Technology & Finance
Politics
Thursday, July 15, 2010
GE Chief Takes on China, Obama
I kind of liked seeing that Jeffrey Immelt criticized China as hostile to foreign businesses, and President Obama as hostile to American businesses, even if a GE spokesman did claim the day after that he didn’t really say what he said, or didn’t mean to, whatever.
Getting some debate out in the open would be a refreshing change for companies, especially with the Supreme Court ruling giving them free rein in campaign finance. If corporations want freedom of speech, how about if they speak out rather than spending? (The Washington Examiner reported GE was the largest single corporate lobbyist, spending $7.1 in the last quarter. )
Speaking at a private event in Italy, he said the US has become apathetic exporter and needs to become an industrial powerhouse once again, “but you don’t do this when government and entrepreneurs are not in synch.”
In the Financial Times, Clive Crook said business doesn’t really have much to complain about.
“They should be thanking Mr. Obama for his restraint,” he wrote. He quotes Ivan Seidenberg, head of Verizon, who complained that ‘ “By reaching into virtually every sector of economic life, government is injecting uncertainty into the marketplace and making it harder to raise capital and create new businesses,’ he said.
He had previously been viewed as an Obama ally.
But where is the business leadership, as opposed to the whining?
“...you cannot help noticing that CEOs have little constructive to say on any of those policy issues. According to Mr Seidenberg, for instance, they want a smaller budget deficit – plus lower taxes and more investment in infrastructure and education. If you want to dispel uncertainty, you have to do better than that.”
Meanwhile the US Chamber of Commerce “called for the White House to extend the Bush administration’s annual $55bn (£36bn) worth of tax cuts for the rich, set to expire at the end of the year, and to cut the corporate tax rate and pass pending bilateral trade deals.”
Ah, there’s some ground breaking innovation in thinking. At a time when the share of America wealth going to the top 1 percent is reaching levels not seen since just before the Great Depression, the Chamber can’t do better than serve as an echo chamber for the Bush administration’s continued call to lighten the tax burden on the very rich.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Germany's Chancellor Merkel -- the Ordinary Housewife
I was struck by the opening to Businessweek’s cover story on Angela Merkel —Merkel’s Choice: Germany or Europe. (Great cover graphic, by the way)
“Merkel likes to pose as an ordinary citizen, compareing her economic policies to those of a provincial housewife who simply wants to balance the family budget. She and Germany are well suited to each other,” writes Peter Coy, one of my favorite economic reporters.
Obama could use some lessons from Merkel. Most citizens want to know how the grand policies from the political capital will affect them, and so far the Obama administration has done a pretty lousy job of speaking to the people who will benefit, or will have to cope, with their policies. Then again, a lot of the policies put in place have been at the industrial level and supported the banking industry. The administration has been very slow to deliver similar levels of benefits to people who have lost jobs, or face losing their homes.
It’s not just PR and perception—when it comes to jobs and houses, individuals focus and reality counts.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
House Committee Dems Opposing Financial Regs got 2X the Industry Donations
The House Financial Services Committee voted yesterday to give regulators the authority to break up large financial firms that create too much systemic risk, in an effort to prevent future financial crises.
The vote passed by a 38-29 margin, but three Democrats joined with all Republicans voting no. Those three Democrats--Melissa Bean (D-IL), Dan Maffei (D-NY), and Gregory Meeks (D-NY)--received an average of $99,483 from banks’ PACs in the last two years, 119% more than the average of $45,358 received by the 38 Democrats voting for tougher regulation.
This comes from Maplight, an organization which tracks campaign contributions and voting.
The power of lobbyists is one of the greatest problems in American governance, and it is especially a problem in financial regulation. Countries which have, or get, their financial services industry under control and contributing to the entire economy rather than sucking money out of the real economy into speculation and bonuses.
Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times on Sunday, pointed to the role of money in politics as a major problem facing the country.
