LBJ knew how to win legislative battles:
Uncooperative legislators paid a price for their independence. When Senator Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, justified a vote against a Johnson bill by saying that columnist Walter Lippmann shared his view, Johnson scolded him: “Frank, next time you want a dam in Idaho, you call Walter Lippmann and let him put it through.”
Many defenders of extravagant CEO pay say it is justified because their expertise results in shareholder value. On CBNC today, they discussed the issue and gave us these comparison between CEO pay last year and what the shareholder return was last year
| Company | CEO compensation | Stock Performance |
| AT&T | $15 mil | Down 34% |
| Verizon | $20,2 mil | Down 26% |
| Macy’s | $14.8 mil | Down 66% |
| JC Penney | $14.9 mil | Down 57% |
| Met Life | $12 mil. | Down 45% |
| Dow Chemical | $19.3 mil | Down 53% |
| Martha Stewart | $6.9 mil. | Down 70% |
| Sprint | $14.2 mil. | Down 87% |
And before you say, “Well, the stock market was down overall,” let me point out that the S&P last year fell 39.3%. Which means that only two of the eight companies above beat the average. What shareholder value?
UPDATE: Listen to this discussion on CEO pay later today. Note that the hyperactive Jim Cramer and faux journalist Erin Burnett touch on two points:
1. Compensation committees on boards of directors can’t really evaluate what the CEO should be paid and therefore relies on compensation consultants.
2. Pay is forced upwards by the “comparison” approach; it just bids up the prices.
A Washington Post article this morning on the GM board provided insight into an issue that I don’t think The Post or other media have focused on nearly enough. This relates to culpability of boards of directors in not just the carmakers strategic decisions but those of banks as well. Have boards been AWOL on the collapse of the banking industry? And if so, why? Do boards have any real power? For example, is the decision to return TARP money one that CEOs can make without any board input, especially if the decision is largely for the purposes of protecting CEO pay?
A related issue is executive compensation. Is the relationship between directors and CEO pay incestuous? I believe directors are often compensated well for their minimal work. How well?
Does that compensation then influence what boards agree to pay CEOs and other senior execs?
Opponents and critics point out that because the CEO’s pay is set by the board of directors and the CEO determines the board’s tenure, selection and committee assignments, and compensation consultants, an inherent conflict of interest occurs and effectively prevents effective price competition.
On the compensation issue, what evidence is there that the extravagant salaries and bonuses are necessary – as business leaders contend – to attract top talent?
“Our findings do indicate that compensation consultants are associated with companies that pay at levels higher than the market median. Further, these higher levels of pay are in general not associated with higher levels of shareholder return,” said Alexandra Higgins, Research Associate at The Corporate Library and author of the report.
Are huge compensation packages nothing more than boards trying to CYA from accusations that, should the company founder, they didn’t pay well enough to get the best talent?
I would welcome an article that examined these questions.
On an unrelated issue, the Post reporters include this line in their report.
Some critics characterize the White House’s removal of Wagoner as a move toward European socialism.
Are European markets such as those you find in Germany, France and Great Britain really closer to 1950s style Russian socialism or are they close to U.S. capitalism? Isn’t “European socialism” simply the term corporate apologists and Republicans want reporters to use?
_Charitable contributions over $250 are supposed to include an acknowledgment letter from the charity in order for a deduction to be taken. Out of 49 charitable contributions made, three letters couldn’t be found.
_Sebelius and her husband sold their home in 2006 and then took a mistaken deduction for mortgage interest.
_Insufficient documentation was found for some business expense deductions.
At about 1:50 in this video, Donnie Deutsch, the token, occasional liberal in the CNBC “Power Lunch” gang asks Sen. Jeff Session (R-Ala.) to be specific about the budget cuts he would call for. His answer begins with, “Well, ah” and goes downhill from there.
Note how co-anchor Sue Herrera rescues Sessions.
Kudos to any interviewer who asks for specificity when pols mouth vague talking points with no substance behind them. Sessions finally retreats to the “the president presents a budget, not us” defense.
But in the tax cut debate, that question – what would you cut in the budget? – is often ignored by too many journalists who don’t bother to listen to answers.
Maybe the public has caught on to the disingenuousness of this argument. But I’m not particularly optimistic. It may be that now, people want jobs and would be happy to be taxed. Once they are flush again, they may be susceptible to this false argument once again.
From today’s Media Notes by Howard Kurtz on washingtonpost.com
The easy, liberal solution would have been to keep postponing the day of reckoning. Instead, Obama slammed on the brakes, saying the companies haven’t gone far enough.
The “liberal” solution? What makes it a liberal solution? Oh, wait a minute. This is Howard Kurtz, hubby of a Republican consultant and widely considered to be biased.
Furthermore, Kurtz maintains, the downfall of the auto industry? It’s Obama’s fault.
