work force has already
accomplished, from aiding troops on the battlefield, to helping draw
together intelligence from across the national security spectrum.
"I have never seen an agency as young as the NGA do so much in so
little time," she said of the organization, which was established in
1996.
She spoke before several hundred VIPs from the intelligence and special
ops community on the roof of a parking garage next to her future
offices. The "Jetsons"-style rounded wedge of buildings is rising from
a vast construction site at Fort Belvoir. The NGA's staff, now spread
among several sites across the Washington metropolitan area, is slated
to relocate there by fall 2011.
Long's 32-year career has led to a series of senior management
positions: deputy director of Naval Intelligence, deputy undersecretary
of defense for intelligence and, most recently, second in command at
the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Long's old boss and mentor, James R. Clapper, newly confirmed as
director of national intelligence, noted her 32 years of service, with
16 of them often working in agencies under his purview. Clapper warned
her that as soon as he is sworn in as DNI, his "meddling" would
continue in her next mission.
Long thanked him for "taking a chance on a young executive, way back
when," and said she welcomed the meddling to come.
Long represents the vanguard of women in the intelligence community.
Women represent 38 percent of total intelligence work force, according
to Wendy Morigi, DNI spokeswoman. In six of the most prominent
agencies, 27 percent of senior intelligence positions are held by women.
Long has taken over one of the "top computer geek shops" in the
national security world. The NGA synthesizes satellite imagery, using
everything from the number of electric lines a city has to the density
of the soil, to create three-dimensional, interactive maps of every
spot on the planet. They're used by everyone from invading troops
gauging whether a country's roads or deserts can handle tank tracks, to
oil spill cleanup crews trying to decide where to deploy resources.
Long has the science-and-technology credentials to do it, with a degree
in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, and a masters in
mechanical engineering from the Catholic University of America.
Together with those high powered jobs, Annapolis-born Long and her
husband have raised three daughters.
Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., said Long's "experience and position make
her an important role model for all the women in the intelligence
community." Eshoo is a member of the House intelligence committee and a
longtime proponent of women in top intelligence roles.
Some of Long's new women staffers at the NGA say her example will
surely change how the largely male-dominated work force sees them.
However, women in their thirties and forties at these agencies say the
climb they face is small compared to Long's fight, against an older
generation that hadn't yet witnessed women in combat or a woman come so
close to capturing the nomination for U.S. president.
Yet some of those women out in the national security trenches say the
fight's far from over.
Intelligence executive Carrie Bachner, a former Air Force officer,
worked as the legislative adviser to Charles Allen when he was the
Department of Homeland Security's top intelligence official.
That meant she advised him daily on how to deal with the 86
congressional committees responsible for DHS oversight.
Still Bachner says, when she'd walk into a room of intelligence
officials or congressional staff with Allen, "they'd automatically
ignore me, assuming I was the executive assistant or a note taker until
they'd realize, 'Oh, wow, she's the person we're supposed to talk to.'"
Bachner is also Indonesian, which she believes is another reason she is
often overlooked.
"I still get it, even though I'm the president of my company," she
says. Her firm, Mission Concepts Inc., specializes in information
sharing and serves the Pentagon and most of the intelligence agencies.
"They are taken aback when I introduce myself. They're looking for the
real president, and well, that's me."
And now, when "they" look for the director of the NGA, that will be
Letitia Long.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Adviser at the Heart of National Security
NYTIMES
By HELENE COOPER
July 9, 2010
WASHINGTON
SOME of President Obama’s top national security advisers believed late
last year that they had reached consensus on an aspect of Afghanistan
strategy after meeting with Gen. James L. Jones, the national security
adviser.
They should have checked first with Denis McDonough, the National
Security Council’s chief of staff. “I don’t think that’s where the
president is on that,” Mr. McDonough informed his higher-ups, according
to two administration officials.
A couple of months later, when state officials in Florida tried to halt
medical evacuation flights from Haiti, Mr. McDonough, on the ground in
earthquake-stunned Port-au-Prince, got on his BlackBerry, which is
never far from his side. Within a few hours, as other officials tell
it, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano acted to keep the
airspace open.
Forget Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton or Defense Secretary
Robert M. Gates. When it comes to national security, Mr. Obama’s inner
circle is so tight it largely consists of Mr. McDonough, a 40-year-old
from Minnesota who is unknown to most Americans but who is so close to
the president that his colleagues — including his superiors — often
will not make a move on big issues without checking with him first.
“He is the keeper of the president’s flame,” said Cheryl Mills, Mrs.
Clinton’s chief of staff. Brian Katulis, a foreign policy expert who is
a good friend of Mr. McDonough, said, “When the president needs to pick
up the phone and call someone on national security, that someone is
Denis.”
When Mr. Obama got word of the Rolling Stone article that would lead to
his firing of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal as the top commander in
Afghanistan, Mr. McDonough was one of about a half-dozen people he
immediately summoned to the Oval Office.
Mr. McDonough is intensively protective of the president, and is well
known for picking up the phone — or his BlackBerry — to take people to
task, from reporters to Washington talking heads to other Obama
officials who go off message. He spent the entirety of his bike ride
home to Takoma Park, Md., from the White House late one recent night
arguing on the cellphone with a reporter who he believed had
mischaracterized an internal administration debate over Iraq policy.
He has berated some of the Democratic Party’s most distinguished
foreign policy dignitaries when they have dared to critique Mr. Obama
publicly, leaving a miffed Washington establishment in his wake
muttering — off the record, of course — about just who this guy thinks
he is.
His e-mail messages are legendary across Washington, and usually appear
right after a critique hits the Web. When David Rothkopf, a national
security expert and Commerce Department official in the Clinton
administration, wrote a column for The Washington Post last August that
praised Mrs. Clinton — and notably, not Mr. Obama — as overseeing
“profound changes” to American foreign policy, the first e-mail message
Mr. Rothkopf received came from you-know-who.
“Interesting choice for a profile,” Mr. McDonough wrote.
“Political figures like to have people who are watching their back,”
Mr. Rothkopf said in an interview. “I understand why people are bugged
by McDonough; they’re jealous of his access to the president. But the
president deserves to have someone like him.”
Mr. McDonough declined to be interviewed for this article.
Mr. Obama arrived in Washington six years ago as a political outsider,
a Chicago novice with no historical ties to the Democratic foreign
policy establishment. Early on in the presidential campaign, Mr.
McDonough signed up with Mr. Obama.
A foreign policy adviser to Senator Tom Daschle before Mr. Daschle’s
2004 election defeat, Mr. McDonough was then at the Center for American
Progress, a liberal research organization.
HE was all over the country for Mr. Obama during the campaign. Mr.
McDonough shoveled the driveway and sidewalk of a Davenport, Iowa,
couple as part of an unsuccessful effort to woo them into caucusing for
Mr. Obama instead of Mrs. Clinton. He spent so much time canvassing his
assigned precinct that by the night of the Iowa caucuses he was
greeting most of the caucusgoers by name, prompting his colleagues to
start calling him the town mayor. (Mr. Obama won five of the seven
delegates in the precinct.)
Mr. McDonough looks more like a Town & Country cover model than a
Washington foreign policy wonk. At 6-foot-3, he weighs himself
regularly in the White House doctor’s office to make sure he does not
go above 200 pounds.
But early on during the campaign, Mr. McDonough took on the role of Mr.
Obama’s foreign policy guru. “Foreign policy was always the high wire
for us on the campaign,” one administration official said. President
Obama, he said, “trusted Denis to get the job done but not sand down
his views.”
After the Democratic debate in South Carolina in 2007, when Mr. Obama
called “ridiculous” the notion of not talking to America’s enemies, Mr.
McDonough and Mr. Obama mulled the ensuing furor in the candidate’s
bare Massachusetts Avenue campaign office. Mr. McDonough, according to
a former campaign official, “told the president, ‘You have nothing to
walk back on your position. You don’t need lectures on foreign policy
from the Democratic foreign policy establishment.’ ”
The bond they forged during the campaign sealed Mr. McDonough’s role as
Mr. Obama’s most trusted foreign policy aide in the White House. Today,
many of the old Democratic rivals are in the Obama cabinet, deciding
Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran policy. And Mr. McDonough is far closer to
the president than they are.
AT both the Pentagon and the State Department, officials report being
chewed out by Mr. McDonough when he believes they have leaked something
before the White House is ready. In recent months, Mr. McDonough has
mellowed, his colleagues say. In fact, he began 2010 telling reporters
that he was going to make an effort to be nice, and now routinely
mentions that he will not blow up during his almost nightly phone calls
to dispute articles.
At the White House, Mr. McDonough presses the East Wing to make sure
that junior members of the National Security Council staff are invited
to receptions and parties.
In an interview, General Jones said he could not recall when Mr.
McDonough told him and other officials that their evolving consensus on
Afghanistan policy was not where Mr. Obama wanted to go. But “as a
generic anecdote, I’m not bothered by that; it’s what I expect him to
do,” he said.
“It’s a big asset for all of us to have Denis, who has known the
president for so long,” General Jones said. “He knows how he thinks
about issues.”
A
Concession Wrapped in an Acceptance
NYTIMES
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
December 2, 2008
Presentations of presidential appointees can be
important, but they are rarely interesting. Usually, the men and women
chosen for top cabinet roles are not well known to the public; if there
is drama behind the scenes, most in the audience are blind to it.
That was hardly the case on Monday when President-elect Barack
Obama introduced his national security team. Senator Hillary Rodham
Clinton’s speech was no ordinary public-service pledge; for plenty of
viewers, it was the moment when Mrs. Clinton finally conceded the
election for real.
The occasion was solemn, but like a wedding where the parents
are divorced, the ceremony was carefully choreographed to avert awkward
moments and camouflage past unpleasantness.
When Mr. Obama unveiled his economic team last week, he alone
made a speech. In this more delicate selection, it was decided that
Mrs. Clinton, his pick for secretary of state, should also speak. But
that might look suspect — or too political — unless the five other
appointees also said a word, and that, in turn, required a few words
from Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., who had yet to make
public statements of any consequence since the election. (He spoke
last, spiritedly, and at some length.)
Not all the staging was designed to address Mrs. Clinton’s
sensibilities. She and the five other appointees walked out on stage
and stood in line, almost as if at attention, waiting for the
president-elect to walk in. He did so briskly, with Mr. Biden at his
heels.
Mr. Obama introduced his former rival as “my dear friend,” and
promised that his new team would forge “a new dawn of American
leadership.”
Mrs. Clinton, who has mostly stayed out of public view since the
election, opened on a valedictory note, telling the audience that
leaving the Senate would be “very difficult for me.” She attributed her
sense of loss, or surrender, to ending her service to her New York
constituents, but those who watched her struggle for the Democratic
nomination with such ferocity for the past two years were reminded that
she was also forswearing her independent campaign identity.
And there was a fleeting flashback to her primary season
gamesmanship when she listed representing New York as a foreign policy
credential. “You’ve also helped prepare me well for this new role,” she
told her Senate constituents. “After all, New Yorkers aren’t afraid to
speak their minds and do so in every language.”
Her husband certainly was not letting anyone forget the
campaign: as the ceremony was taking place, former President Bill
Clinton issued a long statement extolling his wife’s qualifications
(“as her husband, I am deeply proud”) and briefly praised Mr. Obama,
not for his vision, but for his good sense in choosing Mrs. Clinton.
The topic at hand was national security, and five other
appointments were announced, but reporters were mostly interested in
exploring how secure Mr. Obama felt about his new secretary of state’s
loyalty. A reporter asked Mr. Obama whether there was any lingering
internal disagreement given that “some people up there on the stage”
had previously attacked his argument that the United States has a right
to attack terrorist targets in Pakistan without Pakistani government
permission.
“I did not ask for assurances from these individuals that they
would agree with me at all times,” Mr. Obama said calmly. “I think they
understand and would not be joining this team unless they understood
and were prepared to carry out the decisions that have been made by me
after full discussion.”
When another reporter asked Mr. Obama about the “evolution” of
his views since those times in the campaign when he dismissed Mrs.
Clinton’s foreign policy experience as a series of “teas” with foreign
leaders, Mr. Obama took it lightly. “Well, I mean, I think — this is
fun for the press to try to stir up whatever quotes were generated
during the course of the campaign.” he said with a grin. “No, I
understand. And you’re having fun, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m not — I’m not faulting it.”
Mrs. Clinton had greeted the question somewhat grimly, but as
Mr. Obama answered, she slowly unfurled a smile. By the end, she
managed to look almost as amused by the question as her new boss was.
Obama
Unveils His National Security Team
NYTIMES
By DAVID STOUT
December 1, 2008
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama called for “a new dawn of
American leadership” on Monday as he formally introduced his national
security team, led by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as his nominee for
secretary of state.
“We will strengthen our capacity to defeat our enemies and support our
friends,” Mr. Obama said in Chicago. “We will renew old alliances and
forge new and enduring partnerships.”
The new president said he was sticking to his goal of removing American
combat troops from Iraq within 16 months, which he called “the right
time frame,” and that this would be accomplished with safety for the
troops and security for the Iraqi people.
He introduced his team one by one, starting with Senator Clinton, his
former bitter rival for the Democratic presidential nomination; then
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who will stay on, at least for a
time, in the new administration; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO
commander, to be national security adviser; Gov. Janet Napolitano of
Arizona to be secretary of homeland security: Susan E. Rice to be
ambassador to the United Nations, and Eric H. Holder Jr. to be attorney
general.
All of the nominations had been expected, and the president-elect’s
announcement contained no surprises. It did, however, contain some not
very thinly veiled criticism of the Bush administration.
“Hillary’s appointment is a sign to friend and foe of the seriousness
of my commitment to renew American diplomacy and restore our
alliances,” Mr. Obama said, apparently alluding to the effects of
President Bush’s Iraq policy — which the president-elect has bitterly
criticized — on America’s international relationships.
And when the new president introduced Mr. Holder, he said: “Let me be
clear: The attorney general serves the American people, and I have
every expectation that Eric will protect our people, uphold the public
trust and adhere to our Constitution.”
President Bush’s handling of the Justice Department has often been
criticized, with much of the denunciation focused on former Attorney
General Alberto R. Gonzales, who was portrayed by many Democrats and
some Republicans on Capitol Hill as little more than Mr. Bush’s
personal lawyer.
The choice of Senator Clinton to be the country’s top diplomat has
drawn the most attention in recent weeks, in part because of the
months-long duel between her and Mr. Obama for the nomination that once
was viewed as all but certain to go to her. But the bitterness of their
contest seemed all but forgotten on Monday.
“Mr. President-elect, thank you for this honor,” Senator Clinton said.
“If confirmed, I will give this assignment, your administration and our
country my all.”
Barring extraordinary surprises, the confirmation of Mr. Obama’s
choices seems assured. For one thing, there is a tradition of giving a
new president his own team of Cabinet-level advisers. Then, too,
senators from both parties who will vote on whether to confirm the
nominees offered warm praise in advance.
“President-elect Obama has chosen a terrific national security team to
protect our security and help restore America’s rightful place in the
world,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who will
become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He promised
a “swift and fair confirmation process.”
The foreign relations committee’s leading Republican, Senator Richard
G. Lugar of Indiana, described the president-elect’s choices as
“excellent” in a Sunday interview on ABC. “I look forward to working
with each one of them,” Mr. Lugar said.
