There is hope that she will not put into this post - Whoo-Hoo!!
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly approve of Sen. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, but will the founding fathers veto this popular addition to Barack Obama's "team of rivals"?
President-elect Barack Obama named Sen. Hillary Clinton as his choice for secretary of state Monday.
Yes, according to one conservative interpretation of the Constitution.
Article 1, Section 6 of the Constitution says the following: "No Senator or Representative shall, during the time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time."
Translation: A lawmaker cannot fill a position if the salary for that position has been raised during that lawmaker's term in office.
In January, President Bush signed an executive order increasing the salary for the secretary of state and other Cabinet positions by $4,700. Hillary Clinton has been in the Senate since January 2001.
Case closed, says the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch.
"There's no getting around the Constitution's ineligibility clause, so Hillary Clinton is prohibited from serving in the Cabinet until at least 2013, when her current term expires," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.
"No public official who has taken the oath to support and defend the Constitution should support this appointment."
Not so fast, most legal scholars say.
In the past, lawmakers have found a way around the clause, with Congress changing the salary of the office in question back to what it originally was.
It happened when Ohio Sen. William Saxbe was named President Nixon's attorney general in 1974 and again when Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen became President Clinton's Treasury secretary in 1993.
"There are many ways around this problem," CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin noted. "One is for Congress to vote a lower salary. Another way is for Hillary Clinton simply to accept a lower salary. Another way is simply to ignore the problem on the idea that no one has the right, has the standing, to sue to stop her from being secretary of state. "This is not going to be an impediment to her being secretary of state," Toobin argued.
One Clinton aide said that both Clinton and Obama were aware of the issue when he announced her as his choice for secretary of state. And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office said congressional Democrats are moving forward with a measure similar to what has been done before.
Judicial Watch takes issue with the precedent.
"We think it's inadequate," Fitton said. "You can't amend the Constitution through legislation like that. ... The Constitution doesn't have any caveats. It's plain as day."
Fitton pointed to what President Reagan did when facing a similar situation.
"Ronald Reagan took a look at this clause and decided against appointing Orrin Hatch, who was a senator and still is, to the Supreme Court," he noted.
Whatever the activists, scholars or pundits say, the public has apparently made up its mind.
A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll conducted December 1-2 indicated that 71 percent of Americans approve of Obama's nomination of Clinton as his secretary of state. Democrats overwhelmingly approve of the choice, with two-thirds of independents agreeing and Republicans split evenly on the pick.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
America's 'other' auto industry | csmonitor.com
In the South, host to foreign-owned plants, there is little sympathy held for Detroit.
West Point, Ga. - The US auto industry is throwing bolts, but here in Georgia's Chattahoochee Valley a South Korean car company is building a massive new manufacturing plant along the new Kia Parkway, replacing abandoned textile mills. The recently opened Korean BBQ House now vies for customers with Roger's Pit-Cooked Bar-B-Que. And in an indication of just how welcome Kia's nonunion jobs are, some 43,000 people applied for 2,600 positions – with starting wages of $17 an hour – as the plant gears up to turn out its first model next November.
The expansion of this "other" auto industry – one that's foreign-owned, nonunion, and based largely in the South – stands in stark contrast to this week's dire reports from America's own Big Three, whose CEOs laid out plans for a dramatic downsizing before traveling to Washington to plead for $34 billion in federal aid.
Two-thirds of "foreign imports" are, in fact, built in the United States in nonunion shops, where it costs at least $2,000 less in labor to build each vehicle.
Critics charge that the Japanese, Korean, and German auto companies are taking advantage of desperate communities and a longstanding distrust of unions in the South. But among people in West Point, Ga., the vision of a foreign-owned Southern car industry standing on its own two feet while Detroit teeters comes down to this: the worth of a day's work, and the role – or nonrole – of unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW).
