Lots of news and talk today about the GM bankruptcy plan:
Declaring the government "a reluctant shareholder," President Obama said Monday that pushing General Motors Corp. into bankruptcy was a strategy designed to create a more viable company, rather than one that was a continued drain on taxpayers. [...]
The plan calls for the U.S. government to increase its investment in GM by $30 billion, for a total of $50 billion in aid, giving the government a 60 percent stake in the company, Obama said. Still, he underscored that he has no interest in getting into the auto manufacturing industry."What we are not doing, what I have no interest in doing, is running GM," the president said, adding that the company will be run by a private board of directors and management team. "They, and not the government, will call the shots and make the decisions about how to turn this company around."
Who is the man in charge of overseeing GM's unprecedented transformation? The New York Times has the story:
WASHINGTON -- It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General Motors and rewriting the rules of American capitalism.
But that, in short, is the job description for Brian Deese, a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry. [...]Mr. Deese's route to the auto table at the White House was anything but a straight line. He is the son of a political science professor at Boston College (his father) and an engineer who works in renewable energy (his mother). He grew up in the Boston suburb of Belmont and attended Middlebury College in Vermont. He went to Washington to work on aid issues and was quickly hired by Nancy Birdsall, a widely respected authority on the effectiveness of international aid and the founder of the Center for Global Development.
But he wanted to learn domestic issues as well, and soon ended up working as an assistant for Gene Sperling, who 17 years ago in the Clinton White House played a similar role as economic policy prodigy. Eventually, Mr. Deese headed to Yale for his law degree. But his e-mail box was constantly filled with messages from friends in Washington who were signing up to work for the Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton campaigns. Mr. Deese chose Senator Clinton's.
"He was pretty quickly functioning as the top economic policy staffer through her campaign," Mr. Sperling said. "He could blend the policy needs and the political needs pretty seamlessly." On the day that the Clinton campaign ended, Mr. Deese left her concession speech and received a message on his BlackBerry from a friend in the Obama campaign urging him to sign on immediately to Mr. Obama's team.
Gosh, we should all breathe a sigh of relief that this is nothing like the Bush years, when young campaign staffers would end up with hugely important jobs without any sort of proof that they'd be competent to handle their responsibilities. At least we don't have to deal with that anymore.
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Polichinello, good point about the CPA.
How does an administration that is reportedly running up more debt than all previous presidents before it, cause Government Motors to run "lean and mean"?
Michele, remember that George W Bush is the one that ran up the debt and wrecked the economy.
Michele, remember that George W Bush is the one that ran up the debt and wrecked the economy.
Dubya's tab is a fraction of what Obama is promising, and that tab will either be paid for with economy-crushing high interest or equally disastrous inflation.
.....that tab will either be paid for with economy-crushing high interest or equally disastrous inflation.
Or: higher growth. Obama's "tab" -- which, by the way, has to be approved by the Congress, which is also elected by the American people -- is the outcome of decisions made during a severe economic crisis that threatened to get much worse if the government didn't act. Would a further cascade of failures, state and local government bankruptcies, etc., leading to an outright depression have been a better alternative? Look, I didn't like it when a gazillion dollars got poured into Iraq over the course of the last six years, but I recognized that (a) Bush didn't spend that money on no authority; it was appropriated by Congress, and (b) there was at least a claim that it was buying me something (better future security against "terrorists," no mushroom clouds in American cities, etc.) that made it worthwhile. I question the wisdom of those claims, but there they are. Talking about Obama's recent actions without acknowleding the crisis he was responding to would be like talking about Bush's Iraq policy while pretending that there had been no 9/11.
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