FROM THE I-BBC:
General James Jones is a former Marine commandant and commander of US
and NATO forces in Europe.
Gen Jones, 64, has been a critic of some of the Bush administration's
war strategy, especially in Afghanistan. The retired general is a
decorated Vietnam veteran and is admired by both Republicans and
Democrats on Capitol Hill. He served as a special Middle
East peace adviser for the Bush administration.
National Security Pick: From a Marine
to a Mediator
NYTIMES
By HELENE COOPER
November 29, 2008
WASHINGTON — James L. Jones, a retired four-star general, was among a
mostly Republican crowd watching a presidential debate in October when
Barack Obama casually mentioned that he got a lot of his advice on
foreign policy from General Jones.
“Explain yourself!” some of the Republicans demanded, as General Jones
later recalled it.
He did not. A 6-foot-5 Marine Corps commandant with the looks of John
Wayne, General Jones is not given to talking about his political bent,
be it Republican or Democrat. And yet, he is Mr. Obama’s choice for
national security adviser, a job that will make him the main foreign
policy sounding board and sage to a president with relatively little
foreign policy experience.
The selection of General Jones will elevate another foreign policy
moderate to a team that will include Robert M. Gates, a carry-over from
the Bush administration, as defense secretary and Hillary Rodham
Clinton as secretary of state. By bringing a military man to the White
House, Mr. Obama may be trying to cement an early bond with military
leaders who regard him with some uneasiness, particularly over his call
for rapid troop reductions in Iraq.
But General Jones will also be expected to mediate between rivals,
particularly in dealing with Mr. Gates, who has his own power base at
the Pentagon, and with Mrs. Clinton, who has told friends that she does
not expect the national security adviser to stand between her and the
president.
And while other generals, including Colin L. Powell and Brent
Scowcroft, have successfully made the transition to national security
adviser, the experience has sometimes been rocky, as in the career of
John M. Poindexter, a retired admiral who fought an uphill battle
during the Reagan administration to mediate between George P. Shultz at
the State Department and Caspar W. Weinberger at the Pentagon before
finding himself caught up in the Iran-contra affair.
Mr. Obama is expected to announce his national security team on Monday
in Chicago, with Mr. Gates at the Pentagon, Mrs. Clinton at the State
Department, General Jones at the White House and possibly Adm. Dennis
C. Blair, who is retired, as director of national intelligence. What is
notable is that none of them have a long history with Mr. Obama, and
none are known to be particularly close to him.
Among Mr. Obama’s previous inner circle of foreign policy advisers,
both Susan E. Rice and Gregory Craig crossed swords with Mrs. Clinton
during the presidential campaign. Ms. Rice may end up as ambassador to
the United Nations, but Mr. Craig will become White House counsel. Two
others, Anthony Lake, a national security adviser under President Bill
Clinton, and Samantha Power, a Harvard scholar and author who left the
campaign after she was quoted as making remarks critical of Mrs.
Clinton, appear unlikely to end up with top jobs.
At the time of that presidential debate in October, General Jones had
spoken only twice to Senator Obama, most recently to brief him on
Afghanistan before the candidate made his first trip there. By
contrast, he had worked since 1979 with Senator John McCain, the
Republican nominee, and regarded him as a friend. On the night of the
debate he had just given a speech to a mostly Republican group in
Pebble Beach, Calif.
But General Jones has long been respected and admired by both
Republicans and Democrats. He is fluent in French, which he once spoke
better than he spoke English after living in Paris from age 2 to 17. He
played basketball at Georgetown University, served in Vietnam and has
received all manner of decorations as a marine, including the Defense
Distinguished Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters and the Bronze
Star Medal with Combat “V.”
At 64, General Jones bicycles from home to work twice each week, riding
the nine miles from McLean, Va., to the offices of the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, two blocks from the White House, where he runs a task force
on energy. Friends say he is a fan of Toby Keith, the country-music
singer and songwriter.
In selecting General Jones, Mr. Obama has also picked a former supreme
allied commander in Europe, a man who, at NATO, had to cajole, prod and
bully recalcitrant nations. At NATO, he led the American operation in
Kosovo. He served as the Bush administration’s envoy to set up an
Israeli-Palestinian security model in the West Bank city of Jenin and
has traveled to Afghanistan and Iraq on fact-finding missions for the
Pentagon.
He has said the war in Iraq has caused the nation to “take its eye off
the ball” in Afghanistan and warned that the consequences of a failure
there were just as serious as in Iraq.
“Jones brings the same balance that Scowcroft did to the job,” said
David Rothkopf, author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the
National Security Council and the Architects of American Power”
(PublicAffairs). “Not only does he know how to work the Washington
system,” Mr. Rothkopf said, but “he’s deeply steeped in Afghanistan,
which is going to be a central front for us.”
But what is unclear, Mr. Rothkopf said, is how quickly General Jones
can develop a close relationship with Mr. Obama and how successfully
he, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gates can define their roles on issues like
Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia and terrorism.
Because of his physical proximity — the national security adviser works
in the West Wing of the White House and consults with the president
several times a day — General Jones will automatically serve as a
counter to the State Department. But a State Department that is at war
with the White House is the last thing that General Jones wants, his
friends and associates say.
“He’s not the sort of person who is going to be chasing down whether
Hillary went through him or not,” said one of General Jones’s friends,
who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He doesn’t have that kind of an
ego.”
General Jones, friends say, gets along well with Mrs. Clinton and has
even hired some of her former staff members to work for him on the
energy task force.
General Jones approaches things in a “get it done” fashion, associates
say, with a propensity to think tactically. Sometimes, that can rub
people the wrong way. When he began working on the security proposal
for Jenin, some Israeli military officials grumbled that he thought he
knew Israel’s security requirements better than they did. Israelis also
worried that he would seek to impose an international force on the
ground to maintain security, an idea favored by many in the
international community but that still leaves some Israeli hawks queasy.
But things have changed in Jenin, much of it thanks to General Jones,
both Israeli and Palestinian officials say. The city that once sent
waves of suicide bombers into Israel now has Palestinian security
officials who have restored order.
“He was able to force all of the different parts of the U.S. government
to work together to make Jenin a model of economic hope, despite a very
dreary past, and so far, so good,” said David Makovsky, an analyst with
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “He brought clarity to a
messy situation.”
Eric Holder, Att'y General, also to be a member of the Security
Team.
Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, selected to be national intelligence director
by incoming administration, now removed.
Keep America Safe: Steps to
reforming intelligence.
BY Stephen F. Hayes, Weekly Standard
June 7, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 36
Two weeks ago President Obama fired his top intelligence adviser—or at
least the man who held the title.
In the six months before Dennis Blair was relieved of his duties as
director of national intelligence, there were three attacks on U.S.
soil, each one with troubling details. After Fort Hood, we learned that
the FBI knew before the attack about email correspondence between the
shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, and al Qaeda cleric Anwar al Awlaki
and did nothing. We know that the Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab, stopped talking to his interrogators after he was read
his Miranda rights and that, moreover, the interrogation was conducted
without the benefit of the dossier the CIA had compiled on
Abdulmutallab. And the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad,
almost escaped after leaks about his identity appeared in the press.
There is much more.
We were told by the administration that the system worked when it had
not. We were told that the attackers had no connections to the
international jihadist networks when they had many. We were told the
high-value interrogation group was operational, and it wasn’t. We were
told that 50 minutes was enough to learn everything knowable about a
would-be attacker and his al Qaeda connections, a claim that was
quickly discarded when he resumed cooperating and the administration
wanted to let us know how much additional intelligence he was providing.
So someone had to go. Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano would have been
better choices than Blair. But the decision to fire him suggests that
the Obama administration has finally recognized that things had to
change.
There have been other indications, too. After initially downplaying
Faisal Shahzad’s ties to international terrorism, the administration
swiftly and decisively corrected itself. Three months after arguing in
a letter to Congress that the U.S. government had no choice but to
quickly mirandize detained terrorists, Holder said that the
administration would work with lawmakers to give interrogators more
flexibility in their efforts to obtain intelligence.
These are good signs. But Obama needs to go further.
His first step is to end the investigation of CIA interrogators by the
Justice Department. The repercussions have been severe. CIA operators,
already risk averse, are today far less willing to take risks in the
field out of fear that a wrong decision, even a legal one that produced
crucial intelligence, could send them to jail. Obama should also insist
that the Justice Department aggressively investigate the alleged
exposure of CIA officials by lawyers representing Guantánamo
detainees. Photographs of officials were discovered in the cell of
Mustafa Ahmed al Hawsawi and were reportedly provided by investigators
working for the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense
Lawyers. John Rizzo, former CIA general counsel and a 30-year
intelligence veteran, said that the breach was far graver than the leak
of Valerie Plame’s name.
Another crucial step: Move the day-to-day direction of intelligence
policy out of the West Wing. President Obama wanted to nominate John
Brennan to run the CIA, but the left protested, pointing to Brennan’s
high-ranking positions at the agency during the Bush administration.
But as White House “intelligence czar,” Brennan occupies a position of
far more influence—proximity to the president is power. Brennan works
for the administration; he is not an independent voice on intelligence
matters. He has repeatedly shown himself willing to make political
arguments in defense of the White House. It was a problem that Blair
noted in congressional testimony after the Christmas Day attack. “The
political dimension of what ought to me to be a national security issue
has been quite high. I don’t think it has been particularly good, I
will tell you, from the inside, in terms of us trying to get the right
job done to protect the United States.”
Nothing is more important, however, than a rethinking of interrogation
policy. Obama ran on a promise to end “torture.” Most everyone
understood him to mean “waterboarding,” but Obama has gone much
further. By restricting interrogators to the techniques in the Army
Field Manual he has chosen to take away valuable interrogation
techniques—enhanced means that do not constitute “torture” and that
have proven effective. Furthermore most of the interrogations of
high-value terrorists captured overseas have been outsourced to liaison
services. We are choosing to know less about our enemies.
Finally, the president needs to provide the intelligence community with
a clear mission. We are at war. We are fighting the adherents of
radical Islam—non-state terrorist groups and the states that support
them. This is the central fact of this war, and the president should
not be shy about saying so.
While these steps don’t go far enough, they would, without question,
make us safer.
—Stephen F. Hayes
US Official: Intelligence Director
Resigns
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:53 p.m. ET
January 27, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A U.S. official says National Intelligence Director
Michael McConnell has resigned his post.
The official, who asked not to be named because the resignation has not
been announced, said Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess, Jr. is temporarily
serving as acting national intelligence director.
President Barack Obama has nominated retired Adm. Dennis Blair to be
the next intelligence director. He would oversee a budget of nearly $50
billion and a work force of more than 100,000 spread across 16 agencies.
Obama has asked McConnell to serve on the President's Intelligence
Advisory Board. McConnell was the nation's second national intelligence
director and has served in the job for nearly two years. The position
was created in 2004.
From the NYTIMES Dec. 1
...He (President-Elect Obama) will not announce any of the top
intelligence appointments on Monday, but the Democrats said they
expected him soon to name Adm. Dennis C. Blair, a retired Pacific Fleet
commander, as director of national intelligence.
From the DAY Jan. 10, 2009
...He (Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.) added there is little
appetite in Congress to prosecute
government employees who engaged in "enhanced" interrogations
authorized by the White House. The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005,
which prohibited cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners,
also called for the protection of those employees from civil lawsuits
or criminal prosecutions if they believed in good faith they were
acting on lawfully. The bill passed with an overwhelming majority.
Obama pledged Friday that Leon Panetta, his nominee to head the CIA,
would be a strong advocate for the agency's interest inside the White
House, and his selection for national intelligence director, retired
Adm. Dennis Blair, would continue "the good work that is being done..."
CABINET POST FOR OBAMA
Susan Rice, United Nations Representative, on the Security Team as well
- that post made Cabinet level for the Obama administration.
Choice for U.N. Backs Strong
Action Against Mass Killings
NYTIMES
By PETER BAKER
December 1, 2008
CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama has chosen his foreign policy
adviser, Susan E. Rice, to be ambassador to the United Nations, picking
an advocate of “dramatic action” against genocide as he rounds out his
national security team, Democrats close to the transition said Sunday.
Mr. Obama intends to announce Ms. Rice’s selection at a news conference
here Monday along with his previously reported decisions to nominate
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for secretary of state, keep Robert M.
Gates as defense secretary and appoint Gen. James L. Jones, a retired
Marine commandant, his national security adviser, the Democrats said.
The choice of Ms. Rice to represent the United States before the United
Nations will make her one of the most visible faces of the Obama
administration to the outside world aside from Mrs. Clinton. It will
also send to the world organization a prominent and forceful advocate
of stronger action, including military force if necessary, to stop mass
killings like those in the Darfur region of Sudan in recent years.
To reinforce his intention to work more closely with the United Nations
after the tensions of President Bush’s tenure, Mr. Obama plans to
restore the ambassador’s post to cabinet rank, as it was under
President Bill Clinton, according to Democrats close to the transition.
While the cabinet consists of 15 department heads, a president can give
other positions the same rank for the duration of his administration.
“She’s obviously one of Obama’s closest advisers, so it underscores how
much of a priority he’s making the position,” said Nancy Soderberg, a
senior United States diplomat at the United Nations under Mr. Clinton.
“If you look at the last eight years, we obviously need to be more
engaged at the U.N. and realistic about what the U.N. can do.”
At Monday’s announcement, the president-elect will also formally unveil
his nominations of Eric H. Holder Jr. to be attorney general and Gov.
Janet Napolitano of Arizona to be secretary of homeland security, the
Democrats said. He will not announce any of the top intelligence
appointments on Monday, but the Democrats said they expected him soon
to name Adm. Dennis C. Blair, a retired Pacific Fleet commander, as
director of national intelligence.
If confirmed, Ms. Rice at 44 would be the second-youngest ambassador to
the United Nations. A Rhodes scholar who earned a doctorate in
international relations at Oxford University, she joined Mr. Clinton’s
National Security Council staff in 1993 before rising to assistant
secretary of state for African affairs at age 32. When Mr. Obama
decided to run for president, she signed up as one of his top advisers,
much to the consternation of the Clinton camp, which resented what it
saw as a defection.
As the ambassador at the United Nations, Ms. Rice will have to
coordinate with Mrs. Clinton, but will not be in the White House or at
State Department headquarters on a daily basis as major policies are
formulated. One person close to Mrs. Clinton said the senator did not
object to Ms. Rice serving at the United Nations.
Some colleagues from her Clinton and Obama days said Ms. Rice can be
blunt and unafraid to “mix it up,” as one put it, on behalf of issues
she cares about. Ms. Rice herself acknowledges a certain impatience at
times.
Admirers said she is a good listener and able to stand up to strong
personalities, including foreign autocrats and militants in volatile
regions of the world.
“Susan certainly is tough, and she’s tough in exactly the right way,”
said Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state and now
president of the Brookings Institution, where Ms. Rice has worked in
recent years. “She’s intellectually tough, she’s tough in her approach
to how the policymaking process should work and she will be very
effective as a diplomat.”
John R. Bolton, who was one of Mr. Bush’s ambassadors at the United
Nations, would not discuss Ms. Rice’s selection, but said it was unwise
to elevate the position to the cabinet again.
“One, it overstates the role and importance the U.N. should have in
U.S. foreign policy,” Mr. Bolton said. “Second, you shouldn’t have two
secretaries in the same department.”
