Obama sets tight auto aid terms

Extract from BBC News online, 30 March 2009

US President Barack Obama has given US carmakers General Motors (GM) and Chrysler strict deadlines to restructure before getting more aid. General Motors will be given 60 days and Chrysler just 30 days to submit new plans for recovery.

Soon after ordering the resignation of GM chief Rick Wagoner, Mr Obama said bankruptcy protection could speed up the restructuring process. But he also offered conditional assurances about the industry's future.

"We cannot, we must not and we will not let our auto industry simply vanish," said Mr Obama.

"But our auto industry is not moving in the right direction fast enough to succeed."
He said the car firms had run into trouble because of a "failure of leadership - from Washington to Detroit".

Restructuring plans may "mean using our bankruptcy code as a mechanism to help them restructure quickly and emerge stronger", he said. This could make it easier for the firms to "quickly clear away their old debts that are weighing them down so they can get back on their feet and on to a path of success".
Mr Obama said this would not have to involve breaking the companies up.

"My administration will offer GM and Chrysler a limited period of time with creditors, unions, and other stakeholders to fundamentally restructure in a way that would justify an investment of additional tax dollars."

The president also said he would work with Congress on a programme to encourage consumers to replace old, less fuel-efficient cars with newer, cleaner vehicles. Germany and others have adopted such schemes, thus boosting vehicle sales.

"Obama promotes reforms on TV show"

From BBC News online, Friday 20 March 2009

US President Barack Obama has appeared on a popular TV chat show to promote moves to resolve the economic crisis. He told NBC's Tonight Show he was taking full responsibility "to fix" the economy, in the first-ever appearance on the show by a serving US president.

Mr Obama said he was "stunned" by the huge bonuses that bailed-out insurance firm AIG was paying its employees.
The bonuses - totalling $165m (£113m) in a company now 80% government-owned - have caused outrage in the US. On Thursday, US lawmakers in the House of Representatives backed a bill to levy a 90% tax on big bonuses from firms bailed out by taxpayers.

Mr Obama told programme host Jay Leno in Burbank, California: "The immediate bonuses that went to AIG are a problem but the larger problem is we've got to get back to an attitude where people know enough is enough and people have a sense of responsibility.

"And if we can get back to those values that built America, then I think we're going to be OK."
Promoting his plans for broad reform of financial regulation, Mr Obama said they were needed because "most of the stuff that got us into trouble was perfectly legal".

The president also mounted a strong defence of his embattled Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. "This guy has not just a banking crisis. He's got the worst recession since the Great Depression," he said, adding: "I think Geithner is doing an outstanding job."

Mr Obama also exchanged jokes with Leno during the 35-minute interview.
Referring to his critics, he said: "I do think in Washington it's a little bit like American Idol, except everybody is Simon Cowell."

Questions veered away from politics and into the personal life of the president and his family in the White House.
He said it was "pretty cool" to fly on Air Force One, and that his daughters Sasha and Malia would get their promised pet dog "shortly".

For fans of the president it was an opportunity to see him looking calm and humorous, the BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says. Mr Obama's staff also felt that they needed to use any opportunity they have to allow him to explain himself to the widest possible audience.

But his opponents say that the appearance demeaned his office and was a distraction from serious issues, our correspondent says.

"US offers Iran a 'new beginning'"

US President Barack Obama has offered "a new beginning" of engagement with Tehran in an unprecedented direct video message to the Iranian people.

Extract from: BBC News online, Friday 20 March 2009

"My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us," Mr Obama said.

An advisor to Iran's president welcomed Mr Obama's message but said Washington had to fundamentally change policy.

Relations between Iran and the US have been strained over Tehran's controversial nuclear activities.

The US fears Iran's uranium enrichment programme is a cover to build atomic weapons, a charge Iranian officials deny.

Mr Obama, like his predecessor, wants Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment programme, but is trying to build up diplomatic capital before confronting the issue, says the BBC's diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana described Mr Obama's appeal as "very constructive" and urged Teheran to pay close attention to it.

The message is a dramatic departure from the policies of the George W Bush's administration, which described Iran as part of the "axis of evil", the BBC's Jonathan Beale in Washington says.
Earlier this year, President Obama said he was looking for "openings that can be created where we can start sitting across the table face-to-face" with Iran.

Click here to read the article in full

"We will create green new deal", says Gore

Extract from The Guardian, UK - Saturday 14 Oct 2009
[by Leo Hickman]

Gore says that, since the election of Barack Obama last November, he feels much more bullish about the chances of political progress in tackling climate change. But one group who are unlikely to ever "get it" are the ever-vocal contingent of climate change sceptics, the most prominent of whom were gathered at a conference this week in New York.