"Workers [in the South] understand that in order for them to have a job these companies have got to make money, because if they don't, they're not going to have a job," says Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R), who represents this river city in Congress and who could be asked as soon as next week to vote on a bailout to keep Chrysler and General Motors afloat. "That's the first issue [Detroit auto executives] need to address before they come to Congress asking for a bailout or a loan or whatever it is," he says in a phone interview.
Around the South and especially here on Interstate 85 – nicknamed the "autobahn" for the prevalence of foreign-owned car plants along its stretch – the manufacture of foreign vehicles has jumped 450 percent since 1986. While the Big Three have shed more than 600,000 jobs since 1980, foreign automakers have created about 35,000 jobs in the same period.
The gap between union and nonunion compensation is big: Total benefits put union workers at $36.34 per hour compared with $25.65 per hour. The Big Three's "legacy costs," some economists say, push UAW members' total compensation much higher. That gap, moreover, figures into Southern residents' views on Detroit's worthiness to be rescued from the brink of bankruptcy.
"If you're making $60 or $70 an hour, I can see how you don't want to work for $20," says West Point barber Dewey Rayley, who reports that most of his customers look unfavorably on a federal bailout for the American auto companies. "But that's the thing: What makes you think it's worth so much just to build a car?"
The UAW, for its part, has tried to unionize the international plants in the South, to no avail. Its membership is down 17 percent from 2007, to 464,910 – the lowest since the Great Depression.
With the stakes rising, the once tough-minded union is now "a shadow of its former self," says Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy in Santa Barbara, Calif.
On Wednesday, UAW head Ron Gettelfinger said the union will discontinue a controversial jobs bank – a kind of private unemployment program – and allow the Big Three to postpone payments into a healthcare trust for workers. It's the second offer to reopen contract negotiations in three years.
The UAW concession "is significant and unprecedented," says Harley Shaiken, an expert on labor and the global economy at the University of California, Berkeley. "The fact that the union is willing to jettison [the job bank] shows that they want to clear the political air for a reasoned discussion on why the industry survival is important to the entire economy."
A prevalent right-to-work philosophy isn't the only reason foreign companies like Toyota have located plants in the South. There's also the proximity to a car-loving region with little mass transit and a population that totals that of the Midwest and New England combined. Moreover, the Southern autoworkers are fairly young, meaning few qualify for pensions. General Motors, for instance, supports 400,000 retirees; Toyota supports 700.
While Detroit and the UAW are locked in what Mr. Lichtenstein calls a "failed marriage," the Asian firms, in particular, have flirted effectively with a South big on states' rights and individual liberties. With different work styles and no union rules with which to comply, foreign-car companies can be more flexible and responsive to customers – though union shops get top marks on seven of eight quality and productivity standards. Unlike in the Detroit-owned plants, workers at foreign-owned facilities eat in the same cafeterias as the brass – a kind of egalitarian mind-set that fits well with Southern social graces, leaving workers few incentives to unionize.
"The auto industry has for the most part transformed the South's economy, and it's because you're empowering [workers]," says Mike Randle, editor of Southern Business and Development magazine in Mountain Brook, Ala. "If you go to any of these foreign auto plants in the South, it looks like a rural high school parking lot – just a bunch of kids. Where are these young men or women going to get a job with a year of community college [experience]? Wal-Mart? Now they're starting at $17 an hour, and we're talking about thousands and thousands of jobs."
But there are troubling implications, too. Like some of the old textile-mill magnates, a Honda plant in Alabama threatened workers with closure if they unionized, says Mr. Randle. Last year, Toyota in Georgetown, Ky, fired two workers for releasing an internal document that discussed lowering wages.
The demise of one or more of the big US automakers stands to benefit the foreign companies, as would the continued weakening of the UAW, whose existence indirectly boosts nonunion wages.
Labor historians note that President Franklin Roosevelt helped to raise wages across the board to get the US out of the Great Depression. Today, they say, many conservative Democrats and Republicans from the South, like Representative Westmoreland, are lobbying for the opposite to rescue Detroit.
