WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama Monday said multi-million-dollar bonuses planned for executives and traders at bailed-out insurance giant AIG were an “outrage” and vowed to pursue a clampdown.
“How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?” he said at the White House, pledging to “pursue every legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.”
source : jang.com.pk
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to help revive the economy and is working on a plan to cut the federal deficit in half by the end of his first term.
Obama will touch on his efforts to restore fiscal discipline at a White House fiscal policy summit on Monday and in an address to Congress on Tuesday. On Thursday he plans to send at least a summary of his first budget request to Capitol Hill. The bottom line, said an administration official Saturday, is to halve the federal deficit to $533 billion by the time his first term ends in 2013. He inherited a deficit of about $1.3 trillion from former President George W. Bush.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the president has not yet released his budget for the fiscal year 2010, which begins Oct. 1, said the deficit will be shrunk by scaling back Iraq war spending, ending the temporary tax breaks enacted by the Bush administration for those making $250,000 or more a year, and streamlining government.
“We can’t generate sustained growth without getting our deficits under control,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address that seemed to preview his intentions. He said his budget will be “sober in its assessments, honest in its accounting, and lays out in detail my strategy for investing in what we need, cutting what we don’t, and restoring fiscal discipline.”
Republicans were not convinced. They said Obama’s plan would hurt small businesses, including many filing taxes as individuals and possibly facing higher taxes under his plan.
“I don’t think raising taxes is a great idea,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “And when our good friends on the other side of the aisle say raising the taxes on the wealthy, what they’re really talking about is small business.”
Obama’s budget also is expected to take steps toward his campaign promises of establishing universal health care and lessening the country’s reliance on foreign oil.
Obama has pledged to make deficit reduction a priority both as a candidate and a president. But he also has said economic recovery must come first.
Last week, he signed into law the $787 billion stimulus measure that is meant to create jobs but certainly will add to the nation’s skyrocketing national debt. He also is implementing the $700 billion financial sector rescue passed on Bush’s watch; about $75 billion of which is being used toward Obama’s plan to help homeowners facing foreclosure.
source : news.yahoo.com
WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama’s Justice Department sided with the former Bush administration on Friday, saying detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.
In a two-sentence court filing, department lawyers said the Obama administration agreed that detainees at Bagram Air Base could not use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys.
“The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we’d hoped,” said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Air Base. “We all expected better.”
In midyear last year, the Supreme Court gave al-Qaida and Taliban suspects held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their detention. With about 600 detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and thousands more held in Iraq courts are grappling with whether they, too, can sue to be released. Three months after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Guantanamo Bay, four Afghan citizens being detained at Bagram tried to challenge their detentions in U.S. District Court in Washington.
After Obama took office, a federal judge in Washington gave the new administration a month to decide whether it wanted to stand by Bush’s legal argument. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd says the filing speaks for itself. “They’ve now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law,” said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented several detainees. The Justice Department argues that Bagram is different from Guantanamo Bay because it is in an overseas war zone and the prisoners there are being held as part of a continuing military action. The government argues that releasing enemy combatants into the Afghan war zone, or even diverting U.S. personnel there to consider their legal cases, could threaten security.
source : jang.com.pk
WASHINGTON – In sheer size, the economic measures announced by President Barack ObamaNew Deal programs that Franklin D. Roosevelt famously created to battle the Great Depression. to address "a crisis unlike we've ever known" are remarkable, rivaling and in many cases dwarfing the
Winning approval was a political tour-de-force for the new administration.
Yet gloom and uncertainty persist about the plan's ability to deliver a cure for the economy's severe ailments.
Stocks plunged to six-year lows after the burst of bill signings, bailout announcements and presidential pledges.
And polls show Americans are increasingly worried about losing jobs and not having enough money to pay their bills.
Why the skepticism?
Maybe there's just been too long a run of bad news. Arthur Hogan, chief market analyst at Wachovia Securities, blames much of the negativity on "the fact that people are so down. They have no confidence in the future."
Republicans complain about wasted money. Some Democratic supporters say the plan won't help very much very quickly.
Former President Bill Clinton, who gives Obama high marks for straight talk in telling the nation the bad economic news, says his successor might try a more upbeat approach now. "I just want the American people to know that he's confident that we are going to get out of this and he feels good about the long run," Clinton said Friday on ABC News' "Good Morning America."
Patience, pleads the administration. Lawrence Summers, Obama's chief economics adviser, says the success of the plan will be measured "not by daily market reaction but what happens over time." Still, he says, "We are moving rapidly."
No matter how people feel about the plans, they are undoubtedly ambitious — and expensive. Tomorrow's taxpayers will still be paying for them long after Obama is out of office.
So far in his month-old presidency:
• Congress passed and Obama signed into law a record $787 billion mix of tax cuts, job-creating projects and aid to struggling states.
• The president pledged up to $275 billion in federal aid to help stem a tidal wave of home foreclosures.
• The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve announced financial-rescue steps that could send up to $2 trillion coursing through the economy.
In all, the plans would raise the federal portion of the U.S. economy to some 31 percent, more than twice the level after eight years of FDR's historic New Deal spending.
"All Americans have a stake in making this work," says Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
But you wouldn't know it from the reaction.
Rather than the bipartisan support Obama first sought, Republicans remain in near unanimous opposition. They contend that the stimulus package is tainted by wasteful spending and that the mortgage-foreclosure plan leaves out many struggling homeowners while rewarding lenders and borrowers who made bad decisions. Some Republican governors from the South even talk of spurning the new federal money.