During her first run at the State Department, Ms. Rice was a point
person in responding to Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombing of United States
Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But her most searing experience was
visiting Rwanda after the 1994 genocide when she was still on the
N.S.C. staff.
As she later described the scene, the hundreds, if not thousands, of
decomposing, hacked up bodies that she saw haunted her and fueled a
desire to never let it happen again.
“I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would
come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that
was required,” she told The Atlantic Monthly in 2001. She eventually
became a sharp critic of the Bush administration’s handling of the
Darfur killings and last year testified before Congress on behalf of an
American-led bombing campaign or naval blockade to force a recalcitrant
Sudanese government to stop the slaughter.
Jerry Fowler, president of the Save Darfur Coalition, praised the
pending Rice nomination on Sunday, calling it a powerful sign of the
new president’s interest in the issue. The coalition is urging Mr.
Obama to begin a “peace surge” of sustained diplomacy to address the
continuing problems in Sudan.
“It sends a very strong signal about his approach to the issue of Sudan
and Africa in general,” Mr. Fowler said. Ms. Rice will be joining a
high-powered team on stage with Mr. Obama on Monday, most notably Mrs.
Clinton.
The two rivals from the polarizing battle for the Democratic
presidential nomination will seal their reconciliation with Mrs.
Clinton’s nomination to head the State Department.
At a time when the country remains engaged in two wars and still faces
the threat of international terrorism, Mrs. Clinton will anchor a
national security team with more of a centrist character than some of
Mr. Obama’s liberal supporters once hoped to see.
Some critics have pointed out that the team represents experience
rather than the change Mr. Obama promised. But it also drew praise from
across the aisle.
“The triumvirate of Gates, Clinton and Jones to lead Obama’s national
security team instills great confidence at home and abroad and further
strengthens the growing respect for the president-elect’s courage and
ability to exercise sound judgment in selecting the best and the
brightest to implement our nation’s security policies,” said Senator
John W. Warner of Virginia, a former chairman of the Armed Services
Committee.
Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security
"About Town" notes that one of Governor Napolitano's strengths is that
she is from a state where you can see the border with...Mexico, and
potential illegal entry into the USA.
Nominee Would Lead ID Program She
Opposed
NYTIMES
By MATTHEW L. WALD
December 2, 2008
WASHINGTON — As governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, President-elect
Barack Obama’s choice for homeland security secretary, pledged that her
state would not cooperate with a major domestic security initiative,
the Real ID drivers’ license program.
The program, which she would direct if confirmed as secretary, imposes
stringent requirements on states for confirming the identity and legal
residency of people who want drivers’ licenses. Ms. Napolitano said the
law would impose huge costs on the states without reimbursement from
Washington. In June, she signed into law a bill that forbids
Arizona from cooperating with the federal requirements. The state law
had no immediate effect, because Arizona already had a federal waiver
allowing it to delay enactment until 2009.
Last year, as the chairwoman of the National Governors Association, Ms.
Napolitano testified before a Senate committee that the program would
cost the states $11 billion. Since then, Congress has appropriated $100
million to meet some of the costs.
Real ID follows the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission; it was
passed without hearings or debate, attached to a mostly unrelated
bill. Janice L. Kephart, a staff member for the 9/11 Commission,
said, “I’m hoping she will see this program from the federal government
side and see it with new eyes.”
A stronger national driver’s license system would help the states
improve highway safety by assuring that drivers do not obtain more than
one license, Ms. Kephart said, and it could cut Medicare and Medicaid
fraud.
Hani Hanjour, the hijacker flew the plane that crashed into the
Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, had an Arizona license, she said.
The federal government has said that people carrying drivers’ licenses
that do not comply with its requirements will not be allowed into
federal buildings and will have difficulty boarding planes. The
American Civil Liberties Union and some state legislators say that the
program amounts to a national identification card, with civil liberties
and privacy implications. Ms. Napolitano, however, has mostly focused
on the cost. Mr. Obama, as a candidate, did the same.
The rules issued by the Bush administration require each state to
verify the authenticity of an applicant’s documents and keep copies,
along with digital photos, so the information can be shared with other
states. The department issued the regulations so late that nearly all
the deadlines fall after Mr. Bush leaves office.
ANSWERS TO MY QUESTION: (The Obama Administration is turning
out to be "team play" - our question--where does each member of the
Cabinet get his or her authority? After all, the "captain" of
each of the teams is responsible for their performance...or am I
missing something here? Or is
President-Elect Obama the "captain"
of each team?)
Clinton to Be
Introduced as Part of Obama Security Team
NYTIMES
By PETER BAKER
December 1, 2008
CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama
and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday will seal their
rapprochement when he announces her nomination as his secretary of
state, Democrats close to the process said Sunday.
Mrs. Clinton, once considered the
Democratic frontrunner for president, is flying to Chicago to appear
together with the man who beat her for the nomination, a person close
to Mrs. Clinton said. The sight of them together, as she joins his
administration, would have been thought unlikely just weeks ago, but
Mr. Obama concluded she would strengthen his team.
At a time when the country remains
engaged in two wars and still faces the threat of international
terrorism, Mrs. Clinton will anchor a national security team with more
of a centrist character than some of Mr. Obama’s liberal supporters
once hoped to see. In addition to her, Democrats said, Mr. Obama plans
to announce that he is keeping Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who
has run the Pentagon for the last two years, and will appoint Gen.
James L. Jones, a retired Marine commandant, as national security
adviser.
Rounding out his national security
team, Mr. Obama will name former Deputy Attorney General Eric H. Holder
Jr. as his choice for attorney general and Governor Janet Napolitano of
Arizona as secretary of homeland security, the Democrats said. Mr.
Obama also will nominate Susan E. Rice, his foreign policy adviser and
a former assistant secretary of state, as ambassador to the United
Nations, a job that will be given cabinet rank, as it had under
President Bill Clinton.
The Obama and Clinton teams have
been preparing the ground for this announcement for days. Mr. Clinton,
who has extensive business and philanthropic interests around the
world, agreed to a nine-point plan covering disclosure, vetting and
other areas to avoid potential conflicts of interest, including for the
first time the release of more than 200,000 donors to his foundation by
the end of the year. That goes beyond the requirements of existing law.
The Obama team has planned for a
while to unveil the national security team after the Thanksgiving
holiday, but the timing took on additional urgency after the terrorist
attacks in Mumbai. The attacks, which killed at least 180, including
six Americans, offered a stark reminder that for all of Mr. Obama’s
focus on fixing the economy, national security can capture a
president’s attention at any moment.
Reports of the selections drew
praise from a retiring Republican elder. “The triumvirate of Gates,
Clinton and Jones to lead Obama’s national security team instills great
confidence at home and abroad,” said Senator John W. Warner of
Virginia, a former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, “and
further strengthens the growing respect for the president-elect’s
courage and ability to exercise sound judgment in selecting the best
and the brightest to implement our nation’s security policies.”.
While the choices have generated
praise across the aisle, some critics have pointed out that the team
represents experience rather than the change Mr. Obama promised on the
campaign trail. All of his top choices served in either the Clinton or
Bush administration.
At a news conference last week, Mr.
Obama said he was trying to “combine experience with fresh thinking” an
added that “the vision for change comes” from him.
Education
Arne Duncan
Duncan: Smart Is Cooler Than Ever
NYTIMES
By Sam Dillon
January 13, 2009, 11:21 am
Arne Duncan, the Chicago schools chief, told the Senate on Tuesday that
he would work for “real and meaningful change” in the nation’s schools
if confirmed as education secretary, and he said he hoped
president-elect Barack Obama’s own example as a model student could
inspire millions of American children.
“Never before has being smart been so cool,” Mr. Duncan said.
But Mr. Duncan did little to resolve the curiosities of educators and
policymakers about how he and Mr. Obama intend to bring about change in
American education, which over the next year is likely to include an
attempt to the rewrite the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law, the most
important statement of federal policy on public schools.
“I have seen the law’s power and its limitations,” Mr. Duncan said, but
he provided no examples of concrete changes he will seek. “I agree with
the president-elect that we should neither bury NCLB nor praise it
without reservation.”
In a confirmation hearing before the Senate educaiton committee, Mr.
Duncan laid out a thoroughly pragmatic and non-ideological educational
agenda, vowing to do “anything that works” to raise achievement in
public schools.
The Obama Administration intends to expand early childhood programs,
foster the opening of more charter schools, improve teacher training
and recruitment, and increase access to college for low-income
students, Mr. Duncan said.
Mr. Duncan, who is 44, walked a careful line among rival factions of
the nation’s educational reform movement, neither fully endorsing nor
rejecting those who want to squeeze teachers and administrators harder
to raise student achievement, nor a rival faction that contends schools
alone are not capable of closing achievement gaps between poor and
affluent students without broader federal investments in school-based
health clinics and other social programs.
The Senate appeared likely to give quick approval to Mr. Duncan
nomination.
“I think you’re the best,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, one of several
Republican senators who praised Mr. Duncan’s record as chief executive
of the nation’s third largest school district. “I hope I still think
that a year from now.”
Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, chaired the hearing in place of
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the committee chairman.
Obama Names Education Chief
NYTIMES
By REUTERS
Filed at 3:12 p.m. ET
December 16, 2008
CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday called
the high U.S. school dropout rate "economically untenable" and said
making U.S. schools more competitive would be a top job of his
education secretary. Saying the road to jobs and growth begins in
the classroom, Obama announced Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan -- a
longtime basketball partner and friend -- as his choice for education
secretary. He charged Duncan with improving America's teachers and
schools to help the United States become more competitive.
"If we want to out-compete the world tomorrow, then we're going to have
to out-educate the world today," Obama told a news conference at an
elementary school. Obama, who takes office on January 20, noted
that the U.S. high school dropout rate is one of the highest in the
industrialized world and many young American children cannot even do
basic math.
"We can't continue like this," he said. "It's morally unacceptable for
our children and economically untenable for America."
After the news conference Obama held a meeting of the key members of
his economic team amid continuing bleak news on the U.S. economy, with
consumer prices plunging at a record pace and housing starts falling to
a new low. They meet as the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark
U.S. interest rate to a range of 0 to 0.25 percent, a record low that
underscored the worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression.
In his news conference before the Fed move, Obama warned the central
bank's traditional tools for fighting recession were running out.
"We are running out of the traditional ammunition that is used in a
recession, which is to lower interest rates. They are getting to be
about as low as they can go," he said. He said other branches of
government needed to step up to help. "That's why the economic recovery
plan is so absolutely critical," he said.
Obama has promised to create at least 2.5 million jobs by 2011 and
launch a major infrastructure improvement drive along with reforming
the nation's health care system, but questions over how to pay for it
all remain. Obama is scheduled to hold another in a series of
news conferences on Wednesday at which he is expected to formally
unveil his pick for interior secretary.
BEGIN IN THE SCHOOLS
As they introduced Duncan, both Obama and Vice President-elect Joe
Biden said the choice for education secretary was the person who could
raise standards and help reform schools.
"We have to have an education system that's second to none in the
world. That's the only way our children and our nation are going to be
able to compete in today's global economy," said Biden.
Duncan has been chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, the nation's
third-largest school district, since 2001. The current education
secretary, Margaret Spelling, has called Duncan a "visionary" leader
and reformer who would be a great choice to run the Department of
Education.
"He's championed good charter schools, even when it was controversial.
He's shut down failing schools and replaced their entire staffs, even
when it was unpopular," Obama said.
Duncan, who was co-captain of Harvard University's basketball team,
played professional basketball in Australia after he graduated from the
university. He returned to Chicago in 1992 to direct a program to
create educational opportunities for inner city children on the city's
South Side. Duncan spearheaded a movement to create smaller,
community schools and has been successful at coping with dwindling
resources. He favors opening the schools up to the community to get
people to invest in them.
"While many issues will demand your attention, I am convinced that no
issue, no issue is more pressing than education," Duncan said at the
news conference. "Whether it's fighting poverty, strengthening our
economy or promoting opportunity, education is the common thread."
FROM THE NYTIMES:
Arne Duncan is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice as secretary of
education. Mr. Duncan has seven years’ experience as chief executive of
the Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school district,
where he has earned a solid reputation for confronting pressing issues
in public education, like how to raise teacher quality, how to
transform weak schools and when to shutter those that are irredeemably
failing.
He and President-elect Obama have played pickup basketball games
together in Chicago since they met in the early 1990s through Michelle
Obama’s brother. Mr. Duncan was a co-captain of the basketball team at
Harvard. His sports friendship with Mr. Obama evolved into a shared
interest in the problems of urban education, and they have visited
Chicago schools together to examine questions like how best to train
teachers. Mr. Duncan helped shape Mr. Obama’s education program.
He played professional basketball in Australia from 1987 to 1991 (he is
6 foot 5); then, from 1991 to 1998, he directed the Ariel Education
Initiative, a philanthropic effort with a small staff that seeks to
create better schooling opportunities for poor children on the South
Side of Chicago. He was director of magnet schools and deputy chief of
staff to the Chicago schools chief, Paul G. Vallas, from 1998 to 2001.
Mr. Duncan, though, has little of the national political experience
that education secretaries often need in representing the White House’s
educational agenda before Congress and negotiating with the leaders of
the 50 state school systems and the myriad interest groups that make up
the educational establishment. His expertise in elementary-secondary
education is considerable, and his late father was a psychology
professor at the University of Chicago, but Mr. Duncan has little
professional experience navigating the higher-education landscape.
Mr. Duncan was born on Nov. 6, 1964. He comes from a family of
educators: his mother founded and has run a vaunted Chicago tutoring
program for 48 years. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and
sits on the Harvard Board of Overseers. Mr. Duncan tutored Chicago
children during a year he took off from studying sociology at Harvard.
Chicago
Schools Chief Is Obama’s Education Pick
NYTIMES
By SAM DILLON
December 16, 2008
Arne Duncan, the Chicago schools superintendent known
for taking tough steps to improve schools while maintaining respectful
relations with teachers and their unions, is President-elect Barack
Obama’s choice as secretary of education, Democratic officials said
Monday.
Mr. Duncan, a 44-year-old Harvard graduate, has raised achievement in
the nation’s third-largest school district and often faced the ticklish
challenge of shuttering failing schools and replacing ineffective
teachers, usually with improved results. He represents a
compromise choice in the debate that has divided Democrats in recent
months over the proper course for public-school policy after the Bush
years.
In June, rival nationwide groups of educators circulated competing
educational manifestos, with one group espousing a get-tough policy
based on pushing teachers and administrators harder to raise
achievement, and another arguing that schools alone could not close the
racial achievement gap and urging new investments in school-based
health clinics and other social programs to help poor students learn.
Mr. Duncan was the only big-city superintendent to sign both
manifestos. He argued that the nation’s schools needed to be held
accountable for student progress, but also needed major new
investments, new talent and new teacher-training efforts. In
straddling the two camps, Mr. Duncan seemed to reflect Mr. Obama’s own
impatience with what he has called “tired educational debates.”
In his last major educational speech of the campaign, Mr. Obama said:
“It’s been Democrat versus Republican, vouchers versus the status quo,
more money versus more reform. There’s partisanship and there’s
bickering, but no understanding that both sides have good ideas.”
The rival educational camps swamped the Obama transition in recent
weeks with recommendations for the post. The National Education
Association, the largest teachers’ union, pressed for several current
and former governors who had made schools a priority in their
states. Many former members of Teach for America, the program
that sends elite-college graduates to teach in low-income schools,
weighed in on behalf of Joel I. Klein, the New York City schools
chancellor, and Michelle Rhee, the Washington schools chancellor, both
of whom have clashed with the teachers’ unions.