"If and when the UAW is destroyed, what will happen to the transplants, like the Toyota plant in Kentucky and this new Kia plant, is that these companies will start offering Wal-Mart wages," says Lichtenstein.
Even here in West Point, where a new interstate exchange the state built for Kia opens Dec. 10, not all is well. Retired textile worker Jim McKee frets that "some of the cultural changes like the [Korean] restaurants are shocking and worrying to a lot of people."
What's more, Detroit may be a competitor, but most people in West Point drive Buicks, Chevys, and Fords. "I'm a Buick man, but, who knows, I might be buying a Kia soon," says Harris Nader, who owns an "old-time" music shop in West Point.
And not everyone blames the unions. The problem is "that the executives with these companies made mistakes down through the years in not producing fuel-efficient cars, not what the union was being paid," says Don Gilliam, a West Point city councilor. "Now it's essential that you give them help, not because of their mistakes, but for the sake of the general economy."
West Point, Ga. - The US auto industry is throwing bolts, but here in Georgia's Chattahoochee Valley a South Korean car company is building a massive new manufacturing plant along the new Kia Parkway, replacing abandoned textile mills. The recently opened Korean BBQ House now vies for customers with Roger's Pit-Cooked Bar-B-Que. And in an indication of just how welcome Kia's nonunion jobs are, some 43,000 people applied for 2,600 positions – with starting wages of $17 an hour – as the plant gears up to turn out its first model next November.
The expansion of this "other" auto industry – one that's foreign-owned, nonunion, and based largely in the South – stands in stark contrast to this week's dire reports from America's own Big Three, whose CEOs laid out plans for a dramatic downsizing before traveling to Washington to plead for $34 billion in federal aid.
Two-thirds of "foreign imports" are, in fact, built in the United States in nonunion shops, where it costs at least $2,000 less in labor to build each vehicle.
Critics charge that the Japanese, Korean, and German auto companies are taking advantage of desperate communities and a longstanding distrust of unions in the South. But among people in West Point, Ga., the vision of a foreign-owned Southern car industry standing on its own two feet while Detroit teeters comes down to this: the worth of a day's work, and the role – or nonrole – of unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW).
"Workers [in the South] understand that in order for them to have a job these companies have got to make money, because if they don't, they're not going to have a job," says Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R), who represents this river city in Congress and who could be asked as soon as next week to vote on a bailout to keep Chrysler and General Motors afloat. "That's the first issue [Detroit auto executives] need to address before they come to Congress asking for a bailout or a loan or whatever it is," he says in a phone interview.
Around the South and especially here on Interstate 85 – nicknamed the "autobahn" for the prevalence of foreign-owned car plants along its stretch – the manufacture of foreign vehicles has jumped 450 percent since 1986. While the Big Three have shed more than 600,000 jobs since 1980, foreign automakers have created about 35,000 jobs in the same period.
The gap between union and nonunion compensation is big: Total benefits put union workers at $36.34 per hour compared with $25.65 per hour. The Big Three's "legacy costs," some economists say, push UAW members' total compensation much higher. That gap, moreover, figures into Southern residents' views on Detroit's worthiness to be rescued from the brink of bankruptcy.
"If you're making $60 or $70 an hour, I can see how you don't want to work for $20," says West Point barber Dewey Rayley, who reports that most of his customers look unfavorably on a federal bailout for the American auto companies. "But that's the thing: What makes you think it's worth so much just to build a car?"
The UAW, for its part, has tried to unionize the international plants in the South, to no avail. Its membership is down 17 percent from 2007, to 464,910 – the lowest since the Great Depression.
With the stakes rising, the once tough-minded union is now "a shadow of its former self," says Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy in Santa Barbara, Calif.
On Wednesday, UAW head Ron Gettelfinger said the union will discontinue a controversial jobs bank – a kind of private unemployment program – and allow the Big Three to postpone payments into a healthcare trust for workers. It's the second offer to reopen contract negotiations in three years.
