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May 21, 2009 - White House Economic Team Touts Green Jobs as Key to
Global Competitiveness - Comment: How "remarkable" that his
panel supports his agenda, especially when they are among those who will
profit from "green" subsidies and mandates. |
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May 20, 2009 - Obama attends economic advisory board meeting -
Comment: Board games to sustain the illusion that the "recovery
plan" will create or save many jobs someday. They finally
met. The content below was prepared back in February when it was
announced. |
| House
and Senate Republicans have shown no intention of giving President Obama
any political cover through "bipartisan" support for the highly partisan
and outrageously expensive "economic stimulus" bill. |
| Obama
therefore announced, on February 6, the creation of an "Economic
Recovery Advisory Board" for the next two years (or more). The
list of Board members is repeated below.
Since most Republicans in Congress won't fall into the
"bipartisan" trap again to become a convenient scapegoat for whatever
damage Pelosi, Reid, and their friends may do to the economy now, Obama
is providing himself with a new advisory group which can deflect his own
accountability for this mess. |
| The
House had tried to quickly ram the stimulus bill down Republican throats
without amendment or serious debate. House Republicans were
unanimous in their opposition to it - and there were even a few
Democrats who crossed the aisle because this wasteful bill was even too
much for them to swallow. Obama seems to have
quickly sought a new way to duck responsibility for this legislative
catastrophe of his own making. Congress is working hard to turn
this recession into another Great Depression, so he needs some political
cover in case this House plan proves to be such a disastrous mistake.
He has kept his distance from the sordid details of
the package, maintaining plausible deniability of his own responsibility
for some of the obvious waste which has been exposed so far. His
approval rating is already starting to plummet as voters realize that
this isn't the change they believed in last November. He is
beginning to look more like Carter, for those who are old enough to
remember his weak tenure. |
| When
voters were assured during the campaign that Obama would not favor
wasteful earmarks, they probably didn't realize that he would favor
ramming all the pork through as an official but obscure part of massive
"emergency" appropriations. This bill is lobbyist heaven, crammed
full of pet projects. As an "emergency" measure,
however, it is carefully exempt from the scope of his new "sunshine"
policy for transparency, publishing new legislation online for 5 days
before signing. Instead, it is being pushed through with as little
scrutiny as possible, and voters are justifiably growing skeptical about
this. The final version will probably be signed without any
hesitation, rather than after more public scrutiny. |
| Obama
may have inherited a serious recession, but that was thanks in very
large part to the housing crisis created by Congressional initiatives
through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They created a federal Ponzi
scheme through which securitized subprime loans were marketed as though
they were as good as traditional mortgages or federal obligations.
Despite any good intentions about helping lower-income people to buy
homes, that fiasco nearly ruined our banking sector and foreign investor
confidence. |
|
According to the White House press release, this new Board "will
provide an independent voice on economic issues and will be charged with
offering independent advice to the President as he formulates and
implements his plans for economic recovery".
"The Board will meet regularly and provide advice
directly to the President on the programs to jump-start economic growth
and facilitate economic stability. The Board will also focus on how the
response to the short-run economic crisis is laying the groundwork for
the reforms necessary for longer-run prosperity." |
| Such
independent panels, boards, special commissions, working groups, and
other variations on this theme are a time-honored tradition in
Washington as a way to deflect, delay, and diffuse responsibility for
any controversial decisions. One can always
claim that the President has been taking such advice into careful
consideration, and that the "best experts" have agreed with some favored
situation analysis or course of action. |
| In
effect, this is the moral equivalent of voting "present" instead of
taking responsibility for a decision. Instead of
"the buck stops here", it becomes a committee advisory process for any
controversial decision so that there is political cover. It
becomes a fig leaf of alleged bipartisanship even if the Republicans in
Congress stand firmly against decisions such as the proposed stimulus
package. |
| Among
the notable appointees is Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE. He has
presided over the economic collapse of GE for shareholders for many
years now, but it isn't clear how much experience he brings to the
"economic recovery" process. There hasn't been much evidence of
recovery at GE yet. Perhaps he will give up his
day job, or accept Obama's limits on CEO compensation. Given GE's
media holdings such as NBC and MSNBC, surely somebody without such
potential conflicts of interest and with much better experience at
achieving "economic recovery" could have been found. |
| Penny
Pritzker also slipped in quietly as one of the new board members,
presumably rewarding her early support of his campaign and her
charitable work with other liberal groups in Chicago. Once again,
however, it isn't clear what experience she brings to the table for
guiding national "economic recovery" despite some prior family
experience with bank failures. |
|
Another advantage of such a commission is that the members do not have
to go through the same review and Senate confirmation process as Cabinet
appointees and other senior administration officials.
Given the rather embarrassing recent track record with
such appointments, this relieves Obama supporters of the ordeal of such
public scrutiny of their past. For example, Penny Pritzker had
reportedly been considered for a Cabinet position, but declined to go
through that approval process. |
|
Here's the full list of Board members from the White
House press release for reference: "Paul
Volcker will serve as Chairman and Austan Goolsbee as Staff Director and
Chief Economist.
Members of the Board include:
William H. Donaldson, Chairman, SEC (2003-2005)
Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., President & CEO, TIAA-CREF
Robert Wolf, Chairman & CEO, UBS Group Americas
David F. Swensen, CIO, Yale University
Mark T. Gallogly, Founder & Managing Partner, Centerbridge Partners L.P.
Penny Pritzker, Chairman & Founder, Pritzker Realty Group
Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO, GE
John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers
Jim Owens, Chairman and CEO, Caterpillar Inc.
Monica C. Lozano, Publisher & Chief Executive Officer, La Opinion
Charles E. Phillips, Jr., President, Oracle Corporation
Anna Burger, Chair, Change to Win
Richard L. Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer, AFL-CIO
Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Dean, Haas School of Business at the University of
California at Berkeley
Martin Feldstein, George F. Baker Professor of Economics, Harvard
University" |
| We
shall see what purpose this Board actually serves in practice. For
now, the primary purpose seems to be to provide the political cover
which Republicans in Congress won't offer. There have even been
some lame attempts in the media to allege that Republican governors
support the stimulus plan just because they favor doing something,
rather than nothing, in the context of the problems which they perceive
in their own states and their budgets. They may not want to
position themselves as publicly refusing to take any federal money for
their states at such a time, but that doesn't mean that they all favor
the House bill or whatever compromise may emerge from the Senate and
conference. Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are in the
lead on this initiative. If their plan succeeds, they will
justifiably claim credit for it. If it fails, however, they seem
likely to just offer excuses and want even more money.
This Board seems to be a prelude to that contingency -
setting the stage for having "independent" advisors agree that more
still needs to be done, even after all the waste which is now being
planned. |
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