“Money in politics has become so pervasive that lawmakers have to spend most of their time raising it, selling their souls to those who have it or defending themselves from the smallest interest groups with deep pockets that can trump the national interest.”
He also noted the role of global corporations:
“A U.S. business community that has become so globalized that it only comes to Washington to lobby for its own narrow interests; it rarely speaks out anymore in defense of national issues like health care, education and open markets.”
Friedman’s prescription: “The standard answer is that we need better leaders. The real answer is that we need better citizens. We need citizens who will convey to their leaders that they are ready to sacrifice, even pay, yes, higher taxes, and will not punish politicians who ask them to do the hard things.”
Robert Reich, the academic writer and Labor Secretary under Clinton, has long warned of an elite, often with two high-earning professionals, which lives in an entirely separate world of wealth suburbs and private schools and has no feel for what the rest of the country is going through.
Bill Bishop has noted that the country is dividing itself in his book, “The Big Sort,” which shows that people are moving into gated communities with people who think just like the, and even sorting themselves into election districts and census tracts that are increasingly becoming filled with people who think similarly. The results show up in elections which have little middle ground. Bill Clinton has been talking about the book in speeches around the country, including this speech at Aspen, where he mentions the book about 4:20 into the talk.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Is Tom Coburn Right? Needed – Engineering, Biology Grads – Not Mass Communication Majors
Almost every article on American competitiveness sooner or later calls for more education – almost non mentions what type of education.
So I was fascinating by a recent piece in the New York Times about Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, who has proposed prohibiting the National Science Foundation from “wasting any federal research funding on political science projects.”
Times reporter Patricia Cohen noted that in an era of shrinking budgets academic departments experience a lot of competition for “jobs, power and prestige,” and some political scientists warn the field is making itself marginal.
“The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. “There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy,” Mr. Nye said, that “it interferes with the science.”
NY Times columnist Paul Krugman immediately warned of the dangers of cutting funding for stuff like the American National Election Studies and provided a link to a Coburn warning of rampant lesbianism in high school bathrooms in southern Oklahoma as an indication of Coburn’s erratic ways.
A larger issue is getting lost here – what should be the role of higher education in a fast-changing America? An English political writer raised the topic a few years ago, asking how many sociology majors the country needed.
In the US, a legislator looking for ways to cut spending might look at mass communications courses. A communications textbook that is more than four years old is going to be hopeless out of data with descriptions of newspapers and network television. Educators talk of the need for life-time learning, yet we are still stuck with four-year education programs (in the UK it is only three years) which are leaving graduates with mounds of debt.
Now I yield to no one in my firm conviction that most politicians, from state legislatures to Congress, are headline-seeking self-promoters with nanosecond attention spans. But I suspect they will have to drive the next wave of reform in higher education, because it certainly won’t come from traditional schools promoting yet more graduate programs in sociology.
Perhaps a governor facing a severe budget crisis will undertake an in-depth study of his state’s education spending and recommend some real change that will reduce costs, eliminate some departments, cut out some graduate programs which are preparing more Ph.D. taxi drivers and redirect some spending to that continuing education, perhaps taught by practitioners, to keep people abreast of fast-moving technology and its societal impacts.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Insider Blows the Whistle on Health Insurance
Wendell Potter was the chief spokesman for health insurer CIGNA; now he is testifying before Congress on how health insurance companies fire clients who get sick, and search through health histories of anyone filing a claim to find evidence they omitted past illnesses so the insurer can refuse coverage. His interview appears in Chicago Life.
One investigation found 20,000 policies had been rescinded, saving insurance companies $300 million.
This is a devastating insider’s view of why the current system fails.
Publisher Pam Berns read through Howard Dean’s prescription for national health care and sifts through the reasons we need a new approach which covers people, doesn’t pull their insurance and leave them in bankruptcy when they get sick, and separates health coverage from employment.
Feel free to admire the cover photograph on the fall issue, since it is mine.