The UAW concession "is significant and unprecedented," says Harley Shaiken, an expert on labor and the global economy at the University of California, Berkeley. "The fact that the union is willing to jettison [the job bank] shows that they want to clear the political air for a reasoned discussion on why the industry survival is important to the entire economy."
A prevalent right-to-work philosophy isn't the only reason foreign companies like Toyota have located plants in the South. There's also the proximity to a car-loving region with little mass transit and a population that totals that of the Midwest and New England combined. Moreover, the Southern autoworkers are fairly young, meaning few qualify for pensions. General Motors, for instance, supports 400,000 retirees; Toyota supports 700.
While Detroit and the UAW are locked in what Mr. Lichtenstein calls a "failed marriage," the Asian firms, in particular, have flirted effectively with a South big on states' rights and individual liberties. With different work styles and no union rules with which to comply, foreign-car companies can be more flexible and responsive to customers – though union shops get top marks on seven of eight quality and productivity standards. Unlike in the Detroit-owned plants, workers at foreign-owned facilities eat in the same cafeterias as the brass – a kind of egalitarian mind-set that fits well with Southern social graces, leaving workers few incentives to unionize.
"The auto industry has for the most part transformed the South's economy, and it's because you're empowering [workers]," says Mike Randle, editor of Southern Business and Development magazine in Mountain Brook, Ala. "If you go to any of these foreign auto plants in the South, it looks like a rural high school parking lot – just a bunch of kids. Where are these young men or women going to get a job with a year of community college [experience]? Wal-Mart? Now they're starting at $17 an hour, and we're talking about thousands and thousands of jobs."
But there are troubling implications, too. Like some of the old textile-mill magnates, a Honda plant in Alabama threatened workers with closure if they unionized, says Mr. Randle. Last year, Toyota in Georgetown, Ky, fired two workers for releasing an internal document that discussed lowering wages.
The demise of one or more of the big US automakers stands to benefit the foreign companies, as would the continued weakening of the UAW, whose existence indirectly boosts nonunion wages.
Labor historians note that President Franklin Roosevelt helped to raise wages across the board to get the US out of the Great Depression. Today, they say, many conservative Democrats and Republicans from the South, like Representative Westmoreland, are lobbying for the opposite to rescue Detroit.
"If and when the UAW is destroyed, what will happen to the transplants, like the Toyota plant in Kentucky and this new Kia plant, is that these companies will start offering Wal-Mart wages," says Lichtenstein.
Even here in West Point, where a new interstate exchange the state built for Kia opens Dec. 10, not all is well. Retired textile worker Jim McKee frets that "some of the cultural changes like the [Korean] restaurants are shocking and worrying to a lot of people."
What's more, Detroit may be a competitor, but most people in West Point drive Buicks, Chevys, and Fords. "I'm a Buick man, but, who knows, I might be buying a Kia soon," says Harris Nader, who owns an "old-time" music shop in West Point.
And not everyone blames the unions. The problem is "that the executives with these companies made mistakes down through the years in not producing fuel-efficient cars, not what the union was being paid," says Don Gilliam, a West Point city councilor. "Now it's essential that you give them help, not because of their mistakes, but for the sake of the general economy."
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Ford asks Congress for $9B line of credit
Ford Motor Co. is asking Congress for a $9 billion "stand-by line of credit" to stabilize its business, but says it doesn't expect to tap it.
Unless one of Detroit's other Big Three auto companies goes bust, Ford expects to have enough money to make it through next year without government help, it said in a plan that projected the firm will break even or turn a pretax profit in 2011.
Detroit's automakers, making a second bid for $25 billion in funding, are presenting Congress with plans Tuesday to restructure their ailing companies and provide assurances that the funding will help them survive and thrive.