Even while supporting the initiatives, some Democrats suggest the efforts won't deliver enough quick help to make a difference, despite the eye-popping price tags.
Joblessness keeps rising. Consumers and businesses are cutting back. Bank lending remains down. And auto demand keeps falling, with two Detroit automakers saying this week that they may need up to $21.6 billion more in U.S. loans beyond what they received in January.
Rutgers University political science professor Ross Baker said, "There is a degree of skepticism involved. Not surprisingly, people are wary of some very expensive proposals with no guarantee of success or even a high probability of how well they'll work."
Economists argue that many of the benefits from the Obama initiatives will take months, if not years, to arrive. The administration cites the complexities of trying to heal a downturn that has turned global.
"The president balances the challenges that we face with the understanding that we're going to get through tough times as we always have in this country," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Friday when asked about Clinton's comments.
As for the New Deal, it's hard to compare Obama's moves to FDR's initiatives. They were a series of programs spread over years, not all-encompassing packages like the new proposals.
Some of Roosevelt's signature programs dealt with revamping government structure rather than job creation, such as securities-market regulation, insuring bank deposits. His biggest idea, Social Security, didn't really have much impact until later.
The largest of Roosevelt's jobs programs, the Works Progress Administration, begun in 1935, did provide jobs across the nation building roads, bridges and other projects. Among his other job-creating programs were the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Civil Works Administration, the Public Works Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Historians and economists still debate whether FDR's New Deal fixed the crisis or prolonged the pain.
After taking office in 1933, he first tried to slash government jobs and spending. And his efforts to balance the budget in 1937 backfired and triggered a new recession within the broader Depression.
"Roosevelt came late to some of the ideas of big public spending to stimulate the economy," said John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
The 1930s began with federal outlays representing just 3.4 percent of the nation's economy as measured by the gross domestic product. Roosevelt's efforts to fight the Depression with government spending caused outlays to rise to 10.3 percent of GDP by 1939 and to 12 percent by 1941 on the eve of U.S. involvement in World War II.
By contrast, government spending was 21 percent of GDP last year. Obama's economic recovery policies are expected to bring it up to 30 percent or more.
"The New Deal by today's standards involved a minuscule amount of spending," said Allan J. Lichtman, a professor of political history at American University. He said Obama is more of a "big spender" than was Roosevelt.
Roosevelt had a bigger crisis on his hands. Unemployment was 25 percent when he took office.
Last month's jobless rate was 7.6 percent, up from 4.9 percent a year before but still shy of the postwar high of 10.8 percent reached in 1982 — and far from Great Depression levels.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE — Tom Raum has covered Washington for The Associated Press since 1973, frequently reporting on the economy.
(This version CORRECTS date of Roosevelt taking office to 1933)
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – Summoning the pride of a nation, President Barack Obama paid fond tribute Thursday to Abraham Lincoln by challenging people to embrace his vision of a collective union and reject a “knee-jerk disdain for government.”
“He recognized that while each of us must do our part, work as hard as we can and be as responsible as we can — in the end, there are certain things we cannot do on our own,” Obama said of Lincoln at a celebration of the revered president’s 200th birthday.
“There are certain things we can only do together,” Obama said. “There are certain things only a union can do.”
Here in the place that Lincoln called home, and from where Obama launched his presidential bid, the new president’s speech capped his third event honoring Lincoln’s bicentennial.
It was a whirlwind day for Obama. He squeezed in economic comments in East Peoria, Ill., and coped with the abrupt withdrawal of another commerce secretary nominee.
The stories of Obama and Lincoln have become entwined by history, geography and symbolism. Their paths are viewed as not just their own, but the country’s as well — a lineage from the man who freed the slaves to the first black president in U.S. history.
Obama said Lincoln understood that self-reliance was at the core of American life. But Obama said individual liberty is “served, not negated, by a recognition of the common good.”
The pendulum, Obama said, has swung too far toward a philosophy that says government is the problem — a notion that it should be dismantled, with tax breaks for the wealthy that might eventually help out everyone.
“Such knee-jerk disdain for government — this constant rejection of any common endeavor — cannot rebuild our levees or our roads or our bridges,” Obama said. His list of collective examples went on: better schools, modern health care, an economy built on clean energy.
“Only a nation can do these things,” Obama said. “Only by coming together, all of us, and expressing that sense of shared sacrifice and responsibility … can we do the work that must be done in this country. That is the very definition of being American.”
Earlier Thursday, back in Washington, Obama celebrated Lincoln’s resolve at a ceremony in the stately Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. And he spent Wednesday evening at a performance at the newly renovated Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.
Like Lincoln, Obama is a skinny lawyer who rose from obscurity and served briefly in the Illinois legislature before leaping to national office at a time of burgeoning crisis.
Still, the White House is mindful to limit the comparison, whatever the parallels.
Lincoln is a monumental figure who fought to preserve the union, presided over the enormously costly Civil War and signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Obama has been president for less than a month.
“This president isn’t seeking to compare himself with I think what many believe is one of the two or three greatest presidents that this country’s ever had,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.
That Obama often operates in Lincoln’s shadow is largely a matter of choice. He admires the 16th president, reads his language, quotes his speeches and draws on him for inspiration.
source : news.yahoo.com
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