“Obama found the sweet spot with Arne Duncan,” said Susan Traiman,
director of educational policy at the Business Roundtable. “Both camps
will be O.K. with the pick!”
Mr. Duncan’s acquaintance with Mr. Obama began on the basketball court
nearly two decades ago but has flowered since he became the chief
executive of the Chicago Public Schools in 2001, and Mr. Obama has used
him as a frequent sounding board in discussions of education
policy. The two men have visited a number of Chicago schools
together. In October 2005, they visited the Dodge Renaissance Academy,
a once-failing elementary school that Mr. Duncan closed and reopened,
with a new staff, as a working public school and a teacher training
academy.
During the visit, Mr. Obama sat down with school staff members in the
library for more than an hour and questioned them at length about
arcane instructional issues, Mr. Duncan said in an interview.
“I’ve taken lots of political leaders on school visits, and nobody
spends the amount of time, asks the depth of questions, or is more
engaged and curious than Barack,” Mr. Duncan said in an August
interview.
The Obama transition team has scheduled a news conference for Tuesday
at the Dodge Renaissance school.
Mr. Duncan’s background includes playing professional basketball in
Australia and intermittently tutoring urban youth, but no formal
teaching experience. He helped draft Mr. Obama’s extensive education
platform, which called for recruiting thousands of new teachers,
encouraging local school districts to adopt performance-based teacher
pay initiatives, recruiting and training effective principals, and
placing new emphasis on science and mathematics education.
The platform also calls for making major federal investments in early
childhood education, which Mr. Obama believes is a more effective use
of educational dollars than spending them on remedial programs later.
Mr. Duncan has been working for several years to expand the early
childhood opportunities in the Chicago Public Schools, increasing
enrollment opportunities for 3- and 4-year-olds by 1,000 places or more
each year. Mr. Duncan has worked closely in that effort with Barbara T.
Bowman, the Chicago Public Schools’ chief officer for early childhood
education, who is the mother of Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, Valerie
Jarrett.
Allan R. Odden, a professor of education at the University of
Wisconsin, heads a project that is studying how school districts
recruit, assign and train their principals and teachers. He said
Chicago had made considerable progress under Mr. Duncan.
“He’s gotten the job done in Chicago,” Dr. Odden said. “There’s more to
be done, but he’s done a great job of reaching out and recruiting and
improving the talent of both teachers and principals.”
During Mr. Duncan’s tenure, the Chicago schools, which in the 1970s and
1980s experienced nine teachers’ strikes in 17 years, has had labor
stability, and last week, Randi Weingarten, president of the American
Federation of Teachers, praised Mr. Duncan.
As secretary of education, one of Mr. Duncan’s major challenges will be
to rebuild the bipartisan consensus that helped President Bush win
passage of his No Child Left Behind law in 2001.
An effort to rewrite the law, the most important statement of federal
policy toward public schools, collapsed last year in the face of
opposition from conservative Republicans angered over the law’s
intrusion onto states’ educational prerogatives and Democrats upset
with the law’s emphasis on standardized testing.
Mr. Obama has called for a thorough rewrite, but has pledged to defend
the accountability provisions in the law that require schools to
improve.
Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform,
said last week that his group would be delighted to see Mr. Klein or
Ms. Rhee appointed, but had sent to the transition team a memorandum
recommending Mr. Duncan.
“He is the kind of guy who can work with all sorts of people with
different viewpoints, and we like his work in Chicago with charter
schools,” Mr. Williams said.
Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who as the
chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee will lead any
reauthorization effort, called Mr. Duncan “a good choice for school
reform and our schoolchildren.”
“He is an experienced and accomplished leader who is open to new ideas
for improving our schools,” Mr. Miller said.
Who Will He Choose?
NYTIMES OP-ED
By DAVID BROOKS
December 5, 2008
As in many other areas, the biggest education
debates
are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are
the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay
for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards.
On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of
the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller
class sizes and superficial reforms.
During the presidential race, Barack Obama straddled the two
camps. One
campaign adviser, John Schnur, represented the reform view in the
internal discussions. Another, Linda Darling-Hammond, was more likely
to represent the establishment view. Their disagreements were collegial
(this is Obamaland after all), but substantive.
In public, Obama shifted nimbly from camp to camp while
education
experts studied his intonations with the intensity of Kremlinologists.
Sometimes, he flirted with the union positions. At other times, he
practiced dog-whistle politics, sending out reassuring signals that
only the reformers could hear.
Each camp was secretly convinced that at the end of the day,
Obama
would come down on their side. The reformers were cheered when Obama
praised a Denver performance pay initiative. The unions could take
succor from the fact that though Obama would occasionally talk about
merit pay, none of his actual proposals contradicted their positions.
Obama never had to pick a side. That is, until now. There is
only one
education secretary, and if you hang around these circles, the air is
thick with speculation, anticipation, anxiety, hope and misinformation.
Every day, new rumors are circulated and new front-runners declared.
It’s kind of like being in a Trollope novel as Lord So-and-So figures
out to whom he’s going to propose.
You can measure the anxiety in the reformist camp by the level
of
nervous phone chatter each morning. Weeks ago, Obama announced that
Darling-Hammond would lead his transition team and reformist cellphones
around the country lit up. Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford, is
a sharp critic of Teach for America and promotes weaker reforms.
Anxieties cooled, but then one morning a few weeks ago, I got a
flurry
of phone calls from reform leaders nervous that Obama was about to side
against them. I interviewed people in the president-elect’s inner
circle and was reassured that the reformers had nothing to worry about.
Obama had not gone native.
Obama’s aides point to his long record on merit pay, his
sympathy for
charter schools and his tendency to highlight his commitment to serious
education reform.
But the union lobbying efforts are relentless and in the past
week
prospects for a reforming education secretary are thought to have
dimmed. The candidates before Obama apparently include: Joel Klein, the
highly successful New York chancellor who has, nonetheless, been
blackballed by the unions; Arne Duncan, the reforming Chicago head who
is less controversial; Darling-Hammond herself; and some former
governor to be named later, with Darling-Hammond as the deputy
secretary.
In some sense, the final option would be the biggest setback for
reform. Education is one of those areas where implementation and the
details are more important than grand pronouncements. If the deputies
and assistants in the secretary’s office are not true reformers,
nothing will get done.
The stakes are huge. For the first time in decades, there is
real
momentum for reform. It’s not only Rhee and Klein — the celebrities —
but also superintendents in cities across America who are getting
better teachers into the classrooms and producing measurable results.
There is an unprecedented political coalition building, among liberals
as well as conservatives, for radical reform.
No Child Left Behind is about to be reauthorized. Everyone has
reservations about that law, but it is the glaring spotlight that
reveals and pierces the complacency at mediocre schools. If
accountability standards are watered down, as the establishment wants,
then real reform will fade.
This will be a tough call for Obama, because it will mean
offending
people, but he can either galvanize the cause of reform or demoralize
it. It’ll be one of the biggest choices of his presidency.
Many of the reformist hopes now hang on Obama’s friend, Arne
Duncan. In
Chicago, he’s a successful reformer who has produced impressive results
in a huge and historically troubled system. He has the political skills
necessary to build a coalition on behalf of No Child Left Behind
reauthorization. Because he is close to both Obamas, he will ensure
that education doesn’t fall, as it usually does, into the ranks of the
second-tier issues.
If Obama picks a reformer like Duncan, Klein or one of the
others, he
will be picking a fight with the status quo. But there’s never been a
better time to have that fight than right now.
Energy
Dr. Steven
Chu for Energy Sec'y...photo above left probably when he received the
Nobel
Prize? Policy really made here?
Energy
Secretary Serves Under a Microscope
NYTIMES
By JOHN M. BRODER
March 23,
2009
WASHINGTON — As a physicist, Steven Chu has seen atoms suspended in a
powerful laser beam and DNA stretched out in a vacuum chamber.
But in his new job as energy secretary, Dr. Chu is observing phenomena
he never saw in the science laboratory.
At a recent Senate hearing, for example, he witnessed a junior cabinet
member (himself) being systematically dissected by a senior senator
(John McCain).
Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, was unhappy when Dr. Chu affirmed
the Obama administration’s intention to suspend work at a planned
nuclear waste site in Nevada. “What’s wrong with Yucca Mountain, Dr.
Chu?” he demanded repeatedly as Dr. Chu tried to explain.
“I think we can do a better job,” Dr. Chu finally replied.
For a slight, soft-spoken Nobel laureate, Washington has been an
initiation that he has likened to being “dumped in the deep end of the
pool.” Dr. Chu, 61, was chairman of Stanford’s physics department and
ran a national research laboratory. But in addition to being verbally
slapped around by Mr. McCain, he has been forced to backtrack on some
ill-informed comments about OPEC and ordered to spend quickly tens of
billions of dollars in stimulus money with virtually no top-level help.
Dr. Chu is still mastering skills like ducking a tough question from a
reporter and delivering the all-purpose “I’ll get back to you on that.”
He has admitted his naïveté on certain policy questions,
like OPEC
production quotas, and is still getting used to the scrutiny that comes
with a cabinet job.
“I didn’t appreciate how much of a public figure you become,” Dr. Chu
said in an interview recently in Milwaukee, where he spent the day
talking to scientists about biofuels and touring a home that was being
weatherized under a local program.
President Obama has assigned Dr. Chu to carry out some of his central
priorities: wean America from dependence on fossil fuels, rebuild the
nation’s electrical grid and address the challenges of climate change.
The science part of his job is the most rewarding, Dr. Chu said. On his
visit to Milwaukee, he visibly brightened when one University of
Wisconsin researcher told him about a local entrepreneur who was
turning the waste products from cheesemaking into ethanol, which was
then blended with gasoline at a nearby convenience store.
“Does he drop some off at the liquor store on his way?” Dr. Chu asked
impishly.
A few hours later, wearing khakis frayed at the cuffs and brown,
thick-soled professorial shoes, he dutifully traipsed through the small
house that was getting new insulation and appliances to cut the owner’s
electric bills. When he emerged, five news cameras were set up on the
lawn. But to his relief, most of the questions went to Gov. James E.
Doyle of Wisconsin, who had accompanied him on the tour.
Asked later what part of his job he liked the least, Dr. Chu said: “The
fact that I’m constantly being told that I have to be careful what I
say to the press and in public. I can’t speculate out loud anymore.
Everything I say is taken with total seriousness.”
Yet as he takes on one of the toughest policy and management challenges
in government, Dr. Chu brings certain assets that none of his peers or
predecessors have had: a Nobel Prize, a YouTube following (for his
lectures on climate change) and an unofficial theme song (“Dr. Wu” by
Steely Dan). He is a major celebrity in Taiwan, where scientific
achievement is rewarded with rock star status. He is a member of
Academica Sinica, Taiwan’s most distinguished scholarly society, as was
his father.
Dr. Chu is struggling to get his arms around one of the most perplexing
and intractable bureaucracies in Washington and to efficiently — and
carefully — disperse $39 billion in funding from the stimulus package.
Most of the department’s top appointed positions, including deputy
secretary, remain unfilled, leaving him largely reliant on career staff
members to manage 114,000 employees and contractors and a budget that
has more than doubled this year. The task at times appears
overwhelming, and some in Washington quietly wonder if Dr. Chu is in
over his head.
Karen Harbert, president of the Institute for 21st
Century Energy at
the United States Chamber of Commerce, praised Dr. Chu’s academic
credentials, calling him Mr. Science. But she suggested that the main
decisions on energy and climate change policy were being made at the
White House by a small team led by Carol Browner, the former
administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
“Is he secretary of energy or secretary of research and development?”
Ms. Harbert asked.
Dan Leistikow, the Energy Department’s director of public affairs, said
that Dr. Chu was a scientist, not a politician, and should be given a
little time to adjust.
“A Nobel scientist is more likely to figure out Washington than a
career politician is to figure out how to deal with carbon
sequestration,” Mr. Leistikow said.
Dr. Chu came to Washington after serving as director of the Energy
Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, a
civilian research organization with 4,000 employees and a $600 million
annual budget. Before that, he was a professor and research scientist
at Stanford and Bell Laboratories. He shared the 1997 Nobel in physics
for his work on cooling and trapping atoms with laser light.
He comes from a family of academic overachievers. His father emigrated
from China to study chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and retired as a professor at the Polytechnic Institute
of Brooklyn. His mother studied economics in China and at M.I.T. One
brother, Gilbert, is a professor of medicine and biochemistry at
Stanford; the other, Morgan, is a highly regarded intellectual property
lawyer in Los Angeles. Dr. Chu once described himself as the academic
black sheep of the family.
Morgan Chu said of his brother, “He’s acclimating very well, all things
considered.” He added, “He has a wonderful set of skills for the job —
an unbending respect for discovering the unvarnished truth and a
willingness to challenge established dogma.”
Matt Rogers, an energy expert with McKinsey & Company whom Dr. Chu
brought in last month to help speed the pace of Energy Department
spending, said it would be a mistake to dismiss Dr. Chu as just a
science geek. “He is a kind man; he is a nice man,” Mr. Rogers said.
“But he is not a patient man. People are going to have to take a deep
breath and realize they’re going to be moving at a much quicker pace
than they were used to.”
Dr. Chu said he had been frustrated by the job vacancies and the
glacial pace of his department. He is eager, he said, to get on with
what he sees as his main task: finding and financing the scientific
breakthroughs that will end the nation’s dependence on carbon-based
fuels and solve the climate change problem.
Borrowing an analogy from the world of physics, he said that in
Washington, Newton’s first law — a body in motion tends to stay in
motion — does not apply. “In a bureaucracy, if you start something in
motion, it either stops or gets derailed,” he said. “You have to keep
applying force.”
He intends to keep applying that force, he said, because it could help
solve the world’s energy and climate change problems.
“If we don’t spend this money wisely and invest in new technology that
addresses these challenges,” he said, “we will have failed the country.
We will have failed the world.”
Energy Nominee Shifts His Stance
NYTIMES
By MATTHEW L. WALD
January 13, 2009
WASHINGTON — Physics
met politics at the
confirmation hearing Tuesday for Steven Chu, the Nobel laureate
scientist chosen by President-elect Barack Obama to head the Department
of Energy, and the physics bent a bit, as Dr. Chu backed away slightly
from earlier statements he has made — that gasoline prices should be
higher, and that coal was his “nightmare.”
Dr. Chu, whose last job was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, answered an array of questions from the Senate committee on
Energy and Natural Resources — about his position on new nuclear
reactors (yes, at least for a few plants), offshore drilling (only as
part of an energy package) and new coal-burning power plants (a few,
until we figure out a better way). He told the lawmakers that “last
year’s rapid spike in oil and gasoline prices not only contributed to
the recession we are now experiencing, it also put a huge strain on the
budgets of families all across America.”
Last September, though, he told The Wall Street Journal, “Somehow we
have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in
Europe.” At the hearing, responding to a question about that statement,
he said, “What the American family does not want is to pay an
increasing fraction of their budget, their precious dollars, for energy
costs, both in transportation and keeping their homes warm and lit.”
The answer is efficiency, using less so that even if the price rises,
the bill does not, he said.
He also said that coal, which has a wide political constituency, would
continue to be used, and that the trick was to convert it to
electricity cleanly.