Al Gore, the world's best-known climate change "alarmist", as the sceptics like to say, was a popular source of ridicule and ire at the conference. Gore brackets the sceptics with those who believe in creationism: "It's fed by a huge amount of funding from carbon special interests who have been financing these phoney, pseudo-scientific reports and they have a self-interest in sowing doubt. Doubt is their product.

"It's also fed by an ideological opposition and, coming out of the 20th century, the battle against excess statism in various forms became a deeply held view, and I share that view if it's stated properly, but some take it to such an extreme that anything which implies a new regulation or a new role for government is automatically attacked."

(Click here to read the article in full)

Six years after Iraq invasion, Obama sets out his exit plan

From The Guardian, UK

Ewen MacAskill in Washington

Almost six years after the invasion of Iraq, the end is finally in sight for America's involvement in its longest and bloodiest conflict since Vietnam. Barack Obama yesterday set out a timetable that will see all US combat units out by summer next year and the remainder by the end of 2011.

Obama said yesterday that "by any measure, this has already been a long war". It had cost the US 4,425 dead, divided the country and cost it friends abroad. For Iraq, the death toll is unknown, in the tens of thousands, victims of the war, a nationalist uprising, sectarian in-fighting and jihadists attracted by the US presence.

Obama flew from Washington yesterday morning to Fort Lejeune, North Carolina, to deliver his speech in front of 8,000 marines. He told them it was going to be a speech with far-reaching consequences: "Today, I have come to speak to you about how the war in Iraq will end."
Of the 142,000 US troops in Iraq, between 92,000 and 107,000 are to leave by August next year. The mission at that point will change, from combat to one that deals primarily with training Iraqi forces, supporting the Iraqi government and engaging in counter-terrorism.

His delivery contrasted with the premature celebrations of President George Bush (right) almost six years ago when, shortly after the invasion, he spoke on an aircraft carrier beneath the now infamous banner reading 'mission accomplished'.
He had gone to North Carolina to bury the biggest and most divisive issue of the Bush era, the failed neo-conservative experiment to create a model Arab country that would be a beacon for the rest. He did that with the words: "Let me say this as plainly as I can - by August 31 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end."

In doing so, Obama fulfilled one of the central pledges of his election campaign.

He aimed his words at those at home who long ago lost faith in the war and at those Iraqis who do not believe the US will really ever leave. He hoped the US departure from Iraq would herald "a new era of American leadership and engagement in the Middle East", changing the way the world sees the US,

Most of Obama's speech was aimed at an American audience, in particular the armed services. He said they had completed their tasks with honour. And he spoke with sadness of an America that will take a long time to come to terms with the legacy of Iraq, of the names of the dead commemorated in town squares and highways and etched on the white stones at Arlington cemetery.

(Click here to read the article in full)

"Obama's budget sweeps away Reagan's ideas"

from the International Herald Tribune.

by David Leonhardt

"The budget that President Barack Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters.

The Obama budget — a bold, even radical departure from recent history, wrapped in bureaucratic formality and statistical tables — would sharply raise taxes on the rich, beyond where Bill Clinton had raised them. It would reduce taxes for everyone else, to a lower point than they were under either Clinton or George W. Bush. And it would lay the groundwork for sweeping changes in health care and education, among other areas.

More than anything else, the proposals seek to reverse the rapid increase in economic inequality over the last 30 years. They do so first by rewriting the tax code and, over the longer term, by trying to solve some big causes of the middle-class income slowdown, like high medical costs and slowing educational gains.

After Obama spent much of his first five weeks in office responding to the financial crisis, his budget effectively tried to reclaim momentum for the priorities on which he campaigned.
His efforts would add to a budget deficit already swollen by Bush's policies and the recession, creating the largest deficit, relative to the size of the economy, since World War II. Erasing that deficit will require some tough choices — about further spending cuts and tax increases — that Obama avoided this week."

But he nonetheless made choices.
He sought to eliminate some corporate subsidies, for health insurers, banks and agricultural companies, that economists have long criticized. He proposed putting a price on carbon, to slow global warming, and then refunding most of the revenue from that program through broad-based tax cuts. He called for roughly $100 billion a year in tax increases on the wealthy — mostly delayed until 2011, when the recession will presumably have ended — and $50 billion a year in net tax cuts for the nonwealthy.

(Click here to read the article in full)

"Green budget"

From la Repubblica, Italy

WASHINGTON - "Higher tax for the well-off, a medium term fund for healthcare reforms, 'green' revenues from the trade-off of C02 emissions to fund tax relief for the low and middle classes. These are some of the core points of the budget as unveiled today by President Barack Obama. Along with the pledge to halve the deficit, which is expected to reach $1,750 bn in 2009, 12,3% of the entire US economy: the highest level since WWII. Obama hasn't denied the severity of the ongoing recession and stated that he intends "to offer transparency on the way each single dollar from the taxpayer is being spent".

(More here)