General Motors Corp., Ford and Chrysler LLC said they would refinance their companies' debt, cut executive pay, seek concessions from workers and find other ways of reviving their staggering companies.
The Big Three executives also are offering a series of mostly symbolic moves to burnish their images, badly tattered after they arrived in Washington D.C. last month on three separate private jets to plead for a federal lifeline for their struggling companies. All three companies offered separate plans for hearings that will be held Thursday and Friday.
That approach the auto executives took last month led Democratic congressional leaders to declare they didn't come prepared to justify their pleas and they told them to go back home and ready a new plan.
This week, the automakers are going out of their way to show deference to lawmakers and a willingness to flog themselves for past mistakes. "I think we learned a lot from that experience," Ford CEO Alan Mulally told The Associated Press in an interview.
Mulally said he'd work for $1 per year if his firm had to take any government loan money. The company's plan also says it will cancel all management employees' 2009 bonuses, scrap merit increases for its North American salaried employees next year, and sell its five corporate aircraft.
And for this week's appearances here, all three company chiefs will skip the lavish travel arrangements. Mulally is coming by car from Detroit for this week's second round of congressional hearings on government help for the Big Three. GM Chief Rick Wagoner will drive a Chevrolet Malibu hybrid sedan for the 520-mile trek from Detroit to Capitol Hill, spokesman Tony Cervone said Tuesday. And Chrysler LLC CEO Robert Nardelli won't travel by corporate jet, but a spokeswoman declined to elaborate on his travel plans, citing security reasons.
The unions were preparing to make sacrifices as well. United Auto Workers leaders summoned local union leaders from across the country to an emergency meeting Wednesday in Detroit to discuss concessions the union could make to help auto companies get government loans.
U.S. automakers are struggling to stay afloat heading into 2009 under the weight of an economic meltdown, the worst auto sales in decades and a tight credit market. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler went through nearly $18 billion in cash reserves during the last quarter, and GM and Chrysler have said they could collapse in weeks.
Meanwhile, the auto companies released new sales numbers that underlined the punishing business environment facing the Big Three. Ford said its November U.S. light vehicle sales tumbled 31 percent amid a continued slump in consumer spending and tight credit markets. Sales at Toyota, Japan's No. 1 automaker, fell 34 percent despite its extension of zero-percent financing on a dozen vehicles.
Ford's blueprint said it would invest $14 billion over the next seven years to boost its vehicles' fuel-efficiency, and improve the overall efficiency of its fleet by an average of 14 percent next year. And Ford is calling for a new partnership among automakers, parts suppliers and the government to develop new battery technologies domestically, so the U.S. doesn't have to rely on foreign batteries — as it now does on foreign oil — to power its cars.
GM will outline efforts to negotiate swapping some of the company's debt for equity stakes in the automaker, either shares or warrants for them, said two people briefed on the company's plan.
With eight separate brands, GM will also discuss efforts to shed brands but it would prefer to sell them instead of shutting down Pontiac, Saturn or Saab, said one of the people briefed on the plan. Killing off brands, like GM did with Oldsmobile in 2004, would require cash the company doesn't have, the person said. The people briefed on GM's preparations didn't want to be identified because the plan hadn't been completed.
Chrysler is expected to outline changes that would include a swap of debt in the company for equity stakes and reductions in some vehicle models, according to a person who was briefed on the plan. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions were private.
GM, according to its quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, owes creditors $45 billion and it must pay more than $7.5 billion early in 2010 to a UAW-administered trust fund that will take over retiree health care payments.
Ford owes more than $26 billion, with $6.3 billion due to its UAW trust fund at the end of 2009. Chrysler, a private company, does not have to open its books, but its CEO, Nardelli, has said it would be difficult for the company to make it without federal aid. All three likely are negotiating with the UAW for delays in payments to the trusts.
The companies are resisting calls for bankruptcy, arguing that no one would buy a car from an automaker that may not survive the life of the vehicle. (can someone say Duh??)
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