…And if [the automakers] go belly-up and 100,000 jobs are lost, who owns the problem? Obama does.
Oh really!?
Not a lot new in Jonathan Chait’s New Republic article about feckless Congressional Democrats, but he sums it up nicely.
At this early date, nobody can know whether or not Barack Obama will escape this fate. But the contours of failure are now clearly visible. In Obama’s case, as with his predecessors, the prospective culprit is the same: Democrats in Congress, and especially the Senate. At a time when the country desperately needs a coherent response to the array of challenges it faces, the congressional arm of the Democratic Party remains mired in fecklessness, parochialism, and privilege. Obama has made mistakes, as did his predecessors. Yet the constant recurrence of legislative squabbling and drift suggests a deeper problem than any characterological or tactical failures by these presidents: a congressional party that is congenitally unable to govern.
Indeed. Chait reminds us that while Obama won by 7 points, Bush actually lost the popular vote in 2000 but he and the Republican Congress governed as if they had a mandate.
Even at this early date, the contrast between Democrats under Obama and Republicans under Bush is stark. Republicans did not denounce Bush for squandering a budget surplus to benefit the rich, the way Democrats now assail Obama for big spending and deficits. And Republicans did not refuse to use the budget procedures available to them to break through the Senate’s inherent lethargy. Republicans, in other words, acted like a parliamentary party.
Part of the problem are Senate rules and the way the GOP has exploited them – when the Democrats didn’t.
Congressional scholar Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute penned an article in AEI’s magazine titled "Our Broken Senate." Over the last three decades, the filibuster, once a rare weapon used to express unusually strong objections, has dramatically expanded and turned into a routine, 60-vote supermajority requirement. During the same time period, the Senate has developed a new, anonymous one-person filibuster called a "hold." The clubby traditions of the Senate have allowed these new practices to expand unchallenged. "The always individual-oriented Senate," writes Ornstein, "has become even more indulgent of the demands of each of its 100 egotists."
The Senate poses a particular obstacle to Democrats. Its structure gives greater voice to residents of low-population states, who tilt more Republican than the country as a whole. If you assume that every senator represents half the population of that state, then the Republican caucus represents less than 38 percent of the public. In electoral terms, we think of that as a tiny, even fringe minority. It’s less than the share of the electorate that voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. But it supports enough senators to block the majority’s will.
Chait summarizes two problems the Democrats face.
One reason is that Democrats are trapped by their past. America’s two major parties have, historically, lacked much ideological cohesion. The GOP contained conservatives alongside progressives. The Democratic Party consisted of everything from Northern liberals to Southern reactionaries. The latter, in particular, held disproportionate sway in Congress. Having less in common with Democratic presidents than Republican ones, they carved out an independent role and guarded their prerogatives.
Since Democrats controlled the Congress almost continuously for more than 60 years beginning in 1933, the culture of Congress left a deeper imprint on their party. Republicans, shut out from the perks of majority status, finally decided under the opposition leadership of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s that their only path to power lay in partisan discipline.
Democrats, on the other hand, came of age under the old Democratic chieftains, and they have mostly aped that style. They do not fall in line, even under a Democratic president who mostly shares their goals. Shortly after Obama took office, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced, "I don’t work for him." Even House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel, whose Harlem constituents danced in the streets after Obama’s election, sniffed of Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the rich, "I have to study it but I really don’t take presidents’ recommendations that seriously." Recommendation–that is the term that summarizes Congress’s attitude. A president can suggest whatever he likes, but Congress is the one making the decisions, and don’t you forget it.
A second factor encouraging Democrats to buck their presidents is the role of the rich and business interests. Unless you are a high school student reading this article in your civics course, in which case I’m sorry to dispel your illusions, you will not be stunned to learn that the affluent carry disproportionate political weight with elites in both parties. So, while people who earn more than $250,000 per year make up just a tiny slice of the electorate, they make up a huge chunk of any congressman’s friends, acquaintances, and fund-raisers.
What’s more, whatever their disposition toward business in general, Democrats feel it is not just a right but a duty to slavishly attend to the interests of their home-state businesses. That is why Kent Conrad upholds even the most absurd demands of agribusiness, or why even a good-government progressive like Michigan’s Carl Levin parrots the auto industry’s line on regulating carbon dioxide.
…Some moderate Democrats seem to suffer from a conflation of their own fund-raising strategies with responsible fiscal policy. The Wall Street Journal reported, of a group of Democratic Senate centrists, "Their stated goal is to rein in deficits and to protect business interests." In fact, this is not a goal but two often-conflicting goals, and neither is synonymous with "the national interest." This sort of behavior didn’t hurt Bush because his agenda largely was synonymous with business interests. But the Democratic agenda isn’t, and Democratic confusion of the two is poisonous.
..Taken as a whole, then, the influence of business and the rich unites Republicans and splits Democrats.