Dr. Chu, who is 60, got a friendly welcome from the committee, but
really warmed up when Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas,
asked him how plants could be turned into substitutes for petroleum.
“Actually, now we’re getting to science, I love this,” he said, to
laugher around the room. He said he has supervised research to figure
out, “How do you break those plants down into the kind of sugars these
little critters, the yeast and bacteria, can actually use.”
Gene-altered bacteria have been developed to turn sugar into
substitutes for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, he said.
Several senators reiterated the idea that the energy department faced
terrific scientific challenges, and that a Nobel physicist was the
appropriate person to head it. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California
Democrat who introduced him to the committee, referred to him as “one
of the great brilliant thinkers of his generation.” Around Washington,
Dr. Chu draws wide approval for stressing energy efficiency and new
technology as approaches to the problems of energy prices and global
warming.
But his science-based frankness sometimes contrasts with ordinary
energy politics, which are often more centered on narrower economic
interests.
For example, in a presentation at Berkeley in April 2007, now preserved
on YouTube, he declared, “coal is my worst nightmare,” words previous
energy secretaries would be unlikely to utter.
“We have lots of fossil fuel,” he said in that presentation. “That’s
really both good and bad news. We won’t run out of energy but there’s
enough carbon in the ground to really cook us.”
And he has said frankly that some of the technologies that federal
dollars are pursuing would be nice to have, but are not today ready for
use, either because they are too expensive to be practical, or not
demonstrated to be safe. In this category he puts sequestering the
carbon dioxide from power plants, recycling nuclear fuel to reduce its
volume and recover unused fuel, and making ethanol from cellulose,
which is essentially woody wastes or non-crop plants.
In the course of the hearing, the main mission of the department —
making, maintaining and dismantling nuclear weapons, and cleaning up
from six decades of nuclear weapon production — got intermittent
mention. According to a report on nuclear weapons spending by Stephen
I. Schwartz and sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment, the budget for
nuclear weapons in 2008 was over $52 billion. Robert Alvarez, who was a
policy advisor to the energy secretary in the Clinton administration,
said in an interview that the department is spending about 11 times
more money on nuclear weapons than on energy conservation.
Dr. Chu faces a variety of conflicting mandates. For example, he said
that using more renewable energy is a national priority and thus will
require a national electric grid. To help create such a grid, a 2005
law gives the department the authority to designate high-priority
corridors, to overrule local objections to new power lines. But Senator
Robert Menendez, a Democrat, complained that the department had
designated his entire state, New Jersey, as part of a corridor. Mr. Chu
promised to investigate.
Another problem is nuclear waste. Dr. Chu repeatedly said that of the
carbon-free power generation in this country, 70 percent is nuclear.
But Mr. Obama has expressed deep skepticism about the plan to bury
nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, the site near Las Vegas that the
government has worked for 20 years to develop. A solution would have to
be found, Dr. Chu said, but construction of new plants should resume
now, after a hiatus of 30 years, even before the solution is developed.
Today, the NYTIMES suggests the above triumvirate
for energy team - Carol Browner (close-up above), Dr. Steven Chu and
Lisa
Jackson; Nancy Sutley, for head of Council on
Environmental Quality; at right, Sec'y of
the Interior Salazar.
E.P.A. Moves Toward Regulating
Greenhouse Gases
NYTIMES
By FELICITY BARRINGER
March 24, 2009
The Environmental Protection Agency has moved to declare that
greenhouse gases are pollutants that pose a danger to the public’s
health and welfare. That determination, once made final, will pave the
way for federal regulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other
heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.
In February, the E.P.A.’s administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, hinted
strongly in an interview with The New York Times that the agency would
take action on the issue before April 2. That date marks the second
anniversary of a Supreme Court ruling ordering the agency to determine
whether carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases qualify as pollutants
under the Clean Air Act.
The Bush administration stalled in complying with the court order,
opting for more study of the issue, although there was wide consensus
among E.P.A. experts that such a determination was supported by
scientific research.
The agency sent the finding on Friday to the Office of Management and
Budget for review, according to a Web site that lists pending federal
rules. Once the budget office clears the finding, it can be signed by
Ms. Jackson.
The action, known as an endangerment finding, would allow federal
regulation of motor vehicle emissions of greenhouse gases. If further
action is taken by the E.P.A., it could open the door to regulatory
controls over power plants, oil refineries, cement plants and other
factories that emit such gases.
Although the agency’s action was widely expected, word that it was
headed for the finish line stirred elation among environmental groups
and Congressional Democrats and brought dire warnings of regulatory
chaos from business groups.
“This finding will officially end the era of denial on global warming,”
said Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of
a select committee on global warming.
John Walke, a senior lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council,
welcomed the E.P.A.’s decision as the opening act of a new effort to
tackle global warming, one that he hoped would ultimately culminate in
federal legislation. “For some period we may have parallel efforts of
Environmental Protection Agency pursuing or even adopting regulation
while the eventual main show will be in Congress,” he said.
But Bill Kovacs, a specialist on global warming issues with the United
States Chamber of Commerce, said that an endangerment finding would
automatically provoke a tangle of regulatory requirements for
businesses large and small, including, he predicted, small dairy farms
whose cattle produce methane gas.
Climate czar left no electronic trail
Washington Times
Jim McElhatton
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Don't bother looking for any electronic records of Carol Browner's
first stint as a federal government executive. The soon-to-be Obama
administration climate czar intentionally didn't keep many.
In sworn testimony obtained by The Washington Times, Ms. Browner
disclosed that she refused to use e-mail when she served as President
Clinton's Environmental Protection Agency chief in the 1990s for fear
of leaving a digital trail. She also ordered her government computer
hard drive wiped clean of records just before leaving office.
"It was a conscious decision not to use a piece of equipment or to
learn how to use a piece of equipment because I didn't want to be in a
situation similar to what I had been in Florida," she testified about
government computers. The testimony referred to her days as an
environmental regulator in Florida, where an e-mail message sent to her
surfaced in litigation.
"This is why I made this decision not to use my computer," she said. "I
was very careful."
Ms. Browner's sworn statements were gathered in a little-noticed civil
case involving the government's obligation to preserve its official
records that transpired after Ms. Browner left office in January 2001.
The lawsuit examined why EPA officials failed to save electronic
records that chronicled the Clinton administration's final actions in
office and that were being sought by a conservative legal group under
federal open-records laws.
The same day a judge ordered the agency to preserve such records, Ms.
Browner asked a staff member that any files on her government computer
be erased, prompting allegations of a possible cover-up.
The ensuing investigation ultimately cleared Ms. Browner of any
wrongdoing, concluding she was unaware of the judge's order. Her former
agency, however, didn't fare as well. It was found in contempt of court
for failing to preserve government records at the heart of the case.
While exonerated, Ms. Browner's testimony provided a rare insight into
her distaste for keeping historical government records in electronic
form. It's an aversion that concerns some government watchdogs as she
prepares to take the high-profile job of coordinating President-elect
Barack Obama's efforts against global warming.
"Obviously, it's troubling that public officials would avoid doing
things because they're afraid the public might see it later," said Mike
Surrusco, senior researcher at Common Cause, a nonpartisan group that
monitors government ethics and openness.
Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of
Information Coalition at the University of Missouri, said avoiding
computers and e-mail "seems a little drastic and over the top."
"It's regrettable," Mr. Davis added. "It seems a rejection of the
entire inertia of the marketplace to forswear digital communications."
Obama aides declined to say whether Ms. Browner plans to use email or
computers in her new job but said she worked to improve transparency
during her years at the EPA, where she made decisions on written memos
instead of e-mails.
She is hardly the only high-ranking government official to avoid
e-mail.
Former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and current Secretary of
Homeland Security Michael Chertoff have opted not to use e-mail on the
job, either, according to a 2006 House report. And President Bush has
cited personal privacy issues for his decision to forgo e-mail.
In her deposition, Ms. Browner said she instructed her staff to remove
her computer when she first took office at the EPA, though she later
kept it when told the computer was assigned to her office.
Still, she said she hardly ever used it and relied on her staff to sort
through e-mails and print out important messages. In Florida, she said
she was overwhelmed by e-mail. She also said during her 2001 deposition
that during her years as an environmental regulator in Florida, she
once had to provide affidavits after an internal e-mail sent to her
surfaced in litigation involving a permitting issue
"I thought, you know what? I don't need this. I don't need to go there
again, I don't need to deal with this. I will not use e-mail, and I did
not use e-mail."
Just before leaving office, Ms. Browner ordered that the hard drive of
her computer be wiped clean, though a group had been seeking a court
injunction to preserve her records. She said she wasn't told to keep
the computer records intact in connection with the FOIA lawsuit, but
wanted to make sure that computer games her son installed on her work
computer were removed.
Landmark Legal Foundation's president, Mark R. Levin, who sued the EPA
and was among the lawyers at Ms. Browner's deposition, said her answers
suggested a "culture of deniability" during her years at the agency.
"She was the most disconnected senior official I have ever come across
in government," Mr. Levin said.
Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the Obama transition team, disputed Mr.
Levin's criticism, calling Landmark "a partisan attack group that
fought clean-air standards and efforts to get arsenic out of drinking
water."
"Carol Browner's record at EPA is marked by her work to increase the
public's right to know about toxic chemicals in the air and water, and
her efforts to improve the government's responsiveness to environmental
issues," he said.
"Both a judge and inspector general report found that Ms. Browner did
nothing wrong" by ordering her computer files deleted, Mr. Vietor said.
Meredith Fuchs, general counsel to the nonpartisan National Security
Archive, which collects and publishes declassified government records,
said government officials have to walk a fine line when it comes to
e-mail.
"A lot of these officials look at the record laws as a limitation of
what they can do," she said. "But they're doing things on behalf of the
public, and there has to be some transparency about what they're
doing."
On the other hand, Ms. Fuchs added, "We don't want these people heading
big agencies reading e-mail all day."
Hard Task for New Team on Energy and
Climate
NYTIMES
By JOHN M. BRODER and ANDREW C. REVKIN
December 16, 2008
WASHINGTON — The team President-elect Barack Obama
introduced on Monday to carry out his energy and environmental policies
faces a host of political, economic, diplomatic and scientific
challenges that could impede his plans to address global warming and
America’s growing dependence on dirty and uncertain sources of energy.
Acknowledging that a succession of presidents and Congresses had failed
to make much progress on the issues, Mr. Obama vowed to press ahead
despite the faltering economy and suggested that he would invest his
political capital in trying to break logjams.
“This time must be different,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference in
Chicago. “This will be a leading priority of my presidency and a
defining test of our time. We cannot accept complacency, nor accept any
more broken promises.”
Shortly after Mr. Obama spoke, transition officials confirmed that he
would select Senator Ken Salazar, a first-term Democrat from Colorado,
as interior secretary. Mr. Salazar’s appointment will complete the team
of environmental and energy officials in the new administration.
The most pressing environmental issue for the incoming team will almost
certainly be settling on an effective and politically tenable approach
to the intertwined issues of energy security and global warming.
The point person for these issues will be Carol M. Browner, who was
named on Monday to the new position of White House coordinator for
energy and climate. Ms. Browner, the administrator of the Environmental
Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, will oversee two former
aides, Lisa P. Jackson, who was selected as the new agency
administrator, and Nancy Sutley, who will be the chairwoman of the
White House Council on Environmental Quality. Joining the group will be
Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics whom Mr. Obama designated to
lead the Energy Department.
Mr. Salazar, a former director of the Colorado Department of Natural
Resources and state attorney general, is a farmer and rancher whose
family has lived in Colorado for five generations. He is known as a
staunch conservationist and an opponent of developing oil shale on
public lands.
His appointment will leave a Democratic vacancy in the Senate.
Colorado, which voted for Mr. Obama 53 percent to 45 percent, has a
Democratic governor, Bill Ritter, who will name a replacement to
complete the final two years of Mr. Salazar’s term. Mr. Salazar’s
brother John, a congressman, is among potential appointees to fill the
Senate seat.
The intense ideological and regional rivalries that have stalled
climate change legislation in Congress for years have not suddenly
melted away. And even though Mr. Obama promises to give energy
legislation a high priority, he first must stabilize an economy that is
shedding jobs by the hundreds of thousands each month.
The new team faces political urgency to deliver on promises made by Mr.
Obama on the campaign trail. One was his pledge to use a cap-and-trade
bill for curbing heat-trapping gases as both the means of shifting
investments away from energy sources that cause emissions of such gases
and also as the source of the $15 billion a year he promised to invest
in advanced energy technology. That figure may be dwarfed by spending
on stimulus programs, including so-called green projects like building
wind farms and making buildings more energy efficient.
Previous efforts to move a comprehensive climate bill through Congress
stalled even without the deepening recession the nation confronts
today, said Rafe Pomerance, a negotiator in the Clinton administration
on international climate agreements and the president of Clean Air-Cool
Planet, a Washington nonprofit group.
Mr. Pomerance said the challenge would be to devise a scientifically
rigorous bill that would satisfy lawmakers who fear the costs.
Left unclear on Monday was how the new president’s advisers intend to
use the levers of government to get to the “new energy economy” Mr.
Obama described. Also uncertain was what relationship they would forge
with his powerful economic advisers.
“In policy terms, I think there are big questions about what priority
will be given to direct public infrastructure spending versus tax-based
incentives versus environmental markets versus direct regulation,” said
Paul Bledsoe of the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan
advisory group. “There is still a very profound debate on all of that.”
The diplomatic tension is driven by the steps required to work toward a
new global climate treaty, which the United States and nearly all other
nations have committed to completing by December 2009. The last round
of talks ended last weekend in Poland with few signs of progress on the
main goal, limiting emissions of heat-trapping gases without hampering
economic development.
It is widely felt that if the United States does not demonstrate
concrete domestic steps to curb its emissions from burning fossil
fuels, fast-growing developing countries will continue to balk at
taking on obligations to cut their emissions. And while Mr. Obama will
enjoy a larger Democratic majority than Mr. Clinton did in his two
terms, the Senate has long made such steps a prerequisite for its
required consent to any climate treaty.
The scientific urgency comes from the unanticipated recent growth in
emissions of carbon dioxide in China, India and other countries with
fast-expanding economies. This heat-trapping gas is the biggest concern
because its long life, once the gas is released, causes it to build in
the atmosphere, something like unpaid credit-card debt, as long as
reductions are not made.
Additional pressure comes from growing recognition that market forces
alone are unlikely to drive the spread of nonpolluting energy
technologies fast enough to matter where all the growth in energy use
is at its peak, in the rapidly growing countries of Asia and Latin
America.
Nathan Lewis, who leads a team at Caltech pursuing ways to greatly
improve solar energy technologies, said the appointment of Dr. Chu as
energy secretary sent a strong signal that Mr. Obama understood that
any program on climate-friendly energy had to have three prongs:
increasing efficiency, moving existing nonpolluting energy technologies
more quickly into the market, and advancing on the frontiers of energy
science in search of radical breakthroughs.
“Energy efficiency cannot be seen as Job 1 and the other stuff Job 2,”
Dr. Lewis said. “You’ve got to do them all as Job 1 because they all
have to work.”
Dr. Chu has spoken of using coal to generate electricity as an
environmental “nightmare,” but he acknowledges that the nation lacks
the technology to replace it or clean it up in the near term. Tom Kuhn,
president of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for
utilities, said that any solution to the climate problem must address
these costs and provide consumers and electricity producers time to
adjust.
“There will be major costs,” Mr. Kuhn said. “It’s a question of trying
to mitigate the costs as much as possible.”
John M. Broder reported from
Washington, and Andrew C. Revkin from New York.
Mr.
Obama’s Green Team
NYTIMES Editorial
December 13, 2008
The League of Conservation Voters, starved for good news after eight
years of the Bush administration’s environmental policies, has hailed
President-elect Barack Obama’s choices for his top energy and
environmental jobs as “a Green Dream Team.” Let’s hope it is.
There is no question what this team must do — mount a strong offensive
on climate change, fashion a more efficient energy system, seek out and
invest in next-generation, transformative technologies. These are
extraordinarily difficult tasks that will face resistance from industry
and many in Congress.
Mr. Obama’s advisers fortunately seem united in their concern for the
threats facing the planet and unafraid to use the pricing power of the
market or the financial power of government to address them.
This effort will also need the full and very public support of the
president. So we are heartened by Mr. Obama’s decision to name a senior
White House adviser to coordinate energy and environmental policy. His
choice, Carol Browner, ran President Bill Clinton’s Environmental
Protection Agency and did not shy from bureaucratic combat. She
toughened air quality standards despite opposition from Mr. Clinton’s
economic advisers.
Mr. Obama’s most intriguing selection may be his choice to run the
Energy Department. Steven Chu is a physicist who shared a Nobel Prize
in 1997 and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
He has a sophisticated grasp of the complexities of global warming and
a strong belief in fighting it aggressively.
Mr. Chu also has refreshingly unconventional ideas of what it would
take to solve the problem. Like others, he would put a price on carbon,
preferably through a cap-and-trade program, and supports the various
efficiency measures — cleaner cars, greener buildings and a modernized
electrical grid — that Mr. Obama is likely to include as part of his
economic stimulus package.
What sets him apart is his fierce conviction that innovation is just as
important as regulation, and that big energy problems, like climate
change and the world’s dependency on fossil fuels, will not be solved
without major private and public investment in the development and
deployment of nonpolluting technologies.
Mr. Obama appears to have chosen well for other essential posts, naming
Lisa Jackson, until recently New Jersey’s top environmental officer, to
run the Environmental Protection Agency, and Nancy Sutley, who holds
the top environmental post in Los Angeles, to head the White House
Council on Environmental Policy.
These are not the passive factotums who have occupied these jobs for
most of the Bush years. Both believe in using and strengthening the
government’s statutory authority to control greenhouse gases and the
ground-level pollutants that cause smog and acid rain.
Admirable appointments would mean little unless Mr. Obama forces these
issues to the top of his agenda. Ms. Browner can work from dawn to dusk
gathering good ideas, selling them to the cabinet and sending them to
Capitol Hill in persuasive legislative packages. But as we’ve learned
in the last eight years, nothing happens unless the president wants it
to.
Daschle
Also to Oversee New Health Reform Office
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:58 a.m. ET
December 11, 2008
...Obama's selections on several important environmental
positions
are also starting to become clearer. Obama intends to round out his
environmental and natural resources team with a Nobel Prize-winning
physicist and three former Environmental Protection Agency officials
from the Clinton administration.
The president-elect has selected Steven Chu for energy secretary, Lisa
Jackson for EPA administrator, Carol Browner as his energy ''czar'' and
Nancy Sutley to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality,
Democratic officials with knowledge of the decisions said Wednesday.
Obama plans to name the four to the posts in the coming weeks, barring
unforeseen developments...
The Democratic officials who disclosed the selections spoke on the
condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal names
that have not been made public.
Among these posts, Browner's stands out because it's a new White House
position.
She is expected to coordinate the various agencies that play a role in
energy and environmental policy, especially on issues such as climate
change that don't fit nicely in the silos of the federal government.
Those agencies could include the EPA and the Transportation, Energy and
Interior departments.
Obama has chosen much of his Cabinet and top White House staff. He has
only a few key posts left to fill: national intelligence director, the
secretaries of housing, labor, education, transportation and
agriculture and the U.S. trade representative...
Obama
Team Set on Environment
NYTIMES
By JOHN M. BRODER
December 11, 2008
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama has selected his top
energy and environmental advisers, including a Nobel Prize-winning
physicist and the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency,
presidential transition officials said Wednesday.
Collectively, they will have the task of carrying out Mr.
Obama’s stated intent to curb global warming emissions drastically
while fashioning a more efficient national energy system. And they will
be able to work with strong allies in Congress who are interested in
developing climate-change legislation, despite fierce economic
headwinds that will amplify objections from manufacturers and energy
producers.
The officials said Mr. Obama would name Steven Chu, the director
of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as his energy secretary,
and Nancy Sutley, deputy mayor of Los Angeles for energy and
environment, as head of the White House Council on Environmental
Quality. Mr. Obama also appears ready to name Carol M. Browner, the
E.P.A. administrator under President Bill Clinton, as the top White
House official on climate and energy policy and Lisa P. Jackson, who
until recently was New Jersey’s commissioner of environmental
protection, as the head of the E.P.A.
Aides cautioned that while Mr. Obama appeared to favor Ms.
Browner for the new White House post, there were still issues to be
resolved before the appointment was formalized. Mr. Obama plans to name
the environmental team next week in Chicago, aides said.
If named to the White House climate post, Ms. Browner, an
acolyte of former Vice President Al Gore, will have forceful support in
the new Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Representative Henry
A. Waxman of California, who will be the new chairman of the House
Energy and Commerce Committee, and Senator Barbara Boxer of California,
who is returning as chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public
Works Committee. Opposing their efforts will be many Republicans and
some Democrats, as well as manufacturers, utilities, oil companies and
coal producers who will bear the brunt of the costs of any steps to
reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the main culprit in global warming.
In the coming months, the administration will also have to
devise a strategy for dealing with global talks to address climate
change, which are already under way.
In addition, both Ms. Browner and Ms. Jackson, who have strong
reputations for regulating industry, will be under pressure to revisit
and overturn many of the clean-air rules and other regulations imposed
during the Bush administration over the objections of
environmentalists.
Mr. Obama has promised to spend liberally to finance
infrastructure projects and support so-called green technologies that
will create jobs while benefiting the environment. These officials will
work with Mr. Obama’s economic advisers to try to find — and finance —
projects that accomplish these goals.
It was not immediately clear how responsibilities for managing
climate change, technological innovation and huge energy infrastructure
spending will be divided among them.
Dr. Chu will be taking on one of the most challenging jobs in
government at the Department of Energy. He will be responsible for the
maintenance and development of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile,
as well as for modernizing the nation’s electrical power delivery
system.
He will also play a central role in directing the research and
development of alternative energy sources needed to replace fossil
fuels in a era of constrained carbon emissions. Mr. Chu shared a Nobel
Prize in physics in 1997 for work on supercooled atoms.
At the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, he has sponsored research
into biofuels and solar energy and has been a strong advocate of
controlling greenhouse gas emissions.
Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating
Council, an industry group, said he was pleased that Dr. Chu had the
technical expertise to realistically assess future energy technologies.
“His experience seems to dovetail perfectly with the
president-elect’s commitment to bringing new energy technology to
market in a timely fashion,” Mr. Segal said. “An understanding of the
art of the possible in energy technology will be critical to the
development of a cost-effective climate change policy.”
Although the scope of Ms. Browner’s job at the White House is
still under discussion, aides said that if appointed she would
coordinate administration policy across departmental lines and advocate
for Mr. Obama’s energy and environmental policies on Capitol Hill. It
was not clear on Wednesday whether her office would carry the
bureaucratic clout of the National Security Council or the National
Economic Council.
Before coming to Washington to head Mr. Clinton’s E.P.A., Ms.
Browner was Florida’s top environmental officer. Since leaving
government at the end of the Clinton administration, she has been a
partner in an international consulting business with Madeleine K.
Albright, Mr. Clinton’s second-term secretary of state. Among her
clients at the Albright Group was a Dubai-based port operator that
sought a contract to manage American ports. The deal fell apart amid
heated Congressional criticism.
Ms. Browner, a lawyer, is well known in Washington and around
the country as a forceful environmental advocate and experienced
capital player. She is married to Tom Downey. a former New York
congressman.
“She was a really strong administrator in really tough times,”
said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, an
environmental group.
Ms. Jackson had been the head of New Jersey’s Department of
Environmental Protection since 2006, but in October, Gov. Jon S.
Corzine announced that she would become his chief of staff starting
this month. She has a master’s degree in chemical engineering from
Princeton and spent 16 years at the federal E.P.A. as a top enforcement
officer in Washington and New York.
She has led the Obama transition team at E.P.A. and knows the
agency inside and out, according to associates.
S. William Becker, executive director of the National
Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents state environmental
bodies, said Ms. Jackson was among the most respected state
environmental officials.
“Her state experience allows her to know what works and what
doesn’t work on the ground,” said Mr. Becker, who is not related to Dan
Becker. “I also am glad to see they chose an engineer to run E.P.A. The
typical choice is an attorney.”
Ms. Sutley, who will direct the Council on Environmental
Quality, is now the top environmental adviser to the mayor of Los
Angeles, Antonio R. Villaraigosa. She has years of experience in
managing water supplies and water quality in California and has also
worked on energy-saving construction rules for the City of Los Angeles.
She was a special assistant to Ms. Browner at the E.P.A.
Jeff Zeleny contributed
reporting.
Health and Human Services
Issues in Health Care - New Sub-page! How big are the
problems...sooooo big.
ON THE OTHER
HAND...ONE-HANDED NOMINEE ABOVE AND...NO "CZARINA" BUT...Director for White House Office
for Health Reform.
Former Secretary-designate of
Health and Human Services Daschle, "Health Care Czar-to-be,"
testified before the U.S. Senate January 8th, below; withdrew
February
3rd.
Daschle Has Ear of White House and Industry
NYTIMES
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
August 23, 2009
WASHINGTON — Six months have passed since the morning
when Tom Daschle, a former Senate Democratic leader, under fire for not
paying certain taxes, called President Obama in his study off the Oval
Office to withdraw his nomination as health secretary and reform czar.
But these days it often seems as if Mr. Daschle never left the picture.
With unrivaled ties on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, he talks
constantly with top White House advisers, many of whom previously
worked for him. He still speaks frequently to the president, who
met with him as recently as Friday morning in the Oval Office. And he
remains a highly paid policy adviser to hospital, drug, pharmaceutical
and other health care industry clients of Alston & Bird, the law
and lobbying firm.
Now the White House and Senate Democratic leaders appear to be moving
toward a blueprint for overhauling the health system, centered on
nonprofit insurance cooperatives, that Mr. Daschle began promoting two
months ago as a politically feasible alternative to a more muscular
government-run insurance plan. It is an idea that happens to
dovetail with the interests of many Alston & Bird clients, like the
insurance giant UnitedHealth and the Tennessee Hospital Association.
And it is drawing angry cries of accommodation from more liberal House
Democrats bent on including a public insurance plan.
Friends and associates of Mr. Daschle say the interests of Alston &
Bird’s clients have no influence on his views. They say he sees no
conflict in advising private clients on the one hand and advising the
White House on the other, because he offers the same assessment to
everyone: Though he has often said that he favors a government-run
insurance option, the Senate will not pass it.
“The message I deliver to labor unions and business leaders is the same
one I share with doctors, hospitals and insurance companies,” Mr.
Daschle wrote in a brief e-mailed statement. “I do not tailor my views
to any specific group or client.”
Mr. Daschle is not registered as a lobbyist and recently told U.S. News
and World Report that he preferred to describe himself as a “resource”
to those in government and industry.
“I’d like to be a resource to my former colleagues, to the extent that
I can, to the administration, to the stakeholders and to people
interested in just kind of knowing how this is all going to play out,”
he said. “I am most comfortable with the word resource.”
White House officials say they appreciate his help. “He is one of a
number of people that provides outside advice to the White House, and
the president greatly appreciates that advice and Tom’s friendship,”
said Dan Pfeiffer, a spokesman for the White House who previously
worked for Mr. Daschle. Mr. Pfeiffer added that the former senator was
“a recognized expert on health reform who knows more about the
legislative process than just about anyone.”
Critics, though, say his ex officio role gives Alston & Bird’s
health care clients privileged insights into the policy process. They
say Mr. Daschle’s multiple advisory roles illustrate the kind of
coziness with the lobbying world that Mr. Obama vowed to end. If he had
been confirmed as health secretary, Mr. Daschle would have been subject
to strict transparency and ethics rules.
His position, some liberals say, raises at least an appearance of a
conflict of interest. “I hope the president can make a decision based
on what the country wants, not what a handful of Daschle’s clients
want,” said Representative Lynn Woolsey of California, a leader of the
progressive caucus.
Clients of Alston & Bird say Mr. Daschle advises them, sometimes
indirectly through the firm’s registered lobbyists, about the
personalities of his former colleagues, as well as strategies to
achieve their policy goals.
“He would tell us, ‘Make sure you present the value proposition of home
care with as great detail as you can, so Congress understands that home
care is part of the solution rather than a cost to be cut,’ ” said
William A. Dombi, a lawyer at the National Association for Home Care
and Hospice.
Some of the health overhaul bills would make deep cuts in Medicare
payments for home health services, but Mr. Daschle has instead argued
for an increase. And though he does not lobby, he took that message to
Capitol Hill last month, giving a paid speech at a meeting for
Congressional staff convened by a group of home health care equipment
concerns.
“My mother’s quality of life is a hundred times better given the fact
that she can live at home rather than be institutionalized at 86,” Mr.
Daschle told the audience, according to industry newsletters.
Representative Jason Altmire, a Pennsylvania Democrat who spoke
alongside Mr. Daschle, praised the former senator but said it was
inevitable that his dual roles would draw criticism, especially “given
the high profile this president has given to trying to show some
distance from the lobbying business.”
Mr. Altmire added, “That makes it even more difficult for him to be
involved.”
Mr. Daschle does not shrink from his leading role in the debate.
Speaking at a hospital industry conference last week, for example, he
accepted billing as “the architect of President Obama’s health care
plan.”
Before such industry groups, Mr. Daschle can sometimes cheer on their
lobbying efforts, as he did at a meeting on Aug. 8 of chain drugstore
executives when he urged them to push lawmakers to raise certain
Medicaid reimbursements.
“This is a message that I hope each and every one of you will take to
your member of Congress,” he said. “There is no more critical time to
do that.”
He both recommends and predicts an incremental approach.
“We are not going to see this happen overnight. It can’t. It is too big
a shift in the economy,” Mr. Daschle told a biotechnology trade group
in May. If the legislation can begin to “ramp up” coverage for all,
health information technology and some cost controls, he said, “we will
have succeeded.”
He often enumerates what he considers areas of political momentum as
well as points of disagreement, including the government insurance
plan. “There is no consensus on whether there ought to be a public
option,” he told the drugstore executives.
Last week he told the hospital executives, “There is virtually no
support among Republican members for a public option, and that remains
an unresolved element of this debate.”
Senate Democratic leaders have recently said they concur it is unlikely
to pass.
Mr. Daschle’s friendship with the president goes back to Mr. Obama’s
first days in the Senate. An early and important backer of Mr. Obama’s
presidential campaign, Mr. Daschle also sent a steady stream of former
aides to Mr. Obama’s Senate office and White House staff. Mr. Obama’s
senior adviser Pete Rouse was Mr. Daschle’s chief of staff. Jeanne
Lambrew, a top White House adviser on health care reform, was a
co-author of Mr. Daschle’s 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About
the Healthcare Crisis.”