In the end, Obama and those who supported him, will suffer.
Democrats have locked themselves into a self-fulfilling prophecy. When their party controls all of Washington, things tend to go south quickly. The president’s popularity plunges, and soon his copartisans in Congress find themselves scrambling to keep from losing their own seats in the political undertow. It happened to Carter in 1978 and 1980, and again to Clinton in 1994.
And, so, they hedge their bets by carving out an independent identity. It doesn’t matter that Obama is popular now, or that a majority of Americans (according to a recent Pew poll) reject the criticism that he’s "trying to do too much." If Obama defies history and retains his popularity, they’ll retain their seats anyway. They have to worry about the scenario where Obama turns into an albatross.
But, of course, the more Democrats defect, the more the president is defined as an extreme liberal, and the more ineffectual he seems as his agenda crashes upon the shoals. Ultimately, the moderates find there is no escape. Republicans in Congress grasped the futility of beggar-thy-neighbor survivalism, and they stood behind Bush in 2005 and 2006, even as his popularity fell to Nixonian levels. The hard truth for Democrats is that Obama’s popularity is bound to fall. The economy will not turn around overnight, and the voters’ memory of disastrous GOP rule will grow dimmer and dimmer with time. The one factor within the Democrats’ control is whether their constituents see Obama as a s
trong leader taking action, like Roosevelt or Kennedy, or a floundering weakling, like Carter or first-term Clinton.It seems impossible to believe that this party, with the challenges before the country so great and the opportunity to address them so rare, would once again follow the path to self-immolation. Yet, somehow, the Democrats can’t help themselves.
In the end, Democratic leaders suffer mostly from a lack of a spine. I’ve toyed with the idea of going to Nevada in 2010 to work for whomever runs against Harry Reid. If it takes his defeat to remove him from his leadership position, it may be, however heavy a price to pay, one well worth it.
Has there ever been a more feckless Democratic Senate leader than Sen. Harry Reid?
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday that John Roberts misled the Senate during his confirmation hearings by pretending to be a moderate – and that the United States is now “stuck” with him as chief justice.
“Roberts didn’t tell us the truth, at least Alito told us who he was,” Reid said, referring to the second Supreme Court justice nominated by President George W. Bush, Samuel Alito. “But we’re stuck with those two young men, and we’ll try to change by having some moderates in the federal courts system as time goes on – I think that will happen.”
Reid’s comments, which came during a wide-ranging discussion hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, reflect Democratic concerns that Roberts presented himself as a neutral arbiter of the law but has wielded a relentlessly conservative agenda.
No shit, Sherlock. Most of us knew it at the time. But believing Roberts’ lies gave Reid cover so he didn’t have to hurt the GOPer’s feelings by filibustering the nomination.
And then Reid has the balls to tell progressives to back off.
With yesterday’s announcement by Regug congressman that they have a “budget blueprint” with no numbers, a larger story went unreported. According to my sources, the numberless budget is part of a greater legislative agenda the GOPers are preparing:
In a report on yesterday’s “Morning Edition” on NPR, Israeli soldiers recounted actions in the recent Gaza offensive.
Yehuda Shaul, an Israeli army veteran, who has interviewed more than 20 soldiers who fought in the conflict:
Some soldiers from some units who led this operation in the front, basically when they received the briefing, it was – guys, we’re entering in, everything that moves, everything that is a threat, everything you are afraid of, you shoot.
NPR reporter Eric Westervelt continues:
Shaul says some of the soldiers he’s interviewed also say they destroyed civilian property and homes, actions that seemed to have little or no tactical purpose or necessity. Some soldiers, he says, called it gratuitous and stupid.
Soldiers interviewed by the Military Institute and Breaking the Silence also allege the army’s chief rabbi used an inflammatory religious and nationalist rhetoric to encourage soldiers to see the Gaza attack as a sacred fight to expel non-Jews from Jewish land.
The rabbi’s office passed out booklets during the war that among other things urged soldiers not to show mercy to the enemy. The army’s chief rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Ronsky, is from Itamar, a West Banks settlement with a history of right-wing activism. Former soldier Yehuda Shaul says the picture that emerges is of a chief military rabbi promoting the fight in Gaza as a holy war.
Shaul:
It’s more than a holy war. You know, there was testimony of one of the guys who came to us – he’s a religious reservist who, you know, there’s a rabbi who approached him; he spoke in the terms of the forces of light against the forces of darkness, a very religious and messianic language, you know. Of course it’s disturbing.
Yesterday, The Washington Post reported on charges that the Israeli army illegally used white phosphorus.
Chemical weapons to kill civilians. War tactics with “little or no purpose” that were “gratuitous.” “[A]sacred fight to expel non-Jews from Jewish land.”
You have to wonder if the Israeli army has embarked on a Jewish jihad or the second Holocaust.