Mr. Daschle’s cabinet nomination was done in by the disclosure that he
had failed to pay taxes on the use of a friend’s car and driver while
making millions advising Alston & Bird’s clients. After he withdrew
his nomination, he threw himself into preparing a bipartisan proposal
for health care overhaul with two Republicans who were Senate leaders:
Bob Dole, a colleague at Alston & Bird, and Howard H. Baker Jr.,
now at another law and lobbying firm. Their proposal, released in June,
was among the first to spell out the idea of helping states establish
health insurance “co-op plans with consumer boards.”
Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and one of Mr. Daschle’s
closest friends, began pitching the idea at about the same time and has
become its champion. Mr. Conrad is among six members of the Senate
Finance Committee working on their own compromise proposal that aides
say looks increasingly like the Daschle-Dole-Baker report. As a
backstop, their plan provided that if state co-ops or other programs
failed to meet certain cost and coverage goals in five years, the
president could create a public plan on a fast track without threat of
a Senate filibuster.
That feature, known as a trigger, was briefly acknowledged as another
possible compromise by the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.
Though it was little discussed, Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of
Maine and one of the Finance Committee’s group of six, has recently
expressed support for the concept, and committee aides say the idea is
under consideration.
To address doctors’ fears of lawsuits, Mr. Daschle and his
collaborators proposed a “safe harbor” from legal liability for doctors
who follow certain rules. Mr. Obama took up the idea in a mid-June
speech to the American Medical Association.
After Mr. Daschle left the Oval Office on Friday, a White House
spokesman described their meeting as a “quick check-in” on the overhaul
process. The spokesman said the two “agreed to stay in touch over the
coming weeks and months.”
Obama
Pick Gets a 2nd Chance on Health Care
NYTIMES
By KEVIN SACK
March 2, 2009
TOPEKA, Kan. — In Kansas, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is
known as a Democrat who can deal with Republicans, a necessity in a
state where the opposition party dominates both houses of the
Legislature.
But on matters of health policy, which she will oversee if she is
confirmed as President Obama’s secretary of health and human services,
Ms. Sebelius’s efforts to forge bipartisan consensus have rarely
succeeded. She recently observed that the greatest frustration of her
six years in office had been her inability to persuade lawmakers to
raise tobacco taxes for a modest expansion of government health
coverage.
Now, with the backing of a Democratic Congress, Ms. Sebelius will have
a chance to achieve in Washington what she failed to accomplish in
Topeka, and then some. When he announces her nomination on Monday, Mr.
Obama will effectively make her the point person for what may become
the largest expansion of taxpayer-subsidized health insurance in more
than four decades.
Ms. Sebelius, 60, would start the job in midstream. Last week, while
she was battling with the Legislature over its desire to allow a pair
of coal-fired power plants in western Kansas, Mr. Obama began his
effort to revamp American health care by telling Congress that change
“will not wait another year.”
Mr. Obama then proposed to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans to
help pay for a $634 billion investment in expanded government health
coverage over 10 years. His efforts are complicated by the recession,
which is draining the Medicare trust fund more quickly than expected,
according to federal officials.
Ms. Sebelius’s nomination comes nearly a month after Mr. Obama’s first
choice, former Senator Tom Daschle, withdrew upon revealing that he had
owed $128,000 in back taxes and paid it only after being selected. The
White House used the time not only to vet Ms. Sebelius, but also to
make sure that the two Republican senators from Kansas, Sam Brownback
and Pat Roberts, would not oppose her confirmation.
The governor is a Roman Catholic who supports abortion rights, and her
vetoes of anti-abortion measures have drawn derision from social
conservatives, including a request by the archbishop of Kansas City
that she not take communion. Her spokeswoman declined an interview
request for the governor, saying her schedule would not permit it.
Ms. Sebelius is said to have a wonkish understanding of health policy,
but she has failed to make significant improvements in health coverage
or costs during her two terms as governor. Although the proportion of
Kansans who are uninsured remains well below the national average —
12.7 percent versus 15.3 percent — it has grown seven times as fast in
the state than in the nation during her tenure, according to census
figures.
Health insurance premiums in Kansas rank just below the national
average and have increased at about the same rate as the nation’s,
according to figures compiled by the federal Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality. The same was true during the previous eight
years, when Ms. Sebelius served as state insurance commissioner.
In that job, Ms. Sebelius cast herself as a consumer champion by
pushing to protect patients from rationed care by health maintenance
organizations and rapid discharges by hospitals. She declined campaign
contributions from the industry she regulated and, in her boldest move,
rejected the 2002 purchase of the state’s largest insurer, Blue Cross
and Blue Shield of Kansas, by Anthem Inc., based in Indianapolis.
No other state insurance commissioner had blocked such a sale, but Ms.
Sebelius argued that it would result in higher premiums for Kansans.
Litigation ensued, and she ultimately was upheld by the State Supreme
Court.
“She rode that decision all the way to the governor’s office,” said
Sandy Praeger, the current insurance commissioner and a Republican.
Legislators in both parties said that as governor, Ms. Sebelius’s
efforts to reach across the aisle had seemed more strategic than
instinctually bipartisan. She is skilled at exploiting the divisions
between moderate and conservative Republicans, and has successfully
forged coalitions with one caucus or the other on redistricting, school
financing and the state budget, among other issues.
When she stood for re-election in 2006, she persuaded a former state
Republican chairman, Mark Parkinson, to join her ticket as a Democrat
(he will succeed her if she is confirmed for the cabinet position).
But when it comes to health care, the governor and the Legislature have
been separated by a philosophical gulf, with Ms. Sebelius supporting a
larger government role and the Republicans steadfastly resisting it.
“Both her proposals and her accomplishments have been limited to some
extent by the political realities of the state that she governs,” said
Dr. Robert F. St. Peter, president of the Kansas Health Institute, a
research foundation.
In 2004, her second year in office, Ms. Sebelius proposed expanding the
state’s low Medicaid thresholds to cover 70,000 of the state’s 300,000
or so uninsured, and to pay for it by raising tobacco taxes. The
measure died.
The next year, she issued an executive order creating a new health
policy agency that would centralize purchasing and planning in her
office. The Legislature blocked the move, and instead created an agency
controlled by legislative appointees. Ms. Sebelius went along.
In her 2007 State of the State address, Ms. Sebelius urged lawmakers to
“commit ourselves to universal coverage.” Though she said little about
how to achieve that, Republicans tarred her as an advocate of
“socialized medicine” — or “Hillarycare,” as Melvin Neufeld, who was
House speaker at the time, put it.
Ms. Sebelius, a former state representative, called on the Legislature
to begin by covering all children up to age 5. Again, she made little
headway, though in 2008, an election year, the Republicans expanded
eligibility for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program without
appropriating any money to do so.
Although she signed the bill, which also made a modest expansion of
Medicaid for pregnant women, she called it the session’s biggest
disappointment. She had also failed to win approval of a statewide
indoor smoking ban.
“It has been something that I find puzzling and troubling and not a lot
different from what’s happened in Congress and with the
administration,” she said in a December interview with the Kansas
Health Institute News Service.
Legislative leaders say Ms. Sebelius presses her case in occasional
meetings and news conferences, but rarely cajoles or twists arms.
“I see her in the hall and say hello, and that’s it,” said State
Representative Brenda K. Landwehr, a conservative Republican who heads
the Health and Human Services Committee. “She’s never asked me to visit
with her. I think she’s a very strong individual, that things are
either done her way or the highway, with little room for compromise.”
The daughter of an Ohio governor, John Gilligan, and daughter-in-law of
a Kansas congressman, Ms. Sebelius herself appears healthy and fit. She
and her husband, Gary, a federal magistrate judge, have been married
for 34 years and have two sons. She played basketball in college, runs
three miles nearly every day and does not smoke. By all accounts, she
remains popular in Kansas, scoring a 57 percent approval rating in one
January poll.
Because the possibilities for change here have been so narrow, there is
little sense of Ms. Sebelius’s views on broad questions like whether
Americans should be required to have health insurance or whether, as
Mr. Daschle proposed, health policy should be delegated to a board
styled after the Federal Reserve.
As secretary, Ms. Sebelius would have considerable influence over
government policy on abortion. Although she says she personally opposes
abortion, she has consistently defended abortion rights in a state
where the anti-abortion movement can be fierce. She has vetoed
anti-abortion measures almost every year, including bills that would
have required the licensing of abortion clinics and allowed relatives
to petition a court to stop a late-term abortion.
Sebelius: No Talks With Obama About
Health Post
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:58 a.m. ET
February 22, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius says she has had no
conversations with President Barack Obama about possibly joining his
Cabinet as health secretary.
Sebelius (seh-BEEL'-yuhs) was in Washington on Sunday for the winter
meetings of the National Governors Association.
Administration officials have said she is near the top of the list of
people being considered to run the Health and Human Service Department.
But Sebelius tells The Associated Press that ''there's really nothing
to tell'' about the prospects of her getting the job.
The two-term Democratic governor also is deflecting questions about
whether she'll run for the Senate next year.
Kansas
Governor Seen as Top
Choice in Health Post
NYTIMES
By PETER BAKER and ROBERT PEAR
February 19, 2009
WASHINGTON — Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, an early
Obama ally with a record of working across party lines, is emerging as
the president’s top choice for secretary of health and human services,
advisers said Wednesday. Should she be nominated,
Ms. Sebelius would bring eight years of experience as her state’s
insurance commissioner as well as six years as a governor running a
state Medicaid program.
But with President Obama about to begin a drive to expand
health coverage, an issue on which the two parties have deep
ideological divisions, her strongest asset in the view of the White
House may be her record of navigating partisan politics as a Democrat
in one of the country’s most Republican states.
Ms. Sebelius resolved a state budget crisis on Tuesday and
plans to be in Washington from Saturday through Tuesday for a meeting
of the National Governors’ Association. Asked
about the health and human services job, her spokeswoman, Beth Martino,
said the governor was “focused on the economic challenges currently
facing Kansas, including our state budget and the impacts of the
federal stimulus package.”
Mr. Obama’s first pick for the job, former Senator Tom
Daschle, withdrew over his failure to pay $128,000 in taxes until
nominated, provoking a storm of criticism and a presidential mea culpa.
With his economic recovery plan signed into law, Mr. Obama
plans to turn his attention more to health care next week with a fiscal
blueprint that will begin to advance his ideas about covering the
uninsured, advisers said. He may also make health care a theme of his
prime-time address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night,
they said. It remained unclear whether the White
House would finish vetting Ms. Sebelius in time to nominate her by next
week. Advisers described her as “the leading candidate,” although they
said other names were still in discussion and emphasized that no final
decision had been made.
After the troubles with Mr. Daschle and other nominees,
the White House has intensified its vetting to make sure it thoroughly
scrubs its choices before Mr. Obama signs off.
Ms. Sebelius’s family and her administration have both
been notably bipartisan. Her father was a Democratic governor of Ohio
and her father-in-law was a longtime Republican member of Congress from
Kansas. She won her first term with a former Republican businessman as
her running mate and a second term with the former Republican state
party chairman on her ticket. Ms. Sebelius became
an early supporter of Mr. Obama by endorsing him in January 2008 and
was mentioned as a possible vice-presidential nominee. After the
election, her name was floated for a variety of possible jobs,
including secretary of labor, agriculture or education.
If she becomes health secretary, she will be the fourth
woman in the 15-member cabinet, overseeing 65,000 employees and a $700
billion budget. But she is unlikely to also wear the second hat that
Mr. Daschle negotiated for himself as White House health czar, a
position that could be influential in setting health care policy.
Administration officials said that was a special
arrangement for Mr. Daschle, adding that they were still considering
what to do about that job.
Should Ms. Sebelius get the cabinet post, she would be
replaced as governor by Lt. Gov. Mark Parkinson, the former Republican
chairman who switched to the Democratic Party when he ran with Ms.
Sebelius in 2006. Mr. Parkinson has said he will not run for governor
in 2010.
As Kansas insurance commissioner, Ms. Sebelius helped
draft a proposed national bill of rights for patients and blocked the
sale of Blue Cross and Blue Shield to an out-of-state company because
it would have raised premiums. She served as president of the National
Association of Insurance Commissioners and often testified before
Congress.
One issue that could draw attention is her stance on
abortion. A Roman Catholic who says abortion is wrong, Ms. Sebelius
vetoed a bill requiring clinics to report information on why a
late-term abortion was performed, drawing the condemnation of the
archbishop of Kansas City, Kan.
Health advocates welcomed her candidacy.
“All signs indicate that she would be a terrific choice,”
said Representative Pete Stark, Democrat of California and chairman of
a major health subcommittee. Ronald F. Pollack, executive director of
Families USA, a liberal-leaning consumer group, said Ms. Sebelius
“knows health care as well as any governor in the United States.”
A trade group for insurers agreed. Karen M. Ignagni,
president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, said Ms. Sebelius would
be “a very smart choice” for health secretary.
“She has a good intellect, a big heart and tremendous
expertise,” Ms. Ignagni said. “As a blue governor in a red state, she
also has lots of experience working across the political aisle.”
Effect and
cause link (below)
Daschle Withdraws as Health
Nominee
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:52 p.m. ET
February
3, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Tom Daschle has withdrawn his nomination to be
Health and Human Services secretary.
That's according to a joint White House statement from President Barack
Obama and his former nominee.
Obama said Tuesday he accepted the withdrawal "with sadness and
regret."
Daschle has been battling for his nomination since it was disclosed he
failed to pay more than $120,000 in taxes.
He said he's withdrawing because he's not a leader who has the full
faith of Congress and will be a distraction.
In
Daschle’s Tax Woes, a Peek Into Washington
NYTIMES
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
February 2, 2009
WASHINGTON
— Tom Daschle, the former Democratic Senate leader, had been voted out
of office. His close friend Leo Hindery, a Democratic donor and media
mogul, was out of a job too, having just sold his latest company, Yes
Networks.
So in early 2005 the two men decided
to team up. Mr. Daschle agreed to become the founding chairman of “a
world-class executive advisory board” of “industry and regulatory
experts” for a new investment firm run by Mr. Hindery, according to a
news release announcing its inception and seeking investors. The
Daschle-led board, the release said, would help provide a “collective
depth of industry knowledge and expertise that will allow us to pursue
unique and high-value opportunities.”
In addition to lending the prestige
of his name, Mr. Daschle traveled to help raise money from investors
for Mr. Hindery’s new venture, said Jenny Backus, a spokeswoman for Mr.
Daschle. And in exchange, over the next four years the firm compensated
Mr. Daschle with over $2 million, and Mr. Hindery lent Mr. Daschle the
use of a chauffeured limousine in Washington.
Ms. Backus said that when Mr.
Hindery was not in Washington he lent his car to Mr. Daschle as a favor
to a friend.
The partnership has now come back to
haunt Mr. Daschle, with the disclosure that he had failed to pay
$128,000 in taxes on the car and driver Mr. Hindery’s firm provided
him, threatening to derail his confirmation as secretary of health and
human services.
Beyond the ramifications for Mr.
Daschle’s ascent to the cabinet, the disclosures about Mr. Hindery and
the many clients Mr. Daschle advised on public policy offers a new
window into how Washington works. It shows how in just four years an
influential former senator was able to make $5 million and live a
lavish lifestyle by dint of his name, connections and knowledge of the
town’s inner workings.
There is no evidence that Mr.
Daschle pulled strings for Mr. Hindery. Indeed, Mr. Hindery’s firm
appears to have had few interests before the government. But interviews
and a review of public documents show that in his work for a Washington
law firm, Mr. Daschle did take on an array of clients seeking influence
with the government, including concerns involved in Indian gambling,
ethanol, health care, telecommunications and federal contracting.
At least one, the nonprofit student
loan company EduCap, may pose new problems for Mr. Daschle. The Senate
Finance Committee said it was trying to determine whether trips to the
Bahamas and the Middle East provided to Mr. Daschle by the company
should also have been reported as income.
Ms. Backus said that the trips
predated his work for EduCap, that he traveled at the request of a
different charity, and that his accountants say he handled the trips
appropriately.
Affiliated with the firm Alston
& Bird, Mr. Daschle has operated in the gap between the popular
understanding and legal definition of a lobbyist. There is no evidence
that he directly sought to influence his former colleagues or other
government officials in ways that would have required him to register
as a lobbyist or could have run afoul of the restrictions on former
lobbyists entering the Obama administration. But the rules still left
plenty of room for him to advise businesses seeking to influence the
government or to profit otherwise from the fame and insights he
acquired in public life.
“Did he attempt to influence?
Maybe,” said Thomas Susman, an official at the American Bar Association
and author of its lobbying manual. “Did he advise others in the
business of influencing? Probably. But he wasn’t a lobbyist.”
Ms. Backus said Mr. Daschle provided
clients with advice based on years of public service. But she said he
also gave the same insights free to the One campaign and the liberal
Center for American Progress, as well as to his students at Georgetown
University.
Aides to President Obama said on
Sunday that they still expected Mr. Daschle to win confirmation. The
Senate Finance Committee will meet on Monday to discuss the nomination.
What expertise Mr. Daschle
contributed to Mr. Hindery’s firm is hard to determine. The firm,
Intermedia, has hired no federal lobbyists and it mainly invests in
media businesses — the television program “Soul Train,” for example;
cable networks devoted to gospel music or hunting and fishing; and the
Christian publisher Thomas Nelson — with few interests before the
government.
Mr. Hindery, who sought the
chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee in 2000, could not be
reached for comment. Other firm executives did not return calls. Former
Senator Bob Kerrey, another board member, did not respond to an e-mail
message.
Former Senator Slade Gorton, a
Washington Republican who also joined the board, said in an interview
on Sunday that the other members received $100,000 a year in
compensation, mainly for attending quarterly meetings about the state
of the firm.
The Senate Finance Committee expects
to disclose this week the results of a two-year investigation into the
possibility that Mr. Daschle’s client EduCap abused its tax-exempt
status by providing lavish entertainment and travel to its officers and
their guests, including Mr. Dashcle. Mr. Daschle is an old friend of
Catherine B. Reynolds, EduCap’s chief executive.
Another client paying for his policy
advice was UnitedHealth, a giant insurance company with many issues
pending before the Department of Health and Human Services. About a
third of its $81 billion in revenue last year came from federally
regulated sales of Medicare Advantage and Medicare supplement and
prescription drug plans.
The company boasted in its annual
report that “one in five Medicare recipients participates in a
UnitedHealth Group Medicare program.” (Mr. Daschle has said he will
recuse himself from matters involving former clients.)
Two of the clients Mr. Daschle
disclosed involved Indian tribes: the Great Plains Indian Gaming
Association, and the law firm Fredericks Peebles & Morgan, which
represents Indian tribes in legal and government-relations matters
involving gambling, health care and other issues.
Another was Perry Capital, a firm
that specialized in handicapping the completion of mergers, many of
which required federal approvals.
Several other clients or employers
have stakes in federal support for the production of ethanol, an
alternative to petroleum popular in farm states but controversial among
environmentalists. Mr. Daschle received fees as a director of Prime
BioSolutions and the Mascoma Corporation, which are involved in ethanol
production, and he sold policy advice to the Governors’ Ethanol
Coalition and the Renewable Fuels Association. Other clients were
investment companies with stakes in federal environmental policies, and
one, Crown Consulting, specialized in work for the Federal Aviation
Administration.
Mr. Daschle was also a director of
the Mayo Clinic. Although he did not officially lobby for the hospital,
he did lend his voice to its cause in at least one notable battle. (As
a director, Mr. Daschle received free medical care from the clinic, and
for that he paid taxes, his spokeswoman said.)
Over the last few years, the clinic
paid several Washington lobbyists to help beat back a $2.5 billion
government loan for a company from Mr. Daschle’s home state, South
Dakota, that wanted to operate a freight rail line near the clinic’s
headquarters in Rochester, Minn.
To much criticism in his home state,
Mr. Daschle sided with the clinic, calling it “an American treasure.”
“I don’t think the Mayo Clinic is
asking too much,” he told The St. Paul Pioneer Press. The Federal
Railroad Administration killed the project last February.
Daschle
Knew of Tax Issues Over Car Use Last June
NYTIMES
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and ROBERT PEAR
February 1, 2009
WASHINGTON — President
Obama’s choice for health secretary, Tom Daschle, was aware as early as
last June that he might have to pay back taxes for the use of a car and
driver provided by a private equity firm, but did not inform the Obama
transition team until weeks after Mr. Obama named him to the health
secretary’s post, senior administration officials said Saturday.
As Senate Democrats rushed to save the nomination of Mr. Daschle, their
former leader, the White House spent the day trying to explain how he
survived its vetting process despite his failure to pay $128,000 in
taxes.
The White House would not say when the president himself learned of the
tax issue, but said Mr. Obama is standing by his nominee.
“The president believes that nobody is perfect, but that nobody is
trying to hide anything,” Robert Gibbs, the president’s press
secretary, said in an interview, adding, “I think Senator Daschle
rightly is going to have to answer questions, but I think members will
be satisfied with the answers that he gives and will understand that
he’s the right man for the job.”
At least six leading Democratic senators have come out in support of
Mr. Daschle, but the fate of his nomination is unclear. The Senate
Finance Committee, which is charged with holding a confirmation hearing
on Mr. Daschle’s nomination, will meet behind closed doors Monday to
discuss his taxes. After Timothy F. Geithner, Mr. Obama’s Treasury
secretary, faced similar issues, some senators may have little appetite
for confirming another nominee with tax problems.
“It’s totally shocking,” an aide to a Democratic senator said Saturday.
“Why do we have to continue to have the same story over and over again
with these nominees?”
Mr. Daschle, who has paid the back taxes with interest, is the latest
of Mr. Obama’s cabinet choices who have run into trouble, and the
revelations about his finances — which include more than $300,000 in
income from health-related companies that he might regulate as
secretary — raise questions about the presidential vetting process, as
well as Mr. Obama’s ability to keep his pledge to run an administration
free of outside influence.
“One of the problems here is what they set up as expectations,” said
Martha Joynt Kumar, an expert in presidential transitions at Towson
University. “If you have talked about the importance of ethics and set
up the kind of rules they did on lobbying, then I think it sets
expectations that yours is going to be an administration that is not
going to have problems that others might have had.”
Privately, some Democrats on Saturday were scratching their heads at
how Mr. Daschle, a Washington insider with a reputation as a
sophisticated thinker, could have made such a mistake.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Daschle, Jenny Backus, said Mr. Daschle became
concerned last June that he might owe taxes on the car and driver, and
instructed his accountant to investigate. Mr. Obama named Mr. Daschle
to the health secretary’s post on Dec. 11. But it was not until late
December or early January, after the accountant came back to Mr.
Daschle with a report on the back taxes owed, that the former senator
informed the White House transition team. Ms. Backus said Mr. Daschle
did not think to mention it earlier, in part because “he thought his
accountant was taking care of it,” and in part because he had no idea
the amount owed would be so high.
“He took responsibility for his mistake as soon as he figured it out,”
Ms. Backus said. “That’s about all you can do. People who know him and
respect him are putting that mistake in context.”
On Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats rallied around Mr. Daschle, a former
senator from South Dakota who lost his seat in 2004 while serving as
the minority leader. Mr. Daschle is a close ally of the president’s —
he marshaled his staff on behalf of the Obama campaign, and at least
five former Daschle aides now have top White House jobs — and Democrats
vowed to go to bat for him.
“We wish this didn’t happen,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New
York Democrat who is on the Finance Committee, “but he’s chosen such
quality people that nobody minds taking a bit of an extra step to help
get them in.”
But already, Mr. Daschle is becoming the butt of Republican jokes, as
was the case at the House Republican retreat this weekend. According to
one person who was there, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the
party whip, had this to say after hearing the news about Mr. Daschle:
“It is easy for the other side to advocate for higher taxes because —
you know what? — they don’t pay them.”
When Mr. Obama was elected, official Washington marveled at the speed
of his transition and the rigorous vetting process. But Paul C. Light,
a professor at New York University who studies the federal bureaucracy,
said that “speed may have been the enemy of thoroughness” in the Obama
process. The White House, though, insisted that was not the case.
“In terms of the vetting,” Mr. Gibbs said Saturday, “we’re comfortable
with the process.”
The information about Mr. Daschle has come to light in different ways.
He disclosed some to the transition team, including the taxes owed on
the car and driver. The transition team spotted a problem with his
charitable tax deductions, and the Senate Finance Committee discovered
the failure to pay Medicare tax on the use of the car.
If Mr. Daschle’s confirmation is derailed, it would undoubtedly hurt
one of Mr. Obama’s major domestic priorities: revamping the health care
system. Mr. Daschle has been asked by the president to serve in a dual
role spearheading that effort as the White House “health czar.”
As a politician, Mr. Daschle often struck a populist note, but his
financial disclosure report shows that in the last two years, he
received $2.1 million from a law firm, Alston & Bird; $2 million in
consulting fees from a private equity firm run by a major Democratic
fundraiser, Leo Hindery Jr. (which provided him with the car and
driver); and at least $220,000 for speeches to health care,
pharmaceutical and insurance companies. He also received nearly
$100,000 from health-related companies affected by federal regulation.
Mr. Obama has instituted rules requiring former lobbyists in his
administration to pledge not to deal with former clients, though he has
made exceptions for two nominees, one at the Pentagon and one at the
health agency. As a strategic adviser to companies, Mr. Daschle did not
have to register as a lobbyist, and is not technically covered by those
rules.
“He’s never lobbied, therefore he’s not in violation of the pledge,”
Mr. Gibbs said. “The president is comfortable with Senator Daschle’s
variety of experiences and backgrounds. It’s why he believes he’s best
suited to the efforts to reform our health care system.”
Daschle
Pays 3 Years of Tax on Use of Car
NYTIMES
By ROBERT PEAR
January
31, 2009
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s pick for health and human services
secretary, Tom Daschle, failed to pay more than $128,000 in taxes,
partly for free use of a car and driver that had been provided to him
by a prominent businessman and Democratic fund-raiser, administration
officials said Friday.
Mr. Daschle, concluding that he owed the taxes, filed amended returns
and paid more than $140,000 in back taxes and interest on Jan. 2, the
officials said.
The car and driver were provided by Leo Hindery Jr., a media and
telecommunications executive who had been chairman of YES, the New York
Yankees regional sports network. In 2005, Mr. Hindery founded a private
equity firm known as InterMedia Advisors. Mr. Daschle was chairman of
InterMedia’s advisory board.
In a financial disclosure statement filed this month with the Office of
Government Ethics, Mr. Daschle reported that he had received large
amounts of income from InterMedia, including more than $2 million in
consulting fees and $182,520 in the form of “company-provided
transportation.”
The belated tax payments help explain delays in the confirmation of Mr.
Daschle, a former Senate Democratic leader who had been expected to win
swift approval. Despite the embarrassing admission, the second for one
of Mr. Obama’s cabinet choices, the White House and Democratic senators
issued statements on Friday supporting Mr. Daschle.
In an e-mail message, Mr. Daschle referred questions to Jenny Backus, a
spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department. Ms. Backus
said that he had cooperated with the Senate Finance Committee, was
answering its questions and expected to be confirmed.
It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Daschle’s tax problems would
derail his nomination. The confirmation of Treasury Secretary Timothy
F. Geithner was held up only briefly after the disclosure that he had
failed to pay more than $34,000 in taxes owed to the federal
government.
On Friday, members of the Finance Committee received a report on the
vetting of Mr. Daschle, done by members of the committee staff from
both parties. The report says that he paid back taxes and interest
totaling $32,090 for 2005, $38,507 for 2006 and $69,570 for 2007.
The Finance Committee document said Mr. Daschle had amended his tax
returns to show “unreported income from the use of a car service in the
amounts of $73,031, $89,129 and $93,096 in 2005, 2006 and 2007,
respectively.”
An administration official said Mr. Daschle’s failure to pay the taxes
was “a stupid mistake.” But, the official said, Mr. Daschle should not
be penalized because he had discovered the tax liability himself, paid
up and brought it to the committee’s attention.
The committee report said, “Senator Daschle filed the amended returns
voluntarily after Barack Obama announced his intention to nominate the
senator to be the secretary of health and human services.”
The committee report said Mr. Daschle had told the committee staff that
“in June 2008, something made him think that the car service might be
taxable, and he disclosed the arrangement to his accountant.”
“Under Section 132 of the Internal Revenue Code, the value of
transportation services provided for personal use must be included in
income,” the report said. “Senator Daschle estimated that he used the
car and driver 80 percent for personal use and 20 percent for business.”
The car and driver were not Mr. Daschle’s only problems. The Finance
Committee said he failed to report consulting income of $83,333 on his
2007 tax return and overstated the deductions to which he was entitled
for charitable contributions from 2005 to 2007. In his amended tax
returns, he reduced the deductions by $14,963.
Under his consulting arrangement with InterMedia, the report said, Mr.
Daschle received $1 million a year, or $83,333 a month. The payment to
Mr. Daschle for May 2007 was omitted from the annual statement of
income sent to him by InterMedia. Ms. Backus said the omission resulted
from “a clerical error by InterMedia.”
The White House and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of
Nevada, affirmed their support for Mr. Daschle.
James P. Manley, a spokesman for Mr. Reid, said: “Senator Daschle will
be confirmed as secretary of health and human services. He has a long
and distinguished career in public service and is the best person to
help reform health care in this country.”
The tax problem is the latest road bump for Mr. Obama’s cabinet
selections. His nominee for commerce secretary, Gov. Bill Richardson of
New Mexico, withdrew his name amid a federal investigation into state
contracting, and Mr. Obama has yet to name a replacement. His
designated attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., has also not been
confirmed.
Mr. Hindery and family members have contributed money to many
Democratic candidates, including at least $42,000 to Mr. Daschle from
1997 to 2004.
Mr. Daschle is still waiting for the Finance Committee to hold a
hearing on his nomination. Members of the committee staff from both
parties have been examining a number of other issues, including his
relationship with EduCap, a student loan company.
Some members of the staff have also been asking whether Mr. Daschle
should have registered as a lobbyist while working at the law firm
Alston & Bird, which itself was registered as a lobbyist for EduCap
and for many health care companies.
In his financial disclosure report, Mr. Daschle said he received
compensation of more than $5,000 for providing “policy advice” to
EduCap. The exact